jamie
He is no monster.
This is what he tells himself.
His peculiarity does not make him a monster.
This is what he tells himself.
He is real, just as she is real.
This is what he tells himself.
But she touches him and, just as he’d anticipated, he knows that she’s done it. He watches her do it. But it’s as if she’s reaching for him through the folds of a dream. She does not pass through him, for he is solid just as she is solid, but the gesture is so little more than an idea. A curious mouth passing through vapor.
The heart spasms and something wicked churns at the very center of all that darkness. Someplace deep inside his bones, which quiver and tremble as he casts himself out of her space. Again, he flashes that feral smile, all that black ink in his mouth. Studies her with those bright yellow eyes, skating that heavy, discerning gaze across all that scaled skin. She refracts the light while he absorbs it.
They could not be more different.
He tilts his peculiar head then, blinks once. “So?” he asks, the voice all a rasp now. Because he is tired. Tired from the talking and from the emotion and from whatever dark thing is chugging through his veins.
He is no monster.
But all that ink in his bloodstream says different.
“What did you learn?”