Riot Act (Crooked Sinners)

by Callie Hart

Want something? Pax will take it from you. Love something? Pax will destroy it. Love him? Then Heaven help you. You’d have to be the stupidest person to walk the face of the earth.

There is no quiet, redeeming quality that saves Pax from the harsh inevitability that he’s simply a terrible person. So, why then, does my heart still ache for such a monster? Why does it bleed from not having him?

I’ve been bleeding out, one way or another, my entire fucking life. What’s another cut? What’s another drop?

I go home and shower. I didn’t want to. I figured the blood spatter would add extra theater to my performance when I burst into my mother’s room like wrath personified,

If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. Nietzsche said that. And that’s what it feels like when I look at a picture I’ve taken of myself.

I’m doing it because you’re a parasite, Presley Maria Witton Chase. You’ve set up shop inside my head and I can’t get rid of you. I tried forcing you out, but you just won’t leave,

But…a part of me doesn’t even care. I don’t need him to be someone else for me. I need him to be every inch himself

But now that I’m here and I’ve seen her bedroom, I’m beginning to suspect that she’s infiltrating my brain via fucking witchcraft, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to combat that.

“You kissed me way before that.” “What?” “You did. Right before you nearly cracked my ribs.” “Are you fucking insane? That wasn’t a kiss. That was mouth-to-mouth. You weren't breathing.” “Tomato. Tomahhhto.” She exaggerates the difference between the pronunciations, trying to drive her erroneous point home. “You say mouth-to-mouth. I say first base. Let's call a spade a spade.”

“But that's the thing, Pax. When all a person has ever known is misery...it's what they come to expect. Soon, they feed on it, because it's the only sustenance they know. Eventually, their misery becomes their strength. They can endure so much more than anyone else. You'll be surprised by what I can endure now. And once the surprise has worn off, you'll see that you're powerless to hurt me. I told you the truth in the dining hall. There really is nothing left of me to hurt.”

“A bastard’s touch, the thought of you. Aye, a waking curse upon my days, I endure you like sun and rain, and both the heat and the cold you feel the same. I crawl atop the shattered panes that fell from the windows of the house you did destroy. And I relish the blood that seeps from me, even as I hate you, because it flows only through my wretched veins for you.”

It isn’t until I’m climbing into my own bed, deliciously sore, my muscles melting off my bones, that I realize something: At no point did he wash me off of him. And he was still wearing the friendship bracelet.

I watch the scene with melancholy detachment. Alone. Other. Outside. Apart from.

She doesn’t hurt me, though. She could never hurt me.

But she’s done something to me. She’s warped my mind and twisted my insides up, and now my soul has been pretzelled into some jacked up, nonsense knot of alien emotion, and I don’t have a clue what the fuck I’m doing anymore. When did this even happen? I used to make sense to myself. Now, I don’t have a clue how to make heads nor tails of my own existence. I’m a stranger in my own skin and it sucks balls.

I don’t want my mind to be fixed on you when the sun comes up and when it goes down.

After that kiss, there’s very little point in lying to myself anymore, when the truth is making itself so painfully obvious. I have feelings for Chase. Big ones. Scary ones. Run-away-and-hide-in-a-dark-closet feelings.

“You’re scaring me.” I can’t help but laugh at this. For the past month, she’s adamantly refused that she’s afraid of me. She’s faced the chaos and the madness of me with her shoulders back and her chin defiantly raised, and she hasn’t backed down. Now that I’m done raging and the storm within me is dying, I am calm. I am still. Now she is afraid.

“I don’t know. I fixate on fucking climate change, and how shit the world’s gonna be in thirty years. I start thinking about kids starving in Africa, and how my friends don’t need me the way I need them, and how I’m probably going to be a terrible father, and how I’ll probably never be able to open up to anyone the way I’m opening up to you right now.”

“When I’m around you. I don’t need the distraction of a video game or a camera in my hand. My head is quiet.”

Now that I’m sitting on the edge of Chase’s bed, I find that I care very much what she thinks of me. I’m being weighed in the balance of my past deeds, and that’s a frightening prospect indeed, knowing what I know about myself. I’m about to be found wanting.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

“I could just put you on your ass again, y’know,” she gripes. She probably could, too. The little terror is frighteningly good at Krav Maga. “Go for your life. But do me a favor and knock me the fuck out this time. Put me out of my misery. At least that way I won’t have to listen to you spout this inane bullshit.”

“The path of least resistance doesn’t always mean taking the easiest option. Sometimes…it means that your soul finds its way home, toward something it loves, after you’ve held it back for too fucking long. So…do with that what you will, I guess.”

“The path of least resistance doesn’t always mean taking the easiest option. Sometimes it means your soul finding its way home, toward something it loves, after you’ve held it back for too fucking long.”

“I’ve handled this entire thing really fucking badly. I have. From the very beginning. I don’t—” He huffs, frustrated. “I don’t have any experience with this shit. I’ve never been nice to a girl a day in my life. I don’t know how to do any of this. But I fucking hate myself for not making it painfully fucking clear to you in your bedroom that day that I wanted you. Not to fuck you. Not to carry on with some stupid, pointless arrangement that made no sense. I should have told you that I wanted you. If I had, you probably would have told me everything.”

“I welcome the day I lose my mind, Chase. At least then, when I’ve truly lost it, I’ll be oblivious to the fact. I’ll just be crazy. Nothing in the world will matter anymore. I want you to be mine. I—I’m fucking in love with you, Chase. I want to learn how to show you that. I want to make you fucking believe it. ”

“Can you deal with that, Chase? Do you think you can handle being loved by me? ’Cause I don’t think I can handle being without you anymore.” “Yes! Yes, oh my god, yes!”

He's trusting me. And, for better or for worse, I trust him. “I love you, too. I am yours,” I whisper. “I have been since the second I woke up on that sidewalk outside the hospital and I saw you looking down at me. From that moment on, you’ve held my entire existence in the palm of your hand.”

“I’d find a way to rip the goddamn moon right out of the sky if you begged me for it,”

“I thought I could walk away from you. God, what a fucking idiot.” He shakes his head, wonder flicking across his handsome face. “I knew it when you opened your eyes on the floor outside the hospital and you looked at me for the first time. It was like part of me snapped. I thought you’d broken something inside of me. I hated you for it. And then I realized that you hadn’t broken anything. You’d—you’d fixed it.”

“Change is hard, Chase.” His fingers flex around the column of my throat, reminding me of the hold he has on me there. Like I could ever forget. He smiles a little ruefully. “And being a lowlife piece of shit who hurts people and doesn’t give a shit about the consequences is a lot fucking easier than trying to be good. It fucking sucks, actually. Because now I have to face all of the bullshit I’ve done in the past. I’m going to have to make amends and apologize to all of the people I’ve shit on before I’ll ever be worthy of you.”

“You don’t need to do anything to be worthy of me. I’ll take you as you are, Pax Davis. I’ve always been willing to take you exactly as you are. Caustic remarks, sharpened teeth, claws and all. I know who you are. I see you. I accept you.”

“Fuck,” Pax whispers. He rests his forehead against mine, unblinking, as if he’s too scared to blink for fear that I might disappear or something. “You’re so fucking beautiful, Presley.”

I just want her to know that this is happening. That…she fucking has me, okay.