That Sik Luv

by Jescie Hall

She’s maintained an innocence in a world of corruption, somehow shadowing the truths I’m bound to expose her to. Briony Strait is about to break for me. I will break her. Dirtying her to anyone else. But the sins I’ll have her caving to will be her reawakening. Her baptism in human nature and the animalistic desires that drive us. A lesson in what it means to be alive from the one she’ll soon be calling God.

“You’re a woman without a voice, Briony,” he whispers against my lips. “Let me be the throat through which you scream.”

The seriousness in his gaze tells me everything I need to know about what this man would do for me. He’d burn churches to the ground, to nothing but ash and dirt. Murder and mutilate anyone intending to harm me. Teach me to explore sensations that human nature craves to be unleashed.

I can’t seem to stay away from him, just as he can’t seem to stay away from me. We appear to be polar opposites, differing colors stretched apart on the spectrum, reaching for the other. He’s the dark to my light as I am the color to his achromatic gloom.

Violence is my love language, and she speaks my native tongue.

“If you want a life that doesn’t have me in it, you’ll have to fucking kill me yourself. I’m yours, and you are forever mine.”

We are in our own space now. A combination of Heaven and Hell, created especially for the saints and sinners like us.

If there truly is a heaven as she believes, it was nothing like what we experienced in that house. Hell is the only place suitable for the kinds of fire we evoked.

I’ve never found myself so completely enthralled by one being in all my life, especially now, after knowing what she tastes like and how she feels around me. She’ll never leave me. I won’t give her that option. Either she chooses me back or we both leave this earth in two dark cavities, dug out next to one another.

I could tell you I’m terrified of this man, but the truth of the matter is the blood running through my veins runs feral for him.

She’s my obsession, but more so, she’s my fucking existence. The only point of destruction I crave. Letting her own the darkness that I am, allowing her to rule over me the way a man in the most painful form of sick love can.

Sex is its own form of worship, and what we did was nothing short of honoring this newfound religion we’ve created. If it’s not that type of primal passion, that spine-tingling demand of his body inside the deepest part of mine, I don’t want it.

“Never fall in line with the disciplines of men who restrict the freedom of thought. It encourages immorality rather than reducing it. They assume utopia rather than expecting realism. Your religion is a man-made institution that uses fear and intimidation to maintain power over you. But the true power resides in you, Briony. It resides in you, and it resides in me. For we are of this earth, not some dreamed illusion of men who came before us.”

“I’ve never thought you were anything less than what I know you to be,” he declares, short of breath, a passion in his direct stare that has me holding my breath. “You are the fire that burns stagnant, the coals and ash yearning for the chance to ignite, ready to burn cities to the ground in your fierceness. A force more powerful than any man that came before you. You are my fucking existence, Briony. I live and breathe for you alone. I am yours eternally, entirely at your mercy.”

He’s always known, beneath the surface of the religion I professed, that there was a woman whose thoughts ran wild. A mind that outdated codes and morals couldn’t detain. A woman who sought truths along with realism and unfiltered revelation. A woman who was ready for the war on the brink of her horizon.

She has the power to tear me to fucking pieces, and the masochist in me will gladly allow every part of my destruction.

I needed her more than she’d ever realize. Feeling her let go around me is my only heaven. I’ll forever worship the deity that is her warm, wet sanctuary. Finding euphoria like that is a dangerous temptation for a man like me.

This man. This powerful assassin, who kills before questioning, is on his knees before me, looking up at me like I’m royalty. He’s submitting himself entirely. When I break, he folds.

“They took away your voice, but remember I’m the one to make you scream.”

“You hold the key, Aero. You hold all the power. Even without it, you own every room you walk into, even the ones you don’t.”

She has no clue what she’s doing to me; how dangerously toxic we’ve become together. My bloomed rose, exploring that darkness between her petals while pushing me to explore mine. She’s proving to be the definition of trust, putting my firm belief in her character, her strength, her truth. My fucking existence.

I’m drowning in our dysfunction. Living for the chaotic dreams of a future filled with promises of darkness and a never-ending obsession. If this is dying, I never want to see the light of life again.

“You deserve better than the mess they made of me.” He kisses me again, as if discovering he genuinely likes the feel of our lips together. “But you’ll never find out, little doll, because I’m never letting you go.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever want anything less than the man that you are,” I speak my words honestly, from the place deep in my soul that he so often speaks to. “We’re of the same matter, you and I. We’re violently ripped from the same dirtied cloth.”

We’ll find a middle ground. A place we can both flourish and prosper. I don’t expect a simplistic love with Aero. It will never be normal, just as it shouldn’t. It’s complicated. It’s an abstract piece that’s painted with harsh strokes of pain, jarring splashes of deception, and obscene colors that scream in the face of injustice. I shouldn’t need to change him, and honestly, I don’t want to. But what I desire more than anything is an alignment of souls set in our own unbreakable bond.

“I’ll defend you endlessly. Until there’s nothing left of the world we burn. My dying day.”

“You’re the only glimpse of heaven I’ll ever see,” he murmurs, rocking into me. “The only redemption I’ll ever need.”

“Everything I am.”

The man that’s witnessed my self-surrender to a life of deception, and sunken into the mystic depths of my newly awakened soul.

But my eyes remained focused on the delectable magnificence before me. Ethereal and decisive in her actions. My intellectual, yet ruthless King. God is most certainly a woman scorned.

My heart hammers in my chest for this woman. Whenever she’s in my presence, I feel it like a gravitational pull, siphoning two lost souls together with formidable strength. I see my past, my present, and the future I’d never known in those blue eyes. The same eyes I’d promised my life to all those years ago in that alleyway. I see the faces of traumatic horrors erased by her captivating beauty. Her selfless love, eradicating the hatred from my bones entirely, cleaning me of the past that haunts me. She fills me with what they could never take away. Faith. Hope. Love. Everything. All at once.