Sugar

by Mia Ballard

we had settled into the kind of comfortable predictability that couples often mistake for happiness.

The promise of sex is a currency devalued by his infidelity, each dalliance a withdrawal from the bank of my patience, until now, when I'm overdrawn and bankrupt of fucks to give.

But love, that fickle, traitorous beast, proves inadequate to the wound festering between us.

Love, for all its beauty, is fragile. It can slip through your fingers or be buried under the lemon tree in your backyard.

them, I find myself helplessly drawn to him. There's a magnetic quality in his ugliness—an allure that defies explanation. He possesses a raw, unfiltered sexiness that defies societal norms and expectations.

I find a twisted kind of happiness in my emptiness, a place where feeling nothing feels like everything.

He had custom-built a roadmap of triggers, and boy, did he know how to steer me down that road.

I'd relent and give him sex because I wanted him to love me.

The world is vast and indifferent, but within it, there's a space carved just for us.

“Trust me, you don’t want me to like you.”

The notion of standing idly by while a man laid a hand on me filled me with a cold resolve, a silent vow to take control of my own destiny, no matter the cost.

Correction: I’ve gotten revenge on a few people. That’s all. Murderer sounds too serious for what I’ve done.

In that moment I had concluded that I would always be someone men wanted, but never wanted to keep.

I long to be ravaged, to be claimed by a hunger that shouts, you are wanted.

She’s like a mirage, all soft edges and sunlight.

This is how I viewed love: not just as the most important thing, but as the singular narrative thread weaving through the tapestry of my life. It was a strange, almost clinical obsession, a need to have my identity mirrored and validated by the man who occupied my thoughts. When I looked at a photo of myself, I could pinpoint exactly which man had been the center of my universe at that moment. Each captured smile, each distant gaze was a timestamp of obsession.

Their ghosts lived on in the most mundane details of my life—a favorite perfume, a song on the radio, the way I styled my hair.