Take Me With You

by Nina G. Jones

A house provides the facade of protection. It's a sacred place, separating you from the beasts that lurk outside. But that's all it is: a facade. The reason your home is safe is because no one has wanted in yet. But if you are so unlucky, nothing can stop a monster from breaching those walls.

Monsters don't live under the fucking bed or the closet. They don't appear in a puff of smoke. No, monsters are like me: the quiet guy who walks a drunk woman home, a protective uncle, that unassuming guy with the friendly smile who fixes your porch. We do our work in the dark, we lurk in the shadows, but we roam during the day, scouting our next prey.

He likes the taste of my sadness and I like when he injects me with his venom.

I thought being loved was the most gratifying feeling. No, it's being obsessed over. It's having someone so infatuated with you that they would risk everything to have you. That is a high that love can't touch. Love is a slow burn, a stockpot simmering to soften the heart. But this—this is a flash flood, it's the smoke billowing when a steak hits a hot pan. It's threatening, but its fierceness is the very thing love dilutes.

“Who am I?” he asks in that voice, dirty and broken. “I am the person who has nothing to lose but you.”

Your brother. He took me. Every part of me. He gave me parts of him. Forced them to fit into me. Now I am stuck with them. Then he abandoned me. I am not the girl in the picture you have in your file. She has not returned. She's disappeared forever.

My gut twirls with a feeling of dread that I'm not sure why I didn't feel sooner around this man. Maybe it's the uniform he wears, the one that tells us all that he's one of the good guys. Just like how Sam's mask told me he wasn't. But sometimes those costumes deceive us. Sometimes the man in the police uniform wants you dead. Sometimes the man in the ski mask saves your life.

You don't stare the devil in the eyes and come out without some of his sin. You can't beat the devil without becoming like him. You can't appeal to his kindness, so you have to learn to play his games. You lie, you fuck, you manipulate, you fight, you hurl insults, until you do whatever it takes to win the battle. Every time you do those things, you understand him a little more. Until finally, he becomes your ally. You think you've won, that you've made him more like you. But the truth is, it's the other way around. So that even when you win, you've lost.

Though the night will always be my home, I finally have a place in the sun with Vesp.