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.

That's the thing about keeping a person alive. In a way you are just as much a hostage to them as they are to you.

I am a monster. 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.

Girls like her don't want the beast. They want the idea of one. They want to be safe and still revel in the thrill. But there's no safety with a monster. Because monsters consume. They take your body, your soul, and your innocence.

I want him to crawl into the bed and hold me like he did that night he carried me to the shower. To make the pain he caused go away. I want him to tell me he wants me to have this child, and he will be good to us now. I want him to fill me with his poison again. He likes the taste of my sadness and I like when he injects me with his venom. He is my danger, my greatest threat. When he's on my side, I know that I am safe.

When he wants me, he wants me wholly and completely. 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.”

“I am a man who has risked everything to have you.” He pulls out slowly and plunges into me again. “You are the only thing, Vesp.” He draws himself out and buries himself inside of me. “And you…are my obsession.”

His obsession. Wanted. Needed. Craved. The most important person in his world. It's what I felt when his eyes first met mine. It's the most thrilling thing to be told you are precious. That you are so valuable it puts you in danger. Nothing of such high regard can exist in this world without causing a storm. When a man covets something so strongly, he is its greatest threat.

My guardian and my stalker. My lover and my enemy. A stranger. The father to my child.

I don't know if there is a world between that cabin and Sacramento. But I do know one thing: we are both hopelessly bound to the other, holding each other afloat. And if one of us snaps the line or sinks, the other will drown.

No one will ever know what became of me. They'll never know my story. And even if they found me some day, would they know I came back? That I had a chance to survive and I ran right back into his path? I run out of words. Words I'm not even sure are reaching him. I used them early on to pry out his humanity. But the person in front of me is dazed. Savage. Beyond language.

All this time, I kept thinking I had changed, while somehow everything around me had remained static. But the world doesn't wait for you just because you were kidnapped. Just like woods with those structures Sam and his father built as a child, it just grows over the memory of you.

Sometimes the choice is so clear. But for the past couple of years, my heart and my mind have not agreed. And here in this moment, there are two types of right. The one for everyone else, and the one for me.

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.

The same hands that he has used to hurt me, he uses to hold me up as I weep with my entire body. “Shhhh,” he whispers, stroking my head. “No one loves you like I do.”

I didn't have her at the ranch. I didn't have her until I let her go. Until I bloomed into the monster that she felt only she could save. I meant what I said. You're all safe now. You can thank Vesper for that.