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November 2 - November 2, 2019
He can’t call me by such sweet names while obliterating my soul into such small pieces they can never be repaired. It fucks with my head—but that’s Theo, and that’s why I’m so strung out on him. Theo is the moment after agonizing pain subsides, when stark relief has you high and you’ve sworn you’ve never felt so good. It’s the most addicting thing I’ve ever felt. Be mean to me just so I can hear you say nice words.
Someday I will be special. Someday I will mean something to someone. Someday I won’t be so alone.
Sweet girl, that would break you.
I think that was the first time I’d ever heard Story speak. She had always been quiet as a mouse when attending to me. So of course, like every other person in my goddamn life, she was using her voice to leave me.
The ugly fucking truth is all the while I’ve been trying to break Abigail, I’ve been the broken one. I love Abigail. I love her without walls and reason. I will always fucking love her. I’m the poster boy for unrequited love, and I have been since the first day I saw Abigail Crowne.
She abandoned me like everyone else, and the first chance I got to come back to her, I took. Because with her, the knife is in me, and I’m gutted, but without her, I’m bleeding.
When I’m finished with you, will you be lost forever, Abigail?
“You didn’t kick your dog hard enough, sis,” Gray said. “He’s following you around, biting all the bad guys at your heel… which maybe isn’t such a bad thing.”
Theo always poked the sorest parts of my soul. The parts of me I didn’t want to acknowledge. My mother didn’t love me, or, worse, no one can love me. He made me look at those parts and question why the wound existed and who had put it there. It was cruel and horrible, but the thing is, if you didn’t acknowledge a wound, you can’t heal. It sits there and gets infected. It grows and it takes over. A wound on your soul changes who you are. If you didn’t love yourself first, you can’t love anyone.
Because that was when I finally understood she would never love me the way I needed. None of my family could. We were all too fucking broken. We were jagged facsimiles of a family. When we tried to love one another, we cut.
I was Abigail Crowne, fire starter, attention seeker, scandal maker. The Reject Princess. Unloved, uncared for, unwanted. There was only one way to dethrone a princess. As my mom said, you don’t get to stay a princess and marry a pauper, and a Crowne without a castle is just a hunk of metal.
I kept waiting for the time I wouldn’t be afraid, as if that was the moment my love for Theo would become real, but love isn’t real without fear. Love is fear.
He was a noir, black and white, moonlight and shadow, a nightmare and a dream. I wondered when his muscles had gotten so sharp, his veins so defined, or if he appeared so because in this moment he was deadly.
“But Abigail thinks so,” I continued. “So I’ll spend the rest of my fucking life trying to be whatever she sees in me.”
I wished I could take all the hurt in her eyes away, heal the bruises on her heart. Maybe if I filled her chest with enough bliss, she wouldn’t feel them.
“You kept all of this? “I keep all of you, Abigail. Every laugh you make and every tear you drop. Every bruise I put on your heart. I keep it all. You’re inside me too. You wove yourself inside me before you even knew who I was.”
My Theo barked, and he bit hard, but when it came to me, he was always so protective.
“You might be the artist, but you’re my masterpiece,” he said. “All my life I’ve been painting you on a canvas, and now I’m going to unravel you thread by thread.”
For some reason, we lived in a society where it was okay for men to terrorize women, but they could never be foolish, and they could never be weak.
“I should’ve listened to you, my princess and my reject, my lying, fire-starting, romantic…” He pushed a strand of hair behind my ear with one finger, eyes throbbing with tenderness. “My perfect contradiction.”
Theo was the only person in the world who knew exactly what to say to make me bloom. Which made sense, I guess, because he also knew exactly what to say to destroy me.
