These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

“Worrying,” said Paul, “means you’re afraid it’s going to happen. Ruminating is when you know it will, if it hasn’t happened already. One is neurotic, the other is fatalistic, and fatalism is supported by evidence. It isn’t the same.”

“If you painted a masterpiece and then set it on fire, it still would have mattered. If you know you’ve made something beautiful, who cares how long it lasts? Après toi, le déluge.” “I like it better the other way,” said Paul. “Where it means you’re leaving the flood in your wake.”

We’ll both be happier if I can find you as fascinating as you ought to be.” Paul was almost relieved to feel the sting. It meant Julian saw every weakness in him and still thought he was worth the effort of hurting.

“Tell me you love me, at least,” he said quietly. “Please. I need to know somebody does.”

“Go ahead,” said Julian, almost too quietly to hear, and when Paul kissed him it was as inevitable and instinctive as breathing.

“It’s that what we call ‘love’ is actually letting your identity fill in around the shape of the other person—you love someone by defining yourself against them. It says loss hurts because there’s nothing holding that part of you in place anymore. But your outline still holds, and it keeps holding. The thing you shaped yourself into by loving them, you never stop being that. The marks are permanent, so the idea of the person you loved is permanent, too.”

They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself together over a wound.

“I kill them because they’re beautiful, and it’s the only way I can keep them.”

“I didn’t want to like it,” Paul said miserably. He felt a flare of hatred toward Julian for kissing his forehead then, as if he were still a human being. “I love you, oh god please promise you’ll forgive me, I’m terrified you’re never going to.” For a moment Julian seemed to consider giving him that unequivocal forgiveness. Instead he smiled, solemn and unreadable, and told Paul the truth. “Of course I will, Pablo.”

He wanted to forget he’d ever yielded to the weakness of wanting anything. He wanted to scrub away any evidence that he existed outside his own head at all—that he was a visible object that anyone else could see and mock and judge.

He felt gentle and endlessly patient; if Julian had asked, he would have happily cut his chest open and handed over his heart, his lungs, every part of himself piece by piece.

Not for the first time, Paul wondered if he might hate Julian a little. He wanted Julian to kiss him again; it wasn’t at all dissimilar from wanting to bite his mouth until he drew blood.

The fantasy of the house fire had brought them to an impossible truth. They could only stitch themselves back together if they did something irreversible.

“I know why you fuck me like you wish you could kill me. I know everything that gets you off, you can’t help but show me, there’s no part of you I can’t see—”

All they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

It was your fucking delusion that if you just made yourself strong and cold and heartless and everything you aren’t—if you could just make yourself ‘better,’ if you could destroy every part of you that’s worth loving, then you wouldn’t ever have to be afraid again. That was what you needed me to do, and I would have done anything, god help me, I would have done anything for you.

I’m safest and happiest when I’m surrounded by walls and by people who love me unconditionally and who aren’t afraid of me, they promise. One fine day I will feel better but not yet. It may be years before that miracle arrives.

Fuck them. They wanted crazy. They’re getting it.

You’re not going to try to make me hate you as much as you do, not anymore. You’re going to let me take care of you, even if you can’t stand to do it yourself. Promise me.”