Bad Wrong Things

by C.P. Harris

Clint and I were like hot oil kissing water. Gasoline crooking its finger at an open flame. We came together like animals in heat, marking and pissing over our territory. And love had everything, yet nothing, to do with it.

I stood there confident in knowing that the worst mistake I’d ever taken part in was the best decision of my life.

No never stopped us. Especially not after we’d decided that turning ourselves into monsters would be the only way to cope with the pain. To be more deserving of it.

“You being territorial over me feeds my need to be loved or some shit.”

“And what do we do once the moment grows heavy? When the words left behind, unsaid, catch up to the present?”

stop.” I expelled a shuddering breath, kissing my forehead to his. “How can you be so sure you’re in love with me?” “Because it’s been six years. That’s seventy-two months, one-hundred and ninety-two hours, forty-three minutes, and twenty-eight seconds, and I still haven’t been able to talk myself out of it. I give up. Tell me you’ll throw in the towel, too.”

“The mouth and the heart are connected. That’s why words hurt. I’d never give either to anyone but you.”

“When the curve of your neck stopped being just the curve of your neck. When it became a place I wanted to bury my troubles away in. A place I hungered to breathe from. When the sun in my eyes stopped being a simple annoyance, but a plot of the universe to keep me from gazing at you. When seeing you do what you love stopped only being an inspiration of pride, but also an inspiration for my attraction.”

He’d turned my name into a prayer, and no matter how untamed and how urgent our lovemaking became, his hands on me, his mouth on me…it all translated to worship.

And now the only way to kick our addiction was to pour hate on it. To extract the love from the toxin before digesting the unfiltered contagion.

That became our sick, wicked game that week. I’d let him slip up and love me, and then get high off him punishing us both for it. And then I couldn’t wait to let him love me again. It’d gotten to the point where minutes of still waters felt like the churning sickness of withdrawal, and fighting and fucking our pain away the ultimate high until it was time for another hit.

“But getting under your skin meant getting under your demons, too. I wanted you lawless. I wanted to know what your hell felt like. I wanted everything.” I’d been searching for a level of unconditional love that could only be reached by the utmost pain. By surviving it. By opening the blackest and most remote parts of myself and having someone see it and say: I still love you. Clint had been searching for that, too. Joey spoke about my love. Well, loving them had been my life’s purpose and top priority since Clint had brought me home. My love for them was what made me worthy of anything. It was all I had to give.

Funny how the better way becomes transparent only after you’ve dipped your toe into the quicksand.

“This isn’t love, Clint.” I cried for all three of us, weeping all over him. “Not anymore.” “Then what is it?” he mouthed more than spoke. “Poison.” The low dose, slow-killing kind, and we’d reached the death end of it.

‘Today I’ve decided to forgive you. Not because you apologized, or because you acknowledged the pain that you caused, but because my soul deserves peace.’ ~Najwa Zebian

‘True forgiveness is when you can say thank you for that experience.’

“Our love was ours to do with as we saw fit. We didn’t need our jagged edges smoothed. We didn’t need to be unbent. I just needed to be brave enough to be broken,” he whispered, chipping away at my resolve. “Brave enough to love you through my brokenness.”

“What if all it would’ve taken was one touch from me to prove that nothing had changed for the better? That we’d been playing a role for eight years, that we were still the same broken people only capable of breaking each other and everything around us.”

For all the good those years without you did, I’d also lost pieces of myself I hadn’t admitted I wanted back.”