That’s when it all went bad.
He’d pick a fight just so he could accuse me of hiding shit when I wasn’t. I’m not the type to argue for the sake of arguing. he didn’t believe that I wasn’t hiding anything from him, when in reality, I just didn’t want to talk about my past. So fine, he didn’t have to believe me. It made no difference to me.
But for him, it made all the difference.
When I didn’t open up and give him what he wanted, he fucked around behind my back. Rather than just cave and tell him how I turned out to be a cold-hearted bitch, I trained more at the gym to get out of the house. After months of fights escalating to the physical sort, I came home to find him fucking some girl on our couch.
So I beat her bloody. I’m not one to be disrespected in my own home.
He snapped, I snapped. We both left that fight with black eyes, but we were finally able to take a breath.
He knew I couldn’t give him what he wanted, and I knew he wasn’t going to stop asking for it. So we broke up.
But underneath the asshole, Joey was a good guy, and he knew that I’d never be able to afford another place to live. So I moved into the room across from his, and we agreed to split rent until I could afford to move out. Two years later, I was almost ready.
In those two years, I hadn’t been exactly…celibate. I just didn’t allow anyone I fucked to stay the night. I’m a one and done kind of girl.
I walked to the mirror I had hanging on the back of my closet door and stared at my reflection. I pulled my hair tie out and watched the thick black mass float around my shoulders. I looked tired, my lilac colored eyes were dull, my face bruised from the fight. Exhaustion was a weight on my body as I turned toward my bed. Thinking about my epic failure of a relationship with Joey always led me to think of the one and only other relationship I’d had.
Three years ago, a few months before I met Joey, I watched the one and only guy I ever loved walk away from me. He left me more broken than I’d ever been. He picked me up after Brinley left, only to do the same thing when I needed him the most, when I thought that surely I wasn’t going to make it any longer. I told him I loved him, I knew he loved me too, but he left me rather than face the consequences. I was back to being the girl who had nothing and no one.
I rarely ever thought about him, tried to never allow myself to remember how it felt to be loved and cared for after Brinley left.
My sister, my best friend.
I pictured her beautiful blonde hair and pretty blue eyes. She was the only family I had. Blood or not, we were sisters. She would let me hold her after my sessions with our foster father. She knew I didn’t need to be taken care of; I just wanted to make the beating worth it.
I held her because I knew that I was protecting her by letting him use me. She was the reason I made the deal in the first place. I wouldn’t let him touch her, and knowing that I was, in my own way, saving her from the same kind of abuse…well, that made the suffering worth it.
After the beatings, I’d hold her in my arms, her head on my chest, and I would cry. I’d let go of my anger, and I’d feel the pain he inflicted, in the safety of her arms.
Once she was adopted and I’d stopped hearing her voice, I couldn’t find it in me to cry anymore. She was no longer there to hold on to.
My reason had been taken from me.
Shortly after she left, a new lifeline showed up. Another bright light—this one bringing romantic love into my life. I couldn’t cry without her, but Alias showed up shortly after she’d left.
Even now, it seemed to physically hurt when I thought of him. Losing him had been more painful than anything my foster father did to me.
But even when I had Alias, I still held onto this anger. It wasn’t hard to do since I didn’t even know where Brinley had been taken to. She told me she’d call me every day, told me she would find a way out once she turned eighteen—that she would come back for me.
But she never did.
She never called.
Since that day, I hadn’t shed a single tear. I let my foster father continue to beat me and got angrier with each session. I was filled with so much rage that after a while, I needed an outlet.
That’s how I started fighting.
I took my aggression out on the mats. I beat the faces of random girls and didn’t feel bad about it, because at the end of the day, they had asked for it when they stepped in the ring with me. I couldn’t bring myself to feel guilty about hurting them when fighting was pure choice. The ring may have been illegal, but JD kept his record clean. No fighter was forced to be there.
It was all about the easy money. The bets. The atmosphere.
No, those girls didn’t have to be there, they didn’t have to face me. But since they were, I used them to get out my anger, and it was an added bonus to make a little money while I did it.
I had only loved two people in my life, and both of them left me, never to return.
Did I want someone to love again? Someone to get to know me through and through? Yes, eventually. But I knew I wasn’t ready. I was locked up tighter than Fort Knox. I had thorns around my black heart, hate in my soul.
Trusting someone with my pain wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
So I fucked. A lot.
Don’t judge, a girl has needs.
Or judge, I don’t give a fuck.
I crawled up further onto my full-sized bed—not bothering to take my clothes off—and snatched the bottle of vodka from underneath my ass. After opening it, I swallowed a few healthy gulps, smiling at the burn of the alcohol as it slid down my throat.
I’d be asleep in no time.
I took the elevator down to the ground floor of our building and made my way lazily to the front door, invitation in hand. I was surprised that my best friends trusted me with this girl, though I was the only one who could get the job done. I supposed that reason was good enough.
I was buzzing as I waited for the elevator doors to open, my body running on residual energy from our little meet up in the alley with a certain female. It wasn’t a good feeling.
The doors dinged, and I was let out into the lobby, walking with purpose past the doorman, giving him a dip of my chin in acknowledgement.
My chest twisted as I pulled out a cigarette and stuck it between my lips, lighting it with my Zippo. Standing on the sidewalk, in the early hours of morning, I wanted to throw fire at the city brownstones, rip children from their parents, steal cash from local business owners. All for the fuck of it.
You see, my mind was a place that even I didn’t want to be. It’s dark in there. A swirling tide of misery and destruction.
Every day, I lived with a driving need for pain and humiliation, fear and hopelessness. I ached to watch the Humans suffer.
Correction: the monster within me wanted the Humans to suffer.
I didn’t associate with him. Not on a personal level, anyway. I ignored his dark desires as much as I could. I pushed and clawed and fought for control over the beast. But it always won.
Because unlike my best friends, I was the beast. I couldn’t separate one from the other. I was at home with my demons, living amongst Angels.
I walked, throwing my lighter in the air and using my magic to slow its pace as it fell gracefully into my waiting palm. I was biding my time, waiting out the hunger, hoping for a night to myself, but I was too wound up to deny it for long.