Page 57 of The Ripper

Granted, I had yet to see him lose control around me, because I knew that the anger I saw in his eyes, and continued to see, was a small flicker of what actually lay beneath his skin.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked as I unlocked my door.

“Nothing, just… you,” I answered as we entered my apartment.

“What about me?”

He looked around as I mindlessly munched on my lips and started to fidget when I realized my apartment was a mess. A colorful one, but a mess, nonetheless. There were clothes strewn across the floor, takeout boxes on the coffee table, piles of books everywhere, empty coffee cups that I never washed until I ran out of clean ones, and an overflowing ashtray at the foot of the couch.

It wasn’t always like this. Actually, it was never like this, but the last few days had been a nightmare, and I hated that he was seeing this side of me. The side that became lost in chaos when faced with sadness.

My apartment was so different from his, a polar opposite actually. Messy while his was spotless, almost as if taken out of Architectural Digest, colorful while his was a black hole, and it smelled like food and cigarettes while his smelled like lavender and him.

My apartment carried the signs of depression. I did too, but I seemed to forget about it in his presence. Maybe because he kept me so overwhelmed that I couldn’t think about anything other than him.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” I said as my cheeks caught fire, remembering that he’d already seen it last night when he brought me the pants.

“Don’t worry about it.” He placed his palms on my shoulders and gently rubbed them as he slowly pushed me towards the bathroom. “Get ready, okay?” He turned me around and kissed me, then went out and closed the door behind him.

Alone.

With the black thoughts.

Again.

As I washed my face and brushed my teeth, I continued to wonder what he saw in me. He was so frighteningly out of my league, and yet he wanted me, even if he could obviously have any other woman on the planet.

Sure, I wasn’t ugly, I knew that, but there was this little voice inside me that kept telling me that something wasn’t right with him lusting over me. While I loved the fact that I inherited my mother’s skin tone and features, I used to feel like a poser between the women in my previous life, because I was pale when most of them were tan, and blonde when most of them were brunettes.

I often wondered if my mother had felt like an outsider in that place, too.

Shaking my head, I took off his T-shirt, folded it carefully and placed it on the overflowing laundry bin.

I looked at myself in the mirror as I removed my plain cotton panties, biting my lips to the point where I drew blood as I saw the rolls that formed on my stomach when I bent over. Sure, I feigned confidence on a day-to-day basis like it was my second skin, but deep down I wished those rolls didn’t exist.

I felt the warmth of my tears before I realized that I was crying, and I gripped the excess flesh between my fingers and winced. Then I looked at my thighs, wanting to hang myself for every acne scar, for every cut left behind by clumsy shaving and for every ingrown hair. Now that I looked closely, they all seemed to grow.

You’re good. You’re healthy. You’re beautiful. You’re warm.

So warm.

That’s what I told myself every morning, and for a while I actually believed it, then he came along, and made me question everything about my body. Not because he was clearly working out and his body was sculpted like a God, but because I wondered what the women before me looked like, and imagined them as these perfect beings with perfect bodies, perfect skin, and perfect hair.

Fucking perfect.

Why was it that we could feel beautiful for a while, then put ourselves down whenever someone more attractive came along? Why did this man’s attraction bring back insecurities in me?

I pinned my hair in a bun, shook my head and crawled into the shower with my sadness, where I turned on the water and let it run hot over my skin, silently crying as I remembered all the disasters in my life, all I was before coming to the United States, and all I became afterwards.

Alana’s image flashed before my eyes and I pressed my forehead to the tiles, trying to focus on him and how he made me feel.

He saw you. He saw you. He saw you.

He liked what he saw. He wanted what he saw.

He’s just pretending.

“Shut up,” I whispered as I opened my eyes and stared at my toes.

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