Page 72 of The Monster of Hotel No. 7
“I don’t know.” I feel compelled to answer, like the blue of her eyes is this ocean she wanted me to swim in with her and I am being pulled under the sea. “I… They are still there, alone. Stein retained ownership of the house.”
“Did you create them again, at… Haunt Muren?” She says the name of Stein’s estate like it is unfamiliar, and I suppose it is, but the fact she remembered it makes me feel strangely, comfortablywarm.
“I wanted to,” I tell her honestly, and I can’t shake the feeling she is still mocking me in some way that I don’t understand, like who would actually want to hear about this? Aboutmylife? Yet I can’t stop sharing tiny scraps of information with her. “But I was just so… tired, then, of everything I liked being ruined.”Like you,I don’t say.They will ruin you for me too.
My heart squeezes inside my chest and I desperately wish it wasn’t true. That this one thing, this beautiful creature I could have for myself.
“I’m sorry, Sullen,” she says quietly. “I wish I had known.”
I don’t know what to say to that. The kindness is so unfamiliar as to feel like a lie.
She searches my gaze as I run my finger along her labia. I know the term; I know every word. But I have never… touched anything like this. I am not worthy, and I know that I have to steal each of these moments. It is the only way someone like me should have them at all.
Her pulse races under my hand over her chest, but she doesn’t shy away from me.
“I can… take off my dress. If you want.” She whispers the words, and I smell the wine on her breath. “You can see where you bruised me, with the needle.” There is nothing of anger in her words. It’s like a true offer, and I feel myself growing harder when she says it. Thinking of her skin, blooming yellow and red and purple from me.
I swallow hard, but I don’t agree with her, or move. This moment already feels impossibly delicate as is.
“Or maybe I could…touch you?” She tilts her chin, as if in waiting, but she doesn’t move her arms from above her head.
I lift my gaze and stare at the beige-pink of her palms. The beautiful underside of her nails.
I flex my fingers in my gloves. My hand is clammy, and I have the sudden, vicious urge to yank this outer shell off, too. But the places where my nails won’t grow, then the strange color beneath the others, alongside the lumps and angles of my fingers… she can’t… see that.
And I… I’ve told her too much.
I’ve given all of me away. I told her I was forced to drink wet specimens and I left out the way my throat burned and I vomited and worse and was dizzy in bed for days, puking on myself. And no one cared and when Stein came, it was only to command me to clean myself up. And some nights I thought I might die and sometimes I simply wanted to.
I could’ve killed myself. Drank too much. Finished what Stein always started. Butshewould cross my mind and I… couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
I am pathetic. She does not love me. She’sdrunk.And before, she was held captive. Maybe she pretended to be jealous over Maude, but as it is, I think it would be much easier to flirt and touchherthen continue to expose myself to Karia. What am I doing, giving these pieces away? If I let her live, she will mock me to Von. Cosmo. The men she has given herself to and will again. And I…
I cover her eyes with my hand.
I can’t look at her.
Not like this.
Not when I am so exposed, in more ways than she is.
She goes entirely still.
She does not even breathe.
I shift slightly, so I can see her legs, her thighs rigid now that she is once again remembering she doesn’t really know me at all.
And as I stare at the smoothness of her flesh, my hand beneath her dress, I know I should’ve never told her anything. How did she get me to speak so much? My mouth is dry with regret, my throat aching, and I just realize it all now. That those are the most words I’ve spoken in… perhaps ever. Glimmers of laughter with my mother echo in distant memories but I cannot hold onto those.
No one is interested in someone like me. No one.
“Sullen?” she whispers, and I hate that I love she has never once called me Sully and I hate that I would love it if she ever did.
In a world of loneliness, it wasn’t the animals who kept me company. It was the sun of her.
But I am the night.
We can never exist at the same time. I will blot out all of her goodness.
