Page 3 of Pretty Black

Or were we doomed to keep up this fight?

My soul was weary.

I yearned for sleep.

An escape from this dreary deep.

Our love story started in the middle. We’d never done anything the right way around. We became famous long before we had a record deal, we were in love long before we ever touched, and we were broken before our lives started. At some point, it clicked, and I realized I couldn’t spend another day without him.

I wasted so much time trying to go back and change the beginning, and here we sat, left with all the mistakes we made getting to this point.

We’d made so many mistakes.

Iris was a tragic love story.

I knew it the first moment I laid eyes on him. I wanted to trap him inside me. The heart of him was impossible to contain, but instead of winning his, he’d stolen mine. The frenzy he’d created in my body. It thudded for him alone, and nothing would satisfy but his love. There would be no containing or sustaining it.

Not after one taste of his love.

He renewed the burn inside me with a single look. A touch. A kiss. I knew I’d be chasing him for the rest of his days.

And maybe that was the tragedy. I’d never survive him.

My Pretty Black.

We were bound up in a death pact. He couldn’t survive the pain of this world, and I wouldn’t survive without him.

TWO

PRESENT DAY

Caspian Locke

Instead of sleep, I drifted in and out of memory.

The best and the worst of us. A flip book of our highs and lows, still not sure how we got here or how we made it this far.

Sleep and awake, I’ve been here dwelling in the wake of us.

Remnants left of best and worst moments.

The collide of our lives.

Mutual distraction guaranteed.

Build each up to tear each other down.

All to drown in the aftermath.

Two Years Ago

Iris could have been dead, as pale as he was. His hair tangled on the pillow behind his head, and he looked more at peace laying in a hospital bed than I’d seen him in years. How had only a couple of years aged him so?

I sat in the corner of the private room, knees pulled into my chest, so unassuming it took most of the nurses who came into the room a few minutes to notice there was anyone else in here.

Machines beeped and whirled, and Iris didn’t move. It had been over twelve hours since I found him sodden and soaked, barely conscious, in the phone booth. We’d been told he hadn’t overdosed, but I still found it hard to believe with the state I’d found him in.

Alexander left in the early hours of the morning after he’d been assured Iris would make a full recovery. But not before he’d fixed me in a glare and, with that single look, took me back to the conversation we’d had so many times over the last four months.

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