She lay in the dim red light, her covers to her chin…watching me. Waiting. I give her my best smile. Oh god, she loves me. I’ve tried pretending she doesn’t know me, but what a lie, we both knew! She knows the hearts I’ve broken, the backs I’ve stabbed. And still, she lay, open and ready for me. I can’t be the one to take this from her. She’s already given too much.

Shivering. I want to be warm. She holds out the covers and I climb into bed beside her. Her skin, like rose pedals against my callous hide. Sending shocks down my arms and legs, raising my hair with goose bumps.

She cries, clutching my shoulders, breathing heavy. I see myself as a child, a little boy. Troubled already. And her as a child? Pure. I remember her then, before they sent me away. She has always been the heart-mender. But who will mend hers after I have left it bleeding and broken? This is right; this is wrong. I know it. I simply cannot deny it. But, for the moment, I forget it. She is in my arms.

I’ve given her my disease; she’ll not look at the world the same way anymore. What’s a boy supposed to do? She cannot expect me to grow old with her. Marry her. No. It’s best for all if I leave soon, while she still has time to cry, hate, then move on. I can’t procrastinate for my own indulgence.

I want to rest in these flower-scented sheets until morning. And when we wake, I’ll have a cigarette, we’ll whisper poetry over coffee, watching the fog roll away. Maybe we’d make love some time that afternoon. She’d lay her head on my chest, trembling slightly. Tiny bruises on my arms in the shape or her hands. Mom and Papa away for the weekend; they trust their little child. Wouldn’t that be something?

But it’s 3 am, and still dark when I slip from the bed. The cold is shocking. I pray to the coldness that she won’t hear me moving. I hear her whisper sleepily. Wondering where I’ve gone to. She pierces my chest with her stare. Confused. This is it. There is no other time then now.

I tell her that it’s time for me to go. She doesn’t understand. I tell here she’s beautiful, breath-taking. I tell her she had too much faith in me. It only makes it worse. These tears are different than the ones before. They’re terrified and angry. I try to take her hand, tell her it’s all my fault, but she recoils. Her eyes are bullets, tearing through my tissue, shattering my bones, exploding out the back of me.

She asks me if I’m going to run away for the rest of my life. I want to answer truthfully. Yes. I do, in fact, plan to run. Movement is my only protection. If ever there was a girl…woman…I were to love: it is she. I’ve been the cause of tears before. I’ve torn out hearts and threw them to the wolves without so much as blinking. I have abused and neglected, and she thought she could change me.

In all honesty, for someone to show that much faith in so small, and black a soul, is utterly terrifying. She deserves better than this. Why did she have to think she could save me? Why couldn’t she see I was beyond repair? She refuses to believe that. Moving fiercely around the room, switching clothes from one drawer to another, making and unmaking the bed. Hold still. Just stand and look at me please. She continues to move.

I start for the door, not knowing what else could be said. She says she loves me, and stops me in my tracks. I tell her to never say that again. I was never aloud real love, not from a mother, a father, a girl. Sometimes I just have to brush my fingertips along the edges of love, to keep from going mad. To anchor myself to sanity and keep from falling away all together. I swear to her I am almost gone already. I turn to leave again. She whispers my name through her tears, but I don’t turn around again. I am gone.