It wouldn’t be so terrible if the woman had harbored a single good bone in her body. From childhood, she’d been the aunt none of the children wanted to get close to. Her passing away does not negate the fact that she had been a horrible witch.
A collage of all the things Aunt Laura has personally done to me swims past my subconscious as I take a careful turn in the road. It’s probably not how you’re supposed to remember the dead, but bad memories are all I have of the shrewd, callous woman with cold eyes and a sharp tongue. She went out of her way every birthday, every holiday to remind everyone of their worthlessness. Her idea of a gift was a jab at your deepest insecurities.
Gained some weight? She’d give you a gym membership and advise you not to snack so much.
Going through a divorce? A check for your ex for putting up with you for as long as they did.
My favorite gift from her was a talking mirror that told me how beautiful I was. An oddly sweet gesture, until I read the card.
“Since you will die single.”
I tell myself I’m not bothered, but Aunt Laura might have been right in her cruel little way. Twenty-seven and the only person who’s ever touched me in bed was a boy I loved before either of us understood what desire was supposed to feel like is a pathetic case.
It’s not like I haven’t tried. I’ve gone on dates. Let men kiss me. Let their hands slide beneath my clothes. But somewhere between wanting and doing, something inside me recoils. A cold, sharp panic that turns my skin into stone. They never see it. They chalk my paralyzed and rigid state as being too shy or nervous. But I feel it like a scream lodged under my ribs.
Once, I forced myself into a one-night stand, determined to prove I wasn’t broken. He finished on my thigh a second later, but the real failure was me. I lay there, waiting to feel something, anything and all I wanted was for him to stop touching me.
After that, I decided maybe it was a sign. Every man I’ve ever let get close—close enough to kiss me, touch me, think they had a chance—has wound up injured.
Accidents, they called them.
A wrecked car on a dry road.
A fall on a trail he’d hiked his entire life.
Nothing suspicious. Nothing anyone could point to. But I know the patterns.
Maybe it’s a coincidence.
Maybe it’s karma.
Maybe it’s me. Either way, I’ve convinced myself the world is safer if I keep my distance.
So no, I haven’t given up on intimacy. I’ve just traded living bodies for silicone and batteries. My bedside drawer holds an impressive collection of toys, each one a reminder that pleasure is easier when no one else is breathing in the room.
A sick part of my brain thinks I should have brought the box with me on this adventure. Aunt Laura would have been horrified by me fucking myself in her bed. But even as I think it, I grimace at my own lack of tact.
“Well, at least I’m going to a warm place when I die,” I grumble to myself.
Toy box aside, there’s my sex demon who does sick, deliciously depraved things to me in my sleep. The gorgeous creature with the body of winding vines and hard muscles and face full of shadows. I’m a hundred percent certain he’s the reason human men mean nothing to me.
It’s been a reoccurring dream for so long, I can’t even pinpoint when it started. He just appeared one night and dragged me into his world where he spenthoursdoing the most unhinged and filthy things to my body. He tortures and terrorizes me in ways that have me waking up to soaked sheets and a body so tender I can’t sit without wincing.
I’m addicted.
It’s sad and pathetic, but I know no human man will ever worship me the way he does.
It’s all amazing ... until I wake up, tender, swollen and so aroused I’m cumming before my eyes open. I’ve started leaving a toy under my pillow for those mornings.
But fantasy is all it is.
A crippling fantasy that can never be real and at some point, I need to come to terms with that.
I’m beginning to think I am never escaping this road when I see it.
In the distance.
Tucked in a cluster of trees far to my left.
