Stuck On You

It is Sunday night, two nights after Sean met Athena, and the encounter has stuck in his playing, playing over and over again like a skipping record. He has never experienced such a tangible memory. It's a drug. He is addicted to the memory of her. He is addicted to the vision of her in the smoke filled room, bathed in the effervescent green and red and purple light of the concert hall. Every detail is stitched into his brain. The way her shirt hung off of her porcelain shoulders and dipped, low-cut and perfect, in the front. He remembers the brown thread stitched delicately around the collar and the wide bell cuffs. He remembers the natural frowning shape of her mouth, the glossless pink of her lips, the smattering of light machine gun freckles near her nose, the gorgeous length and blackness of the lashes surrounding her shock green eyes. He remembers the complex highlights and shadows in her hair, the way it hung over her ears and parted over her forehead and how a rogue wisp of it fell across her eye. He remembers her shape, her almost criminally curvaceous figure, her lack of height, and the defensive stance she had when he introduced himself. He remembers the inadvertent flinch she gave, the surprise of being approached and the wariness that crept into her initial smile. He remembers her so vividly. He remembers the sharpness of her chin, the breadth of her face, the slight rose in her cheeks and the almost unearthliness paleness of her white skin. He remembers her voice, especially, how it was the perfect complement to her, how she was the form he'd envision if he'd only heard her speak on the phone or the radio. He remembers the slight crookedness of her teeth, the dissatisfied calmness of her demeanor, and the cool economy of her language. She wasn't wordy. She answered his small handful of questions in a way that was efficient without being terse.

Athena lived nearby and she was a year younger than Sean. She worked as a receptionist at a high school, which is she loathed, but she was putting herself back through college after having dropped out a semester prior to getting a degree in graphic design. She was single and hadn't had a boyfriend in a while. And, yes, she would be interested in having dinner with Sean some night.

She didn't have any paper with her because she never took her purse to concerts. Sean had accidentally left his phone at home. He did have a silver Sharpie, however, and Athena scrawled out her number on the palm of Sean's hand. The silver was barely legible on against his own white skin, so she wrote the number, again, on his forearm. Sean was embarrassed by the way the sensation of her hand on his arm shocked him, and how the force of it fanned out like downed wire electricity through every nerve in his body. It was at that moment he sadly took note of how long it had been since any girl had touched him.

She was very explicit in her instructions. He was to call her on Monday, because to do so earlier would make both of them feel very desperate. And then she left. She didn't stay at the concert. She didn't hang out with Sean after their brief, wonderful little meeting. She just disappeared. It was probably for the best, because it allowed time for Sean to reboot. The anxiety of the moment had pretty much caused every major system in his body to up and shut down. Sean didn't mind, though. The silver permanent ink on his hand and arm more than made up for the cardiac arrest.

And now it is Sunday and he is waiting. The ink is still clinging, stubbornly, to his skin, but he has transferred her number to multiple sources in a prudent act of safe keeping. He is laying on his bed, listening to songs shuffle on his laptop. Every song seems to be about love, and it is torturous. He has spent the last two days fabricating his first date with Athena, mapping out potential sites, creating mental flowcharts of potential disasters and missteps. He is excited to find out who she is. His gut is telling him that she is amazing, that she is brilliant and as dispassionately interested in everything as he is. His gut is telling him that she is cutely misanthropic and that she has great taste in music and movies and books. His gut is telling him that she hates all the same things he hates. His gut, he knows, could be dead wrong, but he can't wait to find out. He contemplates breaking her rule and calling tonight. He wonders if she would find that annoying or endearing.

Somehow he knows that she would find it annoying. And he loves that. He has been a model of self-control for years, now. He can wait another day, even if that waiting leaves him feeling twitchy and pathetic.

As song after song relays the horrors and divinities inherent in loving another person, Sean realizes how long it's been since he's looked forward to anything. Nearly every aspect of his life had been something to endure, something to slog through on the slow march to death. He didn't tell people that very often, as they tended to take a dim view of him and his dreary outlook, but it really was how he felt. Usually. But he was actually longing to call Athena. He wasn't looking past his dinner with her to the point when it was over and he could return to the solitary lair of his apartment. In fact, the time approaching his call was interminable. He felt as if it had been weeks since they'd met. He wanted so badly to be sitting across from her, talking to her, getting to know her. He forgot what anticipation was really like... before Athena, it had all but been replaced with dread.

He was worried, of course, about the impression he'd make on her... about the impression he'd already made, but it wasn't the crippling anxiety to which he was accustomed. Instead, it was the sort of thrilling worry that goes along with a roller coaster ride or a good scary movie. He was ready to be scared.

The vision of her was still there, and he tried to shake it. He didn't want to obsess or deify her. Although, with a name like Athena, it might be completely warranted.

Hey Pretty

It's loud, even away from the speakers, and there's a non-stop parade of sweat soaked drunks winding through the maze halls that flank the stage. There is revelry and joy and music and Sean is irritated by it all. He knows he is a curmudgeon, and he hates that about himself, but as another plastic cup of beer slops onto his sneakers, he realizes he is overly tired and just wants to leave. But he's stuck. His ride, Glen, is chatting with a girl, and so he has to listen to another song. He hovers at the periphery of the crowd, cringing at the feedback and the tin squeal of the guitar, but otherwise nearly enjoying the moment. A teenager careens into his back and Sean loses his footing and bounces into a leather-clad man mountain in front of him. He gets a glare and backs up. The teenager is laughing. The band, at least, is pretty good.

The whole of the room is slightly, but blandly, disorientating. The twisting colored lights blazing along rafters in the ceiling play out weird kaleidoscope effects on the dark walls, but the effect is more cheap than trippy. The noise is overwhelming, and each drum kick reverberates through the wood of the converted gymnasium floorboards and rattles through Sean's shins and all the way up to his chest. It's incredibly hot. Sean worries that he smells, but decides it wouldn't be detectable in this odious pit. There is cigarette and pot smoke everywhere, and he can feel it clinging to the fibers of his overpriced t-shirt and infusing into his jeans. He catches snippets of inane conversation, the pseudo-philosophical ramblings of the intoxicated fans, and he sneers. And this is the most fun he's had in weeks.

He sees people enjoying themselves, dancing, moshing, singing along with the slightly banal lyrics of a decent group well beyond its prime, and he wonders if he's even capable of joining along. He feels silly giving himself up to a moment of abandon, but he's not exactly sure why. A little ways away, a high school girl disperses the crowd with a seemingly ceaseless stream of foamy vomit. She falls on her ass and starts to sob. Nobody helps her up. She just sits there, dangerously close to the colossal milky puddle on the ground and cries her eyes out. And Sean wants to help her. She looks so sad and frail and stupid, and he feels bad for her. But he worries that he'll seem like some old pervert trying to take advantage of this poor, blitzed little girl. So he just watches to make sure nobody else messes with her. For now, at least, she seems ok. Sort of.

Glen is still chatting, saying God knows what, to the girl who goes to the nearby college. She seems kind of ditzy, but it's a snap judgment made from a few overheard sentences. Sean chastises himself for being overly critical, but then gives himself a pass since his criticisms are usually spot on. He knows, too, it doesn't matter to Glen if this girl is smart or interesting. All that matters is that she's willing to converse, and a lack of explicit rejection is all Glen really needs to strike up a short term relationship. Sean sometimes envies that ability, but, far more often, he finds it repulsive. And while he's had weak moments, Sean would say that he was not willing to trade loneliness for meaninglessness. If he's going to devote his time to someone, that someone better be worth the time devoted. A warm body and lowered expectations are not enough.

Glen tells Sean all the time that Sean is too picky, too rigid in his demands. But Sean is fine with that. He doesn't need anybody. He doesn't require a companion. He's had girlfriends in the past (four, to be exact) and he enjoyed being with them, but his lived fine without them, too. He's good at being alone. Glen is terrible at being alone. There's nothing wrong with that, Sean would say, condescendingly, but there's nothing wrong with solitude, either. Not that it doesn't sting, sometimes, to see loving couples holding hands or putting their arms around one another or making out. And not that it hasn't been rough to spend two and a half years alone in bed. But it's better than settling. It's better than passing time with anybody who's available. Glen and college girl don't have a commonality amongst them. There's nothing tying them together besides loneliness and desperation. Sean would rather be alone than tethered to some fellow desperate anchor.

The opening band leaves the stage and a smattering of applause goes up from the crowd. It is a weak thank you to a group that most of the kids in the audience have never heard before. There is a window of noise reduction, then, as the clamor of electric instruments dies and the muffled roar of a hundred conversations buzzes over the smoke haze like the thrum songs of locusts in the summer. It is a sort of relief, like when aspirin finally starts eating away at a headache. The lights come up for a bit, revealing the wilds and chaos of the room. There is trash everywhere. Fliers, cups, random bits of detritus from who-knows-where coat the floor in a layer of filth and sediment. It makes Sean sad, but he would not be able to accurately describe why. The puking high school girl is back on her feet, now, and she seems all right. She looks tired and embarrassed. She'll probably be sicker in the morning. She's with a large group of friends, but nobody bothered to help her when it was needed. Now that she's fine, she's been adopted back into the fold. That makes Sean angry and he wonders if it's just a byproduct of youth or if her friends will grow up and carry that indifference into adulthood. He wants to believe the former, but thinks the latter is probably true.

After a while, the lights go down again, and a roar goes up from the crowd. The stage is still dark when a crackle spits out of the amplifiers and something like music spills out of randomly strummed guitar strings. The audience intensifies their commotion and suddenly spotlights blaze from a balcony and illuminate the rock goddess on stage. And she begins to play a song called "Hey Pretty." It's one that everybody in the room knows. Shouts and whistles shriek out of hundreds of mouths and, almost as quickly as it began, the cacophony dies down as the song kicks into gear.

Sean does not believe in fate. He believes fate is the name given to coincidence that is neither unpleasant nor inconsequential, a way to elevate happenstance to something that infuses it with a deeper meaning than it deserves. However, as the chorus of the song rings out, "Hey pretty... don't you wanna take a ride with me," Sean makes eye contact with a girl who happens to be quite pretty herself. And he is stunned. It's not the prettiness that stuns him. There is no shortage of beautiful women at the concert. He is stunned by how taken he is with this particular girl for no reason that he can logically discern. He feels an immediate need to connect with her, a driving impulse to tell her who he is. And he doesn't know why. He doesn't know a thing about her, except that she has big green eyes and long, dusty brown hair and she is short and wearing a white top that looks like it is made of crepe paper. But there is something about her face, or more accurately, her expression, that seems to spell out her entire personality. The chorus hits again, and Sean, surprising himself with his decision to act on impulse, walks with purpose toward the green eyed girl.

And he tells her his name. And she smiles. And she tells him that her name is Athena.

Change

As the darkness of night closed in on Marshall, he sat on his bed, his head in his hands, and a sort of monolithic sorrow crushing his chest. He was certain, now, of his own stupidity, his absolute lack of grace. He had ruined everything and he was sure it was never going to be good again.

The sun set, and dark rolled in, and soon, Marshall was illuminated only by an orange glow of parking lot lights streaming in through the half-open slats of his blinds. A desk fan oscillated and hummed. Dogs barked outside. Every now and then, he could hear a couple pass by on the sidewalk or a car drive past. He felt sick. Isolated. Alone. He replayed the day’s events in his head, over and over, and with each successive viewing, the error seemed more obvious. It seemed more egregious. A cool breeze blew in through the window and jostled the blinds. There was a mild din of plastic on drywall as the treatment slapped around. He didn’t know what to do now. He felt paralyzed. Abandoned.

Nothing good, he decided, came from expressing emotion. Nothing good came from telling someone how you really feel. All it does, he decided, is shatter finely built illusions. All it does is force reality to come charging through like rhino. When people ask you how you’re doing, they don’t really care. Nobody wants to hear about your fears or your worries or your hopes or your dreams. That’s what therapists are for. People want the artifice of intimacy without really knowing a thing about one another. That’s what she had wanted. And he wrecked that. He wrecked it and he didn’t know how, of even if, it could be rebuilt.

At some level, of course, Marshall knew she knew. She had to know. She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t blind. She saw him fawn over her, gush over her, leap to her defense, beg for time. She saw all of that. She knew he was in love. But she was lucky enough to not really know. She could believe anything she wanted. She had nothing but circumstantial evidence… just an idea of it, no proof. Before he felt the need to upend his guts and tell her, breathlessly, just how in love he was, she could claim blissful and beautiful ignorance. Her reality was constructed in such a way that she and Marshall could be friends and nothing more, because Marshall never made the demand of anything else. She was fine pretending at closeness, and assumed that he was too. But inside, he was dying. Inside, he was clamoring to expel the truth.

As he sat on his bed in the dark, he wondered why he did it. He couldn’t adequately explain it. His stomach had been in knots around her. His brain hemispheres fused together in awe and lovestruck idiocy whenever the two of them were together. He cherished those moments, like rare stamps in some collection of time. Those moments stood out to him, and he wanted more. She was clear in her boundaries, but it didn’t stop his ridiculous heart or his ridiculous head from wanting, so badly, to cross into her borders. He kept it in check. He convinced himself, for a while, having her affection in any way was enough. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t close. It only whet his appetite. Every minute with her called out for duplication, for exponential growth. Every blush of something more only made the gulf between his hope and his reality that much more pronounced. He began to loathe the situation, the limits, the constraints and he hated himself for being cowed into action by his own asinine feelings.

He laid down then, on top of his blankets, in his clothes and tried to sleep, but he failed miserably in the attempt...

As night fell, Meredith was laying on her bed, struggling with a headache and pressing down on her eyes with her forearm draped across her face. She was sad and she was tired and she was angry that she wasn’t going to get to sleep tonight. She wished, somehow, she could go back and erase the last few hours, or that, at the very least, she could get a do-over. With her eyes shut so tightly, all she could see was the look of heartbreak on his face as he whispered “I love you,” and she responded with, “No you don’t.”

He did love her. She knew it. She didn’t want to know it and she certainly didn’t want to admit it, but it was doubtless. There was a polished sheen to the way he treated her… there was, in his words and his actions, a sort of barely contained admiration that both flattered and frustrated her. She knew. She could even pinpoint when his affection changed, when it grew it something unwieldy and larger than life. She saw the difference. He struggled with it, she could tell. And she wanted, badly, to somehow put him at ease. But she didn’t know what to say. The idea of it scared her to death. The idea that things could sour, that the status quo, a good status quo, might change made her sick to her stomach. So she ignored it and prayed that he would latch his attention on to somebody else. The idea of that made her queasy too. She liked things exactly how they were, but nothing stays the same for very long. Today she felt like she was watching a distant tornado, admiring it from her roof before realizing with dawning horror that it was headed straight for her. Now things had changed, and badly, and he was hurt and she was hurt and she didn’t know how to soothe any of it.

It wasn’t exactly that she wasn’t interested. She was. As much as she gagged at the idea of a soul mate, he was awfully close to that ideal, and she felt better with him than she did without. For Meredith, that was about as high of praise as any potential mate could get. But she squirmed, sometimes, at the idea of it as well. She would imagine the awkwardness of a first real date, a first real kiss… she would cringe at the thought of actual intimacy with someone she genuinely cared about because it just left so much room for things to go awry. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him, so she kept up as many walls as possible and expunged any romantic notion of him from her head. Every now and then, her heart would twinge as she felt the flush of his kindness, of his compassion, of thoughtfulness she didn’t believe she’d ever be the recipient of. And she would crumble, a little, and try desperately not to let on.

Now, as the moon rose and she downed a cocktail of too many aspirin and too much Diet Coke, she was struck by just how off the rails it had all gone. She wished, then, that she could cry, because it seemed like other people in similar situations always felt better after a good cry. But she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even know what muscle to flex. She felt sad enough, certainly, but it just sat on her shoulders, heavy and damp, and she slumped back onto her bed and covered up her eyes again and pictured him, standing there, trembling with emotion and rejected wholesale by the girl he adored. If it had been anyone else she would have chastised their weakness, she would have mocked how much they cared. But she could feel it from it, waves of heat like the warmth of a campfire, and it was sincere and it was directed at her. She wanted, at that moment, to wrap her arms tightly around him and press her lips against his and tell him, madly, that she loved him too. She imagined it, and it seemed strained. It wasn’t her, and it wasn’t the response she could ever muster no matter how deeply she felt for him. It was too much, too theatrical… too showy. She did love him. If she was honest, she had to admit it, but she’d never love him in the same way he loved her. He’d never believe it because she’d never be able to show him. She convinced herself that, bad as this was, it was better in the long run.

But the long run seemed awfully far off on the horizon, and the here and now sucked. She hated knowing how badly he felt and she hated, even more, how badly she felt, herself. She tried, again, to picture the two of them, together, actually together, holding hands or sharing popcorn or driving late at night to faraway, star spackled beaches, content in a lovely silence and happy just to be with one another. And all of it fit. She didn’t retch, she didn’t recoil. The kissing, the sex, the gangly retro-teenage awkwardness of a burgeoning relationship was surmountable. It would, she was certain, be enjoyable at some point, even if it took some getting used to. So why did she balk at it? Why was her reaction so harsh and so cold and so damning? She knew why.

To let him in, to open that door and start something new would mean a drastic change. And Meredith saw all of the potential pitfalls... whatever he had to offer, she couldn't see the benefits being worth the trouble. She was angry at herself for admitting that, but she was, at her core, a brutally honest girl. She struggled with the loss and desperately searched reason to find a decent way out... but she couldn't think of anything to do or anything to say to assuage the situation.

She let out a soft painful moan and tried to sleep. She couldn't do it. Her brain wouldn't shut the hell up.

At around three in the morning, both Marshall and Meredith were bleary-eyed and wild with insomnia. Both of them thought fondly of the other, and then coldly, and then angrily and back to fondly again. Both of them felt bound by arbitrary rules, bound by some unwritten etiquette, bound by limitations and expectations they had set for themselves, and they were suffering because of it. Both of them felt hollow, out of sorts with the circumstances and lost in some sickening, confusing sea. Both of them wanted nothing more than to call the other, to hear the voice on the other end of the line and say, without hesitation or fear or anxiety that they loved one another. Both of them wanted that vocal embrace, that reassurance that despite a wretched day, things between them would be just fine.

Both of them stared at their telephones, paralyzed by the moment, and unable to act. They were certain things had changed forever.

Stolen Heart

It was not in Christian’s nature to pray. He didn’t believe in it. He didn’t think it was anything but a whining plea to God, the fussy mewling of children unable to deal with the unswerving harshness of reality. It made him angry when people claimed to have had their prayers answered. When his family spoke of the healing power of prayer, it made him wonder why so many people who had just as many prayers muttered on their behalf still succumbed to cancer, or AIDS, or sepsis or influenza. He thought it seemed awfully arrogant that any one person would truly think their trivial concerns were getting through on God’s hotline. So he refrained from it, mostly. Every now and then, though, a prayer would escape his lips.

The last time that it happened, Christian was in a church, of all places, which was already quite a departure from his normal routine. He was there for a wedding, unsure of why he had been invited and even more unsure of why he was attending. The bride was an acquaintance, a friend of a friend’s, and he barely knew her at all. What’s more, he didn’t much care for the icy girl or the mousy little engineer she was going to marry and certainly subjugate. They weren’t horrible people or anything. He just didn’t care for their casual haughtiness or the way they disdainfully called waiters and waitresses by their first names. He didn’t like that, underneath a faux-liberal exterior of leftist politics, they were really just money-hungry borderline racists. He didn’t like that the groom cheated at Scrabble by playing proper nouns and then throwing a virtual temper tantrum until his opponent just gave him his points. As Christian sat in the church, listening to the excruciating self-penned vows, he realized, in fact, that he didn’t care for the couple very much at all. Given the sparse population of friends and family seated in the chapel, he assumed he was not alone in this verdict. It also probably explained why he had been invited at all.

Although Christian was hesitant to admit it, he knew that he had only come to the wedding in the hopes of meeting a girl. He felt silly about it, and understandably desperate, but it didn’t stop him from searching the small church for any signs of a single young woman. Clutches of older, or attached (or both) ladies dotted the pews. Haggard aunts of the bride seated with their husbands flanked pretty young cousins of the groom who had their heads on the shoulders of disinterested boyfriends. It was not a promising arena. The annoyance of it was twofold. Lonely Christian was not only shut out of potentially dating any of the girls at the ceremony, he was also subject to their fawning displays of lovey-doviness as the preacher read from the “Song of Solomon,” and then launched into a long sermon about the various glories of being in love. As Christian sat, thumbing through a hymnal and wishing he had just stayed at home, he looked up and noticed just how beautiful the stained glass windows of the sanctuary were.

The one closest to him, in fact, was especially gorgeous, although it seemed to be in no way related to church. He stared at the window, antique and ridiculously lovely and practically bursting with mosaic filtered sunlight. There was a woman pictured in the glass, and she was absolutely stunning. She had the look of an art nouveau advert girl with a serenely beautiful face and skin so milky white that it rivaled moonlight. Her hair was dark blonde and soft, and her eyes were nearly glowing with emerald illumination. She looked proud and strong and noble as she arched her back regally, her lovely curves accentuated by a clinging white and gold gown. Around her head, a golden halo fired its rays into the brilliant cloud-dotted azure skyscape behind her, while a lush garden of rich pink and purple flowers sprung up like fireworks around her feet. She was alluring and mystical, a creation of flawless artistry that seemed strangely out of place amidst windows depicting lambs and anchors and tablets of commandments. Christian was suddenly mesmerized, taken aback by her, and he found himself muttering, “God, I wish I could meet a girl like that.” He had said it quietly, but aloud, and the moment the words spilled out, her swung his head frantically, checking to see if he’d been heard to determine whether or not he should be mortified with embarrassment. If anyone nearby had overheard his accidental prayer, they weren’t snickering about it, so he went back to gawking at the woman in the window.

She looked different, somehow, now, as if she had moved. He couldn’t remember her exact position prior, but her eyes seemed lower now, more like they were looking at him. His face flushed and he felt extremely stupid. Infatuation was one thing, but he decided he should really reserve his unrequited love for breathing human beings and not exquisitely rendered works of art. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, and as he scanned her, he felt as if she was, almost imperceptibly, moving. He decided it must be a trick of the light, maybe an illusion created by the motion of real clouds outside. But it was hard to deny that she looked different moment to moment. Her eyes seemed to be following his, and her pale pink lips, emotionless and cool to begin with, seemed to be loosening into a very pretty smile. She was moving. She was moving and she was looking at him. And Christian unconsciously began to inch away from the window, toward the center of the church, staring intently as the woman in the glass as she very obviously stared back at him. He wanted to scream or to yell, but he was certain what he was seeing wasn’t real, so he kept his mounting fear to himself. If anyone else was seeing what he was seeing, they didn’t seem to think it was odd. Not a single person in the church seemed even slightly perturbed that this gorgeous, unreal girl was crawling out of the glass and carefully stepping down from the window’s sill to the green carpet of the sanctuary.

Christian didn’t think his eyes could physically open any wider and he had crowded all the way to the church’s center aisle as the woman from the window, still as luscious and as fabricated as a painting, calmly walked toward him and sat down at his side. His skin was a topographic map of goose bumps and shivers and she gently wrapped her cold, crystalline fingers around his. She smiled, her expression stalled out somewhere between sweet and sinister, and kissed him on his cheek. He felt science fair explosions go off in his stomach and his brain just sparked and reeled from the sheer improbability of what was happening. He assumed he had lost his mind, but as her drawn glass form began to soften into real flesh and blood, as her crystalline fingers became warm digits of skin and bone, he no longer cared. She was incredible. He could just tell. It was as if he’d known her in a dream or in another life or from some long forgotten childhood event. He was melting in her presence, his rationality snapped in half by a lightning bolt of suddenly falling madly and dizzyingly in love. If he had been thinking logically about any of it, he would have found it absurd and wholly unacceptable. As it was, his heart was twittering and every one of his nerve endings seemed to be lit up like a white hot sparkler.

“My name is Simone,” the girl cooed in his ear. Even her breath was sweet, like honey and lilac, and her voiced slithered into his brain and then fizzled into something effervescent and tickling. Christian couldn’t stop smiling. Any attempts at putting the situation into reasonable terms were thwarted by a mad sort of love-sickness that had entirely overpowered him. He felt as if his prayers, his trivial prayers to alleviate loneliness, were somehow being granted. There was a ballooning gratitude in his heart as she nuzzled her perfect head on his shoulder and he ran his fingers through her soft, sienna hair. Spiralbound trills of birdsongs and liquefied melodies slid down the bones in his spine and he shuddered from something he assumed was the genesis of boundless contentment. The world around him had gone fuzzy and indistinct, but that didn’t matter.

And although she’d said no more than four words to him, Christian knew Simone was everything he had ever been looking for. Her green eyes just sparkled with intellect and wit and inquisitiveness. Her voice was a summer-drenched purr of slow burning charm and molasses calm guile. She held herself with the proud rigidity of a queen, with the sparkling detachment of self-awareness and the soft-eyed look of rare and precious compassion. Christian could tell. She unlocked her hand from his and ran her fingernails along the back of his neck. He responded with the eyes-shut muted elation of a scratched pet cat. As she touched him, she spoke again. “You and I, my dear, are so very much alike. I wonder how long ago it was that I was seated here, like you, wallowing in the self-pity of being alone? I was so sad, then, so unhappy with my solitary lot. I would spend my time praying, like you, just praying for some salvation from this isolation. And then he came… he came and he stole my heart.”

Christian opened his eyes, then, with a vague fear suddenly rumbling through him. It was instinctive paranoia, and absolutely correct. Simone’s nails, as she finished her sentence, dug into Christian’s flesh hard. He felt a jolt of pain and flinched forward, trying to free himself of her talon grip. It was only a moment before tiny droplets of blood beaded up from the wound and ran in warm streaks down his collar.

Simone’s smile was wild, now. Her eyes were flaring with opportunity. “Up there, he was… another victim, I suppose, of his solitude. He called out to me while I bemoaned my fate… Oh, it was such a ridiculous prayer. I remember it so well. I remember begging for him, begging for rescue… from this sad situation. From the company of myself. I just begged. And it was like a miracle when it happened… like it was for you, just now. I saw him slowly descend from that beautiful perch, and he was a miracle. I was… I fell in love with him, on the spot. He was everything I’d ever wanted. And he stole my heart.” Simone grabbed Christian’s wrists, stronger than he could have imagined. She licked her pale lips and looked at Christian with a terrifying lust. “He stole it right through my chest.” She moved Christian’s hand toward the neckline of her gown, and with his flailing fingers, she pushed it down just a bit, straight under her left clavicle and showed Christian the shattered glass hole just above her breast. It was a surreal vision, as if a window of her skin had been pierced with a hurled rock. A spider web network of cracks and fissures radiated out from a hollow black void, marring her perfect white skin with a frighteningly incongruous wound. “You felt me do it to you, didn’t you? Did you feel yourself fall? Did you feel yourself surrender to me? You poor lonely soul. You poor, praying fool.”

Christian felt a horrible sense of panic and nausea wash over him. He was scrambling, trying to free himself from her tightening and increasingly painful grip. Her green eyes were narrowing with malevolence. Her figure was somehow more serpentine, suddenly, a living weapon of arching grace. She was still beautiful, but she was also dangerous and terrifying. “Now, sweet boy, I’ll steal your heart, too.” And with that, she lunged at his chest with her mouth, ripping open his shirt while he bleated in fear. Then, with an unrelenting fury, she smashed open the suddenly glassy form of his skin with her bared teeth. The pain that Christian felt was unbearable. Time froze as he focused on the agony. His whole being was stark white with hurt… his nerves jumped like downed wires while Simone rooted in the hollowed cavity of his chest and ripped out a pumping, blood red mosaic of foggy glass. And as she released him from the bond of his own heart, Christian felt an amazing release. He was free of any need for friendship, for companionship, for love. She had torn it asunder, leaving him broken and unbound. Christian stared at the gaping, shattered window hole in his chest. He looked aloof and remarkably unconcerned.

Simone looked at him, smiling with pride, bits of jagged red glass stuck to her lips and cheeks. “You poor lonely soul,” she repeated.

Christian felt nothing, then, for her. The unbridled lust, the desire, the head-over-heels madness of his brief love was extinguished, replaced with a calm void of presence. He felt at peace. He was unjangled, unexcited and pleasantly cold. And he tried to thank her, but she wasn’t really there anymore, if she ever had been at all. He was, he discovered, alone in his pew, still inundated with the long sermon about the power of union. Christian smiled, no longer bothered by the displays of affection and his utter lack of it. Instead, he was content to smirk, inwardly, at the stupidity of it. He didn’t need his heart. Simone had stolen it, and he was no worse for the wear. He persevered through the remainder of the ceremony, congratulated the unpleasant couple and went about on his merry way.

He never even noticed the resemblance that the figure in the window now bore to him.