This novel is going to be part of my book "Of Love and other Nightmares", out soon!
The house was already bleeding light through its wounds when I arrived, each crack in the walls seeping amber like old honey mixed with blood. She was there, of course she was there, perched on the window ledge like some feral angel who'd torn off her wings just to feel the weight of falling. The cigarette between her lips wasn't just smoke; it was a fucking prayer to whatever gods still bothered listening to people like us.
"Took you long enough," she said without turning, and Christ, the way she said it, like she'd been waiting not just tonight but through every incarnation we'd lived and failed to love properly. It sounded less like an accusation and more like "where have you been all my fucking life" wrapped in barbed wire and sarcasm.
"Figured you'd be too busy giving a TED talk to your reflection," I said, stepping through broken glass that sang beneath my boots, "about how the world keeps letting you down to actually show up on time."
She smirked, that particular curve of lips that could mean murder or foreplay, sometimes both. Dragged on the cigarette like she was trying to inhale the entire night. "Cute. You rehearse that little performance in the mirror? Or did you workshop it with whatever sad thing you've been fucking to forget me?"
"No mirror," I said. "Broke it. Too many lies staring back. Besides, you're the only reflection I've ever needed to see how truly fucked I am."
A silence fell between us, dense as wet earth, pressing against our lungs. But it was familiar, this suffocation, like we always paused at the same cracks in conversation, afraid that finishing a sentence might mean finishing us.
"Well," she said, finally jumping down from the ledge, her boots hitting the rotting floorboards with a sound like a heartbeat stopping, "this place has nothing left to reflect anyway. Just us and whatever we're about to burn."
The hallway stretched before us like a throat, reeking of wet rot and stale smoke, of promises that died before they could leave the mouth. Wallpaper peeled away from the walls like old skin, like the house itself was trying to shed its memories. There were more holes than solid wall, more absence than presence, each gap a conversation we'd never finished, a touch we'd withheld, a truth we'd swallowed rather than speak.
This abandoned house, still standing through spite alone just outside the city limits, in that godless stretch of nowhere that even the desperate avoided, this was our temple that night. The kind of place that keeps your secrets not out of loyalty but exhaustion, too tired to judge, too broken to care. And if I had known what she meant to do, what we would become in those rooms, maybe I would've stopped her. Or maybe I would've struck the match myself.
I leaned against a doorframe that groaned under even that slight weight, the wood soft with decay. "So what's this then? A date? A dare? Some elaborate suicide pact with mood lighting and foreplay?"
She tossed me a pack of cigarettes, empty except for the ghost of tobacco. "It's whatever you're most afraid it might be. Whatever keeps you up at night, sweating through your sheets, thinking about my mouth."
"Jesus fucking Christ," I said. "You always talk like an art film that's trying too hard to win at Cannes."
She smiled then, proud as a queen surveying her burning kingdom. "You love that about me. You love how I make everything feel like it matters more than it should."
"I fucking hate that about you," I lied, and we both knew it, but lying was part of our liturgy, the call and response of people too scared to pray honestly.
She shrugged, lit another cigarette from a different pack, didn't offer me one. That was our dance, always almost kind, always withholding just enough to keep the other hungry. Like maybe love was just another word for the particular way we starved each other.
We ended up in what used to be a living room, though 'living' felt like blasphemy in that dead space. A sofa had collapsed into itself, springs exposed like broken ribs, reaching up toward a ceiling that had given up holding anything. Old newspapers nested in corners, yellowed prophecies of disasters that had already come to pass. The room was dressed in memories we'd never made, futures we'd already ruined.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, legs folded like origami made of flesh and denim, exhaled smoke through her nose like a dragon too tired to breathe fire. "So," she said, examining her fingernails as if they held scriptures, "what was her name?"
"What?" The word fell out of me, stupid and heavy.
"The girl. The one you thought might taste less like ashes than me. The one you let touch you in all the places I'd already claimed."
I blinked, throat suddenly full of sand. "There wasn't..."
"Don't fucking lie to me," she cut in, sharp as surgery without anaesthetic. "I don't care if you fucked her six ways to Sunday and twice on Monday. I don't care if she made you come so hard you forgot my name for thirty seconds. I just want to know if she made you feel less. Less hungry. Less hollow. Less like you're walking around with a me-shaped hole in your chest."
I sank to the floor across from her, my knees protesting, everything protesting. "No," I said, and it tasted like confession. "She didn't."
"Did she try?" Her voice was curious now, almost gentle, which was always when she was most dangerous.
"Everyone tries," I said. "They bring their little tools, their sweet words, their normal love. They don't stay long enough to fail properly. They see what you left behind and they run."
She studied me then, eyes sharp as winter stars, mouth soft as a fresh bruise. She looked like she could devour me whole or save me, depending on which hunger won. The silence stretched between us, taut as skin about to tear.
"What about yours?" I threw back, needing to draw blood too, needing to not be the only one bleeding. "Where's the latest saviour? The one who was going to fix you with his steady job and his good intentions?"
"He left," she said, then let something deeper crawl out, "three weeks ago. Said I was too much. Said loving me was like trying to hold fire in his bare hands."
"Smart man."
"Coward," she corrected. "Just like you."
The accusation hung between us, and then she asked, "You ever think maybe we're just bored and scared and this is the only way we know how to feel anything real? That we're addicted to the burning because at least it's honest?"
"I think about you more than I think about being okay," I said, and immediately wanted to take it back, swallow it down with all the other truths that made me weak.
She smiled, vicious and beautiful. "That's fucking pathetic."
"You're the one asking questions you already know the answers to."
She laughed, but it was all edges. "God, you're such a coward. You'd rather choke on your own silence than risk saying something real."
"And you're fucking cruel," I shot back, feeling something crack in my chest. "You make people want things you have no intention of giving. You dangle yourself like bait and then act surprised when someone bites."
"Better that than your politeness," she said, and her smile landed like a slap dressed as a caress. "Better cruel than whatever neutered thing you pretend to be when you're not with me."
I laughed, bitter as burnt coffee. "You're impossible."
"And you're here anyway."
She crawled toward me then, slow and deliberate, cigarette trailing smoke behind her like a ghost dragging chains. When she kissed me, it was soft at first, tentative, like we were both remembering how to be ruins together. Then she bit my bottom lip, hard enough to draw blood, and pulled back.
"You feel that?" she asked.
"The blood? Yes, you fucking vampire."
She rolled her eyes. "Not the blood, idiot. That ache behind your ribs, that twist in your gut. That's me. I live there, rent-free, renovating your insides to make more room for missing me."
"You're a squatter in my nervous system," I said, trying to make it sound like a joke, failing.
"And you're a hypocrite. You crave me and resent me for the craving. You want to own me and you want to be free of me, and you can't figure out which wanting is worse."
"You're the cigarette I keep quitting and lighting again. The drink I swear off every morning and pour every night."
We stared at each other, neither blinking, the smoke curling around us like something alive, something waiting. The house creaked around us, settling deeper into its decay, and I wondered if buildings could die of loneliness too.
"Do you think there's meaning in this?" she asked suddenly, vulnerability creeping into her voice like water through cracks. "In what we are? In all this bleeding and breaking and kissing and running? Or are we just two damaged things breaking against each other because we don't know how else to touch?"
"I think meaning is what people tell themselves when they can't admit they just want to fuck and fight and feel something other than empty," I said. "But I know what we have is real because I keep crawling back to it. To you. Even when it tastes like smoke and splinters."
"You crawl back because you don't know how to walk away. You stay because you're terrified of being the villain in someone else's story, so you'd rather be the victim in mine."
"No," I said, and for once I meant it. "I stay because we started a fire long before tonight, and I want to see what's left when everything burns away."
She stood then, moved to the fireplace with the grace of someone who'd practiced leaving. She stared into the black mouth of it, traced her fingers through years of ash like she was reading braille prophecies.
"Words rot," she said finally. "Promises too. They're just pretty lies we tell to make the temporary feel permanent. Maybe all that's left, all that's honest, is heat. Chemical reactions. Flesh and friction and the honest disaster of bodies trying to occupy the same space."
Before I could respond, she struck the match. One fluid motion, casual as breathing, like lighting a candle at a séance for our better selves. She dropped it into the debris piled in the fireplace, newspapers and old wood, the detritus of whoever had lived and left before us.
The fire caught immediately, hungry as we were.
I stood, moved to her, didn't ask why, didn't try to stop her. I just watched her watch the flames, saw the orange light paint her face into something medieval, something that belonged in a cautionary tale.
"You keep waiting for the perfect sentence," she said, not looking at me. "The right combination of words that will make this make sense. But I just want to feel something that doesn't lie, even if it burns everything down."
"We mistake intensity for truth," I said. "We think if it hurts enough, it must be real."
She laughed, but there was no joy in it, just breath and bitterness mixing with smoke. "You mistake silence for wisdom. I mistake pain for love. At least we're consistent in our delusions."
I moved closer, close enough to feel the heat from the fire and the heat from her body, two different kinds of burning. "We've already torched the past," I said. "Every good thing we might have been. Might as well add the lies to the pyre."
My fingers found the inside of her wrist, that soft place where the pulse lived. She flinched but didn't pull away, and I could feel her heartbeat, rapid as a bird trapped behind glass.
"Touch me like I'm temporary," she whispered.
"You are," I said. "So am I. Everything is. That's the fucking point."
"Then let's be unforgettable in our impermanence."
I kissed her again, harder this time, like I was trying to crawl inside her mouth and live there. Her hands slid under my shirt, nails dragging across my ribs like she was trying to play them like a xylophone, make music from my bones. Every place she touched felt like a small death, a little apocalypse of nerve endings.
"You ever notice," she gasped against my mouth, "how people only say 'forever' when they're scared shitless of losing something?"
The fire was spreading now, reaching out from the fireplace, tasting the wooden floor, finding it good.
"Yeah," I said, pulling her closer, feeling her heart hammer against mine. "And it's always just before they lose it anyway."
We moved through the house like a natural disaster, like entropy given form. She grabbed a broken chair leg, used it to smash the remnants of an old television, the screen shattering into a thousand dark mirrors. I kicked through a door that was barely hanging on, sent it crashing into the next room. We were unmaking the place, finishing what time and neglect had started.
"This feels like church," she laughed, spinning in the middle of what might have been a bedroom once, arms spread wide like she was trying to embrace the smoke. "Like we're finally being honest with God about what we really are."
"If this is church," I said, pulling down a set of moth-eaten curtains that disintegrated in my hands, "then we're both going to hell."
"Already there, baby," she said, and kissed me again, her mouth tasting of smoke and endings. "Been there since the first time you looked at me and I recognized my own damage staring back."
The fire was taking over now, claiming room after room with the patience of something that had all night to destroy. The wallpaper curled and blackened, revealing older patterns underneath, like the house was showing us all its secret selves before it died.
"I bet you still won't say it," she said suddenly, pressing me against a wall that was growing warm.
"Say what?"
"That you belong to me. That I'm carved into your bones. That when you're alone at three in the morning, hating yourself for all the ways you've failed to be normal, I'm the first thing you think of."
"You want ownership or honesty?"
"I want the truth," she said, eyes reflecting the flames. "Ugly and whole and without any of your pretty words to dress it up."
I stepped closer, pressed my forehead to hers, our skin slick with sweat and soot. The air around us was thick with smoke and heat and the particular ozone that comes before lightning or endings.
"I would ruin everything good in my life just to keep feeling this," I said. "You make me want to be destroyed if it means being destroyed by you. You're the only religion I've ever believed in and the only god I've ever wanted to blaspheme against."
She closed her eyes, and for a moment she looked young, looked fragile, looked like maybe she was made of something other than sharp edges and scar tissue.
"Say it," she whispered, and now she was the one who sounded scared. "Say something real. Something that matters."
The fire was climbing the walls now, reaching for the ceiling like prayers from heretics. The floor beneath us cracked and groaned, threatening to give way. The whole house was becoming a mouth, and we were the last words it would ever speak.
She opened her eyes, looked directly into mine, and said, "I love you, you fucking coward. I love you like burning, like drowning, like every disaster that ever felt like coming home."
The words hit me like shrapnel, each one finding its mark. I pulled her against me, kissed her like it was apology and absolution and damnation all at once. Like maybe if I kissed her hard enough, we could fuse at the molecular level, become one ruined thing instead of two.
The house was screaming now, wood cracking, glass exploding from the heat. I could see her hair starting to smoke at the edges, could feel my skin beginning to blister, and I realized with perfect clarity that we needed to leave if we wanted to live through this confession.
"I love you too," I said, the words ripping out of me like they'd been waiting behind my teeth for years. "I love you like madness, like sickness, like the only honest thing I've ever felt. Now fucking run before we become a metaphor."
We tore through the back of the house, the fire chasing us like it had taken our confession personally. Splinters clawed at our clothes, our skin. Our lungs burned with smoke and truth. We crashed through what was left of the back door, tumbled into the grass that was already beginning to warm from the heat of our destruction.
We lay there, gasping, choking on oxygen that felt too clean after all that smoke. Covered in ash and sweat and probably blood, grinning like we'd gotten away with murder, like we'd killed our old selves and were whatever came after.
"We made it," she said, wonder in her voice like she hadn't quite believed we would.
She rolled onto me, laid her head on my chest where my heart was trying to break free from my ribs, her clothes still smoking, little wisps rising from her hair like she was part dragon after all. "This," she said, "this is the closest thing to peace I've ever felt."
I touched her face, traced the ash across her cheek like war paint, like a blessing. She kissed my neck, soft and strange after all that violence, like she was trying to memorize the taste of my pulse.
"I am a ship lost at sea with you," I said, watching our fire eat the house, the sky turning orange with our confession. "I don't care about the shore anymore. I don't care about drowning. You are my north star and my storm, and I will break myself against you again and again, and each breaking will be a kind of birth."
For once, the fire behind us didn't feel like punishment or prophecy.
It felt like baptism. Like we'd finally burned away everything false, everything careful, everything that kept us from this terrible, perfect truth.
It felt like we'd earned the complicity of destruction, the intimacy of mutual ruin.
The house collapsed in on itself as we watched, sending sparks up into the night like a love letter to the void, and I thought maybe this was what redemption looked like for people like us: not healing, not wholeness, but the honest catastrophe of admitting what we were willing to burn for each other.
She shifted against me, and I could feel her smile against my throat.
"Next time," she said, "let's burn something bigger."
And God help me, I was already thinking of what we'd destroy next, what we'd reduce to ash in the name of this thing that was too raw to be called love, too honest to be called anything else.