There was one thing he was certain of: she was no princess. Not even in her past life. She got off the car before him all the time, never giving him any chance to open her door. Once she came home late and half-drunk. “I’m back,” she said, kissing him lightly on the head before casually walking into the bedroom to sleep without showering. He followed her in and sat on the bed, leaning forward to smell her hair, only to frown when he realized that every strand stunk of smoke, beer, and men. She had been drinking again with her male friends—something he had straightforwardly told her not to do in his absence. But she kept doing it nonetheless.
He ran his hand across her bare arm and felt a familiar feeling of warmth circling in his chest. That feeling he hated just as much as her habit of burning sausages for breakfast. Speaking of breakfast, she rarely made him breakfast. In that tiny apartment they shared, he had to learn how to make breakfast for himself. She liked doing the dishes though. That, at least, made her a little useful to have around the house. The laundry she never did herself. Their laundry basket was split in two, their clothes segregated like recyclable rubbish. He sometimes did the washing for her but doing that made her upset. “Leave my clothes alone,” she said. “I’m taking them to the cleaner this afternoon.”
She liked to sing in her early morning shower. And he had become accustomed to waking up to the sound of water spattering down the tiled floor of the bath, drowning some of the lyrics of her songs. He sat in front of the TV and watched the morning news, waiting for her to emerge from behind the bathroom door and give him her signature smile—which was more of a smirk, by the way—before getting ready for work.
Oftentimes, she made him want to tie her up and keep her in their bedroom. To keep her away from her friends. To keep her away from her job. To keep her away from everything that had been taking her from him. She was his, he decided. No matter how hard-headed a girl she was, she was his. She, who made it clear to him that there indeed was a fine line separating love and hate. For he sometimes found himself hating her as strongly as he loved her. At such times he wished she would cry and tell him she was sorry for whatever wrong she had committed, but she never did. Neither did she retort to his threats of abandoning her. What she did was leave him alone to quarrel with himself, with his conscience. So that by the time he was done mulling over the incident, he was already blaming himself for being a selfish prick, when in truth he was anything but.
She knew him well enough, this little devil of a girl.
She was, in every respect, the wrong girl to fall in love with. But love was a trap—a deep dark well he found himself plummeting into one summer day, when the air was still and moist. There was sweat on her brow and dust on the sturdy leather of her shoes. Her mouth reeked of cigarette smoke even then. He knew because he stood so close to her in the train, her chest almost touching his—something that should have bothered a normal girl.
But she was no normal girl.
She was, even at the very beginning, a very strange girl.
And she could have well been a witch. For she had him under a fucking love spell. No matter how many times he tried to walk out of her life, he kept finding himself stepping back into the flat they shared. For the life he was escaping was not just hers alone.
Even that, they shared.
No comments:
Post a Comment