Claudia D. Christian

Estimated reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

“You should give this to me. I’ve rarely asked for anything.”

“Not true.” His whisper echoed like bells. “All you’ve done is demand. Not ask.”

“Yes. It’s what you owe me.”

“But I’ll never finish paying.”

“No. You won’t.”

“Sophie, I’m so weary of all this.”

“All what?” Her hiss sharpened teeth on his ear. It stung like a thousand cuts. “You’ve done nothing, Narcissus. Three months is all you’ve given. Three. While I’ve suffered three centuries and here I lay, dead to the world, and for what? For the obsession of a spoiled demigod?”

Narcissus lost his will. He stared down at the pretty corpse. Hopelessness numbed his morals. Or perhaps it exposed him for the degenerate he was. “Tell me again what you want.”

Sophie slid across his back and sighed her pleasure. “I want you to make love to me. I want to watch you do this.”

“And then?”

“Nothing. I want it and you will give me your obedience. You will give me what you should’ve given three hundred years ago.”

Narcissus approached the table. He pressed into the marble skin with one finger. “You’re not going to leave me, are you?”

“I’ve given you what you want. I’m here just as you wanted me before. I haven’t abandoned you as you did me. You truly are ungrateful.”

“No. Not ungrateful. Just damned.”

Sophie tittered. Her laughter spiteful with secrets. “Damned is such a silly word for what we are. There is no damned, Narcissus, with free will.”

“Now who’s being silly? Everybody loves that falsity coined to hide inevitability.”

“Damned. Free will. Either way you’re not going to get out of fucking me.” Acid couldn’t have eaten through any deeper than the pain Sophie’s flat voice created.

Narcissus squeezed the limp hand. He threaded his fingers with hers. He felt the tiny bones, knowing its fleshy shell would only last for so long. “I thought you wanted me to make love to you.”

Sophie flickered. She laughed at the sick terror his face revealed. “I told you already. I’m not leaving you.”

He shook, body convulsing like a man in chemical withdrawal. He seemed to have no control over the words falling out of his mouth. “I was so scared. I can’t take you leaving me again. I’ll go mad. I know I will. Something inside will just break. I don’t want to break, Sophie. I really, really don’t.”

“Of course you won’t. You can’t break because you can’t feel.” She patted his cheek before kissing it.

“That’s not true. It’s not. I feel. I feel so much I’ve choked on it a million times over. I want to go back in time, erase everything I ever did to you. I can’t. They won’t turn it for me. Nephilim won’t help me.”

“Why should they? When I sold my soul, Narcissus, I made it so you can’t do that.”

“Sophie, why would you do it?” He shuffled around, hand still clasping his dear girl. “I could’ve changed what happened to you. I could’ve brought Lisette back. We wouldn’t have had to part like that. Damn you, Sophie!”

“Not Sophie. Lisette. Damn Lisette.”

The urge to disarrange Sophie’s face beat upon him with sickening compulsion. “Never!”

“Tell me. What would you have changed?”

“That night. I wouldn’t have ignored you. I would’ve sent them away.”

Her canvas became blank. All amusement, pity, and revulsion washed clean. “That night.”

“Yes.”

“You would’ve changed that night.”

“Yes. I would’ve.”

“You are beyond damned, Narcissus. You’re lost. You can’t even see past your own needs to see anyone else.”

“I don’t understand.”

Sophie flashed to her corporal twin. She lay prone on her side, ephemeral hand playing with the jagged neck flesh. “What about the other nights, Narcissus? There were many, many of those. Do you think Lisette enjoyed kissed you, feeling you in her while feeling someone else behind her?”