YOU BRING ME CLOSER TO 𝐺𝑂𝐷

their nightstand.

their voice memos.

their junk drawer.

their car visor.

their desk.

their dorm room.

their basement.

their laundry basket.

their sock drawer.

their keyring.

their notebooks.

their safe.

their cup holders.

their shoe rack.

their gym bag.

their old hard drives.

their USBs.

their medicine cabinet.

their garage.

their e-reader.

their center console.

their shower shelf.

their trash can.

their workstation.

their notes app.

their spare tire compartment.

their spam folder.

their email inbox.

their tablet.

their storage unit.

the place they never let anyone look.

their makeup bag.

their phone.

the back of their closet.

their underwear drawer.

their jeans pockets.

their shared bedroom.

their storage bins.

their passenger seat.

their bookshelf.

their suitcase.

their bed.

their razor drawer.

their spice rack.

their shoebox of keepsakes.

their driver's seat.

their dresser.

their filing cabinet.

their computer.

their bathroom sink.

their playlists.

their freezer.

their online shopping carts.

their glovebox.

their toolbox.

their coat pockets.

their browser bookmarks.

their pockets right now.

under their bed.

their camera roll.

their pillowcase.

their backpack.

their trunk.

their saved passwords list.

their kitchen counter.

their pantry.

their sketchbooks.

their closet.

their loose papers.

their unsent messages.

their purse.

their toiletry bag.

their fridge.

their overnight bag.

their cloud storage.

their shed.

their school bag.

their attic.

their photo albums.

their childhood bedroom.

their wallet.

their headboard shelf.

their locker.

their blocked contacts list.

their burned CDs.

❝ you occupy my thoughts. day and night, even in dreams you're there. i want you to never stop haunting me. ❞

❝ i am eternally yours. until the stars go out. and maybe, even after that. ❞

❝ my heart bleeds the color of your soul. i would cut it out and put it in your palms if i could. ❞

❝ it's like you have knit yourself around my ribs. i could no more cut you out than i could remove my own lungs. ❞

❝ you are woven into my soul and i dare not cut a single thread. ❞

❝ i am yours, body and soul, to do with as you wish. ❞

❝ i don't require you to love me back, or to care for me as i do you. only let me be here, let me devote myself to you. that would be enough. ❞

❝ i want to trap your smile in a bottle and take it out when no one else can see. ❞

❝ you belong to me and i to you. ❞

❝ do not look away from me. i cannot bear it when i do not occupy your vision. ❞

❝ i will follow you. to the ends of the earth, to the very gates of hades and whatever might lay beyond. ❞

❝ i will always be here. no matter how far you go you can always come home to me. ❞

❝ tell me all the places you have been hurt, every rejection, every scar. let me love you in all the places where you have burned. ❞

❝ i will not ever let you go. ❞

❝ you cannot escape this. you cannot run away from the love we share. ❞

❝ what we have is deeper than words could capture. ❞

❝ i will be anything you desire. i pluck out the parts of me you find distasteful and stuff your love in the craters left behind. ❞

❝ tell me what you wish of me and i will do it. ❞

❝ i could spend all day merely watching the air in your lung. i would count every blink. i would cherish every sigh from your lips. i could watch you merely exist for the rest of my life. ❞

❝ don't let go of me. i think if you lost me i would die. ❞

❝ i will cut out the tongues of every man who has wronged you. ❞

❝ i wish i could crawl inside you and make a home out of the hollows of your bones. ❞

ACTIONS:

WATCH: for sender to watch receiver sleep.

WATCHED: for sender to wake up and find receiver watching over them.

DISCOVER: for sender to find a journal full of sketches receiver made of them and sender finds them looking at it.

DISCOVERED: for receiver to find a journal full of sketches receiver made of them.

FOLLOW: for sender to stalk receiver, claiming they're doing it to protect them.

FOLLOWED: for receiver to stalk sender and claim they're protecting them.

GOING: for sender to take receiver to a secluded cabin for a romantic getaway.

GONE: for receiver to take sender to a secluded cabin for a romantic getaway.

SACRIFICE: for sender to kill someone who wronged receiver as a grand gesture.

SACRIFICED: for receiver to kill someone who wrong sender as a grand gesture.

CAUGHT: for sender to catch receiver staring at them.

CATCHING: for receiver to catch sender staring at them.

REVEAL: for sender to slowly undress themselves while receiver watches, but doesn't touch.

REVEALED: for receiver to slowly undress themselves while sender watches, but doesn't touch.

BATHE: for sender to bathe receiver, meticulously and tenderly as if serving them.

he's old enough to be her father / grandfather. she's young enough to outpace him in damn near everything. somehow, they fit together like two puzzle pieces.

⠀

⠀

Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019) dir. Quentin Tarantino

she told her parents that it was only going to be dinner -- a private and intimate affair, really, at the girl's favorite restaurant. she'd even sent a few photos to her mother; the first whenever her plate arrived and then the next immediately after, whenever she and all the other girls bunched together tightly for a group photo. her mother only reacted to the image with a simple thumbs-up, but suki could feel the unease behind it. could picture her ammi, thumb hovering over the telephone icon and struggling not to call her for the third time in the hour. she'd typed a hurried response, then, to keep it from ringing. thank you for trusting me, ammi! she wrote. for letting me spend some time with my friends. she'd made so few friends so far into the semester; her gratefulness was far from exaggerated. her response was left with a 'seen' notice. the silence that followed it felt permissive.

that was earlier.

now, it's well past midnight. the group splintered apart after dinner, with some opting to go home and the rest (including the birthday girl) insisting on a late night bar crawl. suki knew she should have stayed behind. should have shyly asked one of the early birds if she could maybe get a ride home -- my abbu doesn't like to drive so late at night, but for some odd reason, she was compelled to stay out. maybe it was the birthday girl's teasing, or maybe it was just suki's own desire to catch a glimpse of the city's nightlife. she wasn't sure; all she knew was that she was becoming increasingly nervous the longer she stood dumbly* near a vacant pool table. they'd disappeared into the bathroom in a cluster of tipsy giggles, and suki felt dangerously out of place; she'd only had a sip of something bubbly and fermented before she hastily returned to her glass of alcohol-free cherry juice at dinner, so she hadn't joined the bathroom brigade. maybe that was a mistake.

it's beginning to dawn on her that she's a little too dressed up for the wrong side of town. she glances down at her little kitten heels and grips onto the wristlet of her handbag, nervously twisting it between her fingers. suddenly, she feels a little mortified that she'd borrowed some lipstick from her mother. it's with a new resolve that she suddenly pivots forward, dodging laughing bodies and drunken stumblers, and makes her way to the bar. she awkwardly shifts onto an unoccupied stool, leaning over the sticky surface to ask about a charger in a meek yet polite voice.

Eden is a viper and he has been sitting in a corner, nursing his fifth beer, watching her. Not because she’s a pretty young thing—though, she is—but because he likes to analyze. He likes to observe, and drink in the nuances of those he is not allowed to do so. 

It is a silent usurping of power. A quiet taking of agency. He does it not because he needs dominance, but because he needs to understand. 

She intrigues him. With her beauty. With her little fizzy drink. With the way she stands in the corner by the pool table, looking entirely out of place, and not quite aware of just the magnitude of such in all the same breath. 

Perhaps he is also unaware of himself—or, rather, unaware of the social faltering inherent to that of what he is doing. A sweaty, dirty old man, staring at a young woman all night. Misbehaving. Inappropriate.

He is still ever so slightly flushed from the day’s work. Gritty with sweat and he washed his hands before he left and once when he got here, but there’s still a distinct black embedded in the grooves of both digits and palm. He’s blown his nose thrice already, ejecting a spray of earlier-inhaled metal fragments. A mark of what he gets paid a cushy, three-figure salary to do every day. 

Now he’s tired.

He’s tired, and came down to watch the game and get drunk and not be around his wife.

He’s tired and he’s been staring over at her for the better part of the night, watching her engage with her friends and the surrounding grunge and wondering what it is, exactly, that she craves from life. Is it this—a shitty, run-down bar in the not-so-great part of town? Is it the thrill of its dangerous undertone? Is it to please the likeness of those girls who seem entirely unconcerned with her? So quickly, so intensely, she has captured his interest.

Beside him is a little basket of fries, all but untouched and left to go cold. They were too crunchy, and he wouldn’t eat them, because he couldn’t eat them. And he knew himself well enough that if he tried to ask for them to be remade, he would lose his temper, because he was tired, and there were too many conversations happening, and there was a strange, stale smell wafting over to him from behind the bar every now and again.

See, Eden had always been what others would term strange. Atypical. He couldn’t eat potatoes that were crunchy, and he hated the feeling of silk, and if he were allowed to, he could talk for hours about the intricacies of welding and the woodwork involved in guitar-making, as though he were a master at the craft himself. He wore earplugs at work, even though welding wasn’t considered particularly loud by his coworkers, and he often made casual conversation that always tripped up somewhere along the way, and he could never quite figure out what had been offensive.

It was all something his father had tried to beat out of him. Asserted he was defective like it was prayer. But to this day, with six decades of life under his belt and his father six feet under dirt, Eden was still as defective as ever. 

In a lot of ways, he had never quite fit in. But he found his own little corner in life. At work. At this bar—where he never showed up as anything but solo, always had the same exact amount of beers and the same exact brand, too. He’d leave the same tip, and show back up like clockwork every week on the weekend, sit on the same stool ( and god forbid anyone get to it first, or they would have hell to pay ), and never speak more than a few words. 

He’d come to watch the game, or whatever else was on the television above the bar, and then he’d go home, back to his boring townhouse, and his boring wife, and his boring evening. 

Surely, it was time for a break in the routine. 

There is a brief moment when her friends disappear into the restroom that his own bladder calls for attention, and when he gets up, he passes by her. His gait is wide-set, each step powerful, like it holds purpose—though it’s more telling of being on his feet for the past sixty years. 

When he comes back out, he finds his seat again, and not a few minutes later—she takes the adjacent bar stool. 

He takes this as an invitation. If not from her, then the universe. And would you look at that? An excuse to speak to her.

The bartender had a usb-c. Eden had a lightning, tucked in his pocket. He reaches in to fish for it, and brandishes it in the same moment her eyes coast over to his. “iPhone, right?” he greets, with his token of ice breaking. 

“Just don’t steal it from me, or I’mma have to hunt you down,” he jokes, voice gritty—deepened from his fatigue, and the swim of booze on his senses.

Now, up close, her youth strikes him, and he wonders briefly if she’s even old enough to be in this place. She doesn’t look it, to him. But, maybe he’s not so good with gauging age anymore. His own son is in his thirties, gone no-contact, and soon to be giving him grandchildren, of which will be begrudgingly allowed to visit.  Not because Eden had ever abused his boy, but because he had been a ghost as a father. There in physicality, but emotionally? He had only told his son a handful of times that he'd loved him, all before the age of ten, and had never been too good with expressing what he felt. Emotionally absent, in a way that he now regretted, but had no idea how to rectify.

His marriage was much of the same. Bland. Passionless. Still and stagnant. Comfortable, but routine. That's why he doesn't want to spend his free time with his wife, and would rather spend it here, alone. Or—today—picking apart some other woman like she is petals upon a flower's stem.

“What’re you havin’?” he asks over the bustle in a slight drawl, retained from his youth, already motioning for the bartender to get him another beer, and tack her drink onto his tab. “It’s on me.”

you just won me with the highest bid @ an underground prostitution/trafficking ring auction, now what????

your dad owes me a shit ton of money so i kidnap you (his kid) as leverage to make sure i get what i want but hey… now i kinda want you instead

PLOT TWIST: your dad owes me a shit ton of money so he offers you up instead and i take him up on it 

MAIL ORDER FOREIGN BRIDE