Regrets

Disclaimer: I don't own anything (Insert obligatory 'Not even Matt Damon!' here)

I watch her sleep, her head curled like the bent wing of a butterfly. Her eyes, so vibrant and bright when she's awake, are closed to me.

And I wonder what she dreams about.

Sometimes, in her state of semi-consciousness, her fingers reach out to grasp at my hand, clutching it so tightly that her half-bitten nails leave jagged prints on my skin.

But she never draws blood. She never will.

She loves me. And I don't understand.

I hadn't wanted to feel anything. She was merely a means to an end for me, someone fucked-up and anchorless who wouldn't run to the police if something went wrong.

And when it did, I tried to get rid of her. But seeing her standing there, eyes unfocused and hands quivering, uncomprehending of what had just occurred, I was powerless. I didn't want to leave her. She was my only link to anything resembling normalcy.

If she had any sense she would hate me. Hate me for taking away her life, however pointless and shitty it had been. She would hate me because she can never see her family again, can never have a family of her own. She should hate me for the nightmares of deserted farmhouses and solitary gunshots, her open-mouthed bloody-faced corpse being deposited roughly next to mine. The things that cause her sweat-drenched body to convulse wildly in her sleep.

But she doesn't.

After the final chaos of Paris I was a mess. I went to Russia and slept at a dingy hotel for weeks. I tried to sleep away my loneliness with prostitutes and alcohol but only managed to intensify it. I saw Marie in every shorthaired brunette, every onyx-eyed beauty. My longing for her became the new pounding headache at the base of my skull.

She was hard to find again. It had taken longer than I had wanted.

Seeing her, her hair long and windswept, her suntanned legs escaping from her dress, I had felt dizzy, disoriented. Some sort of undefined longing had wracked my body and I was reminded that, this time, I wasn't letting her go. She was beautiful and warm and when I clutched her cinnamon-scented body close to me I was overcome with a sense of familiarity. It had been too long since I'd felt something like that.

So we've made our life. She flashes her crooked-toothed smiles at me and tells me stories of her childhood that I don't reciprocate. I hear about her emotionally manipulative mother and her absent father and I think about my own parents, living out their days at a trailer park in Des Moines.

I hold her every night and hate myself everyday.

Because I know that one day, she'll see what I've done to her future. And then she'll have to live with her regrets, and hate herself for it.

But for now, I'm happy.

And she only thinks she is.

-end-