Rosemary and Rue | A Man of Many Shadows

He was a beautiful mess of contradictions - with a face that was too perfect for the living and too cold for the light of day. Like a creature that belonged in the darkness - so much so that he almost felt inhuman.

He was a perfect lover; his touch was urgent and warm.

His heart? It beat in a perfect, linear line. It felt wrong. The rhythm was consistently unreal—it never stuttered, never spiked. Cold and precise.

Was this love? Or was it a dark possessiveness?

I really could not tell them apart.

Photo by Mike Tsitas on Unsplash

In his extreme shifts, she knew there was a vast, dark sea of his current life that she might never reach nor fathom.

She was physically close, but emotionally and situationally stranded.

All she knew was that he managed a local club for a firm in the next town, but the actual details of his work remained completely unspoken, and unanswered.

His life was a series of vaults; even if she found a key, the cipher would always be kept somewhere else.

Whenever she pressed for details, he would straightway change the subject, citing business prudence to deter her from probing too much. His lips were sealed and he gave no words save a hushed mum; the business asketh silent secrecy.

He would just pull her close, murmuring to his good girl- they worked like aphiltre and a sedative that would disarm her and end the conversation before it began.

To block her from his secret world, he smothered her lips with his - shushing away her questions with a shield made from closeness that felt far too calculated. The intimacy between them was never more intense than in these moments, yet it felt like anything but.

It boded only the quiet before a final Armageddon of his own creation.

A lover's lips could mask a world of treason. His kisses weren't an answer; they were a bribe - a brief trading of heat for a lifetime of looking the other way. For what are such breathless embraces but a holy piracy, where a kiss is offered only to buy a deeper blindness?

Smooth and slick like oil, almost impossible to grasp.

On his better days, whenever she sulked or tried to leave, he would not even chase her; he knew her heart too well for that. He would only drop a cold 'suit yourself' dismissal, knowing perfectly well that her love was a tether that would always pull her back to him.

He was also oftimes absent, frequently without a word, leaving her in a new, sharper kind of isolation.

There was a civil war waged within her own breast.

Years had passed between them, and he had built a life sans her. She understood all of that, of course, but it ached all the same- she wanted to be part of his presence, to learn and embrace the man before her.

If he would only let her in. But he won't.

She clung to the only version of him she knew how to love, clinging to the dust of the love of their youth.

In the sanctuary of her imagination, she pictured the life they should have had - one where their promises to each other were kept. It would be them against the world, together. The beautiful children they would raise - the happy family that never was.

It was an anchor from the past to keep from being swept away by his current volatility. Misery and a long life are the only things that grow where ghosts are chased - a life sentence of agonizing, empty decades, nourished by nothing but one's own pain.

But there was no exit from the reality he had created.

He was a man obscured by his secrets now, and no ghost of their youth could bridge that divide.

And it is a perilous thing to wed oneself to a ghost.

Daily Prompts for FreeWriters

©Britt H.

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