Page 92 of Creep

Fuck.

Every time I kissed her always felt brand new. It always made me feel things I hadn’t thought I was capable of. If it were possible, I thought she might have made my heart race. But I’d settled for the lightness, the contentment that her kiss brought me.

I could spend forever kissing this girl in my arms.

I turned her around and pressed her body against the glass window with mine. She pulled away from the kiss first, looking up at me with some unnamed emotion in her bottomless brown eyes.

“What?” I asked her softly.

She tightened her arms around my neck, shaking her head slightly, and said, “Nothing.”

Then she smiled at me. That smile made me feel about as powerful as an army of two thousand men.

I hauled her up in my arms, letting her wrap her legs around me, and I pressed in against her.

“Mael.”

” I got you, baby.” And I did have her. I would hold on to her for as long as I breathed.

I kissed her as I moved us away from the window and into my bedroom, gently setting her down on the bed and showing her all the ways she belonged to me, and that was all there was to it.

* * *

Right away,I knew I was dreaming.

I was having a nightmare. I was revisiting an old memory. One I thought about from time to time, for nothing more than to remind myself of the past and why I was doing what I did. Why it didn’t matter how many lives I had taken before because they fucking deserved it, and I would do it all over again if I needed.

Perhaps I had spent too much time inside the dark recesses of my mind.

It had been so long since I’d had a nightmare, and I didn’t know what brought this on.

My surroundings were dark.

And I was me, but I wasn’t. At least, not the me in this time. I was twelve, perhaps thirteen. I was gangly and awkward, still stuck in the middle between being a helpless little kid and the man I would grow to be.

And I was scared.

It had been so long since I was scared, but I could feel it now—the way my heart jumped rapidly inside my chest as if begging to be set free. The way my breathing had increased, and I was on full alert, not knowing which direction the monster would come at me from.

I twisted around when I heard a sharp sound coming from behind me, but it was too dark to see anything.

“Hello?” I called out, my voice meek and childlike. “Is anyone there?”

I already knew how this story ended. I had already lived it once in real life and a million times after, in my dreams, shortly after Theo and I managed to escape.

This dream didn't have a happy ending.

And there was no escaping. I could only let it play out.

The lights turned on, and I found myself standing alone on the metal railing of an old factory.

The factory was dead in the middle of nowhere. No one was around to hear me plead for help. No one was around to hear us scream.

About a week after we had finally escaped, we came back to the factory and managed to burn it to the ground. But in this memory, it was still standing strong and tall. And as spacious as it was, the walls seemed to be closing in on me. There was no escape.

I gasped when I heard the thud, thud, thud of heavy footfalls coming up to the railing. He was coming up.

It wasn’t the first time I tried to escape. My plan was to leave, find someone to help, and then come back for Theo.

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