King of Hearts

Pete had walked out of the room a while ago, but I was staring, transfixed, at our flower. I didn't really know what made it ours, nor did I have any idea the significance of the rose, but it held my gaze with an iron fist.

It squeezed the life out of my vision from holding it so tightly. So much so that I couldn't see anything else anymore. The hair that had fallen in front of my face was not picked up by my eyes, nor was the wooden floor, or the stained walls.

I could see nothing but the perfection in front of me.

I felt a single tear fall from the corner of my eye. I still didn't know what the rose meant, but it had such a significance about it. Just simply looking at it, just simply being near it, made more tears fall because you could not escape the feeling of how important it was.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not move my gaze. It scared me because it seemed the flower held my gaze, not only so it was all I saw, but also so that I couldn't see it's thorns. It held my eyes on the perfection, dodging them from the nasty underside that no one should be subjected to.

But such is the way of all beautiful things. A rose, is a rose, is a rose, and they all have their thorns.

The more beautiful the rose, the sharper the thorns, it seems. They lock your eyes on the petals, and maybe even let you see the leaves, but never the thorns.

No, they can't let you hear the secrets that they keep. The dangerous secrets that you never really wanted to know, but can't help but yearn for the knowledge.

"Hey muffin. You ok?" Pete was sitting next to me, legs crossed and his elbows resting on his knees so he could rest his chin in the cup of his palms.

"Hey Panda?"

"Yes, muffin?" he scooted even closer in curiosity. "What's up?" he asked.

"Well... I think... I-I think I'm ready to play now. That game of yours, I mean." I was looking down, somehow finding it hard to talk about. It made me sad, the possibility of leaving sooner.

Pete lifted up my head with his fingers, in attempt to make me look at him. It worked. Pete was grinning from ear to ear, that cheshire-cat grin of his that sent chills down your spine from fear, and his eyes were so intense I couldn't look away.

"Well then, muffin. Let's begin." the facial expression was getting creepier and creepier as his face moved even closer to mine.

We sat like that for a minute, both of us simply acting as if it were normal to be breathing on each others faces. With Pete, though, it pretty much is. Personal space is for people who can't handle the heat of someone else's breath.

"Come." Pete grabbed my hand and pulled me up, skipping quickly out the door. "It's a beautiful night for a card game, is it not?" he asked. I just stuttered out a few un-comprehensible syllables, and continued skipping along behind him.

He brought me to a small room. It was dark; candles on the walls were the only light, casting eerie shadows across the space.

A round table was poised in the center of the room, a white table cloth strewn over it. It looked more like a sheet pulled over a dead body than a table cloth.

A deck of cards sat in the center of the table, and to the left was another candle. It had melted slightly already, leaving melted wax to dry on the surface of the cloth.

Lightning flashed outside, and a crack of thunder was not far behind. "Well, love, what do you think?" Pete asked me. Before I got a chance to pull my thoughts together into an answer, he pulled me to the table and sat me down in one of the two wooden chairs.

"It's time, Patrick. It's time." he never called me Patrick. I never called him Pete. It was like an unspoken rule. An unspoken rule that he just broke. However, I got the feeling that this room held many broken promises and rules. Maybe even a few lies, and possibly a broken heart.

The window banged open, letting in a gust of wind that blew out the candles. I started shivering, and not just from the cold.

I heard the sound of chair legs scraping against the floor, and my delusions came back. Suddenly, the scraping was nails on a coffin. Suddenly, and wind was someone screaming. They weren't screaming for themselves, but for someone else, telling me to get out while I still can.

The candles were my hope, just burned out.

"Ready?" Pete asked. Lightning flashed for a second time, and I got a glimpse of his face. Only, it wasn't his. Or at least it shouldn't have been; there was blood splashed across his cheek. His hair was messed up in a way I'd never seen it, and the grin on his face and the look in his eyes were even more crazed than usual.

Crazed in a way I hoped I would never have to see. I think he just let me catch a look of one of his thorns.

But the light was gone all too soon, and another came up in the form of Pete lighting the candle on the table. "Don't looked so scared, muffin. It's just a little storm." there was a hint of anticipation in his voice that strangely made me think of a lion, crouched and waiting to pounce on his unsuspecting prey.

The prey only saw the danger once it was too late.

"Let me explain the rules to you." he said. It was something I never thought I'd hear come out of his mouth. I'd known him for a short amount of time, but I knew that he steered clear of any kind of regulations.

He had six cards in his hands. Each one torn and frayed so badly that one could memorize the rips and scratches, if only to differentiate between cards based on the back instead of the front.

"I've got six cards from the deck." he said as he lay them on the table in a line, shuffling them around so that the order was different than when he first put them down.

"You'll need to lend me your heart, Patrick."

"W-what? What do you mean?" Pete was a strange one, but this went beyond his usual freakishly insane behavior. This was scary.

"You trust me, right?" he asked. But it was more of a statement than a question.

"R-ri-right. I-I trust you." I wasn't so sure anymore...

"Good." he said. Pulled two more cards from the deck, placing them on either side of the line up. He shuffled them around again, but he never once looked to see what he was doing. His fingers had minds of their own, working in such a natural way that there was no doubt he'd done this many times before.

"There's two of each suite in there, Patrick. Two clubs, two spades, two diamonds..."

"And two hearts." I finished for him.

"You learn fast, muffin. Good luck, you're gonna need it. It's yours against mine."