Death by Desire

I cursed insomnia and the thoughts it brought me at this late hour. Orion, Orion, Orion…..

”get out of my head you asshole” I muttered into the darkness of my room, not meaning it at all, wishing he would linger there forever, except in a more romantic, we’re-a-couple sort of way and not in the im-so-jealous way that he was right now.

I’d heard that when a person can’t sleep it’s because someone was dreaming about them…how I wished that someone was Orion. It was more likely that he was dreaming of her.

Fucking Iris Rose.

I closed my eyes, briefly visualizing a scene in which she bloated up until she was the size of Jabba the Hut and just as wrinkled, as well as bald, and I holding her hair, a pair of scissors dangling off my fingers.

But such thoughts were only satisfying until I opened my eyes and faced reality again.

A flash of pain brought the other morning back to me, Orion coldly ignoring me for the first time since we had met in the 5th grade and become inseparable. I had been the new kid, and he’d asked me for a pencil and the rest, as they say, is history.

He didn’t care that I was mixed nationality, half Chinese, half British, didn’t find it weird like everyone else had when I first moved here.

He knew I wasn’t filthy rich, that my family was thrifty and our wealth was an illusion, that I had to work harder than most people grade-wise and money wise too, to please my parents.
They’d worked hard for the money they earned, so I had to work hard too.

He’d stood up for me when assholes began noticing me, noticing my body, in all the wrong ways. He didn’t like that I flaunted myself so freely but when I got the attention I wasn’t looking for, from creeps and perverts, he always stepped in.

He’d never been angry with me.

Not when he’d been grounded for a month when his mom caught me sleeping in his room after a night of hard partying and I’d needed a place to crash because going home in the state I was in would have given my parents heart attacks.

Not when I’d convinced him to go down to the beach at midnight, both of us beyond drunk, and he’d driven his new Mercedes Benz right into the middle of the ocean because he wanted to see if cars could swim.

Not when his house got trashed during the many parties I’d convinced him to throw, or when he had to face hell from his mom when we got caught ditching school…but this anger, so foreign to me, hurt more than anything I’d ever experienced in my 17 years of living.

I reached for my cellphone on my nightstand, contemplating sending him a text. Earlier, I’d called him and to my surprise he had answered. It seemed like things were ok between us but…no, I wouldn’t push it. Besides, after what I was planning to do in a couple of hours, I didn’t know how things might turn out, wasn’t sure if things were really back to normal, wasn’t so sure he’d speak to me ever again….
************************************************************************
I took a step back to admire my handiwork. The silver paint against the green synthetic grass sparkled nicely in the early morning sunlight.

“Vote For Iris- The TRUE Snow Queen” read clearly, and no one would doubt that that bitch hadn’t been the one to advertise herself this way.

Amanda, my best friend besides Orion, giggled. “Wait’ll Petrov sees this. She’s gonna shit bricks…” her already pale complexion paled even more as she let her words trail off.

“What?” I asked, and spun around, instantly freezing up.

“Someones had a busy morning” Orion said quietly, his eyes scanning the field. I fiddled with my fingers, the buttons on my top, my hair, not allowing my eyes to meet his.

“Well” he said finally, taking a deep breath. “We’d better get out of here.”

A smile spread slowly across my lips. Things were back to how they should be. My partner in crime was backwhere he belonged, by my side.

Amanda hopped from one foot to the other, anxious as hell. “I’ll let you know how things go” she said, knowing I wasn’t sticking around.

I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and a “thanks!” and then Orion and I got the hell out of there…