I stared at my unchanging pale skin in the mirror's reflection. My indigo eyes followed the contours of my face. They grazed the outline of my petite, sharp nose and followed up to my furrowed blonde eyebrows. I turned my attention to my dulled blue eyes. The eyes that stared at me accusingly every time I looked in the mirror. The eyes that convicted me and the eyes that hid the guilt deeper within.
I hadn't meant for it to have gone so far. Now it would appear that I am drowning from the inside out. It all began hundreds of years ago with two men. We lived together in a cognating harmony. Though later on the cold winter nights there would be hands to warm me. Hands that would touch every part of my body, sending pleasures shivers down my spine.
Mathias was always better to me than he should have. Whispering over and over sweet Danish nothing's into my shivered ear until dusk had graced the earth with its rays. He would hold me for hours after we made love and would caress me till I would drift to sleep. He was always there when I had woken up. Never had he taken advantage of my thin body compared to his broad muscular own. He was too good to me. I wish he had never loved me.
Berwald was always hiding in the shadows. Never announcing his presence until he became desperate. Every time he was curled up with Tino on the corner of the couch, he was trailing his eye over my neck and then down my chest. He took his sweet time in drinking me in with his intense blue green eyes. I would travel down the hallway and he would gently set down his slumbered wife, following me down the hallway. The end result always the same. Bites and scratches. Inevitable bruises. Blood. He was rough, he liked to hear me scream. Truth be told, I liked to scream.
Mathais never seemed to have noticed the bruised hips or the nasty bite marks on my neck that had popped blood vessels. Or rather if he did, he was to blinded by his love to have questioned it. Mathias never bit me or caused me to bleed, he was gentle and never stopped loving me. Never… Stopped. He was the only one who could make me cry. Berwald never let me stay til morning come, so I always stumbled to Mathias. He took me in no matter what hour with open arms. He loved me. I hated it.
I stare at my own reflection now and wondered how such a disgusting organism like the parasite before me could survive.
It probably wouldn't have ended like this if my own lillebror had kept his mouth shut. He walked in on Berwald and I in the garden shed. Nothing but disgust evident on his face. He knew how Mathias felt about me. They all did. He ran out as fast as he had ran in. Berwald apparently wasn't finished and didn't release me to follow Emil.
You see, this whole thing would have been cleaner if he had just told Mathias…or better yet had kept it to himself. The silver haired boy instead ran to Tino. Everything that I had managed to keep a secret for hundreds of years had shattered in a matter of seconds. The 7 seconds that had taken him to find Berwald and I in the shed, and the 70.9 seconds that it had taken him to tell Tino. Tino denied all possibility of what Emil had told him, until he had ran out into the shed himself. He came just in time for the grand finale.
Tino had packed Berwald's bags the next hour through thick drowning tears. The small man screamed on the top of his lungs at the taller man. Two small boys hiding on the top of the staircase quivering in fear, as they still hadn't put the pieces together. He screamed at me and all I did was stare back with a cold distant indigo stare. On the outside I seemed uncaring. On the outside I was just some whore who slept around. On the inside I was drowning. Drowning in the hate I harbored for the tall intense man. Fear of the truth that would be told to Mathias. Even drowning in my own freedom from the secrets that had eaten me away for hundreds of years.
The pudgy sorrowful man next called Mathias. I heard every. Word. I wish I hadn't. First came the waves of disbelief. Then came the cries of a panic stricken love sick man. His words slipping back and forth from English to Danish. As if his mind couldn't make a single decision. A decision between Dansk or English. A decision on whether to believe the truth or hide behind a wall of denial. Mathias hadn't believed a word of it till Tino had handed the phone over to Emil. Emil described to him the birthmark etched across my left backside. The birthmark that Mathias thought he only knew about.
Mathias drove to Tino's house. I sat waiting at the kitchen table. I wasn't being kept there by any means. However, I knew what had to be done. Sooner or later it was to be done. My own brother stared at me with disgust from across the room, far enough away so that he was for sure that he wouldn't smell the sickly sweet stench of my guilt. Tino was upstairs with his sons who were in need of explanations. Of course Tino wouldn't tell then that their father was screwing another man in the shed, but he would tell them a sweetened version that wouldn't abuse their innocence.
Mathias crashed into the kitchen, his eyes rimmed with red and his skin painted pale. Tell me it isn't true, he had said. His beautiful eyes filled with tears. I couldn't lie anymore. It was as if my silver tongue had gone lead. I told him everything. Everything. Tears spilled freely from his eyes and to my surprise as did mine. The wetness on my cheek was new to me. Mathias was the only man who could make me cry, his beautiful loud voice boomed throughout the house in wails and sobs. I reached out to grab his hand, to grab hold of the only thing that could keep me afloat. He backed away and reacted as if my thin hands had slapped him.
Mathias always had a crappy shot. It was always Tino who was the marksman. It didn't matter however how poor of a shot he had when he had the gun pressed to his temple. I loved you, he had cried out through his sobs. A shot rang out and the walls were painted with his last thoughts. Emil cried out in shock and grabbed hold of my Mathias' body. Tears spilled onto his black jacket that had belonged to my brother. I don't remember telling my legs to move but they had. My body sprinted to the bathroom where I vomited all over the carpet. Tears streaking down my face, I looked into the mirror at my face. Tracing the contours and jaw line with my guilty indigo eyes. My hand traveled to the drawer in which held my demise.
If Mathias was gone, there wasn't anything I would or for that matter, even could live for. I brought the razor blade to my neck, the neck that Berwald had bitten and throttled. The neck that had been caressed and sweetly kissed by Mathias. One swift motion was all that it took. Who would have thought that ending your own life would have been so easy. One minute you're there, hating yourself, the next you're laying in your own vomit, bleeding out. When I died my eyes were open, but all I saw was the face of the only man that who could make me cry.