He shot up awake, his heart pounding in his ears and adrenaline coursing through his veins like wildfire. In his dream he had finally done it: he had wrapped his hands around her pretty little throat and squeezed until the light from her panic-stricken eyes had turned stony and her heaving chest had stilled.
The final punchline to a treasured joke.
He remembered how she looked. A myriad of deep violet bruises splattered violently across her neck. Her hair tangled and sticking up in the most hilarious way. She was beautiful even in death.
The image made him shudder with an unpleasant awareness, however when he looked to his right she was still there - snoring softly at his side.
'At my side? Did I say that you could sleep in my bed?' he scowled.
He got ready to kick her off the edge but the tranquility on her face reflecting no care or pain was contradictory to the earlier images in his head. She was flawless - derived from perfection. Though no one can truly be flawless, can they?
'Well maybe I could be ...' he mused.
He looked at her slightly parted lips and the way her hair seemed to surround her face like a golden halo.
'Did you just smile Pooh? Are you thinking of me?' he wondered.
The way the dappled moonlight illuminated her white skin made her seem almost ethereal. Her eyes were closed, her black eyelashes making a striking contrast against her skin; however in his mind he could see her bright blue ones, full of the life that accumulated inside her. He wanted to possess that life.
He never knew their beauty could be so violent, the way she looked at him sometimes would break him instantly, and he would be no more than a pathetic child looking back at her.
'It was the love in her eyes. It was the love that always did it' he grimaced.
'I hate love.'
He felt his blood begin to boil like magma as he stirred in his bed. It wasn't fair - no one should be so perfect! Sometimes he hated himself for the pain he caused her and other times he hated her for making him do it.
'But love and pain went hand in hand as far as I'm concerned. Concerned is such a funny word' he snickered.
His mood swings were as unpredictable as an earthquake and just as devastating when they struck. Blinded by rage, he would lash out at her and delight in seeing the deep purple splashes contaminate her otherwise snowy skin.
'No doubt she would convince herself it was a good thing, that it was the only way I could show my so called "feelings", but I knew exactly what I was doing.'
Yet still, she would turn those incredibly blue eyes on him - filled with innocent love and adoration, until he wanted to scream with frustration. He'd tried to beat that innocence out of her over and over again, yet it never left her.
'I've tried enough times' he sighed.
He was a tornado, causing nothing but mass destruction in his path, picking up the weak just to throw them back down to the cold hard ground again. He was strawberries. He was a discarded sandal on the beach. He was the skyline. He was chocolate pudding.
'I was everything. I am everything. To her, I mean' he chortled.
A disease mutated from the darkest caves of his mind - infecting those around him. Its evil fingers picking and groping at his brain like the sweet painful caress from an old memory. Often he wondered if there was a cure to the spreading sickness that was his soul, but if there was, she would have left me by now.
Yet she didn't, she never left. No matter how many times he beat her or reduced her to tears - incandescent with rage. No matter how worked up he got, until the world was spinning and his head was thumping with a kaleidoscope of fireworks.
No, she never left.
She was bent to his will, his puppet, and he was omnipotent ... except those times when the regret would rush forth from inside with all the force of a tidal wave, built up over time, the tears threatening to flood his eyes and flow over in a constant stream.
'Of all the wonderful emotions that God had created, regret was by far, my most hated.'
In those moments he would collapse in her tender arms, his carefully built walls collapsing around him like a ruined city after a hurricane, revealing all he was to her - a monster.
Questions flooding through his head: 'Do you see me now? Do those bright blue eyes finally see the lie in front of you?'
Sometimes he wondered if she was diseased too. How could anyone so indefectible stay with someone as callous as he was? She was infatuated with him, convinced that one day everything would be better.
'How I laugh at the thought.'
He knew better than to hope. Hope was just a poor man's lie. To hope is too have faith, and he had none. She was tied as tightly to him, as he was to her.
'Yet it wasn't real love. Not really.' he thought.
He looked at her again, his eyes boring into her. This time he saw her differently. True, she was angelic on the outside but on the inside she was just a tangled aftermath of my formidable destruction. If he was the earthquake then she was the aftershocks - quivering in the corner, a hand held tentatively against her reddening cheek.
'Did that hurt? It was meant to.'
He was the sickness, the pestilence in the air and she was breathing him in, his most treasured victim.
Her faultless skin hid the scars within - deep wounds inside her body, manifesting as time went on. The shattered illusion of her perfection was stunning; he had always thought of himself as a beast beside her, there were times when he wanted to destroy that beautiful body of hers, just so he felt less grotesque in comparison.
Her parted lips were now held tight - holding back a torrent of unsaid words. Her eyelashes fluttering like crazy as she dreamed a nightmare.
'Are you dreaming about me? Are you scared?'
Perfection really was a subjective thing, and she was the utmost perfectionist.
She stirred in her sleep and rolled over, her eyelashes fluttering like a butterfly's wings.
'Pwetty little ugly buttywutter fly' he sneered.
He held my breath as he watched her. She stretched out, propped herself up on one elbow and smiled sleepily up at him, her blue as bright as ever.
Yet he saw neither the innocent nor loving blue eyes he had come to fear and cherish, but his own black eyes looking back at him - cold and full of the hatred that burned deep inside.
His creation.