How did they keep ending up like this? Wendy had to ask herself as Stan's hand slid over the back of her jeans. His hand felt heavy and seeped heat even through the denim over her skin. She let her mind go places her body couldn't follow, because Stan was pinning her to his bed and dragging sloppy kisses over her neck. His mouth was hot on her skin, as if he were burning her, branding her with his love. Wendy didn't mind, because she wanted so very badly to be loved. She craved love so desperately, she was willing to lie to herself and everyone else in order to get it. If someone could love her, love would make her into something precious, something valuable. She believed that so deeply that she knew it.

Stan said he loved her, and his voice against her throat, his hand in her hair, his mantra of, "oh God, Wendy, I need you so fucking much," were the perfect reasons to believe him. He meant it, she knew he must. So why did his declarations sound like hope taking flight and disintegrating against the sky?

Sometimes she itched to tear him out of her life and thrust him far away. She was suffocating in her own lies, waiting for love to claim her and make her whole again. But it hadn't; it felt like it never would. Why was his love not enough for her?

Stan's impatient fingers began to play with the clasps on Wendy's bra, and she wondered about this. She realized that she knew nothing about love. Only that Stan loving her felt like a chain around her neck. Love strangled her and kept her from floating away. Love was boredom, but would it always be this way? And even as she longed for her freedom, her desire for love, and her fear of losing the only thing in her life that even resembled love held her down so tightly she sometimes forgot to breath.

Wendy believed in love like some people believed in fairytales. She believed that love would make her powerful, would satisfy her craving and her fears. So why did it feel like she had been lied to, and that this placation was all love had to offer her? And why did she feel so helpless under Stan's gentle hands, which tore emptiness from her instead of cries of passion?

Stan's hot breath in her ear felt intimate, sticky. When she whispered that she loved him, it sat like a lie on her lips and she actually reached a hand to her mouth to wipe it off. She felt so delicate, and so heavy. She might fly apart at any moment, but in the meantime, she had to stay here, held down by the obligations of...having what she'd always wanted. She felt so hollow, as the last echoes of hope beat desperately against the walls of her empty chest.

The moment Eric Cartman's too-small lips pressed into Wendy's, like a secret note pressed into an eager palm, she knew that only hatred could satisfy her craving for love. Hatred burned under her skin, made her blood rush to her head, made her dizzy and drunk and free.

Wendy had never felt so alive, so powerful, so satisfied, as she had when Cartman's eyes bored into her own, not a trace of love in their deep, dark recesses.

"I'm going to destroy you," he had said, so sweetly that Wendy's heartbeat had fluttered low in her stomach.

"Fuck, yes."