Jessica. There’d been Jessica, he thought, desperate. His eyes reflected his inner turmoil – one moment they focused on the bedframe his hands gripped, his knuckles turning white; the next moment they were on the bedroom door on the far side of the room, white panels of oak blurring into one solid figure in his tear-fuzzed vision. He was aware of a line of pain on his lower lip as he pressed his top layer of teeth down into it out of frustration.

There had to be more girls – he knew it. But why couldn’t he recall their names? Or even their faces? Had there been that many, and could he really not have cared enough for any of them to even remember their names?

A face flitted to the foremost of his mind, and he remembered her as one of those whom he had spent more time with, who had been harder to break. But he had managed to break her, all right. In fact, he had shattered her, and watched as he had slowly driven her insane. All the while, he had gotten stronger and stronger, her negative emotions feeding his power. Now her eyes, large and a pretty shade of brown, filled his head, followed by her straight nose and soft lips. Her hair flowed around her face like a smooth river, and he could see her happy, as she had been before he had tainted her.

He twisted the ring around his middle finger while memories of the girl slowly came back to the forefront of his mind, unlocked from its recesses, the abyss where even he dared not go. And unconsciously, he was going there now. He could recall the day he had first seen this girl, one of countless whom he had shamelessly manipulated. The scene seemed so real to him, how he had caught a glimpse of her from afar, and subsequently how he had reveled in the happiness upon her face, how he knew it would be so much more fulfilling when he had had his way with her. It felt like he could open his closed eyes and see her there upon the bridge, over the calmly flowing water of the river.

But he could not remember her name.

His blood rushed to his hand and he lashed out, pulling the ring off his finger and throwing it across the room in one swift movement. It hit the wall and fell, spinning in position until it settled on the carpeted floor. The metal glinted in the light of his bedside lamp, taunting him.

He could only remember a handful of names. There had been more than a hundred suicides in his town that year, and more than ten of them were his fault. Yet he could not recall a single name, other than Jessica’s, and that was because she had been one of the few who had been able to get away from him before she fell into depression like the other less lucky ones. He had known from the start that she would be harder to crack than the others, because she was similar to him – she needed constant change, and she had gotten into a relationship with him to break his heart. When that failed, she had lost interest and moved on.

Jessica was the only one who had won out of him, but right now he didn’t care. All he cared about was the girl whose heart he had only just broken… whose heart wasn’t the only thing he had destroyed.

The scene flashed through his head again, and he grabbed the long locks of hair on his head. His nails dug into his scalp, and he gasped, gobbling up the pain as a welcome distraction from his memories. Still, though, they filtered through, tormenting him emotionally as well.

The blur of purple had caught his gaze even though he had been standing many blocks away, and it had held him in a trance.

She had been wearing the outfit he had loved seeing on her.

A circle of people had formed around her, so thick that he had had to jab his elbow into a woman’s rib in order to be let through.

He had been able to hear his breaths coming in quick, short bursts, and he remembered his heart thundering so loud that it was the only thing he could hear.

Tears had made their way down his cheeks even before he had even seen her.

Her eyes had looked like those of a doll’s as she stared unseeingly up at the sky.

A guttural sound escaped him, and he flung himself back onto his bed, salty liquid mixing with the blood freshly leaking from the cut on his lower lip as he stared into space, witnessing ghosts of memories only he could see. His hands clenched into fists.

As he laid there, his thoughts humming softly in the background, he opened his eyes wider. They landed almost immediately on the mirror hanging on the wall opposite his bed. He stared at himself, his lips curling in disgust as he considered the monster reflected back at him.

That’s right. He was an abomination – a plague upon the human race that didn’t deserve to have been born. He closed his eyes again, his long, perfectly arched lashes falling against the smooth, fair skin of his cheek. As he tried to force himself back to sleep, more images from his past bombarded him. Cursing, he sat bolt upright, shaking his head to try and rid his head of any accursed thoughts. For once, he wanted to think nothing.

Standing up, he crossed the room to the cupboard in the corner. He opened it and sighed as he found it empty. The bare boards seemed to smirk at him, looking down at him from their position high above his head.

There seemed to be nothing left for him in this place.

It’d been five minutes. He had made his decision, and strangely after doing that he felt much calmer. The world seemed to make more sense to him now, like a blanket had fallen over him, keeping his insecurities out and giving him the strength to do what he had to do. Because there was no other way out. He couldn’t change the way he was, same as no human could change their pitifully dependent natures. He couldn’t stop using humans, and they couldn’t stop needing him.

He felt a spike of acid flow in his veins, and he breathed in deeply to try and re-enter the zone of calm he’d been in just a few minutes prior. Upon expelling the horribly corrosive thoughts he’d just had, he took a locket out of his pocket and slung it around his neck. When he let go, it rested slightly above his heart. That meant that it must have rested against her heart – that thought gave him courage and filled him with an illusion of warmth.

The bare skin of his soles made not a sound against the carpeted floor as he moved towards the door. His hair was all mussed up from his constant tossing and turning, and the circles under his eyes were darker than he’d ever seen them. His clothes were all in disarray, but honestly he didn’t care. At the door he paused and turned back.

Like a mirror, his room reflected him.

his locket, he turned around and made his way out, closing the door behind him. He realized belatedly that he had forgotten his keys, then shrugged, deciding that he didn’t much care anymore. People could ransack his room and rob it of all things valuable – he wouldn’t be bothered, because the most valuable thing to him had already been cruelly taken away.

But, he supposed, it was retribution for what he had done.

Although, how was it justifiable that one was punished for being the way nature created him?

No use arguing with himself, he concluded in the end, turning his feet in the direction of the stairs. He walked up them, keeping his eyes glued to the locket in his hand, reliving the memories he had locked away as he climbed.

She hadn’t been his target at first; he had had his eyes fixed on her very sultry friend. But as he had made his move, the latter had disappeared into the restroom, and he had overbalanced onto the other at the counter. It wasn’t as smooth a meeting as he had had with other girls, but yet with his clumsiness he had unwittingly endeared himself to her. Eventually he looked back on it as the best mistake he had ever made.

Well, that was what he had felt when he was in a good mood – basically before it had all spiraled out of control. Now when he recalled it, he did so with a painful lurch of his heart, and the feeling was quickly followed by one of self-hate. Because he had been the cause of her pain, of all her troubles, and he was the one who had slowly driven her out of her mind.

As his dry eyes shed more tears, a flood of happy memories engulfed him. Their first date, how he had truly felt warm and comfortable enclosed in her arms, the way her eyes had crinkled up when she smiled, and the way it had sounded when she said his name. When he thought about it, they actually hadn’t spent all that much time together. At the most, they had been together for two months? And then it had all ended when she jumped.

He choked as the thought came back to him. His knees wobbled, and he nearly fell to the floor, but he grabbed the banister and supported himself at the last second. It had been because of him.

As much as it hurt him to think about it, he had driven the one person he had ever loved to take her own life.

She had killed herself because of him.

It had been because of the mind games he had played on her – the way he had taken her heart and, like it was a piece of thread, knotted it as much as he could and flung it away, as hard as he could, while holding on to the other end as tightly as possible. Theirs was a twisted love. But it was his fault, for he didn’t have a clue how to be nice to people, how to treat a person right – how to love someone.

Sure, he had known all the right things to say, all the romantic ways of giving her things, to make her feel loved, but he would turn the situation around at the very next moment and fling resentment in her face. He had made her feel like she needed him and only him – he’d made her obsessed, addicted. Like anything bad that happened was her fault, and that she lived to please him. And he couldn’t have helped but do all these things, because they were his natural responses to people. Given a choice, he wished he could have acted normal, like any boyfriend would to their girl, but he didn’t have that choice. He only had one setting.

It took an enormous amount of strength to get himself to move away from the railing, to continue up the stairs. He didn’t have much further to go, anyway.

Just a little bit longer, he told himself.

She had left him a voice message, which he had found a day or so after the event, when he had finally plucked up the courage to go look around her house. The police had already been there, of course, but there had been a loose board under her bed that they wouldn’t have touched. She had probably anticipated that the police would search her place, so she had left her message in the place she knew they wouldn’t touch, where she knew he would look. 

For someone so confident, who oozed charisma and could take his pick of girls, he was cowardly. He didn’t accept reality most of the time; he had refused to acknowledge what he did to people, how he destroyed lives – instead he pretended nothing was wrong, deluding himself into thinking that his life was perfect, that he was normal.

When, all the while, he had been a monster.

He hadn’t the courage to face the facts; just the same as he hadn’t the guts to go back to where she lived to make sense of the fact that she was gone. In fact, he thought bitterly, stomping up the last few steps, he hadn’t any bravery at all.

A door stood before him, resolute, as if daring him to change his mind. Gritting his teeth in annoyance, he braced his shoulder and charged towards the door, flinging all his weight into it. The thin sheet of metal bent under the pressure, and he pulled it aggressively away from the frame so that it swung outwards, creaking all the while. He ignored the pain blazing in his arm and stalked through the opening, into the open air.

The wind attacked him like a block of ice thrown in his face, and he gasped from the shock. He staggered blindly on into the cold, keeping his head down so that he didn’t freeze. Still, the coolness infiltrated his clothes, seeping in through the nooks and crannies and spread till they formed a layer over his skin, sapping the heat from him. His breath came out in wisps that melted into the air as he moved closer to the amazing view from the roof of the building, towards the exact spot where she had taken her last breath.

For she had jumped from this building – knowing that he lived here, that the meaning of her choice would be clear to him.

A tear slipped from his eyes – one of the last for his eyes dried up after it fell. It traced a fiery line down his cheek, a vastly different feeling from the cold that surrounded him. As if angered by the warmth, the cold attacked him even more harshly, tracing a line of ice down the same path the tear had taken. The droplet came to a stop at his chin, quivering dangerously.

“Ailee,” he told the cold, feeling his heart skip a beat as he said her name.

It was the name of the girl who had changed his life.

He brought his gaze up towards the horizon, letting a smile wear away the worry lines on his face. In just a few minutes, the sun would rise. But he didn’t deserve to see the sun – it was too pure, and he too tainted. He needed to be closer to her, to repair the damage he had done.

And he couldn’t forget his decision.

Peering over the edge, he tried to gauge where the exact spot she had died was. He shifted his position along the short wall until he was standing directly over it. Behind him, he heard voices – probably people coming up to investigate the source of the noise he had made earlier. Whatever he did now, he needed to be quick about it.

A flash of fear surged through him, and he scrunched his eyes tight, fighting it. For once in his life, he needed to be brave. He needed to do this – for her. In her memory.

Her smile flashed to the front of his vision. Suddenly it was like he could see her, physically, standing directly in front of him. And she beckoned.

He followed.

She smiled wider, moving out over the open space, not disappearing until he was where she wanted him to be. He looked down at himself as she faded, unable to watch her completely disappear from his life.

This was what he needed to do.

Suddenly all his last reserves fled him, and he felt freer than he ever had before. For the first time, a small bit of courage filled him. He took a last breath, and stepped off the edge.

“Oh, God,” someone’s voice said from far behind him.

But he was already falling.

He had never moved so fast before – it almost felt like he was flying. For just a few moments, the world hung in perspective, and he felt invincible. And he felt happy. He was doing the right thing, for once in his life.

Then everything came to an abrupt end when he hit the cold, unforgiving concrete.

Everything was spinning. He should have felt an excruciating pain, but he only felt warmth all around him.

His eyes were raised to the heavens as the life leaked ever so slowly out of them.