I am damned. Have been since birth. Every member of my family is gone, even Shaw, the man my father grew up with in the Michigan State foster system.
I want nothing more than to get the fuck out of here, but I can’t leave the state without permission. I want to get away from the chance that I may run into someone who will recognize and judge me.
There is no harsher judge than myself. I know who I am, what I have done, and what I am capable of.
Even those who think they want to be around me, if I were them, I would run. I would get the fuck away from me as fast as they can. Death and the damned are separated by moments; moments no motherfucker should want to be a part of. I am the fucking damned.
Tonight, while I sit in my apartment, in the old gray chair next to the window, looking at the city lights, I think about tomorrow being another day, pushing forward—all those things that my dad and Shaw said to do. I try my best to focus on being positive, because today was some sort of hell I haven’t experienced.
Since being released, I have been with several women, all eager to please me. When involved in underground fights, there is always the after-fight fuck options, which I avoid. Women swarm around whether you win or lose, wanting a piece of a man who they know is capable of destruction. I never fuck them. A quick blow job is all I allow, and they eagerly provide it.
To be honest, I would rather jerk off than deal with the possibility of a woman thinking she would want a man like me for anything more than that.
Tatum, she should heed my advice, leave well enough alone, and stay the fuck away. I never gave her the impression I was interested. I never gave any one of the women I have encountered a reason to think I was up for anything more than a release. I should have made it so with her. But this fucking book, I think as I grab it, is a release of its own.
Jonathon and Annie, not Michelangelo and Tatum, until she wanted it that way, until she wanted me to call her by name. For some fucking reason, I am so drawn to her alternate reality that I did.
Sure as fuck was better than this, I think, looking around my apartment.
I open the dog-eared journal to see what she wrote that she didn’t want me to see.
On the top center of the page is, Michelangelo, and under it in parenthesis is: I want to know from a man’s point what he would want. Muse me, Michelangelo. Tell me what a man like you thinks a girl like “Annie” would want.
I shake my head, thinking she doesn’t really want to know. Then I grab a pen, knowing it doesn’t matter. The game is over, so why the fuck not?
I begin to write exactly what fictional Michelangelo, a Michelangelo without death and bars, a man not damned, would want from a girl like Annie.
“Dinner, your place tomorrow, Annie,” he would tell her before he left. Then he would kiss her nose because he knew, if he tasted her lips again, he would have to stay. Then he would walk across the hall to his apartment and look around. It was the same as hers, but more masculine.
He would look at the pictures on his walls of the people he loved. They... lived too far away, and he missed them, but not as much now that he had met Annie.
He was gonna have dinner with her tomorrow night.
He would grab a bottle of wine, a bouquet of flowers, which would make him really uncomfortable, but since this is fiction, he would be okay with it.
She would open the door and have a dress on—black—and it would have just a thin belt tied around the waist so that after dinner—pasta and meat sauce—he would sit on her couch, and she would sit on his lap facing him, straddling him. Then he would untie the belt’s bow, letting it fall open so he could see the tits he had jerked off to again.
He would take them in his hands, then take her lips, because he knew how they tasted. Hell, he would never forget how they tasted better than anything he had ever tasted before.
After neither of ’em could breathe, he would suck on her nipples until she was grinding against his lap. He would be hard. So fucking hard it hurt. But he wouldn’t care, because he would be sucking tits and licking inside her mouth, and she would be on him, and he wouldn’t be there alone with a raging fucking hard-on, writing in a journal he would never want any one, Annie included, to see.