• He was cold. Like a dead body. His lips were rough, as if a desert were his home. Yet I wanted more, needed to feel him by me every minute of every day. A spell cast like that of pagan ritual. My heart beat his name alone. Words could never honestly describe all the things he made me feel. My tears fell when he was gone. Bitter and cold as days with him holding me had been. You may say that I'm insane, but if you would have known him you would know. He could make me do things that were absolutely nuts, he controlled me and I let him.

    I remember the day we met. It was winter, the snow fell silently around my family's country side home. The home I'd lived in all my life. The home that had been in my family for generations. In this place I learned, I grew, and I never left. I was home-schooled all my life. My parents were very protective and I never left the confinements of our estate. When I was about 16 a fire enveloped our basement. Where I spent much of my time. The house was saved, my parents left, but I stayed. I could not leave my home. It was less then a year when his family moved in.

    He took my room, I stayed locked in a basement no one would enter. His family became perfectly at home. Then one day he decided to venture down. He saw me, and ran off but he came back. He knew my name and he saw my sadness. Fixing me was something that just could not be done easily. He tried anyway, and he almost succeeded.

    He would come everyday and talk with me. He would hold me, caresses my face. I fell for a boy, for the first time in all my 17, by then, years. Or was I 16, who knows. My parents had left me, but he promised he never would. After two years we were best friends, and I was happy, but I would not leave the basement, for fear. He dated one girl in all our time together, to prove to his buddies he wasn't queer. But that lasted all of one date. I was insanely jealous, but there was nothing I could do.

    Eventually he had to choose a college. He chose one near by so as to stay at home, with me. I couldn't let go, and everyday I felt more selfish, for keeping him so. When I knew it could not be. I was his soulmate, and he mine. But I had to say goodbye. Too early for my time. All that time I thought he'd been the cold one.

    The day I said goodbye, was the anniversary of the fire. It was the first time I spoke of it to him, though he'd known. Somehow I said goodbye to my love.

    "I can't be with you," I started weakly. He looked at me suddenly his eyes filled with pain.
    "What," he whispered unbelieving.
    "I can't, you know that it was never going to work I died years ago and though I wasn't supposed it happened and you have to let me go, if you don't I'm stuck to the place that murdered me." Tears flowed down my pale face. He let one slide trying to be strong. He shook his head. Then looked me in the eye.
    "I wish I could, but I'm human I'm selfish and I've tried it, and it's impossible for me." Now he had tears streaming down his face.

    He never married. I didn't get to leave the basement till a good 5 years later, when he got into a nasty bar-fight. The man killed him, but my love's soul is lost. And now that I got the courage to leave my confinement so is mine...