Andrea (Part 2) (Patreon)

(It's been since February since I had any writing to share, and this continues to be a bit of a slow burn, but I hope you all enjoy it as we get to know Andrea more and more. Part 1 here. Image is from the amazing Katelyn Brooks, circa 2008.)

For the next several days things were relatively unchanged, though when I took my moments to watch Andrea during our class together it seemed like she wasn't nearly as focused on her work in that notebook of hers. It was Friday when she stopped completely and looked up through her hair without even raising her head and stared back at me. She'd never once in a full month looked my way, so that left me blinking and taking a sharp breath, quickly breaking eye contact and staring down at my desk.

Every time I risked a glance back towards her for the rest of the class she was staring right back at me. I was working up the nerve to stare right back at her, but before I got to that point the bell rang, sending the rest of the students towards the door. She only needed to fold her notebook up and tuck it away, and I had been so thrown off by her gaze that my things were all still spread out on the desk. Before I'd packed up she'd gotten up and walked right up to me, her heavy boots thudding with each approaching step.

"Come on. I'm done with school today." It was a firm statement that was simple enough on the surface, but clearly it implied that we were both going to start our weekend early, and most importantly it meant she expected us to do it together. I shoved my things in my bag and took a glance at the teacher, a little concerned about how close she was to our conversation, but it was clear that I was the only one concerned. She led the way out of the classroom and out of the building, and I followed closely behind, watching in spite of myself as those massive boots echoed through the gradually emptying hallway.

"Where are we going?" I asked as she slammed through the exit doors without breaking stride, leaving me to take a quick step forward and twist my body a bit to avoid their backswing.

"The tables," she flatly stated. "You still have weed?"

"Sure," I muttered.

"Then the tables."  That was all she had to say until we were there. She walked up to the same table we sat at earlier in the week, but instead of sitting down she whirled back around and walked back up to me as I was digging in my bag for my stash.

"So, if you think about me all the time, which we both know you clearly do, what exactly is it you're thinking about?"

I furrowed my brow a bit as I sat down and started packing the bowl, a little confused by her question but at the same time just faintly relieved to see this little crack in her facade of utter aloofness. "I just wonder about things, I guess."

"I'm sure your fantasies are as depraved as I'd expect," she spat, her eyes narrowing just enough to make me feel far more disgusting than I could possibly be.

"No, no," I calmly answered while offering her the first green hit. "Like, I wonder what you were like as a kid, or how you can afford all of your clothes, what your family is like and what you do outside of school..."

She took the pipe and extended her other hand expectantly as she waited for my lighter, and that was enough for me to quiet down as I dug it out and handed it over. I watched as she again expertly drew in a long, deep lungful of sweet smoke and let it drift skyward from her full, dark lips, and when she was done she gradually let her eyes fall back to me.

"I was smaller," she began, counting off on her fingers the answers to my questions. "We're out of school now, I have an older sister in college and my parents went missing before I moved here last year. They were declared legally dead and had excellent life insurance."

I stared wide-eyed at that and dumbly accepted the lighter and pipe back once she felt like handing them over. "I'm sorry," I muttered while shaking my head, but she quickly responded.

"Don't be. I'm sure they're fine." I couldn't tell if it was tremendous optimism or denial, but either way she dismissed my clumsy condolences more calmly and easily than I was prepared for.

"Anything else?" she questioned with a raised eyebrow before taking another hit, giving me plenty of time to dumbly shake my head. By the time she was done and actually handing the bowl back to me for once, I had an answer.

"There's the notebook." I played it cool and sparked the lighter, feeling tremendously proud of myself as I drew the smoke into my lungs.

She stared at me as I exhaled, and for a long moment after. My moment of confidence quickly dissipated as she just stared back at me, expressionless. She'd told me once. Why was I forcing the point? The fact that she even wanted me to be out here with her was enough, or it might have been if I wasn't just so damn curious.

But then she reached for her bag. Why was she indulging me so much? Was she really doing what it seemed?

The notebook was a well-worn, thick sketchpad, spiral bound and black, unadorned by any sort of decoration. I'd never seen it up close like this before, but it seemed to fit her. Dark and full of secrets. Maybe that was a little much, but still, when she opened it up and started flipping through the pages, keeping them hidden behind the cover, I felt like some spectacular mystery was about to be revealed.

Finally she folded the cover back and dropped the book onto the table. All I'd made out was that it was a drawing by the time she flatly stated, "This is this week."

I approached the table with this careful wonder, and she hopped up onto it, settling next to her notebook, almost seeming protective of it. I leaned in closer and took a seat on the bench, letting my eyes take in the expansive, detailed work.

It was a sketch, all in black pen. Most prominent was a somewhat vague feminine figure in a black dress seated cross-legged on an elaborate, high-backed chair. Her face wasn't really filled in, though the shape of her hair and attentive detail given to the huge platform boots on her feet left little doubt as to who she was supposed to be.

The background was less distinct. There seemed to be structures of some sort, small, distant and surrounded by what looked to be smoke and flames. At her feet there seemed to be what could only be several people, barely more than tiny stick figures, and the only other thing that seemed to have any sort of detail was one of her hands held before her face, clenched into a fist with some sort of liquid or sludge oozing between her fingers.

I stared for a long time, my eyes scanning different parts of the page and trying to take it all in... make some sense of what I was seeing. There were dark streaks across the ground here and there, too. Blood? What was this?

"This is your dream?" I finally murmured, still staring intently at the drawing.

"You get to look, not question," she coolly replied while looking down over my shoulder. "I was thinking of adding you to the scene, though," she tacked on as an afterthought. "I'm just not quite sure where to put you."

"There doesn't seem to be anyplace left to really put me," I murmured while leaning in a little closer, my hand moving towards the corner of the page as my thoughts wandered to what might be on the next one.

I didn't even see her move, but in a flash her heel was slamming down on my wrist, pinning my arm to the table beneath her heavy boot. I briefly howled, more from the shock than the pain, though there certainly was pain. She kept the pressure firm and constant on my wrist as she leaned in and snatched the sketchpad away. "I'd fit you in," she assured me as she closed the book and tucked it away in her bag.

I stared up at her as she turned back towards me, her foot remaining firmly planted on my arm and showing no signs of moving. I knew I could have wrenched it out from beneath her, maybe even lifted it and sent her tumbling off the back of the table, but I wasn't ready to defy her like that. I wouldn't move. I couldn't.

"Never touch my things without permission," she declared, her voice just the faintest bit lower and the slightest bit more menacing. I didn't nod, but I felt my head dip or move somehow, and then she gave just this little twist of her foot, eliciting a subtle gasp from me as my skin was wrenched by her boot before she lifted it from my arm.

I pulled it back the moment it was free and rubbed my wrist, though the pain didn't really linger once Andrea was done stepping on it. I was so... perplexed. Confused and frustrated for sure, but she was also giving me enough that I was still irresistibly intrigued. The more I learned, the deeper and more complex she seemed to become. Of course it didn't hurt that, now that I'd had the chance to be closer to her like this, I realized she was even more gorgeous than I'd known.

I looked back to her and had to catch my breath. She was smiling. Smiling at me. It was brief, and in the next instant she was hopping up from her seat and turning away, but for that brief moment I was filled with this warmth and excitement and this... this energy that overwhelmed me with some sort of hopeful desire.

"Hey, come check this out." She'd walked off towards the trees while I was lost in my little blissful moment, and now she was calling back to me over her shoulder. Obviously I popped up from my seat and started to walk over to where she stood.

Andrea wasn't a very tall girl, though she always seemed to have about four or five inches of shoe to help her out. I had to get pretty close to her to look over her shoulder, but I didn't mind that in the least; I was just excited that she let me be where I was.

Her hair had this sweet, floral smell with a touch of mint. I closed my eyes and took another long breath, savoring just... just the nearness.

"Look." It was just one word, but it brought me back to attention. She gestured towards the ground with a little jerk of her chin and I followed, seeing a little mound of loose dirt about six inches across with a tiny hole in the middle.

"An anthill?" I questioned, and she was nodding before I even finished.

"Big one," she replied. "There's usually a bunch of them out here."

I was perplexed until I her boot started to rise into the air. Her foot only came a few inches off of the ground, but she took her time with the process, letting it hover above the mound for a moment before smashing it down in one firm stomp, then quickly lifting her foot away and settling it back to the ground next to its twin.

The anthill had been flattened beneath her boot, of course, and her heavy sole had left a clear impression of its shape in the soft dirt. Where I had seen one or maybe two ants before, though, there were now hundreds scrambling around this way and that. Andrea's stomp had brought a flurry of activity to the colony, like...

"It's like they're afraid," she murmured. "I know they're barely more than tiny machines, foraging and eating and breeding, but they have self-preservation instincts." I couldn't see her face very well from where I stood, but it definitely looked like she was grinning as her toes lifted and her massive boot slid forward, settling to the ground atop a pile of scurrying ants and starting to slowly twist, crushing and grinding them into the dirt.

"They're afraid of me," she purred while she squished them to death.

There was this incredible energy about her all of a sudden. This excitement, and I don't know if it was her body giving off heat or pheromones or our closeness and the smell of her hair but I was suddenly caught up in it as well. "They should be," I murmured in her ear in this low, throaty voice I didn't know I had.

“Mmm,” was the only reply she gave; a short, subtle sound of agreement as her foot rose into the air again and she took a moment to judge the largest concentration of fleeing, panicked insects before her boot slammed to the ground on top of them. Any that weren’t smashed by the impact were surely destroyed when she started to slide her boot back and forth, smearing the survivors beneath a boot sole a million times bigger than they were.

When she was done Andrea turned around to face me. I’d seen the faintest hints of a smile in her before, but I was catching my breath not only from the display but from seeing her grinning like this for the first time, so clearly pleased and satisfied with herself. “See, you’re not the only one who likes to come out here,” she declared with a smirk.

“You do this often?” I asked, watching the afternoon sunlight dance in her dark, sparkling eyes.

“Sure,” she replied, reaching down and looking back over her shoulder to take a glance at the bottom of her boot, briefly surveying her handiwork. "It's something I've enjoyed for a while. it's like--"

As I watched her look over her destructive foot and saw the exhilaration in her eyes things swiftly started to click into place. The drawings and the tiny figures and the blood and boots and buildings and flames.

"It's like stepping on a city," I breathed, completely lost in her passion for herself. The way Andrea's head popped up and her eyes locked with mine I knew that my observation had surprised her, but her grin hadn't dissipated one bit. Instead, she broke into this musical bit of laughter that sent my heart to racing.

"Oh, Puppy," she cooed, though the warmth in her smile completely removed any sting that the condescension in her voice might have carried. "I knew you'd get it," she finished while reaching out and firmly patting my cheek.

"My name is Eric," I murmured in a total daze, her perfectly smooth, warm hand still resting on my face.

Her hand drifted down my cheek and took hold of my chin, and Andrea moved my head back and forth in time with hers as she adopted the most patronizing voice, though she continued to grin all the while. "Maybe you'll get a collar with a little name tag, then, if your name's so tremendously important to you, huh?"

I was so stunned with the way this small, gorgeous girl talked down to me like I was nothing that I let her walk away without a single word of reply. She was halfway to the parking lot before she called a casual "See you Monday" back over her shoulder.

At least she was talking to me, though. Right?

*****

Monday I’d shown up to class to find another note on my desk. This one was simple enough, informing me in her own unique way that I should wait for her at the end of the day. After school, the front steps. Sit. Stay.

Andrea didn’t leave me waiting long, at least. It wasn’t boots today, but instead a pair of these cross-strap broad-heeled platform mary janes that heralded her approach with their heavy impacts on the concrete behind me. I’d noticed them in class, just like I noticed everything about her, but when I turned to look I got a closer view.

They were black, of course, but they had this scalloped white detailing on the straps and heel and toe that reminded me of lace even though it had the thickness of a piece of leather. Her striped socks were black and white as well, stretching well up past her knees, though when I dared to glance I saw black tights instead of pale skin beneath them at the highest reaches where the hem of her short dress fell.

Perhaps I was lost in thought about her outfit, or maybe some part of me was taking her note seriously, but I didn’t stand up when she walked up to me. “Good boy,” she murmured while taking the opportunity to pat my head, and again I simply appreciated the attention and the touch without concerning myself with anything more.

“Where are we going?” I eventually asked after I’d stared up at her for a long moment, and she gave this little adorable shrug as she gestured down the street.

“I’m taking you for a walk,” she replied, leaving me pondering the many other ways she could have phrased that that didn’t imply treating me like a pet, but she didn’t let me sit there critiquing her diction for more than a moment. “Come on,” she demanded while clomping down the stairs, and I quickly popped up and followed at her side.

We walked wordlessly down the sidewalk for a while, my steps unconsciously falling into rhythm with Andrea’s sonorous footfalls, but eventually she broke the silence. “What do you think death is like?” she asked.

The question took me off guard for a moment, but I felt like my reply came quickly enough to make me seem casual and cool. “I don’t know. I mean, I think I heard somewhere that it hurts--”

She scoffed and shook her head, rolling her eyes while I tried to hastily continue so she wouldn’t spend more than a second or two thinking I was so stupid and ridiculous. “No! No, not just like, whatever kills you, but the actual experience of dying. Like, there’s some deep existential or spiritual pain associated with dying. Something you can only experience when you die.”

She turned and gave me this somewhat quizzical look, but she was smiling while she did. “Hmm. I like that. A special and unique sort of final suffering. Pretty appealing thought.”

I couldn’t resist raising my eyebrows at that sort of response. I knew she had some dark fantasies for sure, but I still didn’t quite expect that reaction. “Well, there’s a chance that may just be from one of the Night of the Living Dead movies, so don’t put too much stock in it. Why? Do you think about dying a lot?”

She let out another peal of laughter that delighted me almost as much as the first time I heard it, even though this was a good bit briefer. “No, no, not myself. I’m reasonably sure I’ll live forever, one way or another, but the people around me? I think about them dying all the time.”

I turned to look at her for a minute as we walked side by side, watching her adjust her stride to settle her massive shoe onto a random dried-out leaf, noisily crunching it to bits as we went by, and suddenly reached the utterly obvious conclusion. “You’re the one that makes them die, aren’t you?”

“Clearly,” she instantly responded.

It took me another minute to process that we were walking down the streets of town casually discussing Andrea’s murder fantasies, but that didn’t deter my curiosity at all. “Who would you do first?” I found myself asking.

“Ms. Christie,” she replied just as quickly, referring to the teacher in the class we shared and seeming to have considered the answer to my question well before I asked it. “She’s a worthless educator and mangles the English language regularly. The only reason she has a job at all is so she can coach the cheerleading squad. Having to sit in her class is an insult that I shouldn’t have to bear.”

Her tirade seemed to be equally well-prepared, though I could see her eyes narrowing and hear the deep disdain creeping into her voice as she continued. “She’s a wretched, self-important vapid whore whose broken body I’d love to stand over while watching the light go out of her dumb cow eyes,” she muttered, then took a deep breath to perhaps clear her mind.

I found myself smiling as she finished. Despite how dark and violent her thoughts were, there was something refreshing about the way she described Ms. Christie. For all the ways that she’d captivated and confused me, somewhere under all of that mysterious exterior was a girl that just hated her teacher.

I wasn’t really paying attention to where we were going, taking a bit to look up at the sky while grinning at the reassuring moment I’d just experienced. I didn’t notice the sort of grizzled old homeless guy until he was pretty much right on us, change rattling in his torn styrofoam cup and all.

“...just trying to get change for the bus, anything helps,” the nearly toothless man muttered in our general direction. I expected we’d just keep moving past him, but Andrea stopped dead and swiftly whirled on the beggar, standing toe-to-toe with him and giving him this fearsome, furious stare.

She didn’t say anything for a long, tense moment, just narrowing her eyes and glowering at him with utter contempt. He started to shake his head, completely confused by her reaction and eventually starting to stammer through some sort of apology. With the help of her five inch heels she was a little taller than him, and she seemed to enjoy that fact as she edged closer to the hapless bum.

“Don’t you talk to me,” she growled, then reached out and slapped the cup from his hand, sending his collection of change noisily spilling across the sidewalk. “You don’t deserve to speak to me.”

He gave this faint wail of protest, but the man didn’t so much as maintain eye contact with Andrea once she started to speak. He turned to chase after the quarters and dimes jangling on the concrete, and I could only stand and stare while she stretched out her leg and hooked his foot, tripping him and sending him roughly tumbling to the ground.

She let out this brief, cruel laugh as we both watched him try to pull himself together and get his legs beneath him, and once again I thought we were done. I moved to take a step away but Andrea took her step towards the groaning, cursing beggar, then swung her other foot towards him, smashing her heavy shoe into his gut with all of her strength.

“You’re disgusting. Pathetic disgusting trash,” she firmly declared as another brutal kick struck the man's midsection, leaving him wheezing and nearly retching as the force of the impact rolled him onto his side.

I was totally frozen to the spot. I didn't know if I should help her, help him, stop her, run... all I knew was that I couldn't look away.

"You. Talking to me," Andrea sneered while roughly kicking the man's shoulder and knocking him flat on his back. "You don't deserve to even share the same sidewalk as me," she informed the helpless man as her shoe's thick heel crashed into his face. His nose erupted in a burst of dark blood and one of the few teeth he still had tumbled to the ground as he wailed in desperate agony.

"You don't belong on the same planet as me," she spat as she raised her knee towards her chest, letting her foot hover over the man's battered face for an intense, lingering moment. I wasn't sure when it happened, but in that instant she was grinning, wild and ecstatic and totally, utterly in control.

Her shoe smashed down, mercilessly stomping his skull into the concrete with a sickening smack. I stared at Andrea in something like fearful wonder as she held the man's head pinned beneath her shoe. One thing was certain: she definitely didn't need my help.

She started to slowly twist her heavy platform sole into the guy's head, leaving him alternately gasping and howling in pain as she savored grinding his face underfoot. "In fact," she began, her voice dropping to this low, terribly seductive purr that left me quivering for reasons I didn't completely understand, "the world would probably thank me for doing everyone a favor and erasing a piece of human filth like you from it."

This whole thing was so far outside of the reality of my life that I didn't have the first idea how to handle it. My mind was struggling to process the events and understand how one person could so easily just do this to another, but then there was the fact that it was just some homeless jerk, and Andrea... Andrea was incredible. She never thought twice about just destroying this man in a minute flat, and now she had him weeping and bleeding and broken beneath her heel.

Such tremendous, beautiful and sensual power. I still didn't understand what it was doing to me, but for whatever reason I was completely lost in her.

Well, almost completely. I still had enough awareness about me that I caught sight of a woman walking towards us down the opposite side of the street. "Hey, someone's coming!" I called out, breaking the spell that the moment had placed both of us under. Andrea looked up and gave this exasperated sigh, shaking her head and halfheartedly kicking the man's battered face away from her foot.

"Look, five bucks," she noted as she stepped away from the pathetic, wailing wretch, gesturing with her chin towards where his change cup had fallen.

"We've got to go!" I protested with an intense, panicked urgency, but Andrea only pointed to the dirty bill at her feet.

"Pick it up, dummy," she instructed while she turned and started walking, and after glancing around with wide, crazed eyes I bent down and snatched the money up, then turned and scampered off after her.

"Come on!" I insisted, my voice higher and more shrill than could possibly have been anything manly, but she only shot me this withering look as she continued along with her casual gait.

"I do not run," she stated firmly, and so I fell into step with her, Andrea and I simply continuing to walk down the sidewalk just as we had been before, leaving a trampled, brutalized and beaten man in her wake.

My breath came short and swift as we went, the blood rushing in my ears and my heart unceasingly hammering in my throat while my mind went over all the things I'd seen in the last two minutes over and over and over. I kept glancing at Andrea like she was some sort of alien. A beautiful, unknowable, unstoppable and unequivocally alluring alien that was walking right beside me, simply smiling with total self-satisfaction.

We eventually arrived at the large, colorful convenience store downtown, and I followed Andrea in. For some reason I expected everyone to look at us like violent criminals, but nobody seemed to even notice we were there as I went with her to the Slurpee machine.

"Shit," she muttered, which sent a paralyzing chill running up and down my spine.

"What? What is it?" I hissed, furtively glancing around for police and concerned citizens that might have seen what we'd done. What she'd done and I'd watched, more accurately, but I felt just as responsible.

"There's blood on my shoe," she sighed, and when I followed her eyes down to her foot I noticed that there certainly was, and more than just a little bit. Andrea just stood there, though, staring at me expectantly until I realized that I needed to do something about her problem.

I reached for the napkin dispenser on the counter but was quickly rebuked for my first thought. "Are you serious?" she snapped. "Scratchy recycled paper product? No, just no. Use something soft." 

I stood there utterly clueless for a moment longer, looking around the store while my mind raced, but Andrea had things all figured out, as she always seemed to. She reached out to give a single tug at the sleeve of my sweatshirt. "This will work."

I didn't do anymore thinking after that. Simple as could be, I found myself in a 7-11 crouching down at Andrea’s feet, taking off my favorite hoodie and using the lining to wipe a homeless man's blood from her platform shoe. I used a few slow, even strokes, careful to not let the zipper scrape her shoe’s black leather. It only took a minute or so, and when I checked my work, seeing a few dark stains on the white inside of my hoodie and nothing marring the smooth surface of Andrea’s shoe, I looked up and hoped my efforts had met her approval.

She was smiling at me, and that filled me with both joy and relief, but then the shoe I’d just cleaned rose from the ground and settled at my shoulder, and Andrea grinned a little more as she pushed her foot out and watched me lose my balance, falling onto my back.

I was going to open my mouth and even maybe protest, but before my slow-moving mind even got that far, Andrea had taken a step forward and dropped that same heavy shoe onto my chest. I gasped to feel her weight on me, but also felt a little surge of desire run through me as I stared up at her, this girl from class I’d watched for weeks now towering over me like a goddess, exuding total power as she held me pinned beneath her foot.

I don’t think my heart had slowed for half an hour, but now, seeing her like this and feeling her, feeling her weight on me, it seemed to have found a higher gear.

“Is there anything you wouldn’t do for me?” she asked, her expression giving nothing away while her weight shifted a little, drawing a soft grunt out of me while she waited for my answer.

I tried to reply, croaking and having to swallow a few times before I could get any words to come out. My answer, however, was far from profound even though it was as honest as I could be.

“I… I don’t know,” I stammered, but apparently that was enough to bring a brief smile to her angelic face. I felt her shoe sliding forward atop my chest and watched as she lifted her toes, seeing the tip of her sole rise above my chin even as her heel further dug into my sternum.

I hadn’t cleaned the bottom of Andrea’s shoe. I hadn’t even thought about it, though the way she’d kicked and stomped that guy down the street it should have been clear that I needed to. I saw some dark, grimy reddish streaks on my shirt at the same time that she spoke.

“Kiss it,” she demanded, and my body responded before my mind even considered the act. I wanted nothing more than what Andrea wanted. I needed the approval she was giving me and needed to make sure I kept it. I strained my neck, closed my eyes and pushed my lips forward, pressing them firmly to the dirty platform sole of her shoe.

I heard perhaps a little wordless murmur of pleased satisfaction from somewhere far above, and when I opened my eyes her shoe had settled back to my chest and Andrea was leaning over me, one hand braced on the counter as she looked into my eyes and asked another question, her voice sultry and low.

“Would you die for me?”

I felt the words sink into me and laid there in silence for a moment, my chest heaving as best it could beneath the weight of her shoe, the taste of blood and dirt from its sole still fresh on my lips. This wasn't an idle romantic notion. I'd seen her drawings. I'd seen what she was capable of. If that woman hadn't shown up, Andrea very well might have stomped and crushed the life out of that man right there on the sidewalk. The weight of the question held me as helplessly motionless as the weight of her heel, but we were in the middle of a store. I couldn't just lay there and leave her waiting while people walked in and stared, and we weren't that far away from where she'd brutalized the homeless guy, either.

So I said the first thing that resembled a rational thought in my mind, and answered her question with a question.

"Would you kill me?"

There was just as much silence after my response as before, but Andrea filled the time with a long sip of her blue raspberry Slurpee instead of panting and nervous sweats. When she finally pulled the straw away from her gorgeous, full lips, though, it was only to give a long, enigmatic smile. 

"Pay for my drink," she instructed me as her shoe lifted from my chest and she walked away, leaving me flat on my back and in the midst of a deep struggle to pull myself together. I heard the dull electronic tone of the door opening and a few thickly accented shouts from the man behind the counter directed first at her and then at me, and that’s how I realized that I really did need to get up off of the floor.

I was too dazed to really try and figure out what the man was saying to me, but I did sort of clumsily dig the crumpled, dirty five dollar bill from my pocket and toss it on the counter before I stumbled out the door, but when I looked around, Andrea was gone, leaving me with a shoe-sized grime spot on my shirt and a ruined hoodie, and so many swirling thoughts that wanted to coalesce into questions but never quite could.

I thought to dash around and glance down some side streets, but if she’d wanted me with her she would have waited. All I was left to do was walk alone back to my car at school.

The walk back seemed terribly longer than the one we’d taken to get here, and not just because I swung a thoroughly wide arc around where we’d encountered the homeless man. Andrea… she was clearly a sociopath, and a violent one, too. I didn’t know what her limits were, or if she even had them at all, but none of that mattered nearly as much as the way every inch of my body ached for her.

I needed her. I needed her presence and her smile and her voice and I couldn’t ever let my life go back to the dull, empty monotonous void it had been before we’d met.

When I crawled into bed that night I stared at the ceiling and imagined Andrea between it and me, straddling my hips and towering over me like she had at the store. She wore the same wild grin that she’d had while grinding the homeless guy’s skull beneath her heel, and it was her sweet, enchanting laughter that I kept hearing as I dreamed of her massive shoe rising above my face as well.

My fingers ran across the bruises that her sole had left behind on my chest, and let out a little groan from the depths of my longing for her as I eventually managed to slip into a long, dreamless sleep.