This was a night of firsts for Jack.
It was the first time he’d ever smoked in-doors, and the first time he had smoked in the nude. The girl curled up against him, arm resting on his chest, was also the first person he had ever slept with.
Jack didn’t really see her as beautiful, nor did he find her to be ugly. Attractive, but far from beautiful, as he saw it.
Jack eyed her softly, taking note of her furrowed brow, and twitching lips. That, and her indecipherable mumblings led Jack to assume that she wasn’t having the best of dreams.
“I hope my performance didn’t have anything to do with that...” Jack whispered to himself, half-jokingly.
Jack considered this to be an odd night for him. As a social hermit, he felt it strange to find himself in an apartment filled with inebriated college seniors, dwarfing him in age.
This girl, who had introduced herself as ‘Alexandria’, brought him here on what seemed to be a whim. Jack found it unusual for someone to run up to him on one of his nightly walks, inviting him to this cramped apartment. He found it even stranger that he decided to go along.
“Why am I here?” He thought to himself as he walked into a bastion of noises he found to be too loud, people he found to be too irritating, and various illicit substances he found to smell too putrid.
“What the hell am I doing?” He said to himself as Alexandria led him to the even smaller bedroom.
The girl had smiled at that point. It was a smile that made Jack feel uncomfortable, there was something behind it that he did not like, yet he did not know why.
“Don’t worry, I’ll show you.”
That smile never left her face throughout the entire experience. Jack had a hard time concentrating on the situation at hand because of it.
And now he lay, with all this and more running through his mind as the cigarette smoke danced like a translucent and graceful serpent above his head. He considered that to be far more beautiful than the girl.
As Jack turned to the digital clock beside the bed on which he rested, he saw that the numbers had just flickered to eleven fifty-seven.
Sighing, he shut off his mind, (an incredibly useful talent he had developed after many previous sleepless nights) and let the tides of sleep wash over him.
The very last thought that permeated Jacks mind was hoping that his dreams would not be as troubled as Alexandria’s.
Though Jack’s dreams that night would be peaceful as he had hoped, he would find the following day to be far stranger than this night of broken normality.
Alexandria will have died by her own hand by the time he awoke. Jack’s name will be carved into her own lifeless chest. And he would awake to find her name etched into his.
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