it**** Posted September 13 I’ve prepared a short story for people who are interested in Dark Romance/Goth Love. The story is told from a Male perspective. Enjoy! (⚠️This content contains stalking/obsession themes/emotional distress/fictional horror) I’ve been watching you for months. Online first — scrolling back too far, checking your last seen, staring at your pictures until my chest hurt. Then outside, in the real world. Sitting in my car around the corner, waiting for the light in your window to go off. I told myself it was love, but really it was compulsion. Every time I wasn’t near you, it felt like I couldn’t breathe right. I don’t introduce myself. I learn you like a list: the cafe you favor on Thursdays, the exact feed you check before bed, the way you tuck hair behind your ear when you read. I tell myself I’m careful. I tell myself I’m a guardian — that watching is protection. The truth is uglier: it’s hunger that calls itself duty. Tonight the car is cold. I sit with the engine off and the world muffled: streetlights, the low hum of people, your silhouette in the café window like an accusation. You’re laugh-light, rented and bright. Then his hand finds yours. The motion is small, ordinary, and it rips me open. My body decides before my brain can argue. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from shouting. My fingers drum the wheel. The tightness in my chest turns into a short, wired panic — the kind that pulls at the edges of sense. I follow. Following is not elegant. It’s a line of highway lights and tail lights and the small, terrible calculations that keep me a step behind. When you walk, I count your steps. When you wait at a crosswalk, I stop three cars back and watch the way your shoulders relax. Nothing about it feels cinematic. It feels necessary and raw, like breathing through a blocked throat. You get to your building. He leaves. You go inside. I park two houses down and the minutes become a drumbeat in my skull. I tell myself to leave. I tell myself I’m crossing a line. The words mean nothing against the swell inside me. I stay. I watch windows for movement. I scroll through your posts until the glow of the phone blurs my vision. I taste iron. When you come back out alone, something like reality snaps. The car door closes behind me without sound. My walk toward your stoop is half run, half march — urgent, precise. I don’t knock. I step onto the pavement and the city reduces to the distance between us. You look at me like I’m a stranger. That look is exactly the knife I needed. I don’t beg. I don’t fall apart in a way that will make you soft. I am furious, edge-sharp, and that anger is braided with a real, terrifying need. “You were with him,” I say. No flourish. Just a voice that wants to be heard and obeyed. “You betrayed me.” You take a step back. Your body language is polite retreat, the kind people use when they’re not sure whether to call the police. That small act of moving away tastes like betrayal. I lean in. My proximity is a brand. “You don’t get to hand yourself out,” I say. My words are not eloquent; they are commands hidden in calm. “You belong where I know you. You belong where I can keep you. Only I can protect you.” I say the last word low, almost like pleading, but my face is hard. I convince myself of it. Protection is easier than possession, and both make me feel justified. You tell me boundaries, you look terrified, shocked, confused. Each word is a hammer blow, but instead of breaking me, it steels me. The rage is clean: you forged an intimacy without me. The jealousy tastes like power. The madness that follows is method, not theatrics. “Listen,” I say, and I keep my voice level so that no one on the street will mistake me for a threat — because restraint is its own weapon. “You don’t get to forget me. If you move with him, I will know. If you change your route, I will know. This isn’t an option. This is the way it is.” You clutch the doorframe, fingers white. You’re afraid. That *** is not a pleasure I would admit, but it’s the fuel that sharpens my focus. I step back once, as if to give you air, and in that breath I plan: the times I will watch, the hours I can afford to miss without arousing suspicion, the slow mapping of a life until your private corners have no secrets I don’t hold. You slam the door. The sound is final and clean, like a verdict. I stand in the street with my heart thudding and the mania of it folding into a terrible decision: patience. I will not make a scene that gets me taken away. I will not give you the evidence that would *** an end. I will shape myself into what I need to be to stay close. I am guardian and jailor both.
ju**** Posted September 14 The guardian jailer is also a prisoner of his own desires. Both prey and hunter are trapped by each other, because neither can escape their nature. No matter how hard their minds try to fight it, every cell in their body yearns to revel in what they are.
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