My boyfriend, James, and I have been together for just over two years now, and it’s been a good two years. There’ve been ups and downs, just like any relationship. We’ve had arguments about things that, in retrospect, were pretty silly. Him eating all of my favorite cookies, me forever forgetting to put away the mustard when I’m done using it. Just petty little nothings.
Recently though things between us have become strained. I’m not going to name the company he works for, but it’s fairly famous in our area and requires him to travel off and on. It’s not fun being without him for days, sometimes a week or two at a time, but when he comes home he always makes up for it. Since his last trip though, he became distant.
I’ve always loved his shoulders, his hair, everything about him really, and I’m a tactile person. Touching him, running my hands through his hair, and caressing his skin, was just one of the little, silent ways I would say ‘I love you’. Now, however, it’s like he can’t stand to touch me. Or be touched. He was subtle about it, shifting slightly, moving to grab something just as I went to touch him, you get the picture.
Our love life had completely dried up, vanished. Not long after he returned home he started sleeping on our couch, saying that the bed hurt his back. Which, okay, he picked this one out not even a year ago, but we can get another. But when I suggested this he got angry, irrationally angry, as if I was pushing him into a corner and started yelling about money. Now we’re not rich by any means, but a new bed definitely wouldn’t break us.
The night before last I was alone in bed, again, when the need to go to the bathroom woke me up and pulled me out of bed. Once my business was finished I was headed back to bed when I heard these noises, wet, slapping noises coming from the living room. I know where your mind might be going, mine went there too. Suffice to say I absolutely did go to investigate. I missed my boyfriend and if he was doing, you know, that…well, I wanted to see if he might like some help.
The living room was dim when I entered, but I saw James almost immediately. He was standing topless in the middle of the room. It’s a sight that can leave me breathless on any day, but that night it literally took my breath away, because when I say topless, I mean topless. His shirt was on the floor and his skin was hanging down limply at his side like it, too, was a shirt. The flaps of skin that made up his arms shifted and slapped when he spun around to look at me, and I saw his face.
It wasn’t like you’d expect, not a bloody skinless horror. It was worse somehow. I know there was a face there, a mouth, a nose. But I can’t describe them. Liquid. They were like liquid, shifting and changing. And his eyes. He had eyes, so many. those I can describe, so, so easily. There might have been eyes on his face, I don’t know, but on his body as well, eyes lay. Bubbling up out of the meat, forming and blinking and staring blindly at me before dissolving back into the meat, over and over. A thousand eyes staring blindly.
He said something. My boyfriend. The man I loved. The thing wearing the man I loved. And it felt like my ears were being shoved through a meat grinder. A screaming cacophony of noise, that was too loud, too silent, disjointed, and piercing through parts of my mind it had no right to touch. It hurt. It hurt. I was screaming, and he was making that awful noise that was ripping through my mind and it hurt. And I blacked out.
I woke up the following day with a headache like I’d spent the last night drinking. James was in the kitchen cooking breakfast, he seemed normal. Everything seemed normal. His skin was there. He looked normal. He sounded like him. But when he looked at me, it was so knowing. I left for work, he let me. That was a day ago, I haven’t been back yet. I just need time to think.
I love my boyfriend, but, yeah. Things have been a little strained lately.