Candice Raquel Lee

He stared at me in complete puzzlement, __nd while I__ committing incest for you is there anything else you__ like? Maybe a side-order of bestiality?

She came downstairs like a doe stepping into a clearing on the first day of hunting season. I felt like a coward. I was lower than dirt. I had used every trick in my book to get her to come downstairs. I had manipulated her emotions, cheated and wormed to beat her at this game we were playing. But then I saw her, and I was so happy. I knew I would have burned the building down for the sight of her running toward me out of the flames.

One night, we somehow ended up discussing Wile E. Coyote as a paradigm for obsession. She argued that Wile E., with all the resources he wasted on gadgets, could have been living high on the hog.__e was so skinny,_ she complained after she had Googled him and watched a few skits on YouTube. __oor thing, he looks like a size-zero model.___ut, Love, no other food would have satisfied him. He only wanted the Road Runner. He was obsessed with her. Obsession does not allow for satisfaction. You can never really eat your cake and have it too, which is the only way you can satisfy your obsession by devouring and yet having the object of your fascination,_ I said from experience.__ut he really didn't want to catch it,_ she argued.__hat do you mean?___t was the chase he wanted. To eat the Road Runner would have ended that, ended his only reason for living. He isn't really that inept. He really didn't want to catch it.___ guess not,_ I said, thoughtfully. __t's the journey not the resolution that matters. If he caught her, he would lie down next to her and die too.

I__ a virgin, okay?__here was a moment of silence while I assume he was struggling to understand the connection. Then he spoke. ____ not prejudiced against anyone.

To be a devil isn't so bad; to be a devil that can still see beauty, still remember what it was like to be in the sight of the most holy, now that was an obscenity, and that was what I was.

But what if you are a smart girl in love? All because I was a book nerd didn__ mean, I didn__ feel, I didn__ want. Shylock had cried out in excess of pain, __f you prick me do I not bleed!_ But a book nerd is not allowed to be human, to say __ou make me melt_ and still have her mind want something else entirely?

I knew that people said love should be unconditional, given like a dog gives to its master, but what Being could give that way? What could love though it had been kicked and beaten? What could go kissing the hand of its tormentor with upturned eyes? I didn't know. Perhaps Jesus, perhaps the Dalai Lama, but I couldn't. I had a condition, the way life has conditions to live, the body must have certain conditions to grow, and Cristien had to meet mine or I could not live. I could not.