The Dawn of Darkness (Part 1)

"Tell me something nice."

She is up on her elbow, her fingertip is tracing circles on my chest. She looks bored, restless, needing something that I know I won't be able to give her. I search my head for the "something nice" that she is looking for. She is glowing in the dim light of dawn, peeking through the curtains of our bedroom. Her skin is flawless. She has one stray freckle on her right collarbone. I toy with the idea of leaning over and seeing if I can lick it off.

"A puppy's breath smells like tuna," are the words that my mouth decides to deliver. She closes her eyes and holds them closed. Her lips draw into a taut line. This was not the "something nice" that she was looking for.

"But it's the best smelling tuna in the entire universe," a small smile curling at my lips, despite myself. She plops back down onto the mattress. Her golden curls bounce and then settle in a halo around her head. She sighs very deeply, as if from the depth of her soul. She is so used to everyone humoring her. I really wish she would stop fishing for compliments, but it is a part of her, it is who she is.

She's always been needy, demanding and insecure. I knew that from the moment I met her, as she was asking what she could do in order to earn extra credit in the geography class that we were taking. Her palms were planted on the desk of the professor and she was leaning over at the waist, allowing the neckline of her shirt to fall forward, giving him a glance at her ample cleavage. He stammered and suggested reading the bonus articles in the text. She sighed deeply then, too. Honest answers are somehow lacking in her mind.

I asked if she would want a study partner, and it began in innocence, with us meeting at the local bar across from the student center, sipping at pale ale and discussing foreign countries and their capitals. She tried her hardest to not come off sounding stupid, and I tried my hardest to dumb myself down so that she would think that she wasn't far behind. The more we talked, the more I realized just how clever she was. She wasn't smart, no. But she was clever to the point of being devious. She had discovered how to work every angle available to her since birth.

She'd been a premature baby, she informed me one afternoon. The doctors told her mother that there was less than a ten percent chance of survival for a baby born as early as she was. Yet as each hour ticked past, her heart pumped away. Most babies born that early are scary to look at, her mother had told her. But she was gorgeous even with the veins showing through her paper thin skin. The nurses cuddled her more than any other baby in the NICU. She thrived. She persevered.

She had been born early because of her mother's addiction to alcohol and prescription pills. As she grew older, she found that her mother was addicted to men as well. They came and went at all hours of the day. She would return home from school to find her mother's bedroom door locked and 4 sets of shoes scattered about the living room. Most other girls in this situation would have fallen victim to unspeakable acts, but she managed to deflect any untoward attention. By the 7th grade, she'd assigned herself the task of getting  relocated to her grandmother's home. This was achieved by bringing  a sample of her mother's meth into science class and asking the teacher if he could determine the chemical composition of what she'd found. CPS  picked her up that very evening. She'd already packed her bags.

Throughout high school she'd never been the prettiest girl, the smartest girl or even possessing of any special talents, but she'd managed to make a name for herself amongst the student body. She was well known, though if asked, no one could ever pinpoint a reason why. She defied the standard descriptions. Not cheerleader or brain, not geek or slut, not goth or prep. She was known and liked by all, despite never having pulled off anything significant in 4 years.

She scored herself multiple scholarships with the same well-practiced speech. It always began with the perfect picture of a composed young woman, unremarkable in every way, only to end with her tearfully revealing the tragic circumstances of her early childhood. She never knew who her real father was, you know. The doctors didn't even think she would live when she was born. And her mother.... how she hoped that no young woman would ever have to have a mother like hers.

She finessed her way through the majority of her college courses and maintained a quietly respectable grade point average up until her senior year. The professors were stricter and more weary of the standard tactics that had worked so well for her up until then. She was struggling in more than one class when we began to meet and study for geography. If she was best described as the type that needed to struggle to keep her head above water, then I was best described as the type that took to the academic waters like a fish. I understood such a wide range of subject matter without really trying. It was as if the answers were stored behind various doors in my brain, and not a single one of those doors was locked. I could just stroll right in whenever I pleased.

So we began a relationship founded on the concept of tutoring. The first night in my dorm room, while tackling Nietzsche, she asked for incentive. This was baffling to me. Shouldn't passing the class be incentive enough, I had asked her. She'd blinked as if I was speaking in tongues. I second guessed why I was bothering to do this and suggested that she find someone else to amuse her. She tried a coy smile. I shook my head. She sat down next to me, lifted my hand to her face and licked the inside of my wrist. I asked her why she hadn't left yet.

She'd never been turned down before. The wheels in her head were spinning, the expression on her face was blank. It was if she was rebooting after being fed an update to her system. A couple of seconds later, she came back online. OK, OK, she'd softly repeated, then asked me to tell her again what it was I'd been explaining just prior. Her face was impassive. She was ready to receive. After answering a couple of questions correctly, I raised an eyebrow at her and told her I'd have to start fucking her if she continued to do so well. A light blinked on behind her eyes.

Her entire life had been comprised of working others to her advantage. It was time to sit back and allow someone to work her.