She says it, and she looks at me. Her expression is obvious, she doesn't even need to say what she's thinking. She thinks I don't believe her.

Of course I don't believe her. The pleasure she got out of it, every time, would be reason enough for most people. The look in her eyes, the tone in her voice, even when she was so angry she was literally shaking, was white-hot and lusty and it was obvious she enjoyed what she did. Hell, the few times we talked about it during the calm moments, she admitted she couldn't be happy without doing it.

But almost every time... those words. Like I somehow forced her into it, like she'd been trying to quit and I offered her a hit of her drug-of-choice, bullied or conned her into it. Like it was my fault. When I was already miserable, fighting back tears, she'd come out with that phrase and somehow it made it hurt even more.

She told me once that if I wasn't so beautiful she wouldn't find me so tempting. I said I wasn't beautiful. She just laughed. Beautiful, pretty, entrancing, she's used them all to describe me... or more precisely, to describe this hell she puts me through. My suffering, she claims, is beautiful. My pain, my tears, she insists they are beautiful. When I feel like my heart is so shredded and crushed that I'll never really be alive again, that's when she says I am beautiful.

I've started to hate that word.

It's not the only one she's ruined for me, though. There's another one, that I hate myself for ever saying to her and that I can't stop saying. Just four letters, and it tastes like ashes in my mouth when I speak them. It's true, though. I love her. Despite everything she does to me, I love her; maybe because of it, too. She's the only one who has ever been able to slide that deep inside my head. She... she makes me feel as if she really sees ME. Not just a portion of me, not what she wants to see, not some mask I wear, but me. All of me. And she wants it all.

And so I give it to her, all of it, fighting sometimes when my survival instincts kick in, crying and cursing sometimes when I know that she's only going to use it against me, bitter because I don't LIKE me, don't like what I have to give... but she wants it. Demands it. Takes it.

Sometimes, she says she loves me too.

And then she hurts me again.

And then she whispers, so quietly, "I didn't want to do this."

I'm afraid she means it.

I'm terrified that someday she'll stop.