Hate and love are closely related.
Both can take your breath away and immobilize you with their intensity. They represent the ultimate of human emotions. They should be complete opposites, divided by a vast chasm of other less potent emotions, but they arenât always, and where Nevio was concerned, they definitely werenât for me. In my case, love and hate were like toxic lovers, dancing their destructive tango inside my body.
I didnât think they could exist beside each other. Yet they did. Love and hate played tug of war with my heartstrings, draining me with the constant backlash I felt.
I loved Nevio Falcone for almost half of my childhood and teenage life until I realized that I needed to learn to hate him if I wanted to get away unscathed.
Though that wasnât even an option anymore.
Not physically.
Not mentally.
Nevio could hurt me far worse than he already had.
I knew I needed to stop him.
But I wasnât sure if I could.
The worst thing? A part of me didnât even want to try. A part of me wanted to risk heartbreak and pain just to be with him. A part of me was as addicted to our roller-coaster ride of hate and love as he was to his nightly hunts.
Maybe that was Nevioâs special power, to make you long for something that could potentially destroy you.
I was in love, but I wasnât blind.
Nevio embodied pure destruction, and somewhere along the way, Iâd become collateral damage.
Sometimes I wanted to hurt everyone, but there were certain people I always wanted to save a little more than I wanted to hurt them. Save them from me. The problem was that every day, I was a little less sure who held the reins, me or the monster. A monster who reeked of blood and sought carnage.
Maybe I was delusional when I thought there was a difference between the monster and me.