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eternity. Needless to say, I was
sorely disappointed when he abruptly pulled away.
    His eyes peered into mine. “Why can’t
I stop loving you?”
    Confusion gripped me as I tried to
make sense of his question. “Stop loving me? Why would you want to
stop loving me?”
    “ Why?” He laughed deeply and
took several steps back. “Why?” he repeated, as if the answer was
painfully obvious. He crossed his arms and started to pace from
tomb to tomb. “Why?” he repeated the word over and over again like
a madman. When he finally stopped pacing, he leaned against a tomb
and focused his attention on me. His gaze was cool and detached.
“You’re a disease.”
    My heart sank and horrible sense of dread
washed over me. He thought I was a disease? Neurotic, perhaps.
Paranoid, clearly. Insane at times, but a disease? This wasn’t
right. There was something wrong. What had happened to him? I
walked towards him slowly, calmly; approaching him with the same
kind of caution one would approach a man threatening to jump off
the ledge of a skyscraper. “Lucus, what’s wrong? This isn’t you.
What happened on the other side? Please tell me, I can
help.”
    “ You happened,” he
whispered.
    “ But you said…” I stopped
in my tracks.
    “ You see, at first I didn’t
understand how anyone was capable of hurting you. I thought Tony
was a fool for having caused you pain and having let you get away
so easily, but now I understand that he was only trying to protect
himself. Your love is poison, bitter and vile. It’s a parasitic
infection and now it needs to be removed.”
    My body trembled.
“Removed?”
    “ Yes,” he said, as he took off
his t-shirt. Under normal circumstances, the sight of Lucus
shirtless would have made me melt and prompted me to stare at my
toes while I tried to stop drooling like a love-struck school girl,
but at that moment it filled me with fear and worry. He picked an
empty rum bottle up from the ground and smashed it against a
tomb.
    “ Lucus, what are you
doing?”
    He ignored me and brought the crude
piece of broken glass to his chest and with a swift and graceful
move slashed himself. A stream of angry blood spilled out of the
wound and trickled down his chest and onto his stomach. Under the
glow of the moon it appeared thick, ghastly and
tar-like.
    “ What the hell!” I leapt towards
him and tried to snatch the glass out of his hand. He pushed me
away with such force that I fell and hit my head against a nearby
tomb. “Ouch! You ass!” I screamed as I tried to sit up. I had never
thought that out of all people Lucus would have been capable of
acting like such a jerk. Still, I loved him with every fiber of my
being, and I watched in complete horror as he proceeded to slash
himself repeatedly.
    When his eyes rested on me they were
those of a man who had lost all reason. His face was a mask of pure
anger and venomous resentment. “When I was a child, physicians were
convinced that the best way to rid a body of disease was to drain
it of blood. The infection would somehow disappear with the lost
blood and the body would be renewed and fresh. I believe they were
correct in their reasoning. You’re an infection that inhabits every
cell within my body and I see no other way of freeing myself from
you,” he said, as he slashed himself again.
    I got up and pleaded with him again.
“Lucus, please. Whatever I did, I’m sorry. Hurting yourself won’t
make it any better.”
    He tossed his head back and scoffed as
if my words were ludicrous. “I’m not hurting myself. I’m freeing
myself from your evil grip.”
    “ Evil? If I’m evil, why the hell
did you beg me to stay here and relentlessly pursue me? If I’m so
evil why the hell did you fall in love with me?” Anger was slowly
replacing the worry and compassion I had felt for him just moments
earlier.
    “ Because your brand of evil is
so very seductive,” he said. “Women like you seduce, use, and abuse
men like me before tossing us