We were sitting in a petrol station on the way back from a “romantic weekend” that had been anything but. Filled with bile and hate, I just wanted to get away from his suffocating hold on me. “Pump six, the number of the Devil, how apt,” I thought, and laughed internally. I could tell he wanted to say something, but I stared resolutely ahead. When he did get out of the car, the relief that flooded over me was palpable, and I could breathe again.

I watched him in the rear-view mirror, filling the car with combustible fluid. Imagined in my mind’s eye, him driving into something solid and hard and laughing, as we slowly burnt to death. Consumed by the flames of our love. I wouldn’t have put it past him.

But the thing that really petrified me, was that I wasn’t even scared. In fact, I welcomed it. His intoxicating insanity was one of the things which kept me crazy about him, and I needed to be crazy to love him.

Let the flames burn higher ….

The door opened and my fantasy vanished; he was leaning in the door with some generic chocolates and average roses. I sighed and forced a convincing smile onto my lips. He sat in the driver’s seat kissed my cheek, my neck. I smiled properly this time, and looked at him.

He smiled and stroked my wrist where the fingertip bruises were, the result of his grip and my struggling. I laughed, I don’t know why. Probably the stupidity of what I’d got myself into.

I knew he was dangerous, I had always known it. People had tried to warn me. To caution me about how he’d posses me and hurt me. But that is what I’d wanted, and needed. To press the self-destruct button and watch, as everything collapsed in slow motion. Because all I needed was him. Everything else could go to Hell.

He put the key into the ignition and left, with the long miles to home, and to freedom stretching out in front of us; while I was still having pretty daydreams of dying.