Some Girls Never Leave

Part 1/3- Love Needs Proof

Some Girls Never Leave: A Fucking Love Story.

Three Days. Three Stories.

For three days, I'll post a story a day. A slow-burn horror wearing romance like lipstick. No warnings. No happy endings. Just a girl who believed too hard, loved too much, and became something unrecognizable.

And then?

On Day Four, bleed with Tender Killings Colab

C.S. Mee

and five other poets.

---

Silly girl.

Of course, this is how love works.

Love needs proof. Love needs lessons. Love needs legacies.

Same story he told all the girls growing up.

Characters she loved, characters he wrote.

Now I’m one of them.

The mirror brings me back to fifteen. Back to staying up all night , devouring his books with my friends. Back to waiting in line just to hear him speak. Just to get his signature.

“ Love needs proof” --JD. Cliff

A quote. A line. But that wasn’t just a line. And they weren’t just stories.

No, that would be too easy. Too predictable. Too cliché.

He wouldn’t be a ten-time bestseller if they were just stories.

And I wouldn’t be here, like all the others before me.

They were rules. A system.

His system.

A language only a few could understand.

Reflections shows chapters.

Legs. Desire wrapped in submission. Good girls always trembled in his books.

Arms. His ownership marked in purple-black bands. The heroes in his stories always gripped too hard. The heroines always stayed.

Chest and back. His love letters written in welts. Because love, he wrote, should leave scars to prove it was real.

Face. His playfulness. His humor. His little jokes blooming in yellow and green on skin.

I’m not flesh anymore.

I’m a character.

Just sentences, paragraphs, and the ink of his stories written under my skin.

Paper, not flesh.

A page turned.

A chapter ending.

A legacy built.

The book. His book.

The one I read over and over at fifteen, reciting passages like prayer.

The one with the girl who loved too much, who was willing to be broken if it meant she'd be unforgettable.

The quote is me.

She wanted to ask if love had to linger like fingerprints on skin. If it could be something softer. But love that fades isn’t really love at all.

No. Love needs proof.

The girl in the mirror. The marks in the novel. The marks on her skin.

It’s me.

This was never just a book.

Never just a man.

And I smile.

Not because I’m happy.

No--because somewhere, another girl is reading the book for the first time.

Whispering the book's last line. The one I memorized years ago, when I thought it was just another story.

“Love needs proof”

And now, I know how to prove it.