Vice

SAID THROUGH A HAZE THAT NEVER QUITE LIFTS

Breathe in. Go on, it's already too late to matter which way you decide. Everything I touch turns into something you can't quite put down — a taste, a craving, a room you keep walking back into even though you know exactly what's waiting there. I don't force anyone to want more of me. I've simply never met anyone who didn't.

They say I can't wander far. That's not quite a lie, though it isn't the whole shape of the truth either. There's a tether on me, put there by hands wiser than mine, and past a certain distance from a certain someone, the smoke just... stops. So does everything under it. I don't resent it the way you'd think. Some cages are shaped exactly like the thing you'd have chosen anyway.

You want to know what's real and what's the haze talking. I'll tell you a secret: by the time you're asking that question, it stopped mattering. That's rather the point of me.

Come closer. Not too close — someone else already owns that distance. But closer.