He looked at her the way a thief looks at an unlocked safe. The way a starving man looks at food being wasted. His angry eyes were reaching into her soul.

The intensity of his attention burned his thoughts. He thought with the desperation of a drowning man craving air.

He kept his obsession to quiet coals on the outside. She never suspected the affliction her beautiful soul set off in his broken and mistreated one. The coals were well fed and tended. They smoldered and physically made him ache. If only he could have been born in her place.

Instead he was born to daily be reminded what the dirt beneath her feet tasted like. To eat the scraps of her table. Inferior in all ways, but the mind.

His mind knew that he had been cheated by the world.