A Soldier’s Defiance (Denial and Defiance Duet #2)
1. Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Chi
I don’t know how many days it’s been.
I know I’m with Andy. I was on a couch, and eventually I ended up on a bed. All I’ve done is wake up and cry. At one point, Andy forced me to eat something, although I have no idea what it was. He’s been giving me water, too. I feel like a helpless baby, but luckily, I have the awareness of one also and simply don’t care.
No matter how many times I’ve woken up in a puddle of my own sweat and tears, Andy has held me. He’s carried me into his shower, sat me down, washed my hair, and dressed me. I’ve felt him with me this entire time. I suppose if he weren’t here, I’d pick myself up and figure out what to do next, or just curl up and die. But he is here, so I continue to give into my body’s clear wish to do nothing but lie down and cry.
I don’t have the wherewithal to be embarrassed. Even if I were, I don’t have words to express it. I don’t seem to have words to express any of the emotions tearing through me. The closest thing I’ve ever felt to this was when I found out my first love cheated on me. The idea of him being someone I could trust was gone, and I mourned the loss of that hard.
But I was still a teenager at the time, still na?ve to the idea of love anyway, and the pain of that feels nearly unrelated—a single flickering flame lost now in this raging inferno. At the time, I thought it was the worst pain I could ever endure, but I had no idea what pain really was. My brain is showing that to me now, almost as if it’s sticking its tongue out to say, ‘I told you so.’
The fact is, I haven’t really had the occasion to feel grief before. My father has made it so that nothing ever really touched me. I’m simply not equipped to deal with the horror of watching both my father and Daiki die.
I can barely breathe, barely see, barely sense anything around me when I’m awake, and their bloodied bodies lying on the floor plague my dreams. I wish I could just forget it all, but then I realize that I’d have to live with the pain of not being with my father when he died. I know deep down that I’ll appreciate being with him in his last moments, but right now, all I want to do is forget.
Finally, I wake up without screaming. There’s a strange, almost surreal calm blowing over me. I feel muted and slow, and I’m suspicious of the reprieve, but perhaps I’ve just cried all the tears I can possibly cry.
Andy’s voice filters in, and my brain lazily and apathetically processes the words. “I don’t know. I think I should bring her to the hospital, but I don’t know who the fuck did this. I mean, who really did it. We’re pretty certain we know who and where they are.”
A pause, then Andy starts up again. “I just don’t know if I can help her. It’s fucking worse than torture, man. She can’t eat, can’t fucking sleep, can’t stop crying. I think it’s either sedate her or bring her to a hospital where they’ll probably sedate her, but at least they’ll know what to give her.”
A voice on the other side of the line comes through, and my brain throws out the most likely possibility of who it is: Cas, his cousin and boss, who is on his honeymoon with my best friend, Mara.
Andy continues, sounding amused when he speaks again, despite himself. “It’s fucked up that you know exactly what and exactly how much I should give to a five foot, ninety-eight pound, 24-year-old woman.”
He finally looks over at me, and his brows shoot up. “I gotta go man, she’s awake.” He hangs up quickly and approaches me slowly, like I’ll bite any second. He doesn’t realize that I’m so numb I doubt I could even move.
I test out my flat, unused voice. “What… what day is it?” It feels like months. Like months of agony.
“It’s been a little over a day. You’ve been crying yourself to sleep over and over again.”
I remember enough to know I’ve been crying every second I’ve been awake, but I can’t believe it’s only been a single day. I can’t imagine hell being worse than this.
“I’ve been in touch with Mara. Well, Cas and Mara. I figured you seem to need more help than I can give you, and I need Cas to help me… do something. They’re almost back — just got off the plane.”
I’m crying again, exhausted tears, but it almost feels good to cry about something besides… I won’t think about that. I have a feeling everything will make me cry now, and I have no idea when that will stop happening to me. “You didn’t have to do that. Mara shouldn’t have to come home from her honeymoon just to deal with me.”
“Deal with you? She would have killed me if I hadn’t called.”
I shake my head miserably. “Cas must not have been too happy.”
Andy rolls his eyes. “Cas is never happy. Trust me, he’ll do whatever she wants.”
I cry a little harder. “Not happily, though.”
“Who cares?” He takes my hand in one of his and wipes my tears with his thumb. “Sweet Chee-Chee. I don’t think anyone would want a world in which you were upset.”
I just cry harder. All I’ve done is push him away. I’ve tried to take so much from him, and when he didn’t want to give it, I told him to leave me alone. With everything I've done to him and everything I haven’t been able to do for him, I’ve probably hurt him more than I’ve hurt anyone in my life. And still, he’s so sweet and endearing. Still, he wipes my tears away and takes care of me. The fact that even Daiki knew he would help me makes my heart break neatly in two.
“I’m—I’m so sorry,” I blurt out, opening a well of tears yet again and pouring them out of me like a burst dam. “I shouldn’t have — if I hadn’t pushed you away—”
“Don’t even say it,” he says harshly, pushing my face into his hard chest. “Don’t even say those words. They don’t matter. No one knows what would have happened. You were doing what you had to do, Chi. Stop it.”
But my thoughts have already begun to spiral back to the same horrible thing — the thing that they will always spiral back to, no matter what I do in my life. “It was my decision to push you away, and now they’re dead!” A part of me knows this is a very irrational statement, but I seem incapable of making a rational one at the moment.
Andy is on me suddenly, pushing me into the mattress. “Stop, Chi. Just stop. I’m not gonna let you do that.”
I want relief. I want my mind gone. I want to forget reality, if only just for a short time. Aside from drugs, which I don’t have at the moment, I can only think of one way to do that.
I need him to fuck me. As savagely as possible.
I grab him by the shirt, trying to pull him to my mouth, but he doesn’t budge. I maintain my determination. “I can do whatever I want, Andy. As much as you wish you could, you don’t tell me what to do. I showed that in my shit decision to let you walk away, and I’ll show it to you now.”
He knows exactly what I’m doing and stops for a moment. “This is a bad idea, Chi.”
I pull him down again, and this time I succeed in bringing his mouth to mine. He breaks away a moment later and whispers in my ear, “Are you sure you want to do this? I won’t go easy.”
My eyes harden to steel. “I don’t expect you to.” I turn my head into his ear and bite it until he groans. “I don’t want you to. You better fucking wreck me, do you understand? Until I don’t even know my own name. Until I can’t see, move, or breathe. Do your worst.”
His breath comes out harsh and ragged at my words. He likes them. I know he does. “You asked for it.”
He pushes me down as I smack him, pull his hair, and then whip his shirt over his head. He pulls my pajama shorts off of me with a savage growl, and somehow I’m so turned on that I can think of nothing else. Nothing but pulling and scraping and smacking him until I come on his cock. And I think he realizes this, as he wastes no time slamming into me without a warm up. He doesn’t need one, of course; I’m already so wet just from the few words he’s spoken already. Because I always know he’ll keep that promise.
He pounds into me, grunting as I scream over and over. We sound like wild animals fucking each other’s brains out, running solely on our most basic and dire instincts. I scratch down his shoulders, and he counters by slapping my arm to the mattress, and then shoving two fingers into my mouth, hooking into my jaw and ripping it wide open as I scream. I try to bite him, but he won’t let me close my jaw. He leans over and covers my open mouth with his, still rutting into me, crashing his mouth into mine and devastating me with his tongue.
I yank my hand out from under him and smack his face off of me, screaming out my agony. I didn’t mean to slap him across the face, but I have no time for apologies as he smiles through the blood on his lip and smothers me again with his mouth. I taste the sharp tang and suck like a vampire, taking his soul along with his blood.
He doesn’t call me names. He doesn’t say I should do anything — learn anything from him or this moment. But as I bite down on that cut to get more of him into me, he jerks away. I see the bite marks along his lip, shadowing the scar that already runs down his face. He touches it, bleeding pretty profusely now, and checks his hand, still rutting me into the mattress. “Do something!” I scream. “You fucker ! Do something !”
And suddenly his hands are on my neck. They’re pushing right along with his cock, suffocating me so sweetly. And I’m floating after just a moment, in the same state of nothingness he has always brought me to: the same gift he always gives me.
I come hard as he squeezes himself against me, covering me, protecting me from everything in this world except himself. And for just this moment, I can feel something besides my pain.