Chapter 27 Cal
Cal
I don't pretend to know what all of that was about when she finally eases.
I still, breathless and exhausted and still buried inside of her.
I'm not sure I ever want to come out; she's so warm, so perfect.
Being inside of her feels right in a way that I'm not sure anything ever has.
I'm also unbelievably drained, like she took everything from me.
When I draw out from her, she doesn't move, so I take advantage of her exhaustion, too.
I sweep her into my arms before any protest can fall from her lips and carry her into the bedroom with me.
Her body is relaxed, no tension at all, as I take her to my room and place her softly in the center of the bed.
It's hard to explain the feeling inside of me right now, but I know that it's potent.
I know that I'm not leaving her after that, that I'm going to lay beside her and revel in the warmth of her body as the heat of mine seeps out from her pussy.
She's got to be sore, if not from the savage fucking, then from the position I forced her into so that I could bury myself as deep as possible. It was barely enough to sate the beast, but her venom helped the process.
There's no venom to be had as I drop onto the comforter beside her and roll onto my elbow to watch her. It takes a minute before she opens her eyes, so I study her face, wondering what scars she thinks she's been hiding from me.
I think it's time we discuss that.
“Tell me about the scars.” I say, just as abruptly as she asked me to tell her about the snakes.
Her eyes stayed closed, like she could avoid answering me if she pretended she was asleep. But after a moment, her eyes flutter open to find me watching her.
“Which ones?”
“All of them.” I demand.
It was clear with my initial sight of her that she's been through hell, and now she's here.
But it's not burn marks that mar her beautiful flesh... they're marks from a blade. The way she didn't even flinch when I held a knife to her throat assures me that isn't the first time someone's done it, though maybe it is the first time she's welcomed it.
I didn't miss the way she shuddered, the way she opened more to me.
“The ones you can't see are the reason for the ones you can.” She eyes me thoughtfully.
“It's fucked, isn't it, that the worst thing to ever happen to you can leave you looking perfectly whole, and then something as innocuous as a can opener can mar you forever?” She laughs a little, holding up her thumb to show me a small, silvery-looking one above her knuckle.
When I say nothing, she decides to fill the silence.
“I can't see your scars. You think your beast protects you, but he just covers what was already there. I saw them today.”
I blink, unsure what she's talking about. I don't think I have any scars, actually.
“Yours are in your head. That doesn't mean they’re not real. It just means that the people who put them there used their words to do it.”
We're supposed to be talking about her, but I'm suddenly intrigued.
“You're saying I'm crazy?”
“Maybe.” She shakes her head, laughing a little. “I think you have to be a little crazy to survive this world. If you aren't, the world will bend you and break you until you are.”
“That's what happened to you?” I surmise.
“I'm not crazy.” She says calmly. “I'm just angry. There's a difference.”
“What are you angry about?” I can hazard a guess, but something tells me now isn't the time to play the guessing game.
“That the world hasn't given up yet.” She sighs.
“I've been broken for a long time. Kids are assholes, you know? Growing up without parents already makes you an outcast, but then getting placed with a monster... a real monster...” She clarifies.
“That's a kiss of death. It laid the groundwork for the rest of my life.
I'm weird. I always have been, and I never tried to shake it because at least it gave other kids a reason not to want to be friends with me. It gave me a reason not to invite friends back to my place to meet Eric, allowing me to protect them.”
“Who's Eric?” I ask, though I can gather enough context clues that he was meant to be some sort of authority figure.
“Swine.” She shrugs. “A fucking pig who stumbled into my room on my sixteenth birthday and told me he'd been dying inside waiting for this night. I died inside waiting for it to be over.”
Something twists inside of me, rage uncoiling from a place I can't see. No more need for context clues, because I can imagine exactly what she's getting at.
I don't want to. I want to kill. I want my beast to rise to the surface for me, to hunt down the son of a bitch who hurt my little doll and make him fucking suffer.
But my beast is dormant, hiding after her dragging him to the surface.
“I'll kill him.” I promise her, because I don't know what else to say. I know her well enough to know she won't appreciate any sympathy.
She snorts out a laugh, ignoring me.
“Nobody ever stopped him. Two years, and he came more often than not.
He didn't beat me or hold a gun to my head.
He just came and held me down, told me to be quiet, and take it.
And I did. I just... let him, even though it killed me slowly.
Parker tried to help, but it nearly got him killed, and I was so ashamed that I didn't fight…”
Her voice cuts off abruptly, choked by a sound like a sob.
There's something beyond all my rage. Something I don't know how to put a name to. This isn't territory I know how to tread.
All I know is that I’m angry... and more than that, I'm sad.
“Not fighting doesn't mean you wanted it.” I tell her gently. “You have to know that, right?”
“I wish I had.” She swallows. “I wish he'd held a gun to my head, beat me or something…”
I'm staring at her, trying to figure out how she could possibly say that, much less mean it. She laughs coldly when she notices my confusion.
“If it had been, maybe I'd feel like it was valid. Maybe if it had been violent, if he'd nearly killed me, someone would have taken notice... someone who would have been able to help. If it had been violent, maybe—”
“No.” I cut her off. “It doesn't matter if it wasn't violent. That didn't make it okay.”
She stares hard at me, like she's trying to see inside my head.
“Your brain expects there to be physical proof when you're hurting…”
“Scars.” I surmise.
“And since mine weren't visible to me, I decided to make some that were. Some that could change the pain into something else. I learned to dissociate, and thank fuck I did because I needed that skill to survive everything.”
“But why SLUT?” I ask, frowning. “Why would you carve that on yourself?”
“Does it matter?” She scoffs. “It was six years ago.”
Six years ago.
It can be a lifetime and also not at all. I've got shoes buried in my closet that are more than six years old.
“It matters to me.” I tell her, swiping my thumb over her lower lip. “Everything about you matters to me.”
I watch her war between coming up with a sarcastic response or feeling the truth of it. And it is the truth.
“It's what I kept telling myself.” She says. “Because I didn't fight back. I let it happen because I must have wanted it, and that made me a slut. He never even fucking noticed what it said... just told me to knock it off with the attention-seeking behavior.”
I act on impulse, rolling over top of her so that I pin her flat against the mattress. Her eyes are bewildered, but not scared or angry, as she stares up at me.
“Don't ever let yourself believe that lie again. Do you understand?”
Her lips part to let a small laugh pass. “It's not a lie anymore. My body count is probably double yours, and yours isn't exactly single digits, is it?”
“Not even close.” I agree. “Does that bother you?”
“It bothers me that you buy women to sleep with and then kill them.” She says honestly, her eyes not leaving mine, challenging me. “Mommy issues?”
She already knows my first kill was my brother. But she's dead on about the mommy issues, too. She couldn't possibly understand the full context of it, though. Dex has explained it to me more than a few times, but I still don't understand. I don't want to. I prefer not to think about it.
“Yeah.” I chuckle. “Something like that.”
“Was she a slut who slept with too many random men? Did she try to seduce your friends?”
She's lucky she's so damn bewitching because I've shut down a dozen shrinks for less.
“Neither.” I bite the inside of my lip, an offering to keep the beast at bay. My beautiful little doll is still caged beneath me, warm and soft and safe. I don't want him to ruin the moment. “She was perfect until my brother died. It destroyed her.”
Amber is quiet as I think through my memories.
Perfect may be a little bit of a stretch, but she was good to us. Everything I needed in a mother. And then she disappeared inside of herself and never came back out, no matter how much I begged or how loudly Charlotte cried.
“I can't even imagine.” She breathes. “I don't want kids, but I don't think you'd ever be the same after losing one.”
“She wasn't.” I confirm.
“Did she… did she kill herself?”
“No.” I shake my head.
It would have been better for all of us if she had, I think.
But I don't say that out loud. Even thinking it feels wrong.
“She was murdered.”
“Oh my God. You didn't...?”
“Kill her?” I laugh. “Would you understand me better if I told you yes?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I wouldn't, because I'm not a killer. I'm not sure anything you say can make me understand why you want to hurt innocent women.”
That's fair. I can't argue with it. I don't understand my own need; I just know that it exists. I know that if I ignore it, it just presses harder until I am nothing more than the darkest parts of me.
“No one ever does.” I smile softly. “I didn't kill her. It was a home invasion. My father was away, our housekeeper had just left for the day. I'd just put Charlotte to bed and went to check on Mother.”
I shiver at the memory. I still feel cold whenever I go back to it, remembering the way the chill seemed to crawl inside of me.
“I heard them break the door down. It happened so fast, and I tried to get her to run or hide.”
The voices had carried throughout our house, announcing their intentions.
“Find the bitch. Touch nothing else.”
“She wouldn't move. She didn't even acknowledge that I was there.
I tried to pull her out of the bed, but she was like dead weight, and she fell on the ground in a pile.
I didn't know what to do. I could hear that there were a lot of them, and I didn't have any weapon.
I grabbed the phone, but the line was dead, and as I begged her to snap out of it, to help me fight them off, she just laid there, staring at me.
I didn't know what to do, and I was so scared that I hid in the first place I could... under the bed.”
Amber's eyes are full of storm clouds as I recount the story of the worst night of my life.
“You were there?”
“I saw everything.”
I don't clarify what everything means. She doesn't ask me to.
“Cal…” Pain is heavy in the sound of my name, but I don't know if it's for her or me. Her fingers stroke against my cheek for a minute, and I blink, wondering when that got there.
“I've never been so scared. So, I hid like a little bitch and waited until I was sure they'd left. And they didn't leave until they were sure she was dead.”
“Oh my God.” She closes her eyes slowly. “Did you see who did it?”
“I saw them.” I nod. “But their faces were covered, and I didn't know their voices. The police tried to get me to remember anything helpful, but I couldn't give them anything useful.”
Just general height and build, which was likely skewed given that I'd been lying on the floor looking up, and a few glimpses of tattoos.
They had a sketch artist working on those when Father came home and ripped into the officers for questioning a minor without his parents present.
Technically, Mother was present... her body was still in the room upstairs.
It took a while for them to get the full crime scene documented.
Father took us out of the house to get breakfast even though it was still dark out, and by the time we got back to the house, everything was as if it had never happened.
“They've never found anyone responsible?” Her delicate throat bobs as she swallows. “That's horrific.”
“After that, I think my beast came out to make sure I was never scared again. He protected me for a while, and once he started making demands…” I shake my head.
“I can't control him. I tried to fight off the need for violence, for power, but it's never worked.
I didn't even realize that's what it was until it was practically consuming me.
I don't mean to kill... but it always happens.”
My little doll is quiet, and I imagine she's hating me for being so unprincipled, unable to control myself or the thing that lives inside of me.
“You've never thought about channeling your rage toward the people who killed your mother?”
That makes me laugh. “I've thought about it a thousand times, little doll. But I told you, I don't know who it was.”
“Sure.” She agrees slowly. “But... what about men just like them?”
I'm not sure what she's getting at. “Men just like them? Men like what?”
“Killers. Monsters. Men who take what they want without a second thought about who will get hurt in the process.”
“Vigilante justice?” I chuckle. “No. I've never thought about that.”
Her fingers slide down my neck to my shoulders, making me shiver as they trace along my sides, landing on my hips.
When she lifts her own hips, my cock jumps at the sudden contact of her heat, still wet with our combined release.
There's a hunger in her eyes that has nothing to do with food, a craving for something more substantial.
Her eyes don't leave mine as she leans toward me enough so I can hear the words she whispers.
They're choked by seduction, but they're there all the same.
“Maybe you should start.”