Chapter 21 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Show me where it hurts / Let me be the cure / Sometimes life can be a curse / So just show me where it hurts / And I’ll take away the pain”
— “Show Me Where It Hurts” by Skylar Grey
That night, he’s on me before I can get the door closed.
He kicks the door shut behind me and shoves me face-first into the hallway wall so hard a framed photo rattles off its nail and hits the floor. Glass breaks and crunches underfoot as his hands yank my sweatpants down to my knees.
He’s already hard against my ass, grinding, one hand fisted in my hair, the other clamped around my throat from behind.
Something is different tonight. He’s always been rough, but this isn’t rough; this is mean. There’s a fury in his body that has nothing to do with me. He’s here to destroy something, and I just happen to be the nearest available thing.
That’s fine. I can work with that.
He spins me around and lifts me. My back touches the wall and I wrap my legs around his waist. He fumbles with his zipper one-handed, the other arm hooked under my thigh, holding me up. I hear the buckle, the zip, and then he shoves into me with no warning.
I cry out, but he doesn’t stop. He buries his face in my neck and bites down on the tendon above my collarbone. Not a love bite, an actual bite, teeth sinking in until I yelp and shove at his chest. He doesn’t let up. He bites harder.
So I rake my nails down the back of his neck.
I’m intentionally trying to cause him pain, just like he’s doing to me.
I curl my fingers and drag them down from his hairline to the collar of his jacket, feeling skin split and give under my nails.
He jerks his head up and makes a choked, guttural groan.
His hips stutter and then slam forward so hard my skull bounces off the wall.
“Again,” he pants.
I do it again. Harder this time. Both hands. I shove his jacket collar down and claw from his shoulders to the middle of his back, dragging raised welts through the fabric of his shirt. I feel one nail catch and tear through cotton and then into skin. Something warm and wet coats my fingertip.
Blood.
The Masked Man goes absolutely feral. He pins both my wrists above my head with one hand and fucks me so hard the drywall cracks behind me.
His breathing is ragged through the mask.
His free hand grips my jaw and forces my head to the side, exposing my throat, and he licks a hot path from my collarbone to my ear.
“Harder,” I tell him. “I can take it.”
He gives it to me.
When it’s over, for the first time, he doesn’t leave right away.
We found our way to the bed somehow, clothes and blood both getting shed along the way. Now, I’m propped against the pillows, covers pulled up, staring at the backs of my eyelids and waiting for the telltale sound of the window opening and closing.
But, to my surprise, it doesn’t come. Instead, there’s a weight on the edge of the mattress. He’s sitting there, elbows on his knees, head bowed. He’s dressed and has his mask on, like he’s ready to go, but he’s not moving.
A minute passes. Then two.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Don’t.”
I sit up and the sheet pools around my waist, exposing my bare breasts to the cool air of my apartment. “Something was different tonight. Did you—?”
“I said don’t.”
“Is it about whoever sent you?”
He leaps to his feet, charges out of my bedroom, and vanishes. But there’s a moment right before he goes that lives in my head for a long time afterward.
He paused. It lasted half a second, maybe less. But it was like he was torn in two. Something in him wanted to stay with me, even though the sex was done for at least a little while. There was a pull. A hook. A connection. A hope.
It didn’t stop him from leaving. But he lingered.
That’s new.
What’s worse is that he knows I caught that tiny hesitation. He felt me feel it, and that’s exactly why he stormed out so angrily. Because staying would’ve meant answering my question, and answering would’ve meant I’d know something real about him.
And real is the one thing we agreed not to do.