Touching the Scar #3
“Do you remember what you said in the kitchen?” He leans down, his mouth right at my ear. His breath burns hot, wet, heavy with intent. “You said you’d follow my orders.”
“Yes.” I bite my lip, a whimper trapping itself in my throat. The memory flashes: my arrogance, my promise, his hesitation.
“You gave me your word. Now keep it.” He pounds into me, driving the air from my lungs in three brutal strokes. “Take it. All of it. Don’t you dare look away.”
He forces me to endure the pleasure he inflicts on my body. It builds in my belly, a heavy, molten pressure escaping me because he won’t let me move to relieve it. He edges me, controlling the friction, keeping me right on the precipice of ruin.
“You crossed the line.” His voice drops, rough with a terrifying finality. “You opened the door. You let the wolf in.”
The warning shivers down my spine. It isn’t just about tonight. It isn’t just about sex. It’s about the permanence of what’s happening. He tells me there’s no going back. He rewrites the map of my body, leaving fingerprints on my psyche impossible to wash off.
“You belong to me now.” He bites my earlobe, hard enough to sting, hard enough to leave a mark lasting for days. A brand. “Tell me you understand.”
He picks up the pace, abandoning the slow torture for a sprint. He pounds into me, wrecking me, driving me into the floorboards.
“Say it.” He hits the nerve, relentless, unyielding. “Say you understand.”
“I understand.” The surrender tears out of me, a broken sob.
He growls, a savage sound of approval. He doesn’t let up. He hammers the truth of it into me, stroke after stroke. His thumb finds the slick heat of my clitoris, working me with ruthless efficiency.
“I’m going to make sure you never forget this.”
He drives hard. Deep. Hitting the nerve.
I shatter.
My body convulses around him, clamping down. I scream his name, the sound tearing from my throat. Waves of pleasure crash over me, drowning me, obliterating everything but him.
He rides out the spasms, milking every drop of my release before he allows himself his own.
He groans, his control finally snapping.
“Iris.”
He drives into me one last time, hard and deep, burying himself to the hilt. He stiffens, his body bowing like a drawn bow, muscles locked in tension. He pours himself into me, hot and pulsing, gripping me like he tries to merge our bodies.
He collapses on top of me.
We lie there, tangled in the ruins of our restraint. His weight presses heavy, crushing, and perfect. His heart slams against mine, a frantic, shared rhythm.
The silence returns to the room. Altered. The charge is gone. Broken.
We broke it.
For a long while, there is only the fire, our breathing, and the wet, shared knock of two hearts outrunning each other. Then, because he is still inside the circle of my arms and the dark makes it possible, the thing I never say comes loose.
“I had a brother.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
“Danny. Wild. Beautiful. Reckless. He put his bike into a guardrail at nineteen, and I was a first-year medical student who thought she knew everything.” I stare past his shoulder into the firelight, the memory bright and merciless.
“I packed the wound with my own shirt. My belt. My hands. Everything the textbook said. And I tracked his pulse fading under my fingers until it just stopped. I was still holding him when it did.”
“Iris…you don’t have to…”He doesn’t give me a platitude. He doesn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. He listens the way he does everything, completely.
“Maybe that’s why I do it,” I say. “Penance. Or maybe I just want to beat the Reaper. To be the one who gets to say, Not today.”
He shifts. In the firelight, I find the small jagged scar on his left bicep, paler than the burns, lighter than the shrapnel.
“Treehouse,” he says. “I was ten. Certain I could make the jump to the neighbor’s roof.
I missed. Laid in the dirt for an hour, refusing to cry, refusing to call out, until my old man finally came looking.
” His thumb settles over the pulse in my throat.
“Learned it early. Nobody comes for you unless you’ve got something they want. ”
It costs him to hand me that. I feel the cost in how still he goes afterward. This, the boy in the dirt, the one rule he built a whole life on top of, he has guarded far longer, and he gives it to me now, after, when there is nothing left to take and no advantage in the telling.
That is the surrender that wrecks me. Not mine. His.
And I want to be clear with myself, even here, even ruined, that what I handed him on this floor I handed over with my eyes open. I have carried this hunger for years and tested its edges in careful rooms, with safe words, the lights left on, and a man playing a part he could set down by morning.
This is the first time I gave it to someone who didn’t need the script. I chose him in the truck. I chose him on the porch. I chose this. The surrender was mine to give. I gave it.
And lying there, pinned beneath the weight of the man who was supposed to be my protector, knowing I gave him everything he asked for and more, I know one thing for certain.
I never want to be put back together.