10. Chapter 10
Noah
I try to remember if I’ve ever slept in the same bed as somebody else—except for Auntie when I was a young child, which hardly counts—but I come up blank.
Asher is the first.
I suppose he’s a lot of firsts for me. The first I imprisoned in my basement. The first, aside from Auntie, to look at me with understanding in his eyes rather than scorn.
The first to kiss me.
I bring a hand up to my mouth and brush a finger along my lower lip. It doesn’t feel like anything has changed, but the tingle between my legs makes me think otherwise.
I close my eyes and try to think past it. It’s uncomfortable, getting hard. I’ve never enjoyed it much. Masturbating is just a chore like any other, like brushing your teeth. Sometimes, I forget to do it, and the consequence is a pent-up need I have to take care of sooner or later.
But not now.
Asher’s body is still lined up against mine, his arm wrapped around my waist, his cuffed hand digging into my chest. He’s spooned me all through the night. Asher, my prisoner?…
To be honest, I’ve never really thought of him that way, even if it’s technically true. He could have left last night—he could have strangled me, he could have killed me, and left without looking back. But he stayed. Why did he stay? Why didn’t he push down on my throat, like I allowed him to?
If I can’t have him with me, I might as well die by his hand. Such was the trajectory of my thoughts when he straddled me, when my pulse thundered against his palms?…
There was no fight in me left. Not after what had just happened.
Holding the knife to Asher’s throat brought me nothing but fear, just like last time.
He made me feel like a monster when he didn’t struggle, when he said, Do it .
My initial anger when he attacked me dissolved into a great weariness, bringing with it the wish to sink into the dark, and the wish for Asher to be the one to send me there.
The chain clinks as he withdraws his hand. So he’s finally awake. I turn around, and we lie side by side, gazing up at the ceiling, like last night. The silence is comfortable, as it tends to be between us, but the situation is so new and unfamiliar that I can’t help but speak up.
“How did you sleep?” My voice comes out rough and dry.
Asher yawns. “Pretty awesomely. I think it was the best I’ve slept since I got here. Maybe it’s because it’s cold in here, and you’re warm.” He snuggles up to me and slings an arm over my chest.
Oh.
This feels strange. It’s not what my heart is used to at all. It starts beating, loud and hard. I’m sure Asher can feel it too. When he throws his leg over me, I panic; he’ll surely feel the tent in my pants, so I roll back around.
“Oh,” he mumbles, retreating to his side of the bed. “Sorry. Too much touching?”
“No, it’s just?…?I’m not used to it.”
“How does it feel?” He trails a hand over my arm, down my sleeve and into the hem, two fingers ghosting along my pulse point. “When I touch you?”
I shiver all over. “G-Good,” I choke out.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No. Um. Maybe. It’s?…”
“A lot?”
“Yeah.”
We lapse into silence, and I close my eyes again. I’ve started to fall back asleep when Asher speaks up.
“I want a cigarette.”
Of course that’s what he wants. “Okay.”
I make a move to get up, but Asher wraps his arm around my waist again. “No, lie here for a little longer.”
I gulp, suddenly nervous. My heart is pounding, and my throat feels tight. “Why?”
I should have predicted this from the start. Feeling too much is dangerous. Hoping is dangerous. The hope that Asher likes me, that he wants me , is so dangerous that I hardly dare conceive of the thought.
He kissed me, but I have a feeling he didn’t do it for the kiss, per se, but because he wanted to pull a reaction out of me.
Anyone else would’ve just slapped me in the face and yelled at me, but Asher isn’t like anyone else, and that’s why I like him.
I’m not like others either, and I never thought I’d find someone who’s so like me and so different at the same time.
But the core of us is the same. I think he’s started to realize that too.
“Can I touch your arm, Noah?” he asks.
“Okay.”
He trails his knuckles along my bicep and the sharp bone of my shoulder, then up to my hair. He sinks his fingers into it, massaging my scalp like I did to him in the bath.
I shudder again, and I’m hard through all of it. The discomfort is constant—a stirring heat, a pressure begging for friction. My breathing deepens, but I try my best not to moan.
“You like that, don’t you?” Asher asks, his breathing as labored as mine. “Did you like doing it to me?”
I give a brief, breathy noise in reply.
“I like your hair,” Asher continues. “It’s cool, but it makes you look a little scary.”
“It does?”
“Only when it hides your face. You shouldn’t hide your face.” He gathers a few strands that have fallen in front of my cheek and slides them behind my ear.
That simple action, paired with the words, is enough to make me want to cry again. It’s the strangest feeling—to be rock-hard and on the verge of tears at the same time.
“Turn around.”
My heart jumps in my chest, but I do as he says. He turns around as well, so I’m spooning him this time. I take great care not to let him feel the hardness between my legs.
“Do it to me. I want to feel?…” He lets out a deep sigh, and it sounds like surrender. “I want to feel something.”
I reach a hand tentatively out to touch his hair, his blond curls supple against my fingertips. He sighs again, and when I dig my fingers in harder, deeper, he makes a sound between a moan and a sob.
“Are you okay?” I ask, withdrawing my hand.
“Yeah, just?…?It feels good. I haven’t felt good in a long time. Keep going.”
I massage his scalp, stroking him slowly, carefully. The side of my hand brushes the shell of his ear, and I travel further down, stroking my thumb down the curve of his jaw.
He shivers all over, like I did. “That tickles.”
“Sorry.”
“No, keep going.”
My breathing deepens, and the pressure between my legs won’t relent. I want to touch him further, slide my hand under the hem of his shirt and feel his beating heart like he felt mine, but I don’t. I drag my knuckles down the line of his throat instead, and he jolts like I shocked him.
He turns around, I pull back, and for a few moments, all we do is stare at each other, lacking the sense for words, for reason.
He licks his dry lips. “Well? How about that cigarette?”
A little reluctant this time, I rise to go upstairs. I linger for a while to let my erection recede before I return, a packet of cigarettes and a lighter in hand.
Asher sits upright on the bed. He has that hungry expression on his face that he always gets when I bring him a smoke.
“Fuck yeah,” he mumbles as he puts a cigarette between his lips and flicks the lighter.
That set of words does something to me, as does his expression when he sucks the smoke into his mouth, holds it in his lungs, and exhales. The scent tickles my nostrils.
“We need an ashtray, Noah,” he says. “Can’t keep putting it out on the floor. This place is enough of a mess as it is, don’t you think?”
“You’re not supposed to smoke.”
He rolls his eyes. “Not this moralizing shit again. It turns me off.”
Turns him off? Does that mean?…?whenever I don’t moralize, I turn him on ? No, that can’t be what he means. He got hard yesterday, but it was just a fluke. Surely he didn’t get hard just now, like I did?…?My eyes flicker downward, but I don’t dare let them linger long enough to see.
Frowning, I sit next to him on the bed. “What’s it like?”
“Smoking? Here, try it.”
I put the cigarette between my lips. As I inhale and the smoke fills my throat, I seize up and break out into a coughing fit.
Asher laughs. He snatches the cigarette from me and takes a final drag before he puts it out. “Was that your first time?”
I nod, eyes tearing up.
“Don’t tell me you never snuck into the woods with stolen cigarettes as a kid.”
“I didn’t.”
“Figures,” Asher says with a smirk. “I even let a guy jack me off in exchange for a cigarette once.”
“So you didn’t want him to jack you off?”
He shrugs. “I was high and dying for a cigarette, but all the stores were closed. I asked a random stranger at a bar for one, and he told me to follow him into the bathroom.”
“And you just?…?let him have his way with you?”
Asher shrugs again. He leans his elbows onto his knees and stares straight ahead. “I guess.”
“But did you enjoy it?”
“I came, so I guess I did. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? So you just loan yourself out to the highest bidder?”
He sends me a glare. “I don’t know. It’s different when I’m high; I don’t care what happens, and if what happens feels good, why should I complain?”
I grimace and look away, shaking my head, but it seems like the wrong reaction.
“What?” Asher snaps. “You can’t tell me you’ve never just gone along with something.”
My frown deepens. I’ll never understand these types of casual sexual encounters and what people get out of them. It doesn’t seem very intimate, that’s for sure, and what point is there to sex besides intimacy?
“I’d let you do it to me, you know,” Asher says.
“What?”
He flashes a charming smile, but it doesn’t seem genuine. “If you let me go.”
“We’ve already been through this,” I mutter. What would I get out of sleeping with Asher over such an agreement? An unwilling partner, and then an absent one. I could trick him, of course?…?Promise to let him go but keep him here afterward?…
No. I can’t do that. Bad thoughts. Bad.
I grit my teeth, looking away from his sly smile. His fingers smell like smoke as he lifts his hand and caresses my cheek.
“Don’t do that,” I say roughly.
“Why? You liked it in the bath.”
“That was different.”
In the bath, we connected. In the bath, we shared a moment I still can’t begin to decipher.
This is nothing like that. This is just Asher trying to tempt me into sleeping with him—something he doesn’t even want —so he can convince me to let him go.
An exchange of favors. It would be wrong.
I’d be wrong to do it, and he’d be wrong to go along with it.
“Suit yourself,” Asher mutters.
“You’re talking about it so much, it seems like you’re the one who wants it.”
“Ha! You wish,” he scoffs.
“You’re the one who kissed me.”
He glances sideways. “Just a temporary lapse in judgment. I’m?…?not really thinking straight right now.”
“Me neither.”
That earns me a questioning look. “You aren’t? I thought you knew what you were doing. I thought you knew how wrong this is.”
“Yeah, but?…?It confuses me. You. Us.”
Asher sighs. “Me too.”
I don’t like to be confused. It would be far less complicated to be alone in my misery. If you’re alone and have nothing to treasure, no one you care for, then there’s nothing to lose. Now I feel like I have too much to lose. Asher, my life?…?My life, which a week ago, I didn’t even want.
If Asher leaves, he’ll set me back to nothing. I won’t have him, and I won’t have anything else either?…?I can’t live like that, I can’t, I?…
“I’m going hunting,” I say abruptly and rise from the bed.
“Hunting?” Asher mutters, a hint of disappointment in his voice. “Fine.”
It’s too soon to check on my traps, but I have to get away from him—away from this tension between us, this back-and-forth.
I can’t stand it. He’s playing tricks on me, I can tell that much.
Making me let down my guard, making me feel too comfortable around him, until he can finally exact his revenge and escape me.
The realization makes my stomach lurch. Asher doesn’t like me. Not really.
He can’t.
No one likes me.
I just like him , and I try to read into things where the words are misspelled and the meaning distorted, if ever there was any meaning there to begin with.
I take a deep breath. All will be fine. I will go into the forest. Everything always makes more sense in the forest.
In the forest, there are no humans who think I’m strange and scary.
In the forest, I can finally relax and figure out what is happening.
Right now, it’s all a jumbled mess in my mind.
I need to become one with the forest and the animals, where there are no human troubles, and no golden-haired angel will stroke my arm and tell me not to hide my face.