20. Chapter 20
Noah
Days pass. I’m not sure how many.
Days consisting of blissful mornings with Asher’s hands in my hair and around my throat, and long, dark nights where we keep exploring each other’s bodies.
We bathe and eat regularly, and I wash the bed sheets when needed, but other than that, we don’t do much else besides just enjoying each other’s company.
We lie awake until deep into the night, snuggling in bed, until our touches turn heated and we can’t stand not being inside each other one way or another.
Neither of us has brought up the blood thing again, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it: giving Asher that control over me, allowing him to see my insides?…?It feels like a means to assure him I’m not a threat to him. Not anymore. Not ever, though I doubt he sees it that way.
It feels like a means to make him stay with me. To make him feel safe.
“What are we going to do about money?” he asks one afternoon. Or morning. I’m not really sure; without proper daylight, the time of day is hard to discern. “I saw how empty the fridge is.”
He’s right. We have a couple of days, max, then we’ll be all out of food.
“I have money,” he continues. “We could go grocery shopping today.”
When I blink, I see us under the harsh fluorescent lighting of the local grocery store, illuminated, exposed for what we are.
Asher would glance around all the people with grocery carts and normal lives, and he’d wake up as if from a bad dream and realize he can’t be with me—that he has to rejoin the world and go on with his life.
Without me.
“Not today,” I mumble, anxiety taking hold of my heart and making me sweat.
“Order it online, then; I don’t care. I want pizza. And Coke.” He casts me a glance. “I didn’t mean that kind of coke.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
He flashes a grin. “It could be nice though—fucking you while I’m high. It’s awesome enough when we’re sober; who knows how it’ll feel if we’re—”
“We’re not doing drugs together, Asher.”
He rolls his eyes. “Fine. You’re so boring, just like these books.” He snatches one from the foot of the bed and throws it into a corner.
“Hey.” I try to sound reprimanding, but my voice comes out subdued, still affected by the imagery of us in the grocery store, by the thought of Asher realizing what we are and hating it?…
“I need to do something.” He pulls at his fingers, agitated. “It’s really fucking cold in here today. Don’t you think so?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” It is; the outside temperature has plunged, and the basement reflects it.
Asher rises from the bed, looks around for a few moments, and puts on the radio. It crackles and sparks before he finds a channel that sounds right, and when he does, he starts to dance.
He sways his hips, bobbing his head from side to side, tentatively at first, feeling the beats of the song, before his movements get more animated. Now that his wrist is free, he moves without restrictions, and I watch him from my prime view on the bed, unable to take my eyes off him.
“Come on!” He holds his hands out to me. “Dance with me, Noah.” He stomps his feet on the floor, waving his arms, purposefully silly.
I’ve never danced in my life, and I don’t feel a big connection with music to begin with, so I just smile and shake my head, but when Asher has set his mind on something he wants me to do, it’s hard to resist.
“Come on.” He grabs my hands and pulls me upright.
I stand frozen in place, my awkwardly tall body looming over him.
I’ve never had a sense of rhythm, never even tried dancing that I can remember.
Auntie used to put on music sometimes and urge me to dance, but for once, I declined her.
I don’t know how to let loose or move my body to the beats of music, and I feel awkward when I try, like the world is watching me.
But Asher is the only one watching me now, and he takes my hands impatiently in his.
“Come on, just move to the music.”
“I?…?I can’t.”
“Of course you can. Don’t think. Just move. Just enjoy it.”
I try, but my movements are so stilted, so awkward, and I feel watched, as if my middle school bullies are in the same room, watching me embarrass myself.
Dancing is the type of thing normal people do—people with social skills, people who go out to clubs and bars and “hang out.” I’ve never done that. I don’t know how it’s done.
Sensing my discomfort, Asher takes my hands again and sways them from side to side. “Come on,” he says, smiling up at me. “It’s fun. Let’s have fun together.”
We have fun together in other ways. Ways I much prefer.
“No one is watching us in here,” he continues. “We can just do whatever we want.”
I glance at the blacked-out window. He’s right. The outside world can’t touch us here. We’re safe from its prying eyes.
I try to do as he tells me, and just move my body to the music, try to enjoy it, but nothing works right, nothing feels right, and I give up.
“I’d rather just watch you,” I tell Asher, who’s swirling around in pirouettes to an old Motown song.
“No, come here.” He takes my hands and tries again, swaying our arms from side to side and stepping back and forth in some forgotten version of some bastardized dance move.
I try to keep up with him, but we end up falling all over each other, collapsing in a heap on the floor with me on top, Asher laughing so hard he tears up.
“What?” I ask.
“You should’ve seen yourself. You looked so funny.” He giggles, stroking the hair out of my face.
“Yeah?” To shut him up, and also just because I want to, I capture his mouth with mine, and his giggles quickly turn to moans as he wraps his arms around my shoulders.
I suppose it’s the closest to drunk I’ve ever felt.
Instead of on any sort of substance, I’m just drunk on him and the feeling of his lips moving against mine.
I shift my legs between his thighs, and he wraps his legs around my hips, his mouth hungry and open, taking my tongue and sucking it between his lips.
As I press our groins together, I realize there is one thing we still haven’t tried.
A simple thing, but it fills me with want: the thought of having him in my mouth, and having him surrender his pleasure to me like I did to him in the kitchen, on the day that now feels so long ago.
I stroke him there with my hand, still kissing him with an almost violent fervor, and he parts his legs wider, groaning into my mouth.
“Mm, fuck, Noah.”
I crawl down his body, palms scraping the dirt and grime of the cold basement floor. Asher swallows thickly as he looks down at me, eyes glazed over with lust.
Each time we make love, it feels like we’re doing it for the first time, with the same desperation, as if we’re running out of time.
We are. I know we are. How long can I realistically keep him with me?
A month? Two? A year? Sooner or later, he’ll realize how wrong I am, how wrong we are for being together, and all I can do is enjoy the time we have and bask in the little moan he lets out when I rip his briefs down and expose his cock to the air.
I’ve had it in my hand and in my ass but never in my mouth. I lick a strip up the underside, flattening it against his stomach, and he hisses in a sharp breath.
“Fuck, Noah?…?Just like that.”
My tongue reaches his slit. The taste is different there, saltier. When I take the head into my mouth, he bucks his hips, moaning. I grab his hands and put them on the back of my head, wanting him to take his pleasure and lead me where he wants me to go.
“Fuck, like that?…?A little deeper. Oh shit?…”
My knees throb painfully against the unyielding concrete floor, but I don’t care as long as I have Asher with me, as long as I have the length of his cock buried in my mouth.
He leads himself further down my throat, making me gag.
When he lets the pressure off my head, I stay there, swallowing around that wet contraction of my throat, wanting him to go further, to use me, to feel me, to love me?…
“Okay,” he grunts. “You’re going to make me come really fucking soon if you do that.”
I pull off only to say, “So come,” before I swallow him back down. I fight to take him deeper inside, making myself gag, saliva building in my mouth.
There’s discomfort, but it’s fleeting, and it means nothing in the face of Asher’s pleasure, his attention on me, and how every want in his body aligns with mine.
It’s intoxicating, that feeling. I won’t ever get enough of it, no matter what he does with me, no matter how many times he makes me choke on his cock or how many fingers he stuffs inside me.
It hurts, the way my throat spasms around him, but I like the hurt. My hurt is his pleasure. Just when it feels like my stomach is going to turn inside out, Asher cries out, and warm pulses of cum spurt down my throat, too deep for me to even taste it before I have to swallow.
When I look up at him, his head is tilted back, his eyes closed as he catches his breath.
“Come here.” He rips me upward to bring our mouths together in a quick, sloppy kiss, and his voice is dark and husky when he tells me, “After that, you deserve a special treat.”
Anxious anticipation curls in my gut. I don’t know what he’s planning, but I’m sure I’ll like it, whatever it is. Even if I don’t, I’ll let him do it.
“Get on the bed,” he says. “This might get messy though. You’ve just changed the sheets.”
“I’ll change them again.” I lie on my back, waiting, wondering what he’s up to.
He smirks and reaches up to the windowsill. “I found this the other day,” he says, showing me something that glints in the faint light of our singular floor lamp.
My knife.
“Oh.”
I’m so stunned I can barely speak, and suddenly, I feel more anxious than anything else. Is he going to kill me with it? Take revenge for all the things I put him through? A final retribution?
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t slit your throat with it or anything. We’re just going to have some fun with it.”
“Some?…?fun?”
He climbs onto the bed and straddles me, still naked. “Remember what I said the other day? About your blood? I thought you wanted that.”
I thought I did, but now, confronted with the sharp blade of the knife and Asher in that dominant position above me, my heart starts beating hard and loud in my chest.
“You remember our word, right?” Asher asks.
“Our?…?word? Yeah. Oatmeal.”
He chuckles again. “Fuck, calm down. I thought you wanted this.”
“I-I do.”
“Stop looking so terrified, then. Otherwise, I won’t do it. You won’t get your treat.”
I make an effort to school my expression back into neutral.
This didn’t use to be so hard. Asher must have done something to me.
I didn’t use to freeze up at the prospect of dying either.
It’s just?…?I don’t want to leave him. I don’t want his face to disappear from my sight.
Yeah?…?that has to be why. I take a deep breath, letting my body sink into the mattress.
“Good.” He traces the blunt edge of the knife down my naked chest. I shiver at the cold. “Relax. This is going to feel good for you. It’s going to feel good for me too.”
I close my eyes, trusting that he’s telling the truth, that he won’t sink that knife into my throat—that he’ll stay with me and guide us into this new experience. That he’ll be merciful, despite my wrongdoings. Despite the wicked glint in his eyes.
“Are you ready?”