21. Chapter 21
Asher
Fuck do I love the way he looks at me right now: trying to hide his fear and apprehension, eyelids fluttering, his pink tongue darting out to wet his lips.
I have no idea what we’re even doing. Everything feels hazy when I’m around him, unreal. My only steady truths are the knife in my hand, Noah’s body underneath me, and the control he willingly gives up to me, even though he might fear doing so.
I trail the knife down the center of his chest, down the hollow pool between his rib cage and the expanse of his stomach.
His chest is almost entirely flat from lack of body fat and muscle, and his skin is pale and smooth, ribs visible under his pecs.
I lay the knife aside and trace the clear indent of them with a knuckle, listening to his gasp as I brush his left nipple with the pad of my thumb.
“You’d look really fucking good with a piercing here.”
“I would?” He gazes down at his chest, watching as I roll the nub between my index finger and thumb. He gasps and arches his back.
“Sensitive?” I can’t believe I’ve never played with his nipples before. I need to explore every facet of his body—discover what makes him tick, what makes him react, what drives him crazy with want and the need to submit.
“It?…?it feels good.”
“I can tell.” I sit harder on top of him, letting him feel the pressure of my weight on his erection. I’m not hard just yet, but I’m getting there.
I pause to climb off him and get rid of his underwear, wanting to feel our skin rubbing together, sweaty and raw.
Once I’m back straddling him, I massage his pecs with both hands, feeling the flesh shift under my palms. Slowly, I trace his nipples with my knuckles, the hard peaks of them.
I pinch the nubs between my fingertips again and pull upward while simultaneously rolling them between thumb and index finger.
“Fuck, Ash?…?I might come if you keep doing that.”
“Then come. I’ll make you come again.”
“Can you?…?hold me here again?” He tips his head back, offering his throat up to me.
I smirk. “Of course, baby.” I let go of one of his nipples to instead lay a hand firmly over his throat.
I keep twisting his nipples, alternating between the right and the left, and all the while, I keep rubbing against him, feeling our crotches grow sticky with precum and sweat.
The rolls of my hips make my balls stick to his and then peel off.
It should feel weird, but it feels fucking awesome, rutting against him like this with my hand on his throat and my fingers torturing his nipples.
“Fuck, Ash, I—” Noah’s voice cuts off in a moan, and at the moment I feel him come, I press on his throat even harder as I rut my hips against his, feeling his cock twitch and spill onto his stomach.
Smirking, I trace my fingers into the mess. “You say ‘fuck’ a lot these days. Rubbing off on you, am I?”
“You are,” Noah says with a small smile.
I go back to twisting his nipple, making him wince. “You’d let me do it, wouldn’t you?” I ask, digging a nail cruelly into his pink flesh. “Pierce you?”
“You know I would.”
Goose bumps break out all over my skin, and I have to make an effort not to roll my eyes back. It’s amazing how a few words are enough to make me hard.
“I know a guy who’ll do it cheap. A hobby piercer, if you will. He’d do it. We could go to him.”
“Go?” Noah frowns, expression growing distant. “No, I don’t think so.”
“What, now you don’t want to?” I pinch the flesh between my fingers, and he whimpers.
“We’d have to leave?…?Go outside.” His face is turning red, and I don’t know if it’s from the pain or something else.
“Would that be such a bad thing? Going outside?”
He glances away, but I seize his jaw and make him look at me.
“Bad,” he says, voice curt. “Yes.”
“Why?”
His mouth tightens. “I just don’t want to, Ash, okay? We can order tools online, and you can pierce me anywhere you want, but we’ll do it here. At home.”
“You can’t stay in here your whole life, you know.”
“Until a few weeks ago, there was no ‘whole life’ to be had.”
I scoff and let go of him. I can’t stay hard in the face of his words.
They piss me off and make me anxious. I don’t like it when he says things like that, especially not in that casual tone.
I’m brought back to that day he let me go and I sat in the kitchen, thinking he’d left me. That he’d left the world.
It doesn’t seem like he understands how much that day affected me. How much it hurt me. But I don’t know how to make him understand.
My mouth tightens, eyes burning with unshed tears.
“Please.” He takes my arm and fits my hand back to his throat. “Didn’t you want to make me bleed? Please make me bleed, Asher.”
I take a deep breath, pushing back the wave of unbidden grief for what almost happened, what I almost lost, and I try to focus on the here and now. What I have, what I’m given. Noah’s body and his unending trust.
I have to savor it. I can’t let this moment go to waste.
“Well, only if you beg.” I take the knife from where I left it at our side.
Noah’s knife. The knife he used to intimidate me with whenever he let me take a bath.
“We should clean it.” Disinfect it, more like.
My mind is hazy, barely there, but at the same time, it’s just as aware as the edge of the knife, sharp and dangerous.
It’s a strange feeling, but a fucking exhilarating one.
“It’s fine,” Noah says.
Fuck, okay?…?I can’t wait to see his insides. I can’t wait to see his eyes widen and his breath hiss out of his mouth as I cut into his flesh?…
“Where do you want it?” I ask.
“Anywhere.”
I trail my fingertips down his torso once more, stopping under his belly button, placing two fingers there.
“How about here?”
“Yes. Please cut me, Ash.”
My mouth drops open. I can barely speak for the thrumming of my heart.
“You want me to mark you?”
Noah nods, eyes closed.
“Want me to make you mine?” I reach over and grab his throat, digging my thumb into his clenched jaw. He relaxes immediately, and he looks straight into my eyes, unflinching.
“Yes. Make me yours, Ash.”
I force myself to take a deep breath. My cock is throbbing between my legs as I trail the knife down his body where my hand was, placing the flat side of the knife on his left nipple, making him gasp from the biting cold.
Further and further, I trace the tip of the knife, and finally—with barely enough pressure to scrape the skin—I bring the knife toward the place I indicated, right at the sensitive white flesh below his belly button.
There. There, I want to cut him. There, I want to mark him.
The rush of adrenaline lends itself to a high I haven’t felt in a long time.
Finally, I’m not focused on anything else other than this exact moment, so hell-bent on giving Noah and myself the pleasure we crave—the control and the lack of it—and at the same time, I have to make sure I’m not hurting him in a way that can’t be undone, in a way that would truly be dangerous.
It’s my responsibility not to cut him deep enough that he’ll need medical attention. It’s my responsibility, and he trusts me with it. He trusts me, utterly and completely, not to hurt him more than he can endure.
I’ve never felt this high on the rush of power. I don’t think my cock has been harder than this either.
Noah’s rib cage is expanding and contracting fast, his eyes fixed on the knife. At the united exhale of both our breaths, I slice a thin, straight line. The skin parts willingly, and for a split second, nothing happens. Then a little valley of exposed flesh blooms with blood.
“Fuck,” Noah whispers in awe.
I trace the warm blood with my finger, dipping into that pool of life.
I can’t resist putting it to my mouth and giving it a taste.
Sweetness and copper, flesh and life. It feels almost like a religious experience—having Noah gasping and writhing underneath me, an open wound on his belly, the knife in my hand, and his blood on my tongue.
Fuck, this is truly something else, isn’t it? We won’t be able to go back from this. Won’t be able to backtrack our actions to something more normal and less fucked up. The weird thing is, it doesn’t even feel fucked up. It feels right.
When my eyes shoot open, Noah is staring at me, chest heaving, blood pooling down to his crotch and dripping down his sides.
“You’re making a mess.” I gather the blood with my palms and smear it further up his stomach, toward his chest. It makes him look obscene, like he’s my quarry or something, a slaughtered deer. I make an artwork of his blood, and it dries as I smear it on him. The smell?…?It’s overwhelming.
“Do you think this works as lube?” I slide my hands in the mess and grab my cock, spreading some onto the head.
“I don’t know,” Noah says, voice strained.
I position myself between his legs, and he parts them for me, lifting his knees into the air as I bring my bloody fingertips to his hole. “We’ll see.”
He stares down at his body, chest heaving as I press into his wound to make more blood seep out.
“Does that hurt?” I ask.
“Ah?…?A bit.”
“I’m going to fuck you anyway.”
His eyes when I say that, Christ?…?They’re glassy, widened with pain and something like fear, but glittering with want and arousal all the same.
“Yes, please,” he whispers.
I groan in reply. With his blood easing my entry, I push inside in one smooth thrust, hiking his knees over my shoulders.
Noah grimaces, tilting his head back, but he doesn’t make a sound, save for a soft whimper.
“Does that hurt, baby?” I ask.
His head thrashes from side to side, up and down, haphazardly, as if he doesn’t know if he should nod or shake his head.
“Maybe you can’t tell anymore if it hurts?…?or if it feels good?” I thrust into him, snapping my hips to his. I don’t think I’ll last very long. But I want to. I always want to be inside him for as long as I can.
His eyes go wide. “No. No, I can tell.”
With my bloodstained hand, I grip his cock and stroke it quickly. “I’m going to come soon, and I want you to come with me. Okay, Noah? I want you to come with me.”
He nods desperately. “I will. I’ll come.”
“Are you sure you can come through all this pain?”
He keeps nodding, giving me that pained expression I so like to see.
“Because you like it, don’t you?” I mumble. “You like me fucking you. You like me hurting you too.”
“I do, I like it. Ash, please—”
I jerk him like a madman while I fuck into him hard and deep, feeling my own pleasure crest and spill, blood mixing with cum and pain mixing with pleasure.
Noah’s face scrunches up in pain, as if the buildup to his orgasm is hurting him. Granted, he came only a little while ago, so he must be feeling pretty sensitive. Still, he yields to me, arching his back, sobbing as his orgasm hits.
Our eyes lock, his wide and almost scared. I hold his gaze as he comes down, riding on the intensity of what we just did, what he just gave me, and what I gave him.
I roll over and land on his side, catching my breath. “We should clean up.”
Noah gives a breathy moan, as if he’s still experiencing some kind of pleasure or some kind of pain. “I don’t want to.”
“Doesn’t it feel weird?” I glance over at his stomach. The blood around the gash is going dark, coagulating.
“Yes. But it feels good too.”
Well, if that doesn’t sum up my thoughts around this strange intimacy between us. It feels weird, unfamiliar, freaky as hell, taking over my mind and my body, but at the same time, it feels so fucking good I cannot bring myself to care. Until now.
“We need to clean your wound. It’ll get infected.”
Noah doesn’t reply, and I start to get a little frustrated as the gravity of what I’ve done is dawning on me.
I cut him. I sliced into his skin. Why the fuck did I do that? Was I wrong to do that? Our isolation is such that I’ve started to lose my grip on what’s normal and what’s not, what is healthy and what is bad and unacceptable. I cut him out of my own desire, but he wanted it too, didn’t he?
But was it worth it to permanently scar him for that?
What am I doing?
What are we doing?
It’s the sort of thing only self-harming teenagers get up to, isn’t it? Either that or professionals who fucking know what they’re doing. I know nothing of this. I’m in way over my head. I’ve plunged into the deepest, darkest waters. We both have.
It’s happened so quickly and felt so amazingly up until this point that I’ve just?…
gone with it. It’s been so freeing to be the one in control, but maybe I’ve led us onto a darker path than I know what to do with, and before I know it, I’ll have hurt Noah and myself beyond recognition, beyond the ability to go back from it, and it will be my fault, my blame, my guilt eating me raw?…
I’ve never been one to enjoy hurting other people. People have always hurt me, or I’ve hurt myself with drugs and irresponsible sex and letting people walk all over me, but today, I?…?I don’t know what came over me.
My eyes fill with tears, and I want to apologize, want to do anything to make up for what I just did, but there’s nothing I can do, nothing I can say that would make it okay. The worst of it is, Noah is just lying there, on his back, silent and covered in blood.
Wouldn’t it be better if I didn’t feel the need to hurt him and the thrill that comes with it? It would. It surely would. I just don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know how to stop this desire, and I don’t know how to stop my ache for him. I just have to endure it.
You will learn how to stand it. As I have.
His past words echo back to me, and for the first time, I realize the gravity of them.
We’re the same, he and I, and it’s all we can do to endure this ache for each other, this yearning.
Even if it kills us, that ache will always be there.
We’ve made sure of it—we’ve bound ourselves into this isolated darkness, and the only string binding us to life is our own ache for each other, for each other’s bodies and minds, each other’s pain and pleasure.
That’s it, isn’t it? But why does it feel so wrong? Why do I feel so bad? Why can’t I just enjoy it? I’ve never had anything like this in my life. I’ve never had anyone be mine the way Noah gives himself to me so willingly.
I just don’t know how to receive that gift without breaking it into pieces.
There has to be some way I can make this better for both of us. Healthier, at least. I’ll think about it harder tomorrow. For now, I turn around to face the wall, the room reeking of our blood, of our sex, of our sacrifice. Of our love.