Chapter 13 — Repentance68 #2
It went on. That is the part I cannot make sound like anything other than what it was.
It went on and on, the two of us conducting an entire affair in deniable little increments, each move small enough to pass for sleep and aimed too well to be anything but on purpose.
My hand drifted higher up her stomach, asleep.
Her hips pressed back into me, asleep, a slow grind that lasted half a second and then disowned itself.
I set my mouth to the back of her neck, not a kiss, just breath, and she made a sound and swallowed it before it was all the way out of her, asleep, asleep, both of us so committed to being asleep.
And the whole time the urges came up in me blacker and worse, the ones I’d spent a year and a whole island refusing.
Wanting to roll her over. Wanting to stop pretending either of us was anywhere near sleep.
Wanting to do, in the dark, every wrong thing the dark would allow to the woman who had raised me and was now grinding back against me half a second at a time and calling it a dream.
I lay there hard against her and fought all of it and lost the way a man loses to a tide, by inches, certain the whole time that he’s still standing safe up the beach.
I don’t know which of us gave first. For my own sake I have decided it was her, because her hips were the first to stop pretending.
It started as more of the same, the half-second grind that kept disowning itself, except this time it didn’t disown itself.
It just kept going, slow and rolling and steady, the curve of her ass working against my cock through two thin layers of cotton, and I was already so hard it hurt, and I pressed into the heat of her and she pressed back, and we lay there in the dark grinding into each other like two people having the same dream on purpose.
Neither of us said a word. A word would have made it true.
So we didn’t say one. We just moved, breath going ragged and shallow and loud in the quiet, her fist knotting in the sheet, my mouth open against the back of her neck, the both of us delirious with it and still, technically, theoretically, deniably, asleep.
And it was the best thing I’d felt in a year, which was the obscene part of it. Not good. Heavenly, in the literal sense, pleasure arriving from somewhere it had no business arriving from, every slow drag of her against me lighting up wiring I’d spent the whole island insisting was disconnected.
I was past thinking now and into wanting, and the wanting had gone specific and filthy in the dark, the way it gets once a man stops policing it.
I wanted the cotton gone. I wanted to turn her over.
I wanted to finish exactly like this, against the small of her back, all over her, or the worse thing, the wanting I wouldn’t let myself finish the shape of, the one about being inside her, and I lay there rolling into my mother in the dark wanting every evil heavenly piece of it so badly my teeth ached, and hated myself, and did not stop.
It couldn’t hold, the pretending. It wore thinner with every slow roll of her against me until there was nothing left of it, and then she reached back and down, not pretending anything anymore.
And then she’d worked her hand down into my shorts and her fingers closed around my cock, skin to skin, and stayed.
And then she started chewing me out. That was the thing that got me, that her hand began to stroke me, slow and furious, her thumb dragging over the head on every pass, and the whole time she hissed at me in the dark, and she did it in their words now, the way she had on the water, with no air quotes left anywhere in her.
“You let your fear drive,” she breathed, working me, vicious and low. “You let the stagnant water make every single choice and you nearly drowned us both.”
“Mom.”
“No. This is what it does. The blocked tide. It thrashes and it runs and it pulls everyone down with it.”
Her grip was merciless and her voice was worse, and I was getting close anyway, because there is a wire in a man that does not care even slightly about the context it’s being handled in, and she felt it climb in me and got angrier still, as if my body agreeing with her hand were a fresh and separate offense.
And then the anger went out of her voice, and something worse came into it. Softer. Right at my ear.
“Is it really so bad here?” she said.
I mumbled something. I couldn’t have said what. There were no words left at that altitude, only the shape of a sound that wasn’t quite no.
“Could you just bear it?” Her hand never stopped. Her voice had gone as soft as the dark. “Until it starts to make sense for you. Could you do that?”
And I groaned, and I went over her hand, and it was disgusting, and it was the most unreal pleasure of my adult life, and the two facts did not cancel each other out, they fed each other.
It went on, hot and shaming and seemingly without end, her fist working me through every last pulse of it, wringing it out of me like she was still making her point, the mess of it going slick over her knuckles and my own stomach, her mouth at my ear the whole time asking me to stay.
And the worst of it, the part I have never been able to file, was that as I finished into her hand with my mother’s voice in my ear asking me to give up and stay, I couldn’t refuse. I lay there in the wet dark and the no would not come.
She pressed her forehead into my shoulder to keep me quiet until I’d stopped shaking, then wiped her hand, unhurried, on the sheet between us, and let go of me like setting down a thing she’d used to win an argument.
We lay there after, both breathing, the proof of it going cold between us, and neither of us said anything, because what was there to say. She had disciplined me with her hand and the company scripture in one motion and I had thanked her for it with my entire body.
And lying there wrung out in the dark, I understood a thing I had been refusing to understand.
I got why it worked. Not the scam. I’d had the scam since the first afternoon.
I got why it WORKED, on her, on Fathom, on all of them, because there I was, emptied out beside the one person on earth who knew me, on an island that promised I would never be alone again and never have to decide another thing, that would hold me to a shape so I didn’t have to hold myself, and I felt it.
The pull of it. In my own chest, the same hole, the exact same size as hers.
I wanted off that island so badly I could taste salt. And I lay there in the dark and understood, with something close to horror, that a starving part of me was beginning to crave what it had to offer.