26. Jaxson
26
Jaxson
E veryone puts in a team effort to help clean up the mess Lauressa made cooking dinner, despite the fact that there are people I can call in to clean it all the next day. By the time it’s done and everyone leaves, it’s well past midnight. Despite that, Lauressa is wired like it’s the middle of the day—not too shocking considering that, left to her own devices, she would rather be awake at night.
“We’ll have to do this again. After… you know. Everything,” she says as she takes off her clothes. “But next time Jessie should bring her son. Magdalene too. And Adah can drag her children from that boarding school she sends them off to.”
One thing that I’ve always found intriguing about Lauressa is her optimism. Despite her very realist outlook and tendency to point out problems and future problems long before they become a problem, she’s far from a pessimist. She believes not only that the world can be better, and she can effect change in her life to do it, but also believes that people mostly mean well, even if they do terrible things. It’s why she put up with Loving Eden for so long. Why she still worked with them in conjunction with One Humanity despite what they did to her. Why she still showed up to be her family’s daughter, even when it was clear she couldn’t live up to their expectations. Why even when I’ve showed her the worst of who I am, she sees something underneath.
“Jaxson,” Lauressa says loudly.
“Yes,” I say.
“Were you listening to me?” she asks, putting her hands on her hips, now only in her bra and underwear.
“I apologize. I was just thinking.”
She curls her lips into something between a scowl and a pout before it turns into a frown as she asks, “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. That’s why I asked you.”
I hold my hand out to her and say, “Come here.”
She does so without hesitation, a stark contrast to just a few months ago when she probably would have run from the room and been plotting a way to escape me.
I pull her into my lap, caressing the side of her face, stroking my fingers through her hair.
“You’ve been so faithful to me while we’ve been apart,” I mutter. “So dedicated to me. To a scheme that might not even work. Despite the things I know people have said to you to get you to doubt me.”
“How do you know someone’s said something?”
It doesn’t take a genius to guess that. As much as my family claims to know me, I also know them. Lilah has certainly given her some advice about us if the way she kept looking at Lauressa and me standing together with pitiful sympathy was an indication. And if I hadn’t noticed her looks, Adah’s statement was certainly enough.
I don’t answer Lauressa’s question. Instead, I say, “For being such a faithful disciple, you deserve a reward.”
“A reward?” she repeats. “What kind of reward?”
“Anything you want.”
Lauressa contemplates for a long while before finally saying, “Anything… and you won’t get back at me for it later?”
My heart skips in interest, curiosity, and anticipation of what she has in mind.
“Not for this,” I say. Because Lauressa has done and will do plenty more things for me to drag her to a proverbial cross to atone for.
Lauressa’s gaze turns to the fireplace where a small fire is burning. While the drug was making its way through her system last night, Lauressa kept complaining in fits of consciousness she probably doesn’t even remember that she was cold. The temperature outside had dropped some since I’d herded her into the orchard, but not too much. But Lauressa hates the cold, and the Chicago cold is one of the things she’s complained about constantly since being here, even though it’s warmed up quite a bit since this biting chill of winter. So I lit the fire last night and lit it again tonight when I saw the temperature would drop from its daytime high.
“Are you hot?” I ask.
“No. Just… thinking,” Lauressa says.
Finally, she gets off my lap and picks up the fire stoker, the very one that she held above me last night, threatening to pierce my neck. She looks at me gleefully, a wicked glint in her eyes as she plays with the slightly curved sharp tip.
“Going to stab me?” I ask with a smirk.
She grins and then puts the end of the stoker in the fire, letting it get hot as she says, “Take off your clothes for me, Jaxson.”
Part of me balks at the idea of taking a direct order from her because, in this relationship, I’m the one with the power and control. Every boon to her is at my mercy, grace, and benevolence. However, my cock disagrees, beginning to harden in anticipation of what she has planned.
So without argument, I strip down to my briefs.
“Those too,” she says, taking the stoker out, putting the tip to her lips, and blowing off the heat and steam.
I toss my briefs aside, leaving myself naked before her gaze. Her mouth falls open as she ogles me, and my cock grows harder at the naked lust in her eyes. I know what I look like. I know what she sees. I’ve spent most of my life striving to become the pinnacle of humanity. Mentally. Financially. Physically. There’s nothing I consume that’s not accounted for. No exercise regimen that isn’t meticulously planned. I decided how I wanted to look and did everything to make sure I look and stay that way, and it’s paid off. In the business world. In mundane social interactions. In the bedroom.
She gestures for me to come over to where she is, twirling the stoker between her fingers.
I let her pull us both down onto the floor until I’m lying next to the fireplace, and she’s straddling me. She runs a hand over my chest, then removes it and replaces it with the hot stoker, pressing it as hard into my skin as she can.
The stoker is a mixture of metals, but mostly aluminum, which means it doesn’t hold onto too much heat for very long. But it’s still hot. Not hot enough to burn, but hot enough to be painful. At worst, the outer layer of my skin may peel some.
Still, as much as it hurts, I don’t make a sound. I don’t even grit my teeth. I only clench the muscles of my stomach as I just take and absorb the pain for as long as Lauressa makes me. Finally, she takes the hot stoker away, putting it in the fire again.
“Even when you’re in pain, you need to be in control. You refuse to show it. Refuse to show weakness,” she says. “I wanna break you. I want to see how long it takes before you lose that self-control and can’t take any more.”
My cock jumps at her words, growing even harder than it already is with Lauressa straddling her body over it.
When you’re taught that one day some unnamed enemy would oppose you and ask you to forsake the Sovereignty and the Oracle or they’d magically take everything from you, it’s only natural that you develop a bit of a persecution kink. Get you expelled from school. Fired from your job. Your house taken. All your possessions. The people you love. Even your own life. Even when you know it’s illogical and no one really cares if you believe there’s some all-powerful force that wants you to live your life a certain way, growing up hearing that all the time does something to you. It makes you excited at the thought of being made an unsuspecting victim for standing up for your truths, somehow proving that everything you were taught was right all along. Vindicated. Gleefully welcoming someone bigger and more powerful to try to oppress you only to make it out in the end despite their efforts.
I’m not immune to that particular indoctrination.
But I’m rarely ever put in the position of being the one without power.
If I wanted to, I could throw Lauressa off me. But that’s not the point. The point is proving that I can take it. That I’m not the one who is broken. I do the breaking. I’m the one in control even when I don’t control the torment. I’m the one who ruins rather than the one who is vulnerable to being ruined, even with Lauressa holding a hot fucking piece of metal over my skin.
Lauressa removes the stoker from the fire again and blows on it to help it release some of the heat and then presses it on my skin again. Once again, I refuse to give her the satisfaction of seeing that it affects me, clenching the muscles of my stomach as I take the searing heat.
I underestimate Lauressa’s determination. I underestimate the cruel streak in her. The part of her that I recognized as cruel and depraved and monstrous when we met, just like me. The part that came up with an elaborate plan to kill her family, the entire Deacon board of Loving Eden, burn it to the ground, and then pin it on one of the people she murdered.
Like Lauressa, her cruelty is patient. Even as I refuse to make a sound, refuse to let her break me, she doesn’t get frustrated. In fact, a grin begins to spread across her face and widens the more she heats the stoker and presses it to my chest. Because even though I haven’t made a sound, she sees the sweat gathering on my body. She sees the way my chest is completely red, the heat from the rod having spread through my entire chest, even to pieces she’s missed. She sees the way I clench my jaw and narrow my eyes, even as I refuse to make a sound throughout my torment.
Finally, she lifts off me and stands. But I don’t think for a second that she’s given up. Instead, she directs me to sit up and kneel in front of her. Then she walks behind me.
I know what’s coming.
I still bite my tongue to resist letting out a groan as she strikes my back with the hot rod. Not hard enough to break skin, but certainly hard enough to bruise. And with my chest red and hot and in searing pain, my nerves are even more sensitive to it. Honestly, she could probably hover the rod over my skin, and it would be painful at this point.
I love every second of it. I imagine looking over my shoulder into the mirror in the morning and seeing purple and red and black because of her hands. I imagine hissing in pain at the stiffness in my back that will serve as a reminder of this ordeal in the days and possibly weeks to come.
My cock sits heavy and impossibly hard. I’m so wound up and tight and clenched from holding in all my pain that I’m surprised I haven’t already come at this point. I grab it in my hands and begin to squeeze and pump it up and down in time with her strikes. The pain of her strike now mingling with my pleasure. Mixing together into something dirty and ugly like the first snow of a Chicago winter when it mixes with the dirt and concrete of the city, creating an ugly slush .
Lauressa’s strikes come harder, but no less controlled. She hasn’t paused to reheat the stoker, but it still feels piping hot.
The strokes of my cock grow desperate, and my rhythm grows faster than her strikes. The pain and pleasure mix with the tension wound up in me from refusing to break. The same way Job refused to curse God despite all the torment Satan put him through. Except I am said God, and Lauressa wants me to curse myself, and I will not give in. I will not—
The pleasure. The pain. The tension. All of it fuses together to form a reaction that suddenly combusts as I come. My vision goes white, a supernatural sound escapes my mouth, like I’m being exorcised, purified of all my demons and sins.
When I come back, I’m leaning on my hands, sweat dripping from my face, with Lauressa sitting in front of me with a Joker grin on her face.
“You held out longer than I thought you would. I thought I was going to have to break a bone,” she says, pushing me back against the floor again.
I let her, much too exhausted to do anything else. She straddles me, nipples perked and pointed, chest flush, thighs glistening with her arousal. At some point that I hadn’t realized, she apparently got rid of her bra and underwear.
“Coming doesn’t count,” I say, feeling breathless.
She chuckles and leans down not to kiss me, but to lick the blood off my lips from where I bit my tongue earlier.
“You came from getting off on me beating the shit out of you. It counts. ”
This is doubtlessly something we’ll go back and forth about later, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Lauressa thinks she broke me, proving yet again what I’ve known about her all along. That she’s as sick and mad and depraved as I am. We are a match forged in hell, masquerading in someone’s heaven as angels, having stolen the halo and wings of the ones who stood in our way.
Impossibly, despite having what might have been the most powerful orgasm of my life, I’m hard again. But this time, I need to pin her down. I need to dominate her. I need her to share in both my pain and my pleasure.
I roll us over until she’s the one on her back on the floor, ignoring the twinge of pain in my back, the adrenaline and hormones running through me from coming numbing the rest of the pain I’ll doubtlessly feel in the morning.
Without letting her get her bearings, I wrap a hand around her neck and sink my cock into her. Relentless in my thrusts into her. Not giving her a chance to accommodate herself to my girth being as tight as she is, even slick with arousal. Not giving her the chance to even possibly control herself as choked moans escape her. As her breasts bounce up and down in time with my thrusts, nipples pointed straight in the air. Hair haloed around her. Mouth open. Eyes rolling unfocused.
She grasps at the rug for purchase, and unable to get any, she grabs and gropes at her breasts.
I don’t even need to touch her clit. I don’t need to pay any attention to the angle of my strokes. She comes, the walls of her cunt clamping down hard on my cock, milking another orgasm from it, already sensitive from coming once so hard that I couldn’t restrain myself if I wanted.
I let go of my grip around her neck and collapse on top of her with my cock still gripped in her cunt.
I could lie on top of Lauressa just like this all night, but at some point, Lauressa prods at me to get off her. I move, allowing her to get up and go to the bathroom. Predictably, the shower turns on because Lauressa always needs at least a rinse, if not a full bath, after sex if she has the energy afterward.
I lie on the bed, wincing at the pain that twinges in my back. Then I try to roll over onto my stomach only to wince as the material of the soft comforter rubs against my chest like sandpaper. In the end, I settle for laying on my side. I may have promised that I wouldn't punish Lauressa for tonight, but that doesn't mean I can't take some inspiration for the next time she earns my discipline.
Lauressa comes out the bathroom in a robe and with a bunch of items in her hands. It turns out to be alcohol swabs, burn cream, and some kind of ointment.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"You didn't think I was going to leave you like this?" she asks in return.
"I wouldn't have minded."
"Well, you always give me aftercare afterward. It's only fair I give you the same. Can you lay on your back?"
Just because I'd prefer not to doesn't mean I can't. So I force myself to lay back, holding in the instinct to wince. Lauressa still somehow notices .
"I'll be right back," she says, leaving the room.
She comes back not even a minute later with a short from the kitchen table and gestures me to sit on it.
She takes care of the hot marks on my chest first, soothing my chest with a cool cloth and gentle motions. When she's done, she pours burn cream in her hand and begins to spread it all over my chest, taking care to be as gentle and careful as possible, taking her slow sweet time.
"You don't have to take your time. I'm not going to break," I finally say, barely not snapping.
"Maybe I want to take my time with you," Lauressa responds. "You're always taking care of me. Maybe I want to take care you too."
"I take care of you. I can take care of myself."
"Just because you can doesn't mean you have to all the time," Lauressa says. Then she points out, apt as usual, "You're not used to people taking care of you, are you? You've always been the one to take care of and watch out for everyone else, haven't you?"
"I only take care of people if they're useful to me and allow me to take care of myself."
Lauressa give me an unimpressed look but doesn't argue. Instead she says, "Well, no one's every taken care of you in any case, have they? Only you've ever taken care of you?"
I don't know what makes me answer Lauressa the way I do. Maybe because she has the uncanny ability to make me let my guard down. Maybe it's the way her hands massaging my chest sucks all the tension out my body, making my mouth loser than normal .
In any case, I surprise myself when I answer, "Not since Candace died. No."
"Your sister?" Lauressa states more than asks.
"My sister."
"Not your mother?"
"My sister did more mothering me than my actual mother ever did."
"And then your mother killed her. Why?"
"Because she wanted to leave the Sovereignty, and the country. And she wanted to take us with her."
"Us?" Lauressa asks quietly as she moves to tend to the burgeoning bruises on my back.
"Jessie, Magdalene, and I," I reply. "She made the mistake of thinking my mother cared more about the three children living under her roof than the Sovereignty and appealed to my mother to help her escape. My mother told my father. My father ordered my mother to kill her."
"And then you killed your mother."
"Who told you that?" I ask. I certainly didn't.
"Wasn't hard to guess."
"I didn't kill her immediately after. I didn't put the pieces together and figure out what happened until years later. Then I came home from college without anyone knowing I was back. Spiked her afternoon black tea and drowned her in her own pool, and went back to school and waited on them to call me and tell me she was dead," I say as though I'm reciting my multiplication facts.
"And no one's cared for you since," Lauressa says. "You've never trusted anyone to care for you since."
"It's not a tragedy. Look where it got my sister," I say with a shrug, only to hiss at the pain that shoots through my back as soreness starts to set it.
Lauressa silently begins to massage ointment into my back to soothe the bruises and stave off the worst of the inevitable soreness.
When I think she's not going to say anything else, Lauressa surprises me like she always does and says, "I care for you. You can trust me to care for you. Just like you've cared for me."
I more than care for Lauressa. What I feel for her is something I haven't felt in decades. If I have felt it, I've never admitted to it. What I feel for her completely drowns anything I've ever felt similar to it before. It's more than lust. More than obsession. More than possessiveness.
Now would probably be a good time to tell her what I feel outright rather that heavily implying it. But that feeling isn't safe. Whenever I've felt that for someone, bad things happen. My father already knows I care for her. If he knew I… I don't even let myself think it and continue to not say anything at all as Lauressa cares for me for once.