Chapter 22
HARD WORK
When I waken it’s dark outside, but the sky is growing paler. It’s early morning. I haul myself up the bed to sit against the headboard, with one hand above Hailey’s head where her hair is strewn over the pillow, and the other, my injured left, curled on my thigh.
She stirred when I moved but settles again. Her pretty mouth curves in a sleepy smile that breaks my heart. I’m unsure why it saddens me. I have her beside me. Do I feel the loss of the years when we weren’t together, even though I’m not sure we ever were? Or is it that I’m afraid for our future.
She has such dangerous plans. And the honesty she demands, that bothers me.
I don’t know if I can truly ever be honest with her. I don’t know what I will recall in an hour let alone tomorrow. I guess if I don’t remember it, yet, it’s still honest, but will she forgive me? What if I was a bad person when I was simply a man?
The sex was glorious. Felt right. Felt exciting to the point where something on me or in me might’ve ruptured if I didn’t do what I did to her—tie her up, fuck her roughly, make her love what I did. She seemed fully into it…
Yet I do not know where any of that came from—the need for kink, the need for control and bondage, even how to make her come was a mystery that arrived from nowhere that first time.
And those creepy, horror-like scenes of women hanging from the ceiling—did they spring from my memory, or is it possible they planted new ones in my head?
I am a mystery to myself.
On the floor lies the black backpack I pilfered from the dusty deserted house.
Inside it is the handler’s phone, now dead, the charge expired.
In there may lie more of my past—a file on whatever happened or was done to me, perhaps.
But I do not have the skills to get those files open.
Recharging it, though, that should be possible.
I slip out of bed and pad over. I recall what a charger looks like, and Hailey has one plugged into the wall, with her own phone connected, lying on top of an antique dresser.
I head for it, then jolt and stumble. How do I know what an antique looks like or what a charger is? Those are more random memories sneaking in.
One day, hopefully, my memory will have bled in and filled up my head with everything I used to know. Until that day I doubt I will feel a complete person. I’m a charcoal sketch, a half-drawn thing that needs coloring in.
Feelings, I have those in abundance.
In my world, Hailey and I may have been married or partners…which would make the mission they gave me the worst one possible. Did someone send me to obliterate her father knowing I was in love with his daughter?
That would be the zenith of evil.
I unplug her phone and check the end of the charging cord, the part that must plug into my handler’s phone.
Then I turn his phone over. The jack or port—I think it’s called that.
The port looks wrong. Or the end of the charging cord does.
One of them is wrong, or both. They won’t fit together.
I close my eyes, and with hands wrapped on the edge of the waist-high dresser, I lean in and do a sort-of angled plank, tensing and rocking on my bare feet.
I breathe slowly to keep myself calm. There are too many questions.
My duct-taped finger lies before me, doing its job and hanging onto the dresser edge. When I bend the finger, the tape slips and slides. The cut seam where I joined the new dead finger onto my stump still looks ragged and ugly, though it doesn’t bleed. I rarely seem to bleed for long.
All these things, these differences between me, the devices, the normal people, her dad being already dead—they’re proof that Hailey’s world is not mine.
I give up on charging the handler’s phone, place Hailey’s on her little bedside table, and sit on the bed, idly rotating the little black phone in my hand.
My weight makes the mattress dip, and Hailey yawns, which makes me smile down at her.
The sheet has slid off her back to reveal her body all the way to her cute round ass.
One of my bites from last night left a perfect teeth-shaped bruise in the middle of the plumpest section of her left cheek.
I twist and collapse onto my side on the bed with my arm wrapped over her hip, so I can kiss the bruise.
“Heyyy,” she says sleepily. “What’re you doing down there?”
“Admiring my artwork.” I kiss her cheek again.
When she rolls over, I’m find myself at mouth level with her mound, so I kiss her there, too, then let one finger slide between her thighs and rest atop her slit.
I study her, loving how I can just put my finger there, how it made her catch her breath.
I keep my finger still, though I can feel the increased tension in her thighs and the slight moisture that’s gathering in the seam of her pussy.
She squirms her butt on the sheet. Squinting, I side-eye her, and still my finger remains motionless. Her teeth slide over her curling bottom lip, where she anchors them. “Ohh, this is some way to wake up.”
“You like me as an alarm clock? More?” I crank an eyebrow, twitch my finger.
Again, she squirms. “Yes?”
“Really?” I whisper that to her mound, kiss her again there, start to tease her pussy with my fingertip, just enough that she grows impatient and whispers a protest.
“Shhh. I want to turn you on for a long, long time. If you don’t move or touch me, you get rewarded.”
“Fuck. Really? It had better be good.”
“Really.” My finger dips inside her and she sighs, plops her head back onto the pillow. I kiss just above her clit then work at her, slowly pumping my finger in then out, licking at her, sucking a little. Her clit swells.
“God.” She groans. “More, more? As in you? Can I have you in me? My big bad…hot monster.” She has her hands curled into the sheet to either side, gripping it, slightly pushing herself at my mouth.
I rise above her to straddle her at knee level, and her gaze slips over me, pausing here and there, riveting onto where my cock sits upright. Her eyes are wide.
“I forget how awesome you look. Those scars complete you, make you into this perfectly pretty monster.”
Pretty? I frown.
“Fuck me?”
“Tempting, but…” If only I had a dildo to stick in her.
I’d make her wear a vibrating one all day.
Shove it inside her cunt and turn it on while she’s in the street.
Yet another stray memory, that. Buzzing dildos?
Where have I ever? I give up. I know things because I know things. “You want me inside you?”
“Yes!”
“Soon.” Then I slide down her and start to do oral on her, figuring I might stop when she’s leaked her arousal onto the sheets and I have her begging me properly.
“Remember. Stay.” I press her lower stomach to the bed, and she nods and looks intrigued. Good.
I stuff two fingers into her, and she squirms and whimpers but stays put.