Chapter 11 #2
Sam is lying on my bed. He’s bloodied and fast asleep.
He’s wearing a white shirt, but it has been ripped to shreds.
There are bandages on his chest and torso, but they’re bleeding through.
His breathing looks pained and shallow. There’s bruising around his left eye, and his nose looks broken and reset, and someone has punched him in the mouth for sure.
I should call the police. I should call an ambulance.
I reach for my phone.
One of his eyes flickers open. The only one that can, I think.
“Don’t,” he croaks out.
“What the hell happened to you?”
I already know what happened. He tried to prey on the wrong person and he got his shit handed to him.
“I had a disagreement with some gentlemen,” he says. “I need some time to recover. I don’t believe they know about you, so this should be a relatively safe place.”
I should kick him out. I should go to the cops. I should…
I go to the kitchen, get a bowl of warm water, a towel, and some soap, and come back and sit on the side of the bed next to him.
“You bled all over my floor,” I say. “You’re probably bleeding all over my bed, too, you know that?”
“I’ll replace whatever…”
“Stop talking,” I say. “You need your strength to recover from whatever happened. Were you shot? Do you need a doctor? How come you didn’t just go to your house and call one of your evil doctors?”
“If they don’t kill me, your questions will,” he says.
“Do you need a doctor?”
“I’ve called one,” he says. “I got patched up at the time, but…”
“Did you call a cleaner, too? And a bed store?”
That one eye focuses on me with annoyance. “Is this your idea of being helpful, Laura?”
He’s managing to lecture me even in this state. I don’t particularly care for his tone.
“I am being helpful. I’m letting you use my bed as a full body sanitary pad,” I say.
“You’re angry at me,” he says. “You think I abandoned you after Vegas.”
“There was a different woman teaching class today,” I say. “She wasn’t you.”
“A sin for which she will never atone,” he says dryly.
Knock. Knock.
The doctor is here. He’s a tall, lean man with a serious expression.
He’s younger than I expect him to be. Mid-twenties, maybe.
Barely old enough to be qualified. Probably a med student moonlighting in the underworld to pay off his student loans.
The idea sounds far-fetched, but I’m pretty sure that has to be what is happening.
“Dr. Black,” he says as he walks right past me into my house, following the trail of blood to the bedroom, where he opens a black bag and starts poking around Sam.
“A few inches to the left or right,” he mutters.
“And?” Sam asks the question. “They would have killed me?”
“And they would have missed you entirely,” Dr. Black says.
I snort. I like this guy. He’s funny. Even Sam grunts with appreciation.
“It’s a shallow wound and it’s missed anything super important,” the doctor says. “But it’s going to hurt for a while, and you need to stay clear of other murderous activities for a few weeks at least.”
I turn my eyes away as he stitches the wounds that must have just had gauze or something pushed into them before. He must have patched himself up, then come to my house, moved something in the kitchen that made him bleed, then just collapsed on my bed.
The doctor is efficient, but thorough. He cleans up all the wounds, stitches what needs to be stitched, and generally ensures that Sam is in one piece. He doesn’t make conversation while he works aside from a few dry comments that reveal a dark sense of humor.
I clean up the kitchen floor while he works, and go down the hall and stairs too in order to get any blood that might have spilled along the way.
It feels good to be doing something while swept up in this strangeness, which is itself a relief from the awful monotony that had already begun to set in.
The doctor passes me on the stairs, gives me a quiet nod, and walks out of my life without anything in the way of aplomb. He is like a dark ghost. I go back into my apartment and find Sam in my bed, slightly tidier, but still having ruined the sheets.
“I’ll buy you a new mattress,” he promises me as he catches me looking at the mess.
“Okay,” I say.
I go and have a shower, for all that is worth. I know I am going to end this night smeared in blood. It’s good to get the clothes I wore to college off, though. I shed the pretense of normality and put on the jimmy jams of what the fuckery, then I go and sit next to him on the bed.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?”
“It’s best you don’t know,” he says.
“Did you try to fuck someone and end up getting stabbed?”
His lips quirk. “No,” he says “You’re the only one I try to fuck. This was a different matter.”
“Then what was it?”
He turns his head toward me, though that seems to be more effort than he really wants to make.
“How many times are you planning on asking that before realizing I have no intention of answering?”
“How many times am I going to have to ask before you answer?”
HIs response is to grab me by the arm and pull me down next to him, pulling me against the uninjured parts of his body.
“Quiet,” he growls softly against my ear.
I let myself stop talking. There’s no point trying to force conversation, and he is obviously seriously injured. I am relieved he is here. I am happy I know where he is. I am glad he is in my bed. This is…
“Suck my cock, baby,” he orders softly.
“What?”
“Suck my dick.”
I hesitate. He’s so injured. I know I shouldn’t. I should never do any sexual thing for him. But there’s something in his tone that makes me want to acquiesce. It’s a dominant command, but there’s vulnerability there too. He wants me to help him feel better.
I slide down the bed and I take him in my mouth. It’s slower and sweeter than it usually is. He doesn’t thrust his hips, or grab my head to keep it in place. He lets me do what I want to do, lying back and giving me a rare dose of what feels like it might be control.
He has his secrets. Deep, dark ones, I am sure.
I have none. I am an open book to him, and sometimes I feel like he has read every page even before I’ve had the chance to write it.
With my mouth wrapped around his cock, I’m not learning anything more overt about him, but it does feel like I am learning his body better.
I pay attention to what happens when I do specific little things with my tongue, how he reacts to the tip of it playing around under the flare of the head of his cock. He makes the most delightful noises when I engulf him more fully after teasing him to the brink.
“I’m going to come,” he growls, giving me some warning that I don’t really need because I can feel his cock pulsing, and the tightness of his balls is a dead giveaway. He couldn’t hold back if he wanted to, and I am not going to let him.
He grunts and winces in pain, and of course he comes.
I think about swallowing it so it doesn’t make a mess, but then I’m reminded that the bed is a write-off at this point anyway.
I let him cover himself in his seed. It feels appropriate somehow not to take it down into myself, but I guess we’re way past appropriate.
“Thank you, baby,” he murmurs as I slide back up his body and rest my head on his shoulder.
I feel a sense of peace with him that I absolutely should not feel. He’s obviously mixed up in terrible dark things, affairs that have nothing whatsoever to do with his public front as a famous psychologist. Someone really wanted to hurt him today. I would have been devastated if he’d been killed.
Fuck. I love him.
I’ve fallen in love with a man who holds me captive, uses me sexually, will not answer to me, and is probably evil and psychopathic.
I really thought I was going to break the cycle of my family, but it’s starting to feel like I’m just doubling down on it in a way none of my poor forebears would have managed.
I fall asleep before I can dedicate too much more time to worrying.
When I wake up in the morning, Sam isn’t in bed with me. There’s a brown and red patch where he was lying. I think about cleaning it up for a moment, then remember he said he was going to replace the mattress completely. He’s going to have to do that today because it’s going to start decomposing.
I get up and go to the kitchen, where I find Sam is wearing black jeans and nothing else. His hair is hanging in his eyes as he fries up some eggs.
He looks like a completely different person, younger, less psycho, or maybe more so given how many bandages are on his body.
They’re not bleeding now though. The doctor did a good job of patching him back up.
There’s something else too, though. I look at him for a long moment before realizing what it is.
He has a day’s worth of beard growth on his face.
It’s dark black and it adds an attractive shadow to his face, making him look even more dangerous and masculine than he usually does.
The illusion of a refined professor is starting to disappear in front of me.
“Hi,” I say, feeling suddenly shy. This is my apartment and he’s in danger, but it feels like he owns the place. And me. God, I am in so deep. I want to run my hands over his rough face. I want to…
“Sit down,” he says, gesturing at the kitchen table. “I’ll get you some eggs and toast.”
“Our second breakfast together,” I say, sitting down. “We’re starting to make a habit of this.”
He smirks in a sexy kind of way. I am nervous, that’s why I’m being so cheesy.
He’s so fucking hot. He has always been hot.
He has always excited me, but there’s a whole new side of him that I am seeing right now, a kind of domestic, broken, but still so fucking absolutely hot side.
When he’s in his suit in class, making his presentations, he’s so polished.
Right now he’s rough and he’s practical and I kind of love it.