Chapter Twenty-Seven
Micah
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because Tadhg is looking at me when I finally open my eyes.
His expression is guarded. Unreadable, except for how obvious it is that something isn’t right with him. And the fact that he’s not talking to me about it makes it clear that something isn’t right with us , either.
“Hey, doll.”
My voice is low and a little hoarse from not getting enough sleep. I reach out to run my thumb over his eyebrow and then down the side of his face, and he immediately closes his eyes. All the breath leaves his lungs—not like a normal exhale, but like a balloon letting all the air escape because it’s just been popped.
“How are you feeling?” I ask, but he stays still, and his eyes stay closed.
I get the impression that today isn’t going to be a day with lots of communication. Part of my brain is already wide awake and scrambling to find a solution. Solving problems is what I do. Tackling a crisis. It’s in my fucking bones.
But he seems more peaceful right now with my hands on him than he has in a while. I don’t want to be the one to burst that bubble of tranquility. Even if it’s only the illusion of tranquility.
“Tadhg?”
Again, no response. But he presses his face into my hand in a sort of nuzzling gesture, while his hands snake out under the covers to wrap around my waist and pull me closer to him. As soon as I’m near him, he’s pawing at me. Every part of my body is getting tugged until there’s not a single inch of space between us. I try to be mindful of his bruises, but he doesn’t even wince when I touch him. I suppose this level of pain is not something that registers for him, after everything he’s endured.
His eyes stay closed, but that doesn’t stop his mouth from finding me. He works his way over my collarbone, up my neck, all the way to my mouth, while his hands knead and squeeze whatever soft pieces of flesh they can find. His thick thighs wrap around mine, and I can feel how hard he already is as he drags his erection up and down my quad through the thin fabric of both our boxer briefs.
I think he tries to hide it, but I hear him whimper. Not in the horny way, either. It’s a desperate, desolate sound that he immediately tries to swallow before he ravages my mouth with his.
It’s easy to get swept up in the moment. Everything I’ve been thinking about is big and difficult and scary, and the more I focus on it, the more the negative part of my brain is whispering that it doesn’t see any way this situation could have a happy ending for us. I can’t let that happen, though. The bad guys don’t just get to win.
“What’s wrong?” I try for one more question, breaking off the kiss but holding his face close to mine as I run the fingers of my right hand through his hair, scratching at his scalp.
His lip fucking quivers.
Oh, Tadhg.
“Please,” he says. It’s all he says.
How can I say no to that?
“Yeah, okay. Come here, doll.”
He pushes his body against mine, as if we weren’t already fused together. I reach down and fumble blindly under the sheets until we’re both naked, and Tadhg is already panting, rocking his hips against me and leaking a trail of precum over my thigh as he dry-humps me. For all the concerns filling my head with noise, I’m still fucking rock hard myself, because he never fails to get me there.
There’s just something about him going from the most closed-off, tightly wound person I’ve ever seen to this wanton, desperate, slutty thing that immediately turns me all the way on. It’s gorgeous. So unabashedly sexual and submissive, like he’s subconsciously trying to make up for how much of his life he’s spent repressed and contained.
I never want it to stop. I grab on to his ass with both hands, digging my fingers into all the muscle and flesh there and guiding him as he rocks into me. He starts making those little ah-ah sounds that he sometimes does before he comes, and this has got to be a record for how quickly he’s gotten himself there.
He deserves this. I keep rocking him, enjoying the feel of his soft skin stretched over a flushed, stiff cockhead everywhere it touches me. Enjoying the way my own cock keeps dragging across his hipbone as he rides my leg.
And of course, I can’t help but bring my mouth to his ear to whisper to him.
“So perfect for me, doll. A perfect, desperate slut with a greedy cock and a needy pussy. You look so beautiful when you ride me, I want you to make a mess all over my stomach like the hot little prize that you are. What a good girl. Rubbing off on my leg like she needs to. Perfect.”
Tadhg’s small gasps turn to choked, bitten-off moans and cries as his movements get faster and more uncoordinated. He’s getting close, but I still have time to suck my middle finger into my mouth, getting it nice and wet, before reaching back down and slipping it into his entrance to seek out his prostate.
As soon as I stroke him inside, he loses it. With an anguished cry, he stiffens and spills thick ropes of white all over my chest, stomach, and pubes. It’s everywhere. It erupts with the same level of desperation that he was humping me with.
We’re both panting as he comes down from the orgasm high, and he’s staring at me with those gold-tinged eyes, wide and full of wonder. Well, fear and wonder.
The fear is always there when I look at him. No matter what, it’s never truly gone.
“Better?” I ask.
He pants more, his breathing not slowing down. For a second, I worry that he’s about to cry or segue into a panic attack. Instead, he starts pawing at me all over again.
“More,” he says, his voice cracking. “More, Bambi. Please.”
I frown, because I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him desperate in quite this way before. No matter how much begging he’s done for me in the relatively short time since we started fucking.
His big, warm hand wraps around my cock and when he strokes me, his grip is tight enough to make me hiss. I can feel his intensity in every single movement, every shadow, every flicker of his expression.
He needs something from me.
I don’t know what, but I can guess.
I don’t waste time. I know my broth–lover better than anyone.
He whines when I lean away from him, but it’s only for a second. I fish something out of the nightstand, along with the lube. When I turn back to him, he looks wrecked, like I’m about to bail. I’ll show him exactly how much I’m unwilling to let him go, though.
I let myself be as rough as I need to be. I’m careful not to put pressure directly on the bruising over his ribs, but other than that I don’t hold back, grabbing and pushing his larger, heavier body until he’s flipped over on his belly on the bed with his legs spread wide. I pull his beautiful cheeks apart and spit onto his hole, making as much of a mess as I can, before reaching around for my toy.
“Don’t worry, doll. I’m right here. I’ve got what you need.”
By the time I finish speaking, the toy is covered in lube. I brace one hand on his ass and then, without warning and with no hesitation, I slide the entire thing into his hole.
He fucking howls. And I get it. It’s a slim little toy, significantly smaller than most of the things I like to put in his ass, but with no prep whatsoever it’s still going to catch him off guard. I don’t relent, though. He’s bucking and writhing, and I still manage to turn the fucker on to maximum vibrate where it sits snuggly against his prostate.
More animalistic noises tear out of his mouth as his hips jerk. I give his ass a sharp, hard slap for good measure. Hard enough to watch the skin pink up where I touched him. Then I slide my hand up to the back of his neck and scruff him like a lion cub.
“None of that, doll. You’re getting what you need right now. You wanted my hands on you. You asked for this.”
I’ll cover every inch of his bruised skin with my own loving marks until he forgets his father’s fucking hands have ever touched him, if that’s what it takes.
I roll him onto his back again, pulling him until his head is hanging backwards off the side of the bed. The angle leaves his throat completely open and mine for the taking, and just like with the vibrator, I don’t hesitate. I’ve been aching hard for too long, and I slide the whole, hard length of me into his throat, moaning as the muscles there flutter around me.
“Perfect.”
That’s all he gets before I’m too breathless to talk because I’m fucking his throat with abandon. His whole body—all 200-something pounds of muscle—rocks with each movement. His face and neck are already bright red, the flush crawling down his chest underneath all the black lines of his tattoos. And every sound that comes out of his mouth is depraved. Choking, gagging sounds that should repulse me, but actually only make me want to fill him with my cum even more.
I smother him. Not just choking him on my cock but covering his nose sometimes. Crushing his face with my pelvis. There’s no reprieve, just enough of a break each time so he can suck in the air he needs to keep living and then it’s back to gagging and seeing stars. I couldn’t even say how long it goes on for, because I get just as lost in it as he is.
He doesn’t get hard again, but I can see him chubbed a little, dark red where his cock lays against his skin and still wet from before. His hips are still jerking as the vibrator pummels his prostate relentlessly, while the rest of his body has gone limp.
When I feel my orgasm building, I pull out of his mouth. The only sounds are the wet, rattling gasps of air that he’s taking, but that’s quickly cut off when I start repositioning him again.
I’m almost there, but he needs to hurt more. I know it. If I don’t hurt him enough now, he’ll just spend the day wandering around, finding some other way to hurt himself. As long as I do it, I know it’s a hurt he can quickly recover from.
It pushes me to be rougher and more aggressive than I’ve ever been with a partner before. Even ones who asked for it. Every touch leaves a mark. As I maneuver him, I pinch him, scratch him, bite him and slap at the most tender, exposed pieces of his flesh. Even the bruising on his ribs, I’m still careful not to press on, but I scrape the skin with my fingernails over and over, hard enough to make him wail.
Every touch makes him cry out, but his hips keep working like he’s fucking the air and at some point, he starts whispering please, please, please whenever there’s a gap between the pain.
Once he’s back on his stomach, I feel for the vibrator and yank it out. He spreads his legs as wide as he can for me, his thighs already quaking so hard I’m surprised he can control them. I shouldn’t lose momentum, but I can’t help myself. He’s so fucking beautiful here.
I let myself stroke the pads of my fingers over his hole—now bright pink and slick with lube—before dipping them inside and tugging at the rim for a minute. Just a tease. Just rubbing my finger around his rim, applying pressure as I go.
That’s all the prep he gets.
Once my body is braced over his, chest to back, I lean close so I can whisper in his ear one more time.
“You’re getting everything you deserve, Tadhg. Never forget that.”
I don’t know how he’ll take the words in his state of mind, but I mean them. He deserves this. He deserves to be loved unconditionally, no matter how fucked up he feels or how much his hurt makes him act out. And I’ll be damned if anyone is going to stop me doing it.
I press a gentle kiss to his temple, noticing the tear tracks covering his face and nuzzling against them for just a second.
Then I lean back and push my lube-covered cock inside him. Again, he gets no respite. Just burning, stretching pain combined with the pleasure of being filled.
He doesn’t scream this time. He moans, long and low, while his body trembles beneath me and his hands fist the sheet over and over in a desperate movement.
As soon as I’m seated, I start to fuck. Because as much as I love him, this isn’t sex or making love. This is fucking. This is buck-nasty fucking.
The sounds we make are wet and loud, accompanied by my hoarse grunts and Tadhg’s constant, feral cries. I ride his ass as hard and fast as I can, and it feels like he’s squeezing around me the whole time, trying to suck me deeper, trying to keep me deep inside.
“Come again for me, doll. I know you can.” I punctuate this with the hardest slap to his ass I can manage from this angle.
His cock is still soft, but his body is so responsive to everything I don’t think that will stop him. I know he has one more in him, and I want to pull it out of him.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he moans, unable to articulate more than that.
“Yes.” My voice is sharp and full of authority.
I jerk his hips so they’re higher off the bed but put one hand on his shoulder blades, so his chest and face are still buried in the covers. With my other hand, I reach around to fondle him with the same aggressive, relentless energy I’m burying my cock inside him with, feeling him thicken a little more under my touch.
“I can’t,” he wails, but I only squeeze him tighter.
“Yes, you can. You’re my perfect doll, and you have cum inside you that I need to fuck out. Can you get it out for me? Every last drop. Give it to me.”
No more words come from Tadhg, but he starts sobbing. His hips are working though, grinding against me as I keep jerking him. I can feel the telltale pulse and twitch of his cock as he gets closer.
“That’s it. Perfect. Give it all to Bambi.”
Then he really does cry out. It’s loud. Bother-my-neighbors loud and sounds more like an animal than a human being. But at the same time, his cock pulses and jerks in my hand; hard enough to surprise me.
There isn’t a lot of cum left in him, but whatever he has left he slowly drips out of his body like it’s some kind of exorcism. The sheets beneath him are wet with it, and it’s all I need to push me over the edge.
With both hands on his hips, I ride him as hard as I can for a few more thrusts before burying myself as deep as I can and pulsing my own load into his tight little hole. I can practically picture it flooding his insides. Filling him up until he’s soaked in all the creamy fluid I could possibly pour into him. Stretching his belly from the inside out because there’s so much.
It’s an exaggeration, but the thought makes me shiver all the same.
I can’t help but place one hand over his belly as I pull his back to my chest. As if I could feel the head of my cock and the swell of all that cum distending him from the inside.
Tadhg is just crying now. Sobbing. It’s good, though. This is what I wanted. I needed him to let go of whatever he was holding on to. I even manage to wrap my arms around his chest and then gently lower us both to the mattress on our sides without slipping out of him.
We lie like that for a very long time. I go soft eventually, but I stay inside him as long as I can, plugging my own cum in there. I keep him close, but don’t say anything. I let him cry. I want it all out, and I don’t want to do anything to interfere. We can talk when he’s done.
He goes straight from crying to falling asleep, but that’s okay. We’re both disgusting and normally I’d make us clean up first, but this seems like a ‘fuck it’ kind of day.
So, I fall back asleep as well with him still in my arms. Both of us sticky and on filthy sheets, but with nothing left to lose.
Savage
I’m grateful that Micah still doesn’t push me to talk once we wake up for the second time. I can barely get my limbs to cooperate, let alone string a sentence together, after the fucking I received.
I’ve seen a lot of sides to my former stepbrother. Frightened, confident, sexy as fuck, even the dominant side that surprised me so much when I first realized that was a part of him. But the kind of raw, animalistic frenzy is nothing I expected from him.
When he’s broken me down before, it’s been methodical. He’s edged me until I cried. He never physically tried to destroy me. I’m so fucking thankful that he did, though.
I don’t know how he always has this sixth sense for what I need, even when I have no clue. But that was it. That was fucking it. He nailed it.
I feel liquid now. Still exhausted at my core, and just… sad. I’m so sad about everything that’s happened and everything I know is about to happen. I know that sounds childish. Adults should have more complex emotions or something.
Nope. I got nothing. Just tired and sad. I’m sad because of how much I’ve wasted my shitty life. I’m sad because I don’t actually think I’ll ever convince Father to let me leave the Banna alive, after yesterday, and I’m sad because through all of this, I couldn’t even manage to do the one thing Micah asked me to and not kill Eamon.
The satisfaction of sliding my knife into his skull offset that sadness a fraction, obviously. Motherfucker deserved so much worse. But it pales in the face of how weak I feel for letting Micah down.
I should just tell him and get this over with. If he leaves me, at least it’ll be done, and I can stop hovering in the in-between. Maybe he should push me.
He broke me down so systematically that I’ll tell him anything he wants to know right now. All he needs to do is open his mouth and ask.
There’s fuck-all food in the apartment, so Micah orders us some deli sandwiches from town. He reminds me to shower, because I’m absolutely vile, and joins me in there even though he keeps the whole thing PG. The only words we exchange are practical ones, but the whole time we move around this small space together, Micah watches me.
He watches, and watches, and watches.
I feel like a bomb is ticking somewhere. It’s probably the only thing that gets my sluggish, cum-drunk body to eventually switch back on.
“Bambi, can you please say it. Whatever you’re trying not to say, just say it. I can’t take the suspense anymore.”
Ok, so it looks like I was the one to snap.
My hands are shaking a little, and I’m staring at him from across the open living space where he’s putting the sandwiches onto plates in the kitchen. At first, he gives me a wide-eyed look. Then he sighs, and his shoulder slump.
“I was trying not to pressure you, because I know how bossy I can be. Apparently, I was unsuccessful.”
He wanders over to me, one plate in each hand, and places them on the little coffee table. When he gestures toward the couch, I walk over and sit. It’s unnatural, though. I feel stiff and like I’m taking up too much space. Like my legs are wrong and my hands are in a weird place on my body.
This could be the last moment in my life before Micah decides he’s finally done with my shit.
This could be the last moment in my life.
The thought fills me with even more exhaustion, but also a certain sense of peace. It’s all out of my control, now. I can only take whatever happens and then drift away from the consequences if I can’t deal with them. It makes me weak, sure, but what else is new?
“Tadhg, breathe!”
Micah’s voice interrupts my thoughts, and I pull in a breath. He moves toward me on the couch, running one hand up the back of my neck and threading the other through the fingers of my right hand.
“See, this is fucking concerning me, Tadhg. This. What is happening? Obviously giving you space isn’t working, and neither is fucking some serenity into you. I’m out of ideas so I’m going back to being bossy. Tell me what’s happening before I go down there and ask Patrick myself.”
“No,” I growl, even though I know he’s bluffing.
I did all this to keep him away from Father.
Micah’s eyes soften, but his mouth twists and I see so much of my sadness reflected in his face that it makes me physically ache. His thumb slides up into my hairline, and his fingers scratch hard into the skin at the base of my skull, scratching me over and over as if he can force some relaxation into me.
“Then tell me, doll. Just tell me. Whatever it is.”
“Eamon’s dead.”
Micah frowns and looks confused for a second. Then realization dawns, and his mouth forms a small ‘O’. For a second, I think he’s going to ask me outright, but then he looks around his apartment as if he thinks it might be bugged.
“This is what your fight with Patrick was about, I’m guessing.”
Those are the words he settles on in the end, but we both know what he means.
I nod, and he takes a long time to absorb the information. It’s too quiet. I shrink further and further into myself, fighting the urge to physically curl up small and ignore all of this until it goes away.
I don’t know when I stopped even being able to pretend to be strong, but it happened. And I’m so far past caring about it.
“I’m sorry, Tadhg,” Micah says at last.
Something in me cracks. Which makes something else splinter, and then crack after crack spreads through my body. I’m a salt pillar, hard on the outside but so riddled with fissures that I only need one tiny breeze to utterly collapse.
This is it. This is when he tells me to leave.
I don’t feel sad anymore, though. Numbness is quickly taking over.
“I shouldn’t have told you not to do it. That was dumb. It was never in your control in the first place, and I knew that. I was just being self-righteous or something.”
The words come to me, but they’re difficult to parse through the whomp-whomp of blood rushing through my ears.
“What?”
Micah’s eyebrows meet in the middle, and he leans in closer to me, his hand still on my neck.
“I shouldn’t be giving you ultimatums, Tadhg. It was selfish. Not while Patrick still has all the power, here. I’m sorry I made you feel like you couldn’t tell me.”
When I still don’t answer him, blinking slowly and trying to absorb all this, Micah moves closer and ends up climbing into my lap. He wraps his legs around my waist, still gentle on the side with my bruised ribs, but his arms loop around my shoulders and squeeze me as tightly as he can.
It helps. I take a few more short, tight breaths and feel the fog lifting. He’s not leaving me?
“I love you, Tadhg. I told you. I’m in love with you. That doesn’t change because you get trapped in a shitty situation or you fuck up. I know we’re both kind of used to love with strings attached so it’s hard to grasp, but we can at least change that with each other, right?”
I just keep staring at him. Every word in the English language has evacuated my brain.
“Unless,” he says, his brow furrowing. “You don’t feel the same?”
Well, if I ever hated anything in my life, it wasn’t as much as I hate the unsure look on his face right now. Not my Bambi. That’s the final gut punch that gets my gears turning again and brings my tongue back to life.
“Of course I do, Bambi. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. I’ll do anything for you. I just wish I could stop being so weak and letting you down.”
“Oh, doll,” he whispers, before kissing me lightly on each cheek and then my forehead. “I told you before, but I’ll tell you every day if you need me to. You’re so strong. You’re so good. You have no idea how good you are, but I do. I promise, you could never do anything to let me down. Just keep being here and letting me love you.”
I nod, choking on a lump in my throat too big to talk through.
He kisses me. Not deeply, but when he opens his mouth, I respond, and he laves his tongue lazily against mine. It goes on for a while, even though it’s not headed anywhere. It feels good to have him in my hands. I want him wrapped around me forever.
When he breaks off the kiss, it’s too soon and I chase him. He wants to talk, though.
“We need to deal with Patrick, though. That sadistic prick. We can’t keep living in this in-between. You and me, brainstorming. Right now. We either have to find something to frighten him into letting you go, or something valuable enough to trade him so he’ll let you go. So, you tell me. What’s Patrick afraid of?”
I frown. I never really thought about him being afraid of anything. For my entire life, he’s been a cross between a supervillain and an inhuman vigilante. Always there, always waiting, always larger than life.
Does he even feel fear?
“Come on,” Micah says. “There has to be something. Spiders? Clown tchotchkes? Other gangsters? The inevitability of aging? Prison?”
I tilt my head to the side, because maybe he’s onto something.
“The law, maybe. He’s never been to prison, and I know he doesn’t want to go now that he’s getting older. He cares about his reputation and his legacy more than his money, which is why I was always so important to him, I think. I needed to carry on his name. That was what he talked about, anyway.”
Micah looks thoughtful and then pecks me on the lips for good measure.
“Okay. We can work with that. Let’s think.”