Atlas
I was never a forgiving man, but right now I can be. For her.
I can forgive her for manipulating me.
I can forgive her for lying to me.
I can forgive her for hurting me.
I can forgive her, and I will.
She played me, tricked me into falling for her, but was it really a trick when everything I worship about her is real?
“Maeve,” I say her name out loud, but it doesn’t feel right. It’s foreign. Like it was never hers. For me, she is Summer. I will not call her by a different name when my mind has screamed the only one I knew a billion times already.
Taking the corner of the cover, I pull it away from her, revealing that perfect body of hers, naked like I always want it, there for me to take, to own.
My hands find the mattress as I climb atop her, fingers gliding over silky skin, touching everything I’ve claimed, not sure if it’s all I took or all that was given to me.
Leaning in, I trace her lips with my own, whispering over them.
“Are you still playing me, love?” The words choke me as I utter them, but once out loud, they stab my chest like I’m being cut open. “Look at what you are doing to me . . . Succubus.”
I draw back, standing on my heels, removing my shirt, and throwing it to the ground.
My belt follows, the clinking of the buckle doing nothing to awaken my sleeping beauty.
I unbutton my jeans until her favorite toy is out, though at this point I’m not sure if it’s my dick or me that’s her most beloved thing to play with.
Settling between her legs, I leave a trail of hungry kisses on the inside of her thighs, touching, inhaling her, like it’s the first, the last, and the only time I’ve ever done this, savoring everything about her I hold on a pedestal and worship every second she’s in my possession.
My mouth seals on her pussy, letting her taste possess me, as my tongue enters her like I’m starving.
The songlike, mellow sound she lets out is a melody I’d kill for.
Pulling myself up, I find her lips, wanting to swallow those sounds and keep them for myself, while pushing my cock in, forcing her cunt to take all of me.
But there’s nothing forced in the way she greets me inside, gripping tightly while her eyes snap open with a gasp.
I kiss her as if I won’t be able to breathe if I don’t.
“You’re drunk,” she states against my lips.
I slam inside her hard, and her body arches beneath me on a moan to die for.
“Maybe I’m more fun like this.”
I halt, my thumb tracing those luscious, lying lips which can still, despite it all, command my soul.
“Atlas?” Her brows pinch. “What’s wrong?” Summer reads me all too well. Seems she always has.
I thrust to the hilt, harder than before, leaving her breathless. She left me suffocating with her betrayal, so it’s only proper to return the favor. And then the cadence of my movements shifts to match the rhythm of my madness.
“Stop!” Summer utters underneath me, hands on my cheeks, trying to make my eyes meet hers. “Atlas, stop!”
And like an obedient dog, I do, because her wishes will always be my command.
“What’s wrong? Talk to me!”
Her face changes, rearranges, to match the pain my own holds.
I pull myself out of her, lying atop, as my head finds her chest, heartbeat there telling me a story of how I got it all wrong. She’s no carnivorous flower. She’s poisonous. A unique kind of poison runs in my veins now—one that will kill me if I ever stop consuming it.
Her fingertips find their rightful place in my hair with a gentle caress, lessening the pain, luring me into forgetting anything but her exists.
But it does, doesn’t it?
“I want you to tell me what happened to your family. I want the whole story. Why were they killed?”
She pulls her hands away from me, and I look back at her, finding her face holding a not-so-stoic mask, since she can no longer maintain a convincing one around me.
“You’re drunk.”
“Yeah. Not drunk enough.”
“You know, when people get as drunk as you are, they pick fights with judgmental decorative statues, write love letters on a pizza box, or summon demons on a napkin. But you—you go straight to morbid.”
“No!” I’m not letting her deflect. “Fuckin’ tell me! Now!”
She goes silent, her eyes begging me not to ask this of her.
I inch closer, lips hovering over hers, uttering a single command.
“Kiss me!”
She leans in, giving me a gentle kiss, full of love, full of fire, and so much more that’s left unsaid. When she pulls away, her palms stay on my cheeks, running her thumbs there like wiping tears that aren’t on my face, but on hers.
“My father used to work for a good man for over fifteen years.”
Her chest rises as she draws in a shaky breath before she proceeds.
“Not good in the conventional way. He had a criminal front, but he was good to us. We were family to him. His daughter was . . .” There’s a beat of hesitation.
“is my best friend. When her father died of a heart attack, her stepmother fired everyone loyal to her dead husband, including my father. My best friend was not yet in a position of power to have kept us there, so my dad had to find someone else to work for.”
She takes a gulp of air, and then another, like telling the truth makes it harder to breathe. Biting her lower lip, she pauses, staring straight into my eyes, asking once more for a way out. But I won’t give it to her this time, and she knows it.
“One day, he came home with multiple stab wounds on his arms and a bullet inside his thigh. A failed one-off for ‘a special kind of monster,’ was my father’s explanation, but . . .”
Her head tilts in a subtle shake, like she’s unconvinced by her own words.
“I swear those cuts looked a lot like he’d been tortured. Dad said his convoy got ambushed after a handoff. Everyone but him was killed, and the money from the deal was taken.”
For a brief second, her focus shifts away from me, and both her brows and the corners of her lips tighten.
“If he had shown up after that failure, he would’ve been killed. If not, it would look like he took the money. My father knew he was a dead man walking. For that amount of money, all of us were as good as gone.”
She bites her lip to stop it from trembling.
“Go on!” I urge her, and another tear falls down her cheek, which I catch with my thumb and wipe away.
“If he hadn’t taken the FBI deal for witness protection, we would’ve been dead a long time ago.
So we ran, we disappeared. We tried so hard to fit in, the misfits that we were.
An ex-soldier with temper issues. A poker hustler who kept hustling the housewives.
A pyro who had to suppress those destructive instincts.
And me—the psycho that I am. We did fit in a way .
. . until we didn’t. Until, as I told you already, we were found. ”
Summer pauses, silently asking me if this is enough. A slight shake of my head tells her it isn’t. Her gaze falls for a brief moment before finding me once more, while a hand of mine goes over hers, reassuring her that I have her. She can fall, and I’ll catch her.
“That night, when we were packing, waiting for a call from the FBI agent to relocate us, that’s when they came.
Five men. When they burst into our house, we tried to fight them.
They shot my brother’s leg. At gunpoint, they made me and Milo kneel next to each other before calling their boss.
Killing us was not enough for that man. He wanted to see us suffer.
He watched as two of his goons . . . raped my mom right before our eyes.
My father was screaming. Milo was shouting at them to stop, and I .
. . I just . . . I kept crying . . . helpless. ”
Her eyes shut, but tears keep slipping down her cheeks.
“When they were done with her, they . . . put a bullet into her chest first and then—” A sob chokes her words, and her eyes lose focus, like she’s watching it happen somewhere else.
“One to the head.” Her voice comes out detached, hollow.
“That’s the last time my father made any sound.
For the next hour or so, those men kept peeling skin from his body, poking holes and cutting parts of him, while that monster, on the other side of the line, watched, directed, and laughed.
” Her eyes press shut for a heartbeat before she looks at me again.
“That sound haunts my nightmares. They took . . .”
Summer pauses mid-sentence, like she misplaced the recollection somewhere and refuses to look for it. More tears roll down her cheeks when her lips part, ready to speak.
“They took one eye and one ear, so my father would still see and hear us while we watched our hero being dismembered piece by piece, until he . . . he barely looked human. They used the adrenaline boost from my EpiPens to keep dad from passing out. When they were finally ordered to . . .” She swallows hard, “put him down, he looked at my brother and me one last time, with guilt like . . . I’ve never seen before. ”
Her lips quiver as another sob escapes, her eyes struggling to hold mine through a wall of tears.
“The monster’s right-hand . . . He took over the call. The order for Milo’s death came through, along with a carte blanche for his men to have their fun with me before they killed me.”
My molars grind hard enough to crack while I squeeze her in my arms. What my father put her through . . . I should kill him myself.
“He couldn’t even say a word before they—” A raw, fractured sound tears out of her. “They . . .” She tries to speak through it, but chokes on her words.
“I can’t!” With a shake of her head, she breaks before me. “I can’t!”
Cupping her face, I try to steady her, whipping away the salty trails that stream down her cheeks.
“They blew his brains out, and the blood splattered all over my face.” Summer spits out fast, like she’s trying to outrun the memory.
But she can’t.