Chapter 19
Aurora
I wake up with a heaviness in my limbs and a stickiness on my belly and between my legs. Curse isn’t in the bed, but he was last night. I remember it viscerally.
He made me come.
The first orgasm of my life.
He groaned like he was dying for me.
He didn’t let me touch him.
He called me his angel.
That last one is the most confusing. It didn’t sound sarcastic or cruel when he said it. It sounded like it had just…slipped out. In the heat of the moment. Like he never would have said it otherwise.
My fucking angel.
The fake name he chose for me was Angela. I didn’t think about it before, but doesn’t that mean angel, too?
Maybe it’s some bad fucking joke. Calling me an angel when I can’t even come close.
But of all the characteristics I could assign to Curse, of all the things I’ve learned about the adult version of him, I can’t say that having much of a sense of humour is one of them.
I can count the number of times I’ve heard him laugh on one hand, and it always comes out dark and mirthless.
I sit up in the bed. There’s no handcuff on me now. I hated that I experienced a stab of disappointment when he brought them out again last night. Even after what happened between us, nothing’s really changed. He’s still the monster using me for his brother.
I’m still the one who will one day be free of him.
Of all of them.
Starting with washing his come off of my skin.
I strip out of the dirty nightie as I walk to the bathroom, tossing it to the floor.
The skin of my stomach feels stiff from the fluid that has dried on me like glue, and my core goes hot and tight when I remember the sensation of it spurting down onto me.
He was frightening and beautiful and all-consuming when he came.
Somehow both powerful and vulnerable at once.
In the shower, all evidence of last night gets rinsed away. I use soap to fully erase it from my skin, washing every bit of my body before moving on to my hair. When that’s done I step out, grabbing the towel. As I wrap it around myself, Curse walks in.
“Stay here,” he says, pulling his shirt off over his head. “I’m going to shower, too.”
“I still have to do that?”
Since we’ve come to his house, I haven’t had to be in the bathroom for his showers. So far, he’s been doing it while I’ve been sleeping. Not today, I guess.
“Yes,” he says. “I won’t be long. We’re leaving for Toronto today.”
I watch the ripple of his muscles beneath the tattoos, making the ink bunch and stretch.
He kicks off the rest of his clothes, and for the first time, I glimpse his cock in the full view of bright bathroom light.
The long, ruddy organ of it. The dark hair at its base.
Besides his face, it’s the only part of him that’s not tattooed.
It twitches, and I gulp. When I raise my eyes, I find Curse watching me. Something sparks in his gaze, a violent flicker in the unending dark, and then it’s gone. He turns away from me, like it doesn’t matter that I’m there at all, and steps into the shower.
I can’t stay in here any longer. I don’t want to.
I won’t.
When the water turns on, I spin on my heel and leave the room.
It doesn’t take long for him to come for me.
I haven’t even dropped my towel to get dressed yet when strong arms grab me from behind. The towel falls, and I yelp as I’m borne up and over Curse’s shoulder. Like I’m nothing but a sack of potatoes.
“Put me down!” I wriggle in his hold, but it’s no use.
“No,” he says. He doesn’t sound pissed. He speaks the way he so often does, dispassionate and distant.
Like he expected this of me, and can’t even bring himself to be disappointed.
“I told you what would happen back in the motel. If you leave the room when I’m showering, and I can’t see you, then I will find you and drag you back. ”
This is less dragging and more caveman-style carrying, but his point still stands. He did tell me what would happen.
Part of me didn’t think he’d actually do it.
A worse part of me wanted him to.
He does put me down, but not until we’re both in the shower. He blocks the way out with his body. There’s no way I can get past him. I’d probably slip and crack my skull open if I even tried.
“Stay here,” he says again, scraping his wet hair back from his forehead. The water flattens the natural wave out of it, turns it glossy. Rolls down his body in worshipful rivulets. Down his tattooed neck, the hard lines and planes of his chest and abdomen, until it reaches his…
“Curse,” I gasp. “You’re…”
I can’t make myself say it, but I see it. He’s hard.
He ignores me, grabbing his body wash and squeezing it into his hand. He lathers it up, then begins to rub the suds all over himself. Beneath his arms. Down his belly. All around his groin.
Goosebumps prick along my arms, though I’m not cold. It’s hot in here from the steam. My nipples tighten, too, drawing his eyes like metal to a magnet.
With a sudsy hand, he grips his cock. Starts to stroke it. His eyes on me the entire time.
“Don’t move, angel.”
There it is again. Angel. Does he even realize he’s saying it?
Yet again, I find it impossible to obey him. I move, taking a step closer to him. So close that the slick tip of his cock bumps my belly.
His eyes flash. His free hand splays against the place between my breasts, pushing until he’s got me backed up against the shower wall.
“Don’t provoke me,” he growls, still pumping his cock in a relentless rhythm. “I barely have any control around you to begin with.”
Control?
What is he talking about?
“Why do you need control?”
He grabs me by the shoulder, spinning me around. Scared of falling, I plant my palms against the shower wall to steady myself
“Because when I fuck,” he rasps, “I don’t fuck gentle.”
“Maybe I don’t want gentle.”
Carlo was always gentle. Soft touches and syrupy words.
I want Curse to make me come again.
I want Curse to make it hurt.
There it is again – that bitter, humourless laugh. Like I’ve just said the stupidest thing he can imagine. I gasp, arching, when his cock fits itself into the cleft at the top of my thighs. He doesn’t push inside my pussy, but instead shoves forward, thrusting himself between my legs.
“You don’t even know what you want,” he growls. “But I know what you deserve. And I know it isn’t this.”
Suddenly his thrusts are harder. Faster. Brutal. I can’t even imagine how intense this would be if he were inside me right now. How painful. His fingers dig so cruelly into the flesh of my hips that I already know I’ll be bruised tomorrow.
He’s not even really fucking me and it already hurts.
He’s not even really fucking me and I’m already close to coming.
Curse is wrong. I do deserve this. And I do want this.
There’s an ugly sort of darkness inside me. The kind that recognizes his.
The kind that was made to answer it.
Maybe this is why Curse is the first man I’ve ever wanted. The first person who’s ever made me aroused. Not because I loved him before. Not because of who he once was.
But because of who he is now. A monster that won’t give me any mercy. Because mercy isn’t what I need. I need pain and pleasure and the suffocation of every thought in my reeling head.
“Put your legs closer together,” he orders, fisting my wet hair and dragging my head back towards him. “Squeeze me. Fuck.”
I clench hard, not even necessarily because he just told me to, but because I’m coming and I can’t fucking help it.
I trap his brutal hardness between my spasming thighs, moaning hoarsely.
Terrific slaps ring out as Curse slams his body against mine, rhythmic and rough.
If it weren’t for the wall ahead of me, I would have collapsed by now.
He swears again, another rasping “Fuck,” and then he’s coming, too, driving hard, shooting semen against the glass wall ahead of me. He’s still holding my hair and my left hip. My skin screams. My pussy squeezes over and over and over again.
When he finally releases me and pulls his softening cock from between my thighs, it feels like a loss I should be grieving.
“Stay here,” he says to me for the third time this morning.
I do.