Chapter 14 Jillian
JILLIAN
“I want to fuck you like an animal / I want to feel you from the inside”
— “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails
The clear shine on his fingers.
The red lash of his tongue between them.
The pale gray of his eyes.
The black, black, black of his mask.
“Say the word and I’ll leave,” he murmurs. “I’ll go out the window and you’ll lock it behind me and tomorrow, you’ll pretend this never happened. Just like last time.”
I don’t speak.
“Or,” he continues, “you don’t say anything at all. And I don’t leave.”
My breathing is ragged. My fingers are still wrapped around his forearm. I can feel the tendons grinding and pulsing under his skin. We’re reaching a breaking point, but whether it’s him breaking or me breaking remains to be seen…
… until I speak.
“Just… don’t take off the mask,” I whisper.
The Masked Man’s goes very still. His eyes search mine. “What did you say?”
“The mask stays on.” My throat is dry. “That’s my condition. The only thing I’m asking for. Don’t take it off.”
I can’t fully explain why I’m saying this. If I did, it would probably go something like this: If I see his face, he becomes a person, and if he becomes a person, then this is real, and if this is real, then I have to feel it, and if I have to feel it, then I’ll fall the fuck apart.
The mask makes him no one. That’s the only way this works.
He nods once. “It stays on.”
Then he lowers me until my feet touch the floor, but he doesn’t let go. His hand stays fisted in my shirt, right over my sternum. He walks me backward, away from the wall, into the open space of the kitchen. My bare feet find cold tile.
There, he stops and looks down at me. I look up at him.
“Get on your knees, little fox,” he says.
I sink down. My knees hit the frigid floor and then I’m sitting back on my heels, looking up at him the way I did that first night—except everything is different now. That night, I knelt because he told me to and I was terrified.
Tonight, I kneel because this is the only place that feels safe anymore.
He crouches in front of me. His gloved hand comes up and cups the side of my face. “You’re shaking,” he says. “Are you scared?”
I gulp and nod. “Yes.”
“Of me?”
“Yes,” I croak. “But also of myself.”
He pulls the glove off with his teeth. Bare skin now. His thumb traces along my cheekbone, over the freckles there, down to my jaw. His hand is huge and warm and rough with calluses.
“Lie back,” he murmurs.
I lower myself down onto the kitchen floor.
The tile is cold through my shirt. I can see the underside of the table, the legs of both chairs.
The ceiling light makes everything too visible.
He sinks between my legs and I let them fall open and the vulnerability of it almost sends me somewhere else—that ceiling, that crack, that lone gray sock by the door—until—
“Hey. Hey. Look at me.” His hand is on my chin, turning my face toward him. “Stay here. Right here with me.”
I look at the mask and slowly, The Fear recedes. He’s not the one from before. He’s nobody.
The mask proves it.
“Okay,” I breathe. “Okay. I’m here.”
He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my pajama bottoms and pulls them down over my hips.
The underwear goes with them. The cold air makes me flinch, but his hand is already on my knee, pressing it back down and open.
He pulls off the other glove. Both bare hands now.
They grip the insides of my thighs and push them apart.
“Jesus Christ,” he says under his breath, looking down at me. “Do you have any idea what you look like right now? Do you have any clue how fucking radiant you are?”
He drags me closer by the hips until my thighs bracket his waist. He’s still fully dressed—jacket, jeans, boots, mask. I’m naked from the waist down, wearing a faded flannel shirt and nothing else under it. It’s better this way. He’s the one covered up. I’m the one exposed.
He’s the one in control.
I don’t have to choose anything.
His thumb paints a slow line from my knee down the inside of my thigh. I jolt when he reaches the crease where my thigh meets my hip. He pauses there, circling, circling, not touching where I need him to.
“Ask me,” he says.
“No.”
With a shrug, he moves his thumb away, back up my thigh, featherlight, barely there. A retreat. A taking-away.
“That’s not how this works, little fox.” His voice is a hushed reprimand, almost gentle, which is worse than if he were growling. “You don’t get to lie on my floor with your legs open and pretend you don’t want this. That door closed the second you got on your knees.”
“Fuck you.”
His hand leaves my skin entirely. The cold rushes in where his warmth was and I gasp at the loss, which is humiliating, which is, I expect, the point. He sits back on his heels and looks down at me—spread out, half-naked, panting—and he waits.
“There’s that mouth again,” he says quietly.
“I like your mouth. I like it a lot. But right now, it’s the only thing standing between you and what you need.
” He licks his lower lip. “So I’ll ask one more time.
And if you say no, I’ll pull your pajamas back up and disappear and you can spend the rest of the night on this floor by yourself, remembering what my hands felt like. Your choice.”
The silence stretches. My chest heaves. I can feel myself throbbing where he was just touching me, the absence every bit as agonizing than the contact.
“Ask me nicely, little fox.”
Locked doors flying open.
Chains breaking. Deadbolts crumbling. Knobs turning.
The Fear leaves.
The Want remains.
“P-Please…” It rips out of me before I can stop it. “Please, just—”
Chuckling devilishly, the Masked Man gives me what he promised.
Nice guy that he is, he doesn’t even make me finish my sentence.
His thumb drags through my folds and presses directly against my clit and I rise up off the tile with a choked whimper.
He rubs in a slow, firm circle, watching my face the whole time.
I grab for something and find his forearm and hold on.
“There she is,” he murmurs. “There’s my girl.”
He keeps saying that sentence again and again. There’s my girl. There’s my girl. There’s my girl. It’s like he knows I need something to ground me, and those are the magic words.
I lock onto them as he works me with his thumb.
Meanwhile, his other hand pushes the two halves of my flannel shirt apart, baring my stomach, my ribs.
He doesn’t ask permission before his palm covers my breast. He squeezes, rolls, finds the nipple and pinches it between two fingers.
My back bows. He does it again, harder, and I make another keening whine.
His thumb disappears and two fingers push inside me. I’m already so soaked that there’s no resistance whatsoever. It’s a smooth glide, the briefest pang as I stretch around, and then—
“Oh my fucking God.”
I cry out and my hips buck against his hand. He curls his fingers up toward the ceiling and strokes over my G-spot. It’s like he’s pressing a secret button and my whole body, head to toe, responds by squeezing down around the quarter-inch point, all of me compacting to meet him there.
He pulls his fingers out and away, I whine, he pushes them back in, I moan. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. The wet sound of it, of me, fills the kitchen, and I’m well on my way to very far fucking gone.
It’s building fast. So unbelievably fast. My legs are shaking and my stomach is clenching and I need—I need—
I grab his free hand. He lets me take it and I drag it up my body and press it against my throat.
With a hungry snarl, he clamps down and the blood flow to my head is restricted, the world goes hazy, all of it ceases to matter unless it’s this, him, here, now, this cold kitchen floor and my liquid desire and his hand inside me, around my throat, everything that’s ever mattered all at once…
“That’s it,” he encourages, “cum for me, gush for me, my perfect fucking—”
I don’t hear the rest. The orgasm crashes through me and I scream against the grip on my throat.
My whole body locks and I feel the onslaught of it, hot and sudden, covering his hand, his wrist, and the tile beneath me.
He doesn’t stop. He finger-fucks me through it while I bear down like I’m being shoved through a black hole and shake and soak him until I’m gasping and spent and spread-eagled and limp.
Slowly, he peels his hand away from my throat. I open my eyes because, without him choking and touching me, I feel cold.
That’s when I look up and realize something: We are a long way from being finished.
He’s still kneeling between my legs. As I watch, his gray eyes darken and he rises more upright. His hands go to his belt. The buckle clinks as he works it open, then the button, then the zipper. He reaches inside and pulls himself free.
I can’t look away.
He’s as thick as my wrist, hard, and flushed dark, the head already slick and leaking with precum. He wraps his fist around the base and strokes up, slow, squeezing at the top before dragging back down.
I’m still twitching from aftershocks, so speaking is out of the question. All I can do is watch his hand move. Up. Down. Twist at the head. Back down.
He’s in no rush. He’s putting on a show and he knows it.