Chapter 15 #2
We escalate. He throws open a crate labeled Thrift Store and I gasp at the treasure: ceramic frogs with lipstick, a wooden angel that looks like gossip, a lighthouse lamp that gives me church trauma.
“Line them up,” I pant, and he does—gentle, careful, like he’s putting each one on trial.
I pace in front, a tiny judge with bad morals.
“This is Mr. Frogsworth,” I intone. “Charged with Being Smug.” Bonehead decapitates him. “This is the Lighthouse of False Hope.” He smashes it and bows. “This is the ghost of Christmas past.” He obliterates the angel and winks at me through the powdered dust cloud.
I can’t stop cheering. “Faster! Again! One more!” Every break unravels a stitch in my chest I didn’t know I’d sewn too tight. My laugh ricochets around the empty building like a flock of bats. He’s incandescent—sweat shining, helmet askew, grin a sunrise with a concussion.
“Switch,” he says suddenly, shoving the crowbar into my hands like we’re passing a torch. “Your turn, tiny terror.”
“Yes, coach.” I strut to a fat old CRT monitor and jab the bar into its glass belly, pop, a starburst crack crawling out like frost. I yelp, delighted, and jab again until it caves. Static sighs like a ghost leaving its lease. Bonehead claps so loud it startles dust from the rafters.
“More tiny smash!” he begs, bouncing.
I smack a coffee maker off a table; it screams grounds and wires. I kick a little clock so hard it skitters into a wall and dies with a pathetic beep. I am a feral raccoon in couture. Bonehead watches me like a man learning a new religion and repeats, very reverently, “Tiny. But mighty.”
We fall into a dance: I toss him sacrificial offerings—CD towers, a phone with a sticky note CALL MOM, a printer tray—and he deletes them from reality.
He stacks three microwaves on a wheeled cart and sprints, ramming them into a pillar until doors fly open like tongues.
I’m crying with laughter; he’s roaring like a storm.
Between kills he looks back at me, checking for my smile like it’s oxygen. I give it to him on purpose, big and cracked and holy. “You’re perfect,” I say, and mean it like a curse and a cure.
We’re breathing hard when we reach the photocopier with the duct-tape face. I touch its lid. “This one forged my signature,” I whisper.
Bonehead nods gravely and picks up the sledgehammer like an executioner who’s also my boyfriend.
One blow, two, three—the shell buckles, guts spill, a final paper jams halfway out with a squeak like it’s apologising.
I tear it free and crumple it into the shape of a heart.
“Denied,” I say, and tuck it into his pocket. He beams like he just got knighted.
The floor is a new landscape: glittering shiv-sand, plastic islands, wire intestines. Our boots crunch. Our shoulders hum. The speakers roll into a track that sounds like a cathedral collapsing politely. My pulse syncs to it.
And then we turn toward the plinth.
The clock.
It’s obscene up close—office beige, face domed and complacent, the second hand jerking like a smirk. HE KNOWS WHAT HE DID, the Post-it says, and I could kiss the petty little square.
I step in front of Bonehead and raise both hands like I’m quieting a riot. “Grand finale,” I announce. “This is not a smash. This is a ritual.”
He stills, huge and obedient, catching my tone the way dogs catch thunder. He nods once, solemn. “Ritual.”
I circle the clock like a shark that has taken a poetry class. “Charges,” I declare, pointing at the face. “Murder by minutes. Gaslighting via Daylight Saving. Trespassing in dreams. Whispering in my ear when I didn’t ask.” The second hand ticks like a tattle.
Bonehead’s jaw flexes. He looks at me for permission to be the solution. I give it with a smile that shows too many teeth. “On my count.”
I drag chalk from my pocket—always prepared, always ridiculous—and draw a sloppy circle around the plinth. I add three candy corns at the cardinal points because I like my occult sugared. I kiss my thumb and touch the glass dome. It fogs with my breath. “Any last words?” I ask it sweetly.
Tick. The hand twitches.
“That’s what I thought.”
I back away and take his wrist. His pulse is a drum. I place the studded bat in his hands and the sledgehammer at his feet. “Two-stage execution,” I say. “First, disarm. Then, annihilate.”
He grins, feral and focused. “Say when.”
I climb onto a crate so I can see him like a queen on a very stupid throne. I lift my arm.
“One,” I call, and he draws the bat back.
“Two,” and time, the jerk, keeps ticking like it owns us.
“Three.”
He swings.
The bat kisses glass. The face spiderwebs from the center, numbers splitting like teeth. A hairline crack becomes a jag, becomes a wound; the second hand stutters, panics, leaps. Bonehead laughs through his teeth and swings again, the dome collapsing with a sigh like a liar caught.
“Disarmed,” I pronounce, giddy, breath fogging the air. “Stage two.”
He drops the bat. Takes the sledge. Rolls his shoulders as if remembering every minute he ever hated and stacking them into one clean promise.
“October,” he says, and I swear my name sounds like a verdict and a vow.
“Do it,” I whisper. “Kill the future.”
He roars—a sound that starts in the soles of him and climbs every bone—and brings the sledgehammer down with both hands.
The clock’s spine snaps. The face caves, plastic moans, gears leap out like tiny metal crabs trying to escape judgement.
He doesn’t stop. Again. Again. Again. He breaks noon, he breaks midnight, he breaks the smug little frame that pretended it could hold us.
The second hand launches across the room and sticks, quivering, in a drywall seam like a caught arrow.
“Yes!” I’m screaming, clapping, crying, laughing; I don’t know which and it doesn’t matter. “Yes, yes, yes—grind it into glitter!”
He does. He grinds the remains under the sledge’s head until the beige turns into a galaxy of shavings.
He stomps the last stubborn gear and it squeals once and dies, righteous.
When he’s done he’s trembling, sweat-slicked, grinning and breathing with that stunned, newborn wonder he gets when he’s certain he did good.
Silence blooms. Not dead silence—our silence. The kind that’s been earned.
He looks up at me like a dog who brought back a squirrel. “I killed it,” he says, awed.
I jump off the crate and run to him, glass singing under my boots. I catch his face in both hands and kiss him like the lights might never come back on. He lifts me clean off the ground, arms around my waist, the sledgehammer thudding to the floor beside our feet like a satisfied witness.
“You killed it,” I pant against his mouth, dizzy and feral. “You killed it so hard it can’t even haunt.”
He laughs into the kiss, a big, bright, boyish sound that scrubs the room shiny. “You told me to.”
“I’ll tell you again,” I promise, forehead to his. “Whenever it twitches.”
He sets me down and we both look at the ruin. Time is a glitter spill. Minutes are confetti. Somewhere deep in the building, the stereo hums like a purr.
“Victory lap?” he asks, wiping dust from my cheek with a thumb that could break necks and chooses not to.
“Always,” I say, and, because I am me, I fish a tiny Ziploc from my pocket and kneel to scoop a pinch of clock-glitter into it. “For the altar,” I explain. “And maybe a necklace.”
He watches me with that face that makes me want to smash and pray. “You’re crazy,” he says softly, reverent.
“Absolutely,” I say, tucking the baggie into my bra like a relic. “Cheer captain of chaos. And you’re my star player.”
The floor is still glittering with clock shrapnel when he drops the sledge, grabs my hips, and lifts me like I’m another thing he intends to demolish.
“Yes,” I gasp, my laugh already breaking on a moan. “Yes. Smash me, baby.”
He growls, delighted, and backs me into the wreckage.
My spine kisses broken porcelain; my thighs wrap around him like hungry parentheses.
He kisses like he swings: hard, clumsy, desperate to connect.
His teeth click against mine, his tongue is all heat and no finesse, and it makes me arch up like a struck match.
“More,” I demand, clawing at his coveralls.
His big hands tears away every inch of clothing separating us—buttons, zippers, seams splitting like set dressings under his fists. He makes a pleased sound, half laugh, half roar, and buries his face in my neck.
I shove at his shoulders just to see him blink, confused. Then I grin down at him, cracked wide. “What’s rule number one?”
He blinks. “Smash everything.”
“And rule two?”
“Smash you.”
“Exactly.” I grab his wrist, drag his hand down between us, and grind into his palm. “So do it.”
Something goes feral in his eyes. He kisses me again, sloppy and hot, while fumbling his way out of the jumpsuit like it’s a mortal enemy. His cock is thick and eager, already nudging against my thigh like he can’t wait for instructions.
My breath catches, my nails digging into his shoulders as he shoves fabric out of the way.
Every movement is brute-force devotion—tearing, grabbing, claiming—not careful but never careless with me.
He presses the weight of himself against me and I feel the promise of it, the size, the inevitability.
“Bonehead…” It’s a moan, it’s a plea, it’s a prayer.
His mouth crashes into mine, tasting of sweat and heat and the dust of everything we’ve ruined. He groans into me like he’s starving, one hand pinning my wrists above my head, the other yanking my leg higher around his hip. His cock drags along my slit, heavy, slick, tormenting us both.
“Need you,” he growls against my lips, voice cracked and raw. “Need you now.”
“Yes,” I gasp. “Do it. I’m yours.”
And he does. He thrusts in hard, burying himself to the hilt, and I cry out, arching against him, the stretch brutal and perfect. His whole body shudders like he can’t believe I let him in, like he’s worshipping with every inch.
He moves fast, desperate, hips pounding into me with all the reckless strength I’ve seen him spend on sledgehammers and porcelain. Every thrust knocks the air out of me, glass crunching under my back, but all I can do is clutch him tighter and beg for more.
“God—yes—don’t stop,” I pant, clinging to his shoulders, biting at his throat just to feel him growl.
“Never,” he snarls, kissing me like he’ll die if he lets go, rutting deeper, harder, until I’m wrecked beneath him. His grip on my wrists is iron, his other hand gripping my thigh like he’s afraid I’ll slip away.
The room spins, the wreckage sings, and all I know is Bonehead slamming into me, claiming me, breaking me open in the best way. My orgasm tears through me fast and violent, making me sob his name against his mouth.
I’m still shaking when he growls low in his chest and shifts, hauling me up like I weigh nothing. He turns me, bends me over the wreckage-strewn table, my palms pressed flat against cold wood dusted with porcelain grit. I gasp, hips arched, hair spilling wild around my face.
“Not done,” he rasps behind me, voice wrecked and fevered. “Never done.”
His hands grip my hips—huge, bruising, desperate—and then he slams back into me, deeper this time, the angle so sharp I cry out, forehead hitting the table. He’s relentless, pounding into me like he wants to fuse us together, his breath hot and ragged at my ear.
“Mine,” he groans, every thrust punctuating the word, branding it into my bones.
“Yes,” I gasp, clawing at the tabletop, back arching to take him harder. “Yours—always yours.”
The sound of us is obscene—skin and sweat and the crunch of glass under our boots.
My thighs burn, my cunt throbs, and still he drives into me, filling me so deep I feel it in my ribs.
His grip slides up, one hand pressing into the small of my back to hold me down, the other tangling in my hair to yank me back against him.
I moan, long and broken, as he fucks me harder, faster, every stroke making my knees threaten to give. The table shudders under us, objects toppling, shards skittering to the floor. He doesn’t stop, can’t stop, hips slamming like the only rhythm that’s ever mattered.
When his hand slips around to my front, fingers finding my clit, I sob—loud, helpless, undone. The pressure builds sharp and hot, and then I’m coming again, pulsing around him so hard it drags a roar out of his chest.
He fucks me through it, relentless, chasing his own end. His thrusts go messy, erratic, his growls turning into groans, and then he’s spilling inside me with a shout, burying himself deep, shaking against my back.
For a long moment, all I can hear is the crash of our breathing, the hiss of the speakers, the ghosts of everything we smashed still whispering around us. His weight folds over me, heavy, protective, trembling. He kisses the side of my neck, soft now, reverent where minutes ago he was feral.
“I love you,” he murmurs, voice breaking.
I smile into the wreckage, fingers tracing lazy circles in the dust. “Good,” I whisper back. “Because I love you too.”