32. Lydia
LYDIA
He doesn't answer the dare with words.
His hand comes up and closes over my mouth, hard, fingers spread wide enough to cover my jaw too.
I know this hand. I know what it did the first night any of this started, a different room, a different woman standing where I'm standing now, back before either of us had done anything irreversible to the other.
I didn't know him yet, that night. I know him too well now, and it doesn't matter.
The hand is the same. The wall at my back is the same kind of cold, plaster biting through the thin cotton of my shirt.
This isn't that night. He's not claiming anything.
He's punishing me. Exactly like I asked.
His body pins mine flat, his forearm braced beside my head, his mouth dropping to my throat instead of my mouth, since my mouth is covered, since he took that from me on purpose the second I gave him the opening.
His other hand shoves my shirt up and closes hard around my breast, no gentleness in it at all, and I arch into the rough grip anyway, hating myself a little more for how good it feels.
He rips my shorts down my legs and shoves two fingers into me without warning, no build, no patience. I'm already soaked enough that they slide in easy, and that fact alone makes me want to scream.
I say it anyway. Muffled, useless, into his palm.
"Fuck you."
He doesn't stop moving. Doesn't even slow.
He works his fingers rough and fast until I'm right at the edge, and then he pulls them out, undoes his own pants with one hand, and drives into me in one hard thrust that punches every bit of air out of my lungs.
His hips grind into mine, one hand still clamped over my lips, the other dragging my thigh higher against him, his fingers pressing hard enough into skin that I already know I'll find the marks tomorrow.
"Fuck you."
I say it again into his throat when his hand shifts, again when he drags my hip higher against him, again when there's nothing left in my chest but the words and the shape of my mouth making them against his skin, his jaw, the heel of his hand.
They stop meaning anything around the fifth time.
By the tenth they're just breath with edges.
A sound instead of a sentence, the only sound left in me.
I keep making it anyway because it's the one thing he hasn't taken control of yet, so I hold onto it and grind it out against him until my jaw aches and my voice goes rough and small behind his palm.
He doesn't slow down for any of it. If anything my noise feeds him, pushes him harder, the sound doing more work on him now than the words underneath it ever did.
He fucks me hard against the wall, his cock dragging against every slick inch of me, and when he finally speaks it's low and filthy against my ear.
"You want to hate me while you take my cock this well, piccola? Go ahead. Hate me. I don't fucking care, as long as you keep taking it."
Somewhere under all of it, something in me is glad.
Something in me hates that it's glad. I don't look at either one too closely.
I tell myself this is about the fight, about my father, about wanting a man rough enough to make me stop thinking for five minutes.
I tell myself it's simple. Wanting this makes me a certain kind of woman and I let myself be angry about that instead of anything underneath it.
It isn't simple. I know it isn't. I just don't say so, not even to myself.
The plaster scrapes my shoulder blade every time he moves, small stings I'll feel again in the shower tomorrow, and I welcome every one of them.
Pain like this is easy. Pain like this has a source I can point to, a man, a wall, a night, and I let myself sink into that instead of the other kind that's been sitting in my chest since the moment we said my father's name out loud to each other for the first time.
He finishes first, wordless, buried deep, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, his whole body going rigid and then loose against mine in the space of a breath, his cock pulsing inside me until there's nothing left in him.
His mouth stays pressed to the curve of my neck, his hand finally easing off my jaw.
I don't let him settle anywhere near soft.
The second his weight eases, I shove him back, both hands flat on his chest, and he goes, stumbling half a step before catching himself.
I'm already moving. I'm not done and I'm not letting him decide what happens next, not tonight, not after everything he decided without me for years, every silence he kept because he thought it was his to keep.
"Sit," I say. "Or lie down. I don't care which."
He straightens, chest still heaving, amber eyes tracking me across the room, and for a second he looks like he's trying to work out what's happening in his own house, in his own bed, under his own hands.
I don't wait for him to finish working it out.