33. Nico
NICO
She doesn't sit next to me. She climbs on top of me.
One knee on either side of my hips, her hands flat on my chest, and she's not asking; she's just taking, reaching down to grip my half-hard cock and stroke it back to full before she sinks down onto me, not giving me the chance to catch my breath from the last time.
I let her. I want to say I decide to let her, but the truth is simpler than that. She isn't giving me a vote.
Her hips slam down hard, harder than they need to, hard enough that I hear the small broken sound it costs her every time she does it again. She's soaked, dripping down onto me, and the sound our bodies make together is obscene in the quiet room.
She doesn't stop. Doesn't soften the angle.
Doesn't do a single thing to make it easier on either of us.
Her hands leave my chest and brace against the headboard behind me, knuckles white against the dark wood.
Her head tips back. Her hair sticks to her throat, dark strands pasted to damp skin, and her whole body drives down onto mine over and over with a rhythm that has nothing gentle left in it.
"You wanted this," she says, voice raw. "You wanted to fuck me until I couldn't think straight. Well, here I am. Take it."
"Cazzo, Lydia."
For a while I think this is just her taking back what I took in the first round.
Control changing hands. Fair enough. I've wanted her wild and unbossed before, and some ugly part of me still wants her like this now, wants to watch her use me exactly however she needs to, wants to feel her clench around my cock like she's trying to break something in both of us at once.
Then I feel what's actually happening underneath it.
She's not chasing anything good. There's no give in her, no easing toward pleasure, just a rhythm that gets harder on herself every time it should ease off.
Her nails cut into my shoulders, four crescents deep enough that I know they'll still be there tomorrow.
Her breath breaks wrong, too sharp, catching on something closer to a sob than to want, something fighting its way back out of her instead of building toward anything.
She's not fucking me.
She's using me to hurt herself.
I've never once, in all the months I've had her, wanted to slow anything down. Tonight I do.
My hand finds her hip, trying to still it. "Lydia... piccola, stop."
She doesn't stop.
Her hand comes down over my mouth instead, fast, flat, the exact gesture I used on her the very first night, a different wall, the same hand, and something in me goes cold recognizing it even as the rest of me is drowning in her, in the tight wet heat of her still riding me like she can't stop even if she wanted to.
She's not letting me talk her out of whatever this is. She's making sure I can't.
I could move her hand. I know I could. My arms still work.
My strength hasn't left me, and some old part of me wants to flip her under me and stop this the only way I know how to stop things.
I don't do it. Whatever she's doing to herself, some worse part of me understands she needs to finish it, and stopping her now would only be one more decision I made for her without asking.
I don't fight her hand. I can't. All I can do is lie there under her and feel it happen, feel her carry out something against herself using my body as the instrument, and feel her hips grind down against me harder and harder like she's trying to punish herself with the exact same thing that feels good.
There's nothing left for me to do but let her finish it.
Her "fuck you"s come apart into something quieter, half swallowed, gasped out under her breath between everything else she's saying.
I don't care that you killed him. I don't. I hate that I turned you into him.
If that's what she says, none of it comes through as words. It's noise, threaded through the rest of the sounds she's making, no different from any of it. I don't catch a single piece of it clean.
I don't know what she's saying.
I only know that whatever it is, it isn't for me.
She drags a second release out of both of us, hers first this time, silent and shaking, her whole body clenching around my cock hard enough that it drags mine right behind it, wrung out of me before I have any say in the matter.
Her whole body goes rigid over mine and then just stops, frozen there, her hand still clamped over my mouth, her chest heaving against mine, both of us caught in the same held breath for one long second neither of us breaks first.
Then she moves.
The second it's over, she's off me.
No word. No look back. Bare feet on the floor, her robe snatched off the chair and yanked around her shoulders, and then the bathroom door is shutting, then locking, and I'm left flat on my back in sheets that smell like her and like us and like whatever this was, the room gone quiet except for my own ragged breathing and the click of that lock still echoing in my ears.
I hear her crying through the door before the water even starts running.
I lie in the wreckage of the bed and don't move for a long time.
What's sitting in my chest is plainer than shock, the sick, flat certainty of what I just watched her do to herself, in front of me, using me to do it, and not stopping when I asked her to.
I heard nothing worth being shocked by, nothing but noise and my own name half-formed in a warning she didn't take.
My shoulders sting where her nails caught.
My mouth still carries the shape of her hand.
None of that is what keeps me lying here.
What keeps me lying here is the fact that I let it happen.
I felt the exact second it stopped being anger and started being something else, and I chose not to move, chose to let her keep going because some part of me decided that was mercy.
I don't know anymore if it was mercy or just one more time I stood by and let her hurt because stopping her looked harder than watching.
My mother's warnings come back to me anyway, uninvited, not her exact words, just the shape of what she meant, that I'd let Lydia break herself in front of me and call it giving her what she wanted.
I hated her for saying it. I hate her more now for being right, for saying it before I had any way of knowing what it would look like.
Lydia's crying carries through the door, low, exhausted, meant for no one's ears but her own.
I get up.
The floor is cold under my feet. I cross the room slow, unsure of what I'm walking toward even as I walk toward it. I reach the door. I raise my hand to knock.
I stop there.
My knuckles hover an inch from the wood and go no further.
I don't know what I'd say if she opened it, or what I'd do with my own face if I saw hers wrecked like that up close, knowing I put my hands on her while she did that to herself and didn't stop her in time.
Walking in means either lying to her or telling her the truth, and I can't do either, not when the truth is that I let her do it and called it giving her what she needed.
So I do neither.
I lower my hand. I stand there another few seconds, long enough to hate myself for it. Then I walk away from the door, back toward the bed that still smells like her, and lie back down in the wreckage alone.
The crying goes on behind the door. I let it.
Same silence that got us here.
I choose it again, and somewhere underneath everything I already know it's the choice that ends us.