21. Oliver
My fantasy is seconds away from becoming reality.
Cala is between my legs, ready to take me in her mouth, and I’m stopping her.
I couldn’t help it, the jerking was only natural when I felt her breath near my cock, and I stopped her.
“Give me a second,” I say when I finish breathing, although inside I’m counting the plants in my field.
She nods patiently with her warm eyes. I feel like an idiot for stopping this; I’m burning for her, but I can’t. Because of him, my chances of having a normal life were completely ruined.
Oliver, you’re broken.
“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” she whispers, her hands sliding over my thighs.
I cup her face, my chest tight, fury burning low in my blood.
“You have no idea how much I want this,” I growl, unable to hide the anger at myself for ruining it.
She tilts her face against my palm, letting me trace her cheek.
It’s the softest thing she’s ever done.
And somehow, that image punches straight through every wall I’ve built.
My mouth opens—words clawing their way up—but it’s like a snake coils around my throat and squeezes until I’m silent again.
“Maybe it would help if you talked about it, Oli.”
Oli.
Only Killian calls me that.
But when she says it… it feels different.
I shake my head, though every part of me is screaming to let it out, to open my chest and hand her everything inside.
“I can’t,” I say, pressing my palms over my eyes.
Her voice lowers, gentle and patient. “My grandma used to tell me that if I didn’t say what was eating me alive, one day it would eat me whole.” She pauses, her gaze unwavering. “The day I was finally ready, she sat behind me and just… waited.”
Lowering my hands from my face, I risk a glance at her—the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, kneeling quietly in front of me. My voice is barely a whisper. “What did you tell her?”
“I was dating a guy from school back then,” she begins, her voice steady but soft.
“Adam. I really liked him. He was my first big love. One day I caught him with my best friend—wrapped around each other in the bathroom. I felt humiliated, hurt. I never told anyone what I saw. Just… kept going, pretending everything was fine. But my grandma, she could see right through me. I stopped visiting her. I lost weight because I couldn’t keep food down. ”
The pain that threads through her words makes something twist in my gut.
“When I finally told her,” she continues, her eyes distant, “it was like the world lifted off my shoulders. I know it’s not the same as what you’ve lived through, but—”
“You had your heart broken,” I interrupt quietly. “My pain doesn’t cancel yours.”
Cala turns around, resting her arms across my thighs, her bare back facing me.
Funny how much easier it is to speak when the other person isn’t looking you in the eye.
The work gets lighter.
And the snake loosens its grip.
Thirteen years earlier.
There were two ways to look at the situation—one good, one bad.
The good news was that I wasn’t being dramatic.
After a full week of feeling like my body had been run over by a truck and then politely backed over again just to be sure, the test results finally came back.
Turns out I really was sick. Which was satisfying, because my parents had been convinced I was throwing a tantrum about their upcoming trip to the Maldives.
The bad news?
I had mononucleosis.
Which meant two things.
One: I was going to spend the foreseeable future in bed.
Two: everyone now knew I’d been making out with Catherine under the football bleachers.
My mom wasn’t even trying to hide the argument she was having with my dad in his office. They were shouting loud enough for the neighbors to hear.
Most people expect responsible parents to simply cancel a trip if their child is ill—but my parents weren’t like that.
They just hired a nurse, packed their bags, and drove off like the house was on fire.
A man in his thirties, with greasy hair and thick glasses, showed up at my bedroom door. He introduced himself as Eder. The guy had to be at least six foot six—taller and broader than my dad, even.
The first day, he just wrote down my symptoms on some clipboard form, didn’t do much else.
By the second day, he ordered my brothers to stay away because I had to be in quarantine for two months.
I didn’t even know the door had a lock until he showed me—and, of course, locked me inside my own room.
At first, I thought it was great.
I could watch TV as long as I wanted, read without interruptions, play Nintendo, even think without hearing my brothers’ constant nonsense.
My two older brothers fought nonstop—something about the Green sisters—and Killian missed me, I could tell. He didn’t have much to do without me. Sometimes he’d sit on the other side of the door and talk for a bit.
The problem started when the fever spiked. I was irritable, sweating like a pig, and my head hurt so bad I had to shut the curtains.
The last thing I heard the nurse say was that my temperature was over a hundred and four—and that he needed to bring it down.
Wasn’t that supposed to be his job?
The delirium came later, and with it, the nightmares.
Nightmares involving an adult doing things he wasn’t supposed to do, things involving his hands and my most private parts.
When I came to, I was terrified, exhausted, and coughing a lot.
I couldn’t really keep my eyes open for more than five minutes without falling asleep again, and then it would all start over.
The laughter.
The groping.
The fear.
During the second week, the fever began to subside.
“I need to go outside,” I groaned from under the sheets.
I felt hot and cold, I was in a terrible mood, and I couldn’t breathe.
“You can’t go outside. If you go outside, you could infect your brothers. Do you want that to happen?” replied the nurse’s voice.
Of course I didn’t want that, even though moans continued to escape from my throat, begging to breathe fresh air.
Something woke me up, a strange sensation. I opened my eyes and immediately knew something was wrong.
Moving my legs frantically and with what little strength I had, I pushed him away from me.
“What the hell are you doing?!” I shouted, my lungs unable to handle my outburst and I began to shake. Although it could also have been out of fear.
The nurse was smiling, but there was something wrong with his smile.
“I was just adjusting the sheets, Oliver, that’s all.”
“Liar! You were...you were...” I couldn’t repeat it; I didn’t want to say it.
“I was taking care of you.”
“No! No, you were with...with your mouth there.” I couldn’t modulate my voice properly, and I suspected it was the medication they were giving me.
It couldn’t be real, could it? This couldn’t be happening to me. He was an adult, and adults don’t do these things to children, right?
“Well, clearly your fever has returned, because you’re delirious. Come on, let me give you something to bring your fever down.”
“No!” My feet dug into the bed as I tried to create as much space as I could between that man and me. “Call my brother, Silas!” I shouted.
“Oh Oliver, they’re not here. Remember, they can go to school. We’re alone in your house.”
Something about his tone was wrong; what he said and what he did didn’t match. I was too scared to contradict him.
“I want to sleep, go away.”
“Okay, but first you have to take the medicine that...”
“No, I don’t want anything, go away.”
The smile faded from his face, he pressed his lips together, and his eyebrows knitted together in the middle of his forehead.
His voice was deeper than before.
“I’m not asking, Oliver.” With the strength of ten men, he threw himself on top of me and squeezed my nostrils so I couldn’t breathe. I immediately opened my mouth, and taking advantage of my inability to breathe through my nose, he stuck his hand deep into my throat. “Swallow the pill, now.”
I had no choice.
I swallowed it and went back to dreaming the same dream as before.
Three weeks like that.
Three weeks where I knew my dreams were real, that an adult was abusing me. I didn’t know what to do, and when my brothers came to me, I couldn’t find the words to explain what was happening.
All I wanted to do was get out of the bedroom.
My brother Kill broke the lock one night and took me to the garden of my house. We sat on the grass and looked at the stars. I knew Kill was worried; he knew me better than anyone else, he knew something was wrong with me. Luckily, he never asked questions.
I only asked him for one favor, which was to tell our parents that I was fine and that the nurse wasn’t necessary.
Kill got Silas and Luca involved, and they took care of firing him and took away the key to my bedroom. We had two more weeks before our parents came back, and I begged my brothers to let me sleep outside. So, the four of us carried the bed into the garden, and that was my bedroom for two weeks.
The happiest two weeks of my life.
Although the nightmares never went away, sometimes they came back worse than before, the good thing was that when I woke up, I was alone, there were no hands on me, no smiling man.