Chapter 28 The Past #2
We were animals, gnashing at each other, neither willing to yield, neither wanting to win.
It was war, and we needed it.
He ripped my shirt at the collarbone, exposing a patch of skin just to inflict a new wound with his teeth. I wrested my arms free, raked my nails down the side of his neck, satisfied by the blooming red trails.
He pinned my thigh with his knee, ground his hips against me, and my body responded in a way that made me want to rip my own heart out.
I caught him with a knee to the ribs. He grunted, then retaliated by gripping both my wrists above my head, slamming them to the floor so hard I thought my bones would crack.
I writhed, bucked, spat curses, but he only tightened his hold, his face inches above mine, breaths fusing in a hot, angry fog.
“You want to hate me so bad, don’t you?” His words were wet and ragged. “You want me to be the monster. Fine.”
He bit down on my earlobe, hard enough to draw a shriek, and I twisted my hands until the skin tore at my wrists.
With a growl, he let go, yanking my hips up to meet his. We were pressed together. His sweatpants scraping against my bare skin, every point of contact a new place to fight, a new place to burn.
“Fuck you,” I snarled.
He let go with a laugh, but it was the kind of laugh that sounded like a skull cracking. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he sneered, grinding his hips into me. His breath was hot and bitter at my ear, teeth sharp on the curve of my jaw. “I bet you’re fucking wet for me right now.”
The words scraped my skull raw, searing through the last of my resistance.
Hatred pooled between my legs. Of course he could feel it; of course he would use it to humiliate me, to win.
Rage and arousal tangled, a noose tightening at the base of my spine.
“You’re disgusting,” I gasped, jerking my head away, but his grip held, the pain chaining me to this moment.
He knelt over me, chest heaving, and shoved his hand between my legs, fingers pushing past the waistband of my shorts. He didn’t ask, didn’t hesitate, just pressed in, fingers grazing my most private area.
My breath snapped into fragments. I gasped, and he laughed, low and guttural.
“You see?” He whispered, nose brushing the curve of my jaw, his breath sour. “You fucking love this. You love when I break you.”
The line between hate and want was a razor’s edge, and I balanced atop it, desperate not to fall but already slipping.
I wanted obliteration. I wanted to be gutted and left to rot, because maybe then I’d feel something other than the endless, echoing ache.
But, I hated him so much that my ribs ached, that my lungs starved for air. And that hate burned almost as bright as this hollowness within.
I’m doing this for you, Lillian. I want to break him, for you. To hurt him, for you.
In some parallel universe, this was an erotic movie scene, two beautiful people burning with forbidden passion; in this one, it was two rabid dogs locked together in a death roll, desperate to devour and outlast the other.
Shame spiraled through me, but it only fed the hunger. Hunger to feel something other than this bottomless grief.
I bucked my hips, nearly throwing him off. For a split second he lost his grip. I seized the chance and brought my knee up, catching him in the thigh.
He swore, tried to pin me again, but I rolled us, straddling his chest, hands braced on his shoulders.
Our faces hovered an inch apart. Neither of us would back down; neither of us wanted to.
My nails dug into his collarbones, his fingers bruised my waist. His eyes flickered wild, desperate.
I could see myself reflected there. Hair wild, cheeks flushed, lips split. I looked like prey. I looked like a monster.
His hands found my hair, yanked it so hard my scalp burned, and I gasped into his mouth, hating the sound, hating my body for turning against me.
Hate was better than sorrow. Hate was heat and movement.
“Fucking hate you,” I spat, shoving my palm against his face, smashing his head back to the floor.
He laughed, a sound unhinged. “Not as much as I hate myself,” he said, and bucked again, rolling us so he caged me beneath him, arms braced on either side of my head. He stared down at me, breathing ragged.
My chest heaved, and he just stared, eyes wild and wet and empty.
He just pressed harder, his hips rutting against me, friction building and building until my pulse blurred into a single, vibrating note.
It wasn’t arousal; it was annihilation, the need to be ground down to nothing, to finally match the ruin of my insides.
“I could fuck you right here,” he said, voice shredded, “and you’d let me. You’d beg for it.”
I bucked against his palm, half in protest, half in surrender. “You don’t get to have me,” I hissed. “Not after what you did.”
He began circling my clit in tight, brutal circles, thumb rough against the swollen ache of me, and everything sparkled behind my eyelids, black and glittering.
He hissed, “Filthy little bitch. You don’t know what you want.”
I tried to arch away, but he crushed my hips to the floor, fingers working at me with a violence that bordered on hatred.
“Fuck you,” I gasped, but my own voice came out needy, traitorous.
My cheeks burned with shame, but I rocked against his hand anyway, desperate for the raw sensation, the punishment.
He pressed his palm harder, every nerve sparking white-hot and I let a whimper slip.
The pressure, the heat, the need. It was all tangled up with grief and anger, a snarl of feelings so dense I couldn’t breathe.
I just wanted to feel. In the moment, I forgot about the blame, the anger, the hatred. All I could think about was the sensation of his fingers on me.
My head felt like a crow’s wing pinned behind glass, fluttering but hopeless: I was watching myself from very far away. A wet, sickly dream where shame and pleasure were the same color, the same temperature.
I remembered the way my mother used to say, a real woman takes what she’s given and makes it last. Maybe that’s what I was doing. Making this last, letting every second of it stake a claim inside me.
Caiden made a trail with his mouth towards my ear. “You already gave yourself away to my best friend. Don’t pretend you’re pure.” He ground his hips against my thigh. “You’re just a hole. Just like your mom. Just like your sister.”
I arched and writhed and then bucked him off, my elbow slamming into his ribs.
He rolled, groaning. His eyes were glassy, unfocused and wild.
I rolled away, my body burning, skin red and welted where he’d held me.
The whole room spun with anger and disgust, and for a moment I thought I might throw up. The sight of my own trembling legs, the sticky ache between them, was almost too much to bear.
I thought of Lillian. I wondered if this was how she’d felt, in the final moments before she let go. Split and ruined, wanting to claw herself out of her own skin, the scream of being alive so much sharper than the silence of the grave.
I caught his stare, hateful and wounded, I wondered which one of us had gone further off the edge.
“Don’t ever touch me again,” I spat, the words raw and blistered from the inside.
This anger within me had bled into destruction.
He sat up, arms braced behind him, a menacing expression on his face. “You’re no better than me, Amelia. We’re the same fucking animal.”
It stung because it was true, or close enough to make me sick. I felt the heat drain from my bones.
“Get out,” I said, and the words came out as a frigid whisper. The cold in my voice startled even me. “You’re drunk and you shouldn’t even be here.”
Caiden’s jaw spasmed. For an instant, I thought he might lunge for me again, smash the last of the furniture, put a fist through the television, maybe even put a fist through me.
But instead, he staggered up, legs faltering beneath him, a puppet with its strings sheared.
He didn’t look at me as he stumbled his way down the hall, left a smear of blood on the white wall where his hand caught the corner, slammed his palm twice against the entryway in an animal pulse of violence.
Then he was gone, hurtling through the door, clattering down the porch steps, and into the dying afternoon.
And I was left to deal with the aftermath of my destruction.
The world was a fizzled fuse, a scorched wire, the air still hot and trembling from the current that had passed through it. I lay crumpled on the floor, skin prickling with aftershocks.
My heart fluttered between arrhythmia and inertia, unsure whether to keep beating or surrender.
I traced the crescent cuts his nails left in my flesh, the bruises blooming along my thighs, and felt nothing. Not relief, not satisfaction, not even the expected horror. Just a bottomless emptiness and shock.
My sister’s corpse barely cold, mother evaporated into her bottle, the world already soiled and ruined and here I was succumbing to my hatred for Caiden in the worst way.
Lillian would never forgive me. If she were watching from whatever secondhand heaven was left for girls like us, she’d spit in my face and call me a traitor. She’d see how easily I let the monster under my bed crawl in and make itself at home.
I wanted to be sick. I wanted to crawl out of my skin, scrape myself raw, leave my own body behind like a snake’s old husk and never look back.
I lay on the ground for a long time, cheek pressed to the splintered wood, waiting for the house to grow cold and for the ache in my limbs to fade.
It didn’t. Nothing faded.
The aftermath of what I’d done, what I’d allowed him to do, pressed in harder than the act itself.
I was sick with it, drowning in it, swimming through a soup of regret so thick I feared I’d never claw my way out.
Maybe destruction was the only thing I was ever good at, turning hurt into hunger, swallowing the poison just to see if I could survive it.
My mind replayed the events with sickening clarity. A highlight reel of every gasp, every snarl. The more I tried to blank it out, the louder it became, until I wanted to bash my head against the porcelain just to make it stop.
I dry-heaved over the sink, but nothing came up. There was nothing left in me but acid and ghosts.
I was the architect of my own corruption. I watched the world burn and then poured accelerant on the ashes, desperate for a heat that could cauterize the wound where Lillian had been.
I’d let Caiden touch me. Let him use me, even for a second, and it was a humiliation so vast it eclipsed even the grave.
I wish it were simpler. We give in too easily to the things that are poison, chasing the need to feel better, to forget the pain. Even if that thing we give into would inevitably destroy us. Even if, on some level of subconsciousness, we hate the thing we are falling into.
When the fire fades, that’s all we have left, the darkness and the ache.
I had been gutted and hollowed and left to marinate in my own rot, and in the end, there was nothing but this: The stillness after a disaster, the silence that rings in the skull when the sirens are gone and all the screaming has burned itself out.