Chapter 41 The Past #4
I didn’t look at her for a long time. I just let the burn trickle through the veins in my hands, let the numbness work its way up my arms. I closed my eyes and waited for the feeling to crest, but Lillian’s thigh was an insistent heat next to mine.
It was a reminder: I’m here. I’m not allowed to drift.
Not when the world is made of corners and people who never fucking leave you alone.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, hating myself for how pathetic it sounded.
She shrugged then took the Camels from my jacket and sparked one up as easy and thoughtless as breathing. “Why does anyone do anything?” she said. “We’re all just flailing around, trying not to choke, giving in to whatever will distract us from the dark.”
I watched the cigarette smolder between her lips, the orange pulse bright each time she sucked in, and for a moment I thought about how easy it would be to just reach over and touch her.
Her mouth was the same shape as Amelia’s when she frowned, and the idea made my skin crawl.
But it also made my heart ratchet up a notch.
Lillian exhaled, blowing a stream of smoke at the ceiling, and time seemed to dilate. Everything slowed to the birth of a single thought—
I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to feed the animal. To see how far I could press her, or myself, before something broke for good. It was selfish, it was trash, but the hunger inside me didn’t give a shit about dignity.
She tipped the last of the vodka into her mouth, wiped her lips with the back of her hand, then did something I didn’t expect.
She stood up abruptly, teetered for a moment, and peeled her dress up and over her head in one practiced move, letting it drop to the carpet as she stepped out of it. She stood there in a black bra and lace panties, and for a second I couldn’t breathe.
Her skin was as pale as a crescent moon. She shivered, and for a minute neither of us spoke.
My tongue felt replaced with glass and the sight made me dizzy with a new kind of tension.
There was a sick irony to it: sitting in the Langston house, in the room where all the ghosts of my childhood enemies and obsessions were crammed into the carpet and the walls, being seduced into something ugly and reckless by the sister of the girl who had ruined me.
The bile of the day was still hot in my throat, my father’s words and the memory of that dream clinging to my skin. I wanted to smash a window, punch a crater in the drywall, run until my legs snapped.
Instead, I just watched Lillian: the sway of her hips as she knelt back onto the bed, the way she didn’t bother to cover herself, the way she met my gaze head-on, unapologetic.
“Don’t overthink it, Baxter,” she said, her voice thick and slurred but laced with a strange clarity. “You look like you’re about to run, or puke.”
I should have been numb to everything by now, too empty to even register the churn. But my skin prickled with every movement she made, and the animal inside me.
Not the one that fought, not the one that grew strong on hate, but the other one, the one that hungered and starved and pawed at the insides of my ribcage.
I hated this, hated her, hated myself. Mostly myself, for being so weak, for wanting anything at all. I wanted to scream at her to put her dress back on, to roll back the last ten minutes, to erase the sight of her body and the raw need crawling up my limbs. But I did nothing.
She climbed across the bed, movements smooth and deliberate, the practiced confidence of a girl who’d learned exactly how to weaponize her own body.
She stopped a foot from me, kneeling, bare thighs folded under her, arms loose and patient.
“It’s not complicated,” she said, voice softer now, almost slurred, like she was talking to herself more than to me.
“It’s just chemicals and meat. The body wants what it wants, so you give it something. Then it’s quiet for a while.”
I sat there, hands limp, and watched her as she climbed onto my lap.
It was Lillian’s weight, the warmth of her bare skin pressing through my jeans, that snapped the last thread of resistance.
She straddled me, thighs bracketing my hips, the trembling in her hands at odds with the tilt of her chin. I didn’t know if it was the vodka or the weed or just the loneliness, but I let her settle there, let her nudge my hands to her waist, let her pull my mouth to hers.
Her lips were soft, parted and insistent, tasting of cinnamon and smoke.
I kissed her back only because it was easier than refusing, because I knew how to be wanted only in the context of being used, and Lillian, god, she was using me, using me to patch some hole in her own chest.
Her hands slipped under my shirt, fingers cold and restless against my belly, then up to my chest, tracing lines over my ribs as if she could feel the ugly things I kept caged inside.
She broke the kiss, forehead pressed tight to mine, hair curtaining our faces. In the dim, I saw her swallow.
“You okay?” she whispered, voice rough with need or sadness or both.
I almost said no. But I didn’t. Just gripped her hips harder, dragging her against me in a rhythm that was half plea, half punishment. I wanted to hate her for how easily she’d found the switches to flip, for how she’d peeled away my armor with so little effort.
But mostly I hated myself for letting it happen, for wanting it to happen, because being with Lillian was the closest thing to Amelia Langston, to feeding my hunger.
I was inside the warmth of Lillian, but what I wanted was to be outside myself. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? To push my own body out to the perimeter, let it become a set piece while the rest of me—the hungry core—hid somewhere unreachable and watched the show.
The vodka burned, the weed made everything feel underwater, my fingers tingling like they were waking from a decade’s sleep.
Lillian’s mouth was open against my neck, her voice a ragged, fading echo, but I paid no attention to the words.
I watched the ceiling, counted the chips in the paint, the constellations of black mold creeping along the plaster. I did not want to see her face. I did not want to see my own expression reflected in her wide eyes.
I pressed my palm over her breastbone as she rocked above me, feeling the frantic triphammer of her heart, and for a second I thought of crushing down, hard, seeing what noise she’d make if I really tried.
That was the echo of my father, the violence curled in the roots of my DNA, the urge to take and hollow and leave the rest for crows. But I didn’t. I just held her steady, a hand to anchor her as she bit her own lip and let her body work out whatever it needed to.
She was nothing like Amelia. Not in the way that mattered. Her hair was black, not gold; her laughter, even when it bubbled up, was never light, never easy. She was brittle, all edges and scabs and nerves.
I kissed her back with a violence just shy of cruelty, let her grind against me in stuttering desperation, let her teeth scrape over my jaw and ear and neck.
When she pushed my jeans down, I felt exposed, not in the way of being naked, but in the way of being peeled, each layer coming off with a raw, wet sound.
She ground her hips down, and I felt myself harden with a speed I’d never known, like my body was only waiting for the right ache to betray me. I was glass, hollowed and fragile, every cell strung tight.
My hands flexed on her thighs, not guiding so much as holding on; I needed the pressure, the proof of her, the heat beneath her skin.
The room was roaring with our breath, her hair falling in a tangle that lashed my face, the vodka searing my throat, the world reduced to the wet friction and the slip of skin against skin.
She shimmied her hips and arched, a gasp whispering out her mouth, and then she reached between us, pulled my my hard-on free and held it, just for a moment.
She fitted me to the seam of black lace, shoved the panties aside, and rubbed herself against me, wet and shuddering. She was hot, fevered, a tremor in her thighs as she rocked forward, taking me in.
As she slid down onto me, I saw a flash of her face, a wetness in her eyes that looked nothing like pleasure. I knew that look. I wore it every day. The look of someone clawing for meaning inside a burning house.
Her head tipped back, jaw slack, and for a moment I let myself believe I was somewhere else, someone else, not a Baxter or a monster or a freak, just a piece of meat in the dark, being used for its only available purpose.
I let her, let the animal take over, let the rhythm of want and forgetting erase every other thought. I gripped her hips with such force that my thumbs left white ovals in her skin, watched her move above me, watched the muscles in her neck tense and relax and tense again.
I didn’t close my eyes, not once. I stared past her, at the wall, at the photo of her and Amelia taped up by the dresser.
The younger one, bright-haired and oblivious; the older one, dark and already stained with the knowledge of how things went wrong.
They looked like sisters in the way that violence and tenderness can be sisters, sharing the same bone structure but none of the gentleness.
She rode me, rough and fast, a parody of pleasure. I wondered if she was pretending, or if she was desperate enough to need it real. Her hands clutched at my shoulders, nails biting through the thin cotton of my shirt, and I let the small pain anchor me to the moment.
I wasn’t gentle either as we fucked each other. Why would I be? I was never shown gentle; the closest I’d ever come was the echo of a soft voice before the door slammed or the memory of hands that only touched to hurt.
She didn’t look at me, but I felt her face at my neck, her breath hot and erratic. I sensed the trembling in her arms, the ghost of a sob in the way her mouth pressed hard against my skin.
She was grinding down on me now, her thighs locked around my hips, her hands braced on my shoulders as if she needed to hold me underwater.
I wrapped my arms around her, squeezing until she squeaked, until the air in her lungs hissed past my ear. It was a mockery of comfort, but she didn’t ask for less. She clawed at my hair, dragging my head back to expose the pale line of my throat, and bit at the skin there.
This frenzy was born of needing not to feel, not to think, not to be alone with the sick twins of loneliness and longing. She ground out a rhythm, faster and faster until the headboard hammered the wall.
I let myself thrust up into her, hard enough to bruise, hard enough to make her grunt and dig her fingers deeper into my back.
Her round breasts bounced in my face. I caught her nipple in my mouth, bit down almost too hard, used my free hand to fondle the other, and heard her gasp. A wordless whine that might have been a plea for more or less. Didn’t matter.
I was not there, not really. Not with her. I was a thousand miles back in time, a thousand miles forward, orbiting the same doomed sun. Lillian’s hands on me, Lillian’s heat, Lillian’s hair stuck to my cheek, none of it was her, not really. I was fucking the vacancy she left behind.
I almost wanted to call her by the wrong name, wanted to spit out “Amelia” just to see what it would do to the animal clinging to the inside of my ribs. But I kept it inside, let the syllables dissolve on my tongue, because even at my worst I wasn’t sure I could stand the honesty of it.
I drove myself up into Lillian, hard and jerking, needing to fill the hollow she’d found in me. The one I spent every day trying to shore up with hate and violence.
My hands found her ass, rough and possessive, pulling her down, guiding her angles with a control that was more plea than dominance.
She hissed when I pinched, then twisted her hips so I was forced deep inside, nerves sparking in her belly and mine. The pressure built, white-hot, a spiral of want and misery and the need to be needed.
She pressed her palm to my chest, bracing herself, and sweat ran in cold lines from her hair to my bare skin. I watched her fingers creep down, sliding over her ribs to the soaked triangle between her legs. She rubbed herself in little circles, her breath coming fast and higher with each round.
I was hypnotized: by the sight of her, by the furious concentration on her face, by the shattered little moans.
I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. I was inside her, every thrust was an electric storm up my spine, every spasm a riot of hate and longing and the sick, raw need to leave a mark that would never, ever fade.
I heard myself groan and for a second I felt the split, felt myself fracture along fault lines, one side watching from the ceiling while the other bucked and clawed and burned with the need to belong, even if only as a wound.
I held her steady and let her ride me, her face gone slack with concentration, the wet slap of flesh on flesh loud in the shivery air of the room. She pressed her forehead to mine.
When she came, her thighs clamped around me and she ground her hips in a tight spiral, little tremors juddering through the bones of her pelvis. She made a low, keening sound and let the shudder work through her until her nails went slack on my skin.
I could have lasted longer, but I didn’t want to. I’d spent a lifetime holding back, choking out everything that made me weak.
For once I let the animal win. I bit down on the curve of her shoulder, hard enough to leave a mark, and came inside her with a violence that left me lightheaded, nails digging rivers into the small of her back.
The sound that broke from my chest wasn’t pleasure, not even close. It was release. The pure and perfect silence that follows an explosion.
When I was done I collapsed back, dizzy, the world gone white and then pitch black, my heart rabbiting out of control as if it wanted to leap right out of my chest and leave my body behind for good.
Lillian rolled off me, panting, her hair stuck damp to her cheeks. She laughed once, then pulled the rumpled comforter over her chest like a shield.
We lay there side by side, eyes fixed to the ceiling, breathing in sync and out of time. I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
I closed my eyes. I wanted to pretend it was Amelia I’d just fucked, wanted to believe that somewhere, in some possible world, the gap between her and me wasn’t just a nightmare.
I chased that thought beyond the edges of consciousness, inside the hot bell of Lillian’s room, in the aftershocks of sweat and raw skin. I felt nothing as my body collapsed into the mattress.
I felt everything, and that was worse.
Just for one night, I gave in, and allowed myself to hate her a little less, knowing that tomorrow the monster would return, and I would fall right back into the grip of darkness and rage.