35. Nervous, trip over my words. You’re so pretty, it hurts…
35
Nervous, trip over my words. You’re so pretty, it hurts…
Firefly
I knew something was wrong the moment she pulled up.
I could tell by the way she stared off into nothingness, her hands gripping the wheel and her blue eyes unfocused. I hurriedly stuffed the note I’d been holding into my back pocket and jumped off the porch. She didn’t need to see it now, not with that far-away look in her eyes. She didn’t need to see the tiny, rushed scrawl calling her Butterfly and promising to visit her.
I’d kill him. I’d rip out his throat and fuck her in his blood.
No. No, I’d bleed him slowly. Make him watch before I take his final breath.
I walked around the car as the engine died, but still, she didn’t look up at me. Her pain shadowed her beauty, and I felt an instantaneous rage lift inside of me.
Not my baby. Not my Little Moth.
She didn’t even look over as I snatched up the handle and pulled her door open, kneeling in the gravel beside her. I watched her fight for breath, her hands shaking as her fingers grappled for the steering wheel, as if it were her safety net, and she needed it to keep herself grounded.
“Moth?” I asked, and she jumped at the sound of my voice. “What’s wrong?”
I watched her break, her shoulders lurching and her chest heaving as she sucked in a final, gasping breath, and then she broke, tears pouring down her cheeks and dropping down the front of her pristine, white sweater and splattering across the lock of her collar that just barely peeked over the turtleneck.
With shaking fingers, I reached over her, careful not to startle her as I found the latch of her seatbelt and clicked it off. I was careful to hold on to it as I slid it into place, afraid the sound would scare her.
“What happened?” As hard as I tried to keep to anger out of my voice, I heard it anyway, and that only made me angrier. “Who do I need to hurt? Give me a name.”
She shook her head and turned to look at me, her wide blue eyes sucking me in until I lost my breath right alongside her. My cock throbbed to life between my legs and I reached out, wrapping my arms around her and pinning her to my chest.
No. No, not now.
I couldn’t react like this now.
Before I knew it, her hand rose between us, shaking me from my wicked thoughts, a silver key nestled in the creamy skin of her palm as she showed it to me.
“I did it. I b-bought the old clinic. I bought it. It’s… It’s mine. It’s ours. ”
She spoke to me, but when she pulled away, I found myself caught in the web of her eyes, which locked onto mine and drained every intelligent thought from me.
“Is that why you’re crying?” I asked. “A-are you happy? Is that it?”
Every word was a fight—a fight against myself, and the desire that pulsed against my thigh.
Goddamn, my parasite brain.
She shook her head, but her eyes never left mine.
“No. No, it’s not that. Its…” I watched her grapple for the words, fighting with herself as she struggled to find the words to say. Finally, her baby blues lit up in a way that made my heart soar. “Tommy, let’s get married.”
My breath caught behind a wall in my throat, my brain moving somehow too slow and too fast at the same time. This was everything I had wanted since the first day I saw her at the funeral—to own her completely in every way—so why was I so damn nervous all of a sudden?
“I want everyone to know. I want to tell the world. I want to be your wife.”
Something inside of me snapped, and I mentally shook away the apprehension, focusing only on the glow in her eyes and the way her lips twitched when she smiled. Even with a runny nose and tear-stained, red-rimmed eyes, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“Are you sure?” I asked, my voice as sticky and dry as my throat .
She nodded, and when the smile cracked her lips and reached her eyes, a sparkle in the blue that I had only dreamed of before, I knew that she was. She was sure, so why was I hesitating?
We’d talked about this only a few days ago, and I’d been more than happy with the idea then, so what was this worry that had suddenly bloomed in my chest?
“Come on.”
Grabbing her hand, I helped her stand; her legs shaking as she stepped out of the car. My heartbeat was pounding in my ears, my breath sawing in and out of my lungs, tight and unsure as I led her away from the driveway and across the front lawn. Where were we going? I didn’t even know. All I knew was I wanted to walk. I wanted to take her somewhere alone, and I wanted to make it official.
The moment I crossed into the treeline, the uncertainty fell away. With every step, my path grew stronger, and before I knew it, I was dragging her along behind me, practically sprinting as we made our way through the woods.
I had to do this now.
It had to be now.
“Where are we going?” she asked, panting. The sound of her struggling made me stop—to pause, looking back at her in the shadows, beneath the swaying branches of the canopy overhead, among the sounds of the insects screaming and the birds singing their final songs before winter.
“I’m gonna do things the right way,” I said, watching as confusion shadowed her face. “I didn’t know I wanted it until I saw you and he was already gone. ”
“W-wait,” she said, blinking at me. I saw her eyes begin to swim once again, and I forced myself to look away. “Where are we going?”
Grabbing her hand, I continued my walk, if not a bit slower. I couldn’t answer that question right now. I couldn’t listen to her beg me not to do it—I needed to. Maybe we both needed it, more than either of us knew.
“It’s a surprise,” I told her simply and left it at that.
Thankfully, she stayed silent after that, and we walked through the swaying shadows, moving past the shadow of an old willow that bowed over the clearing that had, at one time, been a beautiful pond. Maybe she’d restore it. After all, this land and the pastures on three sides of the house were hers. She just didn’t know it yet.
Maybe she did? Maybe I wasn’t giving my Little Moth enough credit.
Finally, I could see the beams of sunlight breaking through the trees up ahead, leading us into the waving tawny flags of tufted grass that would lead us to our final destination.
When we made it to the edge of the forest and she first placed a booted heel onto the path through the grass, she stopped, pulling me to a halt. I looked back at her, and her eyes were huge, disbelieving disks that stopped me in my tracks.
“Wait, are we going—”
“Just come with me,” I urged her gently. “I’m right here.”
“I haven’t been—” she stopped, swallowing thickly as she looked from me, off into the distance. “I haven’t been to the cemetery since we…”
She trailed off, shaking her head .
Even if I could sense her hesitation, she allowed me to pull her along, practically dragging her through the grass as we closed in, closer and closer.
Birds swam through the air over our heads, looping in lazy circles through the cloudless blue sky.
After a moment, we arrived at the broken and unkempt fence, and I peeled back the chain link to give us a path between the headstones. Most of them had a layer of grime and moss, but one among them gleamed in the sunlight. When she stepped in behind me, I weaved with her through the stones, listening to the sound of her breathing shifting from shallow and steady to wavering sniffles.
I had expected this. I knew this was coming.
How could I not?
After all, if she hadn’t been here since the funeral, then she hadn’t properly grieved. When we made it to the graveside of the late Don Harper, I pulled her down to the short tufts of green that had just started to sprout between the lines of straw they had sprinkled over the dirt. I sat cross-legged, facing the headstone, and pulled her down into my lap. She was stiff, her limbs contorted against her body and her muscles taut and anxious. When she settled against me, I wrapped my arms around her waist and pinned her against me.
“What are you feeling?” I asked her, and she stiffened all over again.
“W-why are w-we here?” She choked on the words, and a pile of guilt landed on top of me like a ton of bricks, squeezing the air from my lungs in a shaking exhale .
At that moment, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. Was this too much? Was I pushing her too far?
Sighing, I rested my chin on her shoulder, and with that one simple gesture, I felt her melt into me.
“Well,” I began, and I paused. How much should I tell her? “Ever since the day at the funeral, and everything that’s happened since, I’ve wondered what your dad would say about all of this. Would he tell me I was a sick son of a bitch? Hell, maybe he’d shoot me himself.” I chuckled, and I felt Vanessa pull in a deep, shaking breath. “But part of me knows that ultimately, he would just want you to be happy.”
She stayed silent for a long time, and just as I opened my mouth to speak, she interrupted me.
“No, he wouldn’t,” she whispered. “I wish. I wish, but he never cared. He never cared if I was happy.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked, genuinely at a loss for what to say. I hadn’t expected this.
After a long pause, her voice was so soft I nearly didn’t hear her over the whisper of the breeze.
“Have I ever told you why I left Cottonwood Falls in the first place? Why my dad and I didn’t speak for so long?”
I stayed quiet, and after pulling in a deep breath, she continued.
“He wanted me to go to the academy like he did. He wanted me to go to Kansas City like he did, and be a cop. He wanted me to ‘follow in his footsteps’,” she said, her fingers coming up and hooking into air quotes. “But I didn’t want to. I wanted to work with animals. He didn’t care. We got into an argument, and he basically told me he was disappointed that I was a girl, and I would never be the son he wanted, and my mom had died before she could give him a boy. So I went off to college, anyway. I never came home, not even for holidays. One year on his birthday, I called to see if he would apologize. He never did. So he would call on holidays, and my birthday…”
She shrugged.
“But it was never the same after that.”
I stayed quiet, a silent anger boiling inside of me. All of this time, that man had never had anything but my utmost respect, but he had never deserved it. He was a bigger monster than I had ever been.
“I just thought…” I trailed off, unsure of what to say. “After everything that happened with Barrett—”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Anything. Always.”
“He knew, didn’t he?”
I paused, my brain running in a million different directions.
“About…?”
She sucked in a deep breath, her shoulders shaking as she let it out in a low whoosh.
“About Barrett? He knew, didn’t he?”
The words caught in my throat, stuck there like a knife in my Adam’s apple.
I didn’t want to think about this. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her—to hurt her with the knowledge that I had known this whole time.
“Not at first,” I said honestly. “But after a while, he found out. ”
“Why didn’t he tell me?” she asked, and I heard the tears cracking her voice again.
Damn it. Damn it, I hated myself for hurting her like this.
“Well,” I said, and I sighed. “He said it was because he wanted you to be happy, and Barrett was the only friend you had.”
“How many people know?”
The tears in her voice had gone, and now it was only anger left.
“As far as I know? Nobody.”
“How did you find out?”
My heart slammed against my sternum. I didn’t want to relive this. I didn’t want to think about it. I clenched my fists, fighting with the anger and the hatred. Red swam at the edges of my vision, and I had to fight it away.
I sucked in a gasping breath before I could force myself to speak.
“I’ve known since I saved you,” I said, my voice low and shaking. “I heard the calls coming over the scanner. Some little old lady that lived next door was calling a couple of times a day, saying she could hear screaming coming from the basement. No one believed her, because when the officers would get there to check, the guy would come out and say it was his chihuahua, and they’d believe him, and leave without even checking.”
I paused, fighting with myself.
I couldn’t get that image out of my head. I couldn’t force the shadows away. When I spoke again, it was a rambling blurt of words that spewed from me like vomit.
“I didn’t believe it. It was just too weird. So I looked for myself, and the curtains had come away from one of the basement windows, so I looked in and I saw what he was doing to you, and I just couldn’t leave you there. I started the fire to get him to stop.”
The wind ran across us, and she shivered. Looking down at her, I saw her jaw clench and her lips shaking.
“What was he doing?” she asked, and I felt it like a knife to the gut.
“D-don’t make me say it, Moth. I can’t.”
She was stiff in my arms, like a statue of the goddess I’d always seen her as. I forced myself to look away. I couldn’t look at the tears slipping down her cheeks. Not like this.
“He raped me, didn’t he? Barrett?”
I could feel it again—the anger pulsing and crawling up inside of me, threatening to take me over like it had that night with Stephen. Only now, I had no way to unleash it. I had to swallow it.
“Tommy,” she whispered, twisting in my arms to look at me. “He did, didn’t he?”
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t find the words. My eyes were swimming, my throat slamming shut around the words that tried to crawl and claw their way out of me.
It was gonna hurt her to know. I couldn’t hurt her.
No. No, I couldn’t say it.
“I’ve had nightmares,” she whispered, looking up at me, the ocean of her eyes swimming with tears she hadn’t shed. “I’ve had nightmares about him doing it. He did, didn’t he?”
I couldn’t keep her in the dark. I couldn’t deny her. My princess could have anything she wanted, but I couldn’t give her this.
I had to. I had to give her this.
“Yes,” I said finally, my voice a low growl. “He did. ”
I expected her to break—to scream in her heartbreak as it tore through her, flooding from her eyes as she crumpled in my arms. She didn’t. She made a single, soft noise in her throat and turned, nesting in my arms and folding herself against me.
I should have known. My moth was strong—stronger than anyone I’d ever known.
“Wow,” she said, shaking her head. “And he knew? My dad knew?”
“I’m not sure if he did. I never told anyone. If they knew what I saw, they’d know I started the fire.”
She nodded, sighing.
“They didn’t do a rape kit at the hospital,” she said. “My dad said he ‘didn’t want me violated like that’.” Her voice was bitter and angry.
“I’m sorry, Little Moth.”
We sat that way in silence for just a few minutes.
“I wanna show him,” she said, turning to look into my eyes with a sadistic grin that I hadn’t been expecting.
“What?”
“I wanna show him how violated I’ve been.”
“How?”
She twisted where she sat until she straddled me, her long fingers twisting in my shirt as she pulled me against her.
“Fuck me, Tommy. Right here. Fuck me on his grave.”
Something inside of me had wound too tightly, and at the sound of her words, it snapped like a too-taut rubber band. I flipped her without a second thought, pinning on her back among the straw and the tiny, just-sprouting seedlings of the grass they’d sewn over the top of the man who had at one point been my mentor—like a father to me. Now, he’d watch from wherever he’d gone as I defiled his daughter right on top of his rotting corpse.
There was something wrong with me, something twisted and evil that needed to be stamped down. I shouldn’t be so excited. I shouldn’t have already been rock hard and aching by the time I popped the button on my jeans and released my monstrous nature out into the world, but here it was, and there was no denying it.
Pressing her down into the dirt with one hand, I used the other to pull at the zipper of her pants until it was down just enough that I could yank the denim down her thighs, her panties coming with them. My eager little girl wrapped her thighs around my waist, pulling me down on top of her to shield her body from the cold, and when she did, I plunged inside of her, forcing her open with my cock until I was forced in up to the hilt and there was no telling where she ended and I began.
The first time I’d fucked her, it had been too tight—too small for everything I had to offer. But over the last month, I’d carved my name across her walls, and now I was content with the knowledge that she would never fit anyone else the way she fit me. She was made for me and me alone, and the thought almost made me explode on the spot.
I rocked against her, and her head fell back to the earth beneath her, her perfect lips falling open in a silent sound.
I didn’t want her quiet. I wanted her moaning—screaming so loud that anyone in earshot would spread rumors about the haunting at the cemetery.
My little banshee .
Her hands hooked into claws, grappling for my shoulders, for something to hold on to. I gave it to her, entwining my fingers between hers and pinning her hands to the ground above her head.
“Good girl. Look at you, you take me so well,” I whispered to her, and I watched her eyes flash open, looking up at me with that same wide-eyed innocence she’d given me the first time. Good, I hoped she never lost it. I hoped being able to defile her every time would tame the beast inside of me.
I drove into her again, slamming into her so forcefully that I felt her hips rock into the dirt, and she gasped. I’d leave an imprint of her body on his gave, and when the flowers grew in the dent her ass left behind, I’d laugh.
“Harder,” she pleaded, her arms wrapping around my neck and pulling me down, dragging me out of my thoughts until I could only focus on her.
So I did. It only took a moment, but I found a rhythm we could dance to, pushing against her as she stared into my eyes, and just like I’d hoped, her voice rose into a fever pitch until the sound of her lust echoed across the rippling fields and through the trees that led to the house we’d make a home.
“T-Tommy! Tommy, fuck. Fuck, harder. D-don’t—”
Reaching up, I pressed the palm of my hand against her lips, silencing her, my fingernails pushing indents into her cheeks. I watched the fear rise in her eyes, only a little, before her lust won the battle.
“No, no. You wanna be my good little girl? Hmm? You want him to see how you’ve been violated? Do you want him to see that you have a new daddy now? Someone to properly take care of you? Don’t you, Little Moth? Show me. Show me who your favorite daddy really is.”
She nodded, her breath coming in muffled bursts against my hand, and when I released her, she didn’t disappoint.
“Fuck, Daddy! F-fuck. Yes! Gonna m-make me c-cum. Shit!” She was panting, her words slipping from between pillow-soft lips that quivered with every syllable she spoke. “F-fill me up, daddy. Please? Show me that I’ve been a good girl. Just for you, daddy.”
I nearly lost it right then and there.
Why was I like this?
Fucking her on her father’s grave while she called me daddy shouldn’t have made me act like this, but I never claimed to be a pious man.
Somehow, I managed to hold on until I felt her walls clench around me, and I pushed myself up, straightening against her as I never stopped the pummeling of my hips. With shaking fingers, I spread her thighs, looking between us and watching as my cock spread her open.
It was a beautiful sight, but it was the thing that ultimately ruined me.
I watched my cock twitch and pulse as I reached my peak, and I filled her—just as she asked.
When I was spent and finally caught my breath, I carefully pulled out of her and watched the evidence leaking out of her abused hole, running in beaded lines down the curve of her beautiful ass.
Momentarily, I felt a bit guilty for the mess I made, then I remembered that it had been her idea the whole time.
Maybe my good girl wasn’t so good after all.
And I liked it.