Chapter 17 #2
I’m thrashing in the water as he holds me down, feeling like I’m going blue in the face from the cold and the lack of air. Why is he doing this to me? What the hell did I do? This isn’t fair. I didn’t do anything. Screw him.
My mind goes through a million emotions before settling on anger as he drags me back up.
Furious, I try to knee him in the balls, and when that doesn’t work, I spit in his face.
Dane gasps and Liam lets out a bark of laughter from where they’re standing on the shore, but Quill merely stares at me, his face a mask, both literally and figuratively, before he dunks me again.
“Holy crap! Stop that, Quill! Stop tha–”
I’m back to being completely submerged in the water, fighting for air, and now, panic takes the place of anger. He’s leaving me in far too long. I’m going to die. He’s actually killing me.
But then he lifts me back out again, and I suck in breath after breath of air. It’s like he knows exactly what my endurance is as he continues to dunk me again and again. Just long enough to allow me to wonder, each time, if I’m going to die, before he drags me back up.
By the time he’s finished with me, I’m limp with exhaustion, my body sagging in his hands. His paper plate is angled at me, and between the lack of the moon and the holes cut out over his eyes that only show pools of darkness now, I have no idea what he’s thinking.
I don’t even know what I’m thinking. Well, I’m thinking I’m going crazy.
Because there’s just no way, as he’s putting me through this nightmare, that I’m finding comfort in his touch.
There’s just no way.
And yet, it’s the truth.
It’s only because his hands, one of them clutching the front of my shirt and the other my hair, are the ones dragging me back from the water each time, I tell myself desperately.
But they’re also the hands plunging me in.
Yet his arms are telling me, somehow, that it’s going to be alright. He’s not going to kill me. He’s putting me through hell, but he’s not going to hurt me. Not really.
My silent monstrous protector.
Nothing I’m thinking is making sense right now. It’s like I’ve lost every one of my brain cells in the freezing cold Astley Lake.
“Come on, Quill,” says Liam impatiently. “We’ve had our fun. How about letting her go now? Let’s go set some trash cans on fire.”
No. Don’t let me go. Never let me go. Please, Quill. Don’t.
What the hell is wrong with me?
Quill keeps his paper plate resolutely angled down at me, and I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing. Probably not. Probably he’s hesitating to continue his torture, or to change it up, or to drop me right into the water and head off with his friends.
Whatever magnetic force is drawing me to him right now is too cruel.
Too cruel, because he’s a psycho. He hates my guts, but no matter what he does… he’s the person who occupies every one of my waking moments.
My nightmares, too.
Despite everything he’s put me through these past few years, he’s still my obsession.
At last he drags his face away from me to utter one word. “Go.”
“Uh… go? What do you mean?” asks Liam. “Aren’t you coming with us?”
“Go,” repeats Quill.
“But… what about your dad’s car? How the hell are we supposed to go downtown? It’s miles from here…”
“Leave the car. Fucking go.”
Again his eyes seem to flash a murderous glare, though this time, with his face resolutely turned toward Liam, there’s no way it could be directed at me. Right?
Anyway, I must be imagining it, because how the hell could I see what kind of glare is in his eyes? In the moonless night, they’ve turned into black vacuums in the middle of his face, and I can barely catch a glimpse of them anyway, since he’s facing away from me.
It’s not like I could see his eyes even if it was the middle of the day and he was facing me. The world went fuzzy the minute Quill took my glasses.
But it feels like I don’t need to see a thing. I can sense it all from the tenseness of his muscles, the way his hands are clenched around me right now.
I’m letting my imagination run away from me.
Regardless, Dane, who doesn’t look quite so stupid as Liam, pulls on his friend’s arm. “Let’s go, Liam,” he says quietly.
“The fuck,” grumbles Liam, but he does what his friend says.
I hear the light, crunchy padding of their feet as they walk away, leaving me alone with my bully.
I shiver, wondering what the hell he’s going to do to me now that I really am at his mercy. Somehow, with his two idiot friends around, it didn’t feel as dangerous. Even though I’m sure he wouldn’t let two hangers-on like them keep him from whatever he wanted to do.
But this eerie silence between us, the realization that we’re entirely alone, suddenly feels terrifying.
I had allowed myself to believe he wouldn’t kill me, but right now I’m very aware that he could drown me and bury me in the dense shrubbery surrounding the lake, and it would take the police weeks to find me.
Maybe they’d never find me, because who the hell would go looking for Piper Day?
Quill slowly turns his head back around to me and I look up at him, my teeth chattering from both the cold and my fear.
“Quill,” I breathe, feeling tears bubble up embarrassingly in the corner of my eyes. “Please, Quill… please…”
I have no idea what I’m begging for as my words push out of me, choked with the overwhelming, contradictory emotions coursing through me.
He stares at me for a long time without moving.
Then his hand slowly leaves my hair to remove his mask.
His eyes glue themselves to mine, and I nearly lose my breath at seeing him so close to me.
We’re inches apart, and holy hell is he handsome.
Even in the darkness of the moonless night, and the fuzziness that surrounds me from not wearing my glasses, I can make out his tan skin, his piercing blue eyes, his long straight nose and high cheekbones.
The lips underneath with just enough fat in them to make me want to…
No. No, no, no, no, no.
“You’re cross-eyed,” he says suddenly.
“Huh?”
“Your left eye. It’s cross-eyed.”
Yeah, well, strabismus. He’s holding me inches over the water, I’m soaked through, shivering and cold, and he’s really asking me about my eyesight?
“It’s kind of blue,” he adds.
I grit my teeth, wondering if the asshole is on drugs right now. What the hell is he doing?
“Heterochromia,” I spit out. “My eyes are all kinds of messed up. Are you going to let go of me now?”
His hand clutching the front of my shirt and the other one that’s back in my hair tell me he very much is not.
“It’s cute,” he says abruptly, and I stare up at him in confusion.
Confusion turns to utter shock as he suddenly lifts me to him and… kisses me.
“What the h–” I begin, but his arms encircle me as his mouth deepens the kiss, and the rest of my sentence is lost.
Out of all the scenarios I’ve been desperately running in my mind for the past few minutes, this one never entered my skull.
Quill Nelson is kissing me.
His hand in my hair strokes it roughly, more as though he’s trying to get a sense of the weird curly texture than actually caressing me, while his tongue darts out of his mouth and presses against my lips.
I let it in without thinking and it explores every single one of my teeth, hooking itself around my tongue, as his mouth devours me.
It’s a weird combination of hunger and curiosity that… awakens something in me.
Something in my core that clenches and writhes with need, and I don’t know if I want to cry or melt into him.
I settle on both as he continues to kiss me viciously, his hands clawing at my back, touching every inch of my skin as if he can’t get enough of me.
Then my tears wet his cheek, and though I wish I could pretend it’s just the water of the lake, I know he can tell. He draws back suddenly, staring at me.
“Please,” I sob, the words pouring out of my mouth, my mind helpless to stop them, “please, keep going. Keep going.”
He stares at me for a beat longer before hooking an arm under my legs. He lifts me out of the water and carries me to the area that surrounds it, and lies me down on the grass with more tenderness than I could have imagined possible from him.
“Are you cold?” he asks, feeling me shiver beneath him.
You dunked me in the freezing water for minutes on end. What do you think, asshole? Yes, I’m freaking cold.
But all I can do is shake my head and cry, big gulping sobs wracking my entire body, desperately wishing they’d stop because I know they’ll scare him away and he’ll leave.
In the span of thirty minutes, my bully’s tortured me worse than he ever had before, before reigniting my childhood dreams.
I feel like I’m going crazy.
He doesn’t leave though. He sits down on the grass beside me, takes off his thick, fleece-lined hoodie, and draws me onto his lap.
Then he wraps his hoodie around me. I can barely breathe as I feel my head against his warm chest, feel the beat of his heart beneath my cheek, his spiciness in my nose.
His arm begins to trace soothing circles on my back and in my hair, and the tenderness of his touch feels like it’s going to break me.
It’s too much. After everything he’s put me through, it’s too much.
There’s no doubt about it. I really am going mad.
But somehow, his touch does soothe me, and after a while my sobs quiet down. The tears spilling down my cheeks cease, and he takes my chin with one hand. He tilts my head back so I’m facing him, then dries my tears with a finger before tasting them. And then he freaking kisses me again.
The kiss this time is a lot more tender, at first. He presses his lips to mine while his hand gently strokes the side of my face.
But it seems to awaken something darker in him, and it grows deeper, more passionate, until somehow I’m straddling him and we’re both attacking each other, clawing at each others’ skin, kissing each other for dear life.
His hands hunt for any skin they can find, first my face, then my neck, then under the hem of my shirt that’s still plastered to my body from the wetness of the lake.
Then up my stomach, my sides, cupping my breasts and kneading them, rolling my nipples between his fingers.
They’re stiff already from the cold, but whatever he’s doing to them makes them actually ache.
Especially when his touch gets a lot less gentle.
He grabs them, twists them to the point of crushing and I squirm on his lap in pain as he keeps hungrily kissing me.
But this is a good kind of pain. This is the kind of pain I wish would continue forever.
Then he removes his hands from me and I moan with the loss of him, but he only does it so he can push me back down on the ground, spreading the hoodie on either side of me before ripping my shirt off. Then he gets on his knees, crouching back to look at me.
I blush under the intensity of his gaze on my bare skin.
I’m skinny and pretty flat-chested. I know girls my age usually have started to wear bras, but I don’t bother, because I don’t have much to support.
But he doesn’t seem to mind, because after a moment of looking, he falls on top of me again, bringing his mouth to my neck and biting down hard before sucking.
“Oh!” I groan, but he ignores my cry of pain, and does the same thing to my chest, then to my nipple.
He zeroes in on it, biting and sucking me until I feel like I’m going to lose it from the mix of pain and pleasure.
Then he continues to work his way down, decorating my skin with a row of bruising hickeys.
He gets to my waist and I gasp as his hands grab at my jeans hungrily, before he unzips them.
I’m sure he’d like to rip them off too, but the denim is just a bit too thick for that, and I’m kind of thankful for it, because how the hell will I ever go home if my clothes are in tatters?
But I stop thinking in rational sentences when he buries his face in the space between my legs.
“Oh, my gosh, Quill!” I squeak out. “Quill! What is that? What are you… oh my gosh!”
He tears himself away from that very private place to glare up at me. “Anyone ever told you you talk too fucking much?”
I clap my hand over my mouth, barely daring to breathe anymore, but it’s not because of his words. It’s because what he’s doing to me is…
Holy crap.
It feels so weird, but I also don’t want it to stop.
His face is buried once more in my folds, and I bite down on the world’s loudest shriek when his tongue darts over them. I suddenly realize that’s where the clenching ache came from. From the place he’s now assaulting with his tongue.
The ache grows when his tongue finds a little bud, my clitoris I realize because I pay attention in health class—crap. It’s like the most sensitive nerve ending that his tongue flicks over, back and forth, then he brings it into his mouth and sucks on it and I actually wonder if I’m going to die.
I’m shaking and squirming as his hands find mine and he pins them to the ground, continuing his merciless exploration.
His tongue darts in and out of me, and I start crying because it’s too much.
I don’t know how I can handle all the sensations that are making my body hum with heat, the freezing wetness of the lake forgotten.
I’m thrashing around under him, and he lets go of my hands just for a moment to nudge my legs wide.
Then he blocks them under his arms, and his hands go back for mine.
All the while, his mouth continues to torture me, his lips sucking on my clit as his tongue delves deep inside me, touching a part of me that makes me cry out.
He keeps going, zeroing in on every part of me that drives me frantic.
I don’t know if he has a lot of experience—I can’t even bear to think of that—or if he’s just very attentive, and keeps doing the things he sees make me react.
Whatever it is, his tongue repeatedly finds that place inside me, while his mouth sucks in my clit, and I’m going insane.
Until I actually do go insane, a thunderous wave crashing through me, making my body spasm under the intensity of it, then go limp, utterly spent.
It’s a far more complete limpness than when I was in the lake, because every single nerve ending in my body feels absolutely fried.
But Quill doesn’t let me remain on the grass.
He grabs me and sits me down on his lap, holding me to him, zipping the hoodie up around me.
A thousand questions should be crowding my brain, but instead I feel strangely empty, strangely…
satisfied just to be in the arms of my bully as he holds me to him, crushing me so hard I can barely breathe.
And then, randomly and suddenly—I fall asleep.