32. Riley #2
His thrusts grow erratic, and his grip on my hair tightens, his length twitching in my mouth.
His piercing grazes the back of my throat, and the gagging becomes unbearable again—but for only a heartbeat.
Then his cum spills, and the intense taste drives me over the edge.
With one more expert flick of his tongue over my clit, I shatter too.
“Swallow everything,” he orders me, his voice low and husky. “That’s it. That’s a good fucking girl.”
With my eyes closed and breathing deep through my nose, I suppress the urge to heave, sucking the last remains of his release from his cock.
My vision is still blurred, my chest aches with the lack of oxygen, and all my muscles feel weak and spent. But I barely get a moment to recover.
“Come here. I want to see your face. I want to see how much you enjoyed having your throat fucked raw.”
Just as easily as before, he turns me around and pulls me close. I’m lying on his heaving chest, and we’re face-to-face, both slick with sweat.
“Yeah, you fucking loved it, didn’t you? I can see it in your eyes. You look completely drunk, Hotshot. You love it when I use you like a thing that belongs to me.”
“Maybe I just enjoyed washing your face with my orgasm, asshole.” The retort comes without thinking.
“My mess is all around your mouth, and you’ll spend the rest of the night smelling like me.
” I swipe my tongue across his chin, tasting the truth behind my words.
“Right now, you look like something that belongs to me.”
His eyes widen, and I brace myself, expecting his anger, his raised voice, the slap of his hand against my flesh.
I cower instinctively, preparing for anything but the thing that he does: he roars with laughter.
Not in a cruel, anticipatory way either.
Still, I don’t trust it, digging my fingers into his chest, my whole body tense.
“Relax,” he tells me when he catches his breath. “I won’t hurt you for having a smart mouth. Not when it served me that well. But fucking hell, Riley, I wasn’t prepared for that.”
He rubs my back, and still not quite believing my luck, I settle against him.
Nestled in his warmth, I start getting sleepy and comfortable.
But I don’t want to close my eyes. I don’t want whatever moment we’re having to be over yet.
And so instead I ask a question that’s been on my mind since his screams woke me up.
“Will you tell me about Haqif?” I feel him stiffen beneath me, and apprehension ripples through me. “You were crying out his name. Was he a friend?”
I’m half expecting him to refuse to tell me, if not to push me off the hammock. But he does neither.
“Heh. No. Haqif was my school bully.” He chuckles, fingers running down my spine. “Fucking typical of him, out of them all, to be the one to come back and haunt me.”
“What do you mean?” Without lifting my head up from the firm cushion of his chest, I glance up to find him looking at me and into an unreachable distance at the same time. “What happened to him?”
I rise when he breathes in heavily, then sink when he exhales, the sound laboured.
“We were in the army together. Our base was blown up during a raid. His leg got torn off. I was only uninjured because I went for a piss at the luckiest possible moment. Just a fucking coincidence. No merit.” He scoffs. His heart speeds up, its thrum reverberating deep inside his ribcage.
“All the medics were dead. The nearest city was ten miles away, and all the jeeps were gone too.”
“There was nothing you could have done,” I tell him mildly. “You couldn’t have carried him for ten miles, Aron.”
“I did carry him for ten miles,” he counters grimly.
“But I stopped right at the edge of the city, not half a mile away from the hospital.” He pauses to take a breath before uttering the next part seemingly without breathing at all.
“That’s when he died. Fifteen minutes away from help. Because I had to stop.”
My throat constricts, and the corners of my eyes burn with salt.
“Aron? It wasn’t your fault he died. It wasn’t your fault that any of them died.”
“It was my fault. If I hadn’t stopped ... and Haqif’s just one of many. It’s like every decision I made caused someone I cared about to get hurt. Like a curse. Until I realised that I could use that.”
Whatever I was about to say, I give in to curiosity instead. “What do you mean?”
“Once I realised who I was, what I was, and that I brought nothing but death to people no matter what I did ... I also realised I could bring it to the right people. I accepted who I was. And used it for the best purpose I could find.”
“It was never you, Aron.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Riley.”
“You don’t think I know a thing or two about survivor’s guilt?
” I raise my head up to meet his glare. “Doing what I do? All that I’ve witnessed without being able to help or interfere?
Always having to remind myself that my job is to make sure others see what I’ve seen so that they can act? And that’s not even the worst of it.”
Something lets up in his features, his eyes darkening with curiosity.
Satisfied, I settle my head back on his shoulder before elaborating.
“The worst of it was my father. Except he stopped being a father to anybody the day he lost his job. He became a violent drunk instead. He beat my mother and my younger siblings. But never me.” I sigh heavily, my breath bitter on my lips.
“I was the breadwinner, remember? He didn’t dare lay a finger on me, oh no.
But I couldn’t get him to stop hurting the others.
I couldn’t do anything but watch the abuse get worse and worse. ”
My voice breaks, and I flinch when his fingers glide through my hair, the gentle contact as surprising as it is soothing. I soak up the comfort the way parched earth soaks up summer rain—cracks smoothing and all that was coarse softening inside of me.
“Then Volker came along with his ... proposal.” Aron’s arms wrap around me, the gesture almost protective, like he wants to save me from the memory—like I’m worth saving. “I can’t even tell. Did I agree because I wanted to get them away from here? Or did I just want to get away from them?”
Something irreparable, something that was already fractured, breaks inside of me when his lips touch the crown of my head.
“Hey, Aron?”
“Hm?”
“Sometimes I think I deserve everything you’ve done to me.”
He stays silent for so long that I no longer expect him to answer by the time he finally does. “Sometimes I worry that you don’t.”
For a long while, neither of us says anything. I listen to the cheerful chirping of morning birds. Warm and comfortable in Aron’s embrace, I close my eyes, drifting off to sleep.
His voice pulls me out of my pleasant limbo. “All the shit you’ve seen, Hotshot ... Don’t you ever have nightmares?”
“I do,” I admit, the thrum of his heart loud and steady in my ear.
“What about?”
I hesitate before replying honestly, “You.”