35. Give Me Fear
35
GIVE ME FEAR
REMIEL
I’m obsessed with you.
He loves me. In whatever way makes sense to him, he loves me, and I’m so struck by his admission that I don’t notice our bodies have gone from rigid to relaxed, cum slicked between us, and Krypt’s usually volatile energy is calm.
In a move so unfamiliar to him, he pulls back to look at me… almost sweetly. His eyes on mine—his beasts gentle and slumbering while my heart thrashes. Because… because something feels different.
Yes, I want him to love me. I want him to be obsessed with me. I want tender moments and savage ones. But this moment, the one that’s become the epicentre of our forward trajectory, the declarations and the words with meanings that mark the progression from before he loved me to after he loved me… it doesn’t feel right to have him so timid.
“Why are you… you said you don’t respond to soft.” I tilt my head at him, confused by his reaction. Because if Krypt is going to love me and obsess over me, I want him to do it as himself. Not as a version of himself he thinks he needs to be to appease me. “Why are you being soft?”
He squints at me, a beast or two waking up within him. “You just survived The Mad House, played me your music, endured a fuck, and told me you…” he swallows the end of the sentence. “I don’t want to hurt you right now, Remiel.”
I’m pathetic because it hurts me that he doesn’t want to. “Then don’t, but you still have to be yourself! I’ve never felt this… comfortable and at ease around you.”
“You want me to hurt you?” His voice is mocking. “No.”
My eyes widen and my anger flares. He’s telling me no? After everything he’s done to me and every instance he’s refused to listen to my no? Fuck that. Fuck him. I push myself to sit on the edge of the rock, and when he backs away, I grab a fistful of his shaggy hair and tug so hard a few more beasts brew.
“You don’t get to say no to me.” I glare at him with a hardened expression I’ve never had before. A power I’ve never felt before.
“Don’t I?” he mocks, still thinking I’m beneath him. “What the fuck is it you’re actually asking for here? Pain?”
“No.”
“Pleasure?”
“Maybe.”
He nods at my abs, still slick with cum from minutes ago. “Tell me what you want, Remiel.” He leans forward instead of away, close enough that the silver of his eyes swirls turbulently. “Fucking tell me.”
“Scare me.”
His nostrils flare.
“Fear. I want fear.” My chest heaves and my heart hammers, the admission monumental because it’s the first time I’ve asked for it. “Don’t obsess over me as someone other than yourself. You scare me, Krypt. Keegan. You scare me, and I fucking like it when you scare me, so stop treating me?—”
I scream when he hauls me to my feet, the brands on my wrist burning under his tight grip. Krypt doesn’t care. He said he didn’t want to hurt me, but he has no problem following through when his foundation is being questioned.
He drags me across the cave, pulling me deeper and deeper into a dark spot with a low ceiling, my sock feet scraping across the stone floor and my skin turning red under his grip. I scream the whole time, begging him to stop, to let me go, to tell me what he’s doing! But he doesn’t, and I love that he doesn’t. Because something about the way he makes me terrified is invigorating, and this is exactly what I asked for.
Throwing me onto my stomach, Krypt pins me down with his knee. The real fear begins. Because I’m looking down. Down. Down. Down. Into a black abyss with no bottom and no end, and for all I know, it could go straight to the pits of Hell. The upper half of my body hangs over a cliff’s edge. A cliff, in the middle of a deep cave, proving that depth has no bounds.
“Look,” Krypt growls at me, his voice back to jittering. “Look and see your fucking future if you piss me off again. You don’t want to know how many people have pissed me off and ended up down there.” He pushes on the back of my head so hard my body slides and I scream into the abyss, listening to my terror echo back at me from the vastness below. “Happy?” he asks.
“Yes,” I whimper. “Because this is you! The real you. Keegan and Krypt together.”
He laughs, and the way it reverberates off the cave’s walls is debilitating and grossly harmonious. “This is you, Remiel! You! You’re the one who craves the fear. You’re the one who sinks under a love confession but comes alive as soon as your life hangs in the balance. Can I love you now? Can I love you while you’re terrified of me?”
Yes. Yes. Yes. Because something is terribly wrong with me. I’m no longer suicidal and tempting death, but I still crave the danger and the lashing of anxiety that reminds me I’m alive. Terror wakes me up. Fright brings me to life. When every hair on my body is erect, I spark and snap, thriving because it’s such a blatant reminder of who I am, what I have to live for, and how much stronger I am now.
Before Krypt, fear rendered me useless. Gregory Malone stalked me through the streets of Moros and turned me into a scared little boy. The constant worry of suicide filled me with so much dread that I hid for half my life. I forgot to live it because I was so scared of it ending.
But since Krypt, I relish the sensation of being so afraid because it doesn’t make me weak anymore. It strengthens me because I can cope. It turns me on because there’s still a part of me that gets a rise out of the simplicity of an accident. One little shove and I’d fall to my death. One wrong move and I’d be lost to the abyss down below. To sit on the precipice of life and death is an aphrodisiac so strong my cock hardens again, digging into the stone and gravel beneath me.
I’m addicted to fear, but I’m a junkie for the way Krypt delivers it.
I laugh. Because I’m crazy. “Love me, Krypt.”
“Jesus,” he groans, pulling me back a little and flipping me onto my back. Only my head hangs over the ledge, and when he looks down at me, my stomach flutters. Because I see his obsession that means love, but I also see something new. The mingling of sick and silly in the way he’s smiling at me. I’ve never seen him playful before, and to be honest, I didn’t know he had it in him. “What scares you more, hero, me, or that fall?” He nods to the ledge.
Relaxing my neck muscles, I let my head fall back. It hangs in the dark air, and I close my eyes to see if the sensation of falling heightens. I feel the sturdy ledge under my back, the deadly fall beneath my head, and the strong grip Krypt has on my arms.
“You,” I answer.
He slides me over the edge a bit more and I sweat all over. Sitting on my shins, he relaxes his hold on my arms until I’m bending backwards, hanging with my whole upper body over the open space. I breathe harder, my eyes opening to see the path to death.
“Still me?” he asks. He lets go of my wrists altogether, and I cry out in fear, scrambling to latch onto him again. He laughs. Fuck, I love it when he laughs. “Backwards, Remiel. So, you’re scared of me, but hold on to me for safety? Which is it? Am I your danger or your safety net?”
“Both.” My abs and the mostly healed slice on my stomach burn when I pull myself up by them, sitting right on the tipping point with my back to the blackness. “You’re my sanity and my insanity.”
He hums at that. “You know what I think?” he asks, pulling me up a little more. “I think you’d be three times more afraid if I wasn’t here. Everything is more terrifying when you’re alone.”
I panic. “Don’t leave me.”
He backs away, and when I try to scramble after him, he kicks out, planting his foot on my chest. My bony ass is unsteady, sitting right on the edge. “Sit there. Alone. Don’t fucking move. I’ll be right back.” He lowers his foot. “If you aren’t here when I get back, I’ll jump down there to follow you.”
Then he walks away. Leaves me here. Sitting on the lip of the underworld. If I lean back, I’ll fall straight down its throat and end up in Hell’s belly. Now that he’s gone and not taking my attention, I hear things I hadn’t heard before. They’re the same sounds I heard in The Mad House. Whispers and secrets. Drips and echoes.
They turn me cold and set off my goosebumps. Phantom, imaginary fingers brush up my spine, tickling me, teasing me, trying to entice me to tip back and surrender to the fall. It’s honestly tempting, but… my will to live is so much stronger now.
I’m fortified here in this new life of mine. I smile at the taunt of death but turn my back on the promise of it. It’s within reach if I ever need it, but it’s not the thing I turn to anymore. Krypt is. That makes me smile. In the middle of a black cave, all alone, with a lethal fall at my back, my naked, dirty, cum-slicked body sitting on jagged stones, and a maniac somewhere nearby, I smile because I’m happy.
Happiness isn’t an emotion I’m too familiar with, and the way it warms my core but flutters my stomach is comfortable. Wanted. It makes me want to laugh during dangerous games with Krypt, then end up in bed together and have a night that depends on his mood—gentle and close together when he’s calm; painful and sinister when he’s not.
“Still in this world, hero?”
I startle when his voice doesn’t come from one clear direction. It travels up my spine, but whispers against my lips, too. “Yes.” My teeth chatter.
Bright light blinds me, coming closer. I shield my eyes, trying to squint past the beam to see my monster. “You need to learn to make the danger fun,” he tells me, his voice not as jittery as usual. “You’re allowed to be scared and happy. Terrorized and laughing.”
“Am I?” I ask, still squinting. “Since when do you know so much about fear?”
“I cause it for a living, Remiel.” He bends down in front of me. “You know what I like about you?” He lowers the light, shining it on my wet cock.
“What?”
“That you see one threat. The one behind you.” He nods at the drop.
“And the one in front of me.” I nod at him.
“What about that one?” The flashlight’s beam goes up, and when my eyes follow it, I gasp. “You forget to assess your surroundings, hero. Same as the night Ophelia died. You were so focused on her, you didn’t even know I was watching you.”
Above me, a large and very heavy stalactite hangs from the roof of the cave. The mineral formation has formed from water dripping from the ceiling, and this particular one is so long that it’s less than a foot above my head. And it doesn’t look stable. He’s right. Despite having that sixth sense, I don’t always pay attention to my surroundings. I would never have noticed the one above me if he hadn’t pointed it out, and now that he has, I realize I’m surrounded.
A deadly fall at my back.
A madman at my front.
A crushing death above me.
Trigger Mountain all around me, ready to swallow my soul.
I look at Krypt, meeting his eyes in the flashlight’s glow. My heart is thumping like crazy, but instead of wanting to move out from under the danger, I grin at him.
“There you are,” he says, voice scratchy and playful. “Fun and fear. That’s what you need. Not everything needs to be so dire, Remiel.” He pushes on my chest and pulls my body back until only my head hangs over the edge again. Positioning the flashlight to point at the stalactite, I stare up at it, wondering if it’ll kill me while Krypt watches.
“I don’t think I want to die anymore,” I admit. “Not even by your hand or by accident. I’m selfish because I’m no longer trying to end the family curse.”
Krypt’s hands slide up my bare legs, passing over my stirring cock to caress my stomach and chest. “When you asked me to kill you to end your curse, I almost killed your uncle to end it.”
Jesus. I didn’t even think of that. “What stopped you?”
“I didn’t want our bargain to end,” he admits. “I didn’t want to free you.” He pinches my nipples, making me hiss. “And now that you’re mine, even after I freed you, you’re mine forever.”
“Not if I fall over this cliff when that thing falls on me.”
“Remiel,” Krypt says, voice serious. “I’ll move this goddamn mountain to stop it from killing you.”
Oh my fucking… “Krypt,” I moan when he blows dust off my cock, using his hand to remove the rest. He takes me into his mouth, and my head hangs over the precipice, eyes staring upward. Krypt doesn’t really know how to suck a dick, but neither do I, so it doesn’t matter. I’ll keep it to myself, but I love that he has an insecurity about sex. He’s more inexperienced than I am and doesn’t like to draw attention to that, but I love it.
Because I’m just as possessive as he is.
Grabbing my knees, he bends them up towards my chest, making my body slide closer to the abyss. “Krypt!”
He laughs around my cock, pulling my knees back down. I want to make him laugh every day. “Don’t shout too loud.”
I won’t. Because the echo of my voice is enough to bring this whole place down. I want to be buried with him someday, but not today.
“Fear is my thing. What’s yours?”
“Power.” His tongue licks my slit, making me writhe.
Obviously. “What else?”
“Dominance. Possession. You.”
The fear I’m feeling mingles with pride. I’m the one who brought his sexuality to life…
Because I’m terrified to say it, I do. “I love you.”
Krypt growls, and then he stands. He yanks me to my feet, my head narrowly missing the stalactite. With one hand latched around my wrist, he shoves against my chest with the other.
My stomach drops, my lungs seize, and every part of my body tingles with jarring fear as I start to fall over the edge.
“Kry—” My teeth rattle together when I’m jolted to an abrupt halt. The soles of my feet dig into the ledge, and the only thing keeping me from falling over is Krypt’s vice-tight grip on my wrist. “No. No, no, no, no. I don’t like this! Bring me back.”
“I will,” he says, his cock thickening in the ray of light. “As soon as you come.”
I shake my head, trying to swallow the terror stuck in my throat. “I can’t! I can’t come like this.”
“Then we’ll be here a while,” he says, looking at my arm, uselessly stretched out for balance. “Jerk yourself off, Remiel. Let me watch how fear lights you up.” He smiles at me, and fuck, my cock throbs with need.
Shaking, terrified, and teeth chattering, I grab my cock in a tight fist, keeping my eyes on Krypt the whole time. When he uses his free hand to rub himself, I look down to watch. I move my hand up and down my length, not even ashamed that I’m this hard.
It doesn’t matter that there’s danger all around me because, once again, Krypt is in control of my life. He lets go, I fall. He pulls me back, I live. Whatever way this goes, we go together, because I’m dragging him with me if he tries to let me go. I grin at him.
Fear and fun. He’s right.
Pleasure builds, mingling with darkness and delight. My body sweats while Krypt watches, and when I’m close, he laughs again. Then he lets go of my wrist.
“Krypt!”
He latches onto me, tugging me back up, and that’s when my body loses its mind and I come, pumping my cock in an unrelenting grip.
“Holy fuck! I’m so sick. You’re sick!” I babble.
“We’re sick.” He hauls me up, my cock still pulsing cum against his hip. “Now get on your knees and open your mouth.”