Chapter 15 #2
I lean forward, gently touching my forehead against hers, my vision dissolving into a kaleidoscope of pain.
“Holly, my phone is in your pocket…” My cock strains painfully against my jeans and I pray to God that Holly keeps her eyes glued to mine.
I don’t want to make her uncomfortable with my hard-on. Not in her own home.
She frowns, her lips parting and closing in a small, almost frustrated gesture. It’s adorable. Swallowing visibly, she presses me harder against the wall. “That doesn’t prove anything. You could have a burner phone. Or someone on the side doing your fucking bidding.”
My bidding? If it didn’t hurt to laugh, I would cackle.
“You knew we wouldn’t find anyone here,” she continues. “You just wanted to get me here, in my room, all alone.”
I realize that our foreheads are still touching. I think I smile. “I always want to get you all alone…”
Unimpressed, she simply pushes her fingers deeper into my wound.
Jesus FUCK. Pain webs my body like a fine mesh.
My stomach feels like it's being ripped apart and sewn back together, clumsily, over and over. “You’re putting…way too much faith in my intellectual capabilities, Hollister. I’m not that smart. Especially not around…you.”
Her fingers rip out of my wound. The room spins. She wraps her fingers around my throat. Soft and warm and coated with my blood.
I can’t think. Can’t move. Can’t speak.
Holly Moore has her hands wrapped around my neck. Her bare hands are around my neck. I’ve dreamed about this moment for months. Fantasized about it in the shower even.
Holly Moore is choking me.
I feel a deep tingling at the base of my stomach.
“I’m going to make you regret the day you ever crossed paths with me.
” She presses the tips of her fingers harder against my windpipe and I feel a sharp stabbing pain in my neck, in my chest, like my lungs are about to explode.
A growing pressure accumulates in my balls, pushing and pushing, wanting, needing to get out.
My balls tighten, the liquid heat in my belly threatening to spill out.
Fucking hell, my pants can’t get any tighter.
It gets harder to breathe and I can’t decide if it’s due to her fingers wrapped around my throat or my desperate need to come because of it.
And then it lessens.
The tightness around my throat, the pressure down below.
Holly’s eyes soften, the anger fading away.
Her grip around my throat eases, and I gasp, air flooding my lungs like a life raft.
The crazy in her eyes is gone, replaced by a form of emptiness.
Like someone’s just flicked off a light switch inside her brain.
The slightest flicker of unease passes over her face. She looks like she’s seen a ghost.
Pain throbs through my gut and a drop of blood seeps through my ripped apart sutures trickling down my abdomen. Leaning heavily against the wall, I slump onto the edge of her bedside table, sweat stinging my eyes as I push my curls back.
I say Holly’s name once. Twice. Three times. No response.
Twisting my neck, I follow her gaze to a spot on her bedside table and — oh.
It’s a photo frame. The one I borrowed the last time I was here. Happy Holly. I frown. How the fuck is it back again?
She reaches for the frame, her hand trembling slightly.
My blood is still on her fingers, some of it smearing onto the glass of the frame as she picks it up, holding it close.
Her focus remains fixed on the photo, a complex mix of emotions flitting across her face.
Fear, anger, grief. Raw and exposed. Like a nerve laid bare.
“Th-this wasn’t here before,” she mutters.
“I know.”
She cuts me a glare. “What?”
“I was here the other night.” I’m starting to think making me bleed is her go-to method to get me to confess everything. “I saw this picture and took it back home. I-I don’t know how it’s…back here again.”
I expect her to get angry again. Or at the very least she could start choking me again. But nothing.
There’s a small pause. Her eyes wander back to the frame.
She looks like she’s tearing up. Her grip around the edges tightens.
Not as a display of aggression, but more like a safety net.
Something to hold on to keep herself from drifting away.
A long pause stretches between us. Holly takes a deep breath, then exhales.
She shakes her head a little and turns to face me with poignant eyes. “You need to leave.”
Everything hurts. “No.”
She sighs.
“Holly, I can’t leave. I’m bleeding.”
She has the nerve to look bored as if I stabbed myself and then decided to mutilate the wound for funsies. She unzips her fanny pack and pulls out her suture kit, dropping it on my lap. “There. Fix it on the way home.”
Swallowing hard, I grab the metal box and push myself to my feet, one hand still pressing against the tiny bleeding cut. “I looked her up. The girl from the picture…” I refrain from saying her name, unsure if it could possibly be a sore subject for Holly. A trigger.
Holly’s eyes stab into mine, a raw mix of pain and fury. “Excuse me?”
“The man who assaulted her…he was released two days before you received your first message…Nate Lawson.”
She shakes her head, wiping a few tears off her face, smearing a bit of my blood across her cheeks in the process.
In any other situation, the sight would have been enough to make me come in my pants.
But not right now. Right now, I hate it.
I hate watching her cry. I hate myself for making her cry.
“You need to leave,” she says. “Get out.”
“I want to help you.”
“I don’t need your fucking help.” Her eyes turn into molten lava, burning with a rage so intense it feels like they can melt me on the spot. “Get. Out.”
“That’s not what we agreed on.”
“And I don’t care. There’s clearly no one here. I don’t need you anymore. You’ve done your job. Now go.”
“Where do you expect me to go with a half-open torso in the middle of the night? The city morgue?” I try my best to sound frustrated with her stubbornness, but the pain is too much. I’m shivering. “You took the Hippocratic oath, Holly…you can’t send me away.”
“It’s barely even a cut, Theo. You’re being so fucking dramatic right now.”
“I’m staying over.”
“Why in the unholy fuck would you want to do that?”
“Because motives can…change.” I shift a little and a dull throb pulses beneath my ribs. “Whoever…fuck…Whoever left a knife on your bed can come back.”
Flinging the photo frame onto her bed, she picks up said knife and points it at my face. “Get out of my apartment or I will slit your throat in your sleep.”
“So, you’re letting me sleep here then?”
“Cockroaches have a better survival instinct than you.”
My mouth quirks. “You won’t kill me.”
“Why not? You have a moderately pretty face. I’m sure you’ll make some nice-looking flowers once your body rots into the earth.”
Prying my hand off my torso, I wrap my bloody fingers around hers, over the hilt of the knife, basking in the warmth of her skin.
I tug her towards me. “I appreciate the…candour, love—” I flip the knife around so that it’s pointing at her, then use the tip to lift her face to mine, “—but complimenting me isn’t going to… get you out of this. Not…tonight.”
Her lips are mere inches from mine. So close.
They part slightly and a soft exhale escapes her mouth, and brushes against my lips.
The effect is cataclysmic. My mind races, imagining a thousand impossible scenarios, none of which seem likely to happen in the near future.
I want to pin her wrists above her head and push her up against the wall.
I want to clean the blood from her face, then kiss her lips and bite them.
I want to stroke her hair until she falls asleep on my chest. I want to make her dinner and do her laundry.
I want to wash her dishes, then fuck her on the sink.
I want to wrap her legs around my waist and kiss my way down her jaw.
All the way down to the spot between her breasts.
I want her to moan my name over and over again, until my brain stops functioning.
Until my name is the only thing she’s capable of saying.
I want her to tell me — no, order me to eat her out.
I want her to grab my head and make me lick her pussy for hours on end until she comes so hard she can’t breathe.
Fuck, yes. Please, Holly. Please, let me make you come.
The heat of her body radiates towards me, intensifying the tension that already crackles in the air.
My cock twitches in my pants, begging for release.
I can feel my heartbeat in my ears. My grip around her fingers tightens and her breath hitches, breaking me out of my trance.
Tearing my gaze away from her lips, I meet her eyes.
A second passes. Maybe two. I’m not sure whose turn it is to glance away this time — mine probably. But she beats me to it anyway.
She yanks herself away from me, and runs her fingers through her soft, blonde waves, visibly pissed off.
She paces about her room, her gaze glued to the floor.
It’s hard not to notice all the gears turning in her head.
Her expression is a mask of conflicting emotions.
Anger, frustration, perhaps even a hint of regret. “Are you going to say something —”
“Why me, Theo?” Her voice, usually tinged with defiance, cracks like a breaking twig. “What exactly are you getting out of tormenting me?!”
The desperation in her voice wraps around me.
Every word, every sharp and hidden edge.
I want to run my finger over the tip of her tongue to see if it will make me bleed some more.
I wonder if she’ll let me. “Tormenting you? I would like to remind you that it was you who stabbed me and not the other way around.”
“Whine one more time about the stabbing and I’ll do it again.”