Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Hugo
When I hear Rue’s bedroom door creak open, I automatically reach for my phone.
In the past, it would’ve been to wrestle with temptation over my video feed. Now, it’s to thumb open my music app.
I’ve been staring at the ceiling in my pitch-black room ever since I made it back from Augustine’s, showered off the evidence, and landed in bed in nothing but boxer briefs.
Now I’m counting the minutes as they tick toward Rue leaving forever.
Even Cosmo decided I’m too miserable to bear and opted for his bed in the living room instead.
Her footsteps sound different as she moves around her room tonight, hollow and echoey.
I’m guessing it’s because her life is packed in boxes and her bedroom rug is rolled up in anticipation of the moving truck that arrives tomorrow.
It makes her movements sound louder, closer—ironic, when she’s about to be out of reach.
Her mattress rustles, and I brace myself.
This is the last time we’ll share a wall. The last time she’ll punish me with her pleasure while—
“Hey.”
I startle and drop my phone on my face. It’s not the hand slam I’ve gotten used to over the past thirty-seven days, announcing it’s time for me to erect the boundaries I’ve forced onto both of us. Her voice is soft, and so is the brush of her knuckles against the drywall.
“Enjoy it, pervert,” she says. Unlike the last time she flung those words at me, they sound fond. A little amused. They almost sound like an invitation.
The low, steady hum of her vibrator kicks on, and I freeze with my finger in place to tap PLAY on my tragically long marching-band playlist. I started this routine so I wouldn’t take anything else from her without her permission.
But I think this is permission.
I lie there in the dark, rigid and silent, listening. Not only does she not shout insults at me; the sound of her vibrator gets a little louder, a little closer, like she’s scooted to the part of the mattress that touches our wall.
Fuck it.
For six hundred and thirty-nine days, my head and my heart were never more than twenty inches from her, while the rest of me was too far away to count. If this is my last chance to be with her like this, I’m not wasting it.
I stand and pull my bed away from the wall where my headboard’s rested since the day after she moved in, rotating the heavy wooden frame ninety degrees and pushing it until only thin sheets of drywall separate the length of my bed from the length of hers.
I’m greeted by silence once I’ve stripped off my boxer briefs and crawled back onto the mattress. Oh hell. Did I misread the situation? The scrape and drag of my bed was an announcement: I’m here, and I’m not hiding anymore. But maybe it wasn’t the announcement she was looking for.
I hold my breath, sick with grief, fear, loneliness, and pent-up, post-kill adrenaline—all of the shit I’ve built my life to avoid. It all waits for her to decide my fate.
Then she clicks the toy back on and gives a little sigh as she moves it back in place between those sweet thighs. I groan in response and wrap my hand around my cock, which has been rock hard since the moment she spared my life and allowed me to listen.
No, not listen. To join her.
I spit into my hand and run my palm down the rigid length of my dick, then back up, grunting when I pass my palm over the sensitive head.
I collect the precum already beading at the tip and slick it back down.
As I do, I let myself enjoy Rue’s pleasure without guilt.
The little hiss when she clicks the vibrator into a slow-fast-slow pattern.
The hitch in her breathing as she moves it over her wet slit.
She’s more vocal than usual, which I know because until the night we killed Daniel Vartan, I studied her masturbation like they were holy texts.
But I know something else now, too: these sounds are authentic.
I’ve made her come, felt her pussy convulse, watched her face flush and her mouth drop open in ecstasy. And Rue is enjoying herself.
The realization has me tugging harder, moaning louder, milking more fluid from my aching dick, especially when the mechanical hum from her side of the drywall moves to a staccato pulse.
On nights she wants to take a little longer to come, she pulls the vibrator off her clit, letting the pleasure ease before sliding it back in place at an even higher setting.
And fuck, that’s what she’s doing right now, isn’t it?
I strangle the head of my dick to keep myself from finishing too soon.
She’s close, and I sure as fuck am going to come with her.
I shift to slow strokes of my cock, and I’m so painfully hard that when I release myself at the top of one long pull, it slaps against my stomach, making me exhale sharply and slam my palm against the wall to keep myself tethered to the earth.
My eyes squeeze shut as I think about filling her sweet, wet cunt, imagining she actually is whimpering my name.
Her pants and gasps spiral into a hoarse cry that accompanies her orgasm, and when there’s a thump on her side of the wall—her hand hitting it like mine did, maybe in the same place where mine still rests, like she’s reaching for me the way I am her—I can’t hold back any longer.
I come in hot spurts onto my chest and stomach, dripping over my fingers as I squeeze the head to wring the last bit of cum and love and joy and regret out of me.
We fade into the aftermath together, breathing like we’ve competed in a race that we both won.
I’m a fucking mess with cum cooling on my skin.
And Rue, god, I bet she soaked her sheets.
Tomorrow some mover’s going to pack them, pick up the box, and carry them away from me.
He’ll be lucky if I don’t make him next year’s mulch.
Once I can breathe normally again, I grope for my discarded underwear, wipe myself clean, and turn onto my side so I can press my forehead against the wall.
“Good night, Rue,” I say.
I hear the shifting of fabric from her side, and I let myself picture her turning toward me, pressing her cheek to the wall where my chest would be.
Her whisper finds me from six inches away.
“Goodbye, Hugo.”