18+ | groping. dubcon. infidelity. blue-collar Simon in a loveless marriage finds another way to entertain himself when his wife is too busy fucking her Pilates instructor to come home. victim blaming. future wife grooming. breeding. implied contraceptive tampering. spitting/spit kink. gross/mean Simon.
It's something to mend the gap between paying for college tuition, and surviving on more than air and the stale crackers they give out at the food bank. A job that takes up less space in your calendar than studying for finals or finishing up last-minute projects due before the end of the term.
And, in all honesty, the kid makes it easy.
Tommy doesn't fuss like most his age. He sits on the couch with his iPad perched on his knees, watching grown men scream in front of a camera for hours. Sometimes he stirs, asks for snacks. Something to drink. But mostly, he just scrolls YouTube Shorts, and puffs out peals of childish laughter at whatever he finds amusing.
It's the easiest job you'd ever had, really. He has no complaints about eating chicken nuggets and Kraft dinner on the nights when you stay later and have to cook something for him. Even when you try to make it healthier by chopping up celery with homemade ranch on the side, it barely makes him whine.
He eats. Scrolls. Pouts about his bath. Negotiates bedtime for ten more minutes with his iPad. And then he's sleeping by ten, hugging the device tight to his chest as a man hollers about Minecraft beneath him.
And that's the extent of it.
An easy job. An easy kid.
The problem, really, is his father.
And more specifically, the way he can't seem to stop touching you.
You're not sure why it happens, just that it does. Becomes some strange staple in this arrangement where you never leave his house without having his hands on you at some point.
But maybe the writing was always on the walls because even as he was showing you Tommy's bedroom, he folds himself over you, spine pressed against his chest, and murmurs in your ear about bedtimes and baths and all the things a babysitter is meant to hear—
But not with the hard, firm outline of their employers cock against their ass.
You should have said something then. Put your foot down. Rained hellfire and retribution over this man and his gross, foul perversions.
Should have done a lot of things, probably. But in the end, the span of his hand over your belly, so wide it threatened to swallow you up, kept you quiet. Docile as he shifted his hips—wife down the hall, flatly informing him she has a class tonight and probably won't be home, so don't bother waiting up, Simon—and rubbed his cock against you, grunting in your ear about how pretty you are. Such a sweet girl, too.
So good for his baby boy.
Keeping quiet seems to spur him on. Spreading the thick, heavy length of his body against your spine isn't enough to quench whatever sticky, awful desire brims in his chest. Insatiable now that he's had a little taste, he gorges himself on what he can get away with.
What you let him get away with.
(if you didn't want this, pretty thing, you'd have said so, wouldn't you? big, strong girl like you. you can 'andle yourself. but you ain't because you want this—)
Broad hands cupping your breasts as he leans over your shoulder and pretends to instruct you on how Tommy likes his lunches. Little more, he rasps, calloused fingers slipping under the band of your bra, and pinching your stiffening peaks between a too-big thumb and forefinger. The rough, dry graze of his scarred skin was some awful amalgamation of stinging, abrasive pain and pleasure. Likes his sandwiches cut up jus' like tha'—
Grabs a handful of your asscheek on the way out the door, pinching the flesh so hard, it aches when you sit down. Rutting into you like a beast when he comes home, and Tommy's already in bed. C'mon, he grunts, hefting you up from the couch. Gotta go an' check on 'im. But it's just an excuse to bend you over banister as you peer into Tommy's room, groaning as he shoves his clothed cock against the cleft of your ass.
Husks in your ear about how good you are for him. He and Tommy both. Such a good girl, ain't you?
It's strange. All of it. And maybe that's why you let it carry on. Continue even though you know he's married, and has a child. And—
He's odd. Intense. Weird.
Looms in the corners of the room sometimes, content to just watch you. Eyes dark, endlessly black. Fixed on every move you make. A wolf wearing a man's skin. A monster in faded blue jeans and black steel-toed boots.
Uncanny.
Scary.
Massive in a way that stole your breath the moment you laid eyes on him. A full body bloom of dread at the scale, the size, of him. Like staring at the face of a mountain, mind reeling over the incomprehensible height of it. Vertiginous. Dizzying.
Thinking about him always makes you feel a little bit sick. Lying on your back and staring up at the sky. Cosmic quasiness. Unease that trickles down from your ancestors and fills your pores with the bitter, acrid tang of fear.
But between the noxious, rolling worry—the unmistakable feeling of a starving man staring at you like you're nothing but a scrap of tender, fresh meat—is a heavy, sick sort of heat congealing in your belly.
It was easier, at first, to lie and say you stayed for the money. Broke college student with a sinkhole of debts already growing on the periphery, biding its time before it sucks you into an unfathomable, inescapable chasm. Bled dry. Used up. It'll crush you.
But this—
Simon works around your schedule. He's gone for most of the day—pulls twelve-hour shifts Monday to Saturday at the oilfield—and is fairly lenient when you have a test, sending Tommy to his uncle's instead. Staying the night is an unorthodox arrangement, you're sure, but it works itself out in the end. Being here to take Tommy to school before heading to your morning classes (the rest all available online), and then free to pick him up after and wait for Simon to come home eases the stress of a long commute to your dorm and then here, to the dorm and then back again. A small respite, sure.
And if he pushed, insistent, that you sleepover, well—
You can hide it behind a wall. Pretend he's just looking out for his son even if you have to lock the door in the spare bedroom at night, and wake up sometime to the sound of the knob rattling.
He lets you use his spare truck whenever you need it. There's always a pot of coffee waiting for you in the morning. He keeps a tidy house and a strict schedule, but money is always in your bank account or tucked into an envelope on the counter a day ahead of when you agreed he'd pay you.
But living on top of each other like this is almost unbearable.
You see more of Simon than you do your own family. Friends. Even his wife. A woman made of contradictions, it seems. Dutiful mother, but only when it matters—parent teacher conferences booked in advance, the darling starlet of his birthday party that passed—and you try to keep out of her way. Shame, maybe.
Do you know what Simon does to me when you're in the next room? Do you know what he says when you're bent into downward dog as your Pilates instructor fucks you on the matt?
Or just the knowledge that both of you, in your own way, are adulterers.
But having something in common with the woman who is more of a guest in her own home, her child's life, than you are is a sickening thought. So you squash it. Ignore it.
All of it—
His hands on you, rough and proprietary. The foul, dirty things he whispers in your ear—Tommy's been askin' for a baby brother, 'bout time we gave 'im one, don't you think? Spread your pretty pussy around my cock and keep ya nice an' plugged until it fuckin' takes—when no one is around. How these incidents keep getting progressively closer to his bedroom door, his marital bed, and one day, you think he might drag you in there and not let you out again until those promises he forced from your lips are fulfilled.
You bite your tongue. Taste blood between your teeth hours after he leaves for work, and curl into the couch as the minutes tick by until Simon's supposed to come home. Trying to distract yourself as much as you can, but there's no escape from it. From the way there was something different about him this morning. Something heady. He didn't touch you, but just quietly observed you with those strange, unfathomable eyes of his. Sinkholes wanting to swallow you down.
Hungry.
And when you asked him if he wanted breakfast, he'd just said, oh, I'll eat, birdie. You can bet on that, and then left out the door without another word.
It takes you until noon to unravel the knots in his expression, and what you find makes your heart jump like a trapped rabbit in a snare.
Possessiveness. Want. Hunger.
But most damning of all—
Anticipation.
In the room over, Tommy giggles, high and shrill, at a video. The noise jars you back into reality. A car drives down the lonely street. The timer on the oven dings. Tommy gurgles again, the sound pasted over a loud, pitchy shout that rankles down your spine. Slowly, achingly, you unfurl your body from the tense crouch you collapsed into, head thick. Underwater. In a fog. Thoughts dripping down the sides of your skull in a slow, syrupy crawl.
Your eyes dart to the clock. Three hours.
oh, I'll eat, birdie.
"Come on, Tommy," you warble out, gingerly moving towards the kitchen. Three hours. There's a buzzing inside your head that grows louder, more restless with every step. "The pizzas done."
On the fridge, a neon pink post-it note mocks you. PILATES TONIGHT AND DRINKS WITH THE GIRLS!!!! DON'T WAIT UP!!
Three hours.
You lick the blood off your teeth.
oh, I'll eat, birdie—
He doesn't bother cleaning up before he goes home.
Caked in grime, sweat, dust from the fields, crudeoil glued under his nails—a walking biohazard of filth, but he lumbers into his truck the moment he's finished, cock already thickening, straining against the harsh fabric of his jeans. Sticky on his thigh where it lays, twitching at the thought of his little birdie sucking his dirty fingers clean.
And you'll do it. He knows you will.
You've been so good for him, haven't you? Sweet little thing.
He scrapes the top of his tongue against his teeth, pulling up the taste of stale, bitter coffee. It's acrid, sour in his mouth. Swallowing around it, he grips the wheel tightly and sifts through the multitude of things he wants to do to you as he navigates the familiar path home. Muscle memory, but there's an emptiness in his belly. An itch under his skin. If fizzles, cracks; want and desire thick in his throat.
He's been thinking about this all day. You—laid out on his bed, fingers gripping the sheets tight as he folds you in half, kneecaps to your ears. Feet kicking out behind the heft of his shoulder. Bearing all his weight down on you. Crushing you.
Pumping you so full of his cock, his cum, that you whine afterwards—too empty, Mr Riley—and he has to stuff you full again just to shut you up.
Whiny little thing, he'll coo, nasty and mean as he fucks you again and again and again—
Another scrape. Tongue against teeth pulling over tastebuds. Sourness in the back of his throat. So bitter, so nauseating, he can't wait to make you swallow it down and beg for more as you try not to dry heave all over his dirty boots and onto the clean floor.
More, please, more even as you gag.
He's too hyperaware for the drive to pass in a blur—it's all startling present, each second ticking down in technicolour—but when he finally slows to crawl in front of his house, he has everything he wants to do to you laid out in a neat, concise list. Left you a defiled mess in his head, leaking cum and begging for more.
Anticipation is a maw in his gut that growls and snaps its jaws, too eager to sink inside the pretty thing that's been playing House in his mind. In his home.
He left it unfed for too long.
And now, it's time to eat.
You're not in the living room when he enters.
It's silent. The idling television paints the room in a pale, neon pink.
The clink of his keys, the thud of his boots, are the only sounds popcorning through the dim, quiet room. He casts his gaze towards the stairs to the left, sees light spilling out from Tommy's room down the hall. The nightlight burning away.
He shifts on the balls of his feet, hums something under his breath. A relic from a bygone era when the man Tommy was named after might have pulled him aside and said man, this isn't you.
Simon keeps his boots on as he trudges through the still, winter night of the house, eyes shifting past each corner, every crevasse. More muscle memory he can't shake. All filed away. Catalogued. Meticulously scoured as he shifts through the hall, pausing only to crack Tommy's door open and steal a glance of his son. Knows he won't be able to sleep without it.
He finds him tucked safe and sound in his bed. iPad on the floor connected to the charger. The screen is frozen with the image of some brightly coloured game that'll hold his interest for another day before it becomes yet another thing Simon packs away. More memories on shelves. Something to feel scraped out, hollowed, when he grows another inch and Simon starts to see more of Tommy in him than he can stomach.
The air stings his nostrils when he breathes in. The burn gives him time to shift around the potent ache of fatherly affection he never thought he'd feel back into the guarded lockbox he keeps it in whenever Tommy isn't in view. With it tucked back in, safe and sound, he lets the thrill of the pursuit fill him again.
Another hum. He peels away from the door.
"Hidin' on me, birdie?"
He knows you're here. Your boots are still drying by the front door. The air still clogged with your scent. He follows it like a bloodhound until he reaches his bedroom door where he finds you on the bed. Waiting. Uncertainty clinging to you like a second skin he can't wait to peel off, run his fingers through the bloody mess until you're raw and aching; shiny new toy stripped bare just for him.
Your mouth pops open. The inside a pretty ring of pink. He thinks about it, about sinking inside that soft little hole, making you gag around the thick of him as he feeds you his cock.
Clean it up f'me, birdie
But it's clear from the way you flit nervously on the comforter that he'll have to work you up to that.
Slow and steady. It's not his usual approach—he's in the habit of taking what he wants. Still. He slows. Glacial. Notches his shoulder against the doorframe, staring. Waiting. Waiting—
And finally:
A shift. You tense. "Mr Riley—"
"Take your clothes off."
Your throat shifts when you swallow. "Mr—"
If you didn't want it, he reasons, you wouldn't be in his bed. Waiting for him.
"Now, birdie."
There's that pause he expects. The hesitation as you stare, searchingly (pleadingly), at him, trying to take a measurement of just how serious he is about this. But he knows he gives nothing away. Just stares with streaks of dirt on his brow, washed down by thick trickles of sweat. Eyes lazy, lidded. Mouth flat. Even.
You demure after a moment. Hands falling shakily to the hem of your sweater, curling beneath the fabric. Gaze downcast, staring wide-eyed at the curve of your jean-clad knees. Bemused, maybe, that it got this far. That you let it get this far.
He doesn't give you time to think about it. Cocks his head to the side, puffs out an impatient breath. "Hurry up. Ain't got much time before my wife comes back."
It's a low blow. He feels it skim his knuckles, a sucker-punch.
You suck in a sharp breath. He wonders if you'll make things difficult now. Fight back. This isn't right. What you're doing to me isn't right. We should stop, Mr Riley—
Instead, you peel the sweater off.
It's artless. Clumsy. Each movement wracked with nerves, uncertainty. There's no coyness to the action. It's not even sexy, or coquettish; nothing about it is done to entice, to seduce. This is an action completed twice a day, every day. Routine. It's mundane, perfunctory.
And yet—
"Fuckin' hell, birdie—"
Something about the latent unwillingness of it all chokes the air from his lungs.
Cock thick in his trousers, throbbing like a wound, he steps into the bedroom, making his way towards you in nothing short of a prowl. It's been building up since you first appeared at his doorstep, eyes wide and bright and scooped Tommy up into your arms until he squealed with laughter.
"I got him," you chirped when he reached out reflexively, dancing artlessly out of the way of his snatching claws. "Don't worry. He's fine with me."
This is your fault, of course. For looking the way that you do. For burrowing under his skin like a parasite. A festering itch. Being close to you always felt like a toothache. Dry socket. Something that made his head split.
"On the bed, birdie," he grunts, hands falling to his belt with a urgency he hasn't felt since he was a clumsy, knobby-kneed teenager. "An' spread your legs f'me."
You give a startled gasp that makes his cock throb, and he groans low in his throat at the waxen look in your eye, the slight quiver to your lip. You look queasy—torn between disgust and fear, eyes slipping to the scarred hands that yank hard on his zipper, cup the bulge that splits through the spread seam, dirty fingers gripping himself tight—and he has to roll his head back to keep from snapping at you to roll over.
A noise does spill out—an impatient rumble gnashing between jagged teeth—when you sit there, bared from the waist up, and watch him with wide eyes. Making no move to show him that pretty pussy he cupped in his palm before. That soft, wet heat in his hand that felt too delicate, too sweet, to be touched with his dirty fingers. Something that rankled down his spine, buzzed in the back of his head when he pulled them free—stained, nails blackened with dirt, crude oil, and glistening in the low light of the kitchen.
He wants it again—on his cock this time. Wants to see that soft pussy get him all wet as he ruins it. As he peels back, sitting on his haunches, and takes in the awful mess he left you in. Poor cunt swollen and abused from from being forced to take the full, fat length of him as he bullies it inside over and over again; puffy lips all sticky with his cum. Sore and stretched and used. Raw after such a vicious pounding—
"Pants off, birdie," he bites out, yanking his jeans down beneath his aching balls. "Ain't gonna like what 'appens next if I 'ave to ask again—"
You give a startled gasp at the rough, callous growl hewing his words, and he wonders if anyone has ever spoken to you like this before. So demanding. With an edge of cruelty slithering out. Demeaning—
No. No one but him, he decides, stroking his cock as he watches you clumsily kick out of your pants, demurring in a faux show of bashfulness as your fingers skim the hem of your panties. The picture of coy shyness as you drop your chin to hide the wobble in your lower lip, the glistening wetness in your eyes as you grapple with indecision. Child's play of modesty.
A farce.
Just the mangled growl of your name is all it takes for those trembling fingers to inch into the hem of your panties, tugging them clumsily down your thighs.
He could come, he thinks, to just that. This. The bloom of fear etching across your brow, panties tangled against the knob of your knees. Unwilling to bend down and push them off the rest of the way. Scared to, maybe.
It buzzes in the back of his head. The idea of paralysing you with nothing more than a sharp bark and crook of his finger; your fear as delectable as that little sliver of skin he can see peaking out at him.
"ain't go' all night," he cuts in with only a quarter of the ice he uses on the field, and feels a deep thrum of satisfaction purr through his chest when you squeak, flinching at his rough, brassy tone.
Your panties fall to the floor in a rumpled pile between your feet, toes curling into the carpet as you try to close your knees as tightly together as you can get them to hide yourself from his heavy-lidded gaze. A last play at modesty. Gaze inward, nervous. A skittish little rabbit with nowhere else to run.
The way you stand before him on shaking knees, trembling like a leaf, makes him want to sink his teeth into you and shake. Little virginal offering to a rapacious god. A feast all for himself. He wants to chew you up. Eat you alive.
But he opts, instead, to bite his tongue until he tastes blood, and bark at you to get on the bed as it oozes between his teeth. Feels something animal split open inside his chest when your eyes widen as he steps into the room, a slow pursuit, a prowl, and has to bite down on the urge to give chase when you flinch, backing away from him quickly. Naked and scared. Running from him with a nervous tremor, but he doesn't miss the way you make, quietly, for his bed.
Eager. Obedient. Fleeing from him like a scared little animal unaware of just how enticing you are.
"Good girl, birdie."
It takes three fingers to open you up, but even that doesn't feel like it's enough.
Not when he knocks your knees apart, wedging his too big, too thick body between them (and then stares, and stares, and stares at your bare cunt, slick and sticky from his hand; flesh left swollen from the brutal spear of three thick, dirty fingers shoving inside—less of a stretch and more a carve: he carved you open) and spits.
You weren't expecting it. Nothing could have prepared you for the suddenness of this degrading act—the nasty, demeaning way he spits on your pussy, and huffs, amused, when the foamy mess slides down your swollen clit to pool between your folds. His finger chases it, rubbing it into your skin, pushing it into your hole.
Ain't got lube, he says, words bordering on a strange equinox of bluntly nonchalant and utterly caustic. Should be thankful m'doin' this much.
Thankful.
Your fingers curl into the sheets, and you try not look at his cock again when he grips himself tight in his big, dirty hand.
He's too big. Too fat. It makes you a little nauseous to stare at it, him—his cock. Marbled like a bruise. Thicker at the base. Veiny. The head is swollen. The tip is soaked in a thick, paste-like spill of precum, and for a horrible second, you almost thought he would make you lick it off.
(later fills the empty space in your head, and you try to mould yourself around the idea until you can decide whether or not the feeling that blooms in the pit of your belly is really dread.)
His hands were rough. Scarred. Dirty. Caked in oil. Stained. He didn't even bother to clean up before he lumbered onto the sheets behind you, one hand falling to grip his cock through his dusty pants, the other heavy on your neck, pushing you down into the mattress that reeks of fabric softener and stale cigarette smoke. Old sweat.
He doesn't need to tell you that she doesn't sleep in this bed anymore, but the idea of it prickles in the back of your head as he pushes you against the sheets and undoes his jeans with an ease that's more muscle memory than thought. Practiced.
You don't have the right to be jealous, but it hums through you like a sickness when you think of him doing this to her. His wife, you add, just to make it hurt. A knife in your gut that aches when you breathe—
"keep breathin', birdie," he grunts, spreading his fingers wide apart inside of you. "Don't get all tense on me now, or I'll have to start over."
You're not sure what that means, but you think you know better than to test his tenuous patience anymore than you have, and so you still. Go quiet. Breathe as he spears you deep, deeper still, and carves a space for that monstrous looking cock to fit—
where it belongs, he'd said, hunched over you like a nightmare in the daytime. All shadow and sinew. Stitched from broken daydreams of a brassy voice in your ear murmuring soon, birdie as his wife pretended to pack a lunch in the kitchen and he rubbed your nipple through your shirt before he slipped off to work.
But it's over too soon. His dirty, stained fingers slipping free from your aching, sopping cunt, leaving you empty—bereft—for a moment as he shuffles up the bed, splitting your knees wide apart to make room for the asburd width of him to fit.
An impossibility, really, but as Mr Riley—call me Simon—is wont to do, he makes it so. Wedges his wide thighs beneath yours until your hips tilt up in his lap, opening you wide. Obscenely so. And—
A grunt.
He stared. And stared. And stared.
Just looked at the split of your cunt sitting invitingly in his lap, wet and messy from his fingers, the cruel push of his palm against your clit. Swollen. Aching already—
"Want it, huh, birdie?"
The words I'm not so sure anymore hitch in the back of your throat, rearing up as he reaches between your legs to grip himself tight, too tight, until he turns a sickly shade of purple around the head that looks wider than anything you'd ever had inside of you before. But he doesn't give you a second to think before notching himself against you, giving a little push that forces the swollen head to sink inside of you—
Just the tip, really, and it already hurts. Stings like a papercut as he stretches your cunt around him, sharp and sudden.
"Too big—" you whimper, tossing your head to the side, breathing in the tang of fresh linen and musk as he grunts above you, pushing and pushing—
Something has to give.
It doesn't surprise you much when it ends up being you.
"Tha's it, birdie. Open up f'me."
It's not so much an opening as it is a siege. A conquest. And with him perched above you, heaving like bull and bathed in shadows that glue alone the mismatched asymmetry of his face, making him look less like a man and more like a figment, a statue—this Stygian being that swoops down and presses his palm against your throat, the other digging into the pillow beside your head, grunting—you feel ever bit of the battered receptacle he turns you into.
Forcing himself into you with a rough grunt, a brutal shove that—for one dizzying, awful moment—you swear you can feel inside your throat, taste on the back of your tongue. Choking on it. But then he's sinking in. Splitting you apart with brute force and that little bit of slick that you know must be stained pink—
"Good girl," he's grunting again, shoving another inch into a space much too small for him to fit. Savouring it. Relishing in the whimpers, the hiccups punched out of you with every flex of his hips. Eyes rolling a little, just a touch, when you feel something warm tickling your cheek and realise you're crying. Shush, birdie, he says, a quiet coo, but he looked delighted. Don't cry. Not yet—
another flex. two more inches. it feels like being speared open; flayed alive. it hurts. it hurts so much, you can't even begin to think through the pain, but he's huffing. groaning low in his throat as he adds:
"—'cause m'not even halfway in yet, pup."
The admission shocks you so much, you barely notice him spreading his knees beneath yours, squaring his stance, until it's too late.
"Wait—!"
If it weren't for his hand tightening around your throat before he speared the last several inches into you, you're sure the wail you might have let out would have woken Tommy. A good thing, you think, dazed, still soundlessly howling around the burning ache of him using his absurd weight to drive into you (balls deep, birdie, he grunts, and sounds so ridiculously proud, you nearly preen—), making you take every last inch. Selfishly carving more space for himself inside of you. Hollowing you out until his whole cock is drenched in your pink-stained slick—
"Makin' me all pretty, aren't you?" Huh, birdie? Nice and fuckin' pink.
A sob bubbles up beneath his palm, and he coos when he feels it, shushing you with a groan as he keeps an awful rhythm, flexing into you. Grinding deep. Carving and cutting and hollowing you out—
"Tha's it, pup," he grunts, eyes masting in leonine pleasure as he bucks into you without respite, taking his bliss from the burning stretch of your cunt. And stupidly, you think about preening. Smiling wide and big and lying to yourself about how bad you want this, him, even as the tears dribble down your chin.
Siphoned satisfaction, maybe. Or just the press of his fingers against that little thing inside of you that made you turn your cheek to his touches. Letting a married man shove his hands down your pants while you made breakfast for his kid and his wife called out to him from the next room about not waiting up for her too late.
Giving in.
That's what this feels like. A slow corrosion from the moment you knocked on his door and said you were here to help him with Tommy to now, buried under his bulk as he batters into your aching cunt, splitting you apart.
Sweat drips down his nape, pours off his face, and when it hits your skin, it feels like battery acid against your cheeks. But with his hand still lodged around your neck, there isn't much you can do except take it. Like his cock, his spit, his sweat. Let him ply you with all of it, every inch, until your body becomes accustomed to the ache.
"Fuckin' stranglin' me."
His cock hits something inside of you, and it isn't really pleasure that blooms in the pit of your belly, but something like a panacea. A wound that's soothed through touch.
Like a knife that hurts more coming out than it does stuffed inside.
But it' saws and it splits. Tears flesh. Rearranges your insides until you're wrapped tight around him, throbbing like bruise against the thick of his cock. A tight fuckin' fit, he says, and inches his fingers up to grab your cheeks. Squeezing until your mouth pops open, mewling at the deep, aching pain, and then he spits.
You don't need him to tell you what to do this time. You just close your mouth and swallow what he gives you, whimpering around the sudden ruck of his hips, a harsh jerk that slides his cockhead against the seal of your womb, dredging up a wave of pain that's soothed by the kiss of that fattened tip pressing against the sting once more. Soothed by touch. By the flood of endorphins.
Fitting, you suppose, since it feels a little bit like being eaten alive when he fucks you, grunting and snarling like a beast as he pounds into you, half-mad and starved, and you remember reading somewhere that people rarely experience any pain when they're bitten by a shark.
An oddly serene experience, out of body almost, as they're taken apart by razor-sharp teeth.
That's how you feel looking up at him, feeling the drip, drip, drip of his sweat splat on your cheeks. Warm, milky breath ghosting over your forehead. A barely there kiss when he bends down, growling into your hairline that he's gonna fill you up, pup; that Tommy's been begging for a little brother, 'asn't he? and ain't it time we gave 'im one?
You think no and don't. please don't, please, but your hands stayed curled into the duvet instead of reaching up to push him away. Knees dropping further apart as he bends down with a brassy grunt that you feel in your belly, between your hips, like molten lead. A pulsing flutter—sore muscles gripping tighter and tighter as he grunts again, and tells you to keep opening that pretty cunt up for him, birdie. Let him get even deeper.
The collar of his shirt dips low, unveiling a mass of moulted flesh suffused together in a pink ribbon array of crisscrossing scar tissue and burns. It's an odd time to notice that he hasn't bothered to undress, just shoved his jeans down his thighs and pulled his—monstrous, ugly—cock out, and forced it into you. But you do. And you feel it so acutely in your chest that even without his hand on your throat, you doubt you'd have been able to breathe. It just—
It says something, you think. Means something.
And maybe it hits you like a fist, too. A bludgeon to that little thing in the back of your head that keeps reminding you this isn't okay. That you're not supposed to be in this bed, with this man.
Marital vows, it says, all wrapped up in the scent of stale sweat and detergent. A whisper of Candy Kiss peppering the room when you arrive; a sweet sillage that tickles your nose whenever he leans down, cupping your breast in the palm of his hand. The flash of metal sitting snug on his thick ring finger. Cold and dry against your damp skin.
It crumbles under the sway of his big, thick body sawing away between your hips; turns to dust, dissolving into soot as the growls spilling out his chest tremble through your bones. The ring doesn't matter. It never did.
Not when he's decorating the space he hollowed out inside of you with these dizzying daydreams—weaving a damning tapestry with fingers bleeding from cuts made by the knife of his own artifice. Staining it red.
Pretty pink.
And eventually the ring warms between his hand and your heated skin until you can't tell the difference between metal and flesh.
(but in the smeared residuum of ash and rust, something stirs, asks if you ever really could at all—)
"Gonna make me a dad again, ain't you, pup?" Huh? He growls, rough and mean. Gonna have t'start callin' me daddy soon—
You're not sure when it started building, but the edge is suddenly there. Within reach. And he tells you in rasping groans that he feels it too. Gonna cum, biride, he says, and it sounds like a threat. A warning. It's a razor scraping against your nerves, pooling heat between your hips.
No, you think again, but your hips roll as much as they can with him bearing down above you, cradled between your slick, damp thighs—roughened up, chafed by the repeated scrape of denim. Eager for it. Hungry. Like you're starving.
And what did he say before? Oh, yeah—
Oh, I'll eat, birdie.
You feel that gnawing, gaping emptiness in your belly as he huffs, breath sticky and warm, glueing to your skin as he pants his desire over your flesh, inside your body. Pace stuttering on his next exhale, morphing into a choppy, clumsy grind—just the desperate, furious graze of his cockhead digging into that bruised, tender spot inside of you where pleasure and pain suture themselves together until one is almost indistinguishable from the other. Fear and desire warping around the edges until you're trembling from the urge to flee, but bearing your neck at the vicious spread of teeth gaping open above your caught jugular.
Simon presses his face against the side of yours, smearing sweat and spit over your heated, damp skin from where a cut in his upper lip leaves his teeth in a constant snarl, bared to the world in a vicious, brutal display of aggression, and the nudge of it against the softened, ripe apple of your cheek is what sends you over the edge before you're ready.
It's mean. A nasty, ugly climax that throbs more like a wound than a satisfying end; pulsing and spitting fire as you yowl into the bubble bulging along his ear, clawing at the duvet, and bringing your other hand up to twist into the wet fabric clinging to his broad back. Needing to hold on. To find purchase as he grunts into your skin with each brutal plunge of his hips, and then sinks his teeth into your pulse, drawing blood—
You're still clenching around him, throbbing like an infected wound, when he lifts his pinked up muzzle, bearing his crooked, bloodied teeth, and grunts with his release. Filling you with a burning, stinging heat. Painting the tapestry he hung on chiselled flesh. A home of his own making. The apex of your being is a crevasse for him to sink his desire inside until something grows.
Tommy wants a baby brother, he'd said, and as you knot your hand tighter around his sweaty shirt, you wonder if maybe you should have paid more attention to the pills you shoved into your mouth each morning, making sure they all looked exactly the same—
"Fuck, birdie," he snarls into your neck as he throbs inside of you, cock jerking until it lodges against the battered, bruised seal of your womb—soothing the ache, you think, giving a weak pulse, a little, desperate clench around him—grunting like this is all your fault.
And maybe it is. But he doesn't give you much of a choice when he ruts into you still in rolling, feverish humps that knock your teeth together each time you unhinge your jaw to tell him to stop.
(But you won't, of course—)
His hands are hot against your clammy skin, searing and rough as he pulls you back into his chest with a grunt, mumbling something about a cigarette as you pant into the sweat-slicked nook of his arm, trying to make sense of what happens next.
You should leave. And really—you're a little surprised he hadn't kicked you out already. Shoved you off of him, told you to pack your things. He'll call when he needs you next because with this burning desire of his sated, what else does he need you in bed for?
But he tightens his grip when you try to wiggle away from him with a salt-crusted, sleep-drenched noise of dissent.
He isn't done with you, he mumbles, pawing at the end table for the carton of cigarettes he left there this morning. Blue Zippo still tucked neatly inside.
It's something you'd noticed during the first week when you opened a drawer looking for Tommy's iPad charger and found his hidden stash—along with the rest. Little clues that piled up until the pieces fell, and you realised this was a strange, habitual thing of his where he needs to leave things lying around the house—a carton of cigarettes with a lighter; a duffle bag full of clothes for him and Tommy. Non-perishable food stuffed inside a rucksack. Cash. Knives. All within reach.
Most people live in their homes. Clothes in the drawers. Shoes on a rack or piled by the front food. Food in the cabinets. They carry their smokes with them or keep them in a convenient place for whenever they need them next. But Simon seems keen to uproot himself at a moment's notice. Bags within reach. Necessities all packed by the front door, ready to go. Each room has a satchel hidden somewhere. A carton of smokes. A lighter.
It means something, you're sure. Nestled between the layers of a restless, caged tiger circling its iron-barred domicile for the first chance at escape is a travesty written in spoiled ink. Chiselled into the bars, imprinted there like braille for you to run your fingers over until pockmarks make sense.
Like why Candy Kiss is left on the vanity, sitting atop a drawerful of untouched clothes. The smell of fresh linen. Pilates on a weekly basis. Don't wait up peppering the air; a soft echo cradled in the harsh snap of a door closing. Eyes barely blinking away from the flashing screen.
Or—why your clothes disappear each time you do the laundry. Lace panties and satin bras first—an almost banal perversion that barely made a gurn at. Then tights. Sweaters. Shirts. Jeans. All missing with a nonchalant shrug of a massive shoulder, and a stare that didn't much pin as it skewered. Flayed. A flat, even dunno, birdie. Maybe the ghost knicked it.
Tightly wound artifice you'll never make sense of beyond the bags and the cigarettes. The stares that make the hair on your neck stand on end—
"Fuckin' hell, pup," he grunts suddenly, pinching the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger as the other slides down your curved spine, grabbing a handful of your asscheek in his palm, giving a vicious, painful squeeze. "Can feel your little cunt leakin' all over my leg—"
He slips the filter between his teeth with an appreciative hum when you jerk, a mocking huff spilling out when you try to clamp your legs shut around the thick split of his hip wedged between them. You can feel it, too—the thick, sticky ooze of him leaking out of your sore cunt, smearing pink-tinged cum all over his jeans. He hadn't let you get up after rolling off of you—just barked at you to leave it. Keep it, birdie. Gotta take, don't it?
A barb you hadn't said anything to, opting to ignore that, like everything else he does. Did.
Will do because you can tell, even beneath all those hidden layers, that this isn't a one-time thing. No. This isn't just a man stuck in a bad marriage fucking the nanny because he can. It's deeper. Worse, somehow, than a gross older man with a fetish for younger women he can financially control. Another pervert slaking his lust on whatever artless little thing falls into his web.
No. No—
This is missing clothes stuffed inside bags kept around the house. Pills that leave a strange aftertaste on your tongue of something a shade too sweet—
You think about running. Slipping out of his hands, this bed that reeks of stale sweat and sex, putting on your clothes, and leaving this house. Burying yourself in debt again, schoolwork, and limping (with your tail between your aching thighs) back to your landlord. Never looking twice at an ad for a babysitter in your life.
—and maybe spend your whole life wondering why people mix wolves and dogs to create something that never truly feels at home in the patchwork skin it wears; pieces of ancestors it can't relate to;
But you don't.
(—you never do.)
You lie there and take it. Like the leers he aimed at you when you first showed up on his doorstep, reeking of financial desperation and swallowed down the litany of things he said to you under his breath with a wobbly grin and your eyes fixed on the tile, convincing yourself it would pass. That you were more than just a pretty face he couldn't wait to cover in his cum. A soft ass he wanted to sink his teeth into before getting his cock in there next. Tight little pussy he was so eager to break in. Pantin' like a bitch in heat, ain't you, pup? can hear you gaggin' for it a mile away—
Biting your lip so hard it bled. Blood between your teeth. Your hands curling into the coarse, starchy fabric of his work shirt when he leaned down, permanent snarl on his face from the manmade cleftlip, and reached down to grab a handful of it. Testin' the merchandise, he cooed, low and mean and ugly. Words wrapped up tight in barbed wire. Brassbound. Said nothing as he pinched your nipples through your shirt, or when he shoved his hand beneath the hem and groaned at how soft you were.
Dirty hands leaving stains all over your skin you couldn't see, but felt like a fresh, weeping tattoo. Pulsing with infection.
(Such a needy little thing he trusts with his son while his wife is gettin' railed by 'er Pilates instructor, huh? But that's fine, ain't it? Need another one, anyway. A better influence for Tommy. Someone who'll give him that little brother he's been buggin' for—)
And so, you slacken your jaw when he grunts, barking at you to open up. Say nothing when he drags his hand back up your body to grip your jaw tight in his palm, squeezing your cheeks until they pop open. Let him spit in your mouth, and swallow down the foul, stale tobacco taste of him on your tongue.
Nod, like an obedient little pup, when he says good, ain't it? and let him roll you onto your back again, wrenching your thighs apart so he can see for himself the mess he made. The one you let spill all over his jeans.
Good ones, too, he huffs, eyelids slicing over the jaded edge of obsidian into a derisive pantomime of a contented cat squinting to show affection. Half-mast in pleasure as he says he'll wear them again tomorrow an' let all the boys see what a mess you make of me—
His gaze drills into the wet, slick seam of your puffy, bruised cunt, grip tightening—vicious, possessive—until his blunt nails sink into your skin. Branding. Bruising. His fingers clench down until it almost feels like he'll break through muscle to touch bone, but just when it starts to really hurt, pushing past that strange equinoctial point where pleasure and pain wrap around each other on a razor's edge, he peels back with a grunt. Leans over you to spit in your mouth again, a wet, foamy glob that hits your bottom lip before it oozes into your mouth, tasting of stale smoke and bitter tobacco. A flavour that reeks of permanence, and smells of an incipient wolfpack—all animal musk and wildness brimming up against stale sweat, laundry detergent, cigarette smoke, and sex.
Cruel, almost, like the gurns etched into his face by the missing chunk of flesh on his upper lip. Snarled and deadly. Mocking in a certain light. Like a constant sneer. Derisive and dangerous.
But not nearly as terrifying when he lists forward, dropping down to catch your jaw in his hand, the other planting itself in musty pillow beside your head, caging you in, and says:
"—and now you're makin' me a daddy again, birdie."
There's a taste in the back of your throat that's much too sweet for the dirty, oil-stained fingers he slips between your slack lips, scratching over your tongue. It reminds you of a spoonful of sugar. Grape-flavoured medicine poured over the top. And you wonder how quickly the pills you have been taking would dissolve in water when you sprinkled the white granules down the drain.
Something else you won't mention even as this house he burrowed inside changes shape—clothes in drawers, bags in the closet; the lingering scent of Candy Kiss a spoiled, stale sillage hidden under the smell of newborn and warm milk. Crushed animal crackers and Nicorette. The sound of a gaping, newly formed maw yowling for attention clashing sharply against the exaggerated screams of a grown man howling about a video game on Tommy's iPad.
thanks for hiring me and don't worry, Mr Riley, I can manage him morphing into a new sound, a continual echo of welcome home, and she called again asking about custody, daddy.
Something that throbs like a fresh wound before knitting itself together again into a thin, pink line; skin all shiny and new. Pulsing with the echoes of everything you dipped your chin again, mumbling around the malformed words of please, and don't, and now,
don't stop, please don't stop
What else are you supposed to do, really, other than lettingnhim slake the remnants of his lust between your sore, slick-stained thighs until he grunts, coming inside of you again to the damning symphony of a creaking bed, heels against the floorboards, and the sizzle of a cigarette burning away in an ashtray.
"Wait—" swallowed down by a mangled mouth. A hooked, crooked nose slides along your sweaty cheek as he all but purrs in satisfaction.
All his, he says.
And you don't fight it even as the blood pools between your teeth because you knew that from the start.
Johnny is sent to Ghost's motel room to grab some document his Lieutenant left behind, and finds the sweet little waitress from the diner they've been using as a pseudo-recon spot tied to his bed, legs spread and dripping Ghost's cum.
(OR: Simon might have left his sloppy seconds behind, but Johnny's just hungry enough to make a meal out of it.)
And it really is sloppy. Wet, messy. Your poor cunt swollen and dripping, leaking so much that it starts to puddle on the starchy sheets below. His Lieutenant is a big man, and he feels a pinch of sympathy swell at the fuckin' sight of you—limp, like a doll; wrists bound above your head, skin inflamed and chaffed from struggling to get out.
On the end table, he spots a water bottle and scattered tablets. Sleeping pills, he's sure. Something to keep you docile and quiet while he's called away from the divine split of your lax thighs, and sent halfway across the city by Price. Leaving you all alone, unattended. Unable to do anything except wait for him to get back so he can stretch that sore, messy cunt on his cock all over again, fill you right back up—
Poor thing.
But he can't really deny that the modicum of sympathy he feels is scrapped together from the sludge at the bottom of a dry well. Just droplets in the palm of his hand, and honestly—it's more jealousy that Simon got to you first instead of real pity because he'd be lying (hand on a Bible, fingers gripping the beads of a rosary—i shall not lie) if he said that the sight of you hasn't been haunting him since the moment they wandered into the diner. His mind spinning debauched thoughts of you—dressed up pretty in soft pink and chocolate brown—from the moment you wandered over to his table, looking like a dream. Like a cutout from a porno magazines his dad hid inside the shed in an old shoebox.
Just the sweetest little thing.
And he's not the only one.
They've all been prowling around you a little bit since landing in your sleepy-eyed town—asking for more coffee even though it tasted like shit and was burnt to hell, just to keep you close. To keep you coming back to their table as they soak in their fill.
Price dropping rasping sweetheart's and love's and thank you, darlin's that they all pretended not to hear. And Simon—
Well. He sees now where all those lingering stares, the ones that made Johnny's hackle raise, hair standing on end, led his Lieutenant, and what they meant. He thought it was wariness at first—or maybe that's just what he told himself late at night when he pulled his shirt up his navel, fingers grazing the thick trail of course hair to the soft, sensitive patch of skin at the base of his cock. Thinking about the way his Lieutenant looked at you. A whisper in the back of his head that screamed wrong and no and look away, she's fucking mine; little bites, nips, he couldn't hold back even when his hand curled around the base of his thickening cock, drawing twisted, ugly fantasies of what Ghost might do with a pretty thing like you.
And fuck—
What that did to him. Does.
It would be another lie if he said he's never thought of it before. Got off on the idea of it. Something that started as a cut—just this little papercut that he kept scratching and scratching until it tore, splitting further apart. Opening wide, like a chasm. This gaping hole that pulsed around the thought of his Lieutenant. A sick little thing that throbbed around the shape of him. The absurd width and the way he moved—like a mean, old dog Johnny would sometimes find prowling corners on the outskirts of town. A grizzled tiger with broken teeth, snapping it's maw at anything that got close enough to eat. Just this awful, mean looking thing in size and shape and temperament. Hard, jagged lines. Solid like a brick. And then—
You. Recoiling when he curled a massive paw around the cup of coffee. His palm swallowing it whole when you could barely get your fingers to meet around the thick of the base. The size difference clicking in a way it sometimes did when pretty, feisty things would try to step toe to toe with him and have to glare up, up, because they barely even reached his chin.
The urge to overpower. To claim. To tuck something smaller and softer than himself beneath the bulk of his body, hiding his kill from view.
He's always been the driver, not the passenger. The one in control. The main character, not the one watching from the sidelines, though—
But he really can't get the thought of Ghost swallowing up someone the way he did with the cup. A stomach-churning thought. Just a sick obsession burning in the back of his head—the massive brute rutting against you. The juxtaposition between the big, nasty beast and the pretty thing beneath him crying out because he's just too big burns him sometimes.
And he should help you.
Wants to, too. Really, he does. Wants to be your knight in shining armour, rescuing you from the big, scary man who tied you to his bed and ravaged you like this, made that poor, little pussy ache when he stretched you on his fat cock. Wants to so bad—
But he wants a taste even more.
Wants to lick your messy, abused cunt until his Lieutenant isn't dripping from you anymore. Until the only thing glistening on your folds is his spit and your slick. Maybe—if he has time—slide inside your poor pussy and fill it up again, like he wasn't even there in first place. Ghost wouldn't even know the difference, would he? Would come back to you leaking all over the sheets, just like he left you. Ready for seconds (or fifths, sixths, considering the fuckin' mess between your thighs, and goddamn, if that isn't one of the hottest sights he'd ever seen—); pretty little cunt ready for that fat, thick cock to split it apart again, stuff it full of cum all over again—
He palms his cock, thoughts of calling for help dissolved into a keening in the back of his head; just this unignorable, urgent need to eat. Hunger like he'd never felt before, strong enough that just looking at you splayed out like the helpless little victim you are, leaking and messy and full of fucking cum that isn't even his, is making his belly growl. He'd cut his own arm off at this point for just a fucking taste—
And he gets it. Drops to his knees at the edge of the bed, wrapping his hands around your thighs before he pulls you into his mouth for that first, scorching lick—
And it's salty, bitter. Thick. Ghost's cum tastes pretty fucking gross, really (something he isn't too surprised by considering the man's diet mainly consists of barely cooked red meat, Marlboros, and bourbon)—or maybe he just doesn't have the acquired taste for it—and he winces, a little, thinking about the dried remnants of it around your mouth, how many times you had to drink down the same, briny taste; but it's not—
It's not enough to make him stop.
Underneath the brine of it, the fuckin' smell of you and his Lieutenant dense in his nose, he can taste you. Sweet. Earthy. Slightly metallic—like the first lick of a papercut, and it makes him whine in the back of his throat, rasping out a muffled, slurred, poor baby before laving his tongue over your abused cunt, soothing the ache Ghost must have left behind. The stretch that was probably on the wrong side of too much, turning his milky cum a pretty strawberry pink.
You poor fucking thing—
He can feel just how swollen you are when he splits your bruised folds apart with his fingers, peeling them away so he can dig his tongue into your tender, chaffed hole to scoop out a mouthful of pink-tinged cum that pools inside of you. Salty and bitter and so fucking perfect, he could almost weep. It spills down his chin, stains his shirt, and despite the several swallows he takes, feeling the slimy, thick cum oozing down his throat, there's still so much of it. A thought that makes him whine, that has him rutting against the side of the bed like a dog because god, you're so fucking full, aren't you?
His hand presses against your pelvis—fingers pushing into the space between your lower belly and mound to push more cum from your cunt, sitting like an eager fucking thing between the split of your thighs, mouth open, tongue out to catch anything that spills from you. Fingers pushing and pushing. Swallowing it down, one mouthful after the other—
Ghost, when he'd changed after a mission that got him a little too messy, was just this jumble of scar tissue and thick pelt, and that's where it should have ended. Eyes politely averted, maybe a crass joke at his Lieutenant's expense (handsome, my bloody arse), but he couldn't stop looking at the thing dangling between his gnarled thighs. The way it hung there, swaying between his legs. Thick and fat and uglier than anything he'd ever seen before. The urge to ask—fuck, LT, how do you ever get pussy with a hideous thing like that?—crawling up his throat as he stared and stared and—
got harder than he'd ever been in his entire life, coming so fucking hard, that his belly ached after
—and he thinks of it now. Almost the width of his wrist soft, and how much bigger it must have gotten when he peeled your panties away, unveiling the pretty, slick split of your cunt. His hand slides up your belly, resting above your belly button where he knows the tip of Simon's cock would reach by memory alone, and how deep he'd speared it into you. Stretching you out around his fat cock, making this pretty pussy swallow every fuckin' inch—
He cums, then, rutting against the side of the mattress, head fuzzy with nothing but the thought of Simon ruining your cunt, coming inside of you over and over again, the taste on his tongue—sweet, wrecked pussy, and bitter, cherry-tinged cum—
He grunts, groaning into the swollen mess of your cunt before shoving his tongue as deep inside of your fluttering, swollen little hole as he can get, and still, somehow, finding the taste of Simon even after his belly feels stuffed full with it.
A dream, he thinks, rubbing his mouth and chin over your messy, wet folds; the silken, swollen split of a tender, well-fucked cunt the most heavenly thing he'd ever felt against his skin. And the fact that all that pink-tinged cum soaking into his stubble belongs to his Lieutenant is something that just wrecks him more than he thought it ever would. A fantasy spinning behind his eyes as he imagines the way you'd have cried and thrashed and screamed when slid that hideous fucking cock inside of your tight cunt, balls slapping against your seam hard enough that he feels the irritated, burning skin above the plush dents of your ass cheeks. How terribly he must have treated you, such a sweet little thing, as he heaved above you, hands curled around your hips, maybe digging into your waist, as he pulled you back into each thrust just to make sure this sweet cunt he risked so much to fuck, to ruin, took every, hard earned inch. Rutting into like a beast, a man starved. The way he looked down at you probably taking on the same shape and colour of that look Johnny saw in his eyes when you turned your back to the table, shoulders tensing like you knew there was a tiger hiding in the bushes behind you.
Pretty, dumb little prey too bracket by the idea of safety indoors and the cellphone inside your pocket to notice the behemoth of a man luring in the shadows after you clocked out for work, following you to your car before he scooped you up and slaked his hunger on this little cunt Johnny can't stop fucking with his tongue either, too eager for another sip despite how sore he knows you must be. Stretched wide around something thicker than his own wrist, insides feeling like the same papercuts he itched to madness in the back of his own head.
Poor thing, he thinks again when you stir, letting out a sluggish little whimper. But it's a muted sense of sympathy. Like the oooh and ahhh of an ambivalent crowd; humming along in obligation instead of real pity because despite how tight your little hole gets around his tongue when he curls it inside, and the darkening of that pretty, pink-tinged cum to rose-red, he's too hungry to stop.
This is the first real meal he's had in years, and no matter how much you wince and whine, he knows he has to take what he can before the predator returns to finish off your bones.
Later, with his belly full and his lips sticky with dried cum and slick, he finds his way back to the diner with the document in hand, ignoring the piercing look Ghost sends him and offering up an easy grin.
Lax and nonchalant because the man will find nothing amiss when he gets back to his room because Johnny had no reason at all to go into the bedroom at all. He'll open the door and see you splayed over the mattress, pussy wet and messy and still leaking cum—
(pink-tinged, of course, because Johnny got a little carried away himself by that sweet clench of you around the thick of him. something he'll coo about and apologise for later when he sneaks back inside for another taste—)
But what he forgot was the keen eyes and sense of smell on an apex predator, and when Simon snatches him up by the scruff of his neck before shoving him against the wall with a hungry, snarling, teeth-clacking kiss (that's more of an eating, really; a devouring that makes Johnny's cock throb and his stomach whine in longing), all he can say is whoops when Simon growls out,
"why can i taste 'er on your fuckin' lips, Johnny?"
it's been decades since Alpha!Ghost had a rut. something that's probably for the best, really. his want is as hideous as he is. as ugly as his goddamn mug. it's best kept tucked away, secured under lock and key.
but then he finds you. and you're all alone. unclaimed, on the verge of heat. poor thing. it triggers a voracious rut. decades worth of want spilling out over you. you're it, he knows. feels the certainty in that statement simmering in his hindbrain, in his essence. he'll have you—now, forever. non-negotiable. where you go, he will follow.
but you run from him. stupid girl. didn't anyone teach you not to run from a starving wolf?
dubcon. size kink. size difference. a/b/o dynamics: knotting, rut. breeding kink. spit kink. implied virgin!reader. obsessive behaviour. possessive!Ghost. semi-public sex. reluctant reader bullied into submission lmao. forced bonds. implied kidnapping. basically, you're hunted down and fucked by Alpha!Simon who growls in your ear about how he's waited his whole life for you. and lucky him. he finally found you
AO3
It's been years, decades, since he had a rut.
(Broken Alpha. Ruined.)
Trauma, they tell him, will do that. Sever the drive in the back of his head, the one that rears—vicious and angry—each mating season, bringing with it the urge to breed. To claim. Own.
A form of self-preservation. It pitches a plexiglass of protection between him and his instincts, not letting them merge. Join. Done so because to be in rut, to want, to need, is vulnerability. It costs hypervigilance. Turns man into beast. Animal.
This bodily reaction makes an alpha extend themselves, like an overarching limb, to shield the omega they pick as a mate. Bearing their own neck to save another.
Naturally, they say, if he couldn't help himself, how could he ever hope to protect a fragile little omega?
They tell him it could be as permanent or temporary as he allows. Healing, they say. Time. Laughable, really. And utter nonsense because Ghost is fine.
Trauma tampered. Revenge sought, found. There's no one out there who could ever harm him, and still—
His last rut was before the mission that buried him alive. That turned him into the living dead. A mockery of man. Frankensteinian beast.
It's not something he cares much for, anyway. From what he remembers of his youth—vague snippets of memories, disjointed, blurred sensation; a profound need, an urge, to sink his cock into something, to plug them up, to bite—ruts have always been a nuisance. In the way. An annoyance that took time away from what he'd rather be doing.
And as Johnny enters his—skin pallid, waxy; cheeks flushed, eyes darkening like a brewing storm on the horizon; snapping at anything that breathes, whining like a dog, miserable and hot, all the time (ahm’a bleedin’ furnace, s’what ah’m)—he finds he doesn't care very much to go reclaim what he lost.
No skin off his nose. Nothing to concern himself with.
Besides. Omegas know better.
Even before he lost himself, dying, rotting in a tumulus, pretty little omegas with their soft hands and bashful smiles always went out of their way to avoid him. Miserable alpha. His scent alone wards them off—burnt leather, charred bones; sarcophagus dust, dirt—and he found himself alone during his burgeoning ruts more often than not.
No pretty little thing to tender the sweat on his brow, or bend over and present for him—offering up a sweet little cunt he got to bury himself inside, tie up nice and tight on his knot.
It was usually his hand. A bottle of bourbon. A printed porn stash he swiped from Tommy, who nicked it off their old man—
And when he did find a partner, it was always transactional. Hand to hand, an exchange of money. All clinical and detached. Empty. Fucking into a concept instead of a person; a vacuum eating away at his soul because he knew, then, that they wanted to be there almost as much as he did.
But what choice did either have when their home was the rotted gullet of a dying beast?
(Simon told them to stay away from shitty men like him, who broke bones in the throes of his heat, snapped his jowls at anything that got too close, and had to be chained to the bed like an animal during it—)
Nothing to miss. Nothing to mourn.
And it's not like he doesn't get the urge. Wanting to sink his cock into something warm, wet, is as recurring as a sweet tooth. A prickle in the back of his head after he devours his dinner that says, dessert might be nice.
He can fuck, but his knot never pops. A worry the doctors had—unsure what the consequences would be in the long run for such a virile, young Alpha already experiencing nature's version of erectile dysfunction so early in life.
(“pity the poor omega who has to deal with that rut,” they whispered. “might not be much of anything left of them when he's through.”)
Inconsequential now because he's pushing forty and his last rut was a false trigger. One dragged out of him by drugs and torture. The last true rut, natural and instinctual, was when he was eighteen.
It's doubtful he'd suddenly be cured at his age.
This is what he tells Johnny when he asks, pries. Broken fuck, ain't he? Unmated. Can't knot. Piss poor excuse of an Alpha. Doesn't he think it's—
“a shame,” Johnny grouses, words muffled slightly by the way he's hunched over the cheap plastic table in the canteen. His fingers dig harshly into his temple. “Alpha like you—” it's enunciated in clipped Queen's English, the barb makes Ghost scoff. “—ack! a waste. ma mam would be livid. no grandbabies t’show off? sacrilegious.”
—funny. If he's being honest. Laughable:
because for as long as Ghost can remember, he's always had a predilection to ruin his favourite toys. slaking his unquenchable lust on their tender skin, biting down to the bone, sipping on their marrow—
not really the sort of thing omegas today go for, is it?
his want is as hideous as he is. as ugly as his goddamn mug—
Instead, he shrugs. “hardly.”
“yer no’ missin’ it?”
“missin’ what, Johnny?”
“knottin’, ye surly prick.” He jeers, then, jabs his elbow into Simon's arm. “a bonnie omega to stick yer prick in. ain't missin’ th’, no?”
“no,” Simon gripes. The last thing Price needs is another order of protection against his Lieutenant. But to humour the alpha in an early stage of rut, he jabs out, hollow and full of wretched derision. “i can barely remember what it felt like. must be heaven, though. is that your plans for tonight, Johnny? gonna go and knot some sorry omega?”
It's meant to prod, poke. Sharp barbs aimed at Johnny's threadbare control, the same one held in place by a fraying, unspooling knot. Alphas in the early stage of rut are considered safe enough to be around. Not yet mindless drones, hosts to an ugly little parasite; a being forced to obey a single, instinctual drive to mate, to gorge themselves into a post-rut stupor.
Safe. Or so they say.
But Ghost knows what Johnny's feeling in the same sense as a phantom limb. A broken, fragmented memory. So, he twists his mockery in deep. All in jest, of course.
And Johnny pales suddenly. Wavers in his seat. The affirmative comes after a bout of contemplative silence. A jagged, choked yeah slips from his Sergeant’s mouth as he drops his head to the table, and groans. Miserable.
“go fuck yerself, Lt.”
Simon intends on taking Johnny up on that offer, lazying out on the futon with his hand stroking lazily along his flaccid cock, thumbing through the latest series of snapshots Johnny—ever the photographer—snapped up during his previous rut. Images of pretty omegas dressed up in fine silk, blood-red lingerie, and coy little grins on their faces, a vixen pastiche of demureness. Jejune appeal in all its coquettishness.
Innocent sluts—Johnny's preferred type. Ones who'll bat their eyes at him, nervous and full of faux modesty, while they rock back and forth on his face, tugging on his mohawk to make him lick their cunts just the way they like. Sweet, like candy. Dressed in sin.
He likes to take before and after photos of them—often with the pretty models unaware (adds to it, aye, Lt?). Ones with them batting their eyes at him, soft and shy in all their twee delight, and then fucked out, ruined and chewed up like a broken toy when he finishes with them. Bitten off more than they can swallow. Cheeky brats sobbing for mercy on his bed.
Likes, even more, to send them to Ghost. A little tease. One he has no compunction about partaking in. Enjoying to his heart's content.
Or—
Intended to, of course. Because what ends up happening is this:
Price calls just as he's getting into the new series sent to his phone—the tear streaks streaming down this omega’s face are particularly appealing, bound in intricate Celtic knots (Johnny, the artist), and gagged with their own panties—and tells him he has a job for him.
Something simple. Discreet. And local, too. Bears have been sighted in town—a mama and her cubs. Dangerously close.
The prelude to the phone call is a clipped take care’a it before the line goes dead.
Ghost doesn't need to pack much—he can't remember the last time he unpacked his duffle bag, anyway—and stays in the recliner until the mission file comes in, idly stroking his thumb across the pixelated, tear-streaked face of the omega in Johnny's clutch. Moussed. Messy. They make the prettiest picture, don't they? Drool dripping down their chin, a spillover from what the lacy, white panties couldn't catch.
Flesh peppered with jagged circles, bite marks. Johnny knows better than to claim them, and their neck is bereft of his teeth. Smooth. Unblemished.
To claim is to bond. To bond—
Well.
His earliest recollection of a relationship is his parents’. His mum, tied and trapped to a man she wanted no part of, but stuck. Unbondings, divorce, were rare during that time. Unheard of. Even now.
And under his old man's influence, he's always seen claiming as ownership. As possession. A lingering remnant he’s told is wrong, but can't shake. Can't change. It glues in the fibrils of his mind. A rotten, pulsing scab that no amount of sanctioned reconditioning can ever seem to get rid of, to scrape out of his skull.
(one he knows would be there no matter what because his sole purpose is exsanguination; bloodletting—
in his warped desire to protect the things he cares about, he ends up smothering them in the end. a child holding a firefly too tight in its chubby fist.)
But Johnny knows better. Good Catholic boy. Knows to keep a muzzle on himself when he sucks desperate kisses into the small omegas' sweet neck, breaking apart the blood vessels of their scent glands, soaking himself in their musk—potent pheromones of a needy omega in heat. Aching for a bite. To be held down and conquered.
It's wrong, they say. This ugly mass sits inside his chest like a foreign body. Scandalised eyes drilling into the side of his head like he's a monster for thinking this way.
And he is.
(always has been)
But he knows better. Knows to keep those uglier, rotten parts of himself hidden away from prying eyes. Got good at it, too. Enough that they let him into the brothels time and time again.
Still—
He can remember the closest he'd come during a rut to biting a shrill omega who screamed in his ear until his head rang, ached. Nearly did it, too. Teeth razoring over their jugular, pinching delicate skin.
Clarity came like a gunshot when he tasted blood. Chiselled a hole through his delirium, broke up the haze, and snapped his jaws up tight, locking them as he finished with a muffled growl, tongue swirling over his teeth for another taste. Another drop.
His ruts have always been messy. Bloody. Got him banned from several centres, brothels, where they offered up betas drenched in the artificial musk of an omega in estrus. Ones resilient enough to withstand the harsh coupling of an unhinged Alpha in need.
He had a problem, they said, with treating their workers like chew toys. Biting to break skin, drilling in deep enough to scratch his teeth on their bones.
Deranged, they hissed. Fuckin’ mental, mate. Stay the hell away!
Some are just prone to violence. Need to be half-sedated before they can mate without ripping their partner to pieces. Ghost has always been that sort. Aggressive. Hard to control. Rabid.
His appetite is bigger than the expanse of their skin. He sometimes thinks he could eat the whole world and still starve.
He hums, thumb sliding to cover the omega's neck. Trapped in his hand, his clutch. They're cute when they're ruined like this. Begging. Whimpering.
His cock gives a half-hearted twitch. His work phone chimes, signaling the end of his leisure.
shame, he thinks, squeezing his hand until the metal dents, the screen cracks, splinters. Pops. Hairline fractures split across their distorted, tear-stained face. He closes his fist over it until it breaks. Goes black.
really. such a goddamn shame.
Some things are just not meant to be—
—but they have a habit of falling into his maw, anyway.
It's a simple set up.
Man—
beast, monster, thing
—with his empty, growling stomach and teeth made to bite, tear, goes out hunting for a meal. In that search, he finds you.
You, Persephone personified: damned (eternal), standing beneath a spruce tree. Limned, halo gold, in the waning sunset's bashful kisses, you lean on the rough bark, idling your timelessness away.
Postcard beauty. Pinup demure. Alluring.
(creature of sin
and oh,
do you reek:
The air is saturated in the tantalising scent of honeybush, roasted hazelnuts, and clove. Saccharine—almost nauseatingly so—but with a hint of spice, black cardamom, cinnamon. He drags in lungful after lungful until it tangles deep within his chest, nearly suffocating. Smothered in this earthy sweetness. Drowning. Drowning—
the perfect dessert)
It unleashes something in him. Chips at the lock buried deep in his mind, cudgelling through the hinges until they pop. Rusted, slick with oxidising oil. It peels back from the gate, unveiling this gaping, ravenous chasm, polluted and gangrenous, rotten down to the marrow. Noisome. Noxious. This frothing pit sloshes, geyser-like, and greedily foams at the maw, the mouth, aching for a taste. Something to quench this gnawing hunger.
This bottomless abyss hadn't seen light since he was eighteen, and—
The hollow space where his rib once sat throbs, aches. phantom bone. He holds his chest with his hand, feeling for the gap, the chasm, stolen from him. Ripped away, taken.
By you. you—
—so,
it's only fair that he steals something back.
(quid pro quo, or something, right?)
You greet him with a small nod when he wanders close, eyeing him warily under the black rim of your ballcap. Tense. Small hands curl into fists, partially hidden under the rain-soaked windbreaker nearly two sizes too big. It smells like you—honeyed milk, molasses; lilac, lavender and warm bread—and he fights the urge to pull his mask down, to shove his misshapen nose into your neck, and breathe it in right from the source. Drinking, feasting, on it.
This want is visceral. It coils in his guts, bubbling in his veins. His musk—heavier than yours, pungent—beads along his scent glands, mushrooming into the air like a fine mist.
Your nostrils flare. He takes a step closer, eyes skewering into you, taking in everything you have to offer. The rucksack left at the bottom of the tree, stained with dirt and leaves. A sprig of Saskatoon berries peeks out from the lopsided flap. And—
Ah.
Foraging is off-limits in this area unless granted a permit. One you don't seem to have based on the skittish way you keep avoiding his eye.
His scent thickens, tainted sour with faux suspicion, and you wince, ducking your chin, tucking it close to your chest, hiding from his spearing gaze.
All it does is give him a voyeuristic view of your fragile nape, your vulnerable neck.
His teeth ache. Jaw clenched up tight.
It looks so bare. So naked.
(Be a shame to keep it that way forever, wouldn't it?)
“Hi,” you stammer, seemingly oblivious to the musk you leak into the air, into his lungs. Forcing some sense of staid indifference into your tone. Like being here, out in the middle of the forest is normal. “Did you need something?”
On the verge of a heat like this, wobbling where you stand—
He wants to chew you up. Spit out the pieces on the pavement. Drink from the gash he'll rip into your jugular,
quench this unbearable thirst.
He doesn't know how you made it out here as long as you have, smelling like you do, and the thought burrows through the haze spuming, clotting, on the fringes of his muted periphery. Anger is an icy deluge of white water raging through his veins.
Under the mask, the remnants of his scarred lip curls. His hands close into tight fists. Balled up. He feels the tension crackling along his muscles, his body. Coiled spring. Ready to leap—
But:
There's clarity. Focus. Where he was meant to become a mindless monster, driven by instinct, he instead feels the pieces of himself snap back into place. Missing puzzle pieces. It shifts. Settles. Locks.
He wants you. Will have you. It's non-negotiable. Ironclad. You just—
Belong to him, don't you? Pretty little thief. And wandering around like this, reeking like you do, you must want him, too. Need him.
(protect, protect, protect—)
Honed in, drilling into your face to catch every expression that flickers past, he sees the moment you take a sniff, when realisation blooms in the inkpools of your gaze that you are less than an arm's length away from a starving predator. Supple, soft. All plush flesh seated seamlessly against brittle bone. Fragile.
“hi,” he echoes, and it sounds hollow. Garbled. Like he's speaking underwater. Thinks, for a moment, that he's buried again. Drowning under the crushing weight of dirt. His own tumulus. Suffocating. Choking on dirt—
But you twitch. Feral little thing. It breaks him out of this nightmarish obtundation; shaking the cobwebs loose. He tracks it like a viper. Attention narrowing, shrinking, into nothing but the way you move. Smell. You anchor him in his place, keeping him stable amid this horrific onslaught of emotions that rip talons down his chest.
“I–” you breathe in again, lashes fluttering. Strains of silk batting over your etiolated cheeks. You breathe him in. Deep. He sees your chest grow, expanding with his air. His musk. Has to bite down on a growl before it forms, the lash of a whip in his throat. Aching.
There's something spellbinding about you—caked in a layer of grime, briny sweat clogging your natural scent; wild and untamed. Uncharted wilderness, untouched by man and their dirty hands. A corrie after a rain shower. Snow melt. He wants to bathe in it. Carry it with him wherever he goes.
As if scenting this thickening desire, your eyes widen. You take a step back, swallowing audibly when he follows. Marionette on strings. Your shadow.
“I should go—”
And he knows he can't let you do that.
Won't.
He hums, a fickle, brittle thing in the far reaches of his chest.
“Go?” he flicks his hand toward your bag, head cocking to the side in a mockery of contemplation. “Don' think you got a permit for that, do you?”
“A permit…”
He has you. Your eyes lower, falling to the badge on his chest. Game Warden. You stare at it, eyes widening. Swallowing thick.
With you distracted, he leans in. Curves his body over you mockingly, like he's bending down to whisper a secret in your ear. Cupping a pretty little firefly in the palm of his hand.
When his shadow falls over you—dark and damning—you flinch back, fists trembling under the hem of your jacket. Brows furrowed, knotted tight. Your lower lip wobbles. You try to hide that, too, by sinking your teeth into your flesh until it floods white under the strain.
He wants to pry it apart with his own teeth. Take the bruised flesh into his mouth until you start to drool, whining from the abuse he inflicts on you in a mockery of a kiss.
(wants to tear through it, taste your blood on his tongue—)
“An’ I don't reckon tha's a good idea, pet.”
You shiver when he places his hand on the truck above your head. Boxing you in completely, nothing to spare—not even an inch.
He hums at that, cock giving a vicious jerk inside his trousers at the almost impossible dearth between your sizes, at the way he swallows you up in an instant. Has to take a deep breath to steady himself, to keep the inkblack tendrils swirling, gathering, at the edges of his periphery from bleeding in. This starving murder of crows.
When he speaks again, it's low. Deep. Kittenish licks from the tongue of a tiger; abrasive, rough. Mocking baritone of a shifting canyon, a mountainside, before it buries anyone alive under rubble.
“Not reekin’ the way you do. Might ‘ave every alpha in a one square mile radius frothin’ at jaws for a taste. Ain't safe out there.”
And it's definitely not safe with him.
He watches, transfixed, the moment this clicks. When your eyes waver between the hard bulk of his body—spread out, laxed; plumage unfurled—and the noisy clatter of the town just within reach. It's this thicket that cups your scent, that protectively curls over you, and keeps the Alpha's prowling about the market square from sniffing you out. A beaten trail. Hidden desire path no one was supposed to wander down.
Except the bear problem in the woods, infringing on town, and him, the gun bolstered on his thigh still hot from his warning shots into the bush.
(lost little Lamb—
wandered too far from the herd.)
You take another step, cautious. Small. It brings you flush against the tree. Your polyester jacket whines at the friction. He can see indecision play out on your face. Oscillating between the badge on his uniform shirt, the gun on his massive thigh, and the clamour of muted noise from the town just within reach. Alphas prowling. Their acrid scent is unmistakable even through the dense foliage spreading around you.
It's an impasse. Neither option affords you much choice in the long run—it's either stay here with him, with the heady scent of want, of an Alpha on the incipient cusp of a voracious rut; or risk yourself in town. There are police officers patrolling. Ones who can sedate an alpha who gets too out of hand, but still.
The mimesis of desire pooling around you might send you into heat sickness. That, or you'll get in even more trouble for fleeing a pursuing officer. Resisting arrest. Jail time, certainly.
The pendulum wavers. Your knotted fists wobble.
Then—
Your eyes leave his chest, the gun, trailing over his shoulder. Widening in surprise at whatever is there in the distance.
He ought to commend you, really. The rouse is quite believable—
But:
“Not bad,” he murmurs, leaning down further. If you won't jump, he'll push you—
He sees his mistake as soon as it happens.
As he bends, you drop. Waiting until his attention seemingly drifts elsewhere, to when he's distracted and off balance. Lured in by your faux attempt at distraction.
And it might have worked on a lesser being, but all Ghost has ever been is raw, unadulterated instinct.
He lashes out as soon as you move again, palm curling over your wrist in an instant. Snapping jowls of a defensive snake. Shackled. Locked. He tugs—
But the movement costs momentum. You use this against him, going limp. Forcing him to take the brunt of your weight on the spread of his fingers. Tricky little minx. His mouth breaks out in a feral smirk, tugging harshly on scars, on burns. Stretching skin. Distorting it under the mask, ugly and vicious.
Your scent plumes up around him, sickly sweet. His jaw aches, gums itch. He wants to bite, snap his jowls around the scruff of your neck, chew on your skin until you sob out his name—
In seconds, you twist. Swinging your body back in a beautiful pivot, clumsy as it is. You're all animal now. Reckless in your pursuit to escape. Throwing out pheromones at him—purposeful, he realises a moment too late.
And it works. Distracts him long enough for his grip to slacken. Your arm slips out of his grasp, and you're on your feet in an instant, darting through the thicket in a maddened dash to escape the heavy, starving alpha and his burgeoning hunger.
Escape, or—
Weighed down by the afterbirth of his sudden rut, a prickle of his old self buoys, brims, from beneath the mess. He shouldn't chase you. Should leave you alone, call someone—Price, perhaps. Bark out between a clenched jaw that he needs a tranquiliser and chains. Will have to break Simon's teeth to stop him from biting into you like a man starved, famished. Tie him to the back of his pickup truck, drag him to the edges of the forest. Knock him out. Knock his teeth in.
Anything.
Because they said this might happen. The doctors’ who poked and prodded. Therapists—all mandatory, non-negotiable, when he signed his name on the dotted line—murmured about unravelling. His self-control snapping like a twig. Sense of self retreating. All hiding away, protecting itself from the torrent of chemicals flooding his hindbrain. A heavy, unrelenting accumulation of a decades-long bout of rut celibacy all washing over him, all at once.
Said to lock himself up if it happens. Chains. Shackles. Nuts and bolts. Heavy tranquiliser. Immediate sedation.
And in Price’s office, in that messy filing cabinet he keeps, is a folder. A playthrough of everything that's supposed to happen if this happens.
(“but that won't happen, will it, Simon?”
and he'd rolled one massive shoulder in an easy, effortless shrug.
“no.”)
The failsafe is that he's meant to call in if it does. Precious seconds of clarity, cognisance, enough time for him to dial the number, to bark out the order. To be hunted down, rounded up, and thrown in a pit.
where he belongs.
He should. Should. It's the book. Rules. Coloured in red ink. No option to negotiate.
But as you slip through the dense foliage, angelic gold against the phthalo green bosky, the knot in his shoulders abates. Uncoils. In this sense of ease that permeates within him, he finds that he's shockingly cognisant. In full control. The plexiglass shatters, and in the ruins he finds purpose.
You smell good. Too good. Any alpha will scent you in an instant, will claim you. Take you. It makes something in his broken, moulted head shift. Crack. He can't let that happen. Has to protect you the only way he knows how—
To wrap his paws around your throat before any other Alpha has the chance to sink their teeth into you. To claim you.
All his. Little Persephone tucked tight against his ribs where you belong.
And if the way the air clots with your cloying smell—heady, potent; the unmistakable ripeness of an omega in heat—then you must want him to chase you. Want him to follow.
(escape, or—
a game.)
He tracks your movements, honed in on the rustle of the underbrush. When you're out of sight, Ghost flexes his hand, curling his gloved fingers over the leather on his palm. There's an itch in the back of his head. Festering. Rotting. He wants to reach in, rake his claws down the mass, shred it to pieces, but it affixes one simple truth inside of him:
you need him. want him. why else would you run in the opposite direction of help if you didn't want him to give chase?
And so, he does.
You're a crafty little thing. To throw him off of your trail, you leave scent markers on the tree trunks you pass, doubling back to run in the opposite direction.
It might have worked on someone else, but Ghost has spent half of his life buried in this thicket, and knows better than to follow smells in the forest. A vacuum, a great chasm; it plays tricks with sounds. Distorts scents wafting through the canopy, mingling with the natural loam, the disturbed humus underfoot.
Instead, he hums at your cleverness—his smart little omega—and shifts his gaze to the forest floor, roaming over the footprints sinking into the soft soil, the peat and moss. A breadcrumb trail leading right to you. Broken twigs, crushed bushes.
Ghost follows it. Places each foot down carefully, nose angled upward to catch the fresh wave of your heat leaking through the tangled furze. It beckons him forward. Calls out to him.
(come, come, come—)
This lost little lamb needs a shepherd.
He intends to give you just that.
(—find me)
The path you cut through the forest is a twisting sawtooth meant to throw him off your trail. Traps laid out in tall tussocks, weaved through sweetgrass all drenched in your scent. Pieces of your clothing torn at the hem, the shorn fabric pressed on pine needles and tangles furze.
These breadcrumb trails—a neat nest of wile, it seems—are cunning, he'll give you that.
Even with his eyes to the forest floor, he finds himself throwing a wayward glance in the opposite direction, snagged in your webbed subterfuge. Somewhere between the visitors centre and the first trail meandering into the thick taiga, you seemed to have realised that your boots leave indents in the mor. He follows the deep impressions in the podsol until he finds them shoved under a Saskatoon berry bush. Another dead end.
Clever little thing, aren't you?
But even when strays from the path, he's right on your tail. Confident in his scenting abilities. His prowess has always been tracking down wily little rabbits when they try to flee, picking them off in stasis from high above. The layout might have changed—his perch closer to the ground instead of a deer stand—but his eyes are just as keen. Your winding trail is ingrained in his mind. A long loop through the eastern trailhead, and he knows, instantly, that you'll try to throw him off at the placard where the west trail branches off through the dense conifers, and the east meanders downslope to the hidden stream where hunters like to trawl.
He feels a pinch of pride simmering low in his guts. Anyone else would have lost you three pitfalls back. He's enraptured by this pursuit. Smitten by you. Your clumsy little escape. Your sweet little ploys. He wants to chew into you, let his teeth leave jagged scars, false starts, on your bones. Permanent. Starlight—dusting meteor showers in milk white.
Ghost’s belly gives a tremendous growl. He huffs at the ache clawing against tissue, ravenous and unbearably empty.
He'll have you soon. All to himself.
The thought makes fresh blooms of pleasure spume from the rot in his chest, prickling through the layers of muskeg and peat, etiolated little sprout. Germinating in wet gangrene. Feasting on necrotised flesh.
He swipes his hand over a honeybush, catches the lingering scent clinging to the leaves. You must have fallen here. Tangled yourself in the furze, overcome by your heat.
Poor thing. Tired already.
He holds his hand up to the fading gossamer of twilight trickling through the dense canopy, clenching the lingering remnants of your scent in his fist. It's fresh. He wants to tuck it in his pocket, carry it around with him.
He finds you in a small clearing, bent down with your palm resting on the trunk of a tree. Nails digging into the rotting bark, desperately struggling to catch your breath. Your heat is a wildfire. It scorches the earth. Burns his nose.
You're no longer on the cusp of it anymore, but in the throes.
His rut, he finds, isn't too far behind.
Perfect synergy. Meant to be. You call to him, and the gaping, gnarled chasm inside of him answers with a growl—
Before you can blink, he moves.
He falls over you, felled timber. The earth shakes under his indomitable weight. Palms slam into the rough bark of the gnarled spruce you've taken respite against, boxing you in.
You fall against it with a gasp, hands pushing against his broad chest as he backs you into the tree. Little fists pounding on his sternum, mouth pinched, twisted in a snarl. There are pieces of bush caught on your clothes, tangled in your hair. Leaves. Sticks. A spot of dirt on your nose.
It's mesmerising.
The ballcap falls first. Morning sunlight over a boscage in bloom. Pitfalls, ravines. The canyons of your eyes quiver; this new topography shifting, sliding. Tectonic beauty in muted midnight.
He wants to reach in, feel these granite walls of yours with his bare hands. Clamber up the colluvium, the scree, until he reaches these rugged peaks gleaming at him, angry and feral, in fading twilight.
Time is endless. There's no limit to how long he has to know you—drink from your rivers, feast on your valleys; find all the hidden nooks, the crannies, shaded under the towering monoliths of your body. Chart your couloir. Defile your flume. Bathe in your estuary. Tangle himself inside your dells. Tame your chaparral.
Fastidiously. Expertly. Until no part of you is unknown to him.
Your chest heaves, mouth open as he crowds you further. Pressing into you. Over you.
He wedges his broad thigh between your legs, presses it tight against your pussy. Your thrashing stills when he touches you, when he angles his knee up, up—
There. Through the layers of clothing that separates his bare skin from your cunt, he feels the heat bleeding out against him. The wetness from your sodden panties. Undeniable proof of how much you want him. Need him.
“All wet f’me?”
“Fuck you—!” You spit, angry and feral, but you arch into his touch, pushing your pussy onto his thigh. Aching for friction.
It makes him hum. A low growl caught in the back of his throat.
“Reckon I'll be the one fuckin’ you, pet.”
And he will be. This is fact.
You shudder, brows notching together in a vicious glare. “I don't want you.”
It's hissed between the sliver of your clenched teeth. Full of heavy conviction. Forging truth out of lies—
And that's all it is. A lie. A fallacy.
(and even if it wasn't, unlikely considering the way you arch into him, needy despite the disdain dripping down your brow—he really just can't find it in himself to give a fuck; he'll make you want him—)
Ghost leans down, muzzle pressed against your neck. He inhales deep, audible. Chest expanding, lungs swelling. Full of the aroma bleeding out of your pores. Proof of just how much you do, in fact, want him. Betrayed by your own body.
He huffs out, paints the air with his derision. “Is that so?”
Ghost drags his hand down the solid line of the tree, dropping it to rest against the jut of your hip. He ducks his head, watching. Staring at the way his palm nearly swallows you up when he rests it over your waist. Spanning nearly the entirety of it—hip to hip.
It bludgeons into him. Knocks the air clean from his lungs.
He's always had a hunger for things he can cup in his palm. The barrel of his rifle. The hilt of a knife. Your wrist in his hand. The curve of your hip.
His gloved fingers slip under the hem of your shirt. Pads ghosting over your skin. Warmth bleeds through the leather, an unmistakable tell of your heat reaching its first equinox. It'll be all fire, all smoke, from this point onward. Desperate. Feral.
Groaning deep, wanting, he pushes into you further. Chest rumbling. Eager.
It takes a great deal of effort to pull his hand away. To bring it up to his mouth, fingers hooking over the edge.
The fight in you abates—marginally—and you watch him with a keen look of suspicion dancing in the moulted dirt spread over your nullah. Wary. Anticipatory.
He fights the urge to laugh—deep and delirious—and instead works on prying his mask down over his crooked nose, his mangled mouth. Letting the hem snap under his chin, kept there. Bearing himself to you for the first time. Naked. Exposed.
Your eyes widen, trailing down the jagged lines, mauled ridges of scar tissue. Drinking in everything he offers in the fading embers of a summer twilight.
He grins—a rivened, ugly thing—when you let out a heavy, quick breath, and your hips drop, rutting your sopping cunt over the wide heft of his thigh. Gyrating subconsciously. Quietly pleased by the way he looks—as maimed, as beastly as he is. He lets you. Lifts his knee, pressing his cap tight into the bark, and bumping the top of his flexing quadriceps at the apex of your groin, right where he knows your clit sits.
The breath you take is pulled in through clenched teeth, biting on the rind of a moan. Its shapeless silhouette ducks, hides from sight.
He lets you have it. Lets you run.
But it's not without recompense.
With his upper lip curled, he sinks his teeth into the leather tip of the glove above his middle finger. Letting you see them for yourself—these thrawn teeth he'll bury into your neck. Claiming you entirely as his.
Your pupils start to eclipse your irises. Lagoons of liquid black blotting over rugged peaks.
Ghost slowly tips his head back, dragging the glove with him. Eyes setting along his lashline, he drinks in the sight of you swallowing thickly, your gaze darting between his teeth, his mouth, and now—his bared neck. Voracious, greedy, in the way you feast on him. Drilling into the stretch of skin slowly unveiling itself to you.
The muscles in his neck flex against rimy skin. Adam's apple bobbing with his slow swallow.
You follow it all, but your gaze seems to fix itself on the brawny arch of his neck, falling—and then glueing— to the thick vein protruding from his flesh, pulsing with the steady rhythm of his heart, and the small, swollen bump of his scent gland beneath it.
Hunger, he finds, paints such a pretty picture on your face. The greedy, anfractuous glances a bludgeon into him; so heavily affixed with desire that the shake of your head when he pulls the glove free, letting it dangle from between his teeth, and drops his hand back to your skin, is minute. Meaningless.
You want him as much as he wants you.
The clause in this, the axiom, is ironclad. Irrefutable. Bound in brass when you shiver at the touch—feverish skin on feverish skin—and arch into his palm for more. Panting through clenched teeth, each hiss striking against that fraying coil leashing his threadbare control. To distract himself from the unspooling knot, the ache in his gums, he charts the first inch of skin he passes with his thumb, committing the sloping plains of your body to memory. The jut of your hip, the stutter in your breath when he runs the rough pad of his forefinger over the slope of your underbelly.
It's easy to marvel at the sheer enormity of his size compared to yours. Simon hitches his thigh firmly into your clothed cunt, nearly lifting you up off the ground. You teeter on the tips of your toes, falling forward into his chest to stabilise yourself. Little fists curling into the fabric of his jacket, knuckles tight against his the last rungs of his ribcage. Your head lifts, a glare chiselling into the soft fields of your face.
You hiss something at him—feral and scathing. He drops the glove, leans down to meet you in the middle, and eats your feeble protests from your lips in a bruising kiss. Scorching. His teeth knock into yours. Tongue lashes out to catch the vitriol dripping from your fangs. You make a noise in the back of your throat, and he swallows that, too. Devours it all.
It's a vicious kiss. All teeth, tongue. Bullying. He lets you sink your teeth into his tongue, huffing into the seam of your lips when you coo, victoriously, at the first drop of blood spilled.
In retaliation, he sets his hands over your ribs, and lifts you up off the ground. Making you gasp. Mewl. Your legs kick out as the back of your head catches on loose bark, raining it down over your shoulders in flakes. He doesn't stop kissing you throughout. Eyes half-mast, still open, as he drinks in the sight of yours rolling back in your head when his thigh, one the width of both of yours—fuckin’ hell—catches the perfect angle on your clit.
Loose-limbed, caught, you have no choice but to wrap your ankles around his waist, curl your arms around his broad shoulders. Clinging to him desperately to remain grounded, held aloft.
His hand falls down, cups the back of your thigh, fingers spanning the entire curve of your cheek. Held tight in his palm. He bucks into you—quick, hard. Letting you feel the unmistakable bulge of his stiffening cock, leaking spend already in the tight confines of his trousers. This groin, inner thighs, already sticky with the mess dribbling out.
You fall apart at this. Head tipping back, crown thudding against the truck of the tree. He has your lower lip between his teeth, and it pulls, skin stretching until he huffs out another breath, mocking, and unhinges his jaw, letting you go.
Mewling, whining low in the back of your throat, you clumsily rut your cunt into the hard press of his cock. Eyes hazy, liquid, with your blooming heat.
Its approach is quicker than he thought it would be, and he hums, tongue rolling over his teeth to catch the lingering taste of you. Under his hand, your skin burns. Singing with the urgency of your desperation. He answers it with a grunt, falling forward to smother you under his weight.
There's a flash of clarity in your eyes when they crack open. Brief. Fleeting. He feels your sluggish attempt to push him away, to free your hands from between your chests, and he has to dip his head to stifle another groan. It feels good to have you under him like this. Covered entirely in his bulk, his shadow.
His hand pulls away from your flesh, snaking between your bodies to catch your wrists in the palm of his hand. Only one swallows them up, and the easy way he subdued you—effortlessly—has him nearly coming undone in his trousers. Untouched.
“Fuck, want it bad, don't you?” he snarls, hips bucking into you. Chasing pleasure. He pulls your hands out, lifting to arm to trap yours in the shackle his fingers make high above your head, and—
It's devious, this.
Somewhere in the loosening agency of his self, his autonomy, he knows this is becoming dangerous. Something that ought to be stopped before he rips into you with a rabidness that promises nothing at all will remain intact when he's finished. When he's had his fill. He needs to clear his mind. To get away from the way you fit against him so perfectly. Tiny in his wicked embrace.
Like you were made to fit between his ribs. His teeth.
He gnashes them together, trying to stem the ache in his gums.
He wants to fuck you. Needs to—
But as ripe as you smell to him now—tender melon, warmed honeycomb—he knows that you're not yet ready to take him.
Ghost steps back, letting your feet drop to the soil below. With the sparse inch of space between your bodies, he breathes in the lingering scent of your breath—sharp, burning; imbued with a heady thrum of adrenaline electrifying your nerves—and finds the musk a near-perfect pantomime of ozone. The arid tang in the air just before the air. A lightning strike. It rolls over his tongue, tastes of wet pennies in the back of his throat. Heavy with anticipation.
Something he feels very keenly as well. An eagerness he hasn't met in decades. Absolutely famished for it, for this familiarity of want. Potent desire.
He mourns the loss of the way your ass fits in the cradle of his hand when he pulls it free, fingers trailing over the feverish skin of your hips, your belly, as he goes. He doesn't stop until he comes to rest on the button of your trousers, eyes flickering down to catch your gaze. Purposeful, now. Intent clear.
Nothing is stopping him from taking. Your protests are paper-thin, dissolving the moment it touches the dense blanket of humidity in the air, but he wants your submission. Wants to see your resolve break, crushed by your own hand.
The gossamer wings of a butterfly, crumpled up in your palm, and offered to him for the taking. How sweet—
You seem to realise his intentions when his thumb dips below the hem of your pants. Just a tease. Brushing against the soft skin he finds there with the curve of his nail.
Your glare is instant. The sharp tug of a drawstring pinching tight between your brow. Mesmerising as it closes over your lax expression. A fierce snap. He wants to pry it apart. Wedge himself between the seam. Create a gap wide enough for him to fit.
“I won't beg,” you grind out, acidulous. Firm.
He huffs, quietly amused by the fight still sparking in you despite the evidence of your arousal, your want of him, evident in the stain at the seam of your pants. His other hand rests on the trunk of the tree above your head, boxing you in when he leans closer. Taunting. “That so?”
You don't respond, but your glare sharpens, mouth tugging downward in a harsh frown. Displeasure sparks in the air. Cutting into him like fine glass shards. He lets it graze his naked flesh, the warning ghosting over him in needlepoint pinpricks. Entirely too captivated by you to notice the sting.
Your ire is a heady, tangible thing dripping down your brow, slashing over your cheeks. Anger, however misguided it might be, paints a pretty picture over your face. Darkens the inlets nestled in the corner of your eyes. Drenches the ravines, gorges in a startling chiaroscuro. Limns the alpines, the valleys, in a halo of golden starlight.
He wants to drink it down. Hold your fury in the palm of his hand—
Crush it between his fingers.
Because despite the dissent, your desire cuts through, and hews the air in a thick tapestry of want.
mutinous, teeth bared, but your eyes burn, rage against the prison walls, and scream, please—
His fingers dig into the bark above your head, catching flecks of sap between his nails. Knuckles turning white under the flaxen hair dusting over them, strained. The grip is unintentional. Unconscious. He keeps thinking about you beneath him. The heat of your thighs around his waist was a mere tease. A morsel when he wants a meal—
The pressure in his knuckles grounds him. Cuts through the phosphenes blanketing the edges of his vision, smothering the clarity, the cognisance, that lingers in the centre. Threadbare as it is.
There’s an ache in his jaw.
(the need to bite—)
He pulls it off, and shoves his hand tight between your thighs, cupping your cunt in his palm. Feeling the heat bleed through the gusset of your pants. The touch is harsh. Firm. He bullies his fingers into your flesh, letting out a mocking chuff when he feels the fabric dampen.
“Somethin’s’ tellin’ me otherwise.”
Your hand lashes out, grabbing the thick of his wrist. Holding firm. It should be a warning, but the obvious gap between your middle finger and thumb makes him groan instead.
“You're wrong.”
“Am I?”
You twist away from him when he leans down, chin ducking to your shoulder. Hiding. Denying him your mouth, your taste. This meagre measure of control you grapple for is easy to give. He presses his lips to the shell of your ear instead, letting you run. Flee. For now.
His voice is thick when he continues, husky. He pitches it low, lets it swirl into the seashell coil of your inner ear, earning him a shiver in response. Your nails biting into the skin of his wrist. Holding tight.
“‘m a lot of things, pet—” rucked gravel, sodden with his derision, spills into your ear. Your shudder makes him want to bite, to maim. “Wrong ain't usually one of ‘em. But you'll learn that soon enough.”
Your breath hitches. Expression morphing, shifting. Changing into something adorably beleaguered as he encircles you like a tiger, eyes drilling through the tussock, aimed directly at your head. With his body boxing you in, coiling over you like a hideous shadow, he has you trapped, caught. Little lamb writhing between the paw of a tiger.
You seem to be keenly aware of this. Your eyes are shrewd, searching, as you probe around for any escape route, but he's a bulwark around you. Inescapable.
Finding none, you suck in another breath, and slowly lift your chin, glancing up at him through your lashes. The look on your face is—
Enigmatic.
Something changes in the morphology of your mien. Fracturing. Cracking.
“Yeah?” You breathe, soft and goading. Your hips buck into his hand, rutting shallowly against the tops of his fingers. Unconscious. Like you just couldn't help it.
And he supposes you can't.
A fine sheen of sweat has been building since he took after you into the forest. Gathering around your temple, your hairline. The harsh reminder of your festering heat, once dammed by your raw disdain for him—hatred, he'd say, and doesn't the thought just make him want to laugh; you're all bark, no bite, and he knows he'll have fun breaking you in, breaking you apart—but flooded over by the primal drive to mate.
And he's perfect for you, isn't he?
Hideous bastard that he is. It's a sharp juxtaposition to your prettiness, your earthly beauty.
Under the spinel sky, you break. The hand on his wrist tightens, your hips flexing into his palm. Seeking friction. Needing pressure. Needing him. And pissed off about it. Delicious.
“Prove it,” you snap, irritation blanching the corners of your eyes arsenic white. Edging into a frenetic desperation hot enough to burn the threads of your resolve. But there's a gleam of reluctance pushing through the syrupy murk folding over you, heavy molasses. You want to give in, but there's something about him, his appetite, that makes you hold back. That makes you visibly sick at the sight of him—
Unfortunately for you, he has no such compunction to shelf his barbarity. To leash his desire, to muzzle the overwhelming urge to crush you under the weight of his accumulated need. It's decades of listless apathy. Divorced from anything resembling human emotion at the root. Carved out, scraped off bone. He was left to stagnate. A misfortunate creature submerged in a bog, dead but unable to rot.
The deluge of his savage, bestial hunger rages in his veins. It's corrosive, vile, and—
unrestrained.
Ravenously esurient. He wants to sink his teeth into you and never let go—
but first:
he needs to eat.
His meal is a feast, it turns out. Simon gorges himself until he's full. Promises that he'll stop as soon as he's satiated.
(but he's lying to himself, and to you, because he never is—
never will be.)
Tears pebble along your lash line as he feasts on your sopping cunt, licking at your fluttering rim, slurping up your slick. Your clit is pressed tight against the crooked arch of his nose, sliding and catching on the jagged ridge each time he moves his jaw to dig deeper inside of you as if he's trying to taste the seal of your womb. You pant, whine. The noise muffled half-heartedly behind your palm. Teeth sunk into your skin, lodged against your bone.
Angry rivulets rain down your cheeks, dangling like fine beads, gems, on your jaw. He wants to taste them next, as soon as he fills his gullet with the earthy tang you release.
Your tears remind of that pretty omega Johnny sent to him—a brat, he'd said; the best, Lt—and it churns in his stomach, dredging up something awful. Terrible. He wants to make you weep harder. Wants you sobbing, begging. His own little brat to take over the knee whenever he wants—
But that's where the uncanny resemblance ends.
You're not a brat. No. You're a headache. The kind that will have him written up, sat like a bad dog in his best suit, as they level him with charges, and orders, and the like. The sort of thing that even the old man wouldn't be able to string him out of—not that he would. Price is three days away from a much-deserved retirement to the mountains and sitting on his hands to keep from snatching up the pretty conservation officer who moons at him whenever he passes by.
He won't be much help to get Ghost out of trouble. That leaves only Gaz and Soap. And while he's sure they can swing it, he doesn't really want to be under their ahh, guess ye/ya owe us one, Lt/Riley.
So—
It stands to reason then that he should have you tamed before dawn. Shackled down, locked up tight. Only right considering he's the best in town to keep bears at bay. Do you really want to deal with a mama grizzly and her defenceless cubs? Or a starving male clumsily pawing his way out of hibernation?
Probably not.
So. So.
He pulls back, rests his chin on your thigh.
“Gonna be good for me, pet?” He asks, lowering his tone considerably until it catches on the gravel below.
He's not surprised when you hiss through a cloud of tears. “Go fuck yourself—”
Ghost tips his head, suckles your clit into his mouth. Tongue laving over your flesh. Blunt teeth pressing flat against the swollen bead, a tease. You tense, gasping. Hand pushing his head back, back—
“Don't, don't—” you're mewling, nails raking over his scalp. Hips bucking, pulling back. Struggling to get away. The bite marks along your thighs weep fresh blood in your struggle, filling his nose with the heavy scent of iron.
They serve as a harsh reminder of what he can do with these jagged teeth of his.
He chuckles, mouth still closed around your clit. The vibrations have you choking, spine curving into a beautiful arch.
Fingers digging into your hips, keeping you still. Trapping you. He's not quite done with your cunt, yet. And all this wriggling is something he can do without. With his hand pressed to your hips, he notches the other down your thigh. Tracing his index finger over your soft skin, dragging it close to your outer lips. Catching the tacky slick drying on your flesh with the tip.
Tiny fists rain down over his shoulders. Urging him forward, eager for more. Selfish, spoiled little thing.
What a monster he's made—
“Patience, pet,” he coos, mocking and mean. Likes the way you react to the patronisation in his tone. All taut shoulders, shaking fists. Bearing your teeth at the slight, the stinging barb. Shaking in an amalgamation of embarrassment and shame.
You seem to like it when he's a little awful to you. A little mocking. Cruel.
“Shut up—!” You hiss, lips curling as you glare down at him. “I'm not your pet—”
He ignores you. Bends down to sniff at your cunt instead, and finds his answer is the white hot desire he can taste in the back of his throat when he breathes you in.
His fingers pry apart your folds, and he greedily drinks in the sight of your drenched hole, clenching down on nothing. Poor you. His heart thunders in his chest, rages. He wants to sink inside of you—impossibly deep—until the beginning of him and the end of you ceases to exist. Rolled into a single being, atoms merged. Bodies fused. He wants to take everything from you. All of it. Eat it out of the cup of his hand like pomegranate seeds, let the skin get stuck in his teeth.
He wants to devour you whole.
(to eat—)
Settles, instead, for pawing at your cunt.
Pressing the width of it against your slit, feeling the heat of your core on the palm of his hand. Branding himself with the intensity of your desire. Another scar among many. An uncountable number of jagged asteroids cratering along his flesh, making a home out of a ghost. A shell.
Reinforced, too, by the absurdity of how terribly contrasted his flesh is to yours. Monstrous. His scarred hand rests over your pussy, encompassing it entirely with extra digits to spare. Folding each finger on top of the other to wedge between the basin of your thighs. And as his gaze comes to rest on the way he swallows you up, he is struck by the garishness of his hand—hideous scar tissue, burns—falling over your pretty cunt.
Sinful. Frankensteinian beast palming the sweet pussy of a pretty, human woman, and—
Fuck.
His cock twitches, spits out a thick glob of pre-cum.
Ghost has never wanted to ruin something as badly as he wants to ruin your cunt. You. Mess you up so badly that everyone will know you belong to him, and him alone. To brand you with the tattoo of his teeth on your mons; force a claiming bite on the pillowy skin above your clit. His ownership bracketed between your thighs, at the very apex of your hip bones. Buried into tissue right under the bulge of your womb. A fecund valley for him to lay waste; for you to grow beauty from the rot, the ash.
Cinder scraps over his nerves. Fells his resolve in a brutal sweep.
He comes undone at the seams, unravels.
Simon curls his fingers into a loose fist, passing the rugged peaks of his bone over your soft flesh. Gathering slick on thick, scarred knuckles. He holds it there, folds pried apart by his hand, content to luxuriate in the softness of your flesh, the scorching heat.
Possessively, he unhitches his thumb from the coil of his fist, and swipes it over your clit. More slick leaks out as you keen.
“Sweet omega like you should ‘ave been claimed by now,” he rumbles evenly despite the sour twist in his guts at the thought. “Might not ‘ave ended up ‘ere, would you ‘ave? Beggin’ the first alpha you see to fuck this sweet little cunt.”
“Begging?”
“Practically gaggin’ for it, weren't you?” And even though the words are his own, they sit in his gut like a stone. An angry knot tangled in his intestines, snaking its way up his gullet. Bitter. It's quelled by the sight of your bare neck. Ripe for his teeth. And his alone.
But even if you had a pretty ring made by another alpha, Simon knows that wouldn't have stopped him from taking you, anyway. Biting over the claim. Breaking it between his teeth. Precious, loving union shattered by his crooked greed. He'd have relished in it, too. Basked in the way you sobbed as he tore your alpha into pieces. An obstacle turned into a pretty effigy at his feet. Wicker pyre burning to keep him warm.
(he'd have caught dinner for you, too; hunted caribou, moose, and roasted it over the open flame. Fucked you under the blume of orange. Let the fire lick across your skin as he sunk in deep—)
He rocks back on his haunches. Mood labile, quicksilver, as his rut grows. Festers.
You deny it, breathless, as he slips the mountainous peak of his bent middle finger into your hole, stretching your rim around the scarred cartilage. You pulse around him like the fluttering wings of a hummingbird. Rapid, quick. Wanting. It draws him in. Makes him want to spit on your pretty pussy, and then break you apart on his cock—
“Such a needy cunt, eh? Starving for a good knot, ain't it?”
You hiss out your protests, but clench tight around his knuckle. He chuckles, and it's liquid. Wet rot. Lungs polluted, spitting nocuous, black smoke into the air.
“I'm not—”
“You are.”
He pulls back, pursing his mouth, and spreads your lips apart, opening you up wide and vulnerable to his prying eyes. Saliva puddles on his tongue. He gives you a moment to clue into what he's about to do, your fingers tightening, nails digging into his scalp as you do on a shallow gasp of disgust. Then, brutish, he leans forward, and spits. Lets the glob hit your clit, and he has to hold you still when you jerk, cringing away from him, snarling out your displeasure.
“You're disgusting—”
The protests are weak. Your knees tremble, giving away the growing slickness gathering on the insides of your thigh.
He hums, watches as it oozes down between your folds, over your fluttering hole, before it falls to the ground between your legs. He lets his hand fall back over your cunt, middle finger gathering his spit. Rubbing it around your pebbled clit. It's done detachedly, perfunctory. A means to an end with hardly much concern for your pleasure. Not yet, anyway.
You've given him nothing in return yet.
He intends to change that soon.
As you grapple with the harsh reality he presents to you—one of ownership, humiliation, and pleasure on his whim—he drags his finger down, sliding it between your soft lips until he reaches your hole once more. Petting around the drenched entrance slowly, softly, humming under his breath about how wet you are.
Your hips drop, greedily chasing after his finger. You won't ask—not yet—but he likes the way you rut against him: all hateful, spiteful. Like you can't decide on what you want more—to bash his head in, or keep it locked tight between your thighs. Sweet thing.
“Need me, don't you?” He sinks his finger in. Nearly whites out at the pressure, the tightness, he feels. Soft, wet. Squeezing him in a vice as you yowl, whimpering into the stretch like it matters. Like his thick, scarred finger is the most you'd ever taken before. Sweet girl. So naïve.
He drinks in the sight of your flesh forcibly being parted around his knuckle, matting the wisps of blond on his skin as it leaks down to his wrist, until that, too, is pushed up into you. His whole finger now engulfed in the wet heat of your body as you squirm around the stretch, pulsing around him like a heartbeat.
He groans when he tastes your discomfort on the back of his tongue.
“Don't worry, lovie. M’gonna take good care’a you.”
You watch him with slitted eyes as he pushes you down to the forest floor, glaring over your shoulder as he adjusts you the way he wants. Maneuvers you around like a little toy. Forearms braced against the trampled grass, knees sinking into soft moss. Thighs spread. Cunt bare, drenched. Ready to be claimed. Taken.
He drops to his knees, shuffling close from behind you. His hand drops to your lower back, pressing your torso down further into the ground below. His cock aches between his thighs. Heavy, fat. He reaches down with his other hand to where it droops, smearing pre-cum over his inner thigh. He catches it in his fist, flushed the colours of a fresh bruise—angry red, purple—and strokes along the sensitive skin of his shaft, dragging it up and over his engorged head. Pre-cum weeps from the tip, drools long strains down to the forest floor. Puddles thick between your knees.
A prelude, perhaps, for what's to come. When he has you tied like a bow around his knot, milking all the pent-up spend from his heavy, full balls.
It's been decades since he had this—
(“shame.”
he concurs.)
Simon pulls his cock up, taps it against your pebbled clit. Drinks in the sight of you keening, cunt gushing more slick out of your empty hole, dribbling down your thighs. Mingling with the mess he already started making.
It shocks him how good it feels just to tap his cockhead on your pretty pussy. To drag it through your slit, teasing it against your fluttering hole that drools copious slick over him.
He wants to make a mess of you. Fuck your pussy until you cum, until all you can feel is the split of him inside of you. Filling you. Ruining you.
Until all you can think about is the thick drag of him against your stuffed walls. Empty without him plugging you up. Desperate for his cock, his knot—hungry little slut just for him. All for him.
He presses the head of his cock against your rim, letting it catch. Holding it there. A tease. Just a little taste.
Likes when you whimper, head hanging between your shoulders, fingers curling into the moss below. You make such a pretty picture like this—the expanse of your back bare for his eyes to roam, locking on the dimples of your hips, the curve of your waist. The plump shape of your ass inviting him in—eager for a bite. Your flesh looks bare, lonely, without his mark. The contrast of his own inked palm—fingers webbed with faded lettering, some slogan he picked up in his youth. Hands etched in black. Lines bleeding, bulky. The unmistakable tremble of an incipient artist’s first brush of a needle on real skin. Jagged, garring. Ugly. He lets his hand rest against the small of your back, groaning at the way it looks.
Sinful.
You're made for soft silk and a fluffy bed. Head resting on a plush cushion instead of your arms, forehead braced over the uncomfortable squeal of your polyester windbreaker that he didn't even have the courtesy to let you take off. No. Just trousers. Panties. Pushed haphazardly down your legs, left in a pile by the spruce tree so he could throw your ankle over his broad shoulder, feasting on your cunt.
There's a spot of dirt on your asscheek. The curve of it is scraped from the bark, red and raw.
The glare you aim at him from over your shoulder is venomous. There's a smear of moss on your cheek.
You're made for epsom salt baths. Being tended to by a besotted alpha who treats you like fine china, only to be taken out on special occasions. Brushed, always, in a fine layer of dust from disuse. Sweet, tender lovemaking under the waning summer sky. Your alpha apologising for ruining you like this, for making you take the brunt of his rut. Poor thing. Gentle kisses, and hands clasped together.
He can see it so vividly in his eye. So viscerally that it almost feels like a crime when he glances down at his cock, the weeping, engorged head almost comically too big for you. The thick of him could easily swallow your cunt up if he flattened his length against you. Covering you wholly by his girth.
It's a thought that makes his hand tighten, and nearly chokes him on a moan.
Even his thighs bracketing the backs of yours is hideous to look at. Bigger, broader—there's a considerable gap on both sides of his legs that he thinks nearly his whole fist can fit there, notched against the outside of your thigh, covering the expanse of his own. Garish.
He can't wait to lay you down on your belly, lock his thigh tight on either side of your own and rut into you like that. Crushing you under his weight. Swallowing you whole. Until anyone misfortunate enough to wander by thinks he's fucking the cold ground.
His thumb strokes along your fevered skin, collecting the sheen of sweat building up on the pad. Rubbing it in. He feels it too. This unrelenting swelter. A cage, pushing down from all sides. Inescapable.
The only way to quench it is on you. In you.
“Ready for me, pretty girl?” The words are mangled in his throat, thick with want.
Your shoulders tremble. In worry, he thinks. Scents the air like a viper, letting your emotions curdle in the back of his throat. “Just get on with it—”
He meets you in the middle of that taunt, teeth against your throat.
Ghost pushes inside with a groan, eyes rolling back at the way you swallow him up. Stretching around the considerable girth, fluttering around him. Pulsing like a heartbeat.
It's heaven.
Nirvana nests between your thighs, bracketed by rings of blood. Red. Absolution imbued in tender flesh, parting perfectly around his cock in a loving embrace.
You haven't confirmed it for him, but the tightness of your cunt around his fingers, the heady scent of discomfort burning the back of his throat when he buried them inside of you, make him mutedly aware that you're inexperienced. A fact he pockets for later because if he thinks about being the first alpha, the first man, to ever claim you, take you, then he might lose his mind, he might fall down that yawning chasm that reeks of damnation, of brimstone and ash, and never recover—
So, he doesn't. Won't.
Can't.
His pace is slow as he feeds you the fat length of his cock, eyes drilling into the way you swallow him up. Rim stretching taut, flesh paling under the strain of taking him. With one hand anchored against your hip, holding you tight, and the other curled over your shoulder, fingertips resting on your collarbones, he slowly, slowly, sinks inside of you, bottoming out with a deep groan.
The outstroke drags with it an iron scent in the air. He huffs, nostrils flaring. Greedy for more. There's discomfort leaking from your pores. His girth is more than you can conceivably take, even with the preternatural help from your heat, leaking slick down your inner thighs in thick rivulets.
He holds himself there, breathing—heavy, tremulous—through his nose. His hands shake. The pressure, the pleasure, is indescribable. It coils in his guts, spumes liquid bliss in his veins. The way you feel pulsing sweetly around him is—
Equilibrium.
Every misfiring synapse inside himself is slowed. Imbued with a potent sense of ataraxia. His mind comes to a standstill. Thoughts looping over themselves, tangling into the gossamer threads of control floating in stasis. Unmoored. You unravel him.
It's further proof that you are his missing part. His ruts in the past have been calamitous. Snarls wrenched from the trenches of his chest; a gluttonous feast—a sacrifice to Hēdonē. Violent, vicious.
But this—
It's drinking ichor from the vein of Anteros.
There's a crack in the back of his head. The sound of everything, all of it—
Falling into place.
His hands tighten. Tighten some more. He holds you, sure and firm, keeping you nestled in the anchor of his embrace, unable to run, to flee. You're his. Settled. The caveat is ironclad, bound in permanence.
And Simon moans. Deep, and low. The noise jutters out of his chest, and seeps into the evening air. Fine mist, crystallising in front of him. Phosphenes of ice cemented his decision, gluing to his cheeks. The nape of his neck.
His ears burn.
“Fuckin' hell, sweet thing,” it's a guttural growl in the hollow of his throat. “Where ‘ave you been all my goddamn life?”
It's a nauseating confession, one scraped out from the vacancy between his ribs. It peppers the air in a soft, saccharine kiss. Makes you shiver beneath him, gasping in lungfuls of loam, dirt in your throat.
He grunts. Stills. He doesn't want that for you. Ever. Would rip off his own limbs before he ever let you feel the crushing weight of dirt congealing inside of your lungs.
The way he arches over you is damning. Nauseating. He curls his arm around your shoulder, your chest, traps a heaving breast in the palm of his hand, holds tight. The other falls from your hip, closes over your mons. Greedily feeling your slick, hot sex pulsing wildly around him when he passes over your clit, toying with your stretched, swollen rim. It's perfection, this.
He pulls you up, up, leaning back on his haunches until you're balanced on your knees, nearly sat on his lap. Taking him deeper than before. He drops his head back with another moan when he feels your slick gather, dripping down to coat his balls.
Everything about you is just—
Perfection. Absolution.
Your hands fly up, curling over his forearm, mewling when he pinches your nipples between his middle and ring finger.
“C’mon,” he rasps, leaning forward to press his face into your nape. You smell sweet. “Play with ‘em for me, pet.”
Nails bite into his skin. You whimper. Squirming around on his lap. But you do as you're told. Slowly, slowly, reaching up. Touching yourself the way you like. Fingers ghosting over your flesh, brushing across your nipples. Pulling, petting, the way you like. He hooks his chin over your shoulder, watches. Devours. Commits each movement to memory. Every sound, every breath. Everything.
He keeps a slow, languid pace like this. Content to just feel you pulsing around him, listening to the slick, wet squelch of him filling you up. Over and over again. A lazy rut.
It's unexpected, he knows. You've been bracing yourself this whole time, fingers digging into the podsol, spine tightening up. Waiting for the savagery to befall you.
When it doesn't come, he feels your quiet acquiescence come in a soft breath. In the way you slowly drop down to meet the deep rut of his hips. Taking your pleasure, pulling him in deeper. There's an edge to your voice, one still dipped in threads of discomfort, a waning pain that rings out, shrill, in the satin spill of moonlight over the indigo forest.
It's good like this. Tender. Not something he'd have ever imagined for himself, and the reality of it is dizzying.
Reedy, he groans. Nuzzles his misshapen nose into your scent gland. His gums pulse, ache—
But he ignores it. Swallows it down.
He's not sure what compels him to do so. Spellbound, maybe, by this unnatural softness that spools silken threads between you. Sutured in tenderness—so unbefitting of the man he is. The monster—
His hips stutter. Jerk.
“Simon—!”
You whine into it, arching back. Sweat gathers, drips down your spine, smears into his chest, belly. Matts the thatch of hair running in sparse, patchy clusters down the thickness of his midsection. A bountiful spring fattened him up. Made him soft and pillowy over his abdomen. Something you can't seem to get enough of—pressing the flat of your back against him, leaning into it. Groaning when his arm shifts, boxing you in. Crushing you to him.
Wily little kitten, purring so sweetly in his lap.
He draws lazy circles over your clit, grunting with each clench of your cunt. You're soft in his arms. Malleable. He slides his hand up from beneath your breasts, catches your jaw in his palm. Fingers spanning from cheekbone to temple and, oh—
Doesn't that just make him preen.
He drags your chin to the side, catching your mouth in a sickening kiss. All tongue, teeth. He wants to taste, to devour, every part of you. Bones and all.
It's a fight, though. You tense in his grasp, lidded eyes snapping open, wide and around. Cheeks bulging between his fingers when you twist, trying to pull away.
“Don't—I don't want to—” he bites the protests from lips. Messy, sloppy. He flicks his tongue over yours, wrapping it around you like a satiated snake burrowing in after a heavy meal. “Don't—f–fuck—”
It earns him a nip. Teeth digging into his bottom lip. Drawing blood.
He huffs into the seam of your mouth. Only fair, he supposes, and then pulls you down—hard, fast—onto his cock. The air is punched out of your lungs, flooded into his esophagus.
“Be a good girl for me,” he warns, bucking into you. It's harder this time, deeper. Tempo increasing. Growing. He feels himself thicken. Knot fattening up. Each piston of his hips seems to knock something inside of his head loose. Common sense, maybe—
The fraying knot of his self-control winding tight. Pulling taut.
He huffs again, feeling himself slip. Lost in the sensation dripping down his spine, the unified pleasure blooming in the pit of his stomach.
The air plumes with the thickening tang of your arousal—all sweet, spice. You can take it, now, he knows, and tries not to growl when you hiccup his name wetly into the air.
The muscles in his thighs bunch tight. Corded and powerful. He arches up, up, forcing his cock deep inside your cunt, splitting you apart. Rutting desperately, edging into something animalistic.
It runs a knife along the thin skin of his hindbrain. Come out, come out, come play—
He moves you again, pulling his hand away from your jaw and pushing you back down the forest floor. He stays glued to your back. Tucks his arm under your chin, and smothers you under his bulk, groaning when your thighs give out, sliding on the sweat-slicked moss below.
“Simon, ah—” your voice tapers off into a breathless cry when he pulls his hand free from beneath you, wrapping it around to join the other. Holding on, clinging to you. Keeping you locked tight against him, under him. You can't move at all like this—
The swell of his knot bumps against your stretched rim. He presses the brunt of his weight into each thrust now, spurned on by the needy way you yowl into his forearm, drooling all over his skin. Begging for it.
“Please, please, please—”
Your body is jostled forward with each harsh buck of his hips as he gives you everything he has, feeding his cock into your sopping cunt over and over again. Eager now to fill you up, to flood you with his cum. Make you swell with it. Overstuffed.
Perfect little omega, you rut back into him with each thrust, taking his thick cock to the root. Mewling sweetly when his knot begins to catch. Too much, he thinks. It might just wreck you for good—
pomegranate seeds splitting over your teeth, blood red juice leaking from the tear. spilling into your mouth. just a drop. just a drop, and Persephone is all his
—Perfect.
He teeters on the edge of ferality and control. Spinning, spiralling. Loosefooted on the wobbling chossy. Coming undone in a magmatic end—wicked heat, ashes, brimstone; he catches fire, and smoulders you under his heat. Letting the flames lick across your skin until you whine his name, desperate and needy, in the back of your throat. The thrill a bludgeon against his skull, spilling pleasure, bliss, in the broken hole you wrought.
You tighten like a vice around him—tight, tight—and he pistons into you, burrowing deep. Deeper still. Until you thrash around beneath him, soundlessly screaming his name into the dark forest. Begging for mercy, mercy, please—
He won't. Can't.
He can't get enough of the way you feel wrapped around him like this. Silken, whitehot. Tight. Tight—
It squeezes the air from his lungs. Static in his head—
And then you let go. Pulsing, throbbing around him. Pulling him in deeper, blanketing his mind in white noise. In nothing but magmatic pleasure.
“Fuck—!” He snarls, almost angry. Vicious. Chasing after his end in the aftermath of yours. Instincts are at war within him, banging against his skull. Demanding recompense. Paid it's pound of flesh.
It's what he's promised. What it's owed.
(and he always keeps his promises, doesn't he?)
Most describe their ruts as mindless, driven by instinct. No control. But Ghost has never felt more present, more alive, than when he sinks his teeth deep into your nape, nearly choking, drowning, on your blood.
For the first time in decades, he feels the crater inside himself, suffused with spare, broken parts, seal when you yield with a mangled yowl of his name, raw and fractured as it splits between your teeth. Pretty pussy swallowing up his knot when he bullies it in deep, locking you together.
pretty little lamb—
a perfect fit between his teeth.
His rut is a voracious thing.
Ghost has you on your back for the second and third round, heels resting on his shoulders as he bucks into you. Makes you stare at him—don’t look away from me, pet—as he commandeers your body with an ease that seems to break apart all demurrals as they form, rendering you sweet, malleable, beneath him to do with as he pleases.
And you are, aren't you?
So fuckin’ sweet.
(“gonna give me a cavity,” he rasps, thick with pleasure, into your ear. he has you on your belly now. holds you down with his weight, crushes your chest against the soft moss below, thighs squeezed tight between his own. you can barely make a sound with his forearm digging into the dirt right above your crown, swallowing you whole under his bulk.
(owns you like, he finds. no one would be able to see you beneath him if they wandered by. encompassed wholly by every iota he has to give—
he cums like that. nose buried in your crown, moaning low, scorched, in the back of his throat as you twitch beneath him, unable to move at all—)
It's early in the morning when he finally finishes, when his rut begins to slowly recede, and a fresh bloom of clarity yawns over his periphery. Moonrise peppers soft kisses over his aching shoulders as he glances at you curled up against his side, sleeping soundly. Exhausted by the hours and hours of mating, fucking. Taking him, his knot, drinking down everything he has to offer.
The sight that greets him is gnarled fingers wrapping around his rotting heart, affection peeking out between the brackets of his ribs. His appetite for you is dizzying. Unquenchable. He wonders if he'll ever be able to look at you without wanting to crawl inside your body. To reshape your tender flesh around his bulk until it is indiscernible from himself.
This want is agony. It's dread, desire. Greed.
His shoulders bite back in protest when he reaches up to drag his dirt-crusted nails through the prickly hair on his scalp. As dawn slowly unfurls across the midnight blue aether, he knows he'll have to leave soon. Can already feel the creeping heat gnawing in the pit of his belly. His rut starting anew. The scant hours he has of mental clarity, moments meant to eat, to feed, and regain strength for the next marathon of fucking, are needed to feel out his next move.
He glances at you again, and feels the same covetous tug in his chest as he did before, when he was thickly entrenched in the urge to mate. But as the burnt orange of the sun smears hazy fingerprints across the moulted sky, he sees you in a new, cleaner light. You're young. Much younger than he is.
It's something he ought to worry about. To feel some shred of shame, of despondency over shackling you to himself—a defective alpha with more scars than morality—when you're in the burgeoning bloom of your freshly untethered youth. All jejune beauty outclasses nature itself. Snow melts on the alpines, trickling down to feed the valley below. Life itself—
But you are his.
The ugly rings around your throat—mangled tissue swelling in the morning dawn, caked in a thick river of blood—all signify that you belong to him. And while it's a little extreme as far as claiming bites go—one would suffice, but he buried his teeth in you over and over again, biting down on both sides of your neck, your jugular, your nape; inner thighs, mons, wrists—it’s proof enough that you are meant for him. Made for him.
His pretty omega.
The rest doesn't matter. He ought to feel shame, but instead he luxuriates in it. Stares down at you with a needy sort of possession spuming in the putrid remains of his chest, mapping out the marks he put on you. And the ones he'll add to later, not stopping until covered in the perfect impression of his crooked teeth. Tattoos of his ownership all over your body.
Mutual, of course. There's a scant patch of skin, restive and empty, above his heart, save for a fine, jagged line from a serrated dagger. He'll have you bite down on the flesh until your teeth meet inside his muscle. Scarring down to the bone. He'll go, then, to the man who inks him up whenever he has the whim to desecrate scar tissue, and have him etch midnight black against fine silver. Permanent, forever. Always.
And anyone who kicks up a fuss—stupid as they might be—he’ll sort them out. Prove to them that you are meant to be his.
(unshakeable:
his spend leaks out of you, drying, tacky and thick, on your thighs. under the sleepy citrine of the dawning sun, it's tinged pink, and looks just like pomegranate juice.)
Ghost rolls his shoulder, and reaches for his discarded trousers. He's covered in a thick layer of dirt, and reeks like soil. But the thought of being buried alive is miniscule compared to the want of being buried inside you again. The urge. Insatiable. He groans with it, cock throbbing already.
He leaves you naked. No point in dressing when he plans on going home and sinking back inside of you before midday, anyway. An unneeded obstacle, really—
The clearing is close to his truck, and he sets a leisurely pace, yawning into the dawn, as he gathers you into his arms. Carrying you to it as you drool on his chest, brows pinched at the soft jostle of him trudging through the thicket until he reaches it.
He's not in a rut when he stretches you out in the back seat, spreading your sticky thighs around his hips, sinking inside, bottoming out just as you come to, waking up with a gasp.
The intense fucking from before lingers in the air. You're soft, molasses; arching into his chest, whimpering out the name he hissed into your nape only hours ago, folding into him with a somnolent submission. It won't last, of course—
You're a vicious little thing, and his back and chest twinge with the rivers you carved into his flesh when he didn't move the way you liked. Wolfish, aren't you? Spitfire hiding under the soft pelt of a slain lamb. He wants to devour you, bones and all.
He takes his fill of your malleable concession, rutting into you with a sluggish ease. Mapping out the starlight sparking in the depths of your glossy eyes. Magnetic. It pulls him deeper. Unravels him at the seams.
His hand spans the expanse of your jaw from ear to ear. He holds you like this, thumb buried in the tender embrace of your soft tongue, and begins to understand the reason behind Johnny's niche appetite when you toy with his flesh, coquettish and sweet, suckling him in—pretty seductress—and then mewl when he pushes in too deeply, bringing crystalline gems to corners of your eyes.
Angelic innocence. The type that demands he prostrates himself at your altar, let his bones be picked clean when you so wish it. And he'll give it to you—body, blood, tissue; all of it. The entirety of him, however broken, shattered the fragments might be.
He promises it all to you without a word, drilling holes in the gaps of your eyes, chasms wide enough for him to fit. When he cums, it's to a songbirds sonata. Your moans are a whisper, your pleasure swallowed down as it ghosts over his lips, clenching around him like a vice. Pretty bow. He doesn't hold back—groans, baritone; woodsmoke, into the gathering symphony, filling you to the brim. Thick, copious. He wants it to stick. To root.
When the blood sputters back to his head, he gathers you in his arms once more. Keeps you seated on his lap—shush, pet; s’alright, jus’ close your eyes an’ I'll ‘ave us home in a bit—as he starts the old pickup, and puts it into drive. One hand on the wheel, knuckles blanching white in the glimmering sunrise; sparse forests of muted blond catching, limned in the coruscating light. The other is placed on the small of your back, holding your belly to his.
Quietly, your body eases. Melts. You press your face into his chest, fingers curling into the fabric, and nuzzle into the heady scent of his sweat, his musk, still clinging to his shirt. Signing, soft and twee, in the cup of his embrace as you slip back to sleep.
He drives home like this. Mind a quiet place for once. Silent in its contentment, it's comfort. There's an itinerary still left to do, but he pushes it back for now, gaze roaming the dense green of the forest bracketing the road.
You'll like it, he knows. There's a fen on the outskirts of his territory, a little pond where wild rabbits have been known to make burrows. Deers, elk. Bears. They all come and go. You'll amuse yourself in the untamed wilderness of his abode, drawing delineations of your own as you carve out places in his home just for you.
And as he makes the turn to his hidden driveway, this buried sanctuary, he can't help but glance down at your crown, and think—
Persephone, finally home.
He finds your identification in your rucksack, nestled underneath the contraband you smuggled from the park—mushrooms, berries, bark, feathers—and sears your name to memory. Every part of you will be unravelled in the coming days, pulled from the depths of your being until it's all ingrained in his head. A gaping chasm chiselled into bone just for you. All for you.
Your address is a rental. He'll have to call them later today to cut your lease. Your job, too. They'll need to be notified on both your off time for his rut (and your burgeoning heat), and to update your contact information.
But that's later. Now, he just wants to get home. Sink down into his bed with you beneath him, and fuck you until sundown all over again. Stain the house with the scent of you. With the potent tang of your coupling.
It's yours too, after all. Should smell just like you.
And when you wake up later to him fucking his tongue into your drenched hole, fingers toying with your pebbled clit, Johnny will be busy packing the rest of your things into the pack of his pickup truck. The majority of it is already stacked on the porch, waiting for you to rearrange it all in your new house. Lease cut. His name added to your contacts as spouse, husband. Address updated. Marriage certificate laying on the table, only one line unsigned. Waiting for you.
Maybe it's too fast. You'll certainly protest like it is, bearing your teeth and hissing at him from across the room about too much, too fast, slow down, you don't even know his last name—
(“Riley,” he grouses, arms folded over his broad chest. Eyes burning in the cresting twilight. “S’your last name now as well, pet.”)
Fast—sure. He might think so too for a brief moment when he as you purring against his chest, submissive and docile after he fucked the fight right out of you, bullied you into agreeing to everything—it's for the best, after all. No one could ever protect you like he can.
Made for each other. Reinforced when he presses your fingers to the soft spot where his last rib once hung—
(“stole it,” he murmurs into the seam of your lips. “right from under my nose. only fair that i get to steal somethin’ right back, ain't it?”
the look on your face is rapturous when you press your hand to your side, eyes widening when you feel the extra rung—)
He's had decades of waiting. Waiting. And now that he's found you—
He's never letting go.
You're it, he knows. Feels the certainty in that statement simmering in his hindbrain, in his essence. He'll have you—now, forever. Non-negotiable. Where you go, he will follow.
(after all, there's something about three-headed dogs and their bones—)
18+ | INCEST. red string of fate/soulmates. slight body horror. graphic descriptions of weird, mesodinium chamaeleon-esque biology to support this au. manipulation. unreliable narrator. age gap. religious imagery. noncon.
His red string is a hideous thing:
a rotting cord: the core buried deep in his skin, roots stretching, seeking life in infecund soil; the maw still stubbornly suckling from a capped umbilicus. the end of it, unattached and dangling, slowly succumbing to gangrene and decay.
—unattached because his other half, his soulmate, died when he was eighteen, leaving him with nothing but the putrid, necrotised reminder of what could have been. an object that once symbolised forever, his intended (mate, fated one, the thing that once carried his missing rib, his other half), reduced to a rotting, blackened thread that trails behind him like the long rope of a noose fastened around his neck. a thing that makes most people wretch from the stench first before they see the oozing, greasy corpse of fate (of love) being desecrated, in perpetuity, when it's continuously crushed between the rubber of his heel, and the dirty, cracked concrete below.
It's a medical anomaly since most strings either slough off after rotting away when the other half dies, leaving nothing behind but a faint scar to prove its existence (or, in a more humane procedure to save someone from undergoing a secondary grief as they're forced to see it turn from life-filled red to blue, then black; watch it bloat and crack and ooze, leaking with putrid leachates before it eventually falls off on its own, is to surgically sever the tie). But his, for some reason, always comes back. Regrows into rot, like an animal bred for death. For consumption. A thing marked—wretched and cursed.
Root rot, they call it. Likely caused by an infection deep in the cotyledon of his persistent string—one that is stuck in a continuous loop (a curse) of self-propagation. basal keikis. His red string of fate is a mercurial thing that pups itself when the new sprout succumbs to an inevitable death. Over and over and over again:
and oh, you poor thing, they say. left to suffer in the aftermath of a love snuffed out prematurely; a cyclical grief that never stops, never heals. just keeps growing, dying. growing again—
(but he knows better.)
—i. 4:16
It doesn't bother him much—soulmates, the string, the loss of his own—since he has you, after all—
(a home made of flesh and blood; a place for him to return to when he's done being the other. the phantom. the Ghost. Ghost, to everyone except Price. less a dog of the military, and more a half-kept secret; a dead-eyed beast reeking of rot. emanating wrongness and ruin from his gnarled, scarred pores. a walking biohazard that comes to rest in soft skin and small bones; little chirps in his ear (where have you been? and i missed you and i wish you could just stay home instead and—with a pout, voice little bruised—why do you keep leaving me?) that he replays on repeat when he's gone, a trilling coo just for him. just for him—
where safety and comfort—or the closest approximation to either that he's ever found outside of the cold composure of a weathered, obedient knife in the thick of his palm, a rifle over his shoulder: safety in brute force, in dependable bones; thickened meat, grizzle; an uncapped muzzle—come naturally. instinctually.
his own cocoon. a place where he rests: a slow metamorphosis from the other to the man. maskless. laid bare. the only thing keeping him from reaching for the cold comfort of a blade is the way your hands wrap around the thick of his wrist when you drag him along, small snips of words diluted in sunlight and warm breath. your world without him being filled in slowly; reshaped under his heel.)
—and that is what he tells you when you ask him about it, about his string. Words soft in the gloam, a mere whisper—much they usually are after he comes back—as if you're speaking to a wild animal and not a man, afraid to scare him off even though you have to know by now that you'll never get rid of him.
Can't get rid of him.
“Jus’ need you, birdie.”
but doesn't it bother you? is threaded between the screams of cicadas as the sun dips in the horizon, painting their garden, the one he built for you with his bare hands, in a sea of warm, gauzy ochre. Shadows violet touched. The air humid, skin-warm, and reeking of sun-scorched grass, loam; earthy. Herbaceous.
It's been unusually warm this summer—almost unbearably so—and the shade of twilight does little to abate the thick humidity that clings to everything like a second skin, making each breath feel wet. As if he was drowning.
It's uncomfortable. Nothing but hot days and sticky nights. A constant, steady percolation of sweat gluing to every inch of his skin; the air warm enough to make him nauseous. But coming out to the garden every evening when he's home has morphed into a routine. A thing they share that always starts with a look, one full of intent. There's never a question in your gaze, just a quiet, simmering agitation—a restlessness that grows as soon as the shadows darken, and the sun sinks low on the horizon. An itch only he can soothe with nothing but his presence in your garden.
When it reaches a fever pitch and you can't bear to be stuck inside any longer, your fingers will curl over his skin before tucking into the inside of his forearm, his wrist. You'll tug on him—and sometimes he'll go instantly. Melt the hard, unyielding metal of his body into something pliant. Something malleable enough for you to drag along as you please. Other times, he'll firm his feet. Give you nothing—not even an inch—because it's just what older (decades older) brothers do, isn't it? Taunt their younger sisters with a hint of meanness that edges closely to malice. Anchored in derision, in a sadistic sense of amusement that runs through him like a low grade fever, as you pull on him and pout. Keeps the game going until you end up popping his name out on a whine that makes something inside him shift—something unnamed, unknown: a thing that belongs to the other—and he's forced to relent, to give in, before it shatters.
In the end, though, it's always the same:
Tucked into a hidden corner of the garden, buffeted by the thick scent of green.
(and he pretends that smears of your fingerprints on his bare skin doesn't feel like a brand, a hot iron—)
And now, those same green-tipped fingers tugged and pulled, that plucked tomatoes from the vine for him only hours ago in the dizzying heat of the sun are absently rubbing at your wrist where nothing grows.
(a blessing; a curse—)
He shrugs, and it's a careless thing despite the weight of his words when they slip out, rustling the leaves of the ficus that reaches towards the heavens between them. “Don't need anyone else.”
“It's not the same, though, is it?”
He knows what you mean even if you can't seem to bring yourself to utter the words aloud, to sound them out.
You're not my soulmate; soulmates are lovers, and we can never be that.
“I ‘ave you,” he says again, and reaches over to snatch a fat, ripe tomato from your basket. Pops it in his maw as you sputter that was for dinner, Simon! “An’ that's all tha’ matters.”
And it is—
Despite the jokes and jabs when he's the other about the idea of you, this mysterious entity he shapes his other world around (all whispered behind hands and tucked into alcoves because no one has the balls to say anything to his face with his string rotting under his boot the way it is), it's incongruent to reality:
in thoughts of others, you are his woebegotten mistress trying to live up to a corpse; he touches you with fingers stained with adipocere, smearing the untouchable death of another person over your still-living skin.
but reality is apodictic. the bonds they share, the woven walls of affection, are entirely platonic. unblemished, untainted, by the notion of the string.
He isn't your soulmate. You aren't his.
This is incontrovertible, but it doesn't matter.
Soulmates can be platonic, too.
He's heard the spiels. The lectures. Read the memos and the pamphlets from the group that started petitioning for a restructuring of laws and legislature to legally, and definitively, separate the State from the String; to allow bonds and ties to be inclusive to other forms of affection and love beyond connected strings.
your soulmate doesn't have to be the person at the other end of your string.
Ever since the moment he saw you, he knew you were his.
and you was just a little thing, a baby bird; someone—the only one—he'd easily (and decisively) rent the world in half for. render it all to ash and ruin; sodder a safe haven out of the broken bones and charred skin and flayed limbs he'd litter the ground with if anyone got too close.
a moulded sanctuary. a untouched baptism in the shape of little hands on his scarred cheeks; milk-touched breath ghosting so sweetly over the crooked arch of his nose as you stumbled into him, babbling incomprehensible nothings as his brother cooed and his wife watched, hawklike, as the little thing they promised to care for after the disappearance of their parents, tripped into his arms, smearing messy kisses, spit-slick absolutions, over his jaw and chin. the garble of words retextualizing in growth, becoming the approximation of his name that become clearer each time he came back from his missions until there was a sanctity nestled into each Simon's and welcome home's. when goin' back became goin' 'ome.
it was always only (and ever) a fondness, a love. familial and perfectly untainted. innocent—or the closest he'd get to feeling clean, unpolluted, as he'd ever come.
Desire never factored into the equation. Want, lust; it was all neatly tucked into the closet of the room in which feelings for you were housed.
Platonic. A home. That's all you'll ever be to him—
(of course, of course—)
“Oh,” you say, frowning at him from over the table as night devours the sky. Bathed in a soft, warm gold from the fairylights you had him string around the garden when you were eleven, and oh, you say again, quieter this time. Oh—
He feels his age, suddenly, in the ache of his bones. In the distant memory of a child he barely knew, but would devastate the world for all the same, stumbling towards him when he's come home from training, from missions, babbling out some amalgamation of his name that got clearer with each stretch of time between the last visit, and then now—
The pout of a bratty teenager dissolving into the curved lines of an adult's frown as you stare at him from across the wrought iron table. Older. Less delicate. Fragile. The same eyes, the same look, but plucked out of the head of the child he adored and shoved into the body of a woman he doesn't know.
(College, he remembers that. Remembers Tommy's phone call. The texts. Dunno what m’gonna do, Si, m’not ready to watch her grow up. The fear—what if she doesn't come back? But you did.
Out-competed in every single bid you placed for a house. Flats suddenly unavailable hours before you were set to sign a lease. Jobs drying up. No one calling you back—
except a little company down the street from your childhood home, and, hell, should jus’ stay ‘ere, he'd said, lounging on the couch during his perennial return home, flipping through a book as he watched you fret over it all, worried, and really? you wouldn't mind if I stayed home until I found something else?
The no was unequivocal.
You came home. Tommy was happy.
And he—
Well. He got into real estate.)
But there's still that child in you, he knows. Your cheek dents when you sink your teeth into the soft, inner tissue—a habit that hasn't changed since you were six—and just like then, he has to fight the urge to pinch your skin because somewhere deep down, he knows if he touched you, it would hurt.
(knows if he started, he'd never stop—)
And then comes the low pitch of your voice as you say: i just want you to be happy, Simon.
It's such a strange thing to say to a man like him—one who lives half of his life in a mask, making quiet, drawling jabs at everyone around him; a steady, easy distance where he doesn't think about the girl he has waiting for him, the man, late at night when he's the other, half a world away from you, scrubbing the blood from his knife while you sleep.
Shapes him into a respectable military mutt called to heel when he's not at home, not with you. The Ghost is something of a joke between them—is that really what they call you?—and not a spectre, a wraith, that has killed more people than you've ever met in your entire life—
is actively thinking about it, even now, as you sit, pretty as a sunrise, before him, whispering a prayer only the ficus can hear. i just want you to be happy.
(happy—
as if doesn't keep all of his happiness—or some approximation of it—sitting there, his own little sun, right across from him.)
“makes you think m’not?”
You're still rubbing your wrist, nails curled down. Scratching at your skin. Irritating flesh. He can't seem to peel his eyes away from it, even when you shrug. When you say, quiet and unsure, I don't know—you just seem different.
(he knows why. knows he brought too much of the other home tonight. can smell that man—unwashed and rotting—amid the ferns, the lush bath of sweet, earthy green. tangled up in gunshots and hasty burials, the man had no choice but to drag the corpse back with him—)
“What ‘bout you?” He grunts, if only to distract himself. “Anyone I gotta take care’a for you, huh?” Anyone piss you off?
The tension breaks. Your too-adult, too-knowing frown dissolves into ash as you laugh, even though he's only half-joking. And maybe a little less than that—a promise only the ferns can hear. That the oak can remember.
No is a breathless whisper, one caught on the tail end of a giggle. “I don't want you to have to hurt anyone for me.”
“I will,” he says, and he's not joking. Not anymore. “Anyone messes with you, come tell an’—”
“—and you'll take care of them?”
“‘course.”
You're trying to be sly when you roll your eyes at his antics, and for a moment, he wonders what you'd say if he ever told you he already has. Already hurt for you. Already killed for you—
(you, seven, eyes filled with tears as you clutched his jacket and him why you don't have a mom, a dad. did you do something bad to make them go away? if he stays, you won't be bad anymore. you won't, so please, please stay;
him, twenty-five, with more blood on his hands than he could ever dream of scrubbing off, had said—)
it doesn't matter. nothing changes. he curls his fingers into a fist, a tight ball. bottles up all the things he wants to say in his palm, holding tight, and instead says:
“What are big brothers for?”
(brother—
is murmured into the pale spill of moonlight. —brother, and not soulmate.)
It doesn't matter, though—
soulmates, the string, the loss of his own
—because as long as he has you, has this garden, everything else is secondary. Peripheral.
Or it was:
was a safe, uncontaminated space free of pollution, of madness—
(i missed you, you whisper into the thick swath of violet blanketing around them, and you're somehow softer and prettier when all you have to illuminate you is the gauzy, warm glow of old fairy lights and the pale spill of moonlight across the garden. ethereal, almost. hallucinatory. like he made you up inside his head. a product of madness; a symptom of hypoxia.
sometimes he wonders if he really did dream you up. if his subconscious—or what was left of it—scraped together all the good lingering inside of him until it was a pile of claylike residuum on the dirty floor that he sculpted into the shape of you. his own Galatea. here to haunt him—
you offer him a smile, soft and sweet. i kept counting down the days until you came home is whispered out like a secret.
and he reaches for you—a bad idea, he knows: his atoms are needy, unstable; they have this awful habit of clinging to things and refusing to let go. fusing to anything misfortune enough to end up in his grasp.
but he's greedy.
greedy—
and more than a little selfish.
but beneath the veneer of hunger, the eagerness to quell his insatiable appetite, is desperation. he's been carrying around a corpse for the better part of a week, and seeing things that aren't real—not anymore. he needs to know—needs to convince himself—that you're real, whole, and not one of the figures cut out from his childhood nightmares and pasted into the corners during daylight.
touching you is like sliding his fingers across the milky sap of a poisonous plant—a feeling that will linger like an incessant itch beneath his skin hours after you're gone—but he does it anyway. takes in your shape, the softness of your skin. the hard press of bones buried in muscle. you're all soft skin, soft peach fuzz—all flushed with life and warm. warm, and—
wet.
you wince when his thumb touches a faint, sticky line curling over your wrist. a small scratch, he realises. from earlier, maybe, when you kept itching at your arm, oblivious to the blood beading up, congealing beneath your nails.
instinct drives him, makes him hum low in his throat when you wince again, and try to pull away. stay still, is a rumble. lemme see. but it's his training that has him checking for other injuries, following the path back to the sticky, warm source. making sure it isn't catastrophic, isn't a bullet to a temple, striking across skin like a meteor—
it's minor. cat-scratches. your skin is fever-warm, the wounds a little swollen. but you're fine. you'll be fine; it's just irritated skin. you must have annoyed the milkweeds again, or touched a plant that wasn't meant to be touched, and he opens his mouth to tell you this, mocking words nestled in the crooked curve of his teeth, but he stops short. thumb pausing, digging into something that isn't supposed to be there—
—and then he feels that faint bump on your wrist.
It's the emergence of a single thread cracking through skin and bone, a little seedling desperately stretching towards its sun, its other half
Reaching out for someone who isn't him. Who will never, who could never, be him—
You’re a late bloomer, it seems.
(something Tommy calls you with a soft nudge of his elbow against your arm when he hears about it. needling joke, full of fond, brotherly humour—
and it is just that.
a joke.
their green-thumbed little sister—the same one with a garden that never seems to wilt or slumber, always a thick viridian that you can smell before you see, much like you (an earthy, herbaceous scent lingers around you, leaking out like a dense miasma of damp soil and sun-soaked plants)—a late bloomer, of all things.)
But it isn't unheard of. Or even at all that rare, really.
For some, the thread is already sticking out when they're born: a little, red thread poking through the skin of their wrist, a match made in the womb, dangling like their severed umbilical cord; and for others, they don't feel that itch, that prickling pain of something outgrowing the scant space where tendon meets bone, being forced to split through skin and tissue, until they're older.
You are not an exception to any universally established rule, but statistically, if someone hasn't grown a thread by the time they're twenty, it's unlikely to happen at all.
He thought he was safe when you turned eighteen, turned twenty. Grew comfortable when the years kept passing after that and nothing came of it because no string, no other half—an idea that crushed you, he knows; but it didn't matter because you have him. Tommy. His wife. The ones who raised you from infancy. Platonic bonds blooming, full of life and vibrant, enough to slake the ache of a missing soulmate. Something he thought was enough—
Until he's watching silently as you marvel over it, lost in the burgeoning wonderment of who it could be. What they might look like, when you’ll meet them, and oh, if only it were sooner—
Your string is a pretty, shiny pink in its incipient germination; steadily pulsing with life as it cranes high into the air, seeking the other thread to link itself to. Seeking that burgeoning fantasy that he can see spinning in the back of your head. Forging a life without him because what is platonicity, familial affection, in comparison to that promised wholeness.
It's not as if he hasn't imagined that you would eventually move on. Want things for herself that he couldn't, and wouldn't, be able to give you. Braced for that day when you would come home from high school, from college, from work, from trips with your friends to places he could only follow in secrecy, and declare that you found someone you loved. Would move on from the house tragedy built, one brimming with ghosts, and become an occasional guest to a love, a comfort, that once was.
But that was without the string.
And now—
Well.
The apex of it all is simple:
He thought he was safe.a folly he recognises in the paradigm that follows in pursuit of that little bump. the fissure growing, rotting, as reality around him is prodded at, and bends. proves to be more malleable, more penetrable, than he thought.
on the pristine walls of his undiluted sanctuary, a crack appears.
“You okay?” Tommy asks through a slow inhale of smoke.
He can feel the shift of his gaze; feel the burn on the side of his face as Tommy watches him from across the kitchen table. It's the same look as back then, when he stumbled onto the patio in a daze, and found the backyard torn apart. Seven mounds of dirt, all six feet in depth, scattered across the disturbed ground. Bags of soil stacked against the railing. A shovel in his older brother's hand. Dirt, that was a little too red, caked under his nails.
Inside, his wife shushed their baby sister while she cried. Their mother, their father, nowhere to be found.
It's something full of caution. Reproach. He wonders if somewhere, maybe deep down in a place he can't even reach, Tommy knows that wherever his brother went that night, something else came home the next morning.
Something covered in dirt and blood. Manic. Half-crazed. A thing that had an awful habit of making every problem they've ever had disappear.
When the silence stretches on for too long, he forces himself to shrug. But his shirt, damp from sweat, clings to his slick skin, and makes him acutely aware of how hot he feels.
Feverish, almost.
Half-crazed.
He knows how to act. What to say. Reaches for the pack of cigarettes even if the drag of fabric on his sodden skin rankles down his spine in a way that makes him grind his molars together until he hears the creak of a tooth on the nerve of shattering. Enamel tensing under pressure.
The cigarette, the nicotine—or maybe just the habit itself—lessens the strain in his jaw, but does little to quell the heat in his guts. The slow, simmering fever of fury running through his veins.
Everything is hazy. Fever-touched. The sharp end of a manic splinter driving itself deeper into his cranium until everything around him looks slightly smeared. Smudged fingerprints rubbed into the edges of his periphery.
The heat, the stench—because beneath the stale smell of cigarettes, smoke, and ash, is the rot, and it is almost unbearable. Has him gnashing his teeth in anger. Rattling the bars to a cage he hasn't felt like he's been locked inside since he was seventeen. Whatever is leashed inside of him is snapping its jowls to get free.
His string aches. The seed deep in his tissue burning hot, infectious; each pulse makes pus oozes out from the rotted nub that cracks through his skin.
It's worse than it's ever been. Instead of just the string itself rotting from inside of him, his flesh around it is waxy and red. Hot. Tight. The skin bracketing the string cracks and bleeds each time he flexes his swollen fist—
Beneath the heavy swath of ink etched into scar tissue and mangled flesh, the veins that run the length of his arm are black. Branching tendrils drift off from the main line, leaving webs of rot pulsing under his skin.
He knows what he needs to do, what he should have already done, but for a moment, he considers going to rest in the garden instead. Dragging you along behind him before he smears myrrh and milk and honey over their skin—
But he knows that he'd never get that far. And even if he did fall victim to scaphism at his own hands, Price would still find a way to prop his mouldering body up on a stick to wave at their enemies, denying him the rest he doesn't deserve.
Still.
He needs to leave, he thinks. Needs to bring the corpse he dragged home with him back to the battleground. Needs to sink his teeth into something, into—
“m’leavin’,” he says, and it's only an ironclad control over himself that keeps the rabid froth from spilling out of his mouth.
And Tommy—
Tommy doesn't say anything for a long stretch of time. Just stares. Watches him that same expression he started to hone into constant veneer the moment you turned eighteen, frowning at him from above your head with a look Simon can't place (won't place) fixed on his face like some loitering mother hen.
It drives the distance that cracked open between them even wider than it was before, now a deep, jagged bergschrund neither are willing—or wanting—to cross.
In another life, the irreparable damage to his relationship with Tommy might have clawed at his chest until it was a gaping wound; but in this lifetime, he knows—without an iota of uncertainty—that he did the right thing. Did what had to be done.
But each look tinged with suspicion is an arrowhead dipped into poison. A chip at the chasm walls that only widens the maw further.
And when Tommy glances towards the backdoor, to where you’re clawing at the dirt on your knees to make a home for the blue fox willow and rose of sharon you picked out at the nursery this morning, he feels something hot, sickly, twinge in his guts.
“Oh, yeah?” Tommy says finally, turning back towards him and ashing his cigarette in the overflowing tray.
He wonders if Tommy remembers that night in the garden, when he'd come home to a dirty house—dishes lying everywhere, food moulding on the counter; pills scattered across the coffee table, the needle of a syringe dripping onto the floor—and found you screaming in your bassinet while Tommy was passed out on the couch, too high to notice anything around him—
Maybe even Simon grabbing him by his collar and dragging him outside. Pushing a shovel into his hand and telling him if anything ever happened to you, to their sister, while he was gone, Tommy should just start digging his own grave.
The slur in his voice when he said f–fuck, you know I wouldn't let anythin’ ‘appen to her, Si, you know that—
It hummed under his skin each time he had to go away, ears ringing with the sound of your screams echoing through the empty, dark hallway. Worry a splinter beneath his skin he couldn't pry out (even when he took his knife to his flesh, trying to dig it up)—a feeling that still lingers even as Tommy eventually cleaned up his act, sobered up (in parts, pieces), and raised their sister better than their parents ever could.
He should be proud—and he thinks he is (or feels some approximation of pride)—but he can't shake the look. The suspicion, dappled in red against the jaundiced smear of sleeplessness and a glassy high, that keeps burning through.
It's there now, too—clearer this time, brighter without the drugs dulling his senses, but just as potent. As heavy.
Drenched in askance when he shuffles his feet beneath the table their mother sat at, silent and still as a ghost, as their father dumped a tray full of ash into their food after he found a pack of stolen cigarettes stuffed under their mattress, and made them eat it.
Simon thumbs the scrapes in the wood where he was forced to bite down on the edge while their father threatened to bash his teeth out for talking back—something he'd only done to distract the man from beating his brother senseless—as Tommy finally meets his gaze, and says:
“Yeah. Might be for the best.”
His nail scrapes down the torn wood, each ridge a perfect impression of all the places his teeth had caught in the wood. He chipped three teeth. Lost two. Tommy cowered in the corner while his mum sat, still as a ghost, at the table drinking her tea.
Dad laughed. Laughed at the scream he let out. At the tooth that scattered across the wood. Ain't talkin’ back now, are ya?
Laughed—
Until he noticed the blood soaking into the varnish. Bellowed at the mess, at the fuckin’ mess—
He ignores the flicker of discomfort when he scrapes his finger across the torn varnish, unbothered by the sting as little chips, flakes, of wood gather underneath his nailbed. Barely notices it as he holds Tommy's gaze, and curls his hand into a loose fist on the table, knuckles facing downwards.
“Sure,” he rasps.
And the crack widens.
(it began with a garden.)
a garden—
and a choice.)
A choice for which the lines of his conviction never blurred, never smeared. A concise, pristine demarcation emerged from the moment he made a choice that changed the trajectory of his life from tragic to harmonious, giving that little thing germinating inside the womb of his mother a chance—giving you, his safe haven, an opportunity to pullulate within this harsh world built around them.
It's something he's never questioned, despite the wealth of scars and crooked bones and gaping wounds he gained when he uprooted everything around him until all that remained was disturbed soil—enriched with peat moss and calcium; a blood-fed garden freed of all weeds, and slowly leaching from the percolating minerals as his enemies (and the gangrenous limbs of their parents—ones unexpectedly, and suddenly, lost to a quiet disappearance that Tommy stopped asking about when the investigation dwindled and the sparse, threadbare sympathy dried up along with the askance in his gaze whenever it was brought up) slowly decomposed humus and perlite, feeding the tomatoes and blood-red berries they planted together when he was on leave.
And beneath your soft, unblemished fingertips, the silent graveyard he filled for you turned into a lush basin of growth. Everything rich and heady—
Carnivorous, even though you’ll never know the truth of what he fertilises your garden with. Or where their parents disappeared to when you were just a few weeks old.
Secrets he'll take to his grave because the blood dripping from his hands, the slow rot of his string, is worth it just to see you bloom—
And to reap the rewards of your garden as you feed him from it each spring:
please eat better, you said—demanded, really—when you were no more than ten, and he dutifully swallowed the cherry tomato you plucked from the shade of its leafy umbrella without a word when you pressed it to his scarred lips, crooked teeth sinking into the tight, smooth skin until it popped in his mouth, leaking juice and pulpy flesh between his teeth, a mimicry of what he'd done to the man with blooded, bare hands who tried to bludgeon you to death in infancy.
Says nothing about it, about the blood in the vines, in the roots, of your pretty garden that you still fuss over every spring despite the years that passed since your siege of longevity, allowing Tommy the occasional beer, and him his preferred cigarette when you weren't around to see it.
"want me to live longer, eh?" he'd quip instead, licking the stuck skin from between his teeth. breath warm, herbaceous; tomato juice—that was always a little too red—dribbling down his chin. "tryin' to butter me up an' become my favourite sister, are you?"
and your breath would hitch slightly. a shallow catch, made more out of fondness and affection than anything else, that always happened just before you would smile, bright and wide, and volley back:
"i'm your only sister."
and the thing is:
what he felt for you has always been platonic, desireless—
but maybe it wasn't as apodictic as he thought.
and as the fractures split and grow, crumbling the walls of his once unblemished refuge, he's beginning to see how wrong he was. that, at some point, a foreign seed was thrown into the satchel and sowed in with the others. a parasitic, carnivorous spore that grew down instead of up. invasive. pervasive. silently, unknowingly spreading beneath the soil and under the roots of everything else until the infection grew, the rot festered, and he began looking at you with the face of the man but the eyes of the other—
a blameless notion. accidental. happenstance. divined by fate instead of choice.
easy to pick at, to cling to; to wrap the thread of this new truth around his fingers and anchor himself to it as his insides are subsumed by the fecundated spores. unwittingly, and helplessly, consumed by pathogenesis—
an easy out.
but he's been thinking a lot about platonicity lately. dwelling on the shapes his world took when he reduced his overarching sense of greed and possession to an oversimplification, or a symptom, of familial piety.
the raw truth is that he's always had those recesses buried deep in his cranium, waiting to burst. the ooze, that putrid sludge, building up over time as the half of him that died in that shallow grave festers; necrotizing in the back of his head. a bloated corpse of the man he once was: a man who wouldn't feel these twisted, awful things for his own sister—not at all; or at least, not at the expense of Tommy. his own flesh and blood.
a casualty, then—or a cruel twist of fate—that the putrid runoff of the good man's rotting body built up over time, forming a cesspit where ruin thrives. where all the good things inside of him go to rot.
even that hallowed place he made in the softness of your touch. desire, possession: psychosomatic.
reality is a layered plane. multifaceted, multileveled. misshapen and bent. and in the staggered remains of it all is another half-truth:
something shifted inside of him. another crack. another fracture wrought in the gauzy, sweet spill of a girl who has always been his proclaiming your burgeoning love, your desire, for another man, a person you’ve never met before, in front of him; each soft soliloquy, these gentle musings of a life without him in it, unearths the things he buried in the dark: the raw, clawing desperation; the possession he's felt since you wrapped your hand around his finger and wouldn't let go—
his. but not—not really.
familial. a safe, softened affection, a love he knows is there—one that's always been more than enough until now. until he still see that glossy love in your eyes, but is now forced to see it buffered from the inky, wet spread of desire spilling in those unbidden fantasies that spin and spin and spin—
it's irrefutable, he knows. his birdie, his baby, loves him, but it's not enough—
not anymore.
and a man that has only known hunger and desperation is readymade to snap his jaws and bury his teeth into the hand that tries to take his meal away from him.
(a meal that has always been his;
after all, would a truly innocent domicile really need a closet in which to stuff greed, desire, into if the threat of it permeating the air hasn't always been lingering in the shadows, tucked into the putrid recesses of his rotting mind—)
Tucked away in a safehouse he hasn't used in a decade, Simon takes a blade he'd heated over the stove until the metal was red-hot to the blackened skin on his wrist, and cuts out the infectious seed from his body.
On the table, exuding leachates and putrid, old blood into dust-covered wood, is the rotting string he'd cut out first.
The tail is shrivelled into a husk of mummified tissue. It's brittle. Pieces flake off when he touches it, crumbling into char, into ash between his fingers. The string itself is more of a muddy brown than a red. His blood, too, leaks slowly from the gouged wound in his skin—a thick, sticky tar-like ooze that's more pus than blood, he thinks. Or a noxious mix of both—sanies; a seropurulent discharge that reeks of infection. Of fetid flesh.
The seed, too, drips the same fetid liquid as it sits on the flat edge of his knife, and he can't help staring at the slimy, black spore.
It's so insignificant for what it is, for how much trouble it caused twenty-three years ago; now.
Everything about it is—
Underwhelming.
The blood-drenched roots he felt being pulled out from his veins are smaller than he expected them to be. Finger-length. Thin. Just these spindly, desiccated strands that look like they'd uproot with just the slightest tug. Branching secondary roots with torn ends—the part he figures must embed itself in veins. The anchor points that act like an umbilicus, leaching nutrients from his body in an anomalous symbiosis.
To him, it looks far more parasitic than the benevolent organism they've claimed since humans first encountered whatever theorised spore or prehistoric parasite is believed to have caused the strings, one that dug deep into a neanderthal's tissue and refused to let go. That, he supposes, or divine intervention. An act of God.
It's immobile, much like the plants in your garden. The little saplings you picked from the nurseries in town. Lifeless, almost, but it's beguiling.
Even as a dessicated husk of pulp and rotten roots, he can feel the life brimming through the veins. The artificial arteries. There's a heart in the nucleus, even if it's blackened with rot and mold. The apex of his problems sits in the string that emerged eighteen years too early. Reached for someone else—
It's in the lifeless corpse of his supposed fate where he thinks of you.
Of the string budding in your tissue. It's longer, you'd texted last night—another unanswered message in a sea of many because each time he tried to reply, the words you're mine were the only things his fingers seemed to be willing to type—and weird.
He knows.
Has been through it before. Endured the alien sensation of a kernel slowly germinating in your wrist, budding between tendon, ulna, and radius. Burying roots in your median cephalic vein. A new, foreign growing pain that felt like it didn't belong—like glass, a sliver, embedded in skin. An entity. A passenger he was forced to carry as it sliced into muscle and tissue, curled around bone, and broke through skin. A constant ache. A throbbing pain.
His hand became a petiole, a rib. A stalk. Vibrant, blood-red palmates, curling around his fingers as it sought the other half it was cut from.
It's been two weeks. The only spark of guilt he's ever felt in his life is nestled within the words wish you told me you were leaving, i didn't even get to say goodbye, the text sent only an hour after he'd left the house, the kitchen; the suspicion in Tommy's eyes, sharply cut with a thread of relief when he'd stood to go.
That inchoate bud would now be several inches long, the string, the stem, curling around your fingers like a nemertea with branching ganglions. Midribs that slot into place, sessile. Designed to be as unobtrusive as possible as it stretches out from between the brackets of your knuckles, seeking its other half, its other polyp, to join, completing the lifecycle of the parasitic string, or—as romantic manuscripts from the early medieval period like to proselytize—finalising a soulmatic union.
And, with the subsequent text messages that follow, it's a process that might be completed for you sooner than thought because maybe there was a little more to the suspicion in Tommy's eyes at that table, in the garden, on the porch, than he'd realised.
Tommy is being really weird lately, you'd texted. he keeps pushing for me to check out that company that finds your soulmate for you—
On the table, laying open beside the bisected string and parts, is a translated copy of that manuscript. It's the last book he'd read about the topic—everything else stacked behind it is thicker, dense with the knowledge and understanding of this (still) mystifying organism that infects humanity; filled with scientific research, anatomical outlines—and arguably the most fantastical of the lot. They believed that it was a divine blessing from God, and most of it is unfounded, uneducated assumptions, but nestled in the slew of religious nonsense is a single line he can't stop reading. A noetic line in Middle English that bought on this self-guided surgery to begin with:
that in this world nys creature lyvynge. Now be we caytyves, as it is wel seene, thanked be Fortune and hire false wheel, hangynge by a soutil twynes threed. And ther I lefte, I wol ayeyn bigynne.
A bagatelle, really. Or the majority of it is. Almost indecipherable even with the translation beneath—that in this world is no living creature; now we are miserable wretches, as it is easily seen, thanks be to Fortune and her false wheel—but the last part stands out.
hanging by a thin thread of twine; and where I left off, I will again begin—
On the table, the bloodsoaked husk of his string begins to reek of rot, but nestled between tendon and bone, a familiar ache gnaws at him.
Between the carved pieces of tissue and fat, a new seed emerges.
He has two fingers buried in the shallow grave of his wrist when a plan starts to take shape.
—ii. 5:1
The oppressive heat soon gives way to a torrent of summer storms.
Thick, craggy smears of slate and iron clot over the cloudless cerulean skies, hiding the unrelenting sun behind a veil of charcoal. Everything is overtaken by a heavy swath of grey gloom and streaks of lightning.
The deluge that follows is near biblical—a downpour that lasts three days, drenching the ground so heavily in rainwater that it sits on the grass for hours before it eventually soaks into the earth. Feeding the roots. The voracious maw of your garden and the bodies drowning underneath the soil.
Geosmin and petrichor pepper the air in a dense spool, a thickened web.
He comes back during a respite in the cloudburst when the draping greys lighten into a muddled blue and the dense stormcloud crack apart, a sliver of the setting sun spills through. He finds you in the kitchen, your back to him, stirring something in a pot. It smells rich. Full of spices and herbs. Aromatic.
Curry, he thinks. Simmering in a pot on the back burner. Then beneath it—rice, buttery and sweet, browning in a shallow pan with butter and garlic and onions.
On the counter, a handful of sun-ripened tomatoes, diced into pulpy, oozing chunks of red rest on a cutting board next to a small mound of minced, green herbs. Several spoons sit on a cloth near the sink—each of them covered in sauce. There's a wooden spoon tucked behind your ear. A damp towel thrown over your shoulder.
Your phone is on the table; something mid-tempo, atmospheric plays from the speakers, and you hum along under your breath—I gotta know tonight, if you're alone tonight—as you stir grains of rice. Soft. Easy. Can't stop this feeling. Can't stop this fire. Swaying slowly to the beat. Head bowing with each shallow nod, and it gives him the perfect view of your nape. Sloping and vulnerable. Fragile—like the arching handle of fine bone china.
It's—
Sweet. Domestic.
In his chest, something cracks. Fractures. It aches, and it bleeds—
You notice him, then, just as the other man, more of a feral animal now, drags itself to the edge of the precipice, ready to jump—
A flicker. Surprise, he thinks. And then:
a smile, all wrapped up in the rich, heady scent of spices, and herbs; warm, toasted butter and milky cream. home, and him, and you.
didn't know you were coming back, you say, turning towards him with that same, soft smile. “Dinner is almost done. Hungry?”
Is he hungry? He doesn't think a single day has gone by where he wasn't ravenous.
Starving comes out as a mangled sound in the back of his throat. Raw. Charred. Forced out between clenched teeth. All ash, cinder.
The growl he lets out makes that pretty smile falter, just a touch, at the edges. Dimming. Hackles raising. Body tensing in anticipation—even if you're not really sure why.
It's all—
Primal.
Muddled.
You take a cautious step back—unconciously done; atavistic fear driving you away from the bigger, dangerous man looming over you, blocking the only exit; your hindbrain sensing the predator in the bush before your mind catches up to the fact that your body, your instincts, are trying to protect you from your own kin.
Your own big brother.
He scrapes his tongue against his teeth. The pangs in his belly are almost impossible to ignore—a gaping, rapacious beast in his guts that can't stop eyeing the way your meat clings to fragile bones. The cushion of fat. Muscle. Plump and full and ready for him to sink his teeth into—
In the pale light, soft lines of ruby gleam:
Curled—protectively—around your wrist is the string. Thin, branching hyphae loop around your fingers. The trailing tail tipped inward, kept tucked against the heat of your inner wrist, resting along your pulse, unmoved. Unmoving—
the string doesn't stir.
the refusal is clear:
he is not your soulmate.
The anger that sparks through the hunger in his guts is a sick thing. Twisted. But he swallows it down, tucks the feeling into the folds of his chest and steps closer, reaching for you with dirty hands—
“c’mon,” he grunts, curling his fingers around your wrist, cupping the string beneath his palm. He feels agitated. Restless.
“You wanna eat outside?”
Even sounding—and looking—so perplexed, you still turn away from him, turning the dials on the stove to bring the heat down to a simmer. Letting everything rest, your own meal is kept in stasis, as you rearrange your evening to sate his appetite.
“Rain let up,” is all he gives in response. Then, when you make to grab another bowl from the cupboard, he adds:
Done enough, ‘aven’t you?
He lets go of your wrist, and nudges you towards the door. You don't question him at all. Then again, you rarely ever do. Always so eager to please, to soak up any scrap of attention he has leftover to give;
“Go sit outside. I'll grab the food, an’ make some tea.”
so sweetly obedient for him—even to your own detriment.
You always smell like the garden.
Earthy. Damp. A forest floor after a rainfall. Mossy and rich. Slightly mineral, too—wet rocks, stones. Herbaceous—like the thick, full fronds on your boston fern.
A particular thing: like everything before then, before the heart of your scent bloomed to life, was baking in the heat. Everything is still a little sundrenched, a little burnt, but now bathing in the cool respite of a rainshower. The air tinged, slightly, with that soft, sweet acidic scent that lingers in the air after a summer's storm. Geosmin. Water on wet pavement. A street—full of dirt, grime, oil, and scorching concrete—drenched in the aftermath of a deluge.
It's a scent he carries with him everywhere he goes, invoking you through the process of dampening his fingers and digging through a small patch of soil until the urge to run home is slaked in the disturbed earth.
(—him: hunched over on his knees, thick forearm braced against the ground, nose pressed into the soil; breathing the heady scent of loam into his lungs, the scent of you—)
The respite from the storms comes at a cost, and the price to pay tonight is a thick, wet humidity that drapes over everything like a heavy blanket. And within the sticky, molasses-like air is the scent of you. Thicker tonight. Maddeningly so.
He can't escape it. Not when the air itself is perfumed with it, with you, in a dense sillage that drips down the back of his throat with each inhale.
The world itself moulding around the two of you as the trees around the garden table dip from the weight of the droplets sitting heavy on soaked branches and wind-battered leaves, bending to form a lush parentheses of wet, earthy green.
it's enough to drive a man mad, he thinks, and know, then, if he stayed, if he hadn't left, he would have broke until the heavy spill of you clinging to his skin, soaking his lungs—
(—his hand knocking into his thigh each time he stroked downwards on his cock; teeth sinking into a groan that threatens to spill out, the shape of it a little too close to your name for him to do anything but ignore it, ignore it and pretend like he isn't burying his face in the damp dirt, tugging on his cock, and thinking of his baby sister—)
He's half-hard. Half-crazed. You're stuck in the fading vestiges of the hidden sun still desperately trying to squeeze through the thick, dark clouds above. Glowing in soft ochre. In the warm gold of the fairylights. You look—
Otherworldly, in this garden. This moment. Ethereal—
And drunk.
Lids, half-mast, over glossy, red-rimmed eyes. Unfocused. Slumped over the table, the bowl of half-eaten curry and rice perched precariously between the edge and your drooping elbow. All effort focused on keeping you from dropping your head onto the wrought iron.
The mug of tea sits, empty, in front of you.
“Tired?” He pries, leaning back against the chair. Legs kicked out. A big, dusty boot sliding between your ankles.
It's a sick thing when you give a sluggish nod and he coos, a little lower, a little meaner, than usual. Poor baby, slips out into the dripping ficus. You're too out of it to notice the edge in his voice. The hunger.
It's as if the world around you is stuck in molasses, in tar. Slowed to a drip, an ooze. Everything tangled up in a thick, sticky web. Thoughts catching on the strands like flies, unreachable. Paper-thin. He slips his booted toe up your calf, your leg. Nudging your knees until they split apart over the chair for him.
The old table and chair set is a deep emerald—patches of it blackened; lost to time, to rust, to rot—and made of curled iron, all of it bent into curving leaves and vines that twist into a pretty rose centre. Open gaps, finger-thick, keep it from being a solid piece; but that wasn't the design for these old, vintage bistro tables. He can see right through to the ground where dappled sunspots scorch the pavement, and—higher up—the split between your knees, the pretty part of your thighs.
It's too dark out to see much, but the hazy shadow at the apex, hiding the colour of your panties from his view, is enticing enough. More than enough.
In all the people he fucked, in all poses, the positions, not a single one of them comes close to the sheer eroticism of his little sister struggling to stay awake, but keeping your thighs spread for him to look between. A good fuckin’ girl.
It's nothing but shadows. A vague hint—the suggestion of it, of your cunt—but it has sweat pooling along his hairline, dribbling down his spine. A fever in his veins at the thought alone. That dark patch is enough to make him sweat.
Wonders, then, what you'd look like arching into it. Willingly spreading your thighs for him. Desperate for it. Rubbing that pretty cunt on his boot—a little performance, just for him.
“Look’it you,” he rasps, and with his foot, he pushes your thighs apart wider. Openly staring at that crux. Poor thing. “Should get some sleep, huh?”
You mumble something, the words tangled up in exhaustion. Delirium. Slurred and incomprehensible.
Adorable.
“C’mon,” he urges, and pulls his boot away with a huff. “Gotta be a good big brother an’ get you to bed, don't I?”
You say nothing, but he doesn't expect you to. The sleeping pills he crushed up and mixed into your tea are probably stronger than you can handle—
But he pulls back, boot dropping to the ground after tucking the image of you slumped over the table, legs spread; silently letting your older brother push his boot between your thighs just to steal a glimpse of your panties.
(it's not the first time, though—he has several pairs shoved in his duffle bag, all snatched up from the hamper before he left—
some of them kept, just for him. the rest forced onto whoever he picked up for the night; modelled and posed for him. their faces hidden.
he's sick in the head, he knows; and more-so now after the cutting, decimating realisation that just that sliver, that peek, of your panties beneath the table turned him on more than the people he'd forced into your used panties—)
“C’mon—”
He stands with a huff. Hard, amused. Starving. Watching with a strange, awful, mix of want and affection as your head drops backwards, and you blink up with him with liquid eyes, lost to the medication. The drugs. Droop-eyed and dazed, but still so fuckin’ trusting. Arms sluggishly lifting up when he steps towards you, thrusting the string—the one that refuses to even twitch for him—into the warm, gold glow from the lights, putting it on display.
You were so happy about it during dinner. Prattling on about how Tommy was going to register you for a string search, find your soulmate for you as soon as possible. The elation cutting into your gaze as you spoke about it, about finding your mate made his skin crawl. Made him clench down tight until his jaw ached and his head pounded. Biting down on the urge to growl out you're fuckin’ mine—
His sweet baby sister, blooming for someone else.
The mumble of his name brings him back. Centres him.
He helps you up as you babble. A syrupy slip of a thing that he tucks under his arm, holding tight. A sloppy smile, all wide and bright, even as it wobbles at the edges, builds when you see him.
Your nose pressed into his ribs. Missed you, mumbled into the damp fabric of his shirt. Missed you so, so much—
You're so much his baby sister at this moment that it aches.
But it doesn't make the hunger go away.
Instead he presses his lips to your temple in a sloppy, smearing kiss, all teeth and sticky skin that makes you giggle, and pulls you up, walking you back into the house, down the hall. To your bedroom. Pushes you towards the bed, echoing the yawning, slurring mumble of goodnight, Simon that follows him down the hall as he pretends to leave. Leaning against the wall as he waits. Listening to the creak of bedsprings in the old, tissue-walled house as you settle into an artificial sleep.
Then, he prepares.
It's quick. Just two snips. Four neat stitches. Faster than he expected it to be, and with this newfound wealth of time, he can't ignore the itch in the back of his head—some long, forgotten conscience of the man he used to be (the man he could have been if he never dug that grave)—whispering in the still, quiet dark that he can stop here. That this is more than enough—
But he thinks that man ought to know better.
He's known hunger like no other; knows what an empty stomach does to itself. Knows just how far someone would go to try and sate the ache inside that pit that is never full, never satisfied. Should remember rummaging through bins for scraps. Begging on street corners. Stealing from stores and shops just to bring his wears home and have it taken away. Unable to sleep on an empty stomach. And—
The feeling of self-cannibalisation. The act of the body eating itself to survive.
It's never enough. And in that shallow grave, he told himself he'd never settle again for seconds, never beg for the leftovers on someone else's plate. Barter for scraps.
All or nothing.
And he wants all, wants everything, he can gorge himself on when it comes to you.
A rapacious, selfish beast that eats, and eats—
He's decidedly unbothered by the lack of guilt he feels; the absence of morality in any shred of his being as he picks up the torch and continues. Cauterizes the wound, welds the flesh together.
When he's done, he holds the fresh wound between his fingers, letting the blood settle so it can start to ebb and flow. Watches the blackened, burnt skin slowly begin to peel and flake. Dead tissue fluttering onto the bedsheets the way it should, leaving behind nothing but red flesh, slightly inflamed. A little swollen, but nearly healed. Strings heal quick. Quicker than flesh, than skin. The antibiotics will help, too. Everything coming together in a quiet breath; tucked between the stench of rot and burning flesh until all that remains is soft, sutured tissue and a small pile of ash beside your elbow.
And the rest, he supposes. The severed string in his hand, slowly withering away—the signifier to an immediate death on the opposite end of the rope. Whoever your soulmate was, they're gone now.
That, too, he feels nothing about. No guilt. No anguish. Just a bone-deep sense of satisfaction thrumming through him. Something primal, all animal, that preens in the back of his head as he gathers the string in his palm, the symbolic other half that tried to take you away from him, and without a second thought, he pops it into his mouth and starts to chew—
(Can't leave behind any evidence, after all.)
Gamey, slight tough. Touched with incipient bloom of rot percolating from its dying pores. With a single swallow, it goes down: falling to the yawning chasm of a belly that'll never be full; and with it, so too goes the only thing in the world that has ever stood a chance to take you away from him.
And without much else to do but wait it out, he gathers his things, dusts the dead, burnt skin from the bed, and leaves—as if he was never there to begin with.
In the morning, he yawns awake to the sound of a shrill scream. Then the hammering of feet on old, weathered wood. His brothers voice echoing down the hall, words garbled with sleep and confusion. hey, wait—
but heedless, his door is wrenched open, and you're filling the frame; eyes widening with disbelief. With a touch of disgust and horror that he's sure you'll overcome with time. Looking slightly sick, a little mystified as the once small nub stretches across herringbone until it kisses the mouth of his umbilicus. A connected line that gets smaller as the gap closes.
soulmates found.
(or—
reforged.)
A minute later, and Tommy is there, his eyes just as wide as the gears turn, as the sight before him is laid bare. Unmistakable. A breathless, shaken no, oh fuck, no leaving the slack of his jaw as he watches the scene unfold, as his eyes follow that hideous trail. One that binds his brother and sister together—
It's telling, he thinks, that the first thing Tommy says to him is not what happened, but instead:
“Simon…what the fuck did you do?”
He's comfortable in the chaos that follows.
In the visits to doctors and specialists, and the uncertainty that clots the home like a thick, noxious miasma as everyone around him, around you, try to poke and prod at the cauterised knot that ties you to him eternally.
There's no give. No loopholes. His precision fools everyone because no one has ever tried to do what he's done, and the string is a living, breathing thing that's as easily manipulated—just like an organ transplant, tricking the body into thinking things are as they should be—and it pulses to life as it heals, sharing nutrients and blood between the two of you.
Inserverable, the specialists say.
A bond—even one as rare as this (if not utterly unheard of)—cannot be broken without consequence. While there are rumours and theories about it, nothing has been proven. All that is known is that no one has been able to find the perfect middle of a soulmates fated string, and when cut, the individual whose string is shorter than the other dies. This is ironclad. Laws were formed, strengthened, around this very notion.
The string, however taboo, cannot be cut.
And even if it could, he won't let it.
Because the thing is—the missing part to that half-truth—is that he's been waiting for this day since he was eighteen.
—and ther I lefte, I wol ayeyn bigynne, indeed.
from the moment he showed up to the hospital after getting the call from Tommy, and held you in his arms as you peeled your red, swollen eyes open and looked right at him (him, not Ghost, not the other; not Simon, the man, but him, him, him—), he knew you were his. that first hitch, that little breath. he leaned down and caught it between his teeth—warmed milk, honey-sweet—and swallowed it down. let it moulder in his belly until he could taste you in the back of his throat.
this tiny, insignificant thing—
the schematics never mattered much. he doesn't think there was ever a time when dwelled on blood or familial bonds, or felt sick over the fact that you grew up calling him brother. that his brother is your brother, too. same parents. same blood. it isn't, and wasn't ever, a perversion; he didn't try to reshape the boundaries of your relationship, or push you past what was normal. it was kinship. platonic. familial.
you were, and are, simply his.
he was content with just having you close. your presence a balm to the aggravation within himself. sprouting life within lands he once thought were barren. reshaping the geographical plains of his own existence until it perfectly bracked around each breath you took; a shadow that loomed with every step.
he became this—
this thing. a wild animal, once feral and crazed, domesticating itself just so it could be allowed close enough to smell the sweet, warm milk of your breath; feel it on his scarred cheek when you used the broad stretch of his shoulders to balance on his knees, wobbling like an unstable sun in his lap as you kissed the mess of his chin whispered the words that kept bringing him home, over and over again. dragged him back from beneath the funerary dirt he was buried under. giving him the will to turn a nightmare into a home (into mausoleum that entombed the rotting remains of his father and mother—neither good enough to be near you). a lush garden. a happy, giggling girl in his arms pushing blood-fed tomatoes between his maw. he stretched his legs out as he chewed and knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life just like this: no more, no less.
but then he felt that nub. that little seed beneath your skin that mocked him, told him that, under no uncertainty, you belonged to someone else. and that just wouldn't do.
see, the universe might have gotten it wrong—gave him another soulmate, another person, instead of you—but he's learned a lot from the military, from John Price; knows that the most important thing in the world is correcting mistakes. making things right.
killing his own soulmate (and yours when he cut your string) was just the right thing to do because even then, he knew there couldn't (and wouldn't) be anyone else.
and when you slip into his room, the epitome of a sacrificial lamb marching towards death, he feels the cracked, misshapen pieces of himself begin to shift again—
(a little hitch, a hiccup, as you come to stop in front of him, wide-eyed and nervous. wincing sharply when familiarity bleeds into unease, and you can't stop the routine that shapes you anymore than he can stop the blood in your veins; a little slip shattering the silence: Simon—)
—and then fall into place.
he loops his finger around the joined thread, giving a sharp tug that makes you gasp as you're pulled from within; stumbling forward, and catching yourself on the breadth of his thighs. warm, soft hands sinking into the give of fat before steadying against solid, tensing muscle.
your touch, even featherlight, ignites something inside of him. the animal slinks back, squeezing between the gaps of the man and the other until it's prowling in the forefront, ready to stake it's claim—
(a primal thing that buzzes along his hindbrain, over his skin. little animalcules that bead from his pores, fattened with the logic they syponed until all that remained was raw instinct, an itch reaching a fever pitch.)
"c'mere, baby," he burrs, breath reeking of bone ash and cherry tomatoes. "come closer. ain't gonna bite—"
much, is left unsaid, but you flinch like you hear it all the same. the urge to soothe is there—a reminder that despite the desire, the want, the drive to reach for you, his unstable sun, and protect is keeping pace with the fever burning in his veins.
a dichotomy, of sorts.
and he sees the way you lean into him, too—familiar, heartbreaking; his baby and your grabbing, clinging hands always reaching for him when you wobble—before the new delineation of what you are to him, of what he is to you, slips back in, and you pause, hovering. unsure what's allowed anymore. what isn't.
he wants to say anything. everything. that despite it all, he's still the man you baby-fed cherry tomatoes to; the heavy, herbaceous scent of lush green clinging to the tips of your dirt-crusted fingers. all of it shaded in something endearing, sweet (warm, sticky summer evenings spent on the patio he built, watching as you chased down fireflies and beetles and fussed over the perennials: all of it a thick, percolating drip of nostalgia in the back of his throat, stuffed into his nose like the sweat that gathered on the nape of his neck)—even if the man he is now wants to chase them with his mouth, lick the blood-red juice from between your fingers.
wants to fuck you in that garden where the bodies rot until the cries of your ecstacy wake the dead—
he tries, he does, to let you adjust. grow into acceptance, into love, without brute force or shallow manipulation. knows that you need time, space. need to acclimate to the newly established boundaries of your relationship, and come to terms with this—artificial—reality when the man you've known only as family, as kin, as your brother, is your soulmate.
bound by fate, by this dangling red string that clings to each umbilicus, sharing breath and blood. an unignorable truth that the man who built you a garden, taught you how to tie your shoes, and called you baby and birdie and brat is now calling you mine. is allowed to call you that. expected to, really—
could fuck you in that garden if he wanted to despite everyone knowing you're his baby sister because all it takes is a single string and the noble lie blooms back into consciousness.
the boundaries of your relationship blurred overnight, and he wants to give you time, he does, but the other (and maybe the man, too) hunger. have always hungered. and there was a moment, a slip in time, where he could have lost you—
it's enough to drive a half-mad man insane.
push him to the brink.
and that's where he is. what he is. a man on the brink—
until your hands lift, coming to rest on his shoulders. fingers digging into his collarbones as you wobble over his thighs. onto his lap. milk-sweet breath puffing against his chin, his jaw. that little hitch when his hands come up, grabbing your hips; steady and firm and unrelenting as you squirm into this new skin, this new role.
a messy kiss against his cheek, and barely even that. just a smear of trembling lips over scarred skin. too nervous, too novice (too rattled over the sudden shift of your reality—) to really know what to do: you pepper soft, shaky kisses over his skin and pretend that he can't feel the feverish chills racking through your body. a symptom of the lingering uncertainty as you wrap your head around what the world is telling you to do (and not do), to feel (and not feel), and try to figure out how to claw out of the brackets and be as comfortable in his arms, in his bed, beneath him, the way soulmates are expected to be.
sympathy, though, isn't enough to eclipse greed, and he drags you down firmer into his lap, letting you feel the unmistakable press of his cock seated against your clothed seam. relishing in that hitch, that gasp, as he bends down and takes over. turns innocent, kittish kisses into something that's devouring, an eating: all teeth—soaking your lips in his spit, tasting the inside of your mouth as he gags you on the thick of his tongue. swallowing down your spit, your gasps, these little whines in the back of your throat as he pushes his cock into you and wraps his hands around your neck so you can't pull away and hide. revels in the triumph when those little mewls lose the touch of disgust and your hips shift, searching and seeking. eager for the pressure his thickness brings. a smearing, messy kiss—
"want more, don't you, birdie?" he sinks his teeth into the panic shaping your lips with a groan. a greedy nip. "s'alright," he adds, his hand slipping down, down—
the width of his legs pry your thighs apart, but he gets a sick little thrill watching the way they twitch, desperately trying to close. likes it more, he thinks, when you're like this—unsure, but forcing yourself to like it. to enjoy it.
you have to, after all.
but he can taste it on your tongue. the slow glaze molting over your eyes. you don't want him now—not really. any desire you feel is a placebo caused by the string that tugs and pulls between the two of you, but—
not for long.
"it's alright," he burrs again, petting the inside of your thigh. "you're mine, ain't you?"
there's a pause, but it's briefer than he expected. and then a nod, a little less unsure than he thought it would be. he can't stop the groan that slips out, raw and fractured, as your martyrdom begins to crack with the shift of his hand, leaving behind a slick, sticky leak that he chases with his fingers until he reaches soft lace—
soft, damp lace.
he pushes his knuckle into the spill of it, groaning at the soft, wet heat he feels hidden behind the fabric. pity, force, doesn't soak you like this. doesn't make you fever-hot and sticky. hips rocking slightly, a little hitch. pushing forward, into fingers. his touch.
him.
you're his. all his.
"'course you are,” he coos as you ruck against the press of his knuckle, eager and needy and so fuckin’ sweet. that soft, elated look you had for the person who was meant to have his place is angled up, focused on him. it's ego-feeding. has him preening in the aftermath of his hardwon conquest: the spoils his baby sister, his soulmate; doe-eyed and needy. sating the man, but stoking the fire of the other.
after, he'll drag you out into the garden and fuck you amid the drooping vines of the tomato plants just because he can—because you're his. after all,
“the universe said so, didn't it?"
(you've always wanted a soulmate.
and as your brother, he's wont to give you everything you ask for.)
You don't question your brother when he sends you to drop off packages to his friends, but when the enforcer for the 141 shows up to teach the small-time dealer selling on their turf a lesson, you realize there are different ways to pay someone back with pounds of flesh.
(OR: your brother owes them, and Ghost is content to let you settle the debt. after all, if you wanted freedom, then you shouldn't have caught the eye of the butcher of the 141, should you?)
18+ SMUT. noncon. objectification. marking. kidnapping. threats of violence. unsafe sex (manipulation into unprotected sex). rough sex. size difference. breathplay. 10k of foreplay. light pussy slapping. overstimulation. mafia au.
SERIES MASTERLIST | AO3
The goal is to be as quick and discreet as possible.
In and out, he says, looping the baggie around his index finger. Inside, a snowfall of white powder settles at the bottom.
Meth this time. Oxytocin the last.
He ties it tight before giving the bag a quick shake, breaking up the clumps. Satisfied with the way it looks, he turns toward you. Levels you with a sombre look, the picture of a concerned older brother.
You almost fall for it. Believe it. But the clouded, flat edge to his gaze undercuts his worry for what it really is. A farce.
“And if it seems sketchy—”
—run.
But your knees are locked, soles glued to the pavement. You can't move even though everything is screaming at you to flee.
The problem, maybe, is that there's nowhere to go. Escape cut off, filled by a body, a man—even though the idea, the mere notion, of thinking this behemoth as human, flesh and bone; blood and tissue, is laughable when he's so clearly a beast. A monster.
He fills up your field of vision. Your line of sight was eclipsed by the thickness of his waist, the broad expanse of his shoulders. Thighs that are as wide as the trunk of a tree. Arms boxing you in. A prison of obsidian. A black shadow.
In the panic that surfaces, surging to the top like an oil spill, you catch a pocket where he doesn't root. A small alcove between the bend of his elbow and the slot of his knee perched against the wall. Enough room for you to—
“Wouldn't do tha’ if I were you.”
His voice seems to shake the earth, rolling out of his broad chest like the low, brassy roar of a lion; a rumbling thunderclap.
You feel sick—
The leather covering his hand is cold when it closes around your arm, grip tight. Bruising. Trapping you with just the slightest effort.
“Go’ a problem, you and I,” he starts, and it's almost conversational. Might be, perhaps, if the clean, sleek outline of his gun inside the unclasped holster around his ungodly thick waist wasn't threatening you more than the grip he has on your arm. “How do you reckon we can fix it?”
You have a meagre twenty dollars in your pocket. Less money for them to take if things go awry. If they decide that the little girl standing in for her older brother was an easier target to rob—money and drugs—than to settle things fairly. Money, goods. Hand over hand.
Just like the movies, he'd said.
Just like the movies, you think when he leans in closer, bulk swallowing you whole.
There is a pockmark in the corner of his crooked, misshapen nose and the crease of his eye. A scar, maybe. It's circular—almost perfectly so; a silver-pink moon on the angular ridge of his nose. Uneven, craggy, like crumpled printer paper.
It looks almost like—
You think of the mark on your arm. Soot-stained. The smell of burning hair, tissue. The searing pain.
“I–I can pay you—” you stammer out, tearing your gaze away from the ugly mark on his skin. A cigarette burn. It makes you shudder.
He cocks his head slowly like a big, dumb dog, but there's something eerie in the ink spill of his eyes. The soft matte of a saltwater crocodile staring at you from beneath the murk. Calculative. Hungry.
“Pay me?” He echoes slowly, dragging the words out mockingly. “D’you know ‘ow much trouble your brother is in? For sellin’ ‘ere of all places?”
“No,” you swallow. It feels like your heart is stuck inside your throat. “I–I just—”
“Run ‘is errands,” he finishes cruelly but you can't deny it. “Ain't you a good little sister? Almost makes me wish I ‘ad somethin’ as sweet as you f’myself growin’ up.”
You don't answer. He doesn't seem to be looking for one, really; just empty words to fill space. To echo in your head, barbed wire around any sense of comfort you might have felt. Punishing cruelty.
He has the upper hand, it says. He's the one who makes derisive jokes while you tremble in his grasp, and try to make yourself as small, as unassuming, as possible. Hiding from the predator in plain sight. Hoping he passes you over for something bigger, more calorie-dense; the effort to catch and consume you expends more energy than the return. Hardly worth it in the long run. The comfort of a risk-reward ratio, right?
But he's opportunistic, it seems. A snacking scavenger.
Could eat, it says, like a basking tiger keeping a mouse trapped between his paws, letting it squirm and squeak as he slowly licks his lips. Not enough to fill its belly but enough to satisfy the gluttonous urge a predator has to eat. Sharpening its teeth on flimsy bones. Child’s play.
It's a fitting image, especially with the way he arches over you, looms; fingers looped around the thick of your arm, holding firm, but not—
Not as tight as he could.
It's a loose-fisted grasp. Lazy, almost. He knows you won't run—or, at the very least, knows you won't get far.
You peel your gaze away from his, dropping it to the curve of his shoulders—the width of them is just as dizzying as his height; broad, muscular. Pulling it further down the length of his arm, covered in a thick jacket. Black corduroy. Ashes stain the cuffs. A bulky watch juts out from his wrist. Gold. Glinting even in the grey-blue gloom of an overcast evenfall.
His muscles tense. Hand tightening around your arm, fingers digging hard. Rubbing muscle painfully against bone.
A warning, maybe. Stop looking—
But something else catches your eye. Blood red. The colour of meat. A fresh kill.
The back of his hand has a blooming rose. Petals spread out, unfurled. In the middle, a milky skull sits. Stencilled in boxy, yellow letters is ONE-FOUR-ONE—
You know what it means even as your mind whirs, gears turning, turning; plummeting into a tailspin, making excuses as it falls, dragging your heart down alongside it. An area code. Some special date. An inside joke.
But you've seen the marking around town before. Heard whispers about them from your brother, his friends. 141, they say, and then: mafia.
The real deal, he said, puffing around a joint his friend rolled. It's too tight. He scoffs, and rips it out from between his lips. Shitty roll, man, make another one—
Mob. Mafia. Gangsters. It seemed so extreme, Hollywood. Fiction, fantasy, all rolled into one. Tony Soprano. Ralph Cifaretto. Michael and Vito Corleone. Tony Montana. Larger-than-life men created on paper.
You think your brother thought so too. Child's play. Grown men selling weed to kids for two hundred an ounce. Buying themselves sleek, black cars—G Wagons, Escalades, Cullinans—on the Xanax they sell at clubs, parties. Cocaine. Heroin.
Nothing to worry about.
Then his friend went missing.
Sent out on a routine delivery to drop off cocaine to well-dressed men in suits outside of a local butcher shop. A normal, nondescript Tuesday.
But he wouldn't answer his phone. Texts were being delivered, read, but no chat bubble appeared. Nothing sent back. Calls went straight to voicemail. He wasn't at home. Wasn't at his mum's. No one saw him. Heard from him.
Your brother didn't call the police. Didn't report him as missing.
It's just not what they do, he said. You don't involve them. Ever.
The most shocking part of it was that no one saw anything. He just vanished. Disappeared—stock an’ all, your brother angrily spits—without a trace, picked up off the streets.
If it was the police, someone would have said something by now. They're hardly discreet. And a rival—
Well.
The biggest problem was that your brother was blindsided by his own small-time success. An accumulation of little wins bolstered his confidence. Overfed his ego. This fallout was tunnel vision. A refusal to see the bigger picture.
Or the storm clouds looming on the horizon.
You'd heard of the 141 in passing. Little quips, anecdotes from the passel of friends that congregated around your brother—often getting high on the couch and watching old cartoons; sharing a joint back and forth between gossip.
Through rheumy eyes, they'd talk about the real gangsters in town—much to the irritation of your brother—and swap tales of run-ins and feats they heard from a friend (of a friend, of a friend). Most of the guys were known already. Soap and Gaz are the biggest names that cropped up on the streets through reputation alone. Both fighters for a gym. MMA, mostly, but whispers of street fighting and extracurricular activities weren't uncommon.
Liked the thrill of it, they said. But the worst was a man simply known as the Ghost. An enforcer for the 141—a fucking butcher, more like, Liam cut in, jaundiced eyes widening—the guy who took care of problems.
“Can't be,” your brother scoffed, lifting off the couch to reach in his back pocket for his wallet. A small anthill of white powder poured into the glass table. “They don't get involved in our shit—”
And for the most part, you're sure that's true. Dealing to the same circle of people—outreach spread through word of mouth—seemed paltry in comparison to the scale of an operation that had a money laundering gym. But the problem was that your brother lacked common sense. His ego often got in the way of foresight. The shadow greed casts blocking out the bigger picture.
Like—
Territory is territory—regardless of what's being pushed.
You wish there was a modicum of surprise when his friend turned up. Barely recognizable. Sent right to the morgue as a John Doe.
Most would see the marks on the man's skin—the distinct lack of blood—as an indicator to abandon ship, find the boss, beg for forgiveness, and maybe even try to strike up a deal. But—
That picture is hidden under his anger. Greed. Selfishness.
He sends you instead.
You're somethin’ they ain't expectin’, he said. Won't mess with you.
Right.
He catches the realisation dripping down your brow—beads of sweat gathering at your hairline; anxiety, fear, churning your stomach—and hums. Cocks his head to the side.
“Was expectin’ ‘im t’show up, though—” he murmurs, hand tightening around your arm. The pressure, the sting, is eclipsed by the gnawing sense of dread biting viciously into you. “Told ‘im if I caught ‘im sellin’ on our streets again, there'd be trouble. Thought we ‘ad an agreement after ‘is friend. But—”
His eyes cut to yours. It feels like a knife to your guts, sinking into soft tissue. A pain you can't breathe around.
Won't mess with you, you think, and then viciously—sadly—he knew. Was warned by them and still sent you out. Let you take his place for whatever comeuppance they decided he deserved.
It should shock you. You almost wish it did. Desperately clinging to the threads of surprise that slip through your oily fingers, grasping onto the nothing but empty air. Numbed to the resignation that trickles in.
Of course he would leave you here to save himself. Letting you fend off whatever they threw at you alone. Leaving you trapped between a brick wall and a wall of a man.
The excuses are there. They pool on the tip of your tongue—it isn't me, don't do this, it's my (stupid, selfish) brother you want, not me—but you swallow them down and try not to wince at how quickly they dissipate when you do. It doesn't matter in the end because whatever you have to say won't negate the drugs in your backpack. The empty house you'll lead them to—your brother probably squirrelled away somewhere until this blows over. Half-hopeful you'd call him and say everything is fine, the deal went smoothly. You're on your way back. Or that the debt he racked up with them is settled by you.
It's half-hearted when it slips out again, caught between resignation and dread. A brittle whisper. A prayer—
“I can pay you. Whatever he owes, I can—”
He's already shaking his head.
“Too late for that, birdie. ‘sides, I don't want your money.”
He moves back, rocking on his heels to put a small measure of distance between your bodies. In that scant space, he drops his gaze, sweeping it over you. His eyes darken.
When he pivots them down, catching yours, you can't stop the shiver that crawls up your spine.
That calculative gleam is back.
“But I think we can work something else out.”
Something else turns out to be ushering you into the backseat of an old Ford pickup.
The door whines when he opens it. Rust flaking off, falling to the ground by your feet. Your mind reels. Spins comparisons to falling snow, dried blood.
He hauls you in with his hand wrapped around the nape of your neck, thick thigh sliding between your own to boost you up. The protest—a mindless, reactionary squeal at being manhandled—only makes him chuff. A brief flex of his fingers around the skin of your neck is the only warning he gives before it pulls away, and wraps tight around your waist. His thigh flexes, muscle drawing taut as he shifts his foot up to the running board, lifting your feet off the ground and seating you fully on his leg like a child.
(In his hands, you feel like one, too.)
The motion makes you slip, back glueing along his broad chest with a shallow thump. You feel the rumble of his laugh trembling up your spine before you hear it.
“Careful,” he drawls, oiled with amusement. “Might slip.”
Anything you could say in response is choked back when he bumps the corded steel of his thigh into the seam of your legs, pushing tight to your clothed cunt. His intention is unmistakable this time. Unignorable. And with the rasp of filtered, balmy air against your crown; the pull of a groan when you rock back into his groin, the noise still slicked with mirth, you feel a knot of dread spool tight in your belly.
Something else is dragged back to the forefront, coiling like wisps of smoke around you.
And you knew. It's shocking, you think, but not necessarily a surprise. To call it a dichotomy would be lying to yourself, and so, you settle against it. This notion that what he wants—wanted—is flesh. Not money. Not retribution.
Not to talk things out like you'd hoped he’d try (grabbing onto the idealistic thread, holding it tight to your chest); bringing you in and forcing you to convince your—stupid selfish greedy—older brother that quitting was the only option. Dangling you—baby sister—over his head in an appeal to his emotions. Familial bonds. Love.
That thread is cut. Snipped.
Probably severed when they first came to him with an offer. No strikes against him and yet—
The idea of using you to make him bend was expunged from the drawing board. It's not even a plan b, or c, or z.
And—
You knew. Have known. Maybe that's why it's so easy to swallow around the panic when it lances through your chest, climbs up your throat. You can think and feel and breathe around this dagger in your back like it was there the whole time and you've only just noticed it now.
Nothing but a small, whispered oh in the roiling polyphony of your emotions.
It sits there as he manuevers you into the passenger seat of his truck, your head spinning around the indescribable sensation of being woefully cognisant despite the paralysing fugue pressing against the bubble of stark awareness that keeps it at bay. It manifests itself as a numbed sort of shock. Or more accurately—
Indifference.
Defeat.
His hand brushes your cheek, the snag of dry leather against humid skin tugs uncomfortably at your flesh, stinging as they dance down to your jaw, the delicate line of your vulnerable throat, skimming over the curve of your breast—
And it's too much. Too present. Too real.
Autopilot. Dissociation. Derealisation. All of these concepts slip past the bubble of hypervigilance, skidding the surface like a pebble thrown over a lake. Out of reach as he unashamedly gropes you, barely making an effort to mask his actions as just buckling you in.
You pretend, though. Curl your fists around the sides of the seat, fingers digging into the worn foam. Head lulling back on the headrest. Eyes fixed out the window as he walked around the front, head and shoulders still visible in the windshield despite the height of the truck. It makes your heart leap, stuttering in your chest as the absurdity of his size is brought back into focus. Too big, you think. Grossly so.
There's a moment when you think about running. Toying with the idea of sliding your hand over the lock, pulling the door open when he's too busy on his side to notice. It'll give you an advantage—a head start. Enough time to slink through the dense forest of concrete buildings lining the industrial zone, and into somewhere safe. Help, a behemoth is chasing me—
But the door clicks. Swings open with a squeal of rusted metal just as your fingers twitch toward the handle. Hope evaporates with each lurch of the cab as he climbs inside, metal creaking under his weight when he settles in the seat.
From the corner of your eye, you can see his head tip. Chin angling toward you. Staring. Assessing.
When he speaks, you feel the words like cold fingers dancing maliciously down your spine.
“‘pected you t’run.”
It's said idly enough. Nonchalant. Tone even, if a little cruel, and you wonder if this is some test. One that you passed—and failed—in equal measure.
He doesn't look away. It takes less effort than you wish it did to peel your lips apart, to breathe in the stale, mulch scent of the cab—something overgrown, rotting, and damp—and mumble:
Where would I go?
It seems to amuse him. He hums around a mouthful of mockery before turning away, pawing at the ignition. Gloved hand curling over the wheel.
“Smart girl.”
You don't feel very smart. In fact, you feel very small. Stupid. Maybe you should have taken a stab at it—running. Tried, at least, to save your own life before the jaws of the beast closed over you like an iron bear trap around your ankle. Fought like hell. Clawed and kicked and screamed.
When most kids read the back of a cereal box, you learned about secondary locations. You know better than this.
But the truck sputters to life in a belly-deep rumble, hacking up soot into the air as he pulls the lever into DRIVE. The fight inside of you—however ephemeral it might have been—dies inside the smoke spilling out of his exhaust. Gone so quickly that you begin to wonder if it was even there at all—
Must be, you think, eyes listing outward. Keen. Mapping the twists and turns—a futile effort in the end: he doesn't bother hiding where he's taking you, and you've been down these old, grim streets more times than you can count.
It doesn't surprise you much when he turns down the street leading to the butcher shop. An old relic that still carries the marks of a booming farming town before it fell victim to industrialisation. Concrete skyscrapers in place of lush cornfields. Warehouses over old barns, ranches. Cattle, meat, produce—it all used to be a mainstay here but now hides under layers of steel.
The dark windows of the small shop gleam with hazy smears of neon blue, red, when you pull up, catching on the array of rowdy bars across the street. All clubs that belong to the 141. A playground of drugs, sex. More money than you'd ever see in your lifetime.
It's an uncanny juxtaposition to the quiet, assuming street right across from it. Barber, butcher, accountant firm, antique store. All dark inside and bathed in the smeared stream of glimmering neon as lights flash in the fading glow of twilight.
He pulls up to the curb in front of the shop. A bold move if the streets weren't so empty. Lifeless. The clubs won't be open for four more hours. Everything else follows the same nine to five as the rest of the world. The shops closed an hour ago, and everyone in town seems to know not to linger here after dark.
The air seems to stagnate in your lungs when he cuts the ignition. Slips the key into his pocket.
“Don't get any funny ideas in tha' pretty little ‘ead o’yours.”
“Funny ideas,” you echo, toneless. Flat. It rolls out with your exhale. Words that might have been smarter to swallow down. “Like following a stranger to a butcher shop?”
“Lippy little thing, ain't you?” He scoffs. The truck creaks when he shifts. “Ain't go’ no one t’blame but yourself. Told you what would ‘appen if you kept sellin’ in our territory. You should ‘ave known better.”
“That was my brother.” The words slip out before you can stop them. “Not me—”
“‘ow am I suppose t’know that? You were sellin’ where I told ‘im not to—” he has the gall to shrug. Spit these careless words at you like it wasn't life or death. “That's all there is to it, birdie.”
“That's not fair—”
The truck groans under his weight, shaking from side to side as he leans over to push his door open before turning back to you, rolling his eyes.
“Life ain't very fair, is it?”
The acerbic words are flicked out from between his teeth; an apathetic, droning curl clinging to each syllable. He doesn't care. Won't. What happens to you next is your choice, and yours alone.
And he's just doing his job—
“When I get out of ‘ere, you ain't gonna do anythin’ funny—”
His hand lashes out. Gloved fingers close over the thick of your throat in a blink. Fear lags by a beat, giving him enough time to sink his fingers over your neck, and when it catches up—heart rabbiting in your chest, thudding in your ears; roaring as your pulse thunders beneath the press of his thumb—he’s already got you in his hold. The width forces your chin to lift, stretching up to accommodate the curl of his hand around you.
Trapped like a rabbit. Cattle to the slaughter.
He tilts his head down, keeping his eyes on yours as he forces your crown into the headrest, chin lifted up. It's uncomfortable. The curve of your neck cuts off your airways. Constricts your breathing to shallow gasps. An ache grows in your nape.
The swell of panic, fear, in your eyes makes him hum. But there's nothing echoing back. An absence of light in the deep, placid pits. It looks like still water. A stagnant lake.
It's unnerving how dispassionately expressive his eyes are. Wild, wild. Vats of ink. Pools of obsidian. Ringed in red-lined ivory. Long, ashen lashes dusting over the smears of charcoal under his eyes. Sleepless nights, maybe. Fatigue. The corners are tattooed with coal, leaving behind a thumbprint in the crease.
But empty. Barren. No light.
Like black holes. Eating everything around it. Devouring all that gets too close, but giving nothing in return except a bottomless crater in the bruised-plum nebulous of space around it.
You're not sure you like it. You can't look away.
But in staring back so hard (getting pulled in deeper and deeper), you catch the twitch in his left eye. A shallow spasm. It throws off the symmetry when he blinks, one eye a sliver of a second behind. Desynchronized in a way that seems so—
Unlike him.
Disjointed.
You blink in response. Perfectly synchronous.
His lid twitches again. Just once. Brief. Pale, pink eyelids drop, unveiling a nebula of indigo veins on the smooth, thin surface as they roll down to half-mast over his eyes, now narrowed slightly in contemplation. Thought.
Whatever is happening in his head can't be good. It causes a ripple over the lake. Little rings rebound outwards.
He looks away first. A quick slide of his eyes to the corners, glancing out of the passenger side window. Whatever catches his attention is unknown to you. The anchor on his hand around your throat keeps you still. Immovable.
(Every instinct in your body compels you not to look away from him because nothing outside could ever be scarier, more dangerous, than him.)
A second later, he breathes in through his nose. The fabric of his mask is pulled into his nostrils from the force, forming little black holes under the crooked arch.
You hadn't really given much thought to his appearance outside of big, massive. But there's a strange asymmetry to the slopes and valleys beneath the balaclava. Trying to map his face, fill in the blanks with just black cloth and vague, lopsided outlines, is impossible. There are too many gaps. Too many missing pieces. You can only wonder, then, what he looks like under it.
Monstrous, you hope.
It's just a coincidence that he looks at you the moment the thought passes, but you flinch like a naughty child getting caught doing something you shouldn't when the heavy, dour weight of his impenetrable stare is levelled at you once more. Your heart stutters. It's loud in your ears. In the truck.
You wonder if he can hear it just as loudly as you do—
Another blink, and his gaze flickers down, settling on the gap between your lips, watching the little tremble they make with each shallow hiccup of air you greedily suck in. His head tilts to the side, eyes never leaving your mouth even as he leans down, masked lips brushing over the beading sweat gathering on your hairline.
It's a brief touch. A taste. You tremble when he pulls back, fingers tightening around your flesh.
His eyes are lavascapes.
“Are you, birdie?”
You almost forget what he's asking. The conversation hidden between the scant beats it took for him to measure your worth with the blistering intensity of his stare, and the tumult of your feelings still looping around each other in your belly. Knotting up tight into a ball. There's fear, of course there is.
But the rest—
You'd rather not think about.
The grip on your throat eases just enough for you to shake your head no to whatever he is asking. Doing anything funny, you think, scrambling at the tangle of memories flipping past, trying to connect the pieces to a puzzle you've already forgotten.
It must be the right response. Or maybe it's another question like before, a test where there’s no right answer.
Run, stay.
Smart and stupid.
But it seems to appease him—marginally. His eyes crease. Tightening. His other hand folds over your throat, sliding until his palms kiss the sides of your neck in a near-perfect symmetry.
Something frissons across the blank, placid lake of his expression. Another ripple. A shudder. He leans in for a moment, nose touching the apple of your cheek, and when he breathes in, it’s sharp, reedy. Cold air ghosts over your skin. Long, pale lashes flutter when you swallow.
He hums quietly under his breath before peeling back. The flatness to his gaze is back; a cold, impenetrable distance widening like a chasm as he uncoils around you. You almost fall for this—this indifference. An icy nonchalance. But you've been eating the minuscule quirks of him just as ravenously as he's been devouring yours.
There is something there. A fracture, maybe. A splinter.
But what leaks through from the other side isn't anything close to warmth. It's—
Hunger.
The shift in your throat draws his molten gaze to your neck, still wrapped tight in his firm grip. Your reflection blooms in the vat of black; eyes wide, all white. Pupils narrowed to a pinprick. Mouth slack, corners tugging downward from the pressure of his hand. The tilt of your head. His thumbs press under your chin, pushing you back further until it feels like your neck might break—
He stops. Shifts. You puff out a shallow breath.
What looks back at you is unremarkable in the murk. A sliver of fear. A slip of unease.
Eye of the beholder, you think when his breath chuffs out shallowly through the mask. When that hunger is ground down to a raw, esoteric fissure hairlining the black of his eyes. The widening expanse of his pupil.
You wonder if it's your fear that itches under his skin, dredging up something predatory in his hindbrain. The urge to chase. To bite.
But the nearly indiscernible flicker of his gaze has you brushing that idea aside when it snags on the expanse of his hand coiled around your throat. Easily swallowing it whole with just his palms.
You're not a small thing, but the indomitable size of him makes you feel insignificant.
You think he feels it, too.
His fingers flex over your nape, stretching. Pulling. It pushes the flat of his palm into your throat, ridges crushed against your trachea. But you can still breathe. It's shallow. Hoarse. A touch painful. Dizzying in a way that makes you feel like you're on a rollercoaster. A teacup ride that just spins and spins and spins—
The gap closes. A sliver of air snakes down your throat. Muscles flexing, shifting. Struggling to swallow around the pinch of his hand. A harrowing task when you feel the gloved fingers link to the first, then the second knuckle, tying together in a too-tight, impossible, noose around your neck. Thumbs overlap. Fingers slide into place. It forms a chain of his hands with no gaps between them. Not a single sliver of skin shows from under the leather of his gloves.
He makes a sound when they meet—a nasal groan in the back of his throat, mouth clenched shut so the air has no choice but to tear through his nose. It's raw. Fractured. The devastating moan of a tiger nuzzling at its meal.
Your vision blurs. A black fog presses into the edges, seeping over the arch of your peripherals. Dripping down slowly over the hazy smear of the man. The way the ochre sun peeks over the angular roof of the accountant's office illuminates his back and casts swaths of shadows over his front. Drenching him in murk.
Despite the flickering darkness shuttering over your sight, you don't blink. Even as the tears prickle at your eyes, they stay open. Fixed on him. Black holes, you think, watching as the fever marbling those obsidian pools recedes. Cools.
He makes that noise again. Softer this time. A purr from deep in his chest. A breath. And then he peels back. His hands go slack. His shoulders slumping back into the lax, easy spread from before as you gasp hard, nearly choking on the flood of air that roars down your throat.
Your cheeks feel hot for a moment, and then cold. Icy. You don't have to touch them to know that you're crying. That the deluge clinging to your lashline spilt over, dripping messily to the collar of your shirt.
The placid lake is back. In the stillness, you heave. Mouth hanging open, chin quivering. His thumb lifts, slides over the curve of your chin. You don't feel it. Numbed, maybe, by the brief kiss of hypoxia. But you see it. Watch as he slides it up to the jut of your lower lip, the black, angular tip tickling over your skin. He follows the seam between skin and lip, tracing it to the corner of your mouth. It's slick. Drool pools in the crease, dribbles over the top of his finger. His eyes drop when he mops it up, catching it on the pad.
He makes another noise. An arid rasp bubbling between the soft tissue behind the roof of his mouth and the back of his tongue. It's ugly. The shiver you try to fight back slinks through.
His hand peels away from your neck, movements lax. Slow. The unwinding gait of an idling tiger in no real rush, no hurry, because there's nothing in the frigid Arctic that can touch him.
You watch him with flared eyes as he brings his thumb to his clothed mouth, and rubs your spit into the fabric of his mask.
His eyes don't break away from yours once.
Your spit doesn't stand out against the black of balaclava, but the idea of it burns through you. Throwing you headfirst into a dazed stupor. Dizzy. Confused.
Satisfied with whatever it was supposed to mean, he clambers out of the truck before coming around to your side. Distantly, you're sure this is what he meant by funny ideas when he passes the headlight, head straight and eyes gliding around the empty street. An opening to run. You know where you are. It would be easy to flee. Hide in the construction zone just ahead, tucking yourself into the tightest corner you can find until help arrives.
Help, though.
Officer, please. I got caught selling meth in the mob's territory and now they're going to skin me alive. Please hurry—
Right.
They'd rather help bury your body than get in the way of the mafia. Gangland violence isn't their concern unless it tumbles out into the street. Fat wallets keep even the most compassionate person quiet. Willing to turn a blind eye.
You'd be thrown in a cell. Or dropped off at their doorstep.
Either way—
You won't be coming back alive.
There's nothing to steel, harden, when he pulls the door open, your nerves long since ground down to fine powder. Nothing to fight against, either. He hauls you out of the truck, hands firm on your skin. Bursting blood vessels easily between his fingers. Barely any effort at all to crack your bones.
The moment in the car seems miles away when he pulls you in front of him, hand curling over your nape. Any flicker of humanity rendered out when he pinches you tight and shoves you forward. Dragging you back to the butcher shop by the scruff of your neck, leading you down a narrow set of stairs to the basement where pale white carcasses hang from hooks on the ceiling. He laughs when you tense. When your heels dig into the brown-stained linoleum.
Ain't gonna hang you, he mocks, fingers dipping punishingly into the sides of your neck. “Not yet, anyway—”
It brings little comfort when he drags you to a room in the back, kicking open the door with the toe of his boot before pushing you inside with a nudge against your nape.
It's dark. Walls covered in stains; mould, mildew. Something you hope is just rust. A single mattress is shoved into the corner; sheets stained with sweat and grime. Tinged a pale brown. Two pillows sit at the top, lopsided and matted with use. Threadbare. A twisted, black heap of fabric sits at the bottom. Wisps of cotton poke out from the cigarette burns.
A pair of muddy, black boots sit against the wall at the end of the bed. A basket of clothes—jeans, black shirts, black sweaters—is piled on the wall across from the door.
The room smells of stale sweat and old cigarettes.
You don't want to be here. The thought is abrupt. Immediate. Unease prickles along your nape, warmed and damp under his gloved palm. Between the look of the room—the floors stained the same suspicious brown, the rumpled bed in a corner—and the smell, you know this is not a place you want to stay. To be trapped inside with a man cut from Everest; whose hands are more dangerous than the sharp end of a knife.
He must feel the tension brimming beneath your skin; the spark of adrenaline surging through your veins. The clamp of his hand on your nape digs in tighter. Holding firm.
A breath tumbles out, thickening with mockery. “Like I said,” he leans down, pressing the mountainous width of his chest into your spine. The accentuation in your size difference, how big he is in comparison to you, makes you feel like prey. Small. Brittle, thin. He eats you whole. Spares nothing for later. “I wouldn't do that if I were you.”
Another nudge and you're pushed further into the room. He leans away, foot shoving back on the door until it snaps shut with a noise that cuts through the gossamer that spun around you, bifurcating reality from dream. The haze is wafted away, and all that remains is a barren room with a lumpy mattress, the smeared stain of rotten blood coagulating on the floor, and his body boxing you in. No escape.
The rumble of his chest shakes loose the cobwebs spooling across your thoughts. A brush of humid air ghosts along the line of your jaw, dampening the skin below your ear as he leans in close, too close, and purrs:
“Go on now. Strip for me.”
Each scrap of clothing you slowly roll off of your body is exchanged for a slip of information about him—who he is (Simon Riley, the name rumbled through the split between his teeth; a low, brassy purr as his eyes gleam in the dark, drilling into the expanse of skin unveiled to him)—and what he wants—
Nothing, he tells you, lifting one massive shoulder up in a half-hearted shrug. Jus’ what's owed to me, pet. For stickin’ my neck out f’you.
You don't think he did. Not really. But you're harshly reminded of the unsubtle threat. The gun balanced on his massive thigh. So wide, so big, it seems to make it look smaller in comparison. Tiny. A toy.
Child's play.
It's made worse, somehow, as he lounges. Sprawls out on the bed, legs spread, pulling taut on the jeans that stretch around the thickness of his upper thigh, bunching around his calves in a half-tuck inside his black boots. Arms flexing. Folded over his broad chest. He rolled the sleeves of his black shirt up to his elbow, showing off an impressive tapestry of harsh, faded black ink. Crisscrossing lines. All asymmetrical. Guns, barbed wire. A bullet with a wide, toothy grin—
All of it knits together; woven into a tangled mass of muscle. Of man, hidden under scar tissue. Rope burns on his wrists cut so deep that the skin is permanently dented in. More cigarette burns hidden inside the mess of ink. Jagged lines—from a knife, maybe; bullet wounds.
His skin tells stories of a terrible life. Ink spills over the worst of them, but they're visible under the fading charcoal. A series of burns—acid, fire, chemical—and raw, torn skin. He looks like he's been mauled. Pressed into the cold metal of a wood chipper until chunks of flesh were taken out. But even with these deep gouges, craters of missing tissue, he's big. Bulky. Soft—like a tiger. Predatory muscle tucked away under a thick layer of fatty tissue.
The pillowed pouch of his belly, the softness around his biceps—
It belies the danger underneath. The steel.
But as scary as it is, it has nothing on his eyes.
Glinting in the dim room. Dark pools of obsidian that follow each movement with an almost clinical keenness. Sharpened to a razor's edge.
They might be pretty, you think, if they weren't so intense. So liquid. His eyes gleam like wet ink, languidly rolling along his lashline as you clumsily shed your jacket, your blouse. Shoes, socks. Pants. Until you're in nothing but your panties.
Swallowing around the influx of panic that flutters like little birds beating their wings against the soft walls of your throat, you slip your fingers into the hem, now or never, and—
And you hesitate.
There's a difference between undressing willingly and doing so to save your life. It should spurn you on—survive, survive, survive—but you freeze at the apex. The summit is within reach.
You know what happens when you climb it. Cross over the invisible threshold.
What you've been trying to ignore this whole time, ever since he shoved you into the room with a huff, taking his perch on the edge of the bed, legs spread wide, but in such a terrifying state of vulnerability, nearly nude, you can't any longer. Can't avert your gaze to the stained linoleum in a thinly veiled effort to keep from glancing at the thickening bulge lying prone against his thigh.
His—
Well.
You knew what he wanted when he grabbed your face in his hand, squeezing your cheeks until your lips pursed, puckered for him to run his finger along the inseam. Prying your teeth apart. Rubbing his finger over your tongue, eyes dark—full; black holes pulling, tugging you in, dragging you closer to the event horizon framed in a ring of arsenic—and locked on to the sight of his gloved knuckle disappearing into your mouth. Wanting. Hungry.
You knew. And now—
Committing to it is legions above what you’re mentally prepared for. Nausea brims, churns your stomach. Unease curdling inside of you like rotten milk.
You don’t want this. But you don’t have a choice, do you?
That notion, the idea, prickles along your nape, raising the fine, peach-fuzz there until it stands on end.
You freeze. Movements still as every muscle in your body tenses. Coils. You can't do it. Can't—
A huff is dragged out of his chest as he sits up, knocking the gun carelessly to the mattress. His eyes daggering, sharpening into needlepoints, as he stares at you.
“Gotta do everything f’myself, do I?”
A grunt and he’s up. Pulling himself to his feet with nothing but the flex of his abdominal muscles.
There's no reprieve. Not a moment graced to gather your bearings before he crosses the distance between you. Once a comfort, a chasm, now conquered in a single stride.
The tips of his gloves are cold when they brush over your skin, sliding down the slope of your waist until they meet the hem of your panties. The last piece of modesty you have—
But he doesn't wait.
You're aware that this isn't a non-consensual thriller where the lead looms over the hapless love interest, eyes blazing with passion and need. That each interaction is drenched in a thick, palpable tension tethering the two together. Urges coalescing. Threads pulling taut, magnetic, dragging them closer and closer to the brink until they tumble over.
This is reality. And he doesn't stare into your eyes with an all-consuming desire as he slowly removes that last scrap of fabric keeping him from devouring you. No.
His skin-warmed fingers push under the elastic band with a rough shove, curling into the fabric until it tightens across your pelvis and thighs, and then he huffs, annoyed, and pulls. Pulls—
Until something gives.
The lace yields to the tension in his flexing bicep, and scrapes over your skin as it rips apart in his hand, threads snapping. Popping.
It hurts. Stings. You hiss, but the noise is ignored when he peels the ruined scrap of fabric from your legs, shoving it into his back pocket with a grunt of satisfaction. He looks back to you, eyes rippling like the dark, ink-black surface of a lake during nightfall, and coos, mocking and mean—
“Not s’hard, was it?”
He leans closer to you, a hand skimming up your spine before his fingers curl around your nape, keeping you still for just a breath before he pulls you into him with too much force. Your hands lift, palms slapping against his thick stomach when the movement nearly topples you over and threatens to break your nose on his chest.
“Makin’ me do all the work when y’supposed t’be payin’ me back? Ain't very nice o’you, is it?”
He touches you like he's taking stock of your worth. Grabbing a heavy, rough palmful of your beast in his hand, squeezing. Testing the weight, the softness, how supple you were between his fingers like he might with a piece of fruit. Meat. Prodding into the flesh, feeling the ripeness there. Gauging whether or not it was a piece he wanted to keep.
It's demeaning. Humiliating. He treats you like cattle; presses into the elasticity of your muscle, examines every inch of your skin for blemishes. Scouring for imperfections. There's no softness in the way he grabs handfuls of your body—squeezing your breasts, pushing them together, rolling your nipples between his thumb and forefinger; pinching your belly, your sides, your waist; curling his fingers under your thigh, lifting it until it hitches over his waist, cunt exposed and pressed tight to the bulge trapped in his jeans. Your ass is handled rougher than the rest. Each cheek sitting in a hand, squeezed and punched and spread embarrassingly wide.
He ruts into you as he does it. Pushes the thick, fat length of him into your belly, rolling his hips against you with a heavy, ragged puff of air.
He feels big.
Everywhere, of course—it’s not so much his height, but the absurd width of him that really digs into your hindbrain, crossing all those intricate wires until they're tangled up, knotted together. Seeing his thigh, the same scale as a tree truck, slotting between yours—a mere branch by comparison—makes your belly flop. Turn over itself.
The muddled wires spark. Heat pools between your hips.
He could crush your head between them like a bear pushing its paw down on a watermelon.
It's fear and heat.
The two work in tandem, forming a seamless cohesion, as they flit down your spine, brimming up the urge to sink to your knees, the need to roll over and show your belly. A paradoxical desire to both run and be chased.
You're not sure if he's tendering your meat to eat later or if this is the usual type of foreplay he engages in, but once satisfied you're softened up enough for him, he shoves his fingers between your thighs with an abrasive hum that reverberates through his belly, tickling your palms.
“Tired o’waitin’,” is what he says when your head jerks up, eyes widening in shock. Terror. Horror. “Don't look so surprised,” he huffs, dryly. Voice a rough scrap over your cheek. “What'd y’think was gonna ‘appen?”
“Wait—” but he doesn't.
His fingers twist, pushing through your folds to graze your clit. It isn't gentle. It's sudden, quick. You gasp more from shock than pleasure; the rough slide of leather feels strange on your flesh, and your head is too muddled to separate fear from bliss.
Despite that, your body heats. Reacts to his touch. Your lower lip wobbles. You bite back another sound that crawls up your throat when his knuckle catches on your clit again, the pressure just shy of too much.
The burn, the fever, melts the unease. Shallow gasps spill out. Your cunt clenches, fluttering around nothing—throbbing, growing sticky, slick; achy and empty—when he starts to glide his digit between your folds. Little sawing motions drag each groove and stitch of his gloves over your pebbled clit, each thrust of his hand between your thighs making heat pool between your hips. It's done so clinically, so detached, like his hand rubbing over your leaking pussy was nothing to him. An action to get done, a task to complete.
It's the shame of that, the embarrassment, that makes you want to weep. Your fingers dig into his chest, nails pulling uncomfortably on the pleated bumps of his jacket as you grip the fabric right between your fists, clinging to him like a newborn fawn—all wet-nosed, teary-eyed; knobbly knees threatening to buck.
“S–stop—” you mewl when the monotonous rhythm melts into something harder, more intense. Heart thudding in your chest, heat burning you up as he turns his hand, palm up, between your sticky, shaking thighs. He rubs his hand back and forth, curling his middle finger up when he passes your hole, tip pushing against your leaking rim.
The friction aches. The stretch stings. The leather feels strange, foreign when it pries your folds apart and dips inside of you.
You don't like it. It's too much—
He makes a sound—a tut—when you pull away from him, standing on the tips of your toes until the blunt curve of his finger slides out of you. He sucks his teeth in a mockery of disappointment before digging his fingers, hard, into the sides of your neck. A warning. You whine. Whimper—
It goes unheeded. And when you press your thighs tight together, shivering at the slip-slide of your skin rubbing against each other, he growls. The noise is inhuman. Animalistic.
Your act of deviance comes with a swift, bruising punishment.
His fingers tighten on your neck once again. A warning squeeze as he reaches down with his other hand, grabbing your hip. It keeps you still, immobile, as he bullies his boot between your feet, kicking your legs apart. You're not expecting it. When you stumble, he huffs in amusement. Can't hold yourself up? Want me that bad, huh? Needy fuckin' thing, ain't you?
You don't get a chance to respond. His palm splays wide over your hip, leather creaking as he flexes, stretching his fingers out, tapping some soundless beat out against your skin. Touching you like he's owed the privilege. The right. And in many ways—
Go’ a problem, you an’ I
—he does.
Brute strength, and an unmatched, almost laughable, dearth in your physicality ensures that he has the upper hand—even without the gun he left on the mattress; darker and flat, a full matte compared to what you were expecting.
(They're always so shiny in movies, aren't they?)
The threat of it—dull as it might be—roots you to the spot as he slides his hand down, thumb brushing over your belly button, dipping in; pressing until your stomach starts to ache—
It peels away when the whine wells up, sloping down, down. Teases your mound with the tips of his fingers, gentle swipes along the sensitive seam of your belly and pelvis, the sensation is an odd tickle that pulls at your navel, pulses at the apex of your thighs. You mewl—a slow, soft thing that barely makes it out from between your teeth—and he lets his hand drop. Palm flat against the soft flesh of your mons, fingers reaching, spreading, until they curl over your folds. Index and ring finger tucked tight into the hollow bend of your pelvis and thigh. The tip of his middle rubs gentle strokes over the skin above your clit. It's a whisper of pleasure. The idea of a touch.
Mindless, your hips flit, following his hand—
“Needy.”
It cows you. Douses you in icy shame. There's barely any mockery in his even, observant tone, but you feel it unfurl over your shoulders all the same.
He doesn't give you a moment to think, to let the ripples of humiliation take over, forcing you to pull away, hide. His fingers trail over your hood, the pebble of your clit. The sensation, the cool undertone in the leather of his glove, is unlike anything you'd felt before. The thick stitches in the fabric catch on your flesh, nerve endings flaring in pleasure. Heat blooms in your belly.
It feels good.
You gasp, head tipping back. His hand winds around your waist when your knees buckle, catching you with a rasping huff—
“Feelin’ good, ain't you?” He pulls you tight to his chest, finger rubbing circles around your throbbing clit. Your cunt clenches, empty, and you whine, needing something more. Something to fill the ache inside of you—
His finger slips. Slides easily between your folds, parting your lips around the thick of him until he reaches your drenched hole. The sounds it makes when he taps his finger against your fluttering core makes your toes curl. Has heat blistering over your cheeks, down the slope of your neck.
It makes him groan. The low growl makes you throb, clenching in needy little pulls, pulses, as his finger dips into the slick dripping out of you.
“Suckin’ me in,” he grunts, and pushes his finger inside, thrusting up to the last knuckle. Palm tapping against your folds as his index and ring finger close to give him more room to sink deeper into you. The messy, slick squelch is loud, rolling over the mewling gasps that tumble from your lips.
Heat floods your belly at the belly-deep groans he lets out when you squeeze around him.
“Stranglin’ my fuckin’ finger, birdie—”
He leans down, knocking his forehead against the side of your face. It's more intimate than you were expecting. Jarring. The proximity plays a twisted game inside your head—the urge to run, to roll over coalescing into a paralyzing tailspin. Rooting you to the ground when the warm, damp knit of his mask grazes your cheek.
The intimacy of his head on yours is eclipsed when you can feel the shape of his mouth through the fabric.
It's softer than you expected. A plush, fleshy give when he presses his lips against your skin. And—
A gap.
On the side of his mouth, there's a gouge. A pockmark. You feel the gap, the absence, of his flesh when he rolls it over your cheekbone. You try to read the asymmetry of his face—mapping all of these misshapen parts; his mauled lips, the crooked nose that digs into your skin and leaves behind a tacky smear of condescension when he breathes out through his nostrils in a heavy puff of air—and convince yourself that you're doing it so you can bring these patchwork pieces to the police later.
Survival, you think, your head tilting back as he noses down your neck, tickling along your skin.
(And when your cunt flutters around the rough, thick drag of his finger petting along your walls, you add: a bodily reaction. That's all it is.)
He takes another lungful of your scent before he rocks back on his heels, pulling away from you. Straightening up. Looming above you once more.
“Now—”
He pulls his finger out of you slowly and you try not to whimper at the empty feeling that brims up. The way your hips rock toward him, seeking and eager. Wanting.
Needy, just like he said.
Just a bodily reaction—
He holds his hand up to the dim light flickering over his head, fingers spreading apart as he takes in the glossy shine of his middle finger.
The gleam of it makes your ears feel hot. Shame pools in your belly as he makes another noise—a groan, deep and low, in the back of his throat. Eyes darkening as his pupils bloom, eclipsing his irises in an endless pool of black. They flicker toward you, listing half-mast in a way to leonine, so predatory, that it shudders through your bones. Run, run—
His hand flexes around your waist when you twitch. A warning. A threat. You tremble when he leans in, masked lips brushing over your cheek once more. Breath ghosting through the fabric, tickling the inside of your ear.
He smells of war. Of fire and brimstone. Napalm and nitroglycerine. You want to close your eyes, look away, but you can't. His proximity alone roots you to the spot. Turns you into a prey animal, frozen on instinct alone as he prowls around, creeping closer. Maw stretching wide, drooling dripping off razor-sharp canines—
“Let's see if y’worth all the trouble.”
—and he bites.
Knocks his palm into your sternum, roughly shoving you down on the mattress.
His hands fall to the button of his jeans. “Ready?” He asks, but doesn't seem to care about your answer. Opts, instead, to fall to his knee beside you. It pulls on his zipper, tugs it all the way down with a sharp, metallic sound that cuts through the stagnant air as each ring of teeth is pried apart.
You can't help it. You look. Dragged there by something primal, magnetic—the morbid curiosity to see the monster for yourself as it tries to take a bite.
And almost immediately, you wish you hadn't.
The spread of pale skin, dark curls jutting out from the split of his jeans, makes everything feel more real, and moving fast. Whiplash quick. Happening in a blink:
The shift of fabric as he pulls the mask up over his lips, letting rest on the crooked bridge of his nose. A flash of his mouth, mangled. Mauled. Full of ugly, pale pink scars. A gap where tissue once knit his upper lip together. The bite of crooked teeth as he brings the sticky, wet tip of his glove to his mouth, sinking in. Pulling. Tugging. The roll of skin—a rose, a gun, a skull—all encased in barbed wire; thick rivers of blue-green veins.
Another pull and it's free. Dangling between his teeth for a moment as he reaches up and shoves the jacket off his shoulders. Rolling and thick. Wide. A broad chest. Soft belly. There's an inch of flesh around the expanse of him—biceps, thighs, calves, chest, stomach, shoulders—but it's a buffer for the corded, streamlined muscle beneath. A layer of fatty tissue.
Like a tiger, hiding its dizzying musculature beneath a thick, loose pelt.
When he moves, it flexes. His shoulders roll; muscles bunching together, pulling taut under soft skin. The jacket slides off. Falls to the ground behind the mattress. Forgotten, discarded. The glove is next to go. Dropping from between his teeth, landing just beside your ankle with a muted thud.
He follows after it. Ink spilling over his lashline as his eyes drop, staring at the roll of his skin tucked on the outside of your thigh. Trailing up to your knee. Your hip. The split of your cunt beneath your other leg; knee tucked to your chest.
A flash of something, a flicker, is the only warning you get before the back of his hand is nudging the glove off of your skin, replacing it with the rough, calloused grip of his palm.
You jerk at his touch, flinching back—
He's intimidating above you like this. Leaning back on his haunches but still as tall as you are standing up. The sheer absurdity of his height—his width—is dizzying. Gives you vertigo when you look up.
His throat shifts when you move. A swallow. Coarse stubble grows down the column of his neck, dusting over his lower jaw, chin. The rest is swallowed by the balaclava bunched around his crooked nose.
He's not—
He's not handsome.
A smattering of crisscrossing scars, burns, skin pocked and gouged out in deep pockets along his flesh—the slide of a knife carving away at him, you think; digging down to his marrow—all take away from any sense of modern attractiveness you might feel for him with his broad, jagged nose and full lips.
But there's something rugged about him. Untamed. Wild. Appealing in a dangerous way.
You don't know if you would have let this happen under different circumstances. If this minacious beauty of his would have worked on you enough to want it outside of this awful, almost unfathomable trade.
He's too big. Wouldn't even fit inside of your house—
The graze of his thumb on your angle knocks the thought loose, and you're dragged back to the heat of his hand. Rough and coarse; palms slightly damp from the glove. It tugs on your flesh as he draws it up, a rubbery sort of pain as it catches on the soft, dry skin of your ankle. Your shin.
He follows behind a second later, pulling himself into the mattress with a huff, knees shuffling forward as he crawls over you. The jostling rocks your body. Makes your breasts shake as he lumbers on the bed, hand still sliding up, up, until his fingers curl over the bend of your knee.
The bed dips under his weight. Your body sagging, rolling into the divot beneath his knees. Tucked under him. Loomed over. He stares down at you through the cutout of his mask, eyes liquid in the gloam. Pools of melting, dripping obsidian. Black holes. Event horizon—
You look away before it drags you in. Submissive. Softened under the harsh burn of his flat, wide stare. He chuffs when your nose brushes over the thin skin of his wrist, mouth sliding over the thick, pulsing vein stretching down from his inner arm and curling into the bend of his hand. Your lips purse, and he makes that noise again.
Quietly amused, and—
He shuffles forward until the backs of your thighs are pulled over his, spread out on his lap. Bare. Open to him.
And he looks.
And looks.
Hungry, you think. Quietly amused and hungry—
The notion is wrenched out of your head when he shifts his weight. Watches the folds of your pussy open for him as he pulls your knees wider apart, head dropping between his massive shoulders, gaze drilling into the split of your thighs. Gasping at the sting, the sudden stretch, does little to deter him from shoving your leg down until the outside of your knee touches the bed. Muscles straining. Pinching. It hurts; hipbones twinging in agony.
But the embarrassment burning through you singes all the pain.
You're spread open under him. Bare. Legs tangled around his waist, stretched wide around the width of him. Ankles knocking into the hard plains of his lower back each time he shifts.
“Fuckin’ hell—” he grunts. Snarls. The word ripped up from the back of his throat, forced through the twisting channels of his nose. Nasal and ugly when it scrapes out between his teeth. “Gonna ruin this pretty pussy, birdie.”
It's a threat. A promise. You twist, mouthing your protests into the warm skin of his wrist.
There's something about his voice—that airy, brassy tone—that strikes a chord deep inside you. Makes heat pool between your thighs, leaking out in a syrupy mess—
His hand peels away from your knee, sliding down your sticky, damp inner thigh until his knuckles graze the sensitive slip of skin sitting between your outer lip and hip. That ticklish, belly-fluttering sensation blooms in your groin as he rubs his scarred knuckles over the crease, catching the slick gathered there on his thick, meaty thumb.
“Fuckin’ soaked,” he groans, shifting his fingers until they cover the whole of your cunt, cradling you in his hand. He holds you like that for a beat, eyes locked on the way you're swallowed up by the broad stretch of his palm.
The rough drag of his skin over your folds feels good. An all-encompassing heat spreads over your tender flesh from the curve of your ass to the bump of your mons where his middle finger rests, almost touching the strip of skin between your loins and your belly. Held in his grasp. Cradled in his palm.
Your thighs twitch. A shallow jerk as your knees try to bend over his hand, but you can't. With his thumb and pinkie tucking into each crease between your outer lip and leg, it keeps you from closing your legs. Hinged by the wide, flat cup of his palm.
And it shouldn't bludgeon through you the way it does. All heat. All want. Need. A growing ache you can't think around.
(bodily reaction, you think even as the image of his hand—big with thick fingers, scarred knuckles; streaks of faded, ashy ink etched into milky, veined skin—laying over your pussy, swallowing it whole, sears into your mind—)
“Can feel your little cunt,” he grunts, feeling the pulse, the little throbbing pulls of your muscles as they twitch at the sight. The feeling. Clenching down around nothing. “Greedy little thing, ain't you, birdie?”
Anger paints his words as he rasps them out. A teeth gnashing, jaw clenching frustration that needles into the scorn, the fury, forced out between the tight seam of his crooked teeth.
You don't understand it. Can't, maybe.
But it's tucked away as quickly as it appeared, shifting into an ugly, mocking derision. Dry. Acerbic. His teeth flash, lip pulling upward in a sneer—a snarl—before he hums, sliding his hand down. The drag of his damp, rough fingers over your swollen folds has your knees falling open wider around his thick thighs, baring yourself willingly to him.
Want it bad, don't you? He mocks, and the sound of his voice alone has your pussy clenching tight, belly fluttering around the abrasive scrape of his tone. Brassy and full. Gritty. You whine, hips inching up—
His hand peels off of your slit. The rush of cold air drags another whimper out of you, hips pushing up to chase the heady, molten feeling of his skin on yours. And he's amused by it—a laugh echoes out, crackling in the hollow of his throat at your desperation—but you're too achy, too hot, to feel the simmer of humiliation nipping the apples of your cheeks.
He's not even making a real effort to pleasure you, to make you feel good, and yet—
Your hips twitch toward him in needy, mewling cants; please sits on the tip of your tongue, cradled between your teeth. Slips out on a shaky, breathless gasp when he meets you on the next buck of your hips, palm slapping over your wet slit.
The crack echoes through the room. Rough, dry skin on soaked flesh.
And it shocks you more than it hurts. The sting is there, of course, but it's just an afterthought to astonishment. An eye-widening disbelief masking the way your cunt smarts, throbbing from the slap. Nerves muffled behind the burn in your eyes, the searing heat pooling in your sinuses.
Wrenched open, unblinking as you stare up at him, your eyes begin to sting, to water. You blink, and feel something hot trickle down your cheek. A tear. His eyes snap to it. Pupils narrowing to a pinprick as he watches it slide down your face, little droplets clinging to your jaw.
“Poor baby,” he mocks, tilting his head as he tracks the teardrop. “Better behave.”
Behave. Like he's admonishing a child and not an adult.
It morphs; rots. Becomes yet another thing you shouldn't feel feverish over. The slick, sticky feeling grows between your thighs as your cunt flutters at the humiliation of it all.
And deeper—maybe—the bastardized sense of care—
(Punishment is affection in its own, special (awful) way and you've been aching for something just like it, haven't you—)
It's pushed down. Swallowed. And you know in the back of your head that if you keep eating these feelings, you're going to be sick. But you can't stop. Barely breathe around the idea of them sometimes—
“Tha’s’it,” he coos like he knows. Sees them bright and burning behind your irises. Little flickers of need, a smouldering want that you'll never grasp at yourself.
So he gives it to you.
The rough slide of his hand, all scarred and dry and calloused, scrapes over your slit once more. A full, flat stroke upward until your clit bumps into the ridge of his palm. Then down, down—
His fingers spread. Ring and index prying your folds apart as he pushes up once more, opening your seam to slip his middle finger through the slick, sticky mess that drips out of your burning cunt.
“Gonna be good f’me?”
The slide of his fingers drags the tip up to the bump of your clit. You stare down at it, fixed on the jut of his ink-black knuckles threading through your folds. The crease of his nail as he slips his fingers up higher, pad pushing over your pebbled clit. They're dirty. Grey-black under his nails. Congealed with dirt. Blood, maybe.
Your stomach churns even as your hips lift. Eager, searching. Hating yourself each second of it. It's gross. Disgusting.
You want his dirty, thick fingers inside of you—
“When I ask a question—” the tip circles over your clit. A shallow roll that pools heat between your thighs. “I expect an answer.”
“Y–yes,” you stammer out, hips flexing against his hand. Seeking more of that white-hot bloom of pleasure he brings with each pass of his finger.
“Good girl—” and you hate how it burns you up from the inside out. “Wasn't s’hard, was it?”
The retort is bitten back with the slow swipe of his finger drawing tight, small circles around your clit. His fingers are rough, scarred. Too dry. The abrasive drag over your soft sensitive flesh makes you whine—a drawn-out whimper nestled between clenched teeth.
It's too much.
Too harsh. Too sharp.
He rolls your clit under the pads of his fingers in jerking half-circles. Puts too much pressure on the bundle of nerves than you ever would—your touches are always soft, sickeningly sweet; gentling your flesh until you cum—and the sting, the burn, of it makes your toes curl. Body burn.
It's good.
And that's the problem.
It shouldn't be. His touch shouldn't make you so wet, growing slick and sticky between your spread thighs, bare to his hungry, prying gaze. Shouldn't make you moan. Hips twitching with each stroke of his fingers—
And then he peels away from you, but the time to mourn the loss of his touch, the fear of losing this trembling ember pleasure, is snuffed out when he presses his wet, slick fingers against the inside of your knee. The touch is intentional. Insistent. He makes an impatient noise in the back of his throat before pushing it down to the mattress. The twinge of pain swallowed up as quickly as it forms when he drops to his elbows between your thighs, forearms curling under your legs, and tugs you sharply into him.
Heat floods your belly when the backs of your thighs press tight to his broad, muscular shoulders, but it's nothing compared to the sight of him on his knees between your legs. It's so obscene you nearly weep—
And then he leans down and licks a long, broad swipe of his tongue over your cunt.
You hadn't expected it, maybe. His mouth on your pussy, his broken, jagged lips sealing over your pebbled clit. Going down on you seemed too intimate for what he was after. His end goal. It does nothing for him at all—
You realise your mistake when he dips his tongue into your hole and his hips jerk forward. Unconscious. Eager. Seeking. The shifting drags his jeans down his hips, and his cock slips free.
Most of the cocks you've seen—in porn, pictures, art—jut out from the person's groin. standing at attention, the nasty comments used to say. Jokes whispered on the playground. But his falls. Droops down between big, folded thighs. Skin marbled in shades of red, peach. Deep gouges dot his upper thighs, some sinking deep enough to reach bone. More scar tissue than flesh.
—than man.
It looks raw. Fresh. Some injuries not too dissimilar to the Wagyu hanging in the front of the storeroom, on display and oh, so out of place in a town where the richest man must be just a hair above the poverty line.
On paper, anyway.
You swallow, avoiding his gaze as he pauses, dark eyes watching you with his mouth pressed against your seam. Unmoving. Still as a predator between your thighs, cock visible between the bow of his torso, jutting sickeningly from mangled legs as you gawk at this hideous thing that makes several, half-hearted attempts to spring up towards you, spitting clear, milky liquid all over with each jerk. Tugged down by its own weight. Too heavy to fight against gravity like the rest of the cocks you've seen have done—
Normal cocks, you amend. Textbook.
His is anything but.
Ugly, you think again, stomach churning. Roiling. Obscene. An odd thing considering what you're looking at but all too fitting with the way it droops, big, flared head drooling pre-cum all over the bed in long, dangling stands that prickle over your jaws—half nauseous, half hungry, too. Saliva pools in your mouth even though the sight of his cock scares you. Fills your belly with dread. Misery.
It looks like a bruise. Skin smeared with purples, reds. Patches of pink. Long, thick veins run up from the fattened, full base to the divot of his frenulum. Thick. It hangs low. Drips.
He raises slightly and shoves his hand down between his thighs, big hand curling over the fat base of his cock. His grip is tight around himself, and he strokes up, from base to tip. It squeezes more precum from the flushed, fat head, and dribbles between your spread thighs in a thick, pearlescent puddle.
It makes your mouth dry. That twinge in your jaws coming back. Festering. You wonder if he'll make you take that thing in your mouth. Choke you on it. Taste his precum—
“Fuck,” he snarls into your cunt, hand jerking over his cock. “Keep lookin’ at my cock like tha’, birdie—”
You gasp at the rough grunt, the way it seems to tremble through your sensitive flesh. More, though, from the way he sounds. His voice brassy, rough. Unkind, but the words bloom a fresh heat behind your navel.
His voice does things to you. Things you're not allowed to like.
Those thoughts are knocked from your head when he bows down again, eyes still fixed on you, and seals his wicked mouth over your cunt. It's hard to compare it to anything else other than being devoured. Eaten in the truest sense of the word.
His tongue splits down your seam, tip digging into your slick hole. A groan bubbles up at your taste—the soft, fluttering clench of your body trying to drag him in deeper. Needing him deeper. A huff of air ghosts over you, dipped in the same derision as earlier but the harsh slap of skin on skin, his hand working furiously over his cock, makes you acutely aware of how much this affects him.
“Taste good, birdie,” he grunts, and then sucks your fold into his mouth, laving it with his tongue and teeth until the skin is tender, swollen. “S’fuckin’ good—”
Your breath catches when the crooked arch of his nose presses taut to your clit. Pleasure twisting in a dizzying pirouette inside your belly, winding tighter and tighter—
His nose jerks up on your clit. Lips moulded to your seam, you hear him rasp eyes on me, birdie. Don't fuckin’ look away—
The rough snarl trembles through your body, sinking its teeth into the coil until it snaps under its jaw. Your knees snap around his head as your release locks your joints tight. His name, Simon, a hoarse cry on your lips. You barely have time to bask in the ripples of pleasure throbbing through your body before he rips away from you with his teeth bared, and his chin wet.
“Fuck—!” he snarls again, shoving your knees apart as he lifts his massive body up from between your thighs. “Gonna fuck you, birdie. Gotta be inside your tight cunt—”
He towers over you, grinding his cock into the apex of your thighs. The drag of his cock—a little damp from being stuck inside his jeans all day; balmy—against the dry skin of your belly makes you shudder. Shivering beneath him as he huffs through the mask. Head bowing. Dipping to look at the way his cock slaps down on you. Cockhead nudging above your belly button, dribbling a small puddle of pre-cum that gets smeared into your skin when he rocks back on his haunches.
His hand wraps around the thick base of his cock once more, squeezing tight as he grips himself above you. It makes the head swell, engorged with blood. Thickening in his hand as globs of pre-spend leak out onto your belly. That feeling in your jaws comes back—nauseous and wanting.
He leans back with a hum. “Like my cock, eh, birdie?”
The crass words bring a fresh bloom of heat simmering in your veins, creeping up your collar. Like doesn't really cover what you feel when you stare at it—his inked hands running along the long, veined shaft—and the unsettled feeling in the pit of your belly rears when he nudges forward, the weeping head of his cock bumping your mound.
It's humiliating how much want floods through you just looking at it. At him. Disgust, dread, desire.
You don't answer. Not that you really need to—
Your silence is loud enough.
“Don’t worry,” he murmurs, the rasp thick in his throat. “M’gonna give it to you, pet—”
And he does just that. Slips the head of his cock down the slope of your mound, letting it graze your clit until you're panting, whining softly for more, and pulls it over your slit until his pre-cum is smeared over your drenched folds. You know exactly what this is even without glimpsing the ugly burn of his possessive desire smouldering in the back of his eyes—ownership. Greed. Hunger. It revels in the stain on your skin, from belly to slit; his, all his. Outside and soon—
In.
It shocks a creeping sense of worry into you. “Wait, what about a condom—”
He snorts, ugly and caustic. “What about ‘em?” He taunts, and it's flat. Playful.
“You should—”
He drags his gaze away from the pearlescent smear of his spend on your folds, your clit, and the even, placid look in that stagnant lake tells you everything you already knew.
“I've never—” you start, wincing at the kernel of fear lacing your hoarse words. “Not without a condom—”
It's the wrong thing to say. Near cataclysmic. He drops his head back with a groan that rumbles out of the slope of his throat, sounding like the rip of a chainsaw.
“Firsts for everything,” he purrs, and he nudges your entrance with the bare, weeping tip of his cock.
“But—”
His hand lifts, catching your jaw in the too-wide span of his palm. The force makes your teeth clack together.
“Need me to gag you, birdie?”
You swallow. It's not much of a choice. Gagged and fucked raw, or—
Just fucked raw.
No gag. No condom. You fight back a shiver and wish it was all just from fear.
“No,” you murmur, like you have a choice. “No gag.”
“An’?”
“Um. No–no condom, either—”
It's not enough. "What are you gonna let me do to this pussy, birdie?"
You know what he wants. What he's angling for. But there's a line, you think. A delineation between unwilling participant, coercion, and giving into the need that slinks down your spine, and rots inside your belly.
(Being forced to ask for it isn't permission, but what happens when you want it more than your next breath?)
The shame can come later, you think, and feel yourself give in.
"Cum—cum inside me—"
“Good girl, birdie.”
You hate what that does to you. How eagerly your body reacts to the dark possessive curl in his eyes when you do something he likes.
He nudges your entrance again, this time with purpose. Intent. A heavy pressure pushing on your rim. Too tight, you think, and the sting of the first inch he feeds—forces—into you burns, pulsing behind your navel. His tip isn't even in yet, and it's already too much.
You think about telling him so, offering up your mouth instead, but he leans down on his forearms, and catches your lips in a bruising, biting pantomime of a kiss. A blood-soaked parody with more teeth and tongue—sinking into your lips, nipping hard until the skin splits; catching all that spills with his tongue.
With his weight pressed against you like this, there's nowhere to run when he cups your throat in his hand, winding the other up above your head, forearm tight on your crown to cage you in. And then he shifts. Bears his hips down on yours until the fat head of his cock pops inside of you.
Your squeal is chewed up between his teeth, swallowed down with a rumbling groan.
Caught beneath him, trapped, he works himself into you demanding, heavy thrusts. Each inch burns more than the last. A stinging stretch that brings tears to your eyes. It's already too much and it's not even half. Barely even the tip.
“Can't—” you slur into his wet, demanding mouth. “No more. I–I can't—”
The breath rushes out between his teeth. Your watery eyes drop to the divot above his canine. A permanent snarl. A condescending sneer.
“You can,” he says decisively, words ground out from between crooked teeth. He presses them to your cheek, nipping at the skin under your eye. Possessive and wanting—
(Hungry for something you can't name—)
“And you will.”
—Or maybe you just don't want to. Can't look at the thunderous need draped over his mangled, battered face without thinking of the rumble in your chest that echos back against his thundering call—)
Stupid, foolish thing—
The dark promise of his words isn't a threat until his hand tightens around your neck, nails grazing your skin, and he adds, all of me, birdie as he grinds his hips into yours shallowly. Broad chest expanding with each ragged inhale. Cementing his taunt with a steel edge as you try not to come undone beneath him.
You'll take every fuckin’ inch—
He pulls back until only his glands stretch you open, and you know what's coming when his fingers grip the sides of your neck tight. Holding on. Anchoring you to the bed as he nudges his forearm tighter between your skull and the wall, a protective hold.
Before you can tense up, bracing for it, or even cry out no, please, don't, you can't take it, he huffs, and then slams his hips forward, splitting you open on the fat stretch of his thick, too heavy cock.
Maybe it's hysteria, delirium, but the blunt press of his length against your tender, sore walls balms the ache, the sting. The deeper he pushes, the less it hurts. A paradox that leaves you whimpering under his hand, heels digging into the broad stretch of his waist as you struggle to decide if you want to kick him away or pull him closer.
A war you don't have the power to win when he surges forward, burying himself to the hilt with a growl that shakes the fragile tendons surrounding your heart. Fear, misery. Pleasure, pain. It admixes. Coalescing into a dizzying sense of fullness, unbearable pressure. Catastrophic in its heaviness as your mind reels, struggles to come to terms with the gut-wrenching, heart-aching uncertainty of how you're supposed to go on without having him seated as deep inside of you as he can get. You've never known emptiness before him. Before now. Mere seconds ago.
And now, the thought of it leaves a palpable hollowness itching behind your ribs. Festering. Rotting tissue and bone.
“Simon,” you choke, sobbing his name out under the firm press of his hand. “Simon—”
But he knows.
His arm curls over your head like a crown, and you can easily forget the pinch of each thorn when he holds you tight. Protectively. Possessively. Securing you in his arms before he lifts up, palm sliding over the mattress, touch tender against your cheeks, and then settles it on the indent of your knee. Widening you for him as he spreads his thighs under yours until you're opened up for him.
Those dark eyes are dragged down to the split of your legs where his cock disappears into your slick, swollen cunt. You follow it down, gazing at the impressive width of his stomach bowing over you until they land on the jut of skin pushing out from a messy smatter of damp curls around the base of his cock.
The coarse hair of his groin unfurls as it sticks to your wet lips, and he rolls his head back over his shoulders he heaves through the too tight stretch of your walls over his length. You feel the pulse of him inside of you, thudding like a heartbeat. It blooms molten under the feverish weight of his lidded, dark gaze.
“Fuck, birdie,” he rasps, and it's scorched. Charred. “Look at you—”
As the world is condensed, narrowed down to nothing but the near impossible stretch of his cock seated as deep inside of you as he can get, he leans down, scarred, mangled lips brushing cruelly over your ear, and whispers, see? Told you'd take me.
Every fuckin’ inch.
Your hand jerks to your belly, fingers dancing over your navel as if to feel him there, bulging from under your skin. Nearly hysterical as you try to come to terms with the pulsing, white-hot ache of him inside of you, slowly acclimating to his girth, his length.
He grunts when he sees what you're doing, eyes flaring as your fingers skirt around your navel.
“It's—” you shudder, gasping for air. “It's too much, Simon, I can't take it—”
He rolls his hips with a groan. “m’cock too big for you, birdie?”
His usual cadence is flat, droll, but an unmistakable sense of masculine pride, a deep, egotistic sense of satisfaction, drapes itself over his brassy words. Glueing to the scorching rasp of his voice in a way that makes you unerringly certain that he likes it. Likes that his cock is too big for you. That it hurts.
“Y’can take it,” he prompts, forcing more of himself into you until something snaps. Splits. Makes room. Carves out a space for him to fit.
The brief flash of pain is soothed when he's seated deep. That same paradoxical balm making itself known as he flattens his hips into yours with a noise—half a grunt, or a growl; a lazy, pleasure-soaked snarl. You're not sure what it is, but the sound knocks the air from your lungs, igniting inside of you like a spark inside a tinderbox.
It's only when his balls are flush against you that the same masculine pride brims up again. Primal. Animalistic. The urge to present your soft belly rears up suddenly, and it's only stifled when he grunts again, looking down at you with lidded, black eyes.
“Now, be good and let me fuck your tight cunt.”
He's not looking for assent. Nothing you could say at this moment will sway his mind one way or the other. There's a nasty spool of determination welling up like blood on a pricked finger. Beading up to the surface in a clean, neat droplet as he rolls his broad shoulders, and shuffles into a comfortable position on his haunches between your spread thighs. The motion jostles his cock in a way that makes your breath hitch with each jerk.
It's not painful. Not particularly. But you're overwhelmed by the sensation of utter fullness in a way you've never experienced before. Each grind of his cock against your overly stretched walls deeping that incipient feeling of anxiety brewing in your belly that one wrong move and you'll tear. He's just—
Too big.
And despite his claims—or rather, in spite of them—you don't think you can do it. Don't think you can take him. It's too much. It feels like being turned inside out and then put back into place. An uneasy sense of discomfiture blooms with each too-tight, too-sharp tug of his cock pulling taut on your rim.
Almost deliriously, you think you can feel the pulse of his cock inside your goddamn throat.
“Simon—” you start on a tremulous breath but he cuts you off with a hum.
“Relax.”
You can't. Can't—
“Fuckin’ hell, bird,” he rasps, leaning down suddenly until his face was pushed tight into the curve of your neck, breath shallow on your thudding pulse. “Stop squirmin’ ‘round me like tha’ or I'll cum right fuckin’ now.”
Your heart stutters. Gallops painfully in your chest. His words make you dizzy because for as much as this feeling of him, his cock, inside of you dances on a delicate precipice of being more than you can feasibly handle and somehow the most incredible thing you'd ever experienced before, you hadn't considered how he'd feel.
Inexplicably, it pleases you.
There's something so strange—so extraordinary—about bringing a man like him, like this, to his knees. Pleasuring him by just heaving through the white-hot stretch of his cock inside of you. Making him bury his head in your neck, groaning about how he was gonna fuckin’ bust, pretty thing, fuck—
It was a powerful feeling.
Unwarranted, maybe. But incredible, nevertheless.
“Fuck,” he grunts, and you feel his throat work around a thick swallow. “Gonna fuck you, birdie. Gonna fuck this pretty cunt so fuckin' hard until you beg me stop—”
And he does just that. Rears back from your neck, and settles again between your thighs—quicker this time. With an urgency that makes you whimper when his cock grinds against your walls hard enough to bruise.
When he finally pulls out until only the flared head of his cock remains, you knot a fist into the thin pillow, clinging on, and latch the other onto his hip as if that could somehow stop the vicious promise in his eyes about poundin’ you into the goddamn mattress. There's a flash, a brief flicker of his eyes, and then he thrusts back inside of you with a grunt that makes your belly clench, and your back arch.
True to the promises he gave, it's brutal. Violent.
Any pleasure you feel is leached through osmosis. A tether bound around his own.
His arm is shoved under your back, angling your pelvis up. Thighs dangling over the thick spread of his own, ass seated in his lap. He drives into you, thrusts deep—grinds his hips until your moans break into hoarse screams, whimpers. Makes your eyes roll so far back, all you see is black even when you blink your eyes up at him.
He carves a spot deep inside of you with each delirious piston of his cock, pounding into you with brutal thrusts, and then holding tight when his balls slap against your ass. Digging the head of his cock into the seal of your womb until it aches behind your navel. Each breath feels like glass in your lungs—
“Tha’s it,” he slurs in your ear, mouth damp against your skin. “Take my cock so good, pretty birdie. Little pussy was made for it, weren't you? Tight cunt all mine—”
His gruff words tug on that tether until you're wrapped around him like a bow. Following him down this endless spiral as he slams inside of you over and over again, cooing in your ear about the sounds you made for him, pretty cunt so fuckin’ wet f’me, birdie, hear tha’? all f’me—
“Cum f'me, birdie. Want this pussy cummin’ ‘round my cock—”
“Can't—” you gasp, arching into him, desperate and needy. It rides a line between pain and pleasure; a needlepoint you wobble on. “Need—”
You try to reach down, to touch your clit, but grinds his hips into yours with a snarl. “Cum ‘around my cock, birdie.”
“Touch me—”
“Fuckin’ hell—”
It edges on too much. Pain and pleasure teetering on a knife's edge, split apart by a line the width of a razer. Looping and tangling around each other until you can't differentiate between the two. But it makes sense, you suppose, staring up at him arched above you like a black cloud of smoke. All hunger and fire. Consuming, devouring, everything in its path. A wildfire.
Butcher, you think again when his hand wraps around your throat. A mimicry of what he did in the truck, forcing your eyes on him. Your life tucked neatly against his palm.
These hands take lives. It's what they're made for. All scarred, and thick. Scar tissue and bone. Muscle and cartilage. Meant to render meat of cattle. Slaughterhouse in the shape of a man. Consumption personified.
But where there should be fear, all you feel is an echoing sense of hunger. Leatherbound to each other, maybe—
The look that passes over his eyes as he stares down at you, cupped in his palm, seems to fit perfectly into the fractured gaps inside yourself you try so hard to ignore. And what doesn't—
Well.
He'll make room to fit.
You reach up, curling your fingers around his thick wrist. His eyes flash, but he doesn't slow his thrusts. Doesn't stop. Just watches as you peel his hand away from your neck, bringing it up to your mouth.
On his palm, there's a piece of skin that's unblemished compared to the rest of his worn, burnt hands. A strip just big enough for you to sink your teeth into.
And you do.
“Fuck, Birdie—!” The snarl is ripped from his throat. His thrusts grow harder, sloppier. Each bit of strength in his muscled hips and thighs is used to pound into you until your vision blacks out. It hurts. Aches. Your heels slip down, catching on the broad expanse of his lower back. And you tighten them around his waist, pulling him closer. Deeper. “Fuck, Birdie, fuckin’ cunt was made f'me, wasn’t it? So cum on my cock. Now—”
Whining, you shake your head. “Can't. I can't. I need—”
You don't get to finish. With a huff of anger, he rips his hand off of the mattress, leaning back on his haunches, and shoves his hand between your thighs, scarred fingers stroking over your pebbled clit. It's rough. Sloppy. His anger hums through his body, skewering into you as he glared down, gaze swinging like a pendulum between the split of your thighs where his cock disappears into your swollen cunt, his fingers rubbing over your clit, and back up the hand around your neck, the tears staining your cheeks.
There's an edge to his thrusts. A viciousness in the way he pistons his hips into you. Dark eyes catching every flicker—each wince, gasp, moan, whine all meticulously catalogued and exploited. He finds the spots that make your hips jerk, twitching both toward and away from him. Angling into the ones that have your eyes rolling back into your head, drool dribbling past your slack lips as you gasp his name out into the dank, humid air.
It smells of sweat, sex, and him. Something brutal, bloody, and dark. Rotten leaves. Charred forests after a rain shower. Dangerous. Tinged with a slight acrid, chemical stench—benzene, oxidizing iron. It drips down your throat, and drenches your lungs. Staining you from the inside out.
And he exploits that, too. Leans in, and breathes heavily against your upper lip, your cheek. Drowns you in his scent. His sweat beads along his jaw, droplets raining down over your brow. Soaked in his essence. Unable to see, smell, or touch anything that isn't him.
With his hand over your mouth, teeth sunk into his palm, all you can taste is him, too. Leather. Gun oil. Blood.
The ravenous look in his eye sharpens, turning into deadly points.
“Such a pretty fuckin' bird.” He rasps, the words shattered, mangled in the back of his throat. They carry the scent of blood when you breathe them in, and you wonder if he forced them through glass. Pushed them out with his bloody fists.
You bite down harder in response, keening through the white-hot pain of his cock spearing deeper than before, stretching you past your limits. The taste of blood on your tongue, the rasping snarl pulled from his chest, his fingers toying with your clit, push you over the edge once more. Again and again, and again, and—
His hand peels away from your oversensitive clit, dropping down to the mattress beside your face. He follows quickly after several impossibly deep thrusts that shove you higher up on the mattress, pressing in until his balls sit flush against your ass, cockhead battering against your cervix, and he groans—deep and liquid—when he comes, spilling inside of you. Rooted deep, cock twitching, Simon drops to his elbow beside your head, smothering you under his weight as the tension in his body bleeds out.
Your teeth stick to the divots in his hand, and the sensation of ungluing them from the wounds you gave him makes you shiver. Slowly, you roll your tongue out, chasing the drops of blood, and breathe heavily through your nose as he burrows deeper inside of you, chest shuddering over yours.
“Fuckin’ hell,” he rasps, hips jerking into yours with a slap that echoes through the room. “Little tease, ain't you?”
Even with his cock softening inside of you, it's still thick. Fat. Stretching you open as he yawns out above you, bloodied hand dropping down to cup your neck again, forearm resting heavily between your breasts. He raises slightly on his elbow, black eyes glinting in the shallow dark of the room. Piercing as they drill into your sweat-slicked face.
It aches when he moves. When he presses his hips harder into yours, the muscles in your legs throb as his broad waist splits them apart. Your feet dangle, sliding uselessly down his back, over his ass, before coming to rest curled around his thighs. Melting into the mattress, tender and sore and all chewed up—
You feel like a massive contusion instead of a person. A pestle. His.
The thought makes you shiver, and his eyes flash in triumph like he knows.
The feeling of him pulling out of you draws a whimper from your lips. The drag on your sensitive, bruised walls is a strange mix of tender pleasure and pain. He chuckles at your mewl—dark and low; the sound of nightmares, you think. Crackling sap on charred wood.
You try to pretend it doesn't make you shudder, but the way he hums in response dashes the feigned oblivion before it can form. All you can do is heave on the bed, and watch him through narrowed slits as he leans back on his haunches once again, head cocking to the side. His dark eyes fixed on the split of your legs. The ache in your cunt growing sharp under his molten stare.
“Fuck,” he rasps, the shallow groan pulled out from between clenched teeth. You wonder if the mangled curse was unintentional. Ripped from his throat before he could clamp his jaws around it—a crack in the facade. A hairline splinter in the indomitable mask he wears.
Your heart lurches. None of this makes sense, but your head is too muddled, too syrupy, to think much at all. A quandary for later when he throws you from his bed with a harsh slap on your ass and a and don't think about doing this ever again.
But you don't think you can move. “Give me a minute,” you start on a trembling breath. “And I'll—”
His brows move but his eyes stay fixed on your sore cunt. You can feel him leak out of you, spilling on the mattress in thick globs. The sensation makes you shiver.
“You'll what?”
It looks like he has to forcibly tear his eyes away from you, reluctance forming a cold, angry crater between his brows. The brunt of his ire—white, burning—makes you want to supplicate yourself at his feet, roll over on your belly and show the beast you mean no harm.
(Run, and run far—)
He huffs. “You'll what, birdie?”
It takes a minute to find your voice through all the panic clogging your throat. “I'll leave, um—”
He peels away from you with a loud, rough snort, and drops to his his elbow beside you. Hands curling possessively over your waist, fingers tight. Unyielding.
He pulls you roughly to his chest until your head is pillowed on his shoulder, and then rolls on his back, keeping you cushioned at his side. You try to move, but his arm wedges under your neck, curling over your shoulder. Trapping you to him.
The panic wants to come now. To rage against the shackle of his embrace, to run home and scrub your skin until it bleeds. But the exhaustion collapses over it all until your eyes feel too heavy to hold open. Too painful.
As you drift, aimless and dreamless, his voice cuts through the fog. “Gotta learn ‘ow to cum with nothin’ but my cock inside of you sooner or later, birdie. Or you won't be coming at all—”
It sounds like a threat. A promise. You fall asleep with the words echoing in your head, his arm an anchor around your waist.
He wakes up hungry.
A gnawing in his belly pulls him from the thin doze he fell into after fucking you three more times—with your face pressed into the mattress, ass in the air for him to rut against like a beast; teetering over his hips, the spread of them too wide for your thighs to split over leaving you precariously unbalanced and shifting your weight above him as neither knee sat comfortably on the mattress; and on your belly with him crushing you to the floor under his bulk. The memory of which makes his spent cock stir, twisting limply against his damp, sticky thigh. Matted down with drying cum, sweat, the slick wetness of being buried inside your messy cunt.
Filled now with his cum.
He groans low in his throat as he thinks about it. The sloppy way you let him take you over and over again until you couldn't keep your eyes open anymore, passing out before he finished. Letting him fuck his cum inside of you as you whimpered in your sleep—
Perfect little thing, aren't you? So good to him.
Simon can't remember the last time he fucked someone, much less when it was this enjoyable (an understatement, of course; in the back of his head, wheels spin round and round as he tries to come up with a plan to keep his cock buried inside of you at all times while still doing his work—), and the overflow of unquenched lust churns in his belly. A hunger he can now slake on your willing body. In the silence, he purrs—
But the effort, the exertion, dredged up a different need inside him.
Simple hunger. An appetite.
He could eat—
his eyes slant toward the top of your crown in the dark, and he amends it, quickly, to: in more ways than one.
He'll go home in a minute. Make himself a steak from the prime cut he butchered a few days ago, leftovers that no one had any qualms about when he took several pieces home with him.
(and really, why would they argue with the butcher who keeps their wallets fat and their bills paid?)
It was left on the counter earlier before he got the call that your brother was making another move. Now a perfect room temperature as it waits for him to come back. Cook it the way he likes—
Rare.
The perfect grill is a nice char on the outside, but bleeding red on the inside. Basted in duck fat and garlic. A sprig of rosemary in the pan, but not touching the meat. Just enough to give the juice that earthy, sweet flavour. Let it rest for ten minutes under foil with the rest of the fat poured over it from the pan. Served as is with maybe a dash of salt and pepper on the side.
Simple. But incredibly difficult to perfect, he finds.
Everyone tries to make it fancier than what it needs to be, but at the end of the day, meat is meat. And going from picking scraps from the garbage outside of the Italian butcher on the corner to ordering his own pretentious filet mignon still gives him a sense of unease. Whiplash, perhaps. Nothing to something—how about that, Tommy?
Maybe that's why he prefers to raise and butcher his own cattle. A never-ending supply of meat for him to sink his teeth into even if this whole thing goes belly up and he's back to begging for morsels on the corner. Tommy hiding in the shadows with a baseball bat waiting to ambush the richer men who happen to feel altruistic that day.
This practice bled over into his current occupation, too. The basement of that same Italian butcher shop he used to sneak expired sausage from out of the bins is now his home base of sorts. A money laundering front of the 141. Headquarters for them to congregate in secrecy upstairs. And here—
A torture chamber for those who tried to cross them. Strung up on meat hooks like the cattle they eat, the ones he feeds them, until he makes up his mind on what he wants to do to them.
It's where you should have been, he supposes, thumb brushing a spot of dried blood on your shoulder, right below a nasty bite mark on your forearm. The ring nearly black from the clotted blood pooling in the indents. It matches several others on your thighs—top, insides, back—and neck, belly, collarbones, sternum. All chewed up. Marked by the butcher.
In working for the old Italian man who ran the shop when he was eighteen, he learned that most of the butchers preferred to mark their carcasses when they came in. A little x on the fat to signify they'd be the ones carving up the prime meat.
He didn't think you could handle his knife, so he gave you his teeth instead. But the implication is clear.
His.
It's overkill considering his reputation, and the claim he already had on you. Because even before this, back when he saw you through the window of his shop as he was moonlit as a legitimate butcher and businessman instead of the enforcer, the brute, everyone already knew he was, his interest was clear. You were off-limits. His to deal with.
And while Price refers not to get involved in small-time street dealers, the warnings Soap and Gaz impressed onto your brother should have been the end of an irritating situation and not the beginning of a fuckin’ headache. But no. He had to push. And push.
Until Price gave the order to take care of it.
And that he did.
(With the added benefit of killing one bird and keeping the other in a pretty cage.)
Price probably won't like his solution, but Simon racked up enough favours to keep a little pet of his own. Been a good boy for a long, long time now, and he supposes he's owed a bone.
Or a sweet thing tucked tight to his side having passed out some two hours ago after he slaked his dizzying thirst on you over and over again even though it doesn't feel like it's been enough.
It's rare that he has an appetite for people. Even rarer that he lets this meagre hunger consume him like this. But there's something about you that makes his teeth ache in the same way they often do whenever he's hungry for meat.
He wants to devour you. Consume you. Eat you alive and save nothing for anyone else to taste.
(So—
Price will just have to let him keep you, won't he?)
The mattress vibrates under him. His phone buzzing with an incoming text. He reaches over, pulling it close enough to read the notification on his screen. It's from Soap.
All her stuff is on your porch.
He hums, but doesn't reply. Simply opts to drop his phone on his belly, and tug you closer to his broad chest. He'll wake you in an hour, and the stirring in his groin tells him it'll be for another round. Maybe he'll take you in the freezer. Make you cling to the hook hanging down from the ceiling as he fucks you like that. He has a pair of ties for ox, lamb legs, that he can loop around your wrists and heft you up on.
It'll hurt, he's sure. The binds weren't designed with comfort in mind, but he can easily bear your weight as he pounds into you from below, your pretty legs wrapped tight around his waist.
The image, the thought, alone has him thickening against his thigh. He reaches down, gripping the base tight in his hand as he pulls you even closer, burying his nose in your crown.
At the very least, he wouldn't be lying when he told Price he strung you up.
Three rounds—on your back, your hands and knees, perched above him like a pretty goddess he stole away from a temple—and he still isn't satisfied. Fuck. He breathes in your scent and doesn't think he ever will be.
He'll get you out of here, take you home. Make you the steak he likes for a late dinner, rare and simple—the same one he gave your brother weeks ago when he dragged him into the shop, strung him up on a hook, and demanded payment for his disrespect.
Who'd have thought that his payment would be you?
(fitting, though, since he'd had his eye on you for a while now—)
He nudges you when his phone chimes again with another message doubtless from Soap telling him all your things have been tucked away. Matters dealt with.
“C’mon,” he grunts, running his hand down your spine. “We’re leavin’.”
You blink at him slowly. “Leaving?”
He nods. “Get dressed.”
You're quiet as he turns, reaching for his jeans left in a heap beside the mattress, but he hears the hitch in your throat. The click when you swallow. Unbothered by it, he turns, giving you his back as he wedges his feet inside the trousers, pulling them up his legs.
The bed shifts behind him. “I—I can walk back to my brother's—”
The hope in your voice is a delicate thing. Fragile like fine china. A pretty, vulnerable tchotchke meant to be seen, admired, but not touched. Not handled roughly.
Unfortunately for you, he's never had much of a gentle touch.
When he throws a glance over his shoulder, he's not surprised to find your arm folded over your bare breasts as you kneel on the mattress, your palm resting flat between your parted thighs, wrist and forearm covering the slip of heaven between them from his greedy, prying gaze.
It paints a startling picture, he finds. One with you looking thoroughly ravaged. Taken. But presenting it in a soft sort of sensuality meant to make a man feel both hot under the collar and like an unrepentant voyeur.
Pretty bird, he thinks, and feels his cock stir.
He rises swiftly, hiking up his jeans around his thighs as he goes, and then turns to you with a heady desire to crush that gossamer of hope between his greedy hand like a silken cobweb that will stick to his fingers.
“Not goin’ to your brothers,” he says, pushing his tongue against his cheek to stem the ache burning in his muscles.
You shiver, eyes growing wide, frenzied with fear as you stare up at him. The shift of your throat when you swallow makes pre-cum dribble out of his fattened cock. He's never really had much of a taste for it, but he's overcome with the urge to see you cry—
“Where are we going?”
Amid the ache in his loins, the flickering fantasies of your pretty, lachrymal face gazing up at him helpless, hopeless, and needy, he catches the edge of panic when you speak. The razor-sharp tremble of fear.
But buried amongst it, hidden in the bruised look you give him as he towers over you with his cock bulging in his slacks and his eyes burning with want, he finds a keen sense of eagerness amongst the rubble. Agog, almost.
And fuck. If that doesn't do something awful to him.
“What?” He taunts, cocking his head to the side as your breath grows shallow and your eyes wide. “Did you think that was enough to pay your debt, birdie?”
“What? You can't—”
“Don't like it—” he lifts his shoulder up in a cool, indifferent shrug, enjoying the dismayed expression that falls over your brow more than he should. “—go to the police.”
“The ones on your payroll?” You spit, eyes flaring wide like an angry cat. “You—”
Several things might have continued in place of your choked, angry sob, but it's swallowed down as pragmatically as it was the first time he cornered you earlier today. And as beautiful as your ire is, he finds the cornered look on your face to be much more pleasing. Prettier.
“C’mon, bird,” he mocks, holding his hand out toward you with a tick of his lips. “All your stuff is at home. Don't be stupid.”
“Stupid?” You gasp in indignation, but there's a bruised look in your eyes. A wounded thing that makes his breath hitch in his lungs for reasons he can't really ascertain, but just knows that he likes it. Likes it a lot. “This is—insane.”
Again, he shrugs, but the indifference this time isn't the same manufactured callousness meant to inspire fear. The conversation is stale already. Grating on him. He's not used to having his orders ignored or questioned. What he says usually goes—either through association or reputation, or just the fact that no one has ever come close to filling the same measure of space as he does—and questioning him like this makes him feel too much like a boy, and not enough like the living ghost he pretends to be.
“You can't do this. It's not right.”
An appeal to his humanity. Cute. He huffs, reaching down to fasten the button of his jeans. The sound the zipper makes cuts through the room. “You're mine, birdie. Better get used to it.”
Catching your eye as he says it was only meant to reignite the kindling fear you have of him from extinguishing. A scared prey animal was a better pet than an angry one. But the look on your face catches him off-guard.
It reminds him of a flightless little bird shivering in a child's shoebox. Tiny broken thing his mum warned him not to touch or its mother would abandon it to die on its own.
“Until the debt is paid off.”
A statement, not a question. He shrugs, but doesn't respond. Tilts his head toward the door. “Let's go.”
His lack of reassurance doesn't soften the flint in your gaze, but the prospect of recompense seems to spurn you on. Another wishbone of hope to cling to. And despite himself, he lets you keep it. Lets your little finger wrap around the delicate bone for comfort because as much as you might think there's a fifty-fifty chance of getting the bigger piece, he has no intentions of letting something like that get in the way of his appetite even if you do.
(And his hunger has always been particularly voracious, hasn't it?)
“Come, birdie. Gotta get you home, and fed, don't I?”
18+ | noncon. 70s/post war au. established John x Reader. predator/prey dynamics.
She's sitting in the passenger seat of a brand new Plymouth Fury when he sees her.
A pretty thing, even in profile—carelessly popping bubble gum as she waits for whoever is driving to finish up inside the general store the car is parked in front of. Has her feet curled up on the dash, knees slanting on an angle so she can balance an open book on her bare thighs. One arm thrown out the window, fingers drumming figure eights in the air as the other flips pages that sync up with each pop of her pale pink gum.
The flat, harmonized notes of California Dreamin' echos softly from the transistor radio she has sitting beneath a pair of Shrikes hung on the rear view mirror, caught in an endless dance as they twirl around each other above her painted toes—
the same colour as the Fury, he notes. a deep, bold reddish-brown—like true cognac; wet rust. a fiery colour that sits in sharp, distinct contrast to the muted browns and golds of the empty landscape yawning out beyond the small town.
but then—so is she. a constrast, that is. a monadnock in the middle of muted, sandy prairies. something different, something bold, that catches the eye.
The carnal embodiment of this new world that he's been thrust into, it seems. One where women can sit barefooted in a car, thighs naked and on display for the world to see without a care.
He grew up on a farm. Has seen things most men would consider improper, but it's the sight of those thighs shifting in the sunlight, half-hidden beneath the book, that breaks him. Makes him feel like a voyeur for the first time in his whole life. Like a man starved. Aching.
He wants his hands on those thighs more than anything he's wanted in his whole life. Wants to squeeze the meat of them until she's whimpering, begging him to stop—
Run his claws down the length, splitting pretty skin so he can finally leave a mark. Bite down on the insides that she keeps rubbing together. Make her feel it each time she squeezes her thighs together—a permanent imprint of his teeth. A claim that anyone who has the privilege of peeling her knees apart will see.
(and he'll have the privilege of tearing them apart so they'll never get to see it again—)
He doesn't know her name, but that doesn't really even matter because he knows, in his bones, that he wants the taste of her on his tongue for as long as he's alive. Wants her beneath him, clawing at his back until the ugly, twisted scars there are overwrought with her own claim, her struggle to get away—
(wants her buried in a shallow grave beside him, those fingers that keep shaping out looping little figureeights forever knotting tight around the ribcage that tried to swallow her whole—)
It would be a lie to say he's never wanted anything in his life before when he's spent most of it up until now hungry. Starved. But he's never felt compelled enough to have. Never sated the ache in belly because it always seemed so pointless when it would just start grumbling again in a few hours time; but as she rubs those thighs together, he realises that he's just never wanted something badly enough to take it. To have. To sate the ache, soothe the beast.
And it's just instinctual, really, when he wanders up to the open window, nose in the air, scenting the musk of her perfume that clots into the stench of sun-scorched earth and gasoline. Hands clenched tight by his sides, joints tense and ready to spring open and snap shut. To grab, and hold as he drags her into the bushes across the street and disappears into the canyons below, her ensnared in his grasp: a gazelle in the jowls of tiger. Conquered and caught.
She'll get used to him with time. Grow accustomed to the only taste, the smell, she'll ever know again. Ache for it, too, maybe; when he's gone hunting for food with the key to the chains he'll have to lock around her ankles tucked in his back pocket, yearning for his touch and shaking until he comes home. Pries her open, stuffs her full—
(—so full, she'll always feel empty when he isn't inside her. incomplete. unmade on the sheets he'll steal from the motel down the road where holidaymakers stay when they come to gawk over the canyon rim, shifting those pretty, scarred up thighs together like she is now, begging for something to fill the ache he left behind—)
She looks up quicker than he'd expected she would, catching him as he's only five steps away from her and the forever he's building in the back of his head. The look in her eye is flat, but not surprised. Like she was waiting for him the whole time—
"Hello," she says, low and sweet; a voice full of honey as her eyes widen and her lips curve into a small smile. And it would be, should be, but he can taste the sour poison buried in the sugar. Something that sets his teeth on edge. Stops him dead in his tracks. "You look lost. Can I help you, honey?"
Honey.
Nothing about him would make a woman call him honey. Would have them fluttering their lashes at him like she is, lips curved into an artless smile; eyes lidded. Heavy with desire as they rake up and down his body, from the dusty workboots they shipped him home in before the war ended, to the overalls that don't quite fit anymore because he's no longer that eighteen year old farmboy he was when he turned them in for a green uniform. Everything about him is borrowed. Handed down. Stolen, too, because no one is interested in hiring someone like him when the war has been over for months now, and corporate America is ready to move on from the mayhem and misery, and reclaim some sense of normalcy before the haunted, angry faces of men torn from an era that left them behind can leave a permanent scar—
like what the shrapnel did to his face.
The war he was thrown into far too young left him a scarred, mangled mess of a man; a patchwork calamity some sympathetic doctor had the misfortune of putting back together in a humid, disease-ridden tent. Left him twisted and ugly; spare parts that should have been used on someone else, someone better, but we're instead sewn to the empty shell they called a body, held together with fishing wire and rusting staples.
He's all jagged, craggy tissue; missing pieces and healed over pockmarks because there was no flesh left to spare in a graft—one that wouldn't have done much to fix the damage anyway.
He knows she can see his canine through the jagged split of his upper lip where molten metal dripped down from beneath his eye, leaving a path of gnarled scar tissue in glossy, pale pink, a hideous burr, before it burned clean through his mouth, turning it into a cave. The nose that was broken more times than he can remember now sitting in a crooked angle that no doctor is willing to even try and fix. A gash across his brow. A chunk of skin taken out along his jaw, the wound, the indent, so deep, some people swear they can see bone through the thin slip of skin.
Honey, he knows, is the last thing that usually comes to mind when people see him, and it's this misstep—her sticking to the script even when he must make her skin crawl—that picks apart the artlessness of her lure, laying bare the artifice of her carnal design in broad daylight.
She's a trap.
A lure.
Something shiny and sweet dangling deep in the ugly abyss. Gleaming so bright, it's easy to overlook the curved hook poking out underneath.
"Are you okay, honey?" Her head tilts, lips pulling into a pretty little pout, and he's struck by how good she is when he feels the burn of it in his guts. The urge to unravel himself in front of her, lay himself bare for her to gawk at brims, and it takes everything inside of him to swallow it down. To not give in.
To what, he isn't sure—
Not until the bell chimes, and he suddenly understands her game when the door of the shop opens, and he strolls out.
He's tall. Not as tall as Simon, granted—but still big. Brawny. Broad shouldered, thickened up around the waist and thighs. Bearish despite the expensive linen and gold. The simple brown trousers and starch white button-up likely costs more than anything Simon owns, but he thinks that's supposed to be the point.
Through the glare of the bright sun sitting in the passenger seat of a sleek car, a picture begins to take shape. A businessman on holiday with his pretty, younger wife. The image of American luxury—something that is meant to fill him with greed. With anger. With want. Wanting the car and the pretty thing inside of it is natural, isn't it? Jealousy. Desire. That's what this is. That's what they're selling.
Envy and awe.
On the surface, anyway.
"Oh, right," she chirps, slipping out of the passenger seat as the haunting notes of the song follow her out (if i didn't tell her, if i didn't tell her, i could leave today—), and in the spill of daylight, she's even prettier. A plump, preening little bird grinning wide and bright at him. Begging come take a bite. "My husband said he was looking for someone to help him on our ranch. Do you happen to be looking for work? If you don't have any family around here, we have a room available, too—"
When Simon looks back at the man, he catches a dangerous edge in the cerulean eyes that assess him silently from the driver's side—a hiccup in the facade, he's sure; silence in place of a razor sharp speech about a ranch he can't run on his own while his pretty little lure chirps in the front seat, prying apart his life story so sweetly in this feigned song of concern.
The pieces fall together pretty quickly after that because if there's one thing Simon knows more than hunger, it's a predator. A killer.
Danger.
His gaze drifts back to the pair of birds dangling beneath the rearview mirror, and he snorts. Shrikes. He should have known—
But the thing is, he can see this ruse working for a lot of people. Ensnared by the designer watch on the husband's wrist and the big, pretty gem on the lovely wife's finger. The sweet way she speaks to him—honey, won't you come help us? We'll pay you, of course—could put anyone at ease, lulling them into a false sense of security, and maybe even the bite of opportunism. They paint themselves as easy targets—a dumb, rich couple who can't see the plan forming in the back of the strangers head: go with them. Rob them blind. Maybe even fuck the wife, too. And then leave them for dead.
The landscape aids in this plan, too. The Grand Canyon is only a few hours away. The perfect place for someone to go missing and never be found.
He can see them taking a bite. Climbing into the car—
Only to be met with the flat, dead eyes of a predator. Hunters. The wife sings a sweet song as her husband aims a gun at their heads and tells them to behave.
Or that’s how it should go.
But he knows by the way she keeps glancing back at her husband that he's not following the script. That this isn't part of the plan. That this pretty little bird has bitten off more than she, than they, can chew.
The man—John Price, he grunts after some prompting from his pretty songbird—just watches Simon silently for another moment, eyes too sharp, too knowing; assessing in a calculative, deadly way that a lesser man (and maybe even just a whole man) might flinch at, shudder under the weight of, and try to run away before he hums, cocking his head to the side, and all at once the weight in his gaze changes. Shifts. Like a predator sighting something across the field—
Shedding skin.
There's a flicker of intrigue. A disturbance rippling across the stagnant pond, shaking the cool, flat blue of the abyss, and Simon has to imagine that this, this, is the last thing all of the men who stood in this same spot as he is now, half-dazed by the sweet song of the siren in the passenger seat, saw before the bear dressed in beguiling tweed—a man on his way to a country club, who has never known hunger a day in his life—sunk his teeth into their jugular.
(that pretty bird still chirping away in the front seat—oh, honey, c'mon on now, you're gettin' blood all over the seats, baby—before she turned that razor sharp beak on them, sinking it deep into their soft, exposed belly—)
But the bubbling gleam in John’s eye is that of a different sort of hunger—something different from killing, from fucking.
"Sure, sweetheart," he says, lips twitching under the thick moustache, curving up into a too-big, too-tight Duchenne smile. And all at once, the game changes. Shifts when you let out a happy little laugh—
Simon knows he isn’t another spoil to be impaled on a spike anymore, but a pawn to be used against a spoiled little bird who is too blinded by the thrill of the hunt to see the way John’s lips twist in displeasure—pretty bird, in trouble for biting off more than they, than she, can chew.
"Whaddya say, mm? Interested?"
The hunter becoming the hunted, the punished, is really nothing new, but he’s willing to bet that this is the first time you’ve ever been at the mercy of a man who wasn’t your husband.
Left to fend for yourself as John leans back in a chair, and watches the man you wanted so badly to become your prey, a shared soil impaled on a spike, forcing your pretty, bitten bloody thighs apart until they’re split wide around his hips, shoving his cock into your sore, messy cunt over and over again as you plead for mercy, for help—
(sorry, John, sorry—please—!)
Grasping fingers only inches away from the knife John tossed on the bed when Simon dragged you back inside, downstairs, kicking and screaming because this wasn’t the way the game was supposed to go.
And he keeps you there, perched always within reach of the knife, but never enough to be able to close your fingers around the hilt as he takes his spoils in the soft give of your body. The sticky, slick slide of your wounded thighs squirming around his hips, leaving smears of blood on his skin. A trophy he'll keep for as long as he can because there really is nothing sweeter than the way you beg him for mercy, to please, please, take his cock out because it hurts, and it won't fit, it doesn't, and—
Easily the sweetest song he's ever heard as he acclimates himself to this new dynamic, this shifting, evolving game John is playing a game where he pretends to teach his wife a lesson in proper victim profiling with the thick split of a stranger's cock battering her poor, sore cunt, and tosses out his own lure for Simon to bite down on:
“Come on, sweetheart. You wanted to play, mm? So why aren’t you playin’?”
because the thing is, John has always been more of a pack animal, preferring to hunt in a group, as a unit sharing the spoils, a than a solidary predator.
safety in numbers, Simon supposes, and as he stares down into your tear-filled eyes, and those pretty lips that, only hours ago, were blissfully popping bubble gum now caught in a whimper as he does what he wanted ever since he saw you and stuffs you full, he can't help wondering if you ever knew you were never the hunter, but always the prize.
the pretty bird that drew in hungry monsters like him—
offerings for John to pick through until he filled his empty nest.
an escaped convict finds shelter inside an abandoned chapel in rural New Mexico. and with it, a very obliging woman on the run from her fiancé.
(well. obliging, asleep. is there really much of a difference?)
18+ | HEAVY NONCON. COCK WARMING. SOMNOPHILIA. PUSSY SLAPPING. NONCON CUM EATING. UNSAFE SEX/BREEDING. MARKING. SIZE DIFFERENCE. IMPLIED KIDNAPPING. WILD WEST AU. SEXISM/MISOGYNY. BASTARDIZED RELIGIOUS MYTHOLOGY.
He finds you asleep on a pew.
A gloved hand shoved under your temple. The other curled into a loose fist, knuckles resting against the bench seat. Your elbow tucks itself nicely into the slope of your waist, forearm balanced on your belly as you slumber, fully relaxed and utterly unaware of who—or what—stumbled upon you.
Too relaxed, maybe.
There's a softness to the spill of you that makes his teeth ache—melting candy. Spun sugar. Something that makes him want to burrow his jaws into the marshmallow sweetness sitting pretty for him like a little treat.
His belly grumbles. He can't remember the last time he ate.
And lucky for him, there's no artifice to the steady rise and fall of your lace-covered chest. The swell is a lulling rock that disturbs the dust gathered along the wood in a thick, dense blanket of moulder and disuse.
He tucks the pistol he snatched on the way here into the pocket of his stolen jacket, cocking his head to the side as he considers this unexpected discovery.
The church was meant to be empty. A sequestered haven for him to hide inside until the lawmen chasing him passed by further in the north. This diverging path known only to the man who shared his wisdom of it in the prison. Locatable only by staggered markers left behind by the pilgrims who were plundered of their goods and left to die in the sprawling, untenable wilds of New Mexico.
(It's always been man eat man in the dust.)
He's not sure how you found it. The state of your boots and the bottom of your dresses make him believe you'd been on the run for some time. Coincidence, maybe. Or—
You don't stir at all, even as his boots clunk against the loose, dusty floorboards as he prowls closer to your prone form. His breath drawing ragged from his broad chest. Heart dropping down to his empty belly where it pulses thunderously in his guts. The reverberation thrumming in his groin—
It's been a long time since he's seen a woman.
Even longer since he had one.
It never seemed like much of a necessity when he was younger. His life split between survival and hunger. Ripped from his ramshackle home in Manchester and squeezed into an overcrowded boat headed to America.
Land o' opportunity, his old man promised, but much like all of his predictions (and schemes), America had little forethought to spare on a poor family with nothing to their name. Opportunity—but only inasmuch as the wealth carried with you provided. And being poorer than dirt, it only made sense that New York had little to offer except rubble—more dirt. More soot staining his fingers, blackening his father's teeth.
He doesn't find it too surprising they were chased out west within a week. Trudging along the same dirt-covered road as everyone else in search of something to call home.
The only place willing to take them was an aptly named town called Tombstone. A place where both his dad and brother rest.
Incarcerated at eighteen for enacting revenge on their murderers, and now a full-bodied man of some thirty-odd years, it's a jarring, encompassing thing to see you sleeping like this. So vulnerable. So soft.
Maybe it's the fragility of these curled parts making up the cluttered framework of your body that appeals to some aspect of himself that longs to break small, soft things between his fists. Crush bone like paper. Shatter it into pieces like fine china. Brittle porcelain.
Whatever it is, it itches in his guts. Makes his hands grow slick, dampening with sweat. Blooms a vicious fever in his head. This unquenchable thirst clawing at the back of his throat is only sated by the spill of your soft, cottonlike body tucked into the pew.
It's—
Precious, he thinks, cock stirring, thickening in his borrowed pants. Sweet lil' thing, he coos, tongue scraping over his teeth. All curled up inside a church. Alone.
Waiting for him.
He isn't one for religious zealotry. It held no appeal even as the priests visited the prison, beseeching him to repent. The idea of god, gods, never held much interest to him, but he learned the Bible they carried with them, this sacred object of divine wisdom. A fairytale, not too dissimilar to Chaucer, he found.
But he can't deny there's something a little poetic about this. Something divine.
Almost as if that mighty, tempestuous god they preached about was smiling down on him. An offering not at all dissimilar to the riches he bestowed on the men who caught his eye.
And don't all those men face trials and tribulations before being given grace, too? Lands, and honour, and sanctified, but most of all—
Wives.
And a sweet one, too.
Folded up into yourself like a little bird who fell from the nest. Shivering on the cold, unfamiliar ground as it waits for its parents to come and bring it back. Unaware of the viper in the grass behind it. The hawk circling overhead.
Lucky for you, god thinks you'd fare quite nicely in his stomach instead.
And really—
You should know better, he thinks, hands dropping to the stolen buckle of his belt. Sleeping in a lonely building like this. Practically waiting for him to come along and take what he's owed, aren't you?
And who is he to pass up such a pretty little gift from God?
You come awake on a gasp.
Clawing against iron wrapped around you—tentacles, maybe; you were at sea seconds ago, lost to the whims of the ocean as something tried to pull you down, down—and choking on an inhale that gets stuck in the hollow of your throat, glueing to tissue. A bubble that won't pop. That you can't breathe around—
"Keep squirmin' like tha', birdie, an' I’ll be ready t’go again."
The voice, slinking slowly through the thick fog spooled densely over your mind, comes in a lazy drawl half-growled into your crown, warm breath tickling over your scalp. Unfamiliar, too. And much too close.
Pieces click in the back of your head. You remember running. Hiding in the church. Being moved. Dreaming of a turbulent sea that rocked you back and forth—
Seasick. But no—
This isn't the ocean. It isn't your fiancè.
The thing behind you is bigger, broader. Where you would have expected to meet solid muscle, you instead sink into a thick, warm pelt. One that's all heat. A raging fever. Burning against your back, under your thighs.
This laden heaviness in your limbs. Your belly—
A burn there, too. A pulsing, terrifying ache; this pressure you can't squirm away from, can't breathe around—
Panic pops the bubble stuck in your throat when it surges up your esophagus like a fist. The world slowly loses the haze, the thick cloud of confusion and sticky-eyed sleep clinging like molasses to your awareness, but what is left behind when the veil is ripped off is nothing short of abject horror.
There's a man behind you.
But that's only half-true.
In the sluggish grapple of your cognizance flailing around for solid ground in the heavy drape of hypnagogia, you shove your fingers into the degree of separation between sight and dream, curling against awareness, and—
You're cradled in his lap like a child. Spine liquid against his chest, legs pulled taut over impossibly thick thighs, knees bent at an angle that makes your hips twinge in discomfort. Pulled too far apart, and done so to make room.
Nausea claws up your throat when your bleary eyes drop down to the immodest, intrusive spread of your legs, feet dangling helplessly in the air, bouncing with some unfathomable motion. The position takes a second to unravel, to work out with the sleep-sticky tremble in your fingers. Mind still chasing the end of a dream even as the sudden spill of massive, bare thighs takes shape in the trembling ruins of your cognizance.
And God—
You wish it didn't.
With your skirts rucked up beneath your bared breasts, held in place with a big, heavily scarred forearm looped around your ribs, crushing your arms to your body, you can see the unmistakable rut of pale, mauled muscles flexing, tensing
And then suddenly, lifting.
“Told y’to stop squirmin', birdie—”
But you're not moving—
The pressure from before sharpens into a blistering ache as this—thing—inside of you grows. Stretches. Presses against tender, sore muscles as it snatches the last wisp of air from your heaving lungs.
There's a sting so deep, so wide, inside of you that you almost think you can see the soft curve of something moving against the skin of your belly. A trick of the mind, maybe.
Nightmare on solid ground.
You clamp down against the urge to scream when it shifts within you, pulling on soft, tight walls.
It hurts. Feels like you might be impaled on a dagger, maybe. A knife. A writhing mass devouring you from the inside out. But no—
You know what this—what it—is even if your brain refuses to acknowledge it. To let it take shape.
It keeps you cradled in the protective cup of its palms where the world is superlunary, your body incorporeal. Weightless.
But with every hiccup, each gasp, this nebulous sanctity congeals a little more into the brutal reality of what you've woken up to.
A man.
Unfamiliar. Unknown.
Rasping in your ear. His breath soured by the leftover communion wine you'd found tucked beneath the pulpit. Reeking of sweat and stale tobacco. Dust and dirt. Days on the road. Something wild. Primal. Animal, maybe. The musky scent of a horse, fur heated under the sun. Unwashed man. Masculine and potent. Dirty. Carrying the scent of loam, humus, with each harried breath he heaves against you.
But it's not just the smell of him. His hands, his skin, is covered in a hazy watercolour of grime from days without washing. From the sands of the barren, empty plains soaking into his skin, and smearing across scarred, torn tissue as he sweats in the heat.
Maybe it's his own internal fire causing him to burn so hot. Pyretic. An inferno against your back, under your thighs. So scorching, you wonder, dazedly, if it isn't the devil himself rutting into you below like a bullish beast.
With his feet tucked into big, dusty leather boots, you can't tell, but the sight of hooves emerging from them instead of pale, dirty skin wouldn't surprise you in the slightest.
Maybe it'll be easier to stomach if he was just that because what sort of man would do this to you in an abandoned house of worship.
A beast—
His arm tightens. With a grunt, he shifts, grinding you down into that ineluctable pressure, maneuvering you on his lap like some oversized doll, a child's toy. A plaything for him to amuse himself with. To use—
In the pit of your belly, something blooms. A vicious, untenable feeling of fragility. Weakness. You can't move an inch in his ferric grip. Can't breathe without his assent. You're little more than an object cradled in his hands. Utterly powerless in a way you haven't really felt at all—not even when the man you were supposed to marry curled his hand around your wrist and told you that he'd enjoy chopping your independence down into bite-sized pieces. Gorge himself on your helplessness.
This makes the frailty, that clawing, desperation feel like a boy's play at patriarchal ownership. Clumsy stumbling through the motions. A pantomime of sadistic cruelty. Revelry in power.
That was a loss of control.
This—
This is not.
In order to lose something you need to have had it in your grasp to begin with.
It was yours when you ran from the man, your fiance, when he clamped his hand around your wrist, eyes wild and feverish with delirium, and said he'd keep you forever. Life of imprisonment chained a man who scared you more than the gnarled scar on the side of his head.
And after, too. As you fled from the coach on a whim when it rattled over a small hill, tumbling down the embankment. Hiding in a small alcove, waiting for them to grow tired of searching for you.
Cradled when you found the church. A safe haven. A place to rest—
Only to wake up to a hand on your throat. A purr in your ear.
Hands empty.
Useless.
Curling into the messy spill of your skirts, clinging to the fabric until your joints ache from the strain, and your nails bite through cloth to sink into skin, because that's all you can do.
Clutch. Hold. Plead—
"Takin' me so well, ain't you, birdie?"
Even his voice sounds devilish. A robust, brassy rumble you've never heard from a man before. More akin to the growl of a tiger. Beastal and wrong. Drenched in a thick, unmistakable bliss as he seats himself deep inside of you like he's been bestowed the privilege. Allowed to claim what you denied even to your intended husband—
"P-please stop—"
Each steady pump of his hips fills your belly with more of that impossible, overfull feeling. The too-tight squeeze of you around something that wasn't ever meant to fit pulls at your flesh until it burns.
"Please—" your moan is a wretched, mournful thing, but it makes him grunt into your ear like a starved, taunted beast. The arm slung possessively around your ribs tightening into a painful squeeze that forces the air from your lungs in a huff.
The dizzying spill of hypoxia makes you almost thankful when it dulls the blunt, fat split of him bludgeoning into you in response. A sharp, full jerk that tears through you. Forcefully eking space where there is none left to give. Stretching, rearranging, until you can feel him in the very apex of your being.
But in that, a strange, horrifying trill brims, leaking from the pressure cracks of your bones. Spinal fluid dripping out. Thick, hot oil that steadily floods the mess between your thighs, eroding the bones, the muscles, in your pelvis until all that remains is an oozing, gooey pool he rocks into. Molten.
Sticky, wet sounds spill from the cradle between your thighs, each one burning through your chest until you choke, mortified. Blistering from shame.
It's difficult to catch your breath around the squeeze of his arm over your ribs, and the too-full stretch in your belly. Harder, too, to think. To make sense of the wall of solid, soft heat against your spine. The ache in your thighs as your legs are spread much too wide.
Everything below his arm feels like an open, pulsing wound—
But it changes when his hand, just as scarred, as ugly, as his thighs, the forearm clenched tight around your waist, slides down from its lazy perch on your neck, lowering to the gaping, throbbing wound between your thighs.
He curls it into a loose fist, scabbed, scarred knuckles sharpening into fattened peaks. His fingers bend inward, seeking.
It doesn't make sense until he touches you.
With your swollen folds spread over the thigh (impossibly thick; monstrously so—) girth of him, it opens you up to his wandering hand. He delves into the split seam of you, rubbing calloused, rough fingers over throbbing, stretched flesh.
And for a moment, it's just a tickle. Pressure on your puffy, outer lips, but then he leans back, shifting the angle of your pelvis until he can slide his dirty fingers up, up—
"Fuck, lil' bird. Gonna strangle my cock if you get any tighter—"
You're howling. Thrashing in his hold as the ache pulses, squeezing like a vice around the unfathomable, fattened mass bullying itself desperately inside of you. Rutting bluntly against something just behind your navel that makes you nauseous with each stroke. Every muscle in your body seizes as he grunts, ugly and vicious, into your ear and starts moving you against him, lifting and jerking your body into his lap, meeting his own thrusts.
“Must want it bad, eh, birdie? Listen to you—” his fingers slide through the mess between your thighs, and the sound that spills makes you think of the shores of Asphaltites. The splash of brimstone—slick, wet. Wanting. Am-heh lapping at the waters. “Fuckin’ gagin’ for it.”
You're not. No. You want to scream but the air is snuffed from your lungs. Sickness writhes in the back of your throat, clawing desperately at the walls of the esophageal prison it's locked inside. Inescapable. You can't let it out—
He wouldn't like that, you think, and it splinters in the back of your head. Separating into fragmentary pieces. Their sharp, obsidian edges, still slick with those broken, polluted whims—be good, it drips; be good and take it—press into soft tissue, cutting open gyri. Stuffing the wound—
And he's speaking, too. Groaning in your ear as he rocks into you. Bein’ so good f’me, ain't you? Takin’ my cock like this—
Good.
Against your will, you relax. Swallow down the sickness trapped in your throat. Good. The tension bleeds out of your muscles, and in the slippage, your softened thighs sink into his lap a little more, pushing him deeper than he was seconds ago.
It rips a whine from the back of your throat when that too tight, stinging feeling spins into something else. Still overfull, but—spreading. Evolving. Shifting as spills into the gaps, flooding, and filling, and—
Good. It's good.
The noises he makes change suddenly as your body eases, melting around him almost without thought, wholly against your will. Turns animalistic, feral, as you breathe into the heat swallowing you whole, chasing more of that overwhelming fullness, that hazy, ghosting pleasure that peppers delicate kisses over your nerves—gentling, distant; but growing closer with each shift—
“Tha’s it—” he snarls, shoving his face into your sweat-slicked nape. All teeth. The whitehot brush of a tongue. “Can feel your little cunt openin’ up f’me. Want more o’ my cock, birdie? Such a greedy thing, ain't you?”
The physical sting of jagged teeth scraping over your damp skin marries the burn scorching your chest in a brutally demeaning synchronicity.
It's intentional, of course.
You know what this mockery, this cruelty is, but they reave through the vestiges of propriety, unearthing your shame until it lays between those crooked teeth he keeps pressed into your skin.
The etchings of a smirk tickle along the knob of your spine when his mangled mouth pulls upward at your harried whimper.
“Bein’ such a good girl, ain't you?” He coos, digging those assailing fingers deeper into the soil of your mortification. “Takin’ my cock like this—” a groan trembles over his words, a clawing, helpless thing he can't seem to bite down on. “An’ in a ‘ouse o’ god, no less.”
His voice is airy. Thinner. Drenched in thick amusement as he cleaves into you with a growing desperation.
“Who knew I ‘ad such a sweet little cunt waitin’ for me?”
You want to refute his words, but he just squeezes your ribs before you can shape them on your tongue. Renting your protestations until they fall in a choked gasp, a mewl, at his feet.
“Been locked up a long time. Got a lot saved up f’you—”
This new dip in his abasement doesn't make sense until he shifts, shuffling forward on the pew. It brings your line of sight closer to the broken window on the wall to the right of the crooked pulpit. A candle burns on a worn, wooden stand beneath the shattered glass. In the flickering candlelight, and hazed against the unfathomable blackness of a moonless night in the desert, the image that forms in this swelling abyss is nothing short of horrifying.
As the contours render slowly—spilling like liquid ignominy in midnight satin—the hulking shape behind you begins to fill out.
The first thing you notice—
He's big. His broad chest nearly swallows you whole as he leans over you like a hellish beast readying itself to devour you alive.
But it's not just his size that trips your pulse into a painful sprint, but the sight of him.
He looks mauled. Decorated almost entirely in thickened scar tissue running in strange, jagged lines along his skin, coloured in swaths of soft pink and blotchy purple. Deep pocks. Slashes. The meat beneath the right side of his jaw, right beside his chin, is missing, leaving behind the indented slope of shiny pink tissue cratering deep down to bone.
The baleen lines scraped into his wound look like the flat press of teeth and you wonder if someone took a bite out of him.
He makes a strangled noise when you shudder, tensing at the cannibalistic nature of the wound—of the mosaic of brutality sliced into skin.
“Go’ so fuckin' tight, birdie—” in the window, the blurred image of this beast draws closer to you, mouthing along the slope of your neck with a ruined mouth. A mockery of a lover's kiss as he shifts you in his lap, rasping: gonna make me fuckin' cum if you keep squeezin’ me like tha’
It rips out another shiver that tickles along your spine, making you tense up again with a choked sob as the thickened press of his cock grinds against something inside of you that makes your vision swim and your ears ring—
Cutting through the pulsing roar in your ears is a thunderous groan from deep inside of his chest. It's a savage, terrifying thing that claws over the haze, ripping it to pieces between it can spool over your head.
Blinking through the tears in your eyes, you're met with a swell of cold, deadened fury.
“Fuckin’ hell—” he spits on a biting snarl, tendons in his neck bunching together. A vein pops out from beneath his skin, throbbing in a dark, blue line—
“Ain’t givin’ it to you good enough, huh, birdie?”
You don't know what you did. Can't untangle the sudden anger in his voice as it sunders that thread of his derisive subjugation, ushering in an unfathomable anger slashing over his brow.
With your arms trapped under his, you can't brace yourself when he pushes to the edge of the pew with a growl, and begins to shove himself inside of you with a terrifying speed.
It's too much. You can't breathe around the punishing pace he sets. Forcing himself into you over and over again. Taking you. Making you take him.
There's no escape. His hold is like iron around you. You can barely cling on as he moves you up and down his cock, forcing the fat, blunt head into your sore, tender walls at a bruising pace. Each rock jarring your body as he makes you swallow him down to the root—look'it tha', he coos, ugly and biting and mean, his hand dropping to press tight against your belly; the pressure making you feel sick: go' my whole cock in there now, birdie—
"Tha's it," he rasps, rubbing his mauled, torn muzzle over your shoulder. Jagged teeth catching skin. "Squeeze my cock, birdie. Fuck, go' such a tight lil' cunt, don't you? 'nough t'make a man go half insane, ain't it?" He tilts his head suddenly, blowing warm, humid breath over your cheek when he exhales on a mean, callous scoff.
"S'what you do, birdie? D'you offer this sweet pussy up t'anyone who passes by?"
His words are uglier than the moulting scars on his skin, and they sink deep inside your head when he presses his foul mouth up against your ear, groaning the words out between rasping pants. Tha' what y'do, birdie? Spread these pretty thighs t'anyone? Don't even know who I am and y'pantin' for it. Gaggin' for m'cock—
You flinch away from the sting of them, twisting in his hold to escape. To run—
But he just huffs mockingly in your ear, deriding you about how you're tightening up like a pretty fuckin' bow around his cock.
"Made for it, weren't you?" He taunts, words rolling between jagged, fangled teeth. Sharpened to a brutal, devastating point.
You shake your head as much as you can with his face tucked inside the curve of your throat, mewling feebly in denial because that's all you can do. Whine. Sob. Wailing like an animal as he pistons his hips into you, each jarring thrust accompanying a sting on the back of your thighs as his hard, unyielding flesh slaps into yours.
It's humiliating. Shameful. His finger presses into something that makes your belly knot. Muscles tightening. Spasming. Your leg kicks out against the back of the pew when he smothers his thumb over that place again, drawing tight circles that make your navel throb, pulsing as if your heart dropped down to the pit of your belly. Beating like a drum behind your mound.
It's agony. Terrifying, awful agony—
But it isn't. It's not. Not really.
Not when he drapes himself over your back, lowering his stubbled, unevenly textured chin to your shoulder, and shoves you forward. The angle gives him more room to pull out, and the emptiness that follows each retreat has you sobbing. Fingers clawing at the tangled mess of your skirts to cling to something as the ugly, awful feeling inside of you tips on its axis. Shifts.
It's wrong. So, so wrong—
You don't want this.
But he doesn't give you much of a choice except taking it. Letting it happen.
"But tha's not true anymore, is it, birdie?"
His arm tightens around you. Squaring against the ground as he spreads his thighs further apart, rutting into you with a fit of anger that steals the scant air from your lungs. Drills real, tangible fear into your head that he's going to break you if he doesn't slow down, doesn't stop—
"...'cause you're mine," he snarls, lips tucked against your ear so you can hear him over the awful noise made as he hammers into you, the sickeningly lewd squelch. The stinging slap of soft skin of firm muscle. "Ain't you, birdie? An' this cunt—" his fingers trail down, grazing over the skin of your rim stretched too tight around the thick of him. Pressing until it hurts. "Belongs to me now, don't it?"
He mocks your pained whimper with a patronising coo of his own, but mercifully, the pressure shifts away. The respite, however, is brief.
The arm locked around your ribs shifts as his fingers slide to the cradle of your mound, his thumb brushing over your tender, sensitive clit in slow circles. His other hand peels off of your forearm, reeling back slightly before shoving inside the loose gap of your unlaced dress, cupping your breast in a rough, scorching palm.
He squeezes it tight in his hand until you whine, squirming against the discordant sensations dragging over your nerves. The pleasure of his thumb doing something magic between your thighs and the bruising ache in your breast—
It shifts again when he moves his hand, dragging it back until your pebbled nipple is trapped under the broad trap of his thumb. Just pressing. Holding. The touch is daunting. Possessive.
You tense again. Waiting—
The pain doesn't come.
It's just—strange. Ticklish. He rubs his finger over your nipple in slow, ghosting swipes. Barely a whisper of a touch. A mere graze. And as you slowly acclimate to these soft, small circles, the pleasure grows, pulsing between your thighs.
Every pass of his fingers feels like it's strumming against some taut line that coils behind your navel, tightening. Growing—
And then it's gone. Dissipating into frustration with a mean huff spilling out against your nape, quickly reshaping itself into a low, mocking taunt when you thrash, mewling pitifully at the loss of that heady feeling liquifying in your veins.
“We're you about t’cum, birdie?”
He tuts at that; making a low, mordant coo in the back of his throat when you whimper in response.
“Didn’t know you were so greedy.”
There's a strange undercurrent in his tone you can't make sense of. This loose, looping thread that weaves between the seams. Incomprehensible—
But you find the answer in his touch.
It tightens almost in warning, but you know him better now than to let yourself trip into that fallacy. A notion that solidifies itself when the hand that was once pushing you to that heavy, all-encompassing brink steadies itself on your belly. Pushing. He anchors his hold against your breast, letting it fill the cup of his palm as he squeezes once more, another mocking warning, and then begins to move.
The pace is rougher, faster, than before. With you tipped forward slightly in his lap, the angle makes it easier for him to unleash that thread of ire on you. Using the space to plant his feet solidly on the ground, knees spreading as he bucks his hips, pounding his cock deeper, harder, into you with a savagery that rips breathless whimpers and sobbing moans from the back of your throat with each jarring thrust.
Your teeth clack painfully together when he pulls you down to meet each one, cock shoving so deep inside of you, you could swear it was lodging against your heart. Knocking everything inside of you askew to make room, to fit—
There's a sudden, stinging pain that blooms from between your thighs, and you thrash as it happens again, again—
His hand comes down over your clit, and you yowl at the burning sensation of him slapping you there—
"Please, please—!"
You can't recognise your voice anymore. It sounds wrecked. Raw. Each blow draws out a deafening wail as the heat reaches a blistering zenith. A devouring, ravenous heat—
His voice cuts through the shrill ring of it all. "Say it, birdie. Who does this cunt belong to?"
It tips off your lips in a desperate litany. A plea. You, you, you—
"S'not good enough, birdie. You gotta say it. Who does this cunt belong to?"
You say it because that's what he wants—you. it belongs to you. my cunt belongs to you. please, please, pleasepleaseplease stop—but he groans like you've gutted him. Slamming his palm down against your tender, swollen clit as he sloppily ruts into you, grunting in your ear about God and wives and fuck, buried, this sweet cunt was gonna drive him fuckin' mad—
Everything narrows down to raw sensation. Just the constant, feverish push of his cock dragging against your walls, bluntly pushing into that spot behind your navel that makes your ears ring, and your vision swim. The scorching press of rough skin against your stinging, throbbing clit; the abrasive stroke of each clumsy, pawing circle catching on swollen flesh. Blooming a vicious heat in your belly.
It draws tight. Coiling into a tense knot as a ruts into you, grunting about being close, so fuckin' close, birdie, so you better come on my cock; want this pussy coming all over me—
There's a sharp pain burrowing into your nape, his teeth sinking in deep, breaking skin with jagged teeth, and that knot snaps. Shattering into a series of intense, dizzying pulses that squeeze behind your navel, liquid bliss saturating through the cracks, and bubbling, molten, in your veins.
You're a twitching, shuddering mess. A sicky spill melting into his chest as he clamps down harder against you, grunting around the bite of flesh he lodged between his jowls as he swells inside of you, finding his release.
As he throbs inside of you, his teeth dig in deeper, biting down harder on your nape to smother the snarl ripped from his throat. His hips pump into you with staggered jerks bereft of all finesse; just a clumsy rut as he chases the aftermath of that same mind-numbing euphoria rippling through the honeyed mess of your body.
But it's this bliss that mutes the pain, hiding it under the deluge of endorphins that mushrooms inside of your head, blotting out the pain that you can feel lingering on the periphery. Looming on the edges of the syrupy spill of bliss still pounding in your veins.
Even with clots numbing the worst of it, you can feel the ache in your muscles each time you move. A prelude to the rest of the night, perhaps.
A thought that scraps against the film covering your fear. Panic an acrid burn in the back of your throat, a sting in the corners of your eyes—
Just as you open your mouth to rasp out the words let me go, he unhinges his jaw from your nape, and huffs.
There's a paralysing stab of fear cudgelling into you whenever he moves. It wells up from the wound, and you wait, teetering on a knife's edge as he slumps back against the pew, body unspooling from its tight coil as he lazes with you still sat on his lap, on his cock, purring like a satiated cat, ignorant of (or purposefully ignoring) the way you flinch at his touch when he drops his hand down between your thighs to cradle your sore, abused cunt. Even spent, softening, he still feels so big inside of you. A thickness you can't think around.
"Never came inside anyone before," he muses, catching the trickle of slick, of cum, that leaks out when he shifts back. "Ain't you lucky, birdie? Was savin’ it all up for you. An’ you go' the honour o' bein' my wife."
It cracks through the air like a whip. The echo resounds in the back of your head, smothering the whimper of panic that claws up your throat. Wife. Wife—
"I—I have a fiance," you stutter out, heaving through tattered lungs. "I can't—"
"How's I supposed to know? I don't see 'im, do I?"
"He's—he's looking for me. And he's a real, um, powerful man. I won't—I won't tell anyone if you let me go. You can just—just leave, and I'll never speak of this to anyone—"
His arm tightens around you, snuffing the words out on a pitiful gasp.
"Fucked you nice an' full o'my cum, birdie. You jus' gonna go back to 'nother man when I'm drippin’ down your thighs?”
Your lungs ache. "Please, you didn't—you can't—"
He swipes his fingers through the mess puddling under your thighs with a derisive snort, and brings his hand up to your face. Making you look at the thick, milky smear sticking to his skin. Slowly, he pries his index and middle finger apart, twisting his wrist to show you the web that glues between them.
It's a lot, you think, stomach churning. Too much.
"An' there's more o'tha' all nice an' plugged up inside you, birdie. Gonna sit here til it takes."
He draws his hand closer, thumb and ring finger closing around your cheeks, squeezing painfully until your mouth pops open on a whimper. His fingers bully between the gap of your lips.
It's bitter. Salty. You try not to gag as he roughly shoves them in deeper, knuckles knocking into your teeth as he forces them in, petting his fingers over your tongue. Your gums. Your teeth. The soft skin of your cheeks. Smearing his spend all over your mouth. Making you taste it.
And it's as vile as it is demeaning, and you shudder at the chuff of amusement that rumbles out when you gag, choking when he shoves his fingers in too deep. Trying not to weep as he lowers his head to your nape, nipping the throbbing, torn skin around the bite mark, grunting out a callous demand of swallow it. All o' it. Every drop. If you don't, then I'll jus' make sure you get it from the source next time—
"Bet you'd look so fuckin' pretty on your knees f'me, wouldn't you? Gaggin' on my cock. Could barely take it all in your sweet cunt, an' tha' was made for me, wasn't it? Be a struggle to get it all down—"
"Please," you slur around his fingers, shaking your head pitifully as his cock stirs inside of you, twitching at the revolting image he draws. "I'll—"
He taps his fingers against the roof of your mouth and you clamp your lips shut to stem the nausea that surges. Swallowing reluctantly around the bitter taste of him on your tongue. A painful gulp that makes him groan.
"See, birdie? You're full o'me now."
His fingers tickle when they drag over the wet, sticky skin of your lips. A tease.
He grunts when you shiver, cunt inadvertently clenching around him—
"Ain't ready for another round jus' yet," his voice drops, pitching low. You freeze instantly. Falling still on a shallow gasp. "But if you don't stop squirmin' on my cock like this, birdie, I reckon I'll 'ave you bent over the pulpit soon enough. What kinda husband would I be if I didn't give my wife what she was achin' for?"
Wife. There it is again. And nestled within the cruel word is the clink of a metal collar locking around the inflamed curve of your chewed up neck. Bound to a man you don't know. Don't want to know—
With you held in his grasp, tucked securely to his chest, he settles back into the pew with huff. A quiet admonishment when you try to stir, shushing you with a brief flex of his hand tightening around your neck. A warning. Be good.
It's hard to think with him buried inside of you, still taking up so much space.
And maybe that's the crux of it all. You can't breathe around the softening swell of him to let the thoughts form. Take shape. They flicker past in the moonless midnight of your mind; comets dying in the atmosphere.
Or maybe you're too haunted by the pulse of his heartbeat somehow lodged inside of you, echoing in tandem with your own. A deafening rataplan you can feel in your belly. Your guts.
You squirm—
“Birdie.”
The cup of his palm flexes around your throat—a warning, maybe—and he's pulling you further back against the broad, thick swell of his chest. As easy as breathing. As easy as taking you apart in a church. Unmaking you in a pew.
Turning a house of worship into a mausoleum.
It's a little unfair, all things considered. You pay your dues on Sunday, head bowed over the back of a pew, hands demurely clasped in your lap as you mumble through the familiar beats of mild flagellation. Prettied up in penance. Handing out a fistful of coins and spare nickles when the offertory passes by.
To be trussed up and tossed to the wolves twice over in a single night makes you tip your chin towards the angled, crumbling rafters in silent mutiny. But the bold, blasphemous display of fury doesn't cause the heavens to split, and some grand being to smite the demon sniffing the skin behind your ear.
It only makes his hand settle more firmly around your throat, thumb sliding along the smooth curve from collarbone to jaw. The wide, unfathomable expanse of his hand is more than enough to bite at the vitriol brimming in the back of your throat. Don't be stupid.
(At least—not yet, anyway.)
Without anywhere else to direct the smouldering embers of your anger—and not nearly stupid enough to break it on the jagged cut of his teeth—you slump against the steady rise and fall of his chest, letting it whisper out on an exhale. But even with self-preservation keeping the ugly words under a firm heel, you can deny that this tastes like defeat.
A sour, bitter sting in the back of your throat—full o’me, birdie—that you struggle to swallow around.
It feels like a tremendous weight you can't escape. Like everything is collapsing around like the raining ruins of a condemned house, leaving you half-buried in the rubble. Holding the roof overhead in your hands. This Atlassian task sinks your soles deeper into the dirt, dragging you down.
His threat, his presence, is an anchor buried in the seabed—utterly immovable despite how hard you yank at the chain.
Something has to give.
You're not terribly surprised when that something is you.
Riddled with holes, in tatters, the fight is quickly snuffed under the flood of water surging through. Filling space.
It's fatigue. Exhaustion. You're drained, you think. Mentally, physically. Emotionally. Everything catches up all at once, and your heavy eyes start to blur around the edges, listing shut.
For a second. Just a second.
Through the sluggish putrefaction of mouldering grey matter, you try to promise yourself that you'll run, that you'll escape, after. You just need rest. Sleep. And once you have it—
He squeezes, choking the wayward thought out under the broad cradle of his palm almost as if he knew it was there.
“Get some sleep, birdie,” he rumbles, low and brassy; the murmur of his voice purring through your ribs. “Go’ a long trip ahead o’ us yet. Gonna need it.”
It isn't the soft uttering of a man worried over your condition, but rather the rough, patronising drawl of a brute relishing the prize he caught. A plunderer preening over his loot.
You don't spare much thought to where you're going, and let him pull your weak, battered body deeper into the broad spill of his warm chest, holding you against him as the residuum of your wounded survival instincts drown in the spill of exhaustion dripping out of each decisive cut trephined into your head.
His muzzle is back on the side of your neck as your eyes slip shut, licking between the bracket of his fingers spreading possessively over your mauled skin with a rumble that trembles through your bones, shaking loose the last vestiges of your fight.
It's much too late to bemoan your lack of luck. Your lot in life. Even so—
Going from skirting around the grasping hands of a doglike man drooling on your toes, wagging his tail for just a taste—somethin’ tae take th’ edge off, doe, jus’ somethin’ tae quench this thirst; ah can't take it anymore—to waking up in the jaws of another beast, half-devoured, is such a devastating, almost Grecian sort of irony that had you any room to spare inside your belly (and if his hand not been so firmly clenched around your throat), you might have laughed until your knees gave out, and the world collapsed down on top of you.
Instead, all you can do is try to get comfortable around the bellyaching fill of him, and pretend there's still a chance you can wiggle out of his grasp as easily as you did your fiance—
But as his molten tongue lashes over the wounds on your throat, digging the tip into the puncture mark he left behind, you can't help feeling the sharp sting of defeat hew through the lingering tendrils of hope, severing it at the root. Letting it bleed out in his hands. The same ones that shackle you to his chest, keeping you in his clutch like a stunned bird in the gaping maw of a wolf's jaws.
Rather fitting, you suppose, as those artful fingers smear through the blood and sweat, pinching the stubborn remiges that remain until they're stuck firm between the tips.
A tug, a pull—
They come loose, clutched his triumphant, bloody fist.
And as the candle flickers, crawling down the wick, the flutter of them falling to the dirty floor casts shadows on the old church walls:
(crushed birds, burning dogs, and grasping hands surging from the depths—)
He stirs later, rousing you from a fitful sleep running from a burning dog by taking refuge in the gullet of a lake on fire.
You blink, scrubbing your numb fingers over your sore, tired eyes. “What—?”
“Been thinkin’,” he says, and something about his tone prickles sharply at your paltry instincts, making them stir like lead in your guts. "What's the name of tha’ little fiance o'yours anyway?"
"Why?"
He shrugs. "Jus' think I should meet the man, is all. Considerin' I stole his little wife—"
A noise is wrenched out of you—some strange, strangled amalgamation of denial and dread. “Don't,” you whisper, a fever pitch; a plea. “Don't—”
He's unpredictable. His moods are as mercurial as the sea he crossed over to find you. Tempestuous: you think of his eyes, those burning pits. Much too wide. Wild. A frenzy.
Like a fox—the one you saw when you were a child. Rabid, they said, tugging you away from those big, round eyes. Gone fuckin’ mad.
With its lips peeling back, spitting up foam and sickness, it looked like it was smiling.
Oh, doe; the same eyes, the same grin. Sickness dripping down his chin as he stared, slack-jawed and hungry. Been waitin’ so long fer ye—
“C’mon, can't be s’bad as all o’tha’.”
You think of him, then—perhaps the lesser of two evils—and shudder at the ripple of desperation spilling like oil into your chest.
“Johnny,” you mutter, wondering if he'd still take you like this—ruined as you are; a pittance of what your father promised—if you ran back to him, broken tail tucked between your legs. Back to that foaming mouth and those big, wild eyes. “Johnny MacTavish.”
If he hadn't been stroking your jugular as he asked, trailing the tips of his fingers around the aching curve of your thigh with the other, you might have missed the frisson that crackled across his implacable veneer at the name.
So suffused to him are you that any idea of distance is only divisible between atoms, and your skin hums with this little hiccup. The tensing of his muscles under your thighs; hands stuttering along flesh—
Something about that name makes him pause.
“Johnny,” he says it like he's testing the word, feeling the way it fits between his teeth. Shifting the weight of it around his tongue. Warm-up. Stretching a muscle. Familiarity thrums along the seam of his mouth; pregnant with a mordant, mocking delight. “Might ‘ave to pay ‘im a visit after all.”
In its the afterbirth breathed into the world on his name where you see the cosm split, unveiling a world between them marbled in blood and viscera.
Home in the manner of a botfly.
Something that takes. Makes fecund land from flesh and bone; a parasitic kinship that eats itself, and everything else hapless enough to stumble inside its gaping, wounded maw.
You think of a foaming grin. A sickness that burns from the inside out.
A burning dog—
And when his smouldering hands reach between your thighs to cup your cunt in the broad spill of his palm, you feel the flaming waters of a blazing lake lapping at your spine.
“‘ow ‘bout tha’?” he muses, a needling thread of ice splitting through his tone. “Guess it's a small world after all.”
(—and a rather bleak one for you when he decides that God's will is stronger than a still-wet signature on a piece of paper.
Finder's keepers an' all o' tha'.
Besides, if Johnny really wanted you, he wouldn't have let you go, would he?)
“Got a proposition for you, Simon,” the man says, and Simon snorts. He reeks of the same brand of cheap cigarettes as always—stale smoke, day-old tobacco; acrid and unpleasant. It makes his skin itch.
“an’ I told you already, Price. I ain't interested in a team—”
“Not a team, Simon.” The look he levels him with is nothing short of malicious. Dangerous. His hackles raise on instinct, everything inside of him hissing to back away. “Got something else in mind.”
Then through the door was you. Pretty as a picture—
And all his for the night.
or: John strikes a deal with young Simon Riley. his cooperation on a team they're putting together in exchange for a night with you. naturally, it goes awry.
18+ SMUT. implied noncon, dubcon. under-negotiated kink. bondage. overstimulation. size difference. size kink. messy, sweaty gross sex. rough sex. unsafe sex. mean Simon. smitten Simon. bullydom!Simon. spit kink. degradation and humiliation. young!Simon (pre-mw2019-2022 when he was still a Seargent; 25-28ish). manipulation. attempts at taming a stray dog that goes as well as you'd expect.
It's John who takes his muzzle off.
Dangles the key on his finger when he kicks open the door, letting his Lieutenant glimpse what lay behind it. Giving a gruff, like what you see? when his eyes finally adjust to the low light flooding in.
It takes him half a second. Enough time to commit the scene in front of him to memory.
It's you, of course.
good dogs get rewards, don't they, Simon?
Waiting for him. Pretty as a picture in sleek silk chiffon ribboned in intricate shibari around your chest, stomach, and thighs. Legs spread on the table; ankles tied down to the sides in nude jute rope. Hands clasped together, fingers laced; wrists tied above your head. The blindfold wrapped around your head is a pale pink ribbon, thicker than the silk on your body. Wrapped twice over your eyes, and tied in a pretty bow behind your head, he imagines.
In the split of your thighs, he finds you already slick. Wet. It drips down onto the table, puddling beneath your ass. The spread of your pussy, glistening in the flushed light; the small, pink vibrator taped to your clit makes his cock twitch.
"All for me?" He rasps, eyes fixed on your cunt. On how pretty it looks. How inviting. A soft, ripe peach offered in the heat of summer, and he wants nothing more than to sink his teeth into you. Her. "'ow sweet o'you."
And Price, he thinks, eyes slanting sideways as he glances at the man sliding into his chair. It stands to reason that this whole thing, you on a silver platter for a starving wolf, wouldn't have happened if he hadn't seen the look on Simon's face when you first met him. The hunger.
Simon's not stupid, of course. He knew you were off limits the moment Price put his paw on your nape, squeezing once. Owned, claimed. The intention, the message, clear. Mine.
Don't touch.
And the way you lit up, stammering out something about how good it was to meet him, told him everything he needed to know how your willingness to be shackled to his Captain.
But even so—
He couldn't take his eyes off of you.
(and in his intense cataloguing of everything you did, he couldn't help but notice how you kept touching your neck when Price was dragged away for a conversation leaving you all alone in a room rankled down his spine. almost as if you were reaching up to fix a collar—)
The memory alone makes him shudder.
"All yours, Simon," Price drawls from his perch on the throne. Between two fingers, a cigar sits, unlit. Ghost huffs.
The words are a vicious bite to the want pooling low in his belly. "That so?”
The room seems to shake when he steps inside. Floor creaking ominously under his weight. It makes your mouth drop, heavy breaths spilling out between dull teeth. Chest rising and sinking shallowly with a wild sort of nervousness that flits across the expanse of your cheeks, in the tremble of your lower lip.
Despite your unease, your legs stay open. Held aloft by the rope, he knows, but also—
A testament to how trained you are.
He prefers his pets wild. Unpolished. Vicious little things that he gets to bring to heel with a sharp bark and rough hand glued to the back of their skulls, pushing their head into the dirt, to the floor, where it belongs.
Fine china broken at his feet.
But you—
Manicured. Groomed to perfection. Save for the harsh breaths and the shake in your joints—both an indication of just how new you are at this. A novice. One slowly being crushed under the leather boot of a man who reeks of smoke and whiskey.
But knowing his captain and the furious need for control, he imagines you're better than some of the seasoned ones he'd come across in his lifetime. No room for errors.
And certainly no forgiveness for them, either.
His cock twitches again—a heavy, aching weight against his thigh—and he reaches down to cup the thickness of it, crushing the flesh in his palm to stave off the need burning in his loins. The urgency to sink inside of your pretty little cunt rewiring the part of him that likes to mess his pets up first. Ruin them before he takes them. Fucking them to the point of unconsciousness—and sometimes, beyond it.
But you—
You've been a phantom taste in the back of his throat for months now. A tease between his teeth. Sinking his jowls into you is the only thing on his mind.
And when you're offered up so enticingly—
Well.
Price can't blame him much for how badly he's going to ruin you.
He reaches out, fingers pressing cruelly into the slim, thumb-sized vibrator Price has locked against your clit. A mindless, incessant torture, he's sure. Pushing you over the edge on a constant, unrelenting loop.
“Messy girl,” he rasps, the starchy fabric of the mask glueing to his balmy skin.
The reprimand makes you flinch in shame, but the flutter of your cunt belies the contrition that drapes over your brow in a shallow mimicry of sorrow. He can see why Price latched onto you so quickly, and doesn't bother fighting the stab of envy that brims in his chest.
“Didn't your old man ever teach you any manners?” He mocks, dry and derisively. Quietly amused by the soft mewl you let out, one that only just eclipses the snort from Price. “Daddy's been slackin’, ‘asn’t he? Let his little girl turn into a messy fuckin’ slag.”
You try to close your legs to no avail, the rope keeping you spread. In part, he thinks, from shame—blistering, burning, and vibrant when it streaks across your face—but mostly from the slick gush that leaks out of your drenched pussy at his foul words. Trying to hide it from him. To keep him from knowing just how much the brassy roll of his ugly words makes your empty little cunt ache.
“Look’it you.” He rumbles, enjoying the shiver in your joints. The way your head rolls to the side, nose pressed tight to the skin of your arm. “Messy pussy just achin’ to be fucked.”
He adds more pressure until you choke. The scream lodged in your throat. Your toes curl. He hears the soft pop of your joints when you arch your back like a cat in heat yowling for attending.
“Want it bad, don't you?” He taunts. “Daddy must’a spoiled you too much—” another scoff from Price. The creak of leather. The clink of ice against glass. “Didn't teach you any manners—”
He wants you to beg. Wants to hear the peal of your voice—rough and ragged and begging him to sink inside you; fuck your little cunt until you can't walk anymore—but that's not what he's here for. Not why Price dragged him up to the room. Gave you to him.
And with the silk gag in your mouth, he knows he won't get it, anyway. Tied in a pretty bow behind your head. Wet with your spit already.
Simon's fingers slide down, dragging over the folds of your cunt. You're wet. Soaked. Drenched in a way he's never seen before; folds glistening. Thighs wet. Sticky. He licks his lips. Tastes the brine of his sweat. He wants to eat your pussy. Spread you wide on his tongue and make you beg Price to let Simon make you cum.
The thought roots in his head. Burrowing deep. He can already hear your sweet voice pleading with his captain—please, please let him make me cum—but he pushes it down when Price makes an impatient noise in the back of his throat.
He knows why he's here.
And wonders, then, when he steps back and drops his hands to the button on his trousers, how many times you've been punished like this. The thought is a sour smoulder in the back of his head. An ugly, foul thing unfurled over the soot-stained walls of his skull.
(he'll ask later. get the names of every man Price let see you like this, and pluck the memory of you right from their skull—)
“So needy,” he drawls, dragging his cock out of his slacks as they fall low on his thighs. “Even after this pussy’s been spoiled so much?”
It makes you keen, and the noise is a searing knife to his guts. He groans with it—low and rough, the noise scraping over the flesh of his throat until it hurts.
“Gonna have to punish you, ain't I? Needy fuckin' thing—” so he says, but his cock is just as sticky as your thighs, weeping a steady stream of pre-cum that pools in the tangle of hair at the base, dusting over his heavy, fat balls.
He shuffles closer, and reaches out to your knee, slipping his fingers behind your shin. The squeal of naked flesh against the metal tabletop shouldn't make him throb but it does. Cruel man, he thinks, and drinks in the way you wince.
He presses his cock against your slit, mouth dropping in a harsh pant when he takes in the hideous sight it makes. Your pussy is covered up by his girth. The tip of his cock bobbing over your belly button, dripping pre-cum into the divot.
Simon pulls his hips back, letting his cock glide over your silken flesh. The wet squelch it makes when he thrusts forward, cockhead tapping on your belly, has him grunting like an animal. It's obscene, this. The way he can't even see your folds over the wide spread of his cock. Pussy tucked neatly under him.
He can't even begin to imagine how you'll take the full length of him inside of you when his cock nudges past your belly button when he lets his balls rest on your molten slit. Poor thing.
He doesn't know if Price stretched you before this. Got you ready for him. But the man makes no move to intervene when Simon pulls back until his head slips down your seam, bracketed between your plush, swollen folds, tight against your entrance. All he has to do is—
Push
And the tip of his cock slips in.
You make another noise at the sting, and he thinks you might be crying but his eyes are riveted to the spot where you open for him. Pussy so small, so tiny, compared to his cock in a way that's sickening. Garish. But your little cunt drools on him. Rim fluttering like a heartbeat on his glands, pulling him deeper. Enticing him to sink inside. All the way. Until he can feel the hitch of your breath on his cock.
He leans back to get a better view, the motion forcing another inch inside of you. The noise is slick. Giving as your silken flesh parts around him, eagerly taking him in. But as wet as you are, as pliant, the stretch is unbearable. It chokes the air from his lungs when you tighten up around him—
“Fuckin' hell—” he snaps, his upper lip curling up beneath the mask. Your cunt makes him angry. Suddenly, viciously. The fury drips down his spine, pools at the base of his cock. His hand slips out from between your thighs, roughly grabbing your waist. Holding on tight as he jerks his hips harshly against you.
You feel good. Perfect. Wrapped snugly around him. A hot, wet embrace. And he huffs at the bitterness that clots in his lungs; the surge of pleasure so blisteringly intense, it nearly makes him gag. Makes him sick.
Price has this every night.
The thought alone is a poison. It needles in deep, lashing at him with foul, rabid teeth. Cruelly, he pushes deeper, sinking his cock in another inch, another, another—mindless in this pursuit to tear you apart well before you're ready for it.
He wants it to burn. To ache. Wants to be the worst fuck you've ever had; cock too big for you to take, but he feeds it to you in full. Gives you all of it. Every inch. Until your stomach churns with every press of his cockhead against your cervix, his glands sliding over that spot inside that makes your knee jerk and your eyes roll.
Wants you to remember him as a beast. To think of his cock and feel nauseous.
To sink deep inside of you—brutal and savage—until you can still feel him in your pussy for days. Each step causing a sharp pang in your lower belly.
It's awful, he knows. Terrible. But he forces himself into you anyway, feeling your flesh split around him. A blunt, unyielding pressure until his balls tap against your ass, pussy spasming around the fat length he punishes you with. He's sure he's deeper inside of you than anything—any man, cheap silicon—has ever dreamed of being. Kissing places in you that nothing has ever touched. Feels it in the nervous flit of your muscles pulsing around him—this foreign thing bludgeoning into uncharted territory, stretching you wide. Almost virginal all over again. It makes him groan.
Your pleasure is a muted ripple down his spine. The vibrator forcing you into enjoying the sharp sting of your rim pulled taut around the plug of his cock, skin blanching from the strain. He wants to stay just like this—grinding his hips into the backs of your spread thighs, cockhead chiselling into the molten seal of your womb with every gyration until the line between pleasure and pain begins to blur. Until you gag from how badly having your walls battered burns, hurts, but the bloom of pleasure deep inside your groin keeps you in place. Makes you arch your back, wanting more.
Desperate for it.
But this isn't what Price wants, is it?
No—
He voices his impatience with a muffled grunt. Get on with it, Simon is pinched out between the silver of space between his teeth, the butt of a burning cigar keeping his jaw unhinged. The heady, sour-sweet stench of smouldering tobacco, nicotine, staining the words.
You clench at the sound of Price's voice, pretty pussy drawing all tight around him. Perfectly trained. Sweet thing, he thinks, pulling out of you slowly. Just a few inches. Feeling your skin glue his; the glide of your walls over his shaft sickeningly good, nauseatingly so. He holds it for a moment, staring down at you through the eye holes of his mask, breathing heavily. Sweat drenches his skin. Tacky, hot. The starchy fabric clings to his flesh, peeling away each time he moves his head.
The exertion of fucking his cock into you shows through the muted pulse of his joints, muscles aching from the strain of pushing forward.
(Holding himself back.)
You blink at him blearily, eyes misted with tears. A smaller puddle sits on the table near your temples.
Up close, he can see the full detail of the intricate shibari binding you tight. The sleek pink ribbon weaving over your chest, your breast, stomach—hishi karada, Price said. At the base of your neck is more silk in a mockery of a collar. And he wonders if you miss it, then. The solid weight of leather on your skin. If your hands weren't tied up, he imagines they'd be there. Holding firm.
Just like the night he first met you.
The silk rope, the loss of your collar—
“Your dad's a cruel man, ain't he?” He mocks, sliding his fingers over the delicate trim of silk bound tight under your heaving breasts, peppering across your nipple, down the slope. Resting at the base of your throat. The thin slip of fabric is not enough to give you what you need. The pressure, the friction. The sense of being owned. “Didn't even give his little girl a collar.”
More of that tantalising shame rake over your expression. Tears dribble out in hot drops, spilling down the side of your face.
He hums, slips this fragility into his back pocket. “Want me to give it to you, little girl?”
He spits the words out like they're wrong. Awful. Takes in your flinch, the downward twist to your lips, and shoves that, too, into his pocket.
Simon has no intention of waiting for an answer, for permission—he reels back, hand still splayed wide over your sternum, and pulls his cock out more until only the flare of his glands peaks out. He's soaked—glistening with your slick. So wet that it drips out of your plugged hole, gliding down the cleft of your ass.
He wonders if you always get like this—
Bites that thought clean through with an angry groan, and pries his fingers out from the back of your knee, dragging them to the end of his mask. Rucking it up over his skin, bunched against the bridge of his nose.
If the mess of his mouth, chin, the crooked, angular slope of his nose horrifies you at all, you don't let it show. Content to quietly sob on the table, eyes flickering between the thick plug of his cock between your thighs and the Price.
He hates you, he thinks. And then he spits on your pretty pussy, right over your taut rim. Watches the foamy mess bubble, drip down to the skin behind his mushroomed head. When it pools there, he pulls back until the widened flare of his glands slips free. You whine—a noise of bright hot disgust, humiliation—and he lets it burrow under his skin, trickle down his spine. Then he pushes forward, popping the head back inside of you.
The spit—his spit, too.
And he does it again. The same thing. Pulling out, spitting. Feeding it to her. Letting it rub against the slick, wet (wetter now) walls of her cunt.
Price doesn't say anything about this claim. Schoolboy possession—childish and immature when you're used to fine leather gripping tight around the slope of your neck.
Still.
He pulls on your proverbial braids until it burns.
The hum of the vibrator takes some of the sting away when he shoves inside of you again, cockhead bullying into your cervix with an unmatched cruelty. Leaking slick, steady, over your seal. Drooling, thick and viscous, against your walls. Staining you.
Ruining you.
Each breath is punched out when he bottoms out. Forced from your lungs. Winded. He knows it hurts almost as much as the thick bludgeon of his cock pressing deep, but as he scrapes and claws at the rot concealing over his humanity, morality, he finds nothing inside of him left to care.
He stops looking. Stops searching.
Simon fucks into you with vigor instead, laughing mockingly at the lewd, sinful squelch of your cunt. “Think that's the sound of all my spit, birdie? Or is your sloppy little cunt always this fuckin’ messy?”
Each piston makes his pelvis slap into the vibrator; he can feel it through the tangle of coarse hair spooled above his cock. Buzzing incessantly against his skin. The spike of sharp pressure has you yowling beneath him, hips twisting, turning, trying to flee from the brutal onslaught. Pleasure and pain balancing on a knife's edge.
He holds you there. Dangles you above the precipice just because he can—
A lazy flick of his waist. The savage grind of his hips. The softened bulge of his lower belly tapping against the plastic toy—
And it breaks you. This careless, effortless attention he pays to you has you tightening up around him like a knot, a vice; cunt squeezing, squeezing, before you shatter. Wave against a cliff; you spasm on his cock in a series of shallow, tight throbs pulsing along to the rapid fire of your heartbeat.
His eyes are locked on your face. Pretty, lachrymal. Tears bleed down your temples, soaking into your hairline. Puddling underneath.
His own little sea of your miserable pleasure.
Eyes rolled into the back of your head. Toes curling. Hips jerking, twisting. Trying to run from the ugly, awful way he makes you cum. Makes you gorge yourself on pleasure. Force-feeding you pain with each sloppy, brutal thrust into your sopping, messy cunt—swollen, bruised; battered. And his—
—ice clinks against glass. A clicking swallow follows. The hollow thud of glass on wood. Scraping over the veneer as it's pushed back into place. Tobacco is chewed up by flames, popping and sizzling; smoldering with each inhale as the playwright watches the show he weaved together unfold—
—his.
The silk around your neck comes loose with each thrash of your head rolling from side to side, shaking with quick, successive no, no, no’s that go unheeded, ignored. Every animalistic rut of his hips makes you change your mind, anyway. Turning those devastating no’s to yeses so eager, your teeth clack with every thrust.
As it slips, sliding down the sweat-slicked column of your arched throat, he finds a stripe of red. A scab. Right at the knot where your collar would sit. A pretty gem in the middle. Your name, or maybe something that would amuse Price more than the perceived idea of your autonomy—bitch in glinting gold. His name and number etched into the back.
if found, return to John Price.
A foldhold, perhaps. Tailor-made for his boot.
He hunts, Simon knows. Walked in reeking of leather and smoke when they first met and casually mentioned how good he was at Big Game hunting. A threat, then—however thinly veiled and erring on the side of mordant humour it was. But he wonders if Price personally made the collar you mourned the night he swung you into Simon's path.
Your neck was bare, then. Blemishless.
A collar too small. Tightened too much. Punishment, he supposes, and feels a sick sense of satisfaction roll down from his nape to the bottom of his spine where it pools in his groin—hot, molten oil—as he wonders just how much convincing it took you to agree to this. To spread your pretty legs for the ugly brute Price dangled you in front of. Who watched you all night from the corner of the room, chest heaving and eyes wide, wild, and furious. Reeking of rot. Want. To let him rut you like an animal while Price watches from the corner of the room—
A bead of sweat follows the phantom trail.
“Fuck, birdie,” he's rasping, voice uttered wrecked. Mangled in his throat. “So fuckin’ tight f’me, ain't you? Must want me to cum inside this pretty cunt—”
You shiver. Knee jerking. There's a real sense of panic in your eyes when they dart over to Price, silently nursing another glass of scotch. He follows your gaze, catches Price glaring at him with his chin dipped low to his chest, peering out through his lashes. Brow furrowed. A flat line.
Simon doesn't stop thrusting. Keeps a steady pace despite the anger brimming inside of him as the pleasure grows. Festers.
Then—
Barely discernible: a nod.
Shadows fall over his cheeks. He brings the glass back to his mouth with a surly mm between the mouthful. An irrevocable fuckin' get on with it.
And Simon does.
The look he gives you pure predatory hunger. Victory in the potent stench of charred bones. He lifts his chin, stares down at you—all spread out like a gift to a god—and surges forward with a rabid hunger brimming in his guts. Unquenchable. Horrific.
—wants you to eat you alive. Consume you whole. Leave nothing for Price to pick at, to mourn over,
settles instead for ruining your pussy. For fucking you raw. Cumming deep inside of your quivering cunt even when he knows you don't want that. Are silently begging Price to reconsider. To get this ugly fucking mutt off of you—
It churns his guts. Makes him viciously excited over the image that brims in the back of his head, tears raining down your cheeks as you bring a shaky hand to your aching, swollen cunt, feeling the thick, viscous glob of his cum leaking out.
Or before that, when you have to lay there and take it. Feeling his cock throbbing, pulsing as it spits cum inside of you. When he pulls out, and a milky trail follows, dribbling down between your cheeks. At his mercy the whole time, too, because Price won't get up right away to untie you. You'll have to lay there in his filth, feeling it ooze out of you—
He wants it. Badly. Feels it scorching his hindbrain, burning him up from the inside out.
Later, he thinks, he'll fuck you with more finesse. Make you cum on his fingers—stuff them inside of your sore, aching cunt to the last knuckle; give you three of them to squeeze around, to cling to, and watch the ink on his bruised, scabbed skin disappear inside of you over and over again, pulling them out all slick, pearlescent with a mix of his cum and yours. On his tongue, too. Keep you in this pretty frogtie, unable to push him off—or pull him closer. Forced to take it. To let him lap at your pussy until he quenches this uneasy hunger festering inside of his stomach, growing bolder, greedier at the sight of you splayed out like this, exhausted already even though he's only just begun.
Fuck you again, too, just because he can.
all yours for a night, Price had said, sealing your fate with a sharp, decisive nod.
He plans on making the most of the twelve hours until sunrise that he has.
This, then, the appetizer—
It curls over his shoulders, tar-stained fingers digging into the tight coil of his muscles, easing the tension in increments. Soothing out the fear that still clings to him of missing out. Still, very much, that hungry little mutt on the side of the street, peering into the bakery at the family's milling about, smiling happily. Content to ignore the brat in rags glaring at them from an alcove with bruises on his chin, and a black split on his lip. Diving for scraps because the alternative is going to bed with an empty stomach in a house that reeks of flat beer and stale piss.
There's nothing to miss out on here, it reasons, when he has you all night. All his.
“Beg me,” he huffs, sniffing through the balmy, damp mask when it slips down his crooked nose. “Beg me not to cum inside you.”
All you can do is make a small, keening oomph behind the loose gag, words muffled by wet silk. His head rolls back, eyes narrowing down at you in mocking delight—catlike, leonine, in the dwindling glimmer of sunlight spilling through the crack in the curtains.
“C’mon,” he taunts, rolls his hips into you just to hear the loud, wet squelch of your pussy taking the full, fat length of his cock. Lets the noise box through his ears in a vicious, heavy punch. “Or I'll cum inside you—”
He's already there. Edging toward the precipice.
Simon grabs the tops of your thighs, digging his fingers into your skin, and pulls you closer to the edge of the table until your ass lifts. It opens you up wider for him, knees notched wide, nearly level with your ears. The new position lets him push in deeper, fucking you in full now. Balls slapping against your ass with every brutal stroke.
He leans down, knee lifting to the table as he climbs on before dropping the full heft of his weight onto you. Forearm braced above your head, the other catching the column of your bare, scratched neck in the wide spread of his palm.
The size difference before was intoxicating. A rush that pooled in the back of his head before rocketing down to his spine, filling his cock, but this—your knees bracketing around his waist, spread so wide they're forced down flat to the table below in a split that lets his cock sink in deeper, head tucked against his collarbone, swallowed whole beneath him, is his undoing.
Arched over you like a beast, he grunts. Ruts into your sopping cunt and feels the whines that spill from your throat at the rough way he batters into you.
The softness of his lower belly grazes the vibrator humming on your clit. The pressure makes your eyes widen, and roll into the back of your head. Neck trapped in his hold as you thrash beneath him, sobbing in earnest. In dismay.
He's sure it hurts. The pleasure careening into overstimulation—the kind that burns, bellows too much, no more. He huffs out a derisive snort, and eats your misery from your parted lips, dipping his head down to catch the seam of your mouth in a mockery of a kiss. The silk wrapped around your head, tucked neatly into the corners of your mouth, keeps it from being anything more than a messy smear of his scarred, torn lips and your muffled gasps. The band prevents him from really tasting you, and he makes do with curling his tongue over your teeth, catching the drool running down your chin.
It's gross. Messy. He slurps you up, and hums in pleasure when he tastes the brine of your tears.
“Gonna cum,” he grunts into the silk before catching it between his crooked teeth, nibbling on the wet hem, sucking on your spit soaked into the fabric.
Your pussy spasms around him. Eager, he thinks—pulsing like a heartbeat and starving for it. It blooms under his skin, burning hot like a fever. His tongue slips under your gag. Eyes glued to yours, listed in quiet, merciless delight when you grimace as he slides it along yours, nearly gagging you on it.
It's almost sweet. A pastiche of loving making—as close to the real thing as he's ever come. The thought is a bludgeon to his head, making his ears ring—
And he runs from it. Rears back from the sloppy kiss, eyes creasing, brow furrowing, as you stare up at him with wet, glossy eyes, rheumy with tears. Silently pleading for something he can't discern. He feels that trail of anger coiling in his guts again, sitting low in his belly as his hips stutter to a slow, softer roll.
His finger lifts, settles on the corner of your unhinged jaw, holding your head steady. There are lines, he thinks. Walls, divides. Protective armour—
And some shouldn't be crossed.
Simon spits on your gag. Squeezes the huff of disgust from your throat when he feels your chest expand with it. Bullies himself closer, smothering you under his weight. Owned, then. Claimed.
You can't close your mouth around the gag, or fingers digging into the muscle of your jaw. He keeps you like that, degraded. Dehumanised. A vessel for him to use as he likes—
Nothing more, nothing less.
Sinks into your bruised cunt again, hips slapping meanly into yours in a way he knows must ache. Sets a choppy, deep pace; humps your pussy and grinds the weeping, swollen head of his cock into your battered cervix. Loses himself in the messy, plugging rolls of his hips; the wet, tight slide of your skin—flushed and clenching around the thick of himself he feeds to you, over and over again. Mindless in the pursuit to ruin you further. Stain you with his cum—
The problem is:
You feel like heaven. Pussy wrapped tight around him. Silken walls hugging his aching cock until it feels like he's melting into the hot, wet squeeze of it. So good it hums inside his head like a purr, rattles his thoughts around until the ugly, bitter anger is turned inside out. Flipped.
He thinks about lines again as his sticky, wet balls glue to the slick skin of your ass, peeling off in a way that has pleasure peppering along his spine, spooling in his lower back. He did that, caused it. Made you so fucking wet that his knees slide in the messy spill of it leaking all over the table. The loud squelch of him slamming into your cunt echoes in the room—shrill and bone-melting. Ego-feeding. Enough to gorge his pride on it until its belly threatens to burst at the seams. Overfull.
Simon grunts. His face is soaked. The damp fabric of his mask is too drenched to even mop it up, sticking to his skin as sweat rains down from his shorn hairline, misting over his eyes. His upper lip. The dip of his chin. He's more water than man. Liquid. Melting into you.
The heat is unbearable. “Gonna cum in this pussy,” he snarls, and it sounds like a threat. Is one. He's going to burst inside of you, molten and thick. Been a while, he thinks, and feels his balls draw up. Tightening in a promise as he fucks himself into a syrupy stupor above you.
The inside of his ears are wet, and he thinks it might be his fucking brain leaking out—
The tight coil of his body snaps before he does, giving out in a heavy groan. He catches himself before he crushes you beneath him, still mindlessly thrusting into your cunt, cock pulsing, throbbing. Growing thicker, thicker, as he heaves into your temple, breathing in the pine scent of your skin. Loam, sea. Sweat. You smell like Price beneath it all—leather and smoke; scotch and wood—and his lips curl into a vicious snarl, teeth bared at the man in the corner, silent observer to this blasphemous confessional where he spills his guts inside of you, and you eat them up like they're made of gold dust.
It rushes him. A kick to his soft stomach, a boot crushing his ribs. The force of it hurts when it hits, surging up from the base of his spine, too fast for him to brace for. Tensing, coiling. The pressure knocks the air from his lungs, makes his hips stutter. Joints whining, twinging with pain.
He moans low and brassy, mangled deep in the rot of his chest, and cums deep inside of you. Sloppy, mindlessly rutting into the spread bracket of your thighs as pleasure burns across the back of his neck, his spine. His hips roll, shaking. Melting as he spills, spits thick globs of cum out, cockhead bullied tight against your plug.
All you can do is heave beneath him, whining at the molten spend he pours into you. Poor fuckin’ thing—
His lips are sticky, slick with sweat. He rubs them against the tacky skin of your temple, your cheekbone, babbling nonsense out on a purr—
Breedin’ this tight little pussy right in front of your old man, birdie. Got ‘im watchin’ his little girl take my thick fuckin’ load inside o’her. Fuckin’ hell—
—things that leak out between the cracks in the armour. The thick veneer. Made worse, his personal hell, when he feels your hips bump into his, taking his cock deeper inside as you squirm under the heavy weight of him. With your thigh flexing, squeezing his hip, it almost feels like you want more. All of him. For him to crawl deep inside of you, cocooned in the bracket of your ribs—
“Needy fuckin’ thing,” he rasps, words slurring. Eliding into mush. Nonsense he'll come to crush between his teeth later when he buries himself back inside of you over and over again, feeding blood to this vicious seedling inside of him.
Through the pounding in his head, your gasping little hitches in his ear, the undeniable silence from Price weighs on him even as the aftershocks of his release mute the noise in his head. A dense, hazy fog clouding over all thoughts.
It doesn't feel angry. Jealous. If anything it reeks of victory—
He grasps through the blanket, the murk, with lazy hands until he finds what he's looking for, and—
Oh.
Right.
(“Got a proposition for you, Simon,” the man says, and Simon snorts.
He reeks of the same brand of cheap cigarettes as always—stale smoke, day old tobacco; acrid and unpleasant. It makes his skin itch.
“an’ I told you already, Price. I ain't interested in a team—”
“Not a team, Simon.” The look he levels him with is nothing short of malicious. Dangerous. “Got something else in mind—”)
Then through the door was you. Pretty as a picture—
He stares down at you now. The base of his cock is soaked with your slick, flesh throbbing, pulsing, as he cums inside of you.
It's this—you, crying over the feeling of him spilling so deeply inside of you while your old man watches from the sidelines, unable to do anything but sit there as Simon fills his baby girl up—that he wanted. Wants. Needs, he thinks, more than the stale, humid air he breathes. A place of his own. Home. Even if it's made of paper mache, carved inside of someone else, someone who already has a collar. A brand—
But that's the point, isn't it?
A sick feeling curls over his shoulders as he thumbs the slim vibrator off of your clit, staring down at the swollen nub at the apex of your mound. Sore and sensitive and flushed bright. Bruised like an apple. Abused for hours. Poor thing, he thinks, even as he rubs the flat of his finger over it.
His cum seeps out around the softening plug of his cock. But it's still thicker than anything you'd ever taken before, he's sure. Sick with the deep sense of satisfaction that rolls over him at the thought.
It's worth it, then, even as the dawning realisation trickles over him like hot oil—
“What d’you like, Simon?”
A pretty bird in pale pink chiffon. Too good for the likes of him. Afraid of him, too. Cowerin’. Cryin’ somethin’ awful when he sinks his ugly, fat prick into them—
Price hummed. Curled his index finger over the top of his cigar, tapped the thick wrap twice with the tip of it, and then brought it to his lips. A flash of teeth beneath his beard—nicotine-stained; crooked in the low light—before they sunk into the butt.
There was something measured in his stare. Predatory.
Victorious.
And—
He gets it. You were a dangling lure in the deep, dark of the abyssal layer. A glimmer of light in thick murk. Iridescent. Dazzling. He was always meant to sink his teeth into you, wasn't he? Always meant to take a bite—
hook. line—
—sinker.
Or—
It would be if the fish Price caught wasn't a leviathan.
—in the scorching trail the oil leaves behind, something bestial, primordial, inside of his cocks its head in consideration. he can make a feast from this, it says; and so, he does—
“Need my help, Price?” Simon drawls, arms crossing over his chest as he stares down at him, quietly amused, and John feels the pulse between his temples starting up again the same way it had all those years back when he bumped into the man with you on his arm.
He grunts. “Sendin’ you to Mexico.”
“Tha’ so? I might be busy.”
He sucks in a deep breath, reaches for his cigar. The itch claws behind his eyes, in his gums. There's a headache, too. One he knows won't be soothed over with the numbing bliss of nicotine or a shot of scotch. Not when he'll have to slink home afterwards, this massive behemoth nipping at his heel, and deal with the aftermath of what happens whenever he sets Simon loose on you:
an icepack pressed tight against your aching cunt, a glare fixed on your face as he dotes on you after you made him clean up the absolute mess Simon left behind with his fingers and tongue—
“never again,” you'll hiss, wincing with each pull of his knuckles on your sore, bruised walls. “I mean it—”
(you always say that but the look in your eye whenever he pulls out the silk—the new assortment that Simon bought for you himself—tells him otherwise—)
He presses the heel of his palm into the crease between his eye and bone, rubbing until he sees phosphenes spark behind his eyelids.
“She'll be in silk,” he grouses, sucking his teeth in irritation. “And you'll be on fuckin’ plane to Mexico the next morning, Riley. Do I make myself clear?”
“Crystal, sir,” he draws lazily with a half-hearted shrug, but Price can see the mutt inside of him panting with glee. He pretends to huff. Then: “I want her in white this time.”
The fuckin' prick.
—Price’s gamble of using you to lure the big, bad dog in works. but maybe a little too well. because now his sergeant expects one every time he's sent on a mission. and they send him out a lot.
—he now has a key to his captain's house. lets himself in whenever he wants. finds you exactly how he asked for it. usually tied up in silk, crying, and struggling to get away when he stalks inside the room. on your knees, begging him so sweetly not to fuck your throat too hard. you have work tomorrow. or fighting him off as best as you can until he pins you down, works his cock inside of you.
—in full view of the cameras, of course. non-negotiable. Price gets to see everything his brutish sergeant does to his pretty bird. everything.
—Simon is the one who keeps you company when Price is sent off to work with the CIA. keeps you stuffed full of his cock in the bed you share with Price, his little girl sobbing into the pillow that reeks of smoke and leather and sex as Simon forces every inch of his stupid fat cock inside you
