pines, pining @tenderhoof - Tumblr Blog

Jun 3

title: the feminism is leaving your body (one-shot)

fandom: uhhhh...a quiet place? jack o'connell, the fandom that you are? jack-flavored original fiction? all of the above? sure

pairing: jack o'connell's character in a quiet place part 3/fem reader

rating: explicit (fingering, piv sex, creampie)

warnings: attempted rape, graphic violence, murder, stabbing, suicidal ideation, graphic descriptions of blood, biting, blood...tasting? blood eating? blood communion?

sure why not

also reader is younger (how much is up to you) but she's not a minor; reader is shorter than him/petite of build

word count: 7159

author's notes: so i tried writing this without using any names but got sick of that within the first 1500 words so i ended up just calling him jack; all you rpf enjoyers out there can play alternative universe barbies & the rest of you can suspend your disbelief (i might go through and change the name once I know it; i'll probably post this on AO3 with the right name once i know it)

summary:

you're on a supply run when you get ambushed by a lone man with less-than-gentlemanly intentions toward you

thankfully, you are not alone

The whoosh still lives in your stomach.

It was put there the moment Jack grabbed you by the back of your jeans and hauled as hard as he could—a hard whoosh, a band of cloth cutting in and strapping your hipbones, lending your skin just enough determination to keep your sleepy guts on the inside.

Right now that bridge is more memory than anything.

It’s hot. Spring keeps ripening toward summer while sweat forms tiny beads on your skin. You feel them oozing up through the pores—it’s a prickling, a gentle wet crawl—because there’s no constant droning ambient human noise to distract you from it.

You wonder if Jack knows about anechoic chambers.

People couldn’t handle them; they flipped shit over that level of silence.

He walks in front of you.

They couldn’t bear the murmur of their own blood cruising through their own veins for more than thirty minutes without losing their grip on reality.

You watch him move through the high grass.

In front of you with his knees bent, prowling like a lion.

That’s a thing you’ve noticed, too.

His body was more organized on that bridge. Back when there was still enough of a civilization to pay attention to what choices it made, every part of him moved like it was taking directions or remembering charted points on a well-plotted map.

It’s the old left right left, you remember thinking, a special kind of emergency nervous system conditioned into existence during basic training and designed to trip like a breaker switch under extreme pressure.

That’s gone now.

What remains are the animal rhythms, muscles directed by an intense scrutiny of your surroundings and a readiness to spill blood.

He’s prowling for supplies—but that’s not accurate, I’m doing the supply run while he’s providing the cover.

Voices from a different time—back when they were still allowed, even though everyone preferred letters back then and wanted to text—clamor around inside the safe meat of your mind: the feminism is leaving your body.

It’s a joke that feels old because it once came with accessible images but it’s reduced now to the shaky quality of memory, a facsimile of a facsimile: shape of a body separating a ghost transparency from itself; there’s a ponytail and vague breast bumps because the body is a woman. The ghost transparency is light-lined with the suggestion of ascension because the feminism is dead, you see. All pretense of social equality is in the immediate business of vanishing.

You don’t bother arguing with yourself.

But if you did, it might go something like this: it’s not dead feminism when he’s got soldier training and you don’t, it’s not dead feminism when you’ve never so much as touched a gun or killed an animal, it’s not dead feminism when it’s the two of you against what remains of the civilized world and the skill sets you dragged with you over that apocalypse line just happen to fall into neat gendered columns.

You’re approaching a gas station from the back.

It’s worth a look—could be medical supplies, jerky, maybe those crinkly bags of salted nuts or a few bottles of water.

Jack stops walking. He looks at you with widened blue eyes; they’re just big enough to convey an ingratiating sense of urgency.

He gestures you ahead.

You move past him and the stink of his body is tremendous: well-salted thunder, greasy hair, cut grass.

It used to repel me.

The gas station’s door’s been propped open with a rock.

But now it anchors me.

Jack doesn’t see the rock. You glance at it on your way in and think maybe the A/C isn’t working

You think maybe the door-lock’s busted

You think maybe someone’s waiting for a delivery or something

And then you’re too far inside, boxed up in glass, submerged in concentrated sunlight. A different kind of body-stink wafts around you, less body and more general rot and your thought-circuits interrupt.

The skin of your nape crawls.

Wh—

The subtle whisper of boot soles yanks your guts like corset-laces. It unwinds your pelvic floor, catches your breath with both hands; your temples pound and the world tilts. Your heart slams up against your ribs.

The air held back inside your throat squirms.

Shit.

Each muscle group in your body seeks stability before it locks into place and the man sneaking out from behind rows of stripped-bare shelves is old enough for emerging eye-lines, for decades of sun, for his first patches of silver hair.

Old enough to know better.

There’s a hollow gleam in his eyes, a ripe lack of focus that’s smeared all over the bare parts of you in a way that’s familiar as your own blood—it’s ill intent, a displayed thirst to maim or just to take, the craving for domination by way of simple strength differences because there’s no longer any externally imposed reason to live a good life.

He puts a gun on you even though you both know he doesn’t dare fire it.

And it turns out that a wariness of bullets—especially for a city girl who grew up around the corner from the sort of casual gun violence that hovered below the daily radars of well-dressed white people—still pulls at much deeper roots than the new if suffocating fear of sudden alien dismemberment. So you ease down your empty cloth sacks, unloop your canteen. Take off the rifle Jack insists that you carry, even though it’s not loaded.

Even though it’s much too dangerous for you to learn how to use it.

You won’t look your wannabe rapist in the face because you refuse to remember him.

You unbuckle your belt. You keep your trembling palm flush against the metal so the clinking jangle of it isn’t the last thing you hear before the air hums with chittering alien calls and the sunlit glass explodes.

Instead you keep your eyes trained on his handgun—if I stop looking too long will he do a sleight-of-hand, trade it for a knife? Will he ditch an old-fashioned American threat for something that’s quieter and messier but a lot more intimate and if he does what do I do? Is it worth the clumsy lunge the bitter struggle an inevitable introduction of uncontrollable noise? Is it wiser to give in, grant access, pack my mind away, drift off into daydream—and you push your pants to your ankles.

The gun gestures: lie down.

You breathe hard and your teeth chatter and your face flames but you do it.

The floor is dirty. On your back it’s easy to look at the layers of grit and grime outlining the vinyl tiles and remember that the proper world as you remember it doesn’t exist, that social graces don’t exist.

Your hip joints strain, quiver into gnawing pain at the diamond shape you’re forced to hold with your thighs; your pants are khaki shackles and your boots bound into ballast so you fling both hands to your sides and imagine them into roadkill—dazed rabbits, trailer-flattened squirrels, power line-zapped chipmunks, squashed juvenile groundhogs with their little brown legs sticking up—and the man holds tight to the handgun.

He loses his balance and for a moment there’s hope.

It bruises itself against your sternum, beats wild feathers into your ribs.

But the man finds his knees in front of your feet.

He’s a gaunt grizzled thing, not old enough to be your father but old enough to be someone’s father, he has that look, strung-out with accumulated stress and knotted into filthy layers, a rangy-limbed nobody from before—a gross thing living out a gross fantasy, maybe he thinks I’m too pretty for him, maybe it’s just about opportunity, maybe he wants me to be his daughter for five minutes—and for a brief moment the trick of his posture looks like surrender. Like he’s praying for the strength to be good.

But his free hand shakes toward his crotch.

Unzips his greasy jeans.

The soft snarl of unwinding zipper teeth pulls your belly tight as a drum and he stares at your naked pussy, his hand busy inside sagging folds of faded cotton. The cock he wrestles out looks like a fat pink grub.

Your breath founders.

This tall skinny someone’s-dad kneels there and drools at you. He squeezes his cock, aims his glittery eyes at your face; he picks over your cheeks, your eyes, your mouth for traces of fear.

His gross dirty fingers massage his shaft.

He moves onto all fours, starts to crawl. The interstellar death angels flash through your mind like blurs transferring from rooftop to car roof to empty patches of cracked pavement; those long gangling limbs terrifying but efficient, their constant stuttering whimpers revolting—chitters and whistles lobbed at anything that’s alive, purring in order to caress flesh that pulses, to read through every range of sound generated by a body

He climbs over you like a shadow. He trembles there like a wind-tossed pile of roadside trash.

You wait for the whoosh. Yearn for it.

You shut your eyes and summon that moment on the bridge but it’s thin as decaying celluloid, frazzled into a pile of off-color image fragments; you pray on it, wish for it like a child might, but the sensation of whoosh has curled up. It’s cut off from the rest of you and gone numb, fallen asleep like a foot does you don’t want to think but you can't stop it or a hand when your arm’s been curled under you for too long

This tall skinny someone’s-dad loser man smells like homeless sweat and rotted-out teeth and fresh dark earth and Red Bull.

That’s good, that’s good, tally the abjection and wallow in the details of disgust because it gives you focus. It distracts your fear, maps out a way for you to live through this.

The man’s flabby tongue leaves a trail of slime on the side of your neck.

You don’t want to shudder—because this disgust is mine—so you shut your eyes and make weak fists, strategize stillness, pack up your breath.

I will not allow a struggle.

The rising thud of your heart fills your ears.

It will not be me who brings down our end times.

You hold your breath.

You wait for the inevitable cram of cock, for his blunt invasion, the crippling pain of it, the shame.

The moments change the way they pass by until something feels off.

Is he—gentle hitching sounds like spasmodic lungs, like wet pounded meat—strangling?

Fresh adrenaline floods your torso. It frees the whoosh, that sense of plummeting arrested; it wakes up the insides of your thighs—that’s the feminism cutting the cord, that’s the feminism readying for jettison, that’s one light-lined shade kindling itself into existence and preparing for takeoff—and loose shadows writhe across the bright red happening underneath your closed lids I will not look at his face and the noise of your heart recedes just enough to make out a dance of overlapping soft shoe-squeaks and a breath-load that’s far too turbulent for one person.

You open your eyes.

In the blur of too much sun, they find their focus by landing on your would-be rapist’s mouth.

It’s stuffed with a tight band of dirty shirt, his hairy hollow cheeks folded into deep furrows by a pair of muscular hands pulling.

Your stomach flushes with crackling heat—of course it’s Jack he saw it he did see the rock propped against the door he did notice he did follow me in here after all and your numb muscles tremble around the creep of new life. The rush of relief dilates you. It softens you. It lessens the thrust of your breath, loads your armored muscles with lax and quivering meat.

You look at Jack’s straining hands.

You remember the feel of his mouth close enough to your ear for his faintest whisper to carry volume—a hard enough gag will push someone’s tongue back into their throat. The warm air of him tickling you into sweet gentle shivers, prickling puffs of cool eiderdown up and down the length of your spine; hard goosebumps cupped your breasts, turned your nipples into beacons but gagging is a slow death he murmured and when the air hunger takes hold—he licked his lips, swallowed, the slow wet work of his tongue sounding so much like a kiss—a person becomes a lot more willing to make noise.

You nodded, blind with need and too flushed to move—for a slight sip of his air, for the hesitant warmth in his words, for the steady pressure of his his too-hot hand on your too-hot heart.

Jack’s straining hands yank your gross wannabe-rapist’s head.

The dirty neck folds backward.

Just begging for a blade. The memory of Jack’s voice whispers in the back of your mind. Do you remember where to cut?

Still trembling, still much too soft, your hands let go of their fists.

He showed you with his own hand on his own neck—the arteries are deep but still easy to find, they’re where you’d take a pulse. He whispered it while looking in your eyes, while spreading his own hand across his own throat; he lifted his chin, thumb and finger groping for the throbs until he smiled and whispered right there.

The man’s grime-ringed throat jumps and strains.

Then Jack took your hand and your guts writhed and jumped, your chest shuddering; you held back your breath as he opened your fingers, used them to cup the gristle of his larynx. He watched your face and deepened his breathing, slid the tips of your fingers across the staccato thud of his pulse—your eyes shut and you felt the slight surge in him when you did it, his fumble-footed blood tripping speed before falling backward into its strong even stride.

You close your knees but do it in slow-motion, your heart still hammering.

He changed the position of your small hand so your thumb could feel the other side and he muttered size difference will give or take an advantage and the slight bit of voice loaded into his breath was a thing you could feel, a thin fleeting vibration massaged into your palm by the gentle push and flex of his swallowing.

Scintillating silver threads ring your vision.

Jack winds the ends of the dirty shirt around one fist. He hauls back, digs his elbow into the man’s spine. The man’s gurgling muffles.

You hold still and wait for the silver to fade, surf the cresting irregularities in your breath.

Jack slaps the cuff of his boot.

The man’s fingers claw at the shirt.

You glimpse the black leather sheath of Jack’s knife, the way his pants-cuff bunches up behind the hilt.

The man shoves back with his feet. He slams his shoulder blades into Jack’s sternum and Jack’s feet slew sideways but he grabs on to the shirt with both hands.

A fast death is the quietest death he murmured, a slight hum of sound nested in the bottom of his breath and that fleeting wisp of voice chambered inside his skull like a waiting bullet and the fastest death means cutting into an artery—

Jack transfers his loss of balance into a wide swing of the man’s head and pulls back tighter; the man’s nose bubbles with snot and his eyes bulge.

The urge to speak wriggles around in you, fills your throat. It presses up at the inside of your chest. The thought of it paws at your lips, fine-tunes the flow of air through your nostrils.

The man’s chest heaves, his thin hairy cheeks red as plums. His worn heels scrabble at the floor.

Jack pulls on the shirt until filaments of trembling muscle pop up between his collarbones and his jaw; he bares his teeth but keeps them together, watches you, steers a soft staccato string of shhh shhh shhh shhh through the gaps between them.

You dive onto your belly, push with your knees.

Pull yourself closer to their knitted-together bodies, wriggle your hips from side to side.

Jack’s eyes widen.

He shakes his head but you’re wearing down you think, feeling around for the sole of his planted boot I can see it your face is much too red you struggle to hook your fingers on the protruding hilt and your breath is flagging and gross nasty someone’s-daddy man strikes the center of your back with one flailing thigh.

Your body seizes around its sudden dump of air.

Try not to cough—your chest burns, your eyes watering—climb on top of that urge nice and easy its like a spooked horse you can do it—your rib muscles spasm—introduce more air through your nose—you clamp your tongue to the roof of your mouth, grope for the hilt of Jack’s knife—ease it in don’t gasp go slow so slow slow slow

For a brief dizzying second, shimmering black holes dot your vision. You gasp in a shortened breath and collapse onto your belly, curl onto your side, muffle your mouth.

A burst of strength animates Jack’s efforts. His mouth twists into a snarl and he whipsaws the man’s head back and forth like a dog with a ragdoll.

The dirty garbage man arches up into a long stuttering grunt, his limp cock flopping around between his flies. His whole head flushes a bright shade of red.

Jack tourniquets the shirt with one forearm. Lunges sideways, grabs the knife.

Gulps in a huge ragged breath.

He jabs the blade into the man’s straining neck and the thick wet thunk of it rips a vigorous shiver through your flesh. Your guts lurch, the roots of your teeth throbbing; your thighs twitch. Your back humps. Your lungs fills with hot butterflies.

Misty droplets of blood spray through the man’s dilated nostrils. They stipple the back of Jack’s hand, paint the dips between his knuckles.

He wrenches the knife out.

Thin streams of bright red shoot out the wound, spray jagged lines across the windows; the man’s legs jitter and pop. His hips writhe and his throat gargles, his nose spilling thin ruby rivers. The stretched cotton blooms red—his chest twitches with a whole-body effort that serves only to draw blood deeper into the places where it does not belong.

Through muscle and meat and carotid to the trachea you think, the remembered murmur of Jack’s voice calming the hesitation in your own. This is what drowning looks like.

The stale air stinks like rain on rust.

You pull back and sit up, see the whole picture of it—the man’s body a fish flopping, flipped out of water for the spectacle of it; his coordinated spasming, the widening blood-pool, the slackening muscles in his bound-up jaws rhythmic as gills yearning for water.

When Jack pushes the body aside, it rolls like a huge half-torn trash bag spilling litter and fermented slime and boiling maggots and rotten water.

Jack breathes hard.

Cleans the knife.

His hand is slow about it.

Your eyes layer the sight of him, of this methodical hygiene, with increasing levels of clarity until everything else recedes into a bright-white sun-bent blur.

When the blade is clean enough, he slides it back home.

You stop breathing. Heat stirs under the skin of your cheeks while dreamy gooseflesh wraps your arms, drapes down your back.

Jack’s movements coalesce in your direction.

The momentum of him fills your awareness, unravels the sensations in your body one stitch at a time: the persistent ache in your hips, your fluttering hamstrings, the sullen pain-pulse sizzling through your hands and knees, the heavy ache of your tenderized lungs; you have just enough time to recognize finer details—your continued shivering under a thick blanket of sweat, your arid throat, the mounting pressure behind your eyes—and then Jack is there.

He’s squatting in front of you.

He casts a cooling shadow over your face and leans in, moves his hands over your body in a way that’s all business, seeking superficial evidence of injury or disruption.

And the soft efficiency of that touch, its thoroughness, its lingering persistent weight, makes you feel like chattel—livestock to be whispered, a beloved pet, a cherished burden.

He moves onto his hands and knees. He crawls closer to you, puts his mouth against your ear. “You all right?”

His breath fills your head and the humid warmth of it, its speedy rustle, his light trembling rim of beard-stubble, fills your eyes with tears. You sniffle.

Nod.

“You sure?”

The knot in your throat aches. Your vision blurs and you nod again, brush the tear-tracks off your cheeks.

“Let’s get these—” He grabs your pants, sits on his heels.

You nod, wipe your nose. Look around. Lie back down and he pulls them up past your knees and you take the waistband, shift your lower body back into the beat-up khaki as gently as you can.

Jack gathers up your things, loops them over one shoulders. He stands, offers you his hand.

You take it.

He leans back and pulls until you swing up onto your feet but your knees are too soft for it, your legs too jiggly, so he catches you by the hips. He rests his cheek against yours, resets his grip.

“We can wait.” The subtle movements of his mouth scratch into your skin. “For a minute.” He keeps his voice below a whisper. “I’ll hold you up.”

You hear insects buzzing, the noise of them magnified by too many hard surfaces and stagnant air; the wet blood-smell smothers you, carries with it a hint of shit and the acrid bite of loose urine.

You shake your head and mouth I want out close to his ear.

He nods.

You’re looking past the shape of Jack’s upper arm at the scattered spatter of blood—it’s darkening already, trading ruby gleam for maroon mud—when he trades hips for buttocks and pulls you up; your legs go around his waist without thought while adrenaline prickles your stomach and your blood lurches, speeds up, whirls its hard pulse through your head—I could’ve walked it you think, but maybe that isn’t true.

You hold onto his neck and hook your ankles, watch the gas station interior sway backward.

You can’t look away from the receding wet red sprawl of corpse.

It’s funny you think, the doorway passing over your head and a gust of fresh air drenching you with a scent of new flowers, dying has erased some of this man’s repugnance and while he doesn’t look like he’s asleep he does look like repose, a peaceful wreck, as if all his will toward violence intertwined with his blood and made the two things inseparable.

Naked sunlight staggers all around you.

The gas station stops being a doorway and big plate glass windows, becomes a dull gray pile of cinderblocks. Tall grass surrounds it.

You can still see the tall sign peeking over the top of the hill when Jack lowers you feet to the ground.

Your arms stay around his neck. He sways toward the pull of your weight and looks into your face; his eyebrows cast a shadow of slight bewilderment across his face but instead of violating the fragile silence with whispered words or breaking eye contact long enough to breathe them into your ear he blinks. Steadies your hips. Sharpens his focus.

The blood rises into your cheeks. You look up into his eyes and the heat of your blush swells your nostrils.

His hands linger on your sides.

You breathe through your mouth.

Birdsong crashes back into place. Bees buzz their loops around stands of fresh-bloomed clover. Fresh wind mutters its way through the new leaves while the stillness between you spins out into threads of glass and you think of the dead man, his expression molded by his last few drops of agony while the humanity bloats back into him and flies gather, the blood staining the whites of his bulging eyes, the blood-soaked shirt still wedged between his teeth.

Your mind murmurs I guess the opposite of that whoosh is the last thing he got to feel.

The thought of it lowers your lids.

Jack’s body sways closer. His breath lands on your mouth and you nod, lean onto the balls of your feet.

His nose bumps yours.

You put a hand on his neck and tighten your fingers, nod again.

He takes your face in his hands and your breath quickens and flutters, your heart lurching into an unpredictable rhythm—too fast at first and then slow and thick, a threadbare heat flooding your thighs and unraveling the muscles like silky braided ribbons.

His lips skim yours, press into your cheek soft as bruised fruit.

You grab onto his flak vest.

He cups the base of your skull, brings his mouth to your ear. “Not here,” he whispers.

You nod.

By the time you make it back to the root cellar you’ve been camping in, all the patience has evaporated from his body.

He navigates the long narrow low-roofed space like his skin’s threatening to crawl off his flesh, like it’s much too tight and clinging to breath for dear life—he tosses empty rucksacks onto empty shelves, unbuckles his sidearm, relieves himself of the rifle. Peels off the flak vest, unbuttons his fatigues, strips down to his gray t-shirt—he reaches up, clicks on the battery-operated lantern hanging overhead. Leaves it swinging. Shoves the homemade wooden bar down into the brackets he’s screwed into place on either side of the cellar door.

Your eyes bounce away from the jerks in his movements and a frisson grips your skin, begins at the base of your skull; it drizzles a thin cold prickling underneath your scalp’s slow swoon—you think are you going to hurt me and you’re tight enough for that aren’t you, tight as a bowstring and ready to launch some kind of projectile if only for the relief of it and your sigh shakes on the way out. Your thoughts borrow shape and form out of the whirling shadows cast between his restless body and the slight swaying of the flat white electric light and it's easy to imagine him punching something.

And I'm the softest thing here.

You back your way toward the opposite end of the cellar’s long low room.

“What are you doing?” He freezes in place and it comes out a whisper, narrows into a soft hiss at the end. “You’re acting like I’m him all of a sudden.”

You trip over the snarl of sleeping bags.

He spits on the patch of dried blood still smeared across the back of his hand, keeps his eyes on your face.

Why would you say that.

He wipes the back of his hand on his thigh and your eyes drop to the vigorous effort of his hand.

Why are you him right now and your heart kicks up into a harder beat and are you him in this moment when it’s safe enough to cut loose a little and your breath lets go of its well-trained silent smoothness, crouches in your throat. It flutters around inside your mouth like a trapped moth.

His hand stops moving. It slows down, hangs there while he shifts a slide of ponderous movement through his shoulders. His hips rock to one side and stay there; the stillness that takes over his body brings to mind the posture of a hungry animal.

You think your body’s contradicting whatever it is you want your mouth to do and you want to whisper to him that you’re afraid.

His breath deepens, fills his chest like a sail.

You think it’s almost like I’ve become the real threat somehow, that you see me that way, despite the fact that you’re the one positioned between me and the door.

His gaze sharpens.

The light pours shadows over his face. It outlines the sweat around his eyes, the spit lurking in the corners of his mouth.

It draws your attention to the blood patches soaked into his fatigue pants, the places where stray droplets melted between his buttons and smeared stains onto his t-shirt.

And the skin beneath too. Your chest tightens. Where it won’t stick for long.

“So what was that shit out in the grass?” His disheveled breath reorganizes itself into a silky-soft growl. “Huh?”

You watch his face, think thank you for neutralizing the threat because it’s the kind of formal language that might break through and bestow a form of recognition that offers calm, that warms him with its polished and familiar glow, that might distract him long enough to ignore his disturbed breath and shrink-wrapped skin and bowstring joints.

But when you open your mouth, something different comes out.

“I liked watching you kill him.”

There it goes—you imagine your feminism leaking out through your sweat-soaked pores and reorganizing itself into an animated ghost-girl, a more innocent version of you freeing herself from the hungers of your flesh to peer at the environment that has set her free: the canned atmosphere, one man’s limbs arranged into a threat, you body swimming in shadows, your combined and bottled-up body odor, a lingering taste of dust.

You feel for the stone wall behind you, flatten one palm against it.

Jack’s mouth softens. His posture turns lazy. His eyebrows lift. “Oh yeah?”

You nod.

He straightens up. Lifts his voice just out of a whisper, laces it with low-pitched gravel. "Okay." He nods. “But I wanna hear you say it.”

“Yes.”

“So…” He moves closer. “This is your way of saying thank you?”

There’s just enough proximity—just enough evaporated sweat—to taint your breath with the scent of dried blood.

“Or…” He prowls his way around the piles of sleeping bag. “Is it kind of payment.” His smile settles down into something small and tight. “For services rendered.”

It felt appropriate.

You watch his face, shift your weight in time with his steps; you flatten both hands up against the cool stone.

But that’s not right either because it’s too prepackaged, a selection of ready-made phrases plastered over something that’s much messier; it felt necessary the way air is necessary, it put my feet back on the ground, it seemed to be an inevitable conclusion, it balanced my equation of sudden trauma, it felt like a good idea at the time—

“I just wanted to, that’s all.”

It reminded me that my skin my blood my spit my bones are mine, all mine, to do with as I please.

Your face burns.

Mine to use.

“Yeah?”

You look up at him. “Did it feel like anything?” You hold your voice to a whisper. "To kill him?"

“Work.” His face flushes, his eyes sparkling. “Training.” He breathes through his mouth. “That’s all.”

I don’t believe you.

His swift blink and the tension in his mouth, the abrupt stiffening of his spine, tells you that the look on your face is spelling out all of your naked thoughts; he licks his lips and sets his jaw, the muscles flexing.

He brings all of his attention to your face. He props one hand against the wall.

Your shoulders squirm.

He leans all of his weight into his arm and lowers his face just enough to speak into your hair.

“I wanted to gut him.”

Your breath quickens and you shiver a little, shut your eyes.

His words slow to a crawl. His breath floods your hair-roots, hot and fluttery. “For thinking…”

You choke back a whimper because you can see glimpses of a timeline where it happened like that—his knife like a zipper pulling down, unearthing a vulnerable red seam before spilling fat, before spilling blood; the screams would come first, long before the skin finished popping all its hidden stitches, and then the presentation of a squirming pile of guts for your personal delectation—the screams are for you, he might’ve said, a howling demon meant to shout down any feelings about what might’ve happened, you can tame it I swear, I’ll even help you do it—the words of a man leaving the memory of law to rot.

It’s a kind of deification, you think, your breath shallowing. A form of crucifixion.

“He had the right…” His thumb touches your jaw and you flinch; he traces the edge of you, takes hold of your chin. “To touch you.”

A terrible contract.

Your breath jitters inside your nose.

“But that…” He cups your cheek and lowers his breath to the underside of your jaw. “Would’ve made him scream,” he whispers.

And called down the only extraordinary devils that are left.

“I want you,” you breathe, the words shivering. You feel for the back of his neck and grip his nape, pull him down, smother your mouth with his blood-stippled cheek. “To make me scream.”

He lunges forward to kiss you and you pull back, reach down. Palm the fly of his pants.

“You can gut me,” you breathe, your eyes still closed.

You grip the thickening shape of his cock and his breath bursts out of him; he takes you by the back of your neck and hauls your face up toward his. You take hold of a nearby shelf and use it to push backward, lean enough of your weight into it to maintain a slight distance.

“With this,” you breathe, stroking his shaft through the sturdy rumpled fabric—he grabs your wrist and hisses out a short burst of breath; he wrestles your hand behind your back, holds it there. He pins you up against the wall.

“Big words,” he hisses, dragging his mouth across your cheek and he smiles, eases out a slow sigh. He licks the edge of your earlobe. “Comin out of such a little girl.”

You writhe against the press of his weight and whimper. You let go of his neck, arch your belly into his hard cock; he catches your other wrist before that hand has a chance to land anywhere.

“I’m gonna kiss you.” He whispers it against your cheek, wrestles that wrist behind your back. He pulls you up against him. “Do you understand that?”

You nod.

“I’m gonna put—” He moves his mouth until it hovers over yours and his murmuring voice breaks, spills rapid breath into your face. “My fuckin tongue in your mouth,” he growls. “Do you understand that?”

You nod. “Yes, Jack.”

He flinches at the half-whispered sound of his name, shuts his eyes. His hands tighten and his hips jerk, his breath grinding to a half-whimpered halt.

“Kiss me.” You lift up onto the balls of your feet, breathe the words. “I want you to.” Your lips bump into his. “Please.” You pant out a thin whimper and balance on your toes to brush your mouth across his. “I can be good,” you sigh.

Your wrists twist against his grip and his fingers tighten. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You nod.

“Open your mouth,” he whispers.

You nod and tip your head back, arch your neck. Your mouth falls open.

A soft tone wells up through his tremulous borderline whisper: “That’s very good.”

He breathes hard and lowers his face close enough to drag the wet velvet tip of his tongue along the inside of your upper lip and you’re wracked with shivers, your breath fluttering, your skin burning; you fight with your unhinged voice, struggle to quash your faint hitching moan.

He licks your bottom lip and rich sound breaks through, thins your panting breath; it crouches deep down inside your throat.

“Shhhh,” he whispers, his warm stream of air brushing your tongue. “A good girl,” he says, his lips brushing against yours, “is a quiet girl.”

You nod. “I kn—”

He seals your mouth with a soft, wet, open-mouthed kiss and you choke out a low-pitched breathy groan; he lets go of one wrist, wraps that hand around your throat.

A flush of heavy heat grips your belly.

His tongue wraps around yours, his fingers tightening just enough to feel the blood squirming through your arteries and he breaks the kiss, remakes it; you slide your hand over his wrist, palm the back of his hand.

Squeezes a little.

His tongue flicks against yours and he whimpers.

Your neck gets soft and he takes hold of your jaw, uses it to turn your head; he kisses along the line of your jaw. “Wanted this for ages,” murmurs into your ear. “Wanted you under me.”

Your nipples stiffen. “Fuck me.” A thick hot pulse swells into your pussy and you grip the back his head. “Please,” you whimper.

You think of dead slang made by an old world:

Gut me.

Raw me.

Crack me.

Rearrange these guts.

You imagine his cock like a knife, a blade not made to split you open but to make you yield.

Where does all this violence come from?

He lets go of you long enough to maul open your clothes. A button or two rips off, goes flying for the satisfaction of the sound—growling cotton that sags into open breath, spills the accumulated heat of your body out of its cloth container; it’s just another way of bleeding you think, of trading a bit of life for the fleeting comfort of stillness—and he peels down your tank top, wrestles off your bra. He hustles to unfasten the pants he escorted you toward re-fastening back when the exposure of your pussy was for the benefit of a strange man; he knows enough to palm you there and squeeze, to wait for your breath to shiver itself apart.

He parts your wet folds one finger at at time.

He starts to murmur about how wet you are but you cover his mouth with your hand: shhhhhhh because a good boy is a quiet boy right?

He rubs your clit. He presses it through a puddle of slick, uses his lightest touch to caress its throbbing and a cacophony of blood loosens your thighs.

Right?

It tightens the base of your spine.

“You like that?”

Craving feedback.

You nod and breathe like you can’t get enough air.

“I wanna hear you say it.”

“Yes,” you gasp.

He whispers it into your ear: “You still want me to fuck you?”

The throbbing swells, takes up handfuls of your delirious guts and squeezes—gutted by pleasure but strangled by need; hauled up to the precipice of a long drop—and your knees turn inward, your weakened thigh muscles arguing with each other; you think what you can’t say without succumbing to the rushed air of a runaway voice: yes god yes please please PLEASE

You keep your mouth open, your breath shallow. You nod.

He pulls off his t-shirt and ghost-stains of blood cling to his sweaty skin, their curved borders blurred by salt and water.

Your eyes zoom in on them.

You salivate at the thought of iron.

His chin drops, his eyes tracing the path of your gaze. He smears a thumb across the gentle rise and fall of his chest and you chase it with your mouth until he wipes the half-melted blood onto your bottom lip.

You look up into his eyes, lick it off; the salt-metal taste puckers the insides of your cheeks.

His breath roughens and he grabs your hair, pulls your head back; his fingertips stay light and restless on your clit. He licks your mouth.

He gathers up your bottom lip with his teeth.

A slow-loading weight of ecstasy knocks your hips off-balance, clenches your pussy; it strums the base of your spine, works heat into tremulous ache.

He bites down just hard enough to kindle a spark of pain.

You clutch onto his wrist and your breath lightens, comes faster; the orgasm begins with a lazy throb, a light fluttering, then falls through into a gush of feverish weakness—your voice shreds through your breath and hums inside the bones of your face, thins into an unraveling whimper.

He backs his fingers away from your clit and kisses you, whispers how good you are: yes baby girl that’s it, be soft for me, just breathe, shhhhh yes, you’re so good, it’s okay to come

When your legs give out, he hauls you up and out of your downward slide.

Picks you up.

Gets on his knees.

Lays you on your back.

He rubs the blunt head of his cock through your folds and plunges in, scoops forward with his hips; he balances on his forearms and pulls back, slams in to the hilt.

The thick wet thud of it reverberates up your spine, clicks your teeth together. You gasp.

“You want it?”

You nod.

“Good.” His whisper flattens into a drawn-back breathy grunt. “Cause you’re gonna get it.”

His methodical thrusts stir the ruins of your orgasm back to life and your guts twitch, tighten around a rush of tingling.

Your belly fills with hot butterflies.

“Gonna come again,” you breathe.

“Do it,” he hisses.

You shut your eyes and fall back into a red dark—your pussy strains, stretches past its comfort threshold; each smear of trembling pain sinks its claws into your lungs, churns up the coming storm.

His rhythm falters. His soft grunts lose their composure.

It’s your turn to whisper: yes that’s it, give it to me, give it to me Jack, I want it

You widen your thighs to take his rutting and lift your hips, squeeze the flexing muscles in his shoulders.

“Fuck me,” you whisper.

He bites back a moan.

You flatten your hand across his mouth.

His sharp puffs of breath degenerate into raspy humming whimpers.

He flattens his tongue against your palm and his body shudders like a foundering vessel beaching itself on the rapid shallowing of your flesh.

The orgasm sweeps over you, pulls you under too hard to hear him; caught under your own hot rolling waves of ecstasy, your stomach whoosh-drops like it did that day on the bridge—the air too bright and filtered green, mud-smell of water slapping your face, what wind there was nurturing the brimstone stink of the end of the world.

Your limbs thrash.

Your neck arches so hard that your head lifts off the floor.

When all of existence lulls back into the booming thud of a swollen heart and your breath snaps back, your chest still heaving, his hand changes its position fast enough to catch the back of your head.

And when your breath's calmed enough for you to do it, you decide to tell him the truth.

“I was going to kill myself,” you breathe, staring up into his sweat-glittered face. “That day.” You lick your lips. “On the bridge.”

“I know.”

tenderhoof

@pinksiamese giving us some good goddamn treats