I force myself to speak, each word like acid poured directly into my veins. "That's better," I say. "Now you're where you belong."
She doesn't answer. She just keeps her head down, as if she's praying for this to end.
I stare at her for a long time, long enough to see her hands unclench, long enough to see the last bit of light leave her eyes.
It hurts in a way death never could.
"Finish it," she whispers, her voice a scrap of sound.
I don't move. I can't.
"I said finish it, Asher," she says, still not looking at me even as she gives me permission to destroy and damn us both. "You don't get to do it halfway, not this time. Finish it."
But I still don't move. I fucking can't.
"Finish it!" she screams, looking at me for the first time since she started crawling, her eyes wild with something I can't name, some level of devastation that threatens to tear the skin from my bones. "Fucking finish it right now. If you want to be the monster, then be him. Right now. You owe me that much."
I sink my hand into her hair, hauling her to her feet. She doesn't resist, not even when I push her up against the wall. Her palms splay against it, bracing herself as I crowd in, pressing my chest to her back and my cock to the curve of her ass. I breathe her in, a single, shuddering drag of orange blossoms and sweat.
She doesn't look at me. She doesn't say a word. Her silence is worse than any slap, any insult. I want her to scream. To fight me. To hurt me the way I'm hurting her.
That's how this has always worked between us. I hurt her, and she retaliates. We pick at wounds and go for the throat and neverfucking back down. No one really wins, and no one really ever loses, either. We just play the same song, over and over.
She's not playing now, and I fucking hate it. I deserve every hit, every insult, every fucking ounce of rage. And she won't give them to me. She isn't giving me a goddamn thing except permission to break us both, one final time.
I palm her hip and yank up her skirt, desperate to make her feel something, to make her fight, to claw my way into her soul one last time. She's not wearing panties because I never let her. It's been weeks since I last let her. Her skin is cold. Goosebumps chase across her thighs as I shove her legs apart until she's spread wide against the glass wall.
I don't bother unzipping. I just free my cock and line it up, pushing inside in one brutal thrust.
She gasps, not from pleasure, not from pain, but from some place in between. A place only I know how to find.
I fuck her hard, using her body the way a drowning man uses a life raft—not for rescue, but for the illusion of survival. My hands dig into her waist, leaving more bruises. My chest is pressed so tight to her back she can't breathe unless I let her.
With every thrust, I try to obliterate what's left of her. What's left of me. I try to make her fight me, to realize that she'll always deserve better than this. I finish destroying the last threads between us, exactly like she demanded.
She doesn't fight. She barely even breathes.
She whimpers once, the sound so small I nearly miss it. I reach up and grab her throat, squeezing until I feel her pulse shudder beneath my palm the way it does when I control her breathing—when I know that I alone have the power to keep her breathing. Not a goddamn car accident or a punctured lung, but me.
Her face is pressed to the wall, her hair stuck to her lips with tears she doesn't bother wiping away. I want to see her eyes,want to see if there's anything left in them, so I turn her head and look.
There's nothing, not even hate. There's just a girl who knows she's lost.
I bite my own tongue to keep from saying the words she wants, the ones I don't deserve to say. The taste of blood floods my mouth. It drips down my chin, spattering her shoulder. I leave it there, letting it say for me what I'll never be allowed to confess.
I fuck her so hard the glass rattles. At some point, my hand slips from her throat to her jaw, turning her face again so I can see every tear, every spasm, every time she blinks and fails to make herself disappear.
I wanted to break her for good the way she demanded, but she's already broken. She broke the moment she said she loved me the first time, five years ago. And she's broken a thousand times since, plucked apart by my hands because that's all I know how to do. Break the things that matter most.
Her breath comes in ragged gasps. Her hands scrabble at the glass, desperate to find something solid. I keep slamming into her, harder and faster, because I know this is the last time. The last time I'll get to see her like this. The last time she'll let me ruin her. The last time I'll ever get to be the one who touches her. The last time any piece of her will be mine.
She comes around me. It's all violence, pleasure ripped from her the same way I've ripped everything else from her. Her pussy clamps down on me. A sob cracks out of her. It sounds like my name.
I bite my tongue again so I don't scream the truth, so I don't confess the thing I've been hiding from since the day I met her, and rip myself away from her, refusing to give myself the satisfaction of coming. My last memory of her doesn't get to be of my own pleasure.
She sags against the wall, her legs barely holding her weight. For a second, she just stands there, panting, her tears making wet tracks down her cheeks.
And then she pulls her skirt down with shaking hands. She tucks her hair behind her ear, then wipes her face, smearing mascara down to her jaw. She still won't look at me, and I hate myself all over again.
