My dark veins swell all over my body, and my electricity comes to life. But I keep it contained.
Jude is lost to rapture; his eyes rolled back. I gently drop him on the rock again. Right as I feel my orgasm rising, I pull out and come all over his chest and cock. I want him to smell like me. I want my abuser to be covered with evidence of my victory and pleasure.
When I’m finally done, I put both hands on the rock to keep myself upright. My vision is darkening and I close my eyes. I feel faint from the exertion. I’m not as healed as I thought I was. My legs are weak, and it takes me all I have to stay upright.
Jude stays under me for a while, breathing fast. But right as I’m starting to think he has fallen asleep, he slides out of the cage I made with my body.
He walks out of the pool on shaky legs and grabs his gun. I don’t try to stop him. My lubricant and semen drip down his inner thighs. I file the image into my memory. He hands me the towel he gave me earlier.
“Come on. It’s my turn to wash. Dry yourself and get out,” he says, as if I just didn’t fuck his brains out.
For once, the gun isn’t pointed at me. It hangs loosely in his hand.
I don’t try to argue. This is not a fight I want to have right now. I’m too busy sorting through what just happened. What I did.
I dry myself up, grab my clothes, and finish building a fire. This time, I do my best not to look at Jude as he washes himself. First off, because I’m still hard and very much naked myself, and secondly, I don’t know how to act now. And if what we just did changes anything.
Apparently, it doesn’t.
“That’s a lousy fire,” Jude says as he walks back to theFireflya few minutes later.
I offer him a scathing look. “The wood is wet.”
There are no trees around, so everything comes from the river shore.
He laughs. “That’s what he said.”
Jude helps me gather more wood, and as soon as the flames are high enough, we put our wet clothes on the folding chairs close to the fire. We sit on our towels, naked except for the blankets he brought back from theFirefly.
Everything feels so… domestic. As if we were two friends traveling the wastelands and not two enemies who just partook in a hate-fuck.
We stay quiet as our food cooks over the fire. Jude keeps his gun close, but his hand isn’t as tense around it. The silence stretches as we eat, until Jude finally breaks it.
“How long did you stay in the lab?” he asks.
I freeze, my fork halfway to my mouth. “I left when I was five.”
“After your father killed the scientists.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember it?”
“I do.” Sadly.
“My early childhood is a blur,” he says. “I barely remember living at sea. We owned a boat until it sank. Then we moved around the wastelands a lot. But my teenage years are vivid. They fucking sucked. That’s when I started thinking for myself, and I realized I was living among monsters. My mom put a gun in my hand when I was eleven and made me kill my first man. He was a traveler who had stolen some of our food during the night, and I caught him. His death was my prize.” He bites his lips. “The worst part is, I’m so used to killing now that it wouldn’t keep me up at night. But I cried myself to sleep for a week after I killed him.”
Why is he telling me all this?
“My first kill was when I was two,” I say. Jude raises an eyebrow at me. “I came back to the lab when I was a teenager. I watched all the footage. They recorded everything. I had electrocuted a few people since birth, but it wasn’t until I was two that the electric charge was strong enough to kill. She was one of the scientists, and she needed to take a sample. She drew blood. She was wearing isolating gloves, but I reached for her with my small hand, and I killed her.”
In the video, my younger self had cried when she fell to the ground with a loud noise. The other scientists rushed to reanimate her, but it was too late. Her heart had stopped beating. In the panic, I cried and I cried, but no one tried to comfort me. I can’t blame them.
After that, their dislike turned into palpable hate.
“What did they do to you?” he asks.
“They locked me up and never touched me again without putting me to sleep first. Then, by my third kill, they dropped me into the jellyfish tank.”
