I sat there, hands limp, and watched her as she climbed onto my lap.
It was Lillian’s weight, the warmth of her bare skin pressing through my jeans, that snapped the last thread of resistance.
She straddled me, thighs bracketing my hips, the trembling in her hands at odds with the tilt of her chin. I didn’t know if it was the vodka or the weed or just the loneliness, but I let her settle there, let her nudge my hands to her waist, let her pull my mouth to hers.
Her lips were soft, parted and insistent, tasting of cinnamon and smoke.
I kissed her back only because it was easier than refusing, because I knew how to be wanted only in the context of being used, and Lillian, god, she was using me, using me to patch some hole in herown chest.
Her hands slipped under my shirt, fingers cold and restless against my belly, then up to my chest, tracing lines over my ribs as if she could feel the ugly things I kept caged inside.
She broke the kiss, forehead pressed tight to mine, hair curtaining our faces. In the dim, I saw her swallow.
“You okay?” she whispered, voice rough with need or sadness or both.
I almost said no. But I didn’t. Just gripped her hips harder, dragging her against me in a rhythm that was half plea, half punishment. I wanted to hate her for how easily she’d found the switches to flip, for how she’d peeled away my armor with so little effort.
But mostly I hated myself for letting it happen, for wanting it to happen, because being with Lillian was the closest thing to Amelia Langston, to feeding my hunger.
I was inside the warmth of Lillian, but what I wanted was to be outside myself. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? To push my own body out to the perimeter, let it become a set piece while the rest of me—the hungry core—hid somewhere unreachable and watched the show.
The vodka burned, the weed made everything feel underwater, my fingers tingling like they were waking from a decade’s sleep.
Lillian’s mouth was open against my neck, her voice a ragged, fading echo, but I paid no attention to the words.
I watched the ceiling, counted the chips in the paint, the constellations of black mold creeping along the plaster. I did not want to see her face. I did not want to see my own expression reflected in her wide eyes.
I pressed my palm over her breastbone as she rocked above me, feeling the frantic triphammer of her heart, and for a second I thought of crushing down, hard, seeing what noise she’d make if I really tried.
That was the echo of my father, the violence curled in the roots of my DNA, the urge to take and hollow and leave the rest for crows. But I didn’t. I just held her steady, a hand to anchor her as she bit her own lip and let her body work out whatever it needed to.
She was nothing like Amelia. Not in the way that mattered. Her hair was black, not gold; her laughter, even when it bubbled up, wasnever light, never easy. She was brittle, all edges and scabs and nerves.
I kissed her back with a violence just shy of cruelty, let her grind against me in stuttering desperation, let her teeth scrape over my jaw and ear and neck.
When she pushed my jeans down, I felt exposed, not in the way of being naked, but in the way of being peeled, each layer coming off with a raw, wet sound.
She ground her hips down, and I felt myself harden with a speed I’d never known, like my body was only waiting for the right ache to betray me. I was glass, hollowed and fragile, every cell strung tight.
My hands flexed on her thighs, not guiding so much as holding on; I needed the pressure, the proof of her, the heat beneath her skin.
The room was roaring with our breath, her hair falling in a tangle that lashed my face, the vodka searing my throat, the world reduced to the wet friction and the slip of skin against skin.
She shimmied her hips and arched, a gasp whispering out her mouth, and then she reached between us, pulled my my hard-on free and held it, just for a moment.
She fitted me to the seam of black lace, shoved the panties aside, and rubbed herself against me, wet and shuddering. She was hot, fevered, a tremor in her thighs as she rocked forward, taking me in.
As she slid down onto me, I saw a flash of her face, a wetness in her eyes that looked nothing like pleasure. I knew that look. I wore it every day. The look of someone clawing for meaning inside a burning house.
Her head tipped back, jaw slack, and for a moment I let myself believe I was somewhere else, someone else, not a Baxter or a monster or a freak, just a piece of meat in the dark, being used for its only available purpose.
I let her, let the animal take over, let therhythm of want and forgetting erase every other thought. I gripped her hips with such force that my thumbs left white ovals in her skin, watched her move above me, watched the muscles in her neck tense and relax and tense again.
I didn’t close my eyes, not once. I stared past her, at the wall, at the photo of her and Amelia taped up by the dresser. The younger one, bright-haired and oblivious; the older one, dark and already stained with the knowledge of how things went wrong. They looked like sisters in the way that violence and tenderness can be sisters, sharing the same bone structure but none of the gentleness.
She rode me, rough and fast, a parody of pleasure. I wondered if she was pretending, or if she was desperate enough to need it real. Her hands clutched at my shoulders, nails biting through the thin cotton of my shirt, and I let the small pain anchor me to the moment.
I wasn’t gentle either as we fucked each other. Why would I be? I was never shown gentle; the closest I’d ever come was the echo of a soft voice before the door slammed or the memory of hands that only touched to hurt.
