She didn’t look at me, but I felt her face at my neck, her breath hot and erratic. I sensed the trembling in her arms, the ghost of a sob in the way her mouth pressed hard against my skin.
She was grinding down on me now, her thighs locked around my hips, her hands braced on my shoulders as if she needed to hold me underwater.
I wrapped my arms around her, squeezing until she squeaked, until the air in her lungs hissed past my ear. It was a mockery of comfort, but she didn’t ask for less. She clawed at my hair, dragging my head back to expose the pale line of my throat, and bit at the skin there.
This frenzy was born of needing not to feel, not to think, not to be alone with the sick twins of loneliness and longing. She ground out a rhythm, faster and faster until the headboard hammered the wall.
I let myself thrust up into her, hard enough to bruise, hard enough to make her grunt and dig her fingers deeper into my back.
Her round breasts bounced in my face. I caught her nipple in my mouth, bit down almost too hard, used my free hand to fondle theother, and heard her gasp. A wordless whine that might have been a plea for more or less. Didn’t matter.
I was not there, not really. Not with her. I was a thousand miles back in time, a thousand miles forward, orbiting the same doomed sun. Lillian’s hands on me, Lillian’s heat, Lillian’s hair stuck to my cheek, none of it was her, not really. I was fucking the vacancy she left behind.
I almost wanted to call her by the wrong name, wanted to spit out“Amelia”just to see what it would do to the animal clinging to the inside of my ribs. But I kept it inside, let the syllables dissolve on my tongue, because even at my worst I wasn’t sure I could stand the honesty of it.
I drove myself up into Lillian, hard and jerking, needing to fill the hollow she’d found in me. The one I spent every day trying to shore up with hate and violence.
My hands found her ass, rough and possessive, pulling her down, guiding her angles with a control that was more plea than dominance.
She hissed when I pinched, then twisted her hips so I was forced deep inside, nerves sparking in her belly and mine. The pressure built, white-hot, a spiral of want and misery and the need to be needed.
She pressed her palm to my chest, bracing herself, and sweat ran in cold lines from her hair to my bare skin. I watched her fingers creep down, sliding over her ribs to the soaked triangle between her legs. She rubbed herself in little circles, her breath coming fast and higher with each round.
I was hypnotized: by the sight of her, by the furious concentration on her face, by the shattered little moans. I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. I was inside her, every thrust was an electric storm up my spine, every spasm a riot of hate and longing and the sick, raw need to leave a mark that would never, ever fade.
I heard myself groan and for a second I felt the split, felt myself fracture along fault lines, one side watching from theceiling while the other bucked and clawed and burned with the need to belong, even if only as a wound.
I held her steady and let her ride me, her face gone slack with concentration, the wet slap of flesh on flesh loud in the shivery air of the room. She pressed her forehead to mine.
When she came, her thighs clamped around me and she ground her hips in a tight spiral, little tremors juddering through the bones of her pelvis. She made a low, keening sound and let the shudder work through her until her nails went slack on my skin.
I could have lasted longer, but I didn’t want to. I’d spent a lifetime holding back, choking out everything that made me weak.
For once I let the animal win. I bit down on the curve of her shoulder, hard enough to leave a mark, and came inside her with a violence that left me lightheaded, nails digging rivers into the small of her back.
The sound that broke from my chest wasn’t pleasure, not even close. It was release. The pure and perfect silence that follows an explosion.
When I was done I collapsed back, dizzy, the world gone white and then pitch black, my heart rabbiting out of control as if it wanted to leap right out of my chest and leave my body behind for good.
Lillian rolled off me, panting, her hair stuck damp to her cheeks. She laughed once, then pulled the rumpled comforter over her chest like a shield.
We lay there side by side, eyes fixed to the ceiling, breathing in sync and out of time. I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
I closed my eyes. I wanted to pretend it was Amelia I’d just fucked, wanted to believe that somewhere, in some possible world, the gap between her and me wasn’t just a nightmare.
I chased that thought beyond the edges of consciousness, inside the hot bell of Lillian’s room, in the aftershocks of sweat and raw skin. I felt nothing as my body collapsed into the mattress.
I felt everything, and that was worse.
Just for one night, I gave in, and allowed myself to hate her a little less, knowing that tomorrow the monster would return, and I would fall right back into the grip of darkness and rage.
THE PRESENT
AMELIA
The stench of urine invaded my senses, further corroding my already fragile sanity. The man who demanded we call him “master” had provided each of us a bucket to relieve ourselves in.
At first, I had refused. It felt inhumane, a blatant effort to degrade us. But the pressing need to empty my bladder became overwhelmingly consuming, and I reluctantly accepted my fate.
