I grind against him. No shame. No hesitation. Just my hips rolling forward, chasing his cock through the fabric with a desperation I stopped pretending about approximately thirty seconds ago.
His exhale hits my hair. Ragged. Wrecked. The sound of a man whose control just took a hit it wasn’t built to survive.
“Sophia…”
My name in his mouth like that. Like a warning. Like a prayer. Like he’s already lost and hasn’t finished pretending he hasn’t.
“Reth,” I breathe out his name like it’s fucking sacred, and his hand tightens on my breast, squeezing, and the sensation arrows straight down to where I’m grinding against him. I whimper, the sound escaping before I can catch it.
I rock my hips again, harder, rolling into him.
“Don’t.” His voice is wrecked. Barely a word. And I’m nothing but labored breaths and arousal, a physical response to him that I shouldn’t have.
My arms snake around his shoulders, fingers reaching for his neck, nails wanting to dig into?—
“Stop!”
His fist hits the wall, the sound of it cracking through the seasons, and I flinch—my whole body jerking sideways—but I don’t pull away. I don’t move from this wall, but I’m barely able to keep myself upright.
The silence after the impact is enormous, and his forehead drops forward, almost to my shoulder, not touching, his fist stillagainst the wall. I can barely breathe, barely feel the oxygen reach my lungs.
“Reth…”
He’s shaking.
“Reth,” I whisper, almost inaudibly. “What happened to you?”
He takes a step back…then another. When he finally speaks, his voice is the quietest I’ve ever heard it, ground down to almost nothing.
“You can’t fix me.” A pause that has the weight of something he’s been carrying for a very long time. “That’s all you need to know.”
June 9th, 2023
We covered trauma bonding today. The overlap between fear and desire. How the nervous system processes threat and arousal on adjacent tracks, how the two can wire together under the right (or wrong) conditions until the body can’t tell them apart.
I took excellent notes.
Came home, poured a glass of wine, sat on the counter, and thought about it for a long time. Because here’s the thing nobody says out loud in a clinical setting: knowing why something happens doesn’t make you immune to wanting it.
Understanding the wiring doesn’t disconnect it. You can name every mechanism, cite every study…
And still want it anyway.
Not to observe it. Not to analyze it. Feel it. Fear and longing so tangled I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
I don’t know what that says about me.
Probably nothing good.
14
SOPHIA
Ihaven’t turned a page in twenty minutes. Same paragraph. Same fucking sentence. I’ve read it four times and couldn’t tell you a single word because my mind is trapped in that room, replaying every filthy second on loop.
My back flush against the wall. His huge body pinning me there like I weighed nothing. Those burning eyes locked on mine while his rough hand pulled my shirt down and greedily palmed my breast, rolling and pinching my nipple with slow, deliberate strokes like he’d been starving to touch me for too long. Like every single time he watched me from the shadows, he’d imagined exactly how my skin would feel under his palm.
Oh, God, and the way his thumb dragged across my bottom lip, the way he murmured “cherry-red” like he’d been saying it in his head every single day for years, like finally voicing it made his cock throb so hard he could barely breathe.
