“What do you want from me, Lili?” His voice tears out of him harsh, strained.
It’s too much: what she wants, and what he might give her instead.
“I—” Lili breaks off, breath rasping, and she’s just—she’s exhausted. Exhausted, so tired she could let it all go. The struggle against loss she will not grieve, the enormity of her desire—a life stolen from her, memories she never got to have—the reality of how little she might actually mean, to deserve treatment like this; all that she fights with daily. Release, that’s all she wants—the absolution of herself, the loss of her own responsibility for it.
“Just—just...just hurt me,” she whispers, urging him. “Hurt me... that’s all I—want, just hurt me.”
She’s never really realized how dark his eyes are. How easily he can hide from her, how little he can let her see. But she sees it, all of it, before he closes her out now: the anger that fractures black, bitterness and pain—no sign of pleasure, nothing—and she doesn’t understand,she doesn’t understand.
Another thrust—particularly hard, particularly vicious. “This? This is what you want?” Aleksandr snarls, grip tightening around her wrists so hard she can feel bruises forming.
She feels like something close to being ruined. It makes her body give up a little more, struggle draining. He feels it, and pushes further.
“I want to break you, Lili—fuckingbreakyou,” he spits. The intensity in his voice isn’t just anger, it’s agony: inscrutable and confusing, but it’s the mirror, she somehow knows, of her own anguish, the part of her that only wants him to harm her.
She moans, wanting to grasp for him, because God, she wants that: to be broken, and not have it be her fault. It’s terrifying, how much she can handle. The sense that she might keep pushing past what she can survive—that there’s an emptiness waiting for her—but no, not just emptiness—not the physical, mind-altering pain she craves, but that agonizing, bleeding hurt she’s buried, grief emerging between the shattered pieces of herself, the hurt of her life—and she can’t—Lili can’t—shewill notlet herself be seen in that.
She can’t risk that depth of exposure, the finality of that fall.
It’ll take everything from her.
Tilting his hips, Aleksandr pushes—pushes closer, pushes further, and Lili has to gasp, because that’s it. That’s as far and as deep as anyone will ever go. “More,” she urges, desperate, wanting the physical oblivion. “Fuck—please,more—”
Already on edge, she can feel herself about to come. Her body starts to shake. She tries to lean into it—away from questions, away from consequences—ready to black out on some high of skin pleasure, get rid of herself.
But before she can, he grabs her throat.
A resounding, sickening—inexplicable—surge of hurt hits her.
“Aleksa—” she tries to gasp out. Under his hold, her throat contracts around a sob.Why is she crying?She both wants this, and wants to dissolve.
“Take what you asked for,” he grunts, thrusting into her so hard that a groan—choked—stutters out of her. Her vision dances with sparks of black. Too little light, too little air: and her, there—her, too much. Everything inside of her shies away from and rushes towards that. It’s like he somehow knows the depths of what she’s avoiding, feeding emotional pain desperately to physical hurt. What she doesn’t want to see—cannot let herself see. All her striving, all her running, all her conviction, all her constant want—nothing in the face of this calcified, bottomless suffering she’s repressed, what’s now starting to stir in the face of this physical pain, as if released. This isn’t what she thought she was getting here.
Too far,some protection inside of her tries to scream.This is too far.
“I ca—can’t brea—” Breath keeps failing her. “Can’t—”
“Good.” His voice is hoarse. Nothing is left in her lungs, and her blood starts to throb. “You can only breathe when I let you.”
Inexplicably, relief washes through her, keener than climax. The fog in her head, the stretching ache in her hips, the tangle in her chest: It all cracks open, the responsibility for it all—justgone. She needs that; she needs all of that disappeared.
Somehow, her hand—weak—finds his grip on her throat; tries to press it tighter—
It’s like something breaks inside of him.
“Is this all you want from me?” he rasps.
From no part of her, can she summon a voice. Her head aches with tears, wet eyelashes, hitches of her dying breath—unable to fully sob, lungs struggling, body still trying to fight when she’s so close to giving up.
Because there is so much. So much she’s constantly trying to reach, across this spread of loneliness, gray and engulfing, old smoke, signs of fire long gone, infiltrating even the moments she might feel happy. Thisunreachable space she can never quite cross between her and her friends, between her and everything else—the world she’s reaching for, separated by this suffocating grayness, making her feel forsaken, the drumbeat of the belief that if she were to disappear, if she just wasn’t here anymore, it wouldn’t mean much to anyone. Those that love her, they’d live past her. With momentary sadness, but they would live past her.
She, though—she has never lived past the loss of the life she never fully had, her parents she cannot grieve, because beyond that much hurt, there’s—there’s nothing. It all bleaches into darkness too full, saturated with too much suffering. The only relief she can imagine—the only relief she can feel, the force of him inside her—is throwing it all away. From making herself hurt more and more, until she’s drowned out the pain.
And what if she drowns herself, too, in that attempt?
“Is this what you deserve, Lili?” His voice cracks with strain, something like devastation.
And is it? Her body, broken? Her mind, rent from any value of self or thought? Ambition, agency, hopes—gone? Limp, unable to move of her own volition, forced open—the sense of who she is, reduced to something worthless?
