by L V Chase
A flare of rage torches my doubts. No, he’s playing with me. For some idiotic reason, he’s trying to undermine me, and it’s not going to work. Especially when he’s half-naked and my body misses his hands on me. It wants more—more of his body on my body, more of his orders, and more of his intensity.
And maybe it’s a delusion, but his sweatpants are bulging near his groin.
I unclip my bra, letting it fall down. I pull down my underwear and kick it aside.
I take a step toward Klay. He holds his hand up, stopping me from coming closer.
“Stop,” he says. He points to the corner he’s been gazing at. “Get four resistance bands. Two of the black ones and two of the red ones.”
As I walk naked in front of him, I can feel his gaze burning into my skin. I let my hand slide down my side and over my hip. I wish I could put on a better show for him, but I’m new to all of this. In my memories, I lost my virginity at some point, but for everything that isn’t a flimsy memory or a dream, I’ve only ever been kissed, and that kiss was a quick peck in sixth grade by a friend who’d wanted more from me. I never gave it to him.
For Klay, I want to give it all.
I take red bands down and stand on my tiptoes to get to the two black bands. The number “25” is printed in white on the red ones while the black ones have “30” printed on them. At first, it seems strange to me that he’d have two of each, but I remember he has two brothers. I try to stretch them as I bring them back over to Klay, but they’re impressively strong for being made out of elastic.
I nearly walk straight into Klay. He stops me with his hand on my hip and the other one below my sternum, right under my breasts.
If he can’t hear my breathing quickening, he’d have to be deaf.
“Stand still,” he says.
His hand slowly slips away from my body. He takes the black band from my hand. He tightly ties it to my left wrist, knotting it. He takes the other black band and ties it to my other wrist, ending with another knot. He takes the two remaining bands and kneels down. He ties each one to an ankle.
He slowly rises back up to his feet. We’re so close, I can see those slices of gold in his eyes like I’d seen in my memory at the hospital. In that memory, they were beautiful. Now, they’re glowing and full of danger.
“Lie down on the bench.” He nods to the right of us.
I follow his gaze. The bench is in the center of two dumbbell racks. The bench has a foothold, a padded perpendicular pole at the back of it, and a barbell mounted at the front. I can’t read the barbell from here, but the weights on it are larger than manhole covers, and there are four of them.
I look back at Klay. “I can’t lift that weight.”
“I didn’t tell you to,” he says. “I told you to lie down on the bench.”
I grit my teeth. It’s difficult to maneuver under the barbell and lie down on the bench, but at least I know Klay got a decent view of my ass. As I settle down, Klay walks up to me.
“Grip onto the barbell,” he tells me.
“I told you—”
“Grip onto it,” he orders.
I obey, gripping onto it tightly. I’m not a doormat like this. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s just lust. Maybe he’s broken me down with his tormenting or that deliciously evil body of his.
He starts tightly tying the loose end of the black bands to the barbell. I start loosening my hands. He stops. He looks down at me.
“Do you still trust me?” he asks. “Or are you bailing?”
I look up at him. I want to tell him to go fuck himself. But I do trust him. And I don’t want to bail.
I tighten my grip on the barbell again. He ties the other band to the barbell.
He moves down to my ankles. He takes my foot, moving it under the foothold. He starts tying the bands to the foothold.
After the first one, I test the range he gave me. It’s a few inches, which is about an inch more than he gave my hands.
When he’s done, he stands up. “You’re an idiot. I could leave you here. Wait for one of my brothers to wake up and find you. You trust them?”
“No,” I say. I try to bite back my words, but they spill out anyway. “But I trust you.”
He stares at my face. I squirm. I want him to look at the rest of me. I want him to touch the rest of me.
“You’d still be willing to give me control of you?” he asks. “You’d give up everything to me? Because this is nothing. All of the helplessness you feel right now is nothing compared to what it could be like. Is this what you want?”
“I want you,” I blurt out.
The threat in his eyes softens. When the harshness snaps back, he throws himself onto the bench with me, his knee pinching the skin near my waist for the briefest moment. When he kisses me, he kisses like a man desperate to rip all of the oxygen out of my lungs.
And I love it. I need it.
He abruptly stops, turning toward the door.
It’s still open.
As he pulls away from me, getting off the bench, I don’t want him to leave. I don’t care about the door. The ache between my thighs is begging for a moment of friction. I strain against the bonds, but they’re so tight, they might as well be chains.
I’m straining my neck to watch him.
He closes the door. As he walks back to me, he kicks off his sweatpants. He stops near my tethered feet. He hooks his thumbs under the waistband of his boxer briefs. I lower my head on the bench before he pulls them down.
My heart is already beating too hard from anticipation. If he’s smaller than I imagined, he’ll be able to see the disappointment on my face. If it’s as good as I imagined, I might lose my nerve for fear of the damage he could do.
His legs brush against my thigh as he gets onto the bench again. My body welcomes his body’s return. In the back of my mind, I consider the implications of the closed door, but in every other part of my mind, all I wrestle with is my inability to touch Klay, and whether I want his mouth against my mouth or if I want it to lower down—on my throat, my breasts, over my clit like a forbidden fruit.
I feel the heat of his erection bumping against my waist. Even with my eyes closed, I know I’m not disappointed. I turn my thighs outward as much as I can, my instincts telling me to open up to him and give him everything he wants.
For a moment, his body’s heat rises away from me. When I open my eyes, he thrusts into me.
My vision blurs. His cock is thick enough that he could have ripped my insides apart, but I’m wet enough to ease the pain. His hands move over my face, stroking my cheek. I focus on his face.
He’s worried. He thinks that he might be hurting me. He kisses me, gently for the first time, and the world, him, me, everything changes.
But as he pulls away, I see his mask return. The concern vanishes. He grips onto my shoulders, and his jaw is clenched as he starts to move inside me. He starts slowly, but as the crater of need grows between my thighs, his thrusts become more insistent. The barbell groans in its rack. The foothold creaks with his movements.
The way he fucks me, we must have done this a million times, because he hits the right spots with each stroke. But the way it feels is exhilarating in the way that only new and unfamiliar acts are.
For a moment, I worry about his father returning or any of his family members coming in—hadn’t he implied his brothers might walk in?—but those fears crumble away as his movements slow and his hands grasp my hip.
His right hand moves up, trailing along the curve of my ribcage and to my breast. He cups my breast as he kisses the center of my shoulder bone.
I try to raise my legs and urge him on, but he only teases me with his mouth and hand as he remains buried deep enough to remind me of his thickness. It’s the same as my memories of him—just another reminder of what I’m missing.
I jut my hips up. I rock them up and down against his body. He gazes down at me, an amused smirk rippling across his mouth.
As I raise my hips again, one of his hands grabs under my ass. He squeezes, almost harshly, but the second time almost feels like a reassurance.
He grinds against me, rubbing against my clit. Spasms surge under my skin. I arch my back higher, but he slams down into me, forcing me back down as his hand grips onto my ass. He knows he’s the one in control, but some part of me is grasping for a sliver of the control I gave him.
It becomes a battle between our bodies. He adds pressure to my body with his body coaxing all the sensations I’ve tried to lock down. I try to take more pleasure than he’s willing to give, and he fights back against my attempts. He rams into me like his only ammunition is excessive force when he knows that his softer touch is more dangerous.
His hand moves off my ass and up to my neck, placing it over my throat like he had before.
“Sadie,” he says, my name turning into a note of gratitude in his mouth.
He seals my name between us, pressing our lips together, only to open them up and steal my breath one more time as his thrusts take on a new mania. My insanity has crossed over into him, and now we’re two unhinged people, together in our own version of an asylum.
The climax hits like a hurricane. He charges into me, triggering a chaos of pleasure that whips through my body and storms back down on me. The intensity puts my dream to shame.
My body trembles uncontrollably as my pussy squeezes against his cock rapidly. I wouldn’t be certain it was real if it weren’t for his body stiffening above me and the sensation of warmth flooding inside me.
He rests his sweaty forehead on my chest. He must be able to hear my heart, beating so hard that I might need resuscitation. I raise my head to look down at the glistening skin of his beautiful body. He’s built like he has armor under his skin, but the sex didn’t lack any warmth.
For the first time, I notice that my arms are nearly numb except for the burning pain near my wrists. When I try to sway my arm, Klay sits up. He doesn’t look at me as he pulls out of me. He swings his leg over me and gets off the bench.
He continues to avoid looking at me as he unties my wrists from the barbell. My arms fall uselessly onto my chest. He unties my ankles, his movements rough as he pulls my legs out from under the foothold. After plucking up each piece of my clothing, he hurls them at me.
“Get dressed and leave,” he says, still not looking at me. He grabs his sweatpants and pulls them on, shoving his boxer briefs into his pocket.
“Klay,” I say, trying to sit up, but my arms are barely functioning.
He walks away, closing the door behind him before he leaves.
I went through a hundred scenarios before I came here. I didn’t expect this. I try to cling onto the feeling of his body on mine, the way he looked at me, and the way he said my name, but the tears still come, betraying me just like Klay has.
27
Klay
My Jeep whines as I take a sharp turn our of my driveway. I speed down the road with a carelessness that would offend my father and prove that I do carry some of my mother’s DNA.
Careless. It would be fucking fantastic if it were that easy to cut out the parts of me that care, but those parts infect the rest of me, ruining everything my family has built.
How fucking stupid could I be? When I told her to turn around and then touched her, I’d signed my fate. I’d been avoiding getting too close for this exact reason.
In my mind, she wouldn’t do it. Before Sadie lost her virginity to me, intimacy terrified her. She was scared of the idea of sex. Her memory loss should have brought her back to that time. She should have taken off screaming at the thought of getting naked in front of me.
But she had stayed, looking like a damn goddess of sex. She was sensual, she was vulnerable, and she was mine.
I take another sharp turn. If some of my blood ends up on the road, so be it.
I start to slow down. I can’t be another car crash victim, haunting Sadie years and years later. I can’t have her researching every article about my death, wondering if she’s the reason I’m dead since I just left her at my house. She doesn’t deserve that shame or guilt.
This is my own fault. I need to take care of it.
I park my Jeep in front of a convenience store. I reach behind my seat, grabbing the sweater that’s been there for a couple of weeks. I left the house so abruptly that I didn’t even grab a shirt. This will have to be good enough.
I pull it on as I try to gather all of my thoughts.
Fuck.
Fuck the Society. Fuck the Hunt. Fuck all of this.
I need to convince Sadie that having sex with me was her biggest mistake. I need to take any attachment she has to me and turn it into ash.
I open my glovebox. I find the canister of car wipes and pop off the lid. Sadie’s yearbook photo from junior year is hidden inside alongside a note she’d written—a list of ingredients we needed to make s’mores—and a heart-shaped cutout of her Jackson Pollock art piece.
I take out the photo and put the lid back on the canister. I toss it back into my glovebox.
I grasp onto the knowledge that I promised to keep her safe. She may be hurt and she may hate me after this, but she will be safe, and that’s all that matters.
I grit my teeth and pull out of the gas station. If I die and go straight to Hell, I’ll deserve every second of my punishment.
28
Sadie
When I finally manage to get to school on my bike, I had already missed homeroom. Maybe I could have gotten there earlier, but I’d been a total mess, and I ended up trying to clean myself using the kitchen’s sink because I didn’t know where Klay’s shower was.
What should have been one of the best moments of my life is turning into a toxic mess.
I tense as I walk into biology, but Klay isn’t there. I sit behind Ethan and Roman. Ethan turns toward me as I take out my notebook and pen.
“Hey, lovely,” he says. “How’s your day treating you?”
I force a smile. “Fantastic. Klay isn’t here.”
He laughs, smirking as he leans closer toward me. “I thought you liked that asshole.”
“I don’t,” I say. “I don’t understand women who go after guys like that.”
As he tilts his head, I realize his usual pretentious way of speaking is gone. Klay was right about that one thing—it was all an act.
“Me, neither,” Ethan says. “Like I said, we used to be close. He’ll destroy anyone for fun. He thinks other people are less than dirt, and that they should be his slaves.”
Roman turns toward us. “Looks like someone got under your skin, Ethan. Should we start searching for Klay’s body on your family’s property?”
The thought of Klay’s lifeless body twists my stomach. His behavior purged me of any romantic thoughts I’d had of him, but the soreness between and down my thighs, the memory of his body weight on me, and the sound of him saying my name persist, taking all of my attention every few minutes.
It’s a siren in my head, warning me of the danger but still drawing me back to those irresistible thoughts.
“If I wanted to kill Klay, I would have by now,” Ethan sneers. “I’m—”
“A coward and a lightweight,” Roman interrupts. He sticks his pecs out and flexes a bicep. “You want to ride on me later? Or with me. Whichever gets you hotter.”
“Class!” Mr. Miller calls out, standing in front of the class. “We’re working on observing the various distinct tissue cells of the human body. Get a microscope and one of these boxes. The boxes are filled with slides, so carry them like you’d carry a newborn baby.”
Everyone hustles to get to the microscopes on the left side of the room. I’m too tired to be enthusiastic about cellular division or whatever Mr. Miller said we were studying. I wait until people start coming back to their chairs so that I won’t have to fight my way through them.
As I walk up to the counter, there’s only one microscope left—the one with a dick drawn on both sides of it—b
ut it’s better than getting into a scuffle for scientific equipment.
As I turn back to head to my table, clinging to my dick-decorated microscope and the wooden box filled with slides, several phones ping, quickly followed by more phones in the room vibrating.
“Turn off your phones,” Mr. Miller sighs, but my classmates are already checking their phones.
Dozens of eyes shoot up to my face and back at their cell phones. A soft snickering creeps into the room. I see the smirks. I try to convince myself it’s paranoia as I sit back down, but when Roman swivels around in his chair with the biggest grin, I know my day is about to change from bad to a full shitfest.
“To be honest, I knew your prude act wasn’t real,” Roman says. “But I didn’t expect you to be the type to get wet over whips and bondage.”
I grip onto the edge of the table, my fingers cramping from the pressure. “What the hell are you talking about?”
He sets his cell phone down on the table and slides it to me.
At first, I have no idea what I’m looking at. The rope bindings around the woman’s breasts, wrists, thighs, and ankles don’t provide any modesty over her naked body, though with her body, I can’t imagine why she would want to be modest. The dog collar is a bit vulgar, but it’s hardly the worst photo on the internet. On the small screen, it looks like the image was professionally shot, except for the shadows around the face, which isn’t as well-lit as the rest of the body.
That’s when I realize it’s my face edited onto the body.
My hands start to tremble. I drop the phone. It clatters onto the table. As Roman reaches forward to grab his phone, Mr. Miller starts to go over the instructions for investigating the difference between cells.
I raise my head, ignoring all of the people trying to catch a peek of me. I pretend I’m unimpressed by someone’s attempt to hurt me.
Someone sent that text to everyone in class. Every one of my thoughts wants to deny that it’s Klay, but there is no possibility that it’s a coincidence he tied me up this morning and this photo was sent out now.
