I placed the cup down on the bedside table and put my hand on the rag to stop Fallon from her mothering touch. “I’m fine. I’m used to them. It’s just the same dream I’ve had ever since…”
“Timothy,” she answered for me.
She put down the rag and crawled back into bed beside me. Replacing the rag that was on my skin with her fingertips, she began running gentle and soothing circles on my bare back.
“I relive the night we were told he died,” I confessed. I had never told anyone but my therapist about this, but it didn’t feel wrong telling Fallon. She had always been my confidant before… well, before my life fell apart.
“That must be awful.”
“My penance I suppose.”
“Penance? Why would you have to pay penance? It’s not your fault your brother died.”
“I could have prevented it,” I admitted, realizing I had never spoken those words that I truly felt to anyone before.
“He chose to drink and get behind the wheel, Rafe. You couldn’t have stopped that. It was a terrible accident. An accident where no one is truly to blame. Sure as hell not you.”
Her words should soothe but they only festered the wound that was already carved into my soul. Nothing could take away the pain, the guilt and the feeling that it should have been me in the coffin rather than Tim. He should be here in the Oleander, not me.
The devil swapped us as a sick joke.
“You know what’s so fucked up?” I said as I stared straight ahead into the darkness. “I can’t get that night out of my mind. It haunts me. And yet, I can’t remember the days following at all. It’s like I completely blocked out the aftermath. It’s a void, a blur. I can’t remember much of anything for a long time. I think I just operated on auto-pilot or something.”
Fallon’s hands continued to caress my skin which now went from sweaty to chilled.
“And yet, I can’t ever forget the sounds of my parents’ screams. I will forever hear that,” I added.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I wish I had been there more— I’m sorry…”
I didn’t want to talk anymore. I couldn’t. I had to do something to stop the screams in my head. I had to silence them.
Now.
Taking hold of Fallon’s arm, I pulled her to me and into a kiss.
It was bruising, dominating, and uncontrolled.
I didn’t ask. I didn’t seduce. I didn’t even think.
I needed to feel her lips against mine as if it were vital to keep breathing.
When my tongue danced with hers and I heard her breath hitch, I nearly exploded. I couldn’t resist. I couldn’t deny.
“I need you now, Fallon. I need to feel you.”
I stripped off my sweatpants and shed her of her nightclothes and panties with zero thought or hesitation.
“I need you, too,” she rasped as she kissed me again with more force than the first one.
“I need it to just be you and me. No one watching. No one dictating. No canes, no chants. Just us. I just need you in the silence of this room.”
“Just us,” she agreed, the determination in her eyes as unrelenting as the tone of her voice. “I want only you. We’re all that matters right now.”
Our lips met again, a pull neither of us could resist any longer. Our hunger never satiated. Time and distance had kept us apart for too long, but our souls never parted. Her heart beat against mine as I arranged our bodies closer, and we kissed again. But this time… this time…
The single kiss had the power to bond us forever. It could make everything right again. The kiss was the cure for the nightmares. One kiss had the power to chase the ghosts away.
I wanted her in more ways than one.
I wanted her this very second… and every day from this point on.
Now. Forever.
I sucked her breast, then moved to the other to give it equal attention. Lowering my hand to her mound, damp with fresh arousal, I dipped a finger to her clit and applied pressure as she roused in me an overwhelming longing that had me gasping for air.
Moving from her clit, I pressed my fingers past her silky folds and pushed one, then two, digits into her sex. She forced her hips up to drive them inside her pussy even deeper.
This wasn’t enough. I wanted to feel my cock stretching her as I claimed what was now mine. I wanted to feel myself in her so badly that the hunger changed who I was.
I was an animal.
I was a stalker in search of its victim.
I was a man who needed to fuck hard. I needed to fuck so hard that the nightmare wouldn’t return tonight or ever again.
Not being able to hold back the fever that scorched me, I demanded, “Spread your legs wider.”
“Yes,” she purred as she obeyed my command.
“You want me to fuck you?” I asked as I danced my fingers inside of her core. “Say it, Fallon. Tell me what you want.”
“I want you,” she panted.
“Tell me you want my cock inside of you.” I wanted to hear the dirty words come from her perfect lips.
“Fuck me!” she blurted out as a moan followed her command. “I want you to fuck me hard and make me remember the feeling between my legs for days. Make me sting. Make me hurt. Fuck! Fuck me!”
“That’s my good girl,” I praised. “I like that filthy mouth of yours.”
She appeared absolutely desperate at this point as my fingers hit a spot inside her pussy that had her gyrating uncontrollably. I could tell she needed more.
I needed more.
“Please, Rafe. Fuck me. I want to feel you in my bones.”
Hungry as I was, I was prepared to give her exactly as she asked. Not being able to wait any longer, my cock pressed up against her opening, and easily slid in with the aid of her wetness. Wrapping her legs around me, she took complete control over just how deep I would be and how fast I would get there.
Balls slapping against pussy, I was so damn deep.
I had such a craving and an urge that only she could quench.
And with forceful shoves of our hips, I drove my cock all the way in—aggressively, possessively and completely.
“Yes, yes, yes… deeper,” she cried.
In and out, I thrust, deeper and deeper with each pounding action. My moans blended with hers as our bodies merged as one. She was my dutiful soldier in this dark war of lust, and her body would forever be mine to command. I had now had a taste, and my thirst would never be satiated.
Like a vampire knocking, she had opened the door and invited me in. Now it was my time to feed.
“Fucking mine,” I growled as I powered into her, my muscles taut, my eyes closed in pure bliss.
“Yours. Yours,” she groaned. “I’ve never been anyone else’s but yours.”
Her pussy tightened around my dick as her words turned to loud moans that echoed against the haunted walls of our room.
“I’m yours,” she repeated between her orgasmic mewls.
As if I forever had needed to hear those words, a wave of electrical current that had been resting on the cliff since I first put my mouth to hers finally released. Pure carnality shook through my body as I cried out her name.
Her arms slipped around my neck, and I rested my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes, wishing the moment could last forever.
“No more nightmares,” she whispered.
“No more nightmares,” I said as I kissed her again. I didn’t see sweet dreams in my future, but for right now… right now there were no more nightmares.
12
Fallon
I was painting again, for once alone in the room. It was a rarity, but when Rafe had woken up this morning, he’d been withdrawn. Maybe he felt he’d shared too much last night, let me see too much without meaning to?
Last night was so… raw. The things he’d demanded. And I’d given in to him without a second thought.
My hand trembled as I ran it over my bottom lip. When he’d demanded I tell him to fuck me…
A shiver quaked down my body even at the memory.
But when he’d woken up, he’d just mumbled that he was hungry and said I should get dressed so we could go to breakfast.
After the intimacy of last night, the intensity, the raw passion, of him finally letting me in an inch, his coldness was like a splash of cold water in my face.
I told him I wasn’t hungry, and he should go alone. After all, men could wander alone in the Oleander, it was only the belles who weren’t allowed to leave the room unaccompanied.
Such patriarchal bullshit. Better to focus on that than the pain of what felt like his rejection. Again.
Part of me had hoped he’d argue.
He didn’t. He’d just nodded and left.
And I’d sat there in front of my empty easel feeling… well, empty.
I stared at the paintings lining the walls. The one in haint blue of a woman being swallowed into the hungry earth, a hundred hands reaching out from a graveyard to drag her down.
There were plenty of others, but my eyes settled on the most recent one: colorful explosive swirls that danced on shattered shards of glass. Some shards were bright as the sun and some were dark as sin. Others were red with pulsing blood and life and on others were sets of eyes, the eyes of God and men watching, always watching. Lust and life and death.
I stared at the blank canvas before me now.
What the hell was I supposed to paint today? I couldn’t paint last night. It was too personal. Too…
Flashes of feeling Rafe push inside me, taking me so roughly, without pause and without other eyes watching us—just because he’d wanted me, he’d needed me in that moment.
God, what was I supposed to do with that?
I arranged my usual base paints on my palette and dipped my medium brush into the glob of black and mixed it with white and blue until I had a moody gray.
I lifted the brush to the canvas, still not sure where I was going with it. I wasn’t sure how I even felt. About last night. About anything.
In college, for a while after I’d left this place, I felt like I’d finally found myself.
I’d shed the goth make-up. I’d let the real me come out. Or at least I thought I had.
But what if that was just another mirage? Another facade I was trying on? Healthy girl, far away from her lonely mom and the tiny apartment where we’d lived with just enough money to get by but never thrive?
Living paycheck to paycheck under someone else’s thumb, and now knowing it was Rafe’s parents who’d been keeping me there that whole time. Wielding their power over my mother whom they considered “less than” just because they could, because she had a dangerous secret about them and their society friends. Because she knew too much and was using me to keep her in line.
But when I started sketching the outline of a woman, it felt right. I didn’t paint the lines, just the shadows. It’s one of the first things they teach you in art school.
Lines are just illusions. Our limited brain’s way of processing a visual reality too complex for it. No, there weren’t any lines in this life, just infinite shadows and occasional light.
But… my mother also chose to stay. She’d come to these parties week after week even when she knew she wouldn’t win any money or a better life.
And afterwards, she stayed in town with me.
Why?
Why couldn’t she have left, broken free, run away, tried to start over?
But even as I thought it, I looked at the canvas before me.
There was no black and white, didn’t I know that? Hadn’t art school taught me that? That wasn’t how paint, or life, worked. Black darkened and gave depth and complexity to a picture. White lightened and lifted a color. So did yellow.
But it was all such a wild mix.
Rarely did I know when I started where I would finish.
Maybe my mom didn’t either.
My eyes drifted to the door.
It was so easy for me to paint Rafe with one big paintbrush swath of bad guy along with his parents, too.
He didn’t call or write when I left. He never tried to find me. The only reason I was in his life now was because I’d forced my way in, but even now, he didn’t want me here. Maybe for a little while last night when I’d been a warm body to lose himself in to forget about his nightmares.
I frowned and my brush strokes grew firmer as I worked in the figure’s eyes and brows. I dabbed my brush in the brown, pink, blue, and white to create a skin tone, then continued.
Slowly, carefully, I painted a face. The shadowed depths of a brow and two embedded shallows for eyes. I shaped a nose, the least straightforward of any face, coaxing the paint to mimic three-dimensions. I painted the dip right above my top lip, in the center right underneath my nose.
Dipping my brush back into the pink I’d made, I started to craft the outline of lips, familiar lips that I saw in the mirror every day.
And then, after a deep breath, I went back to her eyes.
I started with the iris and built up from the bottom. A swipe of dark black and brown ocher in the center of each eye. Then I went in with my detail brush to add the flecks of gold, the shine of light, the spark of life.
Then I moved back out again, shaping her expression.
She was sad.
She was lost.
She was defiant.
She would survive. She would always survive, and she would never bow down or bend to kiss their ring. Even if they only ever saw her as fit to be on her knees, scrubbing their toilets.
She was more.
“Is it a self-portrait?”
Rafe’s voice from behind me almost made me scribble a black paint smear across the cheek, but I yanked back just in time.
“Jesus,” I swore, spinning around to see Rafe propped in the doorway. He looked comfortable, like he’d been there awhile. I hadn’t even heard him open the door.
“Stalker much?” I asked while I tried to get my thumping heartbeat back under control.
He didn’t move, he just nodded back towards the painting. “You didn’t answer my question. Is it you?”
I was surprised at his question. I pursed my lips and looked back to my painting, determined not to let him unnerve me. “No,” I answered succinctly. “It’s my mother.” It was mostly the truth. Because the more I looked, the more I saw it really was an amalgam of the two of us, a shapeshifter of both our features.
I felt more than heard Rafe come further into the room. And then his warmth was behind me, his chin all but touching my shoulder.
“She’s beautiful. Is this her when she was your age?”
“Something like that.”
I’d only ever seen pictures of my mom at my age, of course, but Rafe was right, she had been beautiful. She still was, in her own way, of course. But she’d been stunning at my age, and I wasn’t surprised they’d chosen her as a potential belle or encouraged her to stay around for the sex parties after she wasn’t chosen.
And yes, it was true that I did resemble my mother even though I sometimes denied it. When I’d first seen the picture of her in her younger years, I’d done a double-take. It was like looking at a picture of myself I didn’t remember taking. Some of my features were foreign to her, but it was something about the eyes that was the same.
I suppose the real truth was that this painting was of both of us, inhabiting the same space at once.
Just like we’d both briefly inhabit the Oleander Manor.
And come away from the experience changed forever, if this past month had been any indication.
My mom had come away with me in her belly.
The doctor had put a shot in my arm to prevent that from happening even before I’d been presented to Rafe along with the rest of the belles, but how else might I be changed?
I’d have money, more money than I could ever imagine if what Mama Hawthorne said. I trusted her. Maybe that was foolish.
I trusted too easily.
So then I closed up and now no one els
e could get in. No one could pass the endless litany of tests to prove themselves to me.
Certainly Jeoffrey couldn’t, and he’d been the nicest guy I’d ever found. But not even he could penetrate the cold, iron shield that I’d built around my heart.
“She looks sad,” Rafe said, still behind me so close I could feel his warm breath on my ear. “Beautiful, but sad.”
I slammed my brush down on the side table and spun to look at him. “Well, maybe she has a fucking right to be sad! Maybe life fucked her over enough times that she got wiser to people trying to manipulate her and use her. Maybe she learned to finally fight for herself.”
Rafe’s eyes widened. “Okaaaaay,” he said. “Calm down, Fallon. It’s just a painting.”
Just. A. Painting?
At least he realized what he’d said and raised his hands in defense. “Wait, that came out wrong. I just meant, in real life she’s happy. She’s got a good job and is comfortable.”
I stared at him. Was he really so clueless? “And you think that makes someone happy?”
He frowned. “Well, no, of course not. But whenever I see your mom, she’s happy and smiling, and is always singing to herself. She doesn’t look like that anymore.” He gestured to my painting. “She found peace later in life even if she didn’t have it when she was young for whatever reason.”
“God, you can be so dense sometimes!”
“What? What did I do now?”
“What do you think people see when they look at you?” I asked.
He looked confused, but also like he didn’t like where I was going. It wasn’t going to stop me. I continued. “They see a handsome, carefree guy who has the world at his feet. Are you happy, Rafe? People look at you and they’d assume you’re happy. You have everything you could need. Food. Shelter.”
I stepped closer to him, ignoring the wet paint on my paint smock. “Are you happy, Rafe?” But I was already shaking my head even as he stared at me like a deer in the headlights.
“We both know the answer,” I whispered. “You’re as lost and unhappy as she is.” I nodded back towards the painting.
Opulent Obsession: A Dark Secret Society Romance Page 11
