Credence
Page 39
He trails kisses along her cheek, her eyes still closed, not awake yet. He hovers his lips over her skin, moving his mouth but unable to voice the words. Pretty little cunt.
He grinds on her once. That’s what she is. Cunt.
Climbing off her, he watches her face as he gently pulls her shorts down. He drops them on the floor and comes back to hover over her, watching her face as he slides his hand inside her fucking panties.
His fingers trail between her legs, enticing her to open for him, but he has to pause a moment to fist his hand, because she’s so soft and smooth. He loves touching it. Nudging his way in, he finds her clit, and just like a fucking whore, her knees fall apart. He smiles, coaxing her little nub in circles. Does his dad do this to her? Maybe his brother? She moans for them, doesn’t she?
He brings his finger up, licking it, and then puts it on her again, listening to her sweet little breaths and moans as he rubs her out. He stares at her face. She’s gonna know it’s him soon enough.
She lets out a beautiful groan as she arches her neck back and starts to move into it, wanting it. His dad and Noah are asleep, and he has her all to himself.
“Kaleb…” she murmurs, reaching down to grab his hand but not actually moving it off her. “You’re an asshole.”
He smirks. He is, and she likes to act like she fucking cares. Putting up a fight one minute, and begging for a dicking the next. She won’t stop him, because as long as someone is fucking her, she doesn’t have to remember all the nothing she is.
“Slow.” She pants. “Please…”
But he doesn’t slow down. He pulls her hand off his and forces it up her chest, making her lift her shirt for him.
She pulls up her top, baring her nice tits, and he watches them bob back and forth as she moves into the rubbing. He leans back, sitting on his heels as he keeps one hand on her clit and moves the fingers of his other hand down farther.
He teases her ass, rubbing the tight hole, and watching her breath catch.
“Kaleb?” she says nervously.
But he doesn’t stop. Rubbing her and not stopping, he presses the tip of his finger just inside her and holds it there as he fucks with her clit faster. Her little ass tightens around his finger, warm and making his cock swell painfully, but it just pisses him off more.
He swipes a finger just inside her pussy, wetting his fingers and keeps masturbating her while his finger in her ass stays still. Eventually, she adjusts and relaxes, getting turned on again and comfortable as she moves into his hands. She likes both holes filled.
Because of course she does.
After a few moments, he’s able to slide his finger deeper inside, and they have a rhythm going now, the room filling with moans and pants as she climbs toward her orgasm.
He almost falters. Looking down at her, he almost wants her to have this, because she’s so beautiful, and he loves seeing her smile.
He loves watching her excited by the snow and happy feeding the horses and how loving she is with the animals and how good her arms felt when she hugged him to her in the car today in the barn.
But he pulls his hands out of her little red panties, letting her body shake and her whimpers go unanswered.
“No, please,” she chokes out a whisper. “I was almost there.”
Sweat beads his brow, and he feels fucking sick, but he climbs off the bed, leaving her hanging.
So far, so good.
Now for round two.
“Kaleb…” she begs.
He ignores her, dropping his jeans to the floor and pulling her off the bed. She stands there, swaying in her fatigue, and he squats down to slide her panties down her legs. She steps out of them, her hands on his shoulders.
“Do you like me?” she asks in a small voice.
The question gives him pause.
“At all?”
And if he weren’t looking at a woman’s body, he might think a child was speaking to him with how innocent and sweet she sounded.
She swallows. “I thought part of me might like that you don’t talk.” She raises her arms as he stands and pulls her T-shirt off over her head. “I can say things and not have to hear your response. I hate talking, too.”
He doesn’t look at her as he plucks the condom out of his pocket and rips it open, slipping it on.
She stands there. “All you can do to me is walk away,” she mumbles but then sighs. “I hate it when you walk away.”
He pushes her back down on the bed and climbs on top of her, avoiding her eyes.
“I hate the way you look at me sometimes,” she whispers, and he can hear the tears. “Like I’m nothing.”
He lifts her knee high, and works himself inside of her. His dick crowns, feeling her open up and take him in as he slides in and out until he’s buried to the hilt. He settles on top of her, forcing away the pleasure and warmth washing over his body and shaking her words from his head.
“And then other times…” She kisses him, wrapping her arms around his body and sliding the tip of her tongue into his mouth. He hardens even more, sucking air in through his teeth.
“I don’t know how to talk sometimes, either,” she tells him. “This is how we talk. This is the only time I feel like you like me.”
The backs of his eyes burn, and he kisses her deep, tasting the tears on her cheeks. Her kisses her everywhere. He does like her. He’s wanted to touch her from the first moment, and he’s been here, watching, as inch by inch she started to laugh and become a part of them all.
He thrusts, the top of his body molded to her as he encases her head in his arms and kisses her.
“Kaleb…” she pants, her pussy clenching. “Kaleb. God.”
He can feel her about to come. She always comes so good. He rolls his hips faster and faster, wanting to love her. Wanting to let her have it, because she was made for him. Neither of them knows how to let people love them, but they don’t have to talk with each other. This is how they say it.
He doesn’t savor anyone like he wants to savor her. Her scent, her sound, her touch…her taste. The feel of her arms around him feels like he thought nothing ever could.
He wants to love her.
He wants to please her.
He wants to trust her and to see her holding his baby someday.
His thrusts slow as he wonders how they loved her, too. All the words she whispered in their beds.
She’s not hard to please.
And as the images of his father and brother with her tonight flash in his mind, he’s reminded…
Women he loves forget him.
He stops, and she whimpers, her body shaking as the second orgasm tries to push through her, but loses steam and drifts away, letting her float back to the ground.
“No,” she breathes out. “Please… Kaleb, what are you doing?”
Tiernan
He rises up, grabs me, and flips me over. Something circles my wrist, and I know what it is before I even look.
The belt he’d given me on my birthday had been sitting on my bedside table, and he takes it, tightening it around my wrist and looping it around the wrought iron headboard above.
Oh, shit. He yanks on it, pulling me up, and I have no choice but to clutch the bars with both hands for support as he secures me.
He forces my knees apart.
“Kaleb…” I start to protest.
I feel my wetness on the inside of my thigh, and every muscle inside me burns. I shake. What is he doing?
He digs his fingers into my hips and jerks me back into him, quickly sliding his cock back inside me. I squeeze my eyes shut, stinging from the rawness as he damn near punches a hole right through me. This doesn’t feel good.
“Kaleb…”
But I don’t know what I want to say, my head is spinning.
He fucks me, pounding his hips hard behind me as I hang onto the headboard and my hair bounces across my back.
He threads a hand through my hair, gripping the back of my scalp, and for a moment, I can�
�t breathe. All I hear is the sound of skin hitting skin as he fists his hands and makes my body hurt.
“Kaleb, stop.”
He pushes my back down more, making my ass jut out as he releases my hair and reaches around to paw my breasts and dig his teeth into my neck.
Tears hang at the corner of my eyes, and for a moment, all I can do is hang on as he pumps harder and faster.
It’s too deep, though. It hurts.
He’s taking. Fucking me like I’m nothing.
“Kaleb, stop.”
He doesn’t hear me, though, his hand landing on my ass with a loud whack and his breath pouring in and out of his lungs. I suck in a cry, the belt digging into my skin.
“Stop!” I scream.
I work the belt wider, slipping my wrist out, and then I whip around, hitting him I don’t know how many times. I burst into tears, seeing the rage on his face, and scramble off the bed. Naked, I run from the room. He catches me and yanks me back to him, but I slap him with everything I have and bolt into Noah’s room, locking the door. He pounds on the wood, and I hear Noah move in bed.
“What the fuck?”
I back away from the door, waiting for Kaleb to break through, but…
He doesn’t. I try to catch my breath, but my knees start to give.
“Tiernan?” Noah says.
I crawl in his bed, pushing him back down and spooning him from behind. I wrap my arms around him like a steel band.
“Go back to sleep,” I mutter, trying to quiet my tears.
“What did he do?”
“Nothing.” I bury my head in his back, the warm skin smelling like my bodywash that he always steals. “Just let me hold onto you.”
“Did he hurt you?” he asks, trying to turn around, but I won’t let him. “Tell me the truth.”
I can’t speak. I just shake my head. I’m the only one who hurts me. I believed it was real. Whatever was happening between us for however long.
He hates me. That wasn’t love.
Kaleb doesn’t come back to Noah’s door, and I think I hear his footfalls on the stairs at some point, but after a few minutes, my breathing calms and my tears subside. Noah just lies there, letting me hold him.
I tighten my arms around him again.
I don’t understand what’s happening. He wants me one minute and is throwing me away the next. He’s gentle and horrible. Vulnerable and hateful.
He shares me with Noah and then gets possessive. What does he want?
“He was with our mom,” Noah tells me, breaking the silence.
I open my eyes, feeling his voice vibrate against his body.
“It was a rainy, spring day, and some guy she’d been running with on the side was with them,” Noah goes on. “They had gone to the store—or so she told my dad. Instead, they went to a white house off a dirt road somewhere, and she left Kaleb in the car. Locked it and said she’d be back in a bit.” He pauses and then continues. “She went inside and the brief stop turned into a party. She got high, lost time, and fell asleep in the house.”
This is only the second time Noah has mentioned their mother. He must’ve been a toddler at the time.
“He was alone in the car with no one around for miles to hear him call out or cry when the minutes turned into hours. And hours into days.” I close my eyes, not wanting to hear the rest. “There was no food in the car and the only water came from the leak in the roof when it rained.”
I try not to see it, but an image of a little boy alone—cold and hungry—flashes in my mind. Kaleb was a child at one time. He was helpless then.
“At some point his throat went raw from crying out,” Noah explains, “but when my father finally found him, he wasn’t crying or calling out. Not anymore. Just sitting in the seat in his own filth staring off and barely even registering when the door was finally opened.”
“How much time?” I ask. “How much time did he lose?”
It takes a moment for him to answer. “Four days.”
My face cracks and silent tears fall.
“Something separated in his head,” Noah tells me. “What goes through your mind when something like that happens, you know? When one day turns into two and two into three? You’re four years old. You can’t get out. You can’t figure out what to do to help yourself. You’re starving. You’re cold. You’re alone. You can’t stand up. You don’t know when help is coming…”
I turn it all around in my head for a moment trying to imagine how long the hours felt to a four-year-old. Minutes filled with fear feel like hours, and hours of fear feel like an eternity.
“It must’ve felt like he was buried alive,” Noah adds. “The doctors said he gave up. A wall just sprung up, and over the years not talking became the one piece of control he had when he had none during those four days in that car. His voice was the one thing no one could demand from him. It was his way of punishing everyone. A way to make the world share the pain.”
Needles prick my throat. Yeah, I know what that’s like. Denying myself anything that made me happy for so long because I couldn’t let it go. It couldn’t not matter.
Kaleb has been punishing the world his whole life, almost like me. Unfortunately, the world moves on, and then it just becomes punishing yourself.
“Don’t cry for him,” Noah finally whispers. “Especially not in front of him.”
After a while, Noah falls back to sleep, and I’m not sure how long I lie there, thinking about what he told me.
Kaleb almost died. Slowly. Painfully. That would be a nightmare for anyone at any age. How much does he remember?
Hopefully not much.
It changed him, though. He turned inward and couldn’t trust again. That’s why he doesn’t speak. Not out of spite necessarily. He doesn’t want to give anyone a piece of himself again. People hurt.
He may not even know how to talk anymore. It’s not like four-year-olds are enunciating full speeches to begin with. You can’t really lose an ability you never had.
And it’s hurt the whole family. His mother must be in prison for other things to keep her there this long, so she’s all but dead to them. Jake had to raise two boys on his own, miles away from the help that Kaleb needed, and Noah never really knew his brother. He’s never known what Kaleb could’ve been. They’ve all been alone, and somewhere in the time I’ve been here, we’ve all learned to care about each other, but I also created a whole other wedge. Kaleb couldn’t learn to live with another woman in the house, and when he tried, the lines were fucked up. How did I fit? Was I his cousin? His friend? His brother’s?
His?
I pull my arms off Noah and swing my legs over the bed, sitting up, the weight of my role in all this sinking in. He acts wrong. He treated me wrong tonight. I’m confused, too. I’m making mistakes, too.
But I don’t want to hurt him. All I know for sure is that I can be there. Maybe over time he’ll trust me as a friend.
Hopefully as someone who cares about him, at least.
I stand up, looking at the clock and seeing it’s after four in the morning. I pick up a clean shirt out of Noah’s laundry basket of clothes he never puts away and slip it on. Leaving the room, I close the door and head for the shower.
As soon as I open the door, though, the steam hits me. The shower is running, and I spot Kaleb sitting there on the edge of the tub. I stop, my heart beating fast again.
His elbows rest on his jean-clad knees, and he hangs his head, quiet. He doesn’t look up.
I almost turn and leave. I need space. He needs space. Right now, anyway.
I don’t, though. I step in and close the door.
Slowly, I walk over to him and stand in front of him, waiting. Maybe for him to make a move or for him to lash out and storm out the door, but I’m not leaving for months yet. He can’t get away from me.
When he doesn’t make a move to escape, I hold out my hand and lightly graze his soft, dark hair.
He immediately clutches it in his own and nuzzles his head into
it.
I let out a breath.
Kneeling down, I come in and circle my arms around his waist and lay my head on his chest, hugging him. I wish I knew what he wanted. I wish I trusted him, and I wish he trusted me.
Friends is a better way to start. Can we go back?
His arms hang limply at the side, and while he lets me hug him, he doesn’t hug me back. I let go, letting him have his space.
Looking up at him, he doesn’t meet my eyes. He pinches my shirt, staring at it. At Noah’s T-shirt.
“It’s okay,” I tell him softly. “I didn’t do anything with Noah.” I glide my hands down his arms. “I’m not going to…”
My right hand comes to his right hand, and I notice he’s holding something in it. I stop, bringing it up and taking the piece of wood from his fist.
“What is this?” But it doesn’t even take a second to realize exactly what it is.
The blue-green leg of my chest I painted with gold accents. I turn it around in my hand, my heart pumping so hard that a cool sweat breaks out on my forehead.
“What happened?” I dart my eyes up to his, breathing hard. “What did you do?”
Tears spring to my eyes, and I drop the leg, running to the door. No. I race from the bathroom, down the stairs, pain and anger curdling in my stomach as I bolt into the shop. The frigid air hits me as I see the bay door open, and I leap down the stairs, into the shop, and spin around, frantically searching for my chest. My first piece. The one he helped me design.
And all at once, it’s not there, and I see the barrel outside in the snowy driveway, spitting fire, remnants of the colored wood I painted sticking out of the top.
My hands shoot to my head, everything going blurry in front of me as silent sobs wrack through me.
No.
I stand at the open door, watching sparks fly into the black night and any traces of my piece quickly deteriorate into the barrel. My hair blows across my face, and I cover my eyes with my hands, unable to stand the sight of it.
But in my head, all I see are my stupid, kid drawings in the trash.
Stupid, stupid… I cry into my hands.
The stairs creak behind me, and I clench my teeth, wanting to kill him. I want to hurt him. Why would he do that?