The Darker Side of Love (A Dark Erotica Boxed Set)

by Tara Crescent

  His hand fisted her hair, pulling at it until her scalp was prickling as much as the rest of her. A whimper escaped her, earning her another bite. She lashed out against the unfair punishment and scraped her nails across his back, deep enough to add more lines to his map of scars. He threw his head back with a hiss that turned into laughter midway, and repaid her in kind.

  Suddenly, pain was winning over every other feeling. Her skin offered almost no resistance to the cutting claws, and he ravaged her for ages, until she felt bloodless and faint and sliced thin. The white-hot flares of pain that accompanied the tracing of each new mark were quick to become so omnipresent that she lost track of his hands. All she knew was that they were still there, spreading the searing stings, bringing her to a height of agony that wasn’t too dissimilar with the bliss she’d experienced earlier.

  He’d been right. She was loving it.

  “Here,” he said, sounding as out of breath as she felt. He presented her with a hand dripping red, and painted her face with it before pressing a few fingers against her lips. “Lick.”

  She opened her mouth, without thinking, without even pondering whether obeying was a sane idea, and whipped her tongue across his fingertips. They tasted like iron and salt. He gave her a nod of encouragement, which made her feel slightly better about giving them another lick. Being approved of didn’t make the thing itself less sick, but the warm glow it filled her with was nice.

  Once she’d cleaned his fingers thoroughly, he removed them and used both his hands to push her down into the mattress, pounding into her all the while. The force of the friction made every wound he’d just inflicted reopen and burn. Rose screamed herself hoarse, but either he was truly merciless or the sound spurred him on, because instead of slowing down, he started pumping her faster. The rhythm of their flesh slapping together filled her world.

  She began to wonder if it was possible to pass out inside a dream.

  The same feeling from when he’d entered her with his tongue began to wash over her. First there was a numbness that incongruently enough was filled with tingles, then that tightness, that impression that everything down there was playing tug-of-war with the rest of her body and winning. Her breathing, which until then had been coming out in quick, cadenced pants, became a scattered mess of air and sound. She knew what was coming. She wondered if she would survive it.

  He squeezed her shoulders and shut his eyes, showing her that he wasn’t faring much better. His powerful frame shook, and beads of sweat ran from his brow and down his back, blending together with the blood she’d managed to draw. All points on both of them were touching and melding together so thoroughly that the different colors were the only way she could tell where he ended and she began.

  Her previous experience couldn’t have prepared her to peak the way she did. The other time had been a release. This was an unleashing, the cresting of a wave and the inevitable downwards plunge that succeeded it, and it taught her that yes, indeed, people could pass out inside of dreams, or at least achieve a state that was very much like that.

  He was still riding her as roughly as possible when she regained something resembling consciousness, and immediately she felt another wave forming, threatening to spill over. She asked him to stop, knowing in her bones that she was too sensitive to handle another round, but it was doubtful if he’d heard her. His brow was wrinkled with concentration, the muscles of his arms corded and tense. His eyes . . . well, it was probably best to not even try to look.

  She realized that he must be standing on the same edge she had just a moment ago, and decided not to begrudge him for continuing. If he had stopped before she could reach her completion, they’d both be swimming in shoes by now.

  Moreover, it wasn’t as if it took him that long. In another minute, he let out a strangled cry, slowed his pace and collapsed on her, stopping just short of crushing her with his weight.

  They stayed that way for a while, their breaths mingling, their skin drinking each other in. He slipped out and kissed her, gently and languidly. The unexpected tenderness felt less like an apology for his former brutality and more like a denouement. A slow end to a wild ride.

  “You did very well,” he said.

  Rose supposed she had.

  “I’m glad you are a dream,” she muttered, closing her eyes. Her voice came out in a sigh that was more than a little wanton. Now that they weren’t joined and things had stopped happening faster than she could think, she felt every ache he had left on her preparing to become a hassle. He sniggered. She couldn’t see how what she’d said was in any way funny, but there was something uplifting about hearing him laugh. She settled against him and murmured into his chest. “I’d be damned for sure if you were real.”

  “Ah.” Something in his voice made her look up. “I suppose I ought to have mentioned this before, but . . .”

  Rose spent the next morning wandering through the bakery, floating from task to task as if stuck in a trance. They were simple everyday things, so she was able to go through the motions without either Millie or Mrs. Cross noticing that anything was amiss, which she considered quite a feat, given that everything was.

  He’d told her that he was real.

  He couldn’t be, of course. She’d believed it in the dream, believed it wholeheartedly, but now she was awake and walking in daylight, and she had reason on her side, telling her that it was flat out impossible that anything from last night had happened in reality. On waking up, she had carefully inspected her own body for scratch marks, and there hadn’t been any. Likewise, there had been no unusual soreness between her legs, just a residual stickiness, and no blood to be found. Without evidence, it was hard to see her dream as anything but what it was: unreal.

  And yet, and yet, and yet.

  “Millie,” she said, without thinking. The other girl looked up from the dishes she wasn’t doing and raised an eyebrow. “Do you think a demon could put a dream inside your head if it wanted to? A sinful dream, to lead you astray and damn you to Hell?”

  “I suppose,” Millie replied, but in an off-hand way that meant that she wasn’t giving the subject much thought. Millie had what she herself described as a tepid approach to faith — although she didn’t describe it as such anywhere near Mrs. Cross. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe, but more that she thought about it like she would think about geometry: it existed, but she couldn’t be bothered to spend much time on it or try to understand it. “Though you’d need to be a very dull person to need demons to put sinful dreams inside your head. Most people seem to manage to have them on their own with no trouble.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Of course you don’t,” Millie scoffed. “You are a dainty innocent flower, and you are training to be a dried up bag like Mrs. Cross when you are old, whether you know that you are or not.”

  The words hurt, even though they hadn’t been said unkindly.

  Rose realized, with a start, that the reason they did was that they were true. She didn’t think about her future often. To her, those who did were only setting themselves up for disappointment. The few times she had tried to squint at it, she hadn’t seen anything unexpected. Just the same day, or days that looked very much the same, running together in quick succession.

  However, she could easily see how what Millie said fit. Mrs. Cross was bound to die at some point, although that was something she had difficulty picturing. Mrs. Cross was one of those people who seemed to have always been there, as if she’d come with the furniture when the world had been created. Nevertheless, when she did die, Rose couldn’t imagine she would have any trouble fitting in her shoes. After so many years of unbroken routine, she’d be stiff and bitter enough to slip into them like they’d never belonged to anyone else.

  She bit her lip. This, this was the true reason why people shouldn’t look at the future. Whenever it was done with realistic expectations, it often turned out horrifying.

  “Ro-sieee . . .” Millie sang. While Rose pondered the frightful t
hings that lay ahead of her, the other girl had been watching her, her expression slowly turning into one of gleeful malice. “Have you been having sinful dreams?”

  “No!”

  “I knew your face was a touch red this morning! Was it nice?”

  “I swear I . . .” Rose stopped and hung her head, defeated. She couldn’t do it. It was one thing to be lost to lust and throw her purity out of the window, because it took two to do that. If she lied about it, she would be doing so all on her own. “Please don’t tell Mrs. Cross.”

  “I won’t. But was it nice?”

  “I . . . I’d rather not say,” she stammered, covering her face to hide her blush.

  Millie smiled wide and reached out to pet her hair.

  “You are growing up!” It was a somewhat humiliating thing to hear from a girl two years her junior, but Rose could forgive it on the basis that it was unabashedly a compliment. “See, now you will have to stop calling me a harlot behind my back.”

  “I never called you a harlot behind your back.”

  “No, but you do think it! Often!” Since that was unarguably true, Rose said nothing. Millie petted her hair again. “It’s just dreams, Rosie. Besides,” she added, as an afterthought. “They’re your dreams. Even if you could get damned for them, God wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of watching them all the way through. I should think He has better things to do than keep track of your tame fantasies.”

  A vivid image of herself, mewling and writhing while dark hands dug ravines on her back, flashed before Rose’s eyes. She nodded, so that she wouldn’t lose face, but could already feel her blood rising to her head. If her fantasies were tame, then what was the rest of the world up to behind closed doors?

  “It worries me, though. That it might have been real. If felt so real.”

  “Lucky you.” When Rose didn’t laugh, Millie pulled her face straight and sighed. “It wasn’t real. Nobody could have come in with Mrs. Cross downstairs and me sleeping next to you, and we always lock the window, don’t we? So there you go. You don’t need to make up stories just to feel better about something that when you get right down to it, happens to everyone.”

  Rose didn’t know if she could trust her reasoning in full. Millie was the sort who wouldn’t be woken before her accustomed time by anything short of earthquakes and the end of days. As for Mrs. Cross, she’d taken to having a drink of laudanum before sleep ever since there’d been a murder outside her door. Someone could come in and strangle her, and it would be unlikely she’d wake before it was done.

  Still, perhaps it was true that she was only clinging to the idea that her dream had been real in order to feel less responsible. After all, it wasn’t a particularly restful thought, was it? To know that her head was so filled with dark want that she’d gone and turned her nightmares into pleasure, a murderer into a lover. It was far more reassuring to convince herself that it was all his fault, that he had entered her head to take advantage of her.

  Even if the latter still didn’t absolve her from the way she had responded to him.

  “You could be right,” she conceded. “I just hope it won’t happen again.”

  It happened again that very same night.

  Rose gained awareness and gasped, struck with wonder at where she found herself. Then, out of reflex, she tapped the floor with her foot. The sound of the impact was tinged with a hollowness that suggested there was a lot of empty air beneath the stone, but all in all, it seemed solid enough. Everything did, from the short rock wall that surrounded the balcony to the empty birdcage hanging overhead. There was hardly anything vague or fuzzy about this dream. Whatever she chose to focus on instantly became as detailed and there as any real object would.

  Then there were the smells, unknown perfumes of odd, colorful, marvelous flowers. Rose had been told once that people couldn’t smell in dreams, but as she leaned forward to take a sniff at the mantle of bell-shaped flowers that spilled over the wall, she decided that the saying had to be untrue. Either that or it was all real, and last night had been real too.

  She needed it to not have been real.

  A plump bird with a long neck and a tail in all the colors of the rainbow jumped on the railing, took a few elegant steps towards her and pecked at her fingers. Rose stared at it, mesmerized, and reached out to scratch its head. She was aware that someone else was standing not far behind her, because the person had just audibly cleared their throat, but decided that she would do nothing about it until she was forced to.

  Which didn’t take long.

  “We meet again,” the killer said. Rose nodded absentmindedly to show she’d heard, then returned her attention to the bird, who had tired of her and started wandering to the other side of the balcony, where it jumped into the foliage that grew along the wall. She followed it. The killer followed her, or his footsteps did, as she wasn’t about to turn and face him. “You are ignoring me. Have I done something to aggravate you?”

  She spun around.

  “You told me that you were real!” And here, stuck in a dream with him, she couldn’t disbelieve that the same way she had during the day. He seemed so solid, even more so than their surroundings. How could she not have noticed it before? Last night, for instance?

  “Yes?” His tone suggested that he couldn’t quite see why that was in any way problematic.

  “If you are real, you . . . I . . .” She gave up, unable to put her feelings into words. What was there to say? That he should have told her so at the start of her last dream, so that she could have shut down his advances? She didn’t even know for sure if that was true, if she would have been able to stop him from doing anything. If she would have wanted to. “How can you be? How can you be real and here, in my dream?”

  “This is my dream, I believe.” He gestured around, to the sunset, to the lavish palace the balcony belonged to, to the blue-green lake before it. Rose noted, with some envy and some disgruntlement, that his scene-setting abilities were far superior to hers. She wondered if their surroundings were all his imagination, or a real place or combination of places. “But that is beside the point. You have yet to tell me what I’ve done to wrong you.”

  “You . . .” Rose pressed a hand against her forehead and let her heated cheeks speak for her.

  “Fucked you?” he suggested. “Is that it? You didn’t seem to take issue with it at the time.”

  “Mind your manners, sir!” The fact that he had a point was beside the point. There was no denying that she had reacted to him like no proper woman should, but that didn’t mean he was allowed to remind her of it. “What you did to me was disgraceful.”

  “Fulfilling your deepest desires was disgraceful?”

  Now she was truly convinced that he was mocking her.

  “Yes! It was!” Her reply threw him, which she supposed was fair, as it barely made sense to her. She was finding it difficult to articulate her emotions coherently when he was standing so close, and the memories of his hands on her were still so fresh. “It doesn’t matter if I enjoyed or even allowed it to some extent, you should have refused to take advantage of my weakness, as any decent man would have!”

  He pursed his lips, lost in complicated thoughts, and the small movement made Rose realize that she’d been giving them too much undue attention. Giving all of him too much undue attention, at that.

  He was starting to infect her with his presence once again. Infect, yes, that was a good name for it. Giving her something bad that did abnormal things to her body, and that she couldn’t help but catch.

  “You are a confusing woman, Rose,” he finally said. His voice had the same smooth, polished quality from when he’d asked to tie her up. Rose decided to consider it a warning, and to take it as a cue to step back, before her confused mind convinced her to do something regrettable.

  “Well, you are . . . you are a murderer!”

  It was not the best comeback, but it would have to suffice. She turned on her heels and crossed the balcony, intending to put as much
distance as she could between them before he caught up with her.

  She threw the doors open and stormed inside the room on the other side. Unlike the one he’d . . . seduced her in, this one was open and light, with pale curtains and bed sheets and pillow cases — because of course, there was a bed. She walked around it, found another door and tried the knob. Much to her surprise, it turned on the first try.

  She stumbled into an inner garden that was just as breathtaking as the sight outside the balcony. Half of it was taken up by a pool, or perhaps a small lake, as there were plants floating on the surface and, as she saw when she came closer, orange and red fishes swimming in it. The other half was all statues and exotic plants and tiles the shape and color of jewels. It was the sort of space where one could feel out of place just by breathing.

  Curiosity got the better of her. Momentarily forgetting the situation she was in, Rose stopped and crouched down beside the lake. A few of the fishes swam up to inspect her, declared her unworthy of their attention and returned to the depths. She wasn’t focusing on them, though, but on the massive wreckage of a galleon that lay — impossibly, as there was no way it could have fit — a short distance below the surface. A creature with the face of a woman and the body of a fish swam in and out of it.

  When it realized that it was being watched, it screeched a jet of bubbles at her.

  “I truly, truly should have started in media res this time around,” the killer said, appearing behind her and catching her wrist. “Come with me. There will be plenty of time for you to explore after we—”

  “Inmediares. You keep saying that word, but I don’t know what it means.”

  “It means that I should have begun this dream with my cock already between your thighs.”

  She slapped him, ineffectually, as he didn’t even budge, and slid out of his grasp.