The Lost

by Cole McCade

“That’s…that’s your problem.”

  “There’s no such thing as someone who wants nothing.”

  He shifted beneath her, denim rasping against her inner thighs. The ridge of his zipper pushed against her again—his zipper, and a straining hardness that forced his jeans into a stiff heavy rise, the heat of his cock swelling against the denim and grazing the line of her panties. A low sound caught in her throat. She couldn’t stop herself from moving, from grinding herself against him until the fire of his flesh scorched her through the cloth, turning her flesh slick and molten, her inner walls clenching with a demanding need.

  Stop it, her pride screamed. But her body refused to listen—her tainted dirty defiled little body that needed sex like an addiction, that wanted to take her hate out on him with raking nails while he punished her with vicious thrusts and filled her until she split apart. She wanted his bruising touch reaching deep inside her, because unless it hurt it wasn’t real enough.

  Her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth and her eyes squeezed shut. She rolled her hips, feeling the deep liquid undulation in every muscle of her body. Rough friction scraped her panties against her skin, dragging them aside until naked flesh rubbed wet and soaking against denim, textures stamping themselves on her skin in hot wild shocks, painful little thrills of pressure and hunger and oh god yes the hard thumping twitch of blood pulsing in his cock, making it jerk against his jeans, swelling as if trying to pierce through layers of fabric. The vicious teeth of need bit into her, pierced her, spilled the wet bright fire of her from gushing wounds of desire to leave her ragged and whimpering.

  Until he let go of her wrists.

  She fell forward, and only caught herself by bracing her hands against the unyielding planes of his stomach, supporting herself on shaking arms. Her eyes opened. He lay passive beneath her, looking up at her with stony indifference, even though she could feel how hard the bastard was—but still he looked at her like she was nothing. She stared at him dazedly, words caught behind the lump in her throat.

  “You wanted to leave, didn’t you?” he asked.

  That lump swelled to choke her. Her eyes stung, burned, blurred. She would not fucking cry. She would not let him humiliate her like this. She wouldn’t let him make her feel like shit when he looked at her with that question in his eyes, asking without words:

  What do you want, Leigh?

  No. She’d said she wouldn’t break, and she meant it.

  Not in front of him.

  She held her body rigid, so tight it hurt, yet still couldn’t stop her trembling. But she lifted her chin as she pushed off him, her thighs sore and aching from his bulk. She slid off the bed with as much dignity as she could manage while he lay there and watched her unwaveringly, refusing to let her escape the pressure of his gaze.

  Her knees buckled as she found her feet, and she thought the low and dizzy sway of the boat would make her vomit. Still she made herself walk away, stepping out onto the deck and into the damp bright air of rising morning. Shakily, she vaulted over the railing and onto the dock. She didn’t look back to see if he was watching. She didn’t look back at all.

  She just ran, stumbling and staggering and reeling from side to side, clumsy feet thunking hard on wood, then concrete, then asphalt as she tore into the streets of Crow City. Blind to all but the haze of colors through her tears, deaf to all but the voice whispering you filthy little slut into her ears, she ran.

  Ran from that familiar voice she’d first heard when she was eighteen, but that now sounded like Gabriel Hart hissing cold and cruel and hateful in her ears.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHE’D JUST TURNED EIGHTEEN, THE first time he’d touched her.

  She’d never thought he’d actually do it. Not even after years of hard hungry glances across the dinner table, glances that grew just a little hotter with every passing month. If this were Lolita she could say she’d enticed him with a woman’s wiles behind a girl’s face, but she’d never been a Lolita. Never known how to purse her lips in that way that made men’s thoughts scream with sex and filth and lust. She was as small as her mother, slight as a doll, and still as naive as that twelve-year-old who’d watched Pretty Woman and felt like she’d done something wrong for wanting Julia Roberts’ hooker boots. She couldn’t even get into PG-13 movies without showing her I.D. and convincing the ticket teller it wasn’t fake. Calling her a B-cup was being generous when she didn’t even need a bra, and she had the slim straight thighs of a girl. But she liked the way he looked at her: like she was sexy as a co-ed, and could lure men in with pink sugar-gloss lips and a single come-hither glance.

  Boys her own age didn’t look at her that way. Boys her own age looked at girls like Stephanie Calhoun, with her strong cheerleader thighs and low-cut shirts and her reputation for being the first girl in class to lose her virginity, while Leigh was embarrassed to admit she was one of the last. Even though she took birth control pills for her periods, she didn’t even know how to kiss—except for one quick, nervous peck from Tony Goldbaum in seventh grade, before they’d never spoken to each other again.

  But when he looked at her, when his eyes raked like claws over the gap between her thighs and his palms left sweat in dark stains against his slacks, she shivered with the hot delicious tingle of something unknown and forbidden and so wrong that at night in her diary she wrote in words tiny as whispers and asked the pages, is it wrong if I like feeling dirty, is it wrong if I think about it? Just one little naughty thought now and then, in those moments when no one was looking while she slipped her hand down her panties to touch the soft fine downy hairs that had just started to grow in a few years before, and felt so good between her fingers.

  Mama didn’t like it. Mama’s nose got thin and her mouth twisted up, and the silence at the dinner table was cut to pieces by the loud angry stabbing of forks and knives against china plates edged in gold filigree. But Mama liked to pinch her arms in places that made it impossible to wear sleeveless shirts because the dark tiny bruises would show, as ugly as the way Mama would smile when she told little Clarissa Leigh all the things she needed to know to empty out her own needs and wants and dreams to make room for the needs and wants of dreams of someone who would one day fill the faceless slot of husband.

  Don’t fill your head with stupid ideas, dear. No man wants to hear some little girl prattle on about the senseless things in her vapid little mind. Now, now, don’t look at me that way. When you’re older, you’ll understand.

  But she wasn’t older. She wasn’t older, and right now she wanted the hot dark fire in his eyes when he looked at her. She wanted the white-knuckled jealous knot of Mama’s fingers against the edge of the table, and wanted the way Leigh could shrug her shoulders like she’d done nothing wrong when she wore her shortest skirt to the dinner table and shook her hair down, while he smiled at her just so and said, “So how’s Daddy’s little girl today?”

  Sometimes he called her that in her dirty forbidden thoughts, when she closed her eyes and spread her legs under the covers and touched. Daddy’s little girl he whispered, and she imagined the scruff of his stubble would feel sweetly painful and rough against her lips.

  It hurt, the days when he wouldn’t look at her. The days when he smiled tightly and looked somewhere over her head, and wouldn’t even make eye contact when she toyed with her shining chestnut hair and flicked it off her neck. His distant half-answers and distracted voice said he wasn’t even listening, something in the tremor of his fingers almost afraid. She’d realized he was afraid of her when he’d stopped snuggling on the couch with her a year ago, every time they watched movies. Careful distance, and the one time their thighs had touched he’d left the room. She at once hated and loved that fear. It made her feel powerful. It made her feel like a woman.

  But the worst part was that it made her feel alone.

  More and more he’d walk away, rather than be alone with her. Sometimes she watched him from the living room door, while Mama sent the maid to bed and bent o
ver his chair and served him his vodka. Mama liked to whisper low in his ear in her after-midnight voice; the voice she used when he’d had a hard day at the office and the contractors weren’t behaving and he was sick of the bureaucracy of business ownership, when just he wanted to get his hands dirty on the construction site again. He growled those things to Mama with the intimacy of a husband reaching for his wife’s support, while a sick dark feeling Leigh didn’t like curled in the pit of her stomach. Every night, she’d crawl into bed and sulk and swear to herself that she wasn’t speaking to him anymore.

  But she always did. And when he ruffled her hair and said don’t pout like that, Rissa-Rabbit, don’t be mad and pulled her close to fold her against his broad chest, she’d inhale his scent of aftershave and fresh clean shirts, and cling to him and just breathe. Everything in her would tremble down to the tips of her toes, while his fingers clutched in the back of her shirt with something like desperation.

  I’m not mad at you, Daddy.

  Good. He’d always kiss the top of her head, and his breaths burned down to her scalp. You make my days better. Stay a sweet little bunny rabbit, Rissa. I don’t know what I’d do if the light went out of your smile.

  He’d said that, that night. But when he’d tweaked her hair and told her goodnight, his eyes had had that faraway look that said he was trying not to see her. He’d let her go a little too quickly. And instead of saying I don’t understand what you mean, she’d just mumbled goodnight and gone to bed, while her heart floated with the scary awful sort of weightlessness that came when it lifted itself up and readied to smash into the ground.

  Curled under the covers, she hugged her diary close and slipped a note between the pages, clumsy blocky letters in Caleb Masters’ awkward hand, asking her to the Homecoming Dance. Caleb had knotty knuckles and pretty lips and a sad straggle of dark fuzz under his nose. Two of the girls Leigh didn’t quite consider friends had crushes on him, but to her he was a little boy and not what she wanted. She couldn’t have what she wanted, and if the nuns at school knew they would say the Devil had her. They would beat her across the knuckles with their rulers until she repented and said her rosaries, and washed the unclean thoughts from her head.

  She hid her diary under her pillow, closed her eyes, and listened to the sounds of Mama getting ready for bed down the hall: running water in the bathroom and the slam of the medicine cabinet door, tins of ointment clicking and clacking, until by morning Mama would smell like the chemical factory she wore on her face to keep her skin tight and smooth as saran wrap. In the morning Leigh would go to school with that smell, smeared on her through a perfunctory hug that mattered less than twitting the maid over her undercooked or overcooked or perfect-but-still-wrong breakfast. Leigh closed her eyes and pressed her cheek to her cool pillow, and drifted off to the thought of dancing under the starlit lights of the Homecoming Dance with the rough, coarse hands of a man curled around her hips.

  The creak of her door woke her, a needling and insidious sound that slunk under her eyelids and pried them open. The nightlight in the hall filled the open doorway with a hazy glow that outlined the tall, stark silhouette standing on the threshold. He hulked like a slasher-flick villain waiting with a knife, all hot heavy breaths and a shivering shrill sense of madness that reached across the room and squeezed her heart until it gasped for air and fought to steal even one beat.

  Trembling, she backed up against the headboard, clutching her blankets close. He stepped into the room. The gray pallid moonlight picked out the dark beads of his eyes and the carnivorous shadows under his cheekbones and the quivering part of his lips. He stared at her, his throat working in a hard swallow above the unbuttoned collar of his shirt.

  “Daddy?” she whispered, and hated the small frightened girlish sound of her own voice.

  With a hoarse, inarticulate sound he stepped closer, stopped, drew closer again. He was shaking, she realized—shaking and moving like a dog testing the give in its leash, jerking back only to stretch a little farther each time. Her gaze dropped to his slacks, and she flushed hotly, heat crawling down her neck to her breasts as she averted her eyes from the thrusting ridge fighting the restraints of his zipper.

  He stopped at the edge of the bed, staring down at her, and in his eyes and the taut set of his shoulders was a compulsory lunacy. Terror curled hot in her gut, terror and a bright shivering needy anticipation, that secret dark sinner inside her whispering please, oh please while Mama’s good little girl said no. No, he shouldn’t be here, this is wrong, bad, what if Mama catches him, you’ll get in trouble, so much trouble, and all the nuns at school will know and they’ll whip you before the cross and send you to hell.

  His fingers brushed her shoulder, flicking her hair back, playing over the strap of her little tank top. She stilled. She couldn’t breathe. That touch scraped over her skin like a knife; her throat closed, her stomach drawing up tight. Every night of stolen glances over the table centerpiece came down to this moment.

  No. She was reading too much into it, being sick and dirty and bad, but he was in her room and looking at her with that hungry animal desperation that always clouded his gaze when he stared over her head and avoided her eyes and pulled himself away from her just when the heat of his body had started to warm her low in her belly.

  “Daddy?” she tried again, looking up at him, looming over her bed. “What’s wrong?”

  “Rissa,” he rasped, slurring her name. “Little Rissa.”

  Then his heavy hand curled against her shoulder, crushing the thin fragile slope of her collarbone. He shoved her back against the headboard. His weight fell over her, straddling the blanket-clad hills of her thighs. A cry clawed up her throat—and silenced when his mouth crushed against hers.

  Her body went lax and unresponsive. She tried to move, but her limbs wouldn’t listen to her commands. Her fingers wouldn’t even twitch. And as his lips sealed over hers, a burning brand with his tongue prying into her with a slick and probing intimacy, something warm and heavy and liquid flooded through her, starting on her indrawn breaths and flowing down through her to gather molten and clinging and sweet against her panties, nearly melting the fabric to her flesh.

  His cock ground against her belly, insistent and hard. His heavy breaths were the only sound in the room aside from the rasp of his callused hands on her shoulders, stroking and squeezing and shaping with a possessive grip. She didn’t know what to do, but she didn’t have to know when his mouth took control of hers with such claiming surety. When he just took, period; he left her trembling and needy and aching to give and give and give even if she didn’t quite know how, but the twisted dark promise in the seeking thrust of his cock frightened her more than anything.

  He rose up on his knees, reached between them, and ripped the blanket from her bare legs. His lips tore from hers. He looked down at her, raking her with the fire of his gaze, trailing like the touch of grasping fingers down her body, over the clinging thin tank top, the plunge of the neckline, the little white cotton panties painted on her flesh. Her cheeks burned, and she dropped her gaze, squeezing her legs shut as if that could stop the throbbing between them; as if that could hide the shamefully soaked fabric. She’d never let anyone see her naked, not even half-dressed, but the way he looked at her felt like he could see everything. All the tiny things that made her dirty and sick.

  His fingertips brushed her pulse, and it jumped so hard she made an involuntary sound in the back of her throat. Lower, skimming over the ridges of her clavicles, his touch playing over her skin like fear and excitement and anticipation made flesh, toying against the neckline of her tank, gliding down over her stomach, until she sucked in a breath and squeezed her eyes shut. She wished he would say something. Anything. Anything but this tense and laden silence filled only with his heavy breaths and her shallow ones, whispering a terrible secret without words.

  I love you, Rissa, she wanted to hear. I love you.

  Instead there was only the hiss of skin on skin as
his fingers delved past the waist of her panties, toying against the ticklish sensitivity of her lower belly—then forcing low and deep to plunge between the clench of her thighs.

  She cried out—but he silenced her again, capturing her mouth and drinking her cries with possessive dominance as his curled knuckles dug into her inner thighs and bulged out her thin panties. His fingertips traced the flutter-quiver shock of her slit until everything inside her drew up into a hot twisted knot. She could have screamed against his lips. Somehow she moved, fingers clutching in the sleeves of his shirt, hips twisting and squirming as she whimpered and gasped against his lips. The wet slick flow of their mouths undid her. He probed against her with a single finger that glided in long demanding strokes through her dripping folds and circled the too-sensitive pleasure-pain of her tight-swollen clit, filling her up with a clutching burn that made her go hot and soft with trembling bursts of curling-sweet sensation, shame, and such a needy, needy emptiness. She’d felt this before, but it had never pulled quite so deep.

  She was supposed to say no. She was supposed to fight him, push him off, and scream for help, but his mouth smothered hers and his stubble burned like fire and it was better than she’d imagined, better than anything ever. She inhaled in the ether-smoke taste of vodka on his breath and mewled when his knee dug under her thigh and forced her legs apart. Her thighs burned, muscles pulling hard along the insides, tight strings reaching right up to meet and tug and draw on her cunt. She wanted his fingers inside her, wanted to feel the thick knotty ridges of his knuckles, better than her own slim soft fingers. She rocked her hips toward him—but he pulled away and smeared his hand against her inner thigh, leaving warm wet trails on her skin and making her sob with the ache of disappointment.

  His zipper scraped. Cloth shushed and whispered. His teeth bit into her lower lip, rough and bruising, and he dragged the crotch of her panties aside, baring her to a cold lick of air that stroked over her slit and drew her up taut, tearing that empty ache deeper and making her feel so open. Then something swollen and hot pressed against her, dripping in thick runnels that burned like hot candle wax on her skin. She tensed and dug her fingers into his shoulders. He pulled back, looking down at her. In the dark hard shadows he was an alien, a monster, a stranger, a secret given flesh, and she feared him and loved him and needed him and hated him. She parted her lips to whisper Daddy before his hand clamped over her mouth—and pain tore her open with needling, ripping heat.