by Cole McCade
She screamed, muffled and choked against his hand, trailing into a gulping sob as tears eclipsed her vision in a searing shimmering wash and everything inside her stretched, forced open by this lividly hot thing like slick forge-fired iron. This thing that made her body mold and conform to it, cutting deeper and deeper and smearing its nasty delicious dirty filth on her insides. She was breaking. She was breaking, he was tearing her in half, it was too big and her thighs were pushing too far apart and everything within her was cracking while he crushed her and smothered her in the thick smoldering weight of man. And still there was more, more, sliding so impossibly deep until he filled her up inside her belly and forced into places he was never meant to go, the thick flared head spreading her open inside and making room for the licking slide of pulsing veins and the stretching thickness of a stroking shaft.
His fingers dug into her jaw and crushed her lips against her teeth, holding her trapped in place. His breaths washed fiery-damp and labored over her shoulder. The roughness of his slacks dragged against her clenching wet lips as his hips seated flush to hers, and she clawed at his shoulders, begging for…for, she didn’t know, but she found it when he began to move. When his back arched and his hips surged and a long heavy stroke touched something inside her. She jerked, lifting herself toward him, thrilled and tortured and torn apart by the dragging burn of friction that pushed and pulled inside her, tugged on every tight peak, dug ragged and rough and wild into her flesh. Her heartbeat pounded violently, rolling through her like a stone tumbling downhill and taking her with it as he slammed deep, rutting her against the headboard, cleaving and parting her in short sharp thrusts that burned hotter every time, friction building higher and higher, wetter and wetter. Their body heat came together in a gliding inferno, and she raised herself into him and ground herself into every stroke that rubbed the hard thick vein along the top of his cock against her clit.
He clawed a hand into the front of her tank top and dragged it down, forcing it below her breasts. And as he wrapped his lips around her nipple and bit and tugged and suckled, every drawing pull reached down inside her and wound her tighter, clutching her around him until she wanted to lose her mind, wanted him deeper deeper deeper never deep enough. She locked her thighs around his hips and begged in muffled gasping whimpers for the pain, for the taste of her own tears on his skin as she bit at his fingers. His body enveloped hers. His lust crashed over her, leaving her dizzy with the rush and tumult of it: the scent of his aftershave and desire, the scratch of his stubble to her breast, the hard flex and flow of his body under her grasping fingers, the feel of her own wetness pouring out on every thrust to pool in the cleft of her ass and soak into the bed, the headboard biting into her shoulder blades. All too much, too intense, and as everything built to the snapping point inside her, he kissed a trail up her throat and bit down over her pulse with claiming teeth.
“That’s my girl,” he whispered against her flesh. “That’s Daddy’s dirty little girl.”
CHAPTER SIX
SHE SPENT THE DAY IN the library, because she couldn’t stand the idea of going back to Gary’s when her throat still felt raw from sobbing in a dawn-slanted alley of the Rooks. If she saw him she would scream at him until her voice died, for throwing her at Gabriel Hart like she was his to pass off to anyone who would take her. She didn’t want Gary’s form of paternal charity. Nor did she want Hart’s hot-and-cold condescension, or the drilling way he looked at her and asked her what she wanted.
She didn’t want anything. Nothing but the unanswered question of the next tomorrow.
So she slid her earbuds in and let her music wail, and curled up in one of the overstuffed chairs in the children’s reading area. She lost herself in the kind of books Jacob had complained about when he’d seen the charges on the debit card, and had been too embarrassed to display on the living room bookshelves next to his tomes on economic models, doomsday predictions of the next financial collapse, and the rise of the egalitarian nation.
Her kind of books were the ones where little girls discovered they could do magic, whether that magic shot from their fingertips in coils of ice and flame, surged into them from the fire of a blue sword and the strength of a wild golden horse, or welled in their hearts when they realized the music in their headphones was the music in their souls, and they held every wild note in that thump inside their chests. Books where girls reached for more than a MRS degree, and learned to let people inside because on the pages the pain was beautiful and tragic and poetic—instead of an ugly tarry thing that slimed the insides black, until girls like Leigh couldn’t let anyone in or they’d see just how poisoned she was.
The librarian kicked her out at closing time, with a tight suspicious look as if she feared Leigh would steal the things people borrowed every day. Leigh ran a longing finger over the spines as she slid them back onto the shelf, but she couldn’t take those magical little girls home when she didn’t have a home to go to.
She spilled out into long shadows of sunset that made tall wide-armed men out of stretching telephone poles, and walked until the tired ache of her calves drowned out memories of waking up with blood on her inner thighs, a hot soreness spearing up into her stomach, stubble burns on her mouth. Drowned out, too, memories of the dull cold light of fury and hate in her mother’s eyes, and the words that would never be spoken because proper people didn’t speak about their problems.
They just let them fester.
There would be no pictures of Elijah today. She thought if she breathed his air she might leave oily stains behind. Stains that would waft across the park to crawl inside his lungs, and wake the venom she’d bred into his veins.
When she couldn’t stand walking anymore, she ducked into a sports bar that had just unlocked its doors, downtown and far from Gary’s low dirty slum dive. People would recognize her at Gary’s. Hart might find her.
And she might feel caged by the idea of belonging in any one place.
A frat boy with a buzz cut and a crooked nose bought her a drink and a basket of curly fries. She tried not to eat like a beast, when the pancakes had been over twenty-four hours ago and her stomach had bottomed out. He watched her like he’d bought her with one mudslide, and when he said I know this great party she smiled like the cute little sorority girl he wanted her to be and chirped sure.
He took her to a townhouse in the Rooks. Music and lights blazed from the windows, bodies moving and swaying, leaning over balconies and screaming to the stereo system and scraping up hardwood floors that would get someone in trouble when their parents came back from Cabo or Bora Bora, or wherever rich people wandered off to while their kids trashed their houses with university keggers. She’d met Jacob at a party like this, tugged along to his parents’ mansion in Blackwing Downs by a friend who’d wanted to get drunk and gangbang half the university football team. All Leigh had wanted was to stay in the dorm and listen to her music and delete her mother’s voicemails from her phone. It wasn’t until Jacob had felt under her shirt and gotten her number that she’d found out, days later, who he was. Who his parents were. And how elated her mother was, with every unspoken word whispering that Leigh should spread her legs and land him fast and never come home again.
This town house was a box full of Jacobs and Leighs, Kens waiting to get to third base with as many Barbies as possible before their parents started playing society matchmaker. This place was a time machine to her past, and as she let the frat boy lead her through the throng, her steps swung to the rhythm of chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!
She let her hand slip free from his, hid herself among the moving bodies, and pretended she was still this young and wonderfully stupid, deep down inside. Her frat boy was looking for her, standing on his toes and searching over bobbing heads, but she slid into the narrow crevices of body heat and wound her arms over her head and undulated to a music inside her that was deeper and lovelier than the pulsing screams of scratchy dirty sexy dubstep filling the room.
And when she found
a girl with thin sharp hands and crow-black hair and creases in the corners of her smiling mouth, Leigh led her to a back bedroom and kissed the taste of mojitos from her lips. She touched her skinny rawboned body until there was nothing but the soft scent of womanflesh and the warm way their tongues slid together, until her mouth felt too hot and everything was all sweet smooth lines and curves, mating and melding. Then the taste of tartness on her tongue, thin and musky and flowing with every lick. Her thumb slid slow against the piercing nestled in the soft sensitive fold of pink just above the crow-girl’s clit, and Leigh drank her cry from her gasping mouth as she slid and twisted her fingers in just the right way, just the way that would always make Leigh arch her hips and scream when she did it to herself. Everything she loved about herself, she gave to the crow-girl, and let herself forget men for just one night of simple quiet where there was nothing she didn’t understand, and no one looking at her and wanting only to take take take without ever understanding how it felt to give.
* * *
“Jesus cockfucking Christ, girl, where have you been?”
Gary wrung a rag between his liver-spotted hands and stared at her, milky witch-eye jumping in its socket, age-softened lips a distressed little pouch torn between a scowl and a frown. Leigh wondered why he suddenly looked so old. If he’d always looked that way but she’d been blinded by the thin sheen of affection, or if her sick and humiliated fury was a film tinting him in uglier, tired, more tattered colors, yellow and jaundiced in the light of the midmorning sun.
He dug his fingers into the rag, stretching it in ridges between his hands. “Fuck,” he continued. “I’ve been worried fucking sick, you know that?”
“Don’t.”
The last thing she wanted was anyone worrying over her, tying her down with the obligation of someone else’s needs. After the worry came the insistence: I know what’s best for you, I just want to help you, I know what you need. She’d always hated that. People who thought they knew her, who loved to tell her who she was and what she wanted, who swore they knew better than her own inner heart when she said No.
No, that’s not me at all.
Her fingers curled into tight tense lumps in her pockets. “Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you palmed me off on some guy who could’ve just as easily left my body in a dumpster.”
“What? Fuck. Fuck.” Gary went white, then a blistering purple that made blue-green capillaries stand out in wormy lines against his ruddy cheeks. “Did that jackass hurt you? I never thought—”
“That’s just it. You didn’t think.” Leigh refused to raise her voice, even if every word felt like that first hitch of sound before a scream of rage. “You didn’t think I wouldn’t want to be passed around like a fucking party favor. What Little Orphan Annie story did you tell him about me?”
Gary said nothing. The fibers of the rag strained until they creaked. He stared down at them with a vein thumping in his bulging eyelid, while Leigh braced her hands on the bar and leaned across it with a hiss.
“What. Did. You. Tell. Him?”
“It ain’t like that,” he flared, his witch-eye sullen, the glass eye placid and clear and empty. “I told him you might be good for him. That’s all.”
She stilled. She couldn’t feel her skin all of a sudden, save for in the very tips of her fingers where they pressed against the cool pitted bartop and held so tight they glued her in place.
“What?” she managed.
Gary shrugged with a snort. “You ain’t the only one with problems, Leigh. You ain’t the only one carrying around old hurts.”
No. I’m just the only one who did it to myself.
She backed away. Backed away from the bitter understanding in his voice; from the sheer familiarity of the wiry raw-cut lines of his shoulders, the way they rolled as he played with that rag and tugged at his cufflinks and did all those little things she knew as Gary well enough to make him a permanent fixture in her world. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. And he sucked the last of the words out of her when he continued,
“Four years. Four fucking years and you still don’t trust me. How long you gonna keep punishing everyone around you for what someone else gone and done?”
She couldn’t stand here and listen to this. She couldn’t stand the weight of that rolling witch-eye, seeing into her like some kind of fucking crystal ball. She backed up a few more tripping steps, then turned and fled for the door with Gary’s voice on her heels.
“Where you going?”
The words just tightened the noose around her neck, choking her with the bonds of dependency. She froze, one hand on the door. “I…it…” It’s not your business. It’s never your business. I’m leaving and I’ll never see you again because I don’t want to know you, don’t want to care, don’t want this awful hateful feeling just because I hurt you when it’s not your problem. I’m not your problem.
I don’t want to be anything to you at all.
But none of that came out. None of it.
And even though the words felt like chains shackling her to earth and keeping her from flying, she rasped “I’ll be back” before pushing out the door.
* * *
She sat on the swings in the park and watched Elijah play, and wondered when she’d become so unhappy.
She’d thought she’d left this behind. This crushing awful feeling of something unfulfilled, something she kept reaching for only to be dragged away and mired in others’ needs and expectations and the cloying sick grasping of their love. She wasn’t looking for happiness. She’d never expected to find it out here in the narrows and bends of Crow City, but she’d at least managed to slough that suffocating monotonous misery for a comfortable numbness that had let her avoid feeling anything at all.
Why would Gary say that? That she could be good for someone. For anyone. She wasn’t even good for herself. Maybe she wasn’t on a path toward anything so dramatic as self-destruction, but hers was still a slow wasting, fading day by day, becoming more of a ghost with every breath she expelled and didn’t draw in again. Ghosts only haunted people, powerless to do anything. She’d made herself powerless, and didn’t know how to feel about that.
She dug her boots into the sand, stopping the moaning creak-sway of the swing, and lifted her head to watch Elijah move his toy figurines across a picnic table under the perky little nanny’s watchful eye. She couldn’t tell if Spiderman and Batman were fighting or kissing, but it didn’t matter when that little boy looked so happy, with his quiet, serious smile that lit up his eyes so bright. God, she hadn’t been any good for him, so here she was—the shade of his mother, hovering around him but never able to reach through the veil into the world of the living to touch.
She’d done the right thing, hadn’t she?
Or was she just punishing Elijah, too?
She’d never thought of it that way before. Punishing people for what she’d done to herself. For being naive. For being stupid and young and scared. Gary would hate her, if he knew. He’d look at her with the same scorn and contempt as Gabriel Hart, empty of the gruff concern that had made him pick her up like a stray kitten off the street. He’d indulged her while she strutted in and out with her tail in the air, only returning home to eat before coming and going as she pleased.
Gary thought she’d run away from some awful life. Maybe he thought she’d had a husband who beat her, or a crack-addicted boyfriend. A pimp who fed her eight-balls before passing her around to his friends. A boss who’d cornered her in a supply room and hiked her skirt up and refused to take no for an answer. He needed a story to go with her wildness, her coldness, her hollowness. The real story was that she’d had everything and hadn’t deserved it, when she’d still wanted something else to sate a broken twisting emptiness that couldn’t be filled.
She caught the nanny eyeing her warily and ducked her head, watching them from under the shadow of her hoodie. Right. Crazy lady in the park staring at that little girl’s meal ticket. A bitter smile creased her
lips. She could take him right now. She could take him because she had more right to him than anyone, but then the cops would come and she’d never see him again. There would be cages of a different kind where no one cared that she was his mother, and she was in his blood in a way that no one else could ever be.
The nanny closed her book, tucked it in her bag, and stood, ushering Elijah close with quick and cooing words. Leigh clenched the chains of the swing so hard they rattled, locking her legs so she wouldn’t get up and run after them, wouldn’t chase this feeling like her heart had fallen out of her chest and was skipping happily off with them, tied to the laces of his little red shoes.
Don’t go, she screamed inside. Don’t take him away!
But Elijah toddled off with his hand slipped trustingly into that perky little girl’s, while the girl kept glancing back toward Leigh. Leigh who didn’t have her camera, who’d left that and her shitty little TracFone back at Gary’s, the only things stopping her from running away and never looking back.
All her memories of the only thing good she’d ever made were trapped inside those boxes of plastic and wires, and she couldn’t leave them behind.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE STAYED ON THAT SWING until the sunlight turned the color of whiskey and the shadows stretched grasping, thin fingers across a playground that had turned into a ghost town. Someone’s abandoned toy truck lay half-buried in the sandbox, tipped over and forgotten. Leigh kicked the swing back and let it sway, and imagined the sandbox was a ruined desert in a world gone to rot, the truck a rusted legacy of a human civilization that had bled itself to death, buried under the uselessness of stock portfolios, hedge funds, and asset valuation. Things she’d been told girls like her didn’t need to understand, when she understood far too well what so many people didn’t seem to see:
