by A. S. Kelly
“I can’t accept it. You can’t be with him, not after you’ve been with me. You…you can’t do it, Christine.”
“I can do whatever I want,” I tell him, meeting his gaze. “I can sleep with whoever I like.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Just me. No one else.”
56
Ryan
I throw myself against her again, letting go of her face but keeping her pinned in place with my body, my hands wandering over hers.
I mark out the borders of my territory.
I take back what’s mine.
I slide my hands under her shirt and lift it up, gliding slowly towards her breasts. I take them tightly in my hands, then bite down hard, bending her in to my anger.
I came here with the best intentions. I only wanted to talk, to explain why I behaved the way I did, why I let her think the worst. I was there, outside her house, ready to take a step forward – and then I saw her with him, in the doorway of her house, as if they were saying goodbye after a moment of intimacy. Too intimate – with the wrong person.
Seeing her hug him…Seeing her kiss him…It completely fried my senses. I don’t want anyone to touch her – not after I have.
I won’t let it happen again.
My hand slides along her stomach and snakes down into her trousers, into her underpants. When I feel how wet she is, my dick almost rips out of my jeans.
“For me…” I snarl. “You’re so wet for me.”
Christine moves against my hand, her body telling me to go deeper, showing me that I was right: she should only be touched by me.
She only wants me.
I move against her in pulses, arching her back to slide my fingers in deeper, massaging her clit with my thumb. I feel it flare up under my touch.
I take one of her nipples in my lips and look at her, her eyes closed, her face flushed, her body calling to mine.
And only mine.
I tug it with my teeth, making her look down at me. I have to make her understand that there are only my hands, my mouth, my skin.
There are no other men for her.
And she has to understand now.
What I get what I want, I slide my tongue up her neck, imprinting my name onto her skin. I hear her moan in desperation, and block her mouth with mine. Christine pants, confused by the pleasure, overwhelmed by my desire and suffocated by my mouth, not wanting to miss a single one of her breaths. I need them, she owes me all of them. She has to give them to me – or I won’t be able to breathe on my own.
I quicken the movement of my fingers, keeping my thumb pressed against her inflamed clit, which pulses against my touch.
“Like this…” I whisper into her ear. “Take me, Christine. Take everything I’m giving to you… I’m fucking you with just my fingers, and look – you’re already on the edge.”
“Fuck you, Ryan O’Connor,” she gasps.
She shouldn’t have said that.
I plunge into her ruthlessly, and her body folds completely over me.
“Fuck you, Christine,” I say, pushing again and feeling her legs tremble with the pleasure of anticipation.
This is what I want. I want to make her understand that only I can do this to her – I can turn her world upside-down and take everything she can give me.
No one else.
“I want to feel you on my hand.”
“I hate you, O’Connor…” she pants, before digging her nails into my back and trembling against my palm, which feels every shudder of her orgasm.
I quickly slip my hand out of her, and she collapses onto me. I unbutton my jeans, and slide her trousers and her underpants down to the floor. I grab her buttocks and lift her up, slamming her back against the wall.
Christine grabs my shoulders and wraps her legs around my back. I slide into her in one swift thrust that makes her yell, letting her head fall onto my shoulder.
I hold her up against the wall – against my body – and I push into her, quickly and furiously, consumed by jealousy and by my own memories. By the past that has come back to remind me of what I was, and what is left of me.
Everything. I want to take everything.
I want to take her, and leave her with nothing.
Because it’s the only way I know to stop her doing the same to me.
“Ryan…” she tries to slow down, seeking out my mouth, but I turn away, letting her slide down the wall with her feet on the floor. I grab her by the waist and turn her around, pushing her back against the wall. I push my palm down on the centre of her back, bending her over in front of me.
I grab her hips and push myself inside her once more.
“Ryan…” she breathes, placing her hands over mine – but I grab them and place them against the wall, keeping her still.
“Shh…” I beg her, thrusting desperately inside her again. “I need to do it like this, please. Don’t…touch me. Please. I can’t do it if you touch me.”
My words hit the right spot. Christine relaxes her arms and lets me take her like that, splayed against the wall of her house.
“I need this,” I continue, my voice quivering with pain. “I can’t feel anything. I can’t feel your touch, or I can’t do it.”
My voice is almost begging.
“I just need to take you. I can’t listen to everything that’s hurting me inside.”
“Ryan…” she tries again, her voice shaking.
And I fold into myself. I crumble and explode into a million tiny fragments.
I tell her the truth.
I tell her who I am.
I tell her what I’ve become.
I tell her that I’m a piece of shit, and even though she doesn’t deserve it, I’m going to pour all of my anger out into her, just to set myself free, even for a few minutes. Just to pass my pain onto someone else.
“I have to do this. You have to hate me, okay?”
I tell her this, ignoring my heart punching against my ribcage.
“I have to hurt you. It’s the only way I can avoid…loving you. To stop you from loving me.”
Tears are piercing at my throat and flaring up in my chest. My thrusts become quicker, my strength uncontrollable even to me. My desperation is overwhelming, and I take everything that this woman will allow me, aware that, when this is all over, I’ll be over too.
57
Chris
His thrusts are beginning to hurt me, but nowhere near as much as his words. My body surrenders to his, but my heart doesn’t. He already knows that, and it’s ready to retreat.
Ryan pushes me against the wall, moving erratically inside me. With one hand, he holds my hip, mirroring his own movements, while the other pins my hands down – maybe out of fear that I’ll defy his wishes, that I won’t let him empty me out completely.
Because that’s how I feel, after having traced every line of his skin, after he destroyed everything with just a few words. After he used me for exactly what he wanted, leaving me with an infinite emptiness.
He pulls away suddenly, as if he’d just realised what was happening. He backs away, as my legs threaten to give way underneath me. I pull away from the wall, but keep my back to him. I don’t want to look at him.
I don’t know what I’ll see in his eyes: maybe hate, pain, conflict, regret. Or maybe I’ll see ice, just like the ice settling over the room right now.
I don’t want to know.
Our breathing fills the silence, interrupted only by the music that is still playing in the living room. Music that I can’t hear, with my ears or with my soul – because the truth is that, now, I can’t hear anything. And this has never happened to me before.
With Ryan O’Connor, I erase myself, flick the switch, stop being me.
And I don’t like it.
I hate him.
I hate how he makes me feel. I hate his hands, his mouth, the way my body moves next to his. I hate the how full I feel when he’s inside me, and I hate the pain that I feel as soon as he leaves me.
You can’t go back to the beginning. You can’t change the paragraph, find a new chapter.
You can’t write a new story.
“This ends here,” I say in one breath. “It all ends here. Whatever this was… it has to end, Ryan. Now.”
His silence proves to me that he knows I’m right.
“It’s not healthy. Not for me.”
“Christine…”
“No,” I cut him off.
I lift my head and finally turn to face him.
“I get the final say tonight. I’m doing it for both of us. We…we’re not right. We’re not meant to be together.”
“I…I don’t know what came over me…”
“I can’t let you treat me like that. I can’t let anyone treat me like that, Ryan O’Connor. And you’re no one to me now. No one can back me into a corner, push me against a wall and…take away my happiness. It isn’t worth it, especially not for someone like you. I don’t ever want to see you again, I never want to hear your name… I don’t want anything to do with a bastard like you ever again. I know you have your demons, but I’m sorry: I can’t fight them for you when you’ve already decided to shut me out, to let them eat you up. I don’t want to fight. Not for anyone else. I fight for myself every day, I can’t fight in your place. That’s why it has to end here.”
Ryan stands there, staring at me with frightened eyes. His cold, angry stare is gone – his strength is gone. He’s crumbled into his own emotions, I can see it, but I can’t do anything for him. The only person who can help him is Ryan O’Connor – but he doesn’t want to help himself.
He turns his back to me and, without a word, he opens the front door and slams it shut behind him.
I fall against the wall, dropping down to the floor.
Even though I can understand him, can see through his muscles and his anger, I can’t.
I can’t fight for something that doesn’t exist.
I can’t fight in his place.
I can’t fight against him.
It’s too late, for both of us.
It has to end. Tonight. Before it’s even begun.
58
Ryan
He opens the door with a mixture of surprise and victory etched across his face. He knows that if I’ve come to his house then I must be really desperate.
I stride past him, into his apartment.
“Don’t start.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“But you will.”
“No,” he says, a smile playing at his lips. “You’re here to talk, not to listen to my bullshit.”
“I’m here because I want to know.”
He looks at me, his brow furrowed.
“I want to hear your side.”
“Now? Why?”
“Because I need to hear it.”
“What’s happened, Ryan?”
I drop down onto the sofa.
“Exactly what everyone expected. I…crumbled. And I hurt someone. I really hurt her.”
Nick sighs and sits down next to me.
“I saw that guy…her ex. He was hugging her, consoling her and…I don’t know. They looked intimate, they looked…too much. And everything came rushing back. I couldn’t stop thinking of that morning, when I saw you and Lauren hugging on her driveway.”
“I get it.”
“And I lost my mind. I hurt her. I hurt her because she was there, within my reach, and because…”
“Because you care about her.”
“It makes no sense. You shouldn’t hurt the people you care about.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. We always hurt the people we love the most because they expect the most from us. And usually, we let them down, because we’re not the people they thought we were.”
He’s starting to make sense.
“That’s what’s happened to you.”
And he might actually be right. Maybe that’s how it went – maybe what Nick did destroyed me, not just for the act itself, but because I never expected it from him. I trusted him, he was my hero. He was the one person I wanted to be – but he betrayed me.
“Why, Nick? Why did you have to sleep with Lauren?” I ask him all in one breath. I ask him plainly, almost painlessly. Because, by now, all my pain is headed somewhere else, and I need to hear the truth from him.
“If I told you that I didn’t even remember sleeping with her, would you believe me?”
“You can try.”
“I went over to see her because I wanted to clear things up – or, at least, I wanted to understand why Lauren had broken up with you literally that day. She was at her local pub – I knew I’d find her there – and I heard her saying to her friends that she wanted to be single. She was at the bar with a drink in her hand, and an expression on her face as if she’d made a huge mistake and didn’t know how to fix it. I went over to her intending to make her talk, to hear her reasons, maybe make her take it all back, but she didn’t want to tell me the truth. She didn’t want me around. So I started drinking, too, to keep her company. Shot after shot, Ryan. She started to open up, to speak about everything, and I listened. I swear I just wanted to help, for fuck’s sake!” He jumps to his feet, his head in his hands. “She told me that…”
“That she didn’t love me anymore.”
I already knew that part of the story.
Nick looks at me again. His eyes are clear and sincere, just like Dads’. I know that what he’s about to tell me is going to hurt – but he’s doing it because I deserve to know the truth.
“She’d stopped loving me for a while.”
“There was nothing I could do, and I felt so stupid and so useless. I saw how you were, how the break-up had left you, and I just wanted to put things right. Please, you have to believe me!”
I don’t move a muscle. I don’t even breathe.
I know how the story goes. Ian had already tried to tell me before. But hearing it from Nick, in his own words, riddled with guilt, had a whole different effect.
“And I don’t know how we ended up in bed. I don’t even know what happened between us, honestly. Neither of us remembered it the next morning. I just know that I woke up next to her.”
“So you didn’t do it to get revenge?”
“Revenge? For what?”
“For me taking your place on the team.”
“Do you really think I’d do that?” And seeing the shock in his eyes confirms to me that I’ve been a real idiot, for believing all these years that Nick only did it to hurt me.
“We both know that you were the one in the running for that place.”
Nick laughs bitterly. “I never had a chance, Ryan. I never thought I’d make the team; I always knew that place was destined for you. I went to the trials, like everyone, but I never believed there’d be a place for me. I was always hoping you’d get it.”
I try, in vain, to control my emotions, because this time I have no idea how intense they’ll be.
“And of course I was pissed off when you gave everything up for her. I didn’t want you to throw away your life, your career!”
“I couldn’t stay,” I say, resignedly.
Nick takes a deep breath and sits back down next to me.
“You were the weakest in the family.”
“I knew it!” I jump up, infuriated, but he grabs my arm and pulls me back down.
“You were emotional, sensitive. You had such a big heart. You loved her, you always had, right from the very first moment – you loved her for almost ten years. And I was worried, I admit. Ian was, too. We didn’t want to see you get hurt, so we tried to keep you safe. Maybe Ian did it better than I did.”
“I didn’t need either of you.”
He smiles. “Of course you did. You were our little brother: you still are. You still need us.”
“I’m old enough to take care of m
yself, Nick.”
“Sure – but your life suddenly took a turn and…you’re losing yourself. You’re not that little boy anymore, but he’s still there, even though you try to hide him. You keep him secret, with no light or air, holding him hostage. And I’m starting to miss that little boy – we all are. We want him to come back.”
“He’s just a disappointment, to everyone.”
“That little boy has never disappointed anyone. We always loved him, and still do.”
“I’m a failure, Nick,” I tell him, rubbing my face with my hands. “A failure with arms and legs.”
“And muscles,” he jokes, trying to cheer me up.
“I still remember the look on Mum’s face, that day, when Lauren didn’t come over.”
“She was upset for you.”
“She was…disappointed.”
“No, Ryan. I promise you: that was not disappointment.”
“And then when Dad heard about us, about my decision to leave.”
“Dad was upset for you, not for what you’d done. Ryan, what happened was not your fault. The choices you made got worse and worse, but we all understood them. We understood you, okay? You don’t have to pretend around us. We all know who you are.”
“So who am I, then?”
“You’re the heart of the family.”
I cover my mouth with my hand, attempting to muffle an embarrassing sob.
Nick places his hand on my shoulder and squeezes it affectionately.
“You’re the best part of us. Of all of us.”
I stand up, hoping to run away from his words, from the commotion bursting out of my heart. I pace around the living room, trying to calm down.
“You were the one who cried over cartoons, who didn’t want to watch horror films because you couldn’t stand the idea of the bad guy killing everyone. We couldn’t even watch films where animals died, because you wouldn’t have slept that night.”
I don’t want to listen to him, but he keeps going, ignoring me shaking my head.
