by Tijan
After the longest time, my body feels his absence and I open my eyes. He pours ethanol onto a rag, then wipes down my body in one swift stroke and before I can say anything, a flame lights on a candle and he lowers it to the ethanol, lighting my skin ablaze.
The scream is trapped in the split second, but before its escape, his hand follows the path, quenching the heat and leaving me wide eyed and breathless.
So hot, and then so cold.
With a pounding heart, I take in the reality. “You lit me on fire.”
“No, I lit the alcohol just above your skin on fire.” He does it again and this time hot wax drips with it and I suck in a tight breath, my hands turning to fists from the slight pain, the immediate heat, and the cold absence that comes afterward. My head thrashes from side to side as he does it again and again. The pain morphing to unmatched pleasure makes my body feel alive in a way I never knew was possible.
Every climax feels higher and more unbearable than the last. My words fail me as Jase moves down my body, not sparing any inch of my skin.
The alcohol, the fire, his touch. Over and over. He massages the wax onto my breasts before using the knife to pick it off, and the third time he does it, I cum violently.
The pleasure rages through my body with no evidence of it even approaching until the blinding pleasure rocks through me, from my belly to the tip of my toes and fingers.
It’s as if my body has rebelled, choosing his touch and this heat over any sense of calm. It prefers the chaos, the unknown, the absence of all control and stability.
With my bottom lip still quivering and my belly trembling as the tremors of the aftershock subside, Jase kisses me, madly and deeply. I feel all of him in this kiss and it kills me that I can’t lift my hands up, keeping him where I want him.
I’m at his mercy. Fully and truly, and that very fact plays tricks on me. Telling me I love it. Telling me he knows what I need more than I do.
With every pleasure still ringing in me, he pulls away and stands up, removing his shirt and the light from the candle plays along the lines of his defined muscles. I can see his thick length pressing against his zipper and when he palms it, I have to look away. I’m so close to another orgasm. My clit is throbbing; I feel swollen and used, but he’s hardly touched me there.
The sound of a zipper makes me look back at him and the instant I do, his pants, along with his belt, drop to the floor with a clink and a thud and his dick is all I can see.
His girth is so wide I’m not sure I could wrap my hand around him. I can practically feel the veins pressing against my walls and pulling every ounce of pleasure from me, practically imagine his rounded head sliding back and forth over my clit. Oh my God. He’s massive. He grabs his cock and rubs the glistening precum over the head and that’s when I lose it.
Cumming again, and he didn’t even touch me. That’s how much power he has over me. Just the thought of what he could do to me, how he could ruin me, how he is so much more than any boy I ever thought of letting touch me… all of it is fuel that ignites a raging fire inside.
Jase groans deep in the back of his throat, dropping to the floor so quickly and so hard, I know it will leave bruises on his knees. “Cum again,” he commands me breathlessly, leaning over my body to kiss and bite the crook of my neck as he pushes three fingers inside of me and ruthlessly fucks me with them.
The waves of my last release have barely left me when the next orgasm crashes through me, harder and higher than any of those before. My scream is silent, my body stiff as it commands attention from all of me. My body, my soul.
And Jase doesn’t stop, even as my arousal leaks down my ass, he continues. Even as I feel myself tighten around his fingers, he doesn’t stop.
I can’t. I can’t take it. I can’t breathe.
I can’t move. I can’t speak.
I’m helpless and consumed by fire and lust.
I try to focus on Jase when he whispers in my ear, but my body won’t stop shaking and my neck is rigid. “When you look at me, know this is what I want from you. Only I can give you this.” His words hiss in the air, crackling and demanding to be burned in my memory.
Jase Cross destroyed me and what I thought was pleasure.
And where I thought my boundaries lied with him.
Bethany
My eyes open quickly, the darkness consuming me except for the moonlight from the bedroom windows. My heart’s racing and it’s then that I realize the trembling isn’t a dream. I can’t stop shaking and I’m so fucking cold.
“Shhh.” Jase’s voice is anything but calming. After the initial shock of realizing he’s in bed with me, I barely turn around before the bed groans and he pulls the weighted blanket up and around my entire body.
Frantically I try to recount it all, every moment that I can remember.
“What did you do to me?” I ask, and the question comes out viciously. I’m fucking freezing, and I can’t stop trembling.
“I brought you to bed,” he says lowly, a threat barely there, warning me to be careful but fuck that.
“What did you do?” The words are torn from my throat. It’s not even the fear that’s the most overwhelming. As my throat dries and a sinking sensation in my stomach takes over, I look him in the eyes and realize how much trust I had in him. It wasn’t just business. I gave up more than I should have, and he did something to me. He hurt me.
How could you? I want to say the words, but I can’t bear to bring them up and admit to the both of us that I thought he wouldn’t hurt me. That I was that fucking naïve.
Jase’s arm is heavy and pulls me closer to him, even though I attempt to push him away as he says, “It’s just the endorphins crashing.” Although his words are drenched with irritation, there’s something else there, something buried deep down low in his words that I can’t decipher. “You’re okay,” he nearly whispers and then pulls me in closer, dragging my ass to his groin, my back to his chest and nuzzling the nape of my neck with the tip of his nose. “It’s okay, I’ve got you.”
His voice is a calming balm. Even as I continue to shake. As my fingers feel numb and then like they’re on fire. Cold again. “I’m so cold.”
I almost expect my confession to turn to fog in front of me. Like warm breath in the winter air.
“You were on a high,” Jase tells me and then presses his arm against mine, pushing it closer to me and acting as if I’m not trembling uncontrollably. “It’s all coming down. I thought you may have a little aftershock. That’s why I stayed,” he explains.
Aftershock. Endorphins.
He didn’t drug me. It’s not drugs. I can barely swallow for a long moment, trying to make it stop, but my body’s not listening.
“Does this happen all the time?” I ask him, attempting to let go of the anger, swallowing my regret that I immediately assumed the worst of him. It was my first instinct, and shame hits me hard as I realize he did quite the opposite.
I’m a bitch. I am an asshole. An embarrassed asshole.
With sleep lacing his words he tells me, “Not often, but I imagine that was your first?” and I instantly clench my legs. Remembering the ice, the cold, his touch, the fire.
My shoulders beg to buck forward, my eyes closing at the memory and the heat flourishing in my belly.
“Was it?” he teases me, nipping my neck and just that small touch threatens to push me over again.
“I can’t,” I say, and the words leave me in a single breath. A single plea. Instantly a chill creeps up my neck, the open air finding its place there as Jase moves his head to the other pillow.
A shaky breath leaves me as I turn my head to peek at him, craning my neck as my back is still positioned firmly against his chest. “Did we have sex?” I ask him, feeling a weight press down on my chest.
Jase merely gazes back at me. The depths of his dark eyes deepen as I stare into them. Licking my lower lip first, I explain, “I don’t remember everything.”
“We didn’t. No,” he answers
me, and his expression remains guarded. “I told you, you’d have to beg me for it.”
His warmth calms me and slowly I stop trembling as hard. Very slowly, but the tremors are still there.
“For all I know, I did tell you to fuck me,” I tell him.
“You could barely look at me, let alone speak.”
“Holy shit,” I murmur beneath my breath.
“When I fuck you, trust me when I say you’ll remember it.”
His words force a shiver of pleasure through me when I remember I saw … I saw all of him. “Why am I shaking so much?”
“From you getting off so many times. Your body can only handle so much.”
“I can’t believe it can feel like that,” I say, thinking out loud.
“Sometimes the things that cause you pain can bring you so much pleasure.”
“Not everything that brings you pain.” The hollowness in my chest expands at my thought, drifting to darker places.
The shaking and trembling stop altogether, but Jase doesn’t let me go and I’m happy for that. There’s so much comfort in being held right now.
“Tell me something,” I ask Jase, resting my cheek into the pillow, feeling the warmth come back to me and the lull of sleep ready to pull me under once again.
“Tell you something?” He ponders and then readjusts on the bed, making it shake slightly. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything,” I answer as my eyelids fall heavily without second-guessing and my eyes pop open wider, remembering all the bits and pieces he told me about The Red Room. “Maybe about your brothers?”
Once again Jase’s lips find my neck, and this time he leaves an open-mouthed kiss there. I’m starting to love those kinds of kisses. I think they’re my favorite. “I had four brothers, now I have three and I recently learned that my younger brother, the one I was closest with…” He hesitates and again that small space on my neck feels the prickle of the air instead of his warmth. “I found out his death wasn’t an accident; it was murder. And it was supposed to be me, not him.”
“Oh my God,” I whisper, completely shocked. My heart breaks in half for him. I know the pain of losing a sibling, the agony of blaming yourself. But knowing it was supposed to be you instead? “I’m so sorry.” I put every ounce of sincerity into my words and pray it doesn’t come out the way everyone else says, like the people who say it simply because they don’t know what else to say. “I’m really sorry.”
Jase doesn’t say anything at all. Not for a while until he requests the same from me. “Tell me something.”
“I can’t figure you out, Jase,” I answer him almost immediately.
“You already know who I am, cailín tine. Don’t let me fool you.”
I look over my shoulder to ask him, “What’s that mean? Cailín tine?”
He gives me one of those smirks, but it’s almost sad and short lived. “Fiery girl.”
My entire body betrayed me earlier, and so does my heart in this moment, beating just for him with a warmth I’ve never felt before.
As I nuzzle back down into the pillow, I remember Officer Walsh and I spit out the words before I hide them forever. “A cop came asking about you today. He knocked at my door.”
Nerves prick down my neck, but Jase’s touch remains soothing and his voice calm when he asks, “What was his name?”
“Cody Walsh,” I answer and then feel Jase’s nod as his nose runs along my neck.
“He won’t be a problem. He’s just new.”
“Don’t you want to know what I told him?”
“If you want to tell me.”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
His response is to kiss my neck. Then my jaw. He tries to lie back down, leaving my lips wanting but I take them with my own. Reaching up to grip the back of his neck, and pulling myself off the comfort of the bed.
It’s a quick kiss, but it was mine to have. And mine to give.
“What was that for?” he asks me, and I answer him honestly. “I wanted you to have it.”
Turning my back to him, I lie back under the covers. There are no more questions or conversations. With my eyes wide open, I pretend to sleep. After a short while, the bed protests under the weight of him moving, the covers are shrugged off behind me and I listen to him leave. Across the wooden floorboards, down the stairs. I can only faintly hear him in the living room, but I recognize the sound of the front door opening and closing.
All the while, there’s this vise wrapped around my heart. Keeping it still, not allowing it to move the way it used to.
Jase
“What happened to her? To Jennifer Parks?”
Seth hesitates. Seated across from me, he slides forward to readjust before leaning back into an auburn leather armchair. It’s silent in the back of The Red Room. Not a single beat of the music or murmur of the guests makes its way through these doors.
Nothing makes it out of them either.
It’s a decadent but vacant space. A simple, but too-fucking-expensive iron and driftwood desk with no drawers stands in the middle of the room. My chair is at one end, while two matching chairs are on the other side. Not a damn thing else in the room.
The stubble on my jaw is rough; I’m way past due for a shave as I run my hand along my jaw as I wait for Seth’s answer.
“I’m still working on it, but let me tell you what I’ve got so far.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” The rage is inexplicable as I slam the edge of my fist down on the desk. It jolts and I clench my jaw, hating that something like this can get to me.
I focus on calming my shit down, ignoring the irritation and Seth’s questioning gaze.
All day I’ve been on edge. Ever since I left Bethany’s place, the second the sun rose.
“It goes deeper than you think, Boss.” His voice is low, testing my patience and apologetic even.
“Let me have it,” I speak and gesture for him to get going.
“She went missing on December twenty-eighth, but before then she was in and out of her sister’s home and several friends’ places. It was January seventeenth that the burned remains, including several of her teeth, were found in a trunk at the bottom of the Rattle River on the west side of town.”
I remember the flash of an image I found myself, searching through the archives at the downtown station hard drive. It was all the information Kent, one of the detectives we keep on our payroll, had to give.
“Fucking brutal,” I murmur. The remains were charred, but some of the bones were broken before being burned.
“She was tortured, but time of death couldn’t be determined.”
“I already know this. Get to something I don’t know.”
He starts to speak, but before he can even suck in the air needed for the first word, I ask, “Did you find anything on the sister?”
My fingers rap on the desk, one at a time with brief pauses, one after the other. As if it’s only a casual conversation.
“Bethany Fawn?”
At my nod, he begins. “Jennifer was born out of wedlock to a Catherine Parks. Shortly after her birth, her mother and father got hitched, then conceived Bethany. Not long after her birth, the father took off. Leaving their mom with no job, a toddler and an infant.”
“Where did he go?”
“Nebraska, where he died of a heart attack in a casino three years ago.”
“Did they keep in touch?”
“Not a word,” Seth answers professionally, but his eyes are questioning.
“Go on.”
“Bethany Fawn, the younger of the two, did well in school. And it seems like that was all she was interested in. She’s a nurse on the psych ward at Rockford. She’s worked there since she graduated. Apparently her mother had issues in the last years of her life and she chose this path because of it. Her sister--”
“What issues?” Again, I cut him off midbreath.
“Alzheimer’s.”
“How old was she?”
“
Bethany? Twenty. Her mother was fifty-two when she died.”
I watched my mother die slowly, but I was young. Cancer is a bitch. I can only imagine being more aware and having to go through that. Being old enough to understand. Back when I was a kid, I was sure Mom was going to get better. Knowing there is no getting better and having to watch someone you love slowly die? That’s a cruel way to live. A cruel way to die as well. But that’s life, isn’t it?
“One thing you may find interesting is that she was spotted with you recently,” Seth says and sits back further in his seat. It’s the only note on her in the entire department. “A possible associate.”
“And who put that in? Our new friend, Walsh?” I surmise.
“You got it,” he says and snaps his fingers. “And you two aren’t the only ones doing some digging. Miss Fawn’s search history is interesting … limited, but interesting.”
“Is that right?” I ask, bringing my thumb up to run along my chin.
“Little Miss Fawn was looking you up and Officer Walsh after he paid her a visit.”
I shrug impatiently, and Seth continues.
“She didn’t find much, obviously, since there’s nothing on the internet to find… although it seems she’s interested in Angie. She’s searching for pictures of her, doesn’t look like she knows her name. Jase Cross with brunette. Jase Cross lover. Jase Cross date. Things like that.”
“Angie?” The only piece of information that surprises me so far is this. “Why?”
“I guess she saw her with you in pictures online. But she doesn’t have her name, or any information on her.”
Who do I remind you of? I remember her question last night. That’s why.
“Shit.” I breathe out the word. “Anything else?” I ask him, ignoring the dread, the regret, the deep-seated hate for myself because of everything that happened four years ago. All of those ghosts belong in the past. They can stay there too.
Seth passes me a folder; opening it up reveals six profiles. All are of women in their late twenties, and two I recognize from the club. Jennifer is the first. The second is Miranda. She’s gotten thrown out a handful of times. Too high to know she was messing with the wrong guys. Causing problems that aren’t easy to fix.
