19. Abel

I’m panting,face buried in a fluffy pillow as reality oozes back in, muddled with the hazy fog of inebriation. I breathe into the cotton, drawing my focus to the scent of lavender over the lingering tendrils of dope burning the hairs in my nose.

The dreams don’t come around often anymore, but when they do, they’re memories of what I went through for Mo. The one person I would have—and did—do anything for. Ones that leave me aching and panting and disoriented when I wake with a hard dick, gagging with revulsion when I realize that every man still had power over me, even when I made it a choice.

To protect. To love.

Only to never see her again.

My Adam’s apple glugs as I swallow the protruding lump in my throat. It sticks at the apex before it slowly crawls down my esophagus to accompany my thrashing heart. Tingling fingers twitch against my abdomen, readily avoiding my arousal as I focus on the murky beat of my heart against my sternum. Feel as the pace slows with each controlled breath, gaze locked on the moonlight shining through the drawn curtains. Overwhelming proof I’m not trapped in a dark room with nothing but damp, mildewy walls at my back and rough, plywood floors beneath my feet.

But here—in a clean bed meant for me.

I wonder if Mo ever made it out… If she’s somewhere safe and happy.

A breath escapes between my pinched lips as I blink into the luminescent, white light of the moon. It comes back into clarity, big and round and nearly full. She is—she has to be. There’s no other reality I’ll accept.

A hoarse cry ripples through the darkness, and I shove myself up, swaying as the blood rushes to my head, a heavy thwomp in my eardrums. The comforter pools around my hips, exposing my sweaty torso to the fan’s cool air. Gooseflesh prickles, making me shiver as the noise sounds again, louder and more pained than before. A cry I recognize.

As I walk to my door with trepidation trickling down my spine and limbs that feel too heavy, I realize I’m still way too stoned. I watch my fingers curl around the doorknob, my grasp weak and leaden as they finally find purchase against the shockingly cold metal.

My shoulders roll with a shiver down my spine as it creaks open, and the warm air from the vent a foot away breezes over my face. Peris’s voice screaming for me to get out echoes in my mind as I push his door open and step inside.

My skin crawls as inky, black darkness swallows me—skin I nearly jump right out of when an ear-piercing shout breaks the sound barrier. Heart hammering, I shuffle closer, ignoring the pins and needles in my brain. Fight or flight, I think it’s called, but I’ve never listened to it before, so I’m not gonna start now.

I haven’t died yet, so I must be doing something right.

Peris rolls, and the shift of his arm reveals the red luminance of a clock at his bedside. The haunting glow gives me a dim path to his bed, which I crawl into with trembling arms. Peris is on the opposite side, lying on his back with his head turned away from me. The blanket has been kicked low, wrapped around his calves in his struggle against his dreams, exposing most of his bare body, which is clad in only a pair of dark briefs.

My head rolls onto my shoulder, too heavy to keep upright as I press a palm to his skin, finding it slick with perspiration—much like my own—and hot to the touch. I smear his sweat around, listening to his cries and jumbled words with sympathy, my own tumultuous evocations still frothing.

No, stop, it hurts. Stopstopstop.

Please.

It’s that word that sinks like a barb.

I never, not once, said it aloud to them. I knew it would only make things worse, get someone hurt. And as much as I’ve fantasized about dying—how much easier it would be to just let go—I have dreamed of the day I’m finally free more.

To have the satisfaction of proving them all wrong. And I’m nothing if not stubborn.

Feeling more grounded in my new reality, I scoot closer to trail my fingers—to drag my hands—over Peris’s body, digging deep into his muscles in hopes of easing some of the ache after he wakes.

We can be whatever we are another time. Right now, it’s just this. Verities spilt, sweeping us into a vortex we can’t escape. Opaque smoke, smelling of ozone and salt. Atrophied muscles and paralyzed vocal cords tangled in a screaming silence.

I feel his agony because it’s my own. Intricate and erratic and disconcerting, tunneled into sweat and screams and a rock-hard cock.

Too real. Too honest.

Who we are.

I’m cumbersome but somehow manage the maneuver of each limb until I’m on my knees against the slight curve of his waist. The tips of my fingers now skim lightly over his bare, sculpted stomach. The muscles contract, and my touch ripples like a surfboard over a wave.

I take in his face, contorted in his restless sleep, deep creases lining his forehead, beads of sweat reflected in the red glow—barely visible yet somehow luminous. He’s truly a paradox. And the game we’ve been playing for months has been the best time of my life. The push, the pull. Pain and resistance. Regret and gravitation.

With a sigh, I dip the pad of my finger into the well of his belly button, and with my other hand, press against the line of scabs exposed beneath my ridden boxers.

I wish I knew what was wrong with me.Why I feel the compulsion to rip people apart just to watch them shatter when they hit the ground. Why, when I finally see what’s laid bare, I lose all interest and turn my back, leaving them as alone as I have always been.

I’m all too aware of it. I like it, even. The fun and games, exposure of lies. Fucking people who deserve to be fucked.

But this… with Peris.

This is dangerous.

But unfortunately, Peris’s apparent instability is just the type of danger I crave. Poking and prodding at all his splintered pieces. He thinks it’s because he watched me—and it’s true, in a way. But he doesn’t know what I saw that night. What the flash of his eyes revealed.

A bone-deep, irresistible terror.

And now… it’s right in front of me. The glimpse into what’s at his core. A truly raw part of him—this nightmare. The sweat coupled with his trembling, rigid body. The whimpered pleas falling from his lips. His hard dick straining against the fabric of his briefs.

This is who he is. Someone as ugly as me. Just as rotten and ruined.

But there is one very sharppolarity.

I’m a slut. And I fucking love it.

The power, the control… It’s heady. And addictive. There wasn’t ever a point in questioning my… overactive proclivities. I want, so I take—because this is the one thing I can.

And I’m not ignorant to the fact that what I’ve been through has shaped who I am and what I like. How I take it. I could’ve been born this way. Maybe I was, but I was too young to figure that out for myself before it all started. So, the truth of it all is lost somewhere in the abyss of the past. My verity has been set in stone since the moment my mother decided drugs were better than keeping me, than loving me.

A sharp gasp pulls me from my musings, and I blink with a tender heaviness in my eyelids, skin flushed and fiery. The red glow of the clock bleeds over Peris’s skin, pink as it refracts off beads of perspiration. I’m drawn to it as I swing a leg over his waist, settling down on top of his groin. He shifts feverishly, features twisted into a grimace as his hard dick rubs against my ass cheek through the thin fabric of our damp underwear.

Gaze locked on his furrowed brows and pinched lips, I lean down on top of him. Placing my chin to his chest, crooked nose skimming his chin, I inhale every breath he exhales. Feel every rise and fall of his chest, the contraction of his abdominal wall against my thighs.

I wriggle a little, fascinated with his heavy sleeping. I would’ve woken up the second I heard the creak of the door. Maybe it’s my environment that has influenced that part of me, but I truly do not understand the depth in which people fall when they are unconscious.

“I know whatever you’re dreaming about hurts,” I whisper, pressing a fingertip against his throat to his pulse. “But it doesn’t have to. You can just be who you are. It’s all I’ve ever wanted from you.”

I’ve gone about it the worst possible way—because it’s more fun—but the objective has always been for him to crack wide open. To shatter the “good guy” guise for the farce it is.

I never planned to go down with him, but right now, feeling the rush of wind against my face as we plummet into the depths of a hell we’ve always known… Well, I’m just glad I didn’t end up here alone.

“I can make the hurt feel better.” A truth I etch into his skin as my mouth finds his pec, tongue darting out to skim over his damp flesh. Salt and musk explode on my taste buds, and saliva floods my mouth. Dizzy, I make my way down his body, my tongue a wet drag. Catching the edge of his waistband, I lick the fabric—cotton and sweat and chemicals. I pull his briefs to his knees, stopping when they catch on the blanket entwined around his ankles, leaving his legs trapped furthermore.

The shadowed outline of his cock sits against his stomach, just as thick and perfect as I remember it. The taste of his cum stuck in the back of my throat. How pretty it looked, how right it felt, smeared across my skin.

With a trembling hand, I bring my fingers to my mouth and lave them in spit. It slips down each digit, between them, and down my palm. Sticky, I reach behind me to slide them down my crack, breath hitching when I graze the pucker of my hole.

The breach is tight, the sting powerful enough to steal my breath for a moment as I push through it. It hasn’t been too long since I was last stuffed, but that was with Peris’s body wash in the shower. Sanitary or relatively safe… not even close. But there was a perverted pleasure in knowing his scent was inside me.

And now, it’s gonna be his cum.

The stretch of my index finger loses its sting, so I pull out, spit some more, and add another. My head rolls onto my shoulder, each breath punctuated as I draw comfort from the heat of Peris’s body against mine.

My high melds into a warm, tingly buzz, drawing a smile. The third finger has my eyes rolling back and a low hum rumbling at the base of my throat. My larynx vibrates, sending gooseflesh rolling down my spine and outward along my arms.

Peris’s torso twists, legs curling up as he grunts. The crease between his brows deepens into a crater, his restlessness morphing into the first wakings of consciousness.

My teeth sink into my bottom lip as I pull my fingers from my body, biting back a whimper. Shaping my lips into an “O”, I hang my head and watch a thick line of spit drip right onto Peris’s dick. With a tentative hand, I loosely wrap my fingers around him to smear it around, repeating the process again and again until he’s soaked and it’s smeared across his groin, dripping down his balls and onto the sheets below.

The noises filling the room are obscene—each shlick of flesh meeting flesh—but it’s the sounds coming from his throat that set my veins on fire. They’re tortured and needy. Broken. And I feel them because they’re mine, too.

I just hope he doesn’t actually kill me when he wakes up.

Keeping my left knee planted on the bed, I shift my right, digging my toes into the mattress to hover over Peris’s length. I pull my boxers to the side, bunching the flowy fabric into the crease of my smarting thigh and drop down, rolling my hips a little to get his slick cock to slide through my cleft.

My eyes roll back with a breathless groan. It’s been a while since I’ve been properly fucked—since Jason, really—and something tells me Peris is more than up for the task.

Tears flood my eyes at the sharp, prickling burn as the culmination sinks in. Fuck, I finally get to have it. Have him.

My mind is warring against the two imaginary beings on either shoulder as my dirty fingers delve into my mouth, and I lather them in spit. I swipe them over my hole, smearing as much excess as I can before wrapping my fingers around Peris’s girth. My thighs tremble as I line him up to my hole, breath hitching when his bulbous head slides against me, feeling so much bigger than it looks.

Peris moans painfully, and his thighs bunch beneath me. I still, chest heaving as I wait for him to settle. How fucked up this really is should affect me in some way. His inability to consent. What I’m taking. But I know this is what Peris needs. Despite all my games and half-truths, he needs to not feel disgusted with himself for wanting what he wants. No guilt, no trepidation. No lies. No matter what, or who,it is—without shame. Because even with the trauma we’ve suffered, we’re fucking allowed to take what we need. Be who we need.

And I wanna give him this amidst his nightmare, shift the pain into something better. Something he can control. Because having it means everything.

Fire licks around my ring as I press down and Peris’s cockhead breaches me, but the stretch is infinitesimal in comparison to the unwavering elation. “Fuck,” I groan, legs shaking and stomach tensing as I keep myself perched so I don’t rip open completely.

I want the pain of this. I want it to hurt, but I also don’t want to bleed. It’d ruin the mood, just a bit.

Peris’s head rolls back and forth, hands flexing, fingers clawing into the sheets. Shadowy veins bulge and dance. The scratching is loud in succession with my panting as I press back, but his hips buck up, forcing more inside me much too soon. I cry out, body instinctively clenching around him, turning the fire to molten lava.

His hands find my hips, just above the waistband of my underwear, and I whimper as he digs in deep enough to bruise. I use his touch as an anchor, hardened steel against pliable flesh, to force my muscles to relax.

With a deep inhale, I rock my hips. A short, gentle up and down movement that puts a little more of his cock in me with each fall. When the burn in my lungs grows unbearable, I drop the rest of the way down. When my ass smacks against his upper thighs, my head falls back between my shoulders, and my eyes roll closed.

Ardent flames lick along my intestines, contrasting with the heavy drag of water against my face until they become one with a rapturous collision.

“Peris.”

A gasp.

His eyes fly open, the whites all I can see as they pin straight to me. I fall motionless, allowing him to take me in. Where I am and what I’m doing.

I know it’s overwhelming. For a nightmare to bleed into something so impossibly good. So unreal.

“A-Abel?” he croaks, sounding disoriented and… scared.

I nod, but I don’t know if he can see me, so I whisper, “Yes. It’s just me.”

“What—” I roll my hips, groaning as his dick shifts inside me. His cockhead bumps my prostate, and I grit my teeth at the sharp tug in my groin.

Peris’s hips buck, sending me tumbling. I grasp for purchase, nails scoring over his chest as I fall face-first into it. His hands move from my hips to my face, fingers digging into my cheeks as he rips my face away from him like he can’t stand the touch.

The arch of his thumb and index finger touch through the flesh of my cheeks, my lips parted in the shape of a figure eight. His eyes dart back and forth between mine, a flash of white as he searches for something.

The pulsing throb of his touch radiates down my jaw, shooting straight to my dick. I whimper as it flexes against Peris’s stomach. The drag of hard flesh makes him jolt out of his skin, arm ripped from my face as he rears back.

My jaw cracks with newfound freedom as I roll my hips again slowly, mind hazy and churning.

His chest is heaving, breath loud and balmy as it fans over my torso. His grimace is so sharp and hauntingly raw as he stares down between my legs with wide, fear-filled eyes. I don’t know how much he can see in the blurry, pink glow, but I hope it’s enough.

Peris scrunches his eyes shut as he turns his head to bury his nose in the pillow. With an inhale, his stomach dips, causing his ribs to jut out as he holds it in, choking out a breathless, “I-I can’t. I’m gonna be sick.” He convulses on a retch, and the bowing of his body sends him deeper inside of me, making the both of us groan in unison at the newfound drag of friction.

I wrap my fingers around Peris’s biceps and dig my nails in until they’re buried in flesh. “Look at me.” He swallows and shakes his head, tendons bulging as he turns further away, as if he could ever find solace in the cotton of his pillow.

My chest aches for him.

Keeping myself still when I can feel the twitching of his dick inside me brings on a whole new level of self-control I didn’t know I possessed. But I manage through gritted teeth and the feel of his body, so tragically vulnerable, beneath me.

“Peris.”

He gags, catching it on a gasp. “Abel,” his voice wavers, “you have to—this is too much. I can’t. N-not after that—” His legs are spasming, hips gyrating of what seems to be their own accord. It sends warmth coursing through me, and I want nothing more than to drop my head back and just feel,but I have to get Peris there, too.

He can’t hate this. I won’t let him.

I reach down and place my fingers at the base of his throat. Feel the roll of cartilage as he swallows. “The nightmares, I know.” My words are cinched tight, barely able to escape my throat. I don’t realize my own tears are streaming until a drop slips from my upper lip to splash on Peris’s chest. I stare at it for a moment, hating the heat of embarrassment. Of shame.

Of what’s real.

“But you can, baby. Just look at me.”

Seconds pass in several lifetimes. The air charged but so still, like the simple spark of static will engulf us in hellfire.

I watch through bleary eyes as his face bleeds through his emotions, all displayed so vividly. Horror, confusion, revulsion—there’s a lot of that. Pain and affliction.

Undiluted fearfearfear.

And then… his lip curls in disdain as he wrenches his eyes open, pinned and glaring at me with malicious intent.

I smile.

There’s my Peri boy.

“Yeah, that’s good, baby. You can be angry. It helps. Something familiar that’s easier to control.” I purse my lips and press them to his bare skin. He hisses and snarls, snapping his jaws like a feral dog.

I’m elated.

“I fucking hate you.” The venomous words echo as he croaks them out. “You think this is okay?” He snaps his hips up. My eyes roll back as the air is punched from my lungs, the skin on my ass smarting from the slap.

“No.” I really don’t—I just don’t care.

“Because it’s fucking not. This—” Peris growls. Holding my hips, he pins me to his chest as fingertips slide beneath my waistband, tugging my boxers against my newest burns. “This is rape too, runt.” The sharp, wavering bite of truth wraps like a vice around my hammering heart, spoken through each thrust.

I grunt with every slap, face sliding over his slick chest. Sweat burns in my eyes. “S’not,” I croak through his abuse. His intense hammering slows fractionally, allowing me to suck in a breath.

Fuck, there was a purpose to this, but the fog in my mind is making it hard to think. Endorphins rush through my bloodstream, sending me higher and higher. The tight, too-dry pressure. The push and pull.

Hate and desire.

Fear and abhorrent acceptance.

I flick my tongue out again, needing to taste him. Peris grips my hair and yanks my head back. His eyes are half-lidded, his guise shattered in a mixture of horny hatred. It’s a good look on him—and he looks good in me.

His tongue darts out, running over his pouty lips, and my brain misfires. I’m slack-jawed and stupefied, and I clench around his cock because I can’t not. Even in the gloomy darkness, the glaze of his eyes is lucent.

He wants to hate this so bad.

“S’okay to fuck me. To want to.” My leaden tongue finally forms the words, even slurred. I clench around him.

Peris’s eyes pinch like he doesn’t understand. “It’s not… that simple,” he grates, fingers flexing in my skin.

“It feels good, yeah?” I ask, already knowing it does. He can hate this as much as he wants, but now that I’ve taken the single choice from him, it’s as easy as breathing.

All he has to do is take a breath.

I plant my hands on his chest to push myself up, huffing as his length shifts inside me, settling deeper. Peris’s head rolls back on his pillow, sweaty hair mussed and clinging to his forehead. Every muscle spasms as we leech into each other. Hate for hate. Ugliness bared.

Through bleeding tears, I utter the words I’ve always wanted someone to say to me—even if I didn’t need them to figure myself out. To be happy with who I am.

“Even if it’s with a man, with me, it doesn’t change who you are. Because you’ve always been this.” I grab his hand to drag my mouth over his knuckles. “You just didn’t think you could.” And then, I place his palm against my covered dick with a small smile. His fingers flex, curl. I swallow.

“Whoever they are… they don’t control you, Peris. You hold all the power now. Take it back with me. Take it out on me.” I rock back slowly, back arching at the stretch against my rim. Panting, I grab his hand on me and make him jerk my dick once, root to tip through stretched cotton. A kiss in the air. “‘Cause I know your pain—it’s the same as mine. And you need to know that even with your dick in my ass, you’re still worthy of the love you don’t think you deserve.”

The twitch in his jaw, in his eye, the tremble radiating from his hand into my dick, makes me think I said too much. Too soon. Wrong time, wrong place to get so deep when really, it was never supposed to be so much. So real and raw. For the both of us. My eyes sting anew with more tears, lacking the selfish intent to manipulate. Only my own fear and indignity—and his—are the same.

Peris’s mouth curves up sharply, vastly sinister in the reddish-pink glare to his left, teeth shining as he swipes his tongue across the fronts. His hold on me constricts as he jerks up, pinning our torsos flush, slick with sweat.

Teeth to my lips, he rasps, “Who’s scared now?” My unsteady heart beats in a cacophony as I open my mouth to taste his breath. I want to wear his bruises again, the evidence of his hatred.

He makes me pretty, mutating all of my wretched ugly into something someone could maybe want.

He pins me with one arm wrapped around my back, the other still on my dick. His canines scrape over my lips for one unsteady beat before he descends, tongue thrusting in, down my throat, taking whatever he wants.

I fall against him, losing strength as his builds into a crescendo, a dark swarm engulfing us as our demons dance, impossibly entwined. Tongues slip together, forever a clash of teeth. Jarring and bloody and perfect as we devour each other’s worst fears.

I swallow copper as he rips his mouth away on a growl, a low and dangerous vibration in the marrow of my bones. The acceptance of his truth.

“Peris, please.” A first for us both. “Plea—” Hand to my throat, he falls back against his pillow. Fingers splay across my waist, only holding—not bruising.

“Shut your mouth and fuck me pretty, runt.”