Chapter 9

Chapter

Nine

WHITE WALLS

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

Edgar Allan Poe

White walls

Unanswered calls

Army crawls

Pirate brawls

Midnight kiss

Slow to miss

In dreams we see

What's meant to be

Ghost face knife

A second life

In my closet

Under my bed

Voices, moths

In my head

Please don't leave.

Oh, Lilac

Mare

Don't.

F all asleep and wait for me. Fall asleep and wait for me. Fall asleep and wait for me. I don't think what I'd been doing could be considered sleep. Monitors beeped, nurses filtered in and out, so many white coats and big words.

The smell of bleach.

The color beige.

The one-size-fits-all grippy socks.

Hospitals were a drag, but the drugs were nice, I guessed. I felt gloriously empty, hydrated, and medicated by an IV drip, drip, dripping. Beep, beep, beeping.

Sam curled up in a squeaky recliner next to me. I never felt like speaking, watching TV, or eating the wobbly green jello. I wasn't even sure why I was there. Had Brandon really drugged me that badly?

The nurse forgot to close my sterile, striped curtains, letting the full moonlight flood over the pale tile beneath me and the stiff waffled blanket draped over my legs. Nurses ruffled chip bags and laughed somewhere outside my room. My heavy door began to ease shut, which I attributed to the heat vent clicking on, but then as it clicked closed, I noticed a dark, looming figure in the corner of the room.

He held something long and hooked.

A scythe.

The hooded grim reaper stood in the corner of my hospital room, and I was stunned in fear. I tried to move my arms, but couldn't. Tried to scream, but it scratched like a small whimper through my throat. My feet wouldn't budge. I was trapped in the cage of my hospital bed as death floated closer. He loomed next to my monitors and lowered his scythe in a gentle, cold caress over my cheek.

"Suppose we'll try something new, Lilac. What a state you're in, just look at you," Mare murmured darkly beneath his hood.

I wanted to speak, tried to speak, but the words wouldn't form. He was scary and menacing. Anyone's worst fear personified. Death, the grim reaper, visiting me in a frigid hospital room. I learned in that moment that when you didn't speak to the Grim Reaper, he filled the silence.

"I'm getting stronger, you know. That's good, excellent, in fact. But you…" He lowered the hooked object over my chin, down my neck, and between my breasts. "You've been bad, naughty, even."

My limbs were like lead, and I was rendered immobile. In dreams I could move, I could speak, but this was like a nightmare while awake and helpless. Horror settled into my blood as I looked into the eyes of death, of Mare, of the grim reaper.

"Don't try to speak, you can't. It's for the best. I think it's time you listen." His rough voice purred next to my ear, the warmth of it sending tingles down my spine. The tip of the scythe pricked at my hard nipple through my thin hospital gown, and I let out a huff of fear and need. The sharp edge scraped round and round my breast, enough to tingle, enough to make me afraid and wet with want all at the same time.

"You have the answers, Lilac. We can't keep playing this same game… though being your sleep paralysis demon, being your death omen, I must say these are quite fun roles to play."

Roles to play? He made these nightmares sound like some grand theater performance.

The scythe eased down my ribs, hooking over the blanket and pulling it down on its descent. My lips parted in a gasp as the large curve of the blade pushed under my hospital gown. With a twist of the reapers wrist, he parted my bare knees and came to a stand between them. "Look at these useful things," he mused, placing my heels in the stirrups on either side of the hospital bed. "These should be attached to every bed, I think."

His form of speech was changing. Loosening from his current casting of the dark and grim death and into something different. Something familiar, something I felt I knew…

Mare's voice sounded like home, no matter what costume he wore, no matter the part he played. Why was that realization more frightening than death standing over me with a scythe in a hospital room?

He tilted his head and pulled up his dark garbs, palming himself between my thighs. How I wished for mobility again so I could reach down and feel him. All I wanted to do was guide him inside me and let him fill me up. But I couldn't move. I was asleep, but I was awake, it was a horrible sensation and one I was trapped in. My body useless, floppy, and completely at his mercy.

"Oh, you want me like this, don't you, Lilac?" He stepped forward, balancing the rod of the scythe on my hip bone while teasing the tip of his cock at my entrance. I fought to buck forward, to greedily take him, but I still couldn't move. Under the shadow of his hood, I caught a small glimpse of his wicked smile. "I'll give it to you, even though you aren't asking nicely. But you'll have to do something for me afterward. Deal?"

Words tried to spring from my throat but stalled. I couldn't even summon a nod.

He chuckled darkly. "I'm going to take that as a yes because you don't really have a choice either way."

Pushing forward, I took him in halfway and let out a strangled breath. The stirrups held my legs apart, biting into my heels as the heart monitor beeping sped up. Any moment a nurse would come in to check on me. What would happen then? Would Mare disappear? Or would the nurse see me getting sleep-fucked by the Grim Reaper?

The scythe met my lower lip as Mare slid inside me all the way, stretching me to the max, and making me wish I could scream. Instead, all that energy had nowhere to go but to build between my legs. With every thrust of death, I felt as if I could truly die from pain and bliss.

He hooked the tip of the blade into my mouth. "Suck on it," he demanded. "Come on, Lilac. You said you wanted death, right? Here it is. Fuck death, be fucked by nothingness, come on the grim reaper's cock. Just like that, baby."

Filthy words mixed with rough and incoherent sex with a phantom man should not have made me feel alive. But it did. Lying in a hospital bed, likely drugged out of my mind, sucking on the grim reaper's scythe while he fucked me in stirrups, shouldn't have made me emotional in a way that nothing had in a long time.

I wanted my headphones.

I wanted to go to sleep.

No, wait. I was asleep, right?

When I couldn't hold myself together any longer, I looked up to see the reaper pull off his hood. Mare's hair was dark and tousled, his cheeks red from exertion. Those pouty, full lips parted as his violet eyes looked over me, so full of emotion. I wanted to feel his sandpaper jaw in my palms. Wanted to pull him close and never let him go. I didn't care if a doctor stumbled in and saw us— I wanted him to take me with him wherever he went when I woke up.

He shook his head, still thrusting hard and long. "No, not that. You know, don't you? You know where you have to go. You know what you have to do."

Control came back just enough that I barely shook my head, feeling tears streak into my ears as I continued to suck the tangy metal of death's legendary instrument.

I didn't know.

I didn't want to know.

I didn't want to go there.

Don't make me go there.

"You can and you will," he answered my unspoken thoughts. "It's time… you're doing so good, Lucy. You've been working through this all with me this whole time. All on your own. We've done it, baby."

In tears of sorrow and of ecstasy, I broke apart. Sobbing into an orgasm as he buried himself deep within me. The scythe scraping against the back of my teeth, the walls of me clenching and fluttering around his girth, I came again and again until I was spent.

Limp once more, but not tense, my heart monitor flashed red.

He carefully removed the blade from my mouth and gently placed my feet back on the bed, covering me with the blanket. Mare's lips tenderly kissed my temple that was wet from sweat and tears, before cloaking himself with his hood once more. "See you soon," he whispered, just moments before the heavy hospital door burst open. Half a dozen doctors and nurses flooded in, crowding around me, and death dissipated as they tinkered with the machines and needled something into my IV bag.

He was gone.

I was gone.

I knew what I had to do.

Who I had to see.

But nothing in me wanted to do it.