Like a Venus flytrap on a butterfly, he grabs my wrist and pins me down. Then I’m trapped.
‘This is the fucked up thing I want,’ he says and returns to it heatedly.
I try to pull away, to use the leverage of my legs against him, but only open myself more. After that, I lie still, trying to find emptiness, to be empty, but I can’t.
All I want is to be fucked.
Forget.
Feel like I don’t exist.
‘It's okay, Amy. You don't have to look at me. I know you're paying attention to this,’ he says.
After that, the worst part is that it feels like something I’m doing to myself. Hurt he can inflict, but the pleasure is my fault. My failure to control that little bit of flesh he traps under his tongue, stroking it until I want to scream. He fucks me with his tongue, and it feels like a spring in me being tightened. My eyes fill with tears, excitement and shame.
I twist against him restlessly, still trying to stop that moment. When it comes, when everything in me clenches and shudders, when the spring unwinds with a snap and sends hot sparks of pleasure through me, I deny him anything. I clamp down on my lip to stay quiet and press my hips hard against the bed to keep from pushing against his tongue. Still, I feel how wet it is, how my body is completely willing to give him that satisfaction.
The blurring between torture and pleasure is almost unbearable, how he can do something horrible and something so good at the same time.
‘You kept quiet,’ he growls and bites the inside of my thigh.
‘I told you I didn’t want it,’ I mutter and groan at the same time, still trembling from the aftershocks.
‘You said I could do whatever I want. And I’m not done yet.’ He makes his voice dark, but he’s smirking and that is more frightening.
I know he’s cruel enough to go on doing it until I give up fighting. He wants to break me. And when he drags me there the second time, I feel like a cesspool of disgust and anger. I strain against him at the last moment, still trying to fight, and gasp, ‘Fuck you, Law.’
It's too late to take it back. The word slips out like falling on black ice. The fall is hard, and it hurts after.
He crawls up the length of me, looking ready to devour me. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Then licks at my tears as if each droplet is the drink of the gods.
‘That is pretty goddamned sly, Amy. Gave me the chills. You haven’t called me Law in a long time. Not by your own volition.’
The tremors of my orgasm still shatter through my body, and it feels so wrong to feel so much . . . happiness.
I know that’s what he wanted.
To make me need him. To occupy me completely. To blot out the horizon.
There’s no one else I’ve ever wanted — ever needed. No one else who has made my wreck of a life worth living. No one I’ve ever wanted to return to despite how many times I try to walk away or hide. No one else whose single touch is another nail in the coffin. No one has made my heart die a thousand times, like this.
In the morning, I wake up in Shepherd’s bed. Alone. I get dressed and when I go into his living room I find another note.
Amy—
Left you something in the fridge. Top shelf, blue carrier bag. Keep eating, Amy. You don’t eat enough. Still fucking beautiful.
— Shepherd
More soup. Two portions, frozen.
I run down the stairs and go into my room. I stand for a moment on the other side of the door. The bag in my hand is heavy.
I check the room, but my heart isn’t in it. Screwed as I am, I can’t ever get away from the fact I love Shepherd. Deny it plenty of times to myself. Never admit out loud to Shepherd. Not even in those moments when we’re inseparable, and it’s like a drug to be touched by calloused fingers. And it’s the only time I feel anything real and that means nothing in the screwed up history that is my life.
And I hate Shepherd from the deepest part of my soul for making me love him — or whatever he’s done — and I hate myself for falling in love with a man that things can never be simple with.
He sees me. Someone who spends so much time fiddling with the front door that I forget to eat. Someone who panics over the harmless of all noises. He sees the cracks in my perfect reflection.
He sees the cracks, and I know through them, he will eventually break me for a second time.
31
ME
INSIDE SWAN LAKE, Fab5 strips off his coat, then his jumper. The heating is high in Crow Ward. I’ve opened up this side of the clinic to take in new older patients. This place is losing me money.
It’s all for her.
Without undoing the buttons, he tugs his shirt over his head, inside out. Now his head and hands are bagged in red plaid flannel. He fights the shirt off his head. Over his jeans and belt, you can see the elastic waistband of his Angry Birds underpants.
‘Dude,’ Fab5 says. He’s still struggling inside his shirt. ‘Too many bloody clothes. Why’s it got to be so hot in here?’
‘What’d you expect? An ice bath?’
The young bottle-blonde receptionist I got hired sits behind her desk. She stares with her face tight around her nose.
I try and tug Fab5’s T-shirt down. His head is trapped
