Vin gives me plenty of time to protest, to react at all.
Like always, I don’t say a word.
His hand comes back to my thigh to adjust the angle of my hips, and then the hard length of him pushes inside of me. He takes it slow, always does at first, with unhurried strokes. Pressure builds deep inside my belly as the pleasure overwhelms my ability to resist. When my nails dig into the heavy arm he has wrapped around my waist, it’s a signal for him.
He thrusts inside me with the all the force of his strong hips, bottoming out until he fills me completely. I let out another gasp as my hands tighten on the only anchor I have as he pounds into me like he wants to drive both our bodies into the springs of my thin mattress. His name dances on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it down until it feels like I might choke on it.
I won’t give him the satisfaction.
Sex doesn’t have to mean anything if you don’t want it to, except part of me wishes it did. Even with all the negative emotions swirling between us, this becomes something greater. We’re more than just two bodies illuminated by a streak of light from the low-hanging moon outside my window.
Anger. Hatred. The sins of the past. Things that connect us in a way that transcends anything physical. Sex is an afterthought to what lies between us.
It’s at moments like this, in the darkness when the whole world has gone quiet, that I can almost convince myself we’ve gone back to a time before. Before we lost faith in each other. Before the world conspired to destroy whatever precious thing once existed between us.
Before it all went wrong.
My beat-up copy of Antigone is on the nightstand, and I focus my gaze on it, willing myself to go somewhere else mentally. I try to remember the first line of the play as my mind descends into fog.
My mouth moves, even though no sound comes out. “You would think that we had already suffered enough.”
The arm around me shifts so his hand can worm its way between the thighs I try to keep clamped shut. His thumb flicks against my clit like he’s thrumming a guitar, and then he presses down ever so slightly with the sharp edge of his nail.
I try to hide my reaction, but he pays too close attention. Orgasm hits me hard enough that my spine bows back against him as my mouth opens in a silent scream. Despite my attempts to keep still, my body turns boneless and loose as I collapse back against him.
Vin lets out a satisfied groan as he comes, gripping my hip hard enough that it will leave a bruised imprint of his fingers later. He chuckles darkly to himself as he rolls away, and I don’t bother to ask him what he’s laughing at.
I am always the butt of the joke.
He rises off the bed and flicks the blanket over me, knowing I won’t move as long as he’s here. The condom is tossed in the wastebasket, and I have to remind myself to take out the trash before Zion gets home, in case he comes in here looking for something. Only as Vin does up his pants do I realize he never took them off, screwing me with just his fly down and the waist of his pants around his hips. Somehow, that little detail makes me feel even worse than I already do.
He leaves a stack of crumpled bills on the table, and I know it will amount to exactly $125 without needing to get up and count it. That is the same amount of money my mother earned each day she worked for his family. In the past, I’ve thrown the money back in his face or tried to burn it with one of the lighters that is always lying around. But it’s usually easier not to fight him, weak protests won’t make him think any better of me.
My voice is hoarse with disuse when I finally recover enough breath to speak. I say the only thing guaranteed to get under his skin, the only thing that will hurt him in even a fraction of the way he hurts me.
“I forgive you.”
His shoulders tense, so I know he heard me, but he doesn’t turn back.
“I don’t want your forgiveness,” he says, voice a raspy whisper in the darkness. “Just your silence.”
The door slams shut behind him with enough force to shake the walls, and a dusting of plaster falls from the ceiling to coat my bedspread.
Two meteors accelerating in the darkness of space.
It is only a matter of time before we crash and burst into a million tiny pieces.
Six
I don’t want your forgiveness, just your silence.
That’s a lie, of course. Maybe not the first part. I have no doubts that the last thing on Vin’s mind is reconciling even the smallest piece of our past. But he doesn’t really want my silence. There is something very specific that he wants to spill from my lips, and I have spent the last ten years refusing to give it to him.
Which is why he decided I don’t get to speak at all.
But secrets are like a cancer, eating away at you. In more fanciful moments, I tell myself that all the things I refuse to say have settled like acid on my vocal cords, burning them into dust.
At this point, I don’t know what I would say if given the chance to speak freely.
It’s easy to slip into melancholy, spend way too much time thinking about how things might have been. Who would I be if I’d been given the chance to grow up in the before, instead of the after. My family would still be poor, and I’d still live in the Gulch, but maybe I wouldn’t exist in perpetual isolation. Maybe I’d go out
