Chapter Two: A Poor Liar
"In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost."
-Dante Alighieri, "Inferno"
March 13, 2009
His hands felt clammy on her skin.
It was hard to focus. Her bedframe squeaked, and her back ached, and rain pounded against the apartment windows. Distant lightning split the black sky.
Neil hadn't shaved. It had been two days, maybe three. His stubble scraped against her cheek, against her neck, as his lips carved a desperate trail down her skin.
It grated at her.
She curled her hands to fists in the sheets, turning her face towards the wall.
"Fuck," he breathed, and his breath was hot in her ear. Hot and damp. The fingers of his left hand dug into the skin of her hip. He rose, tilting his pelvis, drawing her closer as he thrust deeper between her legs.
Fuck was all he said.
Fuck with cheap tequila on his tongue, sharp and sickening. She could taste it when he kissed her. It tasted like college. Tasted like rough, early mornings. Tasted like mistakes. Desperation.
Running.
Stumbling.
He arched his back, and he pumped into her, and her eyes traced a scratch on the wall. Old, yellowed wood peeked out beneath the powdery grey paint.
They'd fucked here a dozen times. Two dozen. She'd pulled him down to the bed by the collar of his shirt. He'd carried her in when she was drunk and stumbling. They'd rolled towards each other in the soft blue-black hours of early morning and done something that didn't feel like fucking at all.
But this was different.
This was empty. This was red-rimmed eyes, and scratchy throats, and sweaty palms. Dark, humid room. Hurried footsteps upstairs, and furniture dragging across the floor. A dog barking threateningly down the street.
The television on in the living room, casting a glow down the hallway.
She strained to hear the muffled voice of the CNN reporter. The words were lost as Neil's skin slapped against her own. A wet, ripe sound. It made her sick.
She craned her neck further, twisting beneath him. He groaned. She ground her teeth.
It had been two weeks since the news came from Africa. Kijuju had fallen. The continent was splitting, fraying at the seams. Thousands dead. Thousands more dying. Thousands infected.
No word from Chris.
No word from him for days. And the virus kept spreading, hour by hour, mile by mile. A ticking stopwatch she couldn't read the time on.
This was wrong. This was all wrong. He'd pulled her into bed. It was supposed to be passionate, desperate, their last chance. She should have been sinking her fingers into his skin. She should have been memorizing the contour of every muscle. She should have been crying his name with tears on her cheeks, holding him like he was the only fucking thing left to hold in the world-
"Look at me," Neil whispered. His hand rose from her hip, resting against her cheek. The pads of his fingers were rough. He lifted his hand higher, tangling it in her hair, and her scalp ached as he pulled.
She'd liked it the first time he did it. A lifetime ago.
Look at me.
His hips bucked again as he slipped out of her - too much K-Y. Her thighs were greasy.
Fuck. Look at me.
He moved sluggishly, like a thick fog curled around him, clinging to his limbs.
After days of turmoil, desperate pleas from Cairo have gone silent. Borders in the Middle East remain closed, and officials fear-
She knew what she'd see, if she turned her head. She'd been watching him for twenty minutes now. His eyes were hollow and glassy. His face was sallow, sunken. He stared down at her in a way she couldn't name - lost, hungry, only half-himself.
He looked haunted.
It was how anyone would look, if they watched the world slip between their fingers, and crumble out from under them. She imagined she had the same look on her own face. She'd been avoiding mirrors.
He mounted an erratic rhythm, pounding deeper into her, and she half-heartedly lifted her hips towards his. His breath hitched. His lips found the dip of her collarbone, and his tongue felt slick, sticky.
She felt numb beneath him.
"Claire," he moaned into her neck, into the tumble of her sweat-soaked hair. His body tensed and shivered. "Please."
The television cut to footage of gunfire. The sound of it echoed through the living room. A man screamed. The light flashed white and red and white again, reflecting off the hallway floorboards.
Her mouth tasted like copper.
"Christ, just look at me. Please." The words cracked as he spoke.
She closed her eyes as he came.
July 3, 2009
Wesker felt heat. Pleasant, pulsing heat. Skin against the tip of his cock - skin like velvet, barely brushing as she sunk down a fraction of an inch. An agonizing, aching inch, enveloping the sensitive head of his shaft. She was hardly dripping, but she was warm, and soft, and the pressure made his breath hitch...and he set his jaw, staring into the blank middle distance, his hands like claws digging into the bed.
She stopped.
She held herself above him, around him, her thighs trembling with tension.
"Is your dick gonna do anything weird?" she asked. "Tell me now."
He nearly sat up, meeting her great blue eyes with a glare.
She looked down at him, unfazed. "I had to ask."
And then, she was rolling her hips - slight, barely perceptible movements, taking a bit more of his body into her own with every pass. He stared at the ceiling through the gauzy tent and counted each motion, counted every stir of her hips like he counted every wave of the tide as it washed over his feet. She was cooler than him by at least fifteen degrees, and while she wasn't exactly wet, she wasn't dry either. Once the entire length of him was fitted tightly, safely in the strange space of her, it felt unnatural and familiar to him at the same time; their joining was violating and pleasurable, and the competing sensations confused him.
She let go of a rush of breath when their pubic bones bumped together, the final inch of his cock buried. And then she stared down at him, wide-eyed, as if she couldn't believe what was happening.
In truth…his expression probably mirrored hers - a sort of stunned resignation. He knew he most likely felt strange to her - with his temperature running so high, perhaps his penis felt like a hot poker in her belly - he didn't know, he couldn't know; he hadn't had intercourse with anyone after The Change.
He turned his face away and tried to focus on the blue sky that stretched, dizzying and endless, over the blue water. Clinical and clean. Quick and sterile. Clinical and...
Slowly, agonizingly so, she lifted her hips, and slid back down. Perhaps accidentally, or maybe reflexively, she pressed her palms to his chest and spread her fingers. He glanced at her. She wrenched her hands away from him as if he'd struck her for the contact. There was another tentative roll of her hips, and then she put her hands the headboard, so that she was leaning over him, and her breasts, still restrained in the infernally taunting bra, were very close to his face.
He begin to take quick, trembling breaths, and no matter how hard he tried to conceal it, he knew she could hear him, feel him between her tensing thighs, falling apart beneath her.
"How fast can you come?" she whispered.
He suddenly wished more than anything that he had taken the lead then, that he had climbed on top of her and been the one to penetrate, dominate. But he was paralyzed by his fear of an act he hadn't committed in so long, and he'd lain passively beneath her, letting her body consume his.
And then…he felt it.
Her single, unnecessary comment dismantled his bitter arousal; his erection was slipping away with each retreating pump of his blood. He held his breath. Goddamn her.
The entire experience had reached its humiliating anti-climax, robbing him of what little dignity he had left on that god-forsaken island. Angrily, his self-control rushing back with the loss of his appetite, he glared at her.
"Wha-" she stammered, feeling him grow soft. "No…no no no. Don't," she pleaded.
"It's over," he growled. "Get off me."
"No. We're not doing this again," she replied through gritted teeth.
She pushed him to the bed then, and rode him hard through several rough thrusts - no more testing pelvic rolls, no more gentle insertion. He grunted, shocked, and sank into the pillows under her force. Unthinking, his hands found her hips, hidden under the comforter bunched around the place where their bodies met. He nearly gasped at the feel of her skin, smooth and cool beneath the searing heat of his palms. He looked down at his arms, disappearing in the folds of the blanket, in disbelief at his wayward hands and the flesh yielding to his touch.
She rolled her hips again and he felt the powerful muscles of her thighs contract around his.
"Come on," she said to him, to herself. "Don't let it go...come on." She ground her pelvis to his and a drop of sweat beaded on her scalp, rolled down the bridge of her imperfect nose, and fell to his throat. He watched her work above him, stupefied and silent, barely cognizant of his own role in the scene. Her brilliant blue eyes were squeezed shut, and she humped his body with such determination, such drive, every bit of her admirably trained on the goal of keeping him hard enough to follow the damn thing through completion.
Her efforts though, no matter how impressive, were in vain; he stayed embarrassingly fat and soft inside of her.
She slowed and then eventually stopped her ministrations, leaning back, her speckled shoulders sagging. She wiped her damp hair from her face and her neck, where it stuck to her glistening skin. He looked away, and swallowed.
"What do you like?" she asked breathlessly. "What is it? Tits? Ass?"
He sighed, staring out at the ocean. His hands fell away from her hips, away from her lovely painted skin and the strange chill of her. He'd been defeated and thoroughly humiliated by his body that morning, and Claire Redfield had been an intimate witness to it all. And now…now she straddled him like he was a lame horse that wouldn't get up, whipping him with her taunts and mockery like she was wielding a crop.
For a moment - the briefest instant - his thoughts seemed to turn red at the edges, and he felt a shadow of the murderous rage that had fed him so many months ago. Dead girls couldn't tell anyone what had...or had not...transpired, could they?
Think rationally, he corrected himself. There will be others, and not one second of this incident would matter in the grand scheme of things. Compatibility be damned, he would try another of those idiots and see if he couldn't -
From the corner of his eye, he saw the quick, furious movements of her fingers near her chest. His face settled into its natural scowl.
But the glower dropped when he saw her undoing the tiny eyehooks on the front of her sports bra.
Three of them. Small bits of metal clinging to one another, holding her flesh firmly in place, so far out of sight…
The first hook popped loose.
"Stop." The order was a hiss through his teeth.
She didn't answer, letting out an aggravated huff of air as she worked the second eyelet loose.
Though her skin was no more exposed than it had been a few moments ago, he suddenly felt as if the room was spinning. He tried to glare again. He tried to roll his eyes up towards the canopy, or back towards the sea, but they stayed wide, locked on her fingers - unearthly pale against the dark fabric - as they fussed with the final hook, slipping and catching. A nervous kind of clumsiness.
"Don't play the harlot, Claire," he said, struggling to sound disdainful when he was actually desperate. The two of them must have made a pitiful sight. His prone body, his soft cock, the sweat dripping down her back, her thighs shuddering as she held herself above him, fumbling with her bra.
"Just do your fucking job," she muttered, wiggling the final clasp free.
He held his breath, still transfixed by the valley of her sternum. The spandex bra quivered with her heartbeat, barely covering her breasts.
His cock twitched, waking inside of her.
She must have felt it as well. Her eyes, cold with a steely kind of determination, focused on his.
Slowly, she eased the wide strap over one shoulder, and then the other. The bra slipped off her arm, onto the floor with her shorts. She looked down at him, her expression solemn in the suffocating silence of the villa. Her breasts were larger than he'd imagined...and how he hated himself for having ever imagined them in the first place. But even he had to admit that she was beautifully shaped - heavy and full and buoyant. The expanse of her naked skin, from her throat to her nipples, was calicoed with tawny freckles, exactly as he'd thought; the lovely round undersides of her breasts were unmarked alabaster. Her areolae were pale pink, barely pink at all, and puffy with what he could only assume was the same reluctant arousal he felt in his loins. Her nipples were small, nearly inverted.
His first thought nauseated him: would those nipples harden with suckling?
His cock throbbed, roaring back to life. He was a helpless teenage boy beneath her.
Beneath Claire Redfield.
And he despised her passionately.
He despised the power she suddenly held over his weak, human body. He'd spent the better part of a decade immunizing himself against such witchcraft, setting himself above it all...and now that wild animal instinct rushed back, overtaking him with a force that seemed to knock the air from his lungs.
It felt new.
It felt familiar.
It felt wrong and right, vivid and surreal, so many things in between...
She rolled her hips, her eyes open and wide in all their blinding blueness. He saw a flash of concern on her face as she rose up, letting him slip nearly all the way out of the secret place between her legs…and then he was plunged into her cool-warmth again.
They both gasped, mirroring the other's look of shamed astonishment.
He was inside. All of him…every millimeter…was deep inside of her.
She arched her back and rocked down onto him again, slower this time, testing the depth of his cock. Testing how it stretched her walls. All the while, they looked at each other - shocked, and sickened, and something else.
Something else.
As she rode him, he swore he felt her getting…wetter. Growing slicker all around him. The friction seemed to lessen with each successive thrust, until there was no resistance between them at all. He felt himself bump up against her cervix, and she unmistakably ground down on him so that he circled and massaged the deepest part of her. She carried on that way for a maddeningly long time, fucking his cock as far into herself as she could. It was almost…greedy. If he hadn't known much, much better, he might have thought...
Her head fell back, the messy waterfall of her copper hair tumbling over her shoulder, tangling about her neck, slick and shining with her sweat in early morning sunlight. He stared at her, unabashed. He stared at her vulnerable milky throat, exposed to him in her lapse of restraint. At her stomach trembling with every labored breath. At her mottled shoulders, tensing with every movement.
"You can touch me," she whispered in the still air. "If it helps."
He looked up at her face again, his mouth slack. She was glowing, the rising sun a halo behind her.
Still rocking them both, back and forth, back and forth, like the rolling, endless sea, she picked up his hands in her own.
"Touch me," she said softly. "Don't hurt me…don't hurt me…"
Never again, he wanted more than anything to say. Never again. But he could only lay beneath her, mute and gluttonous for whatever pleasure she gave him.
She brought his hands to her breasts, laying his palms over their fullness, holding them there and molding his fingers with her own. She shivered, her eyes fluttering closed.
"God, you're so warm." Her voice was a husky whisper, a breath caught in her chest…a secret prayer.
He nearly moaned at the feel of her flesh. He squeezed gently, marveling at the swollen heaviness of her breasts, at the silkiness of her skin. She let out another shaking breath as he touched her, and the edge of one white tooth caught the swell of her bottom lip. She pressed his hands tighter against her.
He did moan then - a sorry, guttural sound that seemed to force its way out of him, breaking past any sense of shame he felt - as she ground herself on him, against him. As he held her breasts, and her little nipples pebbled in the center of his palms. She let go of his hands and steadied herself on his tense thighs, rolling her hips at a delirious, steady pace.
The meeting of their bodies, wet and soft and measured, reverberated around the quiet villa. Amber sunlight fell across the bed, over her chest and her ribs and her belly; she was painted with the palest gold of the morning. His fingertips trailed over her tight little nipples, drawn out by his accidental touch; he saw her flinch under the feather-light caress, her stomach clenching and her breasts quivering. She arched up towards his hands then, gasping quietly: an invitation. He obliged, teasing the turgid pink tips of her breasts between the pads of his forefinger and thumb. He was slow and gentle, the wicked part of him thinking so many steps ahead, relishing in all the ways he might use her pleasure against her, against her dull brother even… while another part of him… the new and unnervingly human part, wanted to see her writhe in pleasure without any ulterior motive. She moved in time to the circles he tickled around her nipples. Her eyes still squeezed shut, she sighed and trembled as if… as if they were old lovers, falling back into bed after years apart.
He realized then that the act had, somewhere along the line, become consensual.
Claire Redfield - one of his most formidable enemies, one of the deepest thorns in his side - was impaled on his cock, of her own accord… her fierce features contorted in what could only be ecstasy.
He grunted through his tightly clenched teeth. His stomach seized and felt the tingling of an orgasm building just beneath his testicles.
"You're close," she breathed, and leaned over him.
He was mesmerized - he couldn't help himself - his gaze following her breasts, swaying so near his face. He panted, trying to hold on, to hold out, but his body was wracked with each labored breath. He gently pulled on her nipples, wanting desperately to feel them in his mouth. He didn't dare, though…he couldn't. His eyelids fluttered shut and his brow furrowed in pleasure, or pain, or disbelief.
How had he ended up here? How?
She grabbed the edge of the headboard and rode him hard. Every thrust of her hips thumped the bed frame against the wall. "Oh god…come," she growled. "Come inside me." The mattress shifted under them, sliding on the box springs, the bed squeaking in protest.
His cock throbbed. The exhausted muscles in his lower belly trembled with exertion. His toes curled under the blanket.
"I want you to come," she commanded again.
He jerked inside of her. So close. So close now. He took a deep, gasping breath and held it, the cords of muscle and latticework of veins straining in his neck. He tossed his head back and forth on the pillow, damp with his own sweat, and he fought, roaring in his helplessness. The sound of his agony echoed in the villa.
"Don't fight it…don't fight me," she begged, still thrusting. "Please come…please."
And then…he felt her cool fingers, her palm, soft and tender against the side of his reddened face.
He whimpered - a pitiful noise in the back of his throat, one he couldn't contain - and came in five nearly-painful streams against her cervix.
March 20, 2009
She woke up disoriented. Her head pounded. The sheets were damp, twisted around her legs. It was still late, and dim yellow light from the streetlamp filtered through the bedroom blinds.
"Neil?" she croaked into the dark. Her voice was thin and reedy. Her mouth was dry, and her tongue felt like cotton.
She reached over, patting the sheets beside her. The bed was empty. Muffled noise filtered down the hallway. The refrigerator door opening and closing. The sound of water rushing from the kitchen faucet. Footsteps on squeaking floorboards. Muffled conversation from the television.
She ran a palm across her face, kicking her legs free from the sheets. She sat up, and the room swam around her, tilting to an odd angle. Her temples throbbed.
She didn't think she'd had that much to drink. She'd wanted to. She'd wanted to tip the whole goddamn bottle back - single malt scotch, some fancy shit from when she'd gotten her promotion. She'd been saving it for something special.
There wasn't a whole lot of special to look forward to now.
There'd been broadcasts from Turkey that morning, frantically detailing the first signs of an outbreak in Ankara. There were rumors of cases erupting in Pakistan, India, China. Efforts to contain the virus doubled as it spread.
And spread.
And spread.
C-virus. They called it the C-virus and some crazy, crooked part of her wanted to laugh at that. It felt like they'd made it just for her. Half Birkin, half Alexia. Half Raccoon, half Rockfort. Half crawling through sewers with blood on her face, half Steve dying with her name on his lips...
She'd pulled out her phone last night, wriggling free from the dead weight of Neil's arm, and she'd sent a bleary-eyed text before she'd passed out. One word to Leon.
News?
She fumbled with the phone now, squinting down at his response.
I'll call.
That was it.
It meant no good news. It meant he was in over his head. It meant she'd hear from him in a week, if she was lucky.
She pushed herself out of the bed, letting the sheet fall to the floor, and she padded out towards the living room. Neil sat on the couch - shirtless, unshowered - hunched forward with his eyes locked on the television. He held a cigarette in his left hand.
"I told you not to do that shit in here," she muttered, crossing over to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator herself, frowning at the choices. Some withered produce. Some strawberry yogurt. A takeout box of old orange chicken.
She grabbed one of the cartons of yogurt, twisting it around, searching for an expiration date.
"I think your landlord's got bigger stuff to worry about," Neil said, leaning back. He flipped from one channel to the next - reporters in Athens, correspondents in Kiev, experts from the CDC sharing tips to avoid contamination.
"Stay indoors unless absolutely necessary. Familiarize yourself with your local community's preparedness plan. Report any abnormalities to-"
The yogurt expired two days ago. She peeled the foil lid back, sniffing delicately, and shrugged to herself. She fished through the drawer for a spoon. "Anything on the BSSA?" she asked, trying to keep her voice even. She bumped the drawer closed with her hip.
"Not the part you wanna know about." He muted the television, and tilted his head back against the couch, taking a long drag of the cigarette. A coil of smoke slipped from between his lips, curling into the air.
She nodded to herself, dipping the spoon into the yogurt. "I was thinking it might not be the worst idea to run by HQ in the morning." She popped the spoonful into her mouth, mumbling around it. "There might be something in that last report from Kijuju-"
"There's not," he muttered.
"Yeah, but the mortality count didn't include-"
"It covered everything."
"They might not have known whether-"
"Stop it." His voice was weary, drained. He sat the remote down gently, lining it up with the arm of the couch. He raised the cigarette to his lips again. "Stop doing this shit to yourself. We've talked about this."
Instead of answering, she stabbed a gelatinous strawberry with the end of the spoon, severing it in half.
She heard him sigh. The leather couch squeaked as he pushed himself up, crossing the room towards her. He stopped before her, looking at her face. Looking down at the yogurt carton. Looking away towards the sink, and tossing the butt of his cigarette into it. Stretching for time. Stretching for words.
Always fucking stretching.
"I can't imagine what you're going through," he finally said. The same canned, empty thing he'd said a thousand times. "This is stressful enough for the rest of the world, but Chris was right in the middle…"
"He's alive." Her voice cut over his. She scooped up half of the skewered strawberry, glaring down at it. "I know he is. And there's a fucking trail somewhere. There's...there's some kind of last correspondence, something." She shifted her glare up to him, tightening her grip. The plastic crinkled beneath her fingers.
He sighed again - always fucking sighing - reaching up to run a hand through his hair. "Claire, you've got access to everything I've got access to. And I swear, if there's anything you need to know, I'll tell you the second-"
"Don't feed me that bullshit!" She slammed the carton down behind her. Yogurt splattered across the counter. "I've been working with you for five goddamn years. You think I'm not smart enough to know when something's going on? When shit's bigger than you're letting on? What about that stuff from the UN? You've had those reports on your desk for two fucking weeks, and you haven't even looked at them."
"Hey. Hey now," he started, in his gentle voice. His careful voice. His kid-glove, defusing-a-bomb voice. "We shouldn't...let's not get into this right now, okay?"
"Yeah, I'm sorry. It's a bad fucking time for you right now, isn't it?" She moved to shoulder past him, but he stepped to the side, blocking her. She exhaled heavily, bristling, and tilted her chin up towards him. When she spoke, her words wavered, pressed through tightly-clenched teeth. "Something...isn't right, Neil. Something isn't fucking right. He's out there. He knows something. He knows why this is happening."
"Sure. I know." He reached out, pulling her into his arms. She stiffened against his torso. He smelled like cigarette ash. "I'm sorry. I know. I'll go check the reports tomorrow, okay? Maybe there's...some kind of answer. I don't know." He tripped over the words. He ran his fingers through the tangled ends of her hair. He sounded desperate, fumbling through another attempt to comfort her. "I'll look in the morning. Let's just...go back to bed, okay? Let's just do that."
Let's just do that while the world unraveled around them. Thread after thread snapping. It wouldn't hold.
They wouldn't hold. The two of them. Him and her.
Him and her.
Her stomach lurched over the words. The way they didn't fit. The way his skin stuck to her skin, and left her feeling like she needed a shower.
But she nodded against his chest. She let him lead her back to the bed, and she crawled in beside him, and she kissed him until the burnt ash taste left his mouth, and she arched beneath him like she could feel his cock in her when he thrust between her thighs.
He came.
She didn't.
He slept.
She didn't.
He woke up in the morning. Splashed some water on his face. Grabbed a wrinkled button-down shirt off the floor. Barely looked at her as she clutched the sheets to her bare chest, lying in bed, watching him dress. Told her not to worry as he rushed out the door. Said he'd look over the UN reports. Said he'd come back in two hours, maybe less.
He didn't.
July 3, 2009
Claire sat back on her heels; Wesker had finally gone over the edge, still buried deep inside her. She stared up at the canopy and counted each throb of his cock.
One. Two.
Three.
Four.
A pause, but his body was still drawn as tight as a bow, unfinished.
Come on.
Comeoncomeoncomeon.
She exhaled through her nose, her lips pursing.
Five. A final jet of come, not as strong as the rest. He sighed, shaking beneath her in his release.
It was different, somehow, than it was with other men. She could...feel his semen more than she remembered with others. His was warmer, like the rest of him. She felt it spreading around his length inside of her.
It was almost pleasant.
It was a terrible thought.
And she hated it.
Sex with him hadn't been what she'd expected. Not at all. No choking, or pain, or spitting or debasement or humiliation. No control. He wasn't even rough. Had it been anyone else…had it been Leon, even Neil...she might have let herself enjoy it.
She watched a bead of sweat catch the morning sun and trickle down his collarbone, through thick blond curls at the base of his throat, peeking out from his t-shirt.
She hadn't expected him to have body hair, she thought, almost idly.
She shook her head, clearing it. Why had she expected anything? What did she care if he shaved or waxed or…whatever he did?
She didn't.
She didn't.
"Hey," she said firmly, trying to sound more like herself.
His eyes, once so bright and cruel and observant, cracked open lazily. His gaze was strangely hazy and unfocused; his pupils contracted to thin slits in the morning light. From under his thick eyelashes, he looked at her - all of her.
She licked her lips and yanked the sheets up around herself. He watched, his expression detached and dreamy; it was doubtful that anything was registering in his post-coital mind at all. She hated that look. She hated him. She hated this. The way the moment lingered, hanging in the air between them. "What do I…should I lay on my back now, or what? Before this shit all drips out of me?" Her words were a sharp bark, chasing the gauzy softness away.
He blinked quickly, shaken by her voice. He cleared his throat. "Yes. On your back, your pelvis tilted up."
She pushed herself off of him. His softening cock slipped from her, leaving her thighs wet with his come, and to her dismay, her own arousal. She grimaced, letting out a disgusted noise. He glanced at her as he sat up and moved to the edge of the bed. His back to her, he rubbed his face. She laid down and arranged the sheet over herself, covering every inch of skin she could.
Without looking, he handed one of his dozen pillows to her. She glared at his hunched shoulders and shoved the pillow under her hips.
"Are you…" His hand moved in circles as he seemed to search his orgasm-addled vocabulary for a word. "Decent?" he asked finally.
She folded her arm over the sheet across her chest. "Yeah," she replied, clipped.
He turned to her then, looking down.
"What?" she snapped.
"Did you…" She heard the reluctance in voice. She had never heard him hesitate before. Not that they had any measurable amount of non-violent communication over the years, but he didn't seem like the kind to search for words.
"Did I what?"
He kept his eyes lowered. "Did you achieve-"
"Are you fucking serious?" She glared at him, drawing back as far as she could. "You wanna know if I came? With you?"
He stared at her for a moment, holding her gaze, before realization sunk in. His eyes narrowed into that familiar red-gold scowl.
"Of course. My deepest apologies, Ms. Redfield," he snarled. "Your theatrics were so very convincing." He tugged roughly at the zipper of his shorts. "I suppose you willed your nipples to hardness, hmm? And your cyprine emissions - that too was faked, correct?" He buttoned his fly, his every movement sharp, furious.
"My what?" She held the sheet tighter to her chest, feeling her heart pound, her body tremble in building rage.
"Let me rephrase that so you can keep up," he drawled. His voice was darker, his words more pointed. "I forget that below-average intelligence tends to be a familial trait." He knelt by the side of the bed until he was eye-level with her. "You were wet. Dripping. Drenched. Sloppy, even."
She felt her upper lip curl. Her tongue touched the back of her teeth.
Before she could think of a retort, he stood, slipping on one tennis shoe, and then the other. "No amount of acting, Ms. Redfield, could produce that."
He turned to leave.
"You're right," she said.
The sound of her voice stopped him. He waited.
"I was dripping, yeah. Thinking about Leon." She was silent for a beat, imagining Wesker absorbing the idea. Turning it over and over. Examining it for credibility. Thoughtful, she ran her fingers over a complex stitch in the beautiful bed linens. She should have left it there - the comment was cutting enough on its own. But he'd called her out, he'd started it, and she had never been the type to choke down last words. "He's bigger."
Wesker's shoulders twitched, tensing and relaxing. He turned to face her. "You're a poor liar, Claire. Truly."
They stared at each other down across the room.
He clasped his hands behind his back. "While in cryostasis, I witnessed Agent Kennedy in all his various states of arousal, and I have to say…I was quite underwhelmed."
Her fingers curled in the sheet. Her jaw clenched.
He took a deep breath and regarded her impassively.
"I imagine that neither of us wishes to repeat this...experience. So just lie still for twenty minutes. And then kindly get the fuck out of my bed," he said, smiling.
The door closed behind him.
Softly.
Gently.
She wished he had slammed it.
She wished the wood had splintered, and the glass had shattered, and the noise had echoed all around the island. She wished that he had left her with something to cling to - some mark of rage, of violation. Some reason for taste of bile on the back of her tongue.
Instead, quiet waves lapped at the pilings beneath the villa.
She turned her head and looked out at the water. It shimmered and glittered invitingly, cerulean and still. It stretched on forever around the coast of their island, and then off to the edge of the horizon. It stretched as far as the eye could see.
She laid her hands on her belly.
Please take, whatever you are.
Please don't.
Please.
She could still feel herself on him. The unnatural warmth of his skin.
He had waited to put his hands on her. He had waited until she had picked up his hands in her own, until she murmured touch me in a voice she hardly recognized. And when he did touch her, it was carefully, cautiously, as if she was made of glass.
No one…no one had ever...
She sobbed, the sound startling her, strangling her. Her hand flew to her mouth, covering it tightly, trying to stifle the weakness in her, to keep it down - but the pain seeped through her fingers. It leaked from her eyes, and slipped down her cheeks. She wiped furiously at her face.
Stop.
Don't.
"Stop!" she cried aloud, and her voice echoed around the empty villa.
For a moment...for one disgusting second...she wished he had beaten her. Raped her. Left her lying in a puddle of come and blood. That...that would be familiar. Agonizing, unbearable, but familiar. A world she could make sense of, where Albert Wesker took what he wanted, leaving a trail of ruin behind him.
But he hadn't beaten her. He hadn't raped her.
She wasn't sure he had taken anything at all.
She bit down on her fist, closing her eyes as tightly as she could. She swallowed the noises that clawed at her throat.
Nothing was familiar now. A month ago, Claire Redfield had woken up in a world she didn't - couldn't - recognize.
