It's always the same inane questions.
Who are you? What do you want? Why are you doing this?
even if it hurts, i want your heart
even at your worst, i love you hard
if you wanna keep me
go too far
Phoebe Ryan - Dark Side
XVII
I wake to a tidal wave of warm weight, arms like a cage of wings, and Grim like a wall of gravity - forceful from all sides - pulling me under.
Dragged from dreaming, my whole body feels thrown to sea. My head swims, but my bearings waver. The first glimmers of sunrise and billows of lingering darkness spin through my field of vision while my heart drums frantic panic between my lungs.
My most capricious and contentious lover doesn't waste a single beat.
Still tugging and nudging me into position, he's already moving, rocking between my thighs while his hands press them far enough apart for his hips to fit. He's so hard, his cock feels heavy and inescapable against the wisp of sheer black mesh I'm still wearing, and he's rolling like he's already inside me.
Like we're already one.
Like I'm already accustomed to the entire nature of him this way.
His magnitude. His power. His angles and cadence.
How heedlessly he seeks and takes pleasure.
How wide I have to spread for it.
How easily he gets me to yield.
Bend.
Open.
Open - I swear I can feel the bass of his voice push into my ears, bearing down on me from eyelids to fists, but his lips don't move. Barely parted around shallow breaths, they're eerily still as I heed his command. Opening my eyes, my mouth, my arms in surrender and my chest to his control, I bring everything into focus.
His head bows slightly, showing me little more than his auburn crown. Night's slow-to-leave shadows cloak his frame with every rise of his hips, while gilded beams of daylight paint his sharp profile with every fall. Revealing himself to me at his own languid pace, this gathering storm of a man doesn't look up as he slides a hand beneath me, gripping my backside. He makes me arch, and it gives me a glimpse of his eyes.
Dream-dark.
Low-lidded.
But not closed.
He's buried deep in sleep, but the celadon windows to his soul are half-open, and I've never, ever felt so close to caught.
Guiding my back into a curve with the singular purpose of taking him better, Grim lets go knowing I'll stay where he drew me.
I do.
I hold myself up for his dreamy rhythm, and stars fill my sight. My rib cage. The little ocean between my legs.
Ask me what it's like.
To be a predator feeling like prey for the first time.
To belong so deeply to someone, you let him mount you when he's blacked-out.
Ask how soft and sweet it makes me come.
Ask what happens when he sets a pace that keeps me coming in endless, concentric little waves. Just like his circles.
My voice breaks around a grateful cry as the dormant hunter that pushed it from my throat leans up onto his knees to rock against me from a higher angle. Pressing my thighs wider apart, he touches between us, and sounds no virgin could make escape from me. Through lingerie that feels gossamer slick, his left fingers trace where I ache to take him, while his right hand grips my hip, tilting me up into pleasure that feels like a downpour.
It's better than any dream and more real than anything -
The warmth rising off his shoulders when I reach up to hold on. The thick flex and stretch of sinew under my palms. The thin hint of sweat on his arms when he comes back down, caging me in again.
The ragged heat of his breath. The nearness of his mouth. The sear of pink across his cheekbones as he shows me how good it would be. How endlessly he could fuck me.
The groove between his brows from refusing to come, from rolling through the need to so that this heavy haze of hedonism can last.
And last.
The way I know it can't when I mindlessly start chanting his name, and he lifts his head. Cloudy, half-closed eyes claim mine, and all the air shudders from my lungs. Trapped in sage green irises as grey as lavender leaves, almost entirely filled by the black holes of his pupils, I know he's too fully asleep to really see me, to see anything, but it feels like he does. It feels like he's staring down not at the dream of me - the nether-god I really am - but at the girl he never looks at a moment longer than he has to.
It feels like he's watching Bella Swan, the barely legal tease, come so helplessly on just the promise of his cock, starlight slips from my eyes. It's too much. Feeling so human like this with him. It's overwhelming, and in the deepest trench of his subconscious, Grim knows it.
Slipping his hands to the backs of my knees, he presses my legs back until they hit tangled bed sheets, opening me like his own personal centerfold, and it takes all my breath away. I've never, ever spread so wide. As badly as he's made me ache, I've never, ever wanted him to take me as much as I do right here. Right now.
Decadent, desire-drunk tears slide down my cheeks, blushed so pink we should both be struck down. That's how good this feels.
Stolen.
Illicit.
Devious.
Letting go of my legs, my private paramour presses one hand over my shoulder to hold me in place as his cadence grows rougher. His dark hand stays on my inner thigh, keeping me explicitly open while he drags low, lustful cries from my mouth with a deliberately crude pace.
He wants to come. I can see it in his tightly-knit brows and his parted and pouting lips. His breath falters and catches, and I know he's about to. He wants to come just like this, all over where I'm all his, and what I really am rushes back into everything like a riptide.
As pleasing as his unrestrained urgency is, the thought of not getting what I need breaks my heart. My whole body pangs with soreness when I think of stopping him now, but I have to. I can't not have it.
"Let me," I whisper, my voice threadbare from singing for him.
Lost in instinct he keeps bottled up, my lover doesn't relent. A groan that's almost a growl rolls from his chest as the hand over my shoulder slips to my other thigh, pressing me inescapably open and holding me in place.
He's so close.
Every part of me knows it by heart.
His heart.
"Please, you have to let me, please - " Unbearable hunger makes my mouth ache as I say it, hating how pitiful I sound. But my lips part and yearn with need I can't help, and I lift toward his neck, pressing them to his skin, licking a provocative path to his ear while I reach between us.
"Please, please -" I beg, stroking how severely hard he is with one hand while trying to slow his hips with my other. "You know how bad I need it, please-"
Every inch of me burns around the confession, and in one smooth movement, Grim pushes me lower down the bed, but I'm already sliding. Writhing down to where I belong. About to turn over onto my knees when his intuitive hands catch both of my own.
Pressing them down above my head, he pins me to our bed by my wrists, keeping me on my back and kneeling over me as I open.
Tongue out.
Panting heat.
Whimpering.
Ravenous.
Drowned in dreaming holds me in place and feeds me just like this. Shutting me up on his cock. Giving me all of it with one hand around the base and his other around my wrists. At first it's everything. The sheer relief of being quieted. The pure pleasure of being pressed down and tended to. The pulsing, palpable ecstasy of need being filled and filled -
It's beyond euphoric, but I should have known better.
It's not his fault.
It's human nature.
Even when he wants to give me his soul, innate reflexes kick in like a fail-safe.
Usually at this point, he's pushing at my shoulders and I'm easily able to hold him down, but in this position, he's in control, and I'm so gone on how deep he's coming, I don't realize what's happening before it's too late.
Terribly selfish, he takes himself from my mouth in the last second and it's so awful I cry out, tears blurring my eyes as strokes just out of reach, wasting what I require onto my chin. My cheek. The edge of my shoulder and disheveled sheets.
And all I can think is this can't be real.
It's too cruel to be real.
Please, please don't let this be real -
But I'm terribly awake as blissfully oblivious releases my wrists and folds down, slipping swiftly into somnolent contentment while I sit up and struggle to recover every drop I can from my skin, and bend down to lick at the bed like a desperate animal.
My heart pounds at the taste while every other part of me seethes, hating that he can make me so base.
That this isn't a dream.
That he made me feel so good just to forsake me in the end.
I lie down beside him, but I hardly rest. I ache so bad. Inherent longing and vicious addiction stitch soreness through every vein, demanding I dip down and clean him like a cat just to get every possible trace of spilled soul. But his hand brushes my arm as he sleeps, gathering me to possessively his side before I can do it, and I sulk against him while his heartbeat drags me to rest. The boundaries that distinguish everything blur slowly into each other. The border between this cabin and the depths of dreams. The lines between his world and mine. The differences between day and night and he and I - all of it fades away as we drift together.
When his alarm goes off, it wakes me instead of him, and I startle so hard it feels like losing balance. Like the bed tips when I reach over permanent old English and the oracle wings on his sternum to silence the sound. Like the floor dips when I realize what I've just done.
Stretched across him, struck-still between fear and shock, I don't have to look to know Grim is still sound asleep. His pulse is steady and his breathing hasn't changed, but I glance anyway, just to find his lids peacefully sealed.
The visual reassurance of this should put me at ease, but the warning scratched across closed eyes knocks my heart out of rhythm with his. I'm pretty sure I'm awake and this is real, but the sense that something is wrong devours me from the inside out. The full-body feeling that I'm missing something spins with feeling like I've done this before, or dreamed it before, that I might be dreaming now - and it all swallows me in dread.
The date on his phone screen doesn't help.
February 1st.
How can it possibly be the first of February?
Why do I feel like it can't be?
Setting it down before it goes off again, I abandon Grim, and my legs nearly give out as I grab my clothes. Barely catching myself, I stumble down the stairs and out of his house in wince after wince of sharp warmth.
My thighs hurt as I run. My jaw is tender, and when I stop to get dressed in the safety of the woods, I find bruises blooming on my hip bones and inner thighs. My wrists sting with the memory of his grip, and deep in my throat, unmet need burns so badly it has to be real.
But uncertainty digs into me like hooks.
I'm exhausted by the time I reach Forks. My lungs feel like a drought and my legs shake like branches bent to their breaking point. Pressing a hand to my chest as I walk the rest of the way, I feel my pulse race like it never has.
Like it's tired.
Like I'm tired.
The single instinct not urging me to go to him says get home, just get home. So I do, but I'm even more lost the moment I close the door behind me.
I recognize the house - my jacket on the coat rack, Alice's mirrors on the far wall - nothing seems out of place, but the place itself feels more like a replica than the true thing. Even my own reflection as I step toward a full-length antique looking glass is unsettling in its surrealness. The girl that stares back at me looks as worn-out and dazed in doubt as I feel, but there's something behind her drowsy, curious eyes that I can't place. I don't trust her, and I can't stand to look at her too long.
Clearing my throat around a cough, I hurry upstairs and run a hot shower. Dense steam soothes soreness inflicted by miles of cold air while unslaked yearning twists through me, wringing muscle and bone to the point of torment.
It shouldn't be like this.
If it's really been months - if I've been feeding consistently for more than five months, one night without a hit shouldn't be debilitating, and it wouldn't explain why running fifteen miles wore me out.
Grabbing his soap, I slide what's left of it all over me, over and over again because as I do, the scent of it, the comfort it offers becomes all there is. I stay under warm water until it stops being warm and my eyes feel heavy. My whole body feels impossibly heavy. It's all I can do just to turn off the faucet and reach for a towel.
I've never slept without Grim.
I didn't know I could.
But I must, because the next thing I know I'm nestled down in the tub, opening up my eyes to find myself curled small underneath oversized terry cotton.
I don't know what's happening or how.
I don't know what time it is or what day. How long I was asleep. If I'm really awake.
All I know is that I'm up and moving, getting dressed and rushing out as swiftly as I can on unsteady legs.
I need what I need.
And no one, not even the merciless source of it himself, can keep it from me.