AN: The last chapter, and this chapter takes place between ch 6 and 7 of Mine Alone to Hate, just so you guys know. And I love the reviews, you're all so nice to me and thank you very much. I hope you enjoy. :)
Sometimes we talk, and it never ends well
"Why do you come here, if not for love?"
I almost smile, as if it's some kind of victory, her remembering conversations from weeks ago. I'm sure she thinks if she has me desperate enough, dizzied enough by her withholding, that I will just give her all her answers. Her efforts were admirable though, because my God am I desperate for her tonight. I wasn't when I first showed up, I was sullen and filled with guilt, barely speaking, though her mood didn't allow for it. She was quick to tear at my defenses piece by piece, as if they were paper. As if it was the easiest thing in the world to do.
She's kissing me while she murmurs the question against my mouth, her hovering over me as I lie naked on her bed, the material of her shirt rubbing gently against my breasts, and I arch into the feeling. It's easy to forget about all the reasons why I shouldn't be here, about all my reservations and morality, when we're in the space that belongs to her, no semblance of my life lies within these walls, so my mind clears of everything but Regina.
"I thought you didn't care." Her teeth bite hard at my bottom lip, because there's a smile in my voice so she makes it a hiss from the sudden sting. She pulls back slightly, looking full of malice and mirth.
"Don't play games." Regina warns, and my hand moves down her chest and under the material of her open blouse, and there's pride in me that I managed to get it unbuttoned before she pushed me away and distracted me with other things. And I know I don't deserve her body, but it doesn't stop me from wanting it. Desperately. It's something that consumes me most of every single moment.
"I'm good at games." I whisper, pressing my body against her as my hand lightly cups her bra covered breast, and her eyes turn red over blown out pupils, a sneer shooting across her face, because I push too far with her, I know. But it's an instinctual reaction, engrained into me from my youth. Because any reaction is better than none, any attention she gives is better than ignoring me, closed off inside herself, for days and weeks, and she would go months without speaking a single word to me, and it made me starving for her.
Regina sits up suddenly, her skirt riding up as she straddles my hips. Her hands smack away mine when they reach for the exposed skin of her thighs. She moves her hands then, over my hips and ribs. Lightly until a single nail settles in the valley between my breasts. Regina presses it into my skin, her eyes rapt in attention to her action, dragging the nail down my body in a straight line. As if she were preparing to cut me open, leaving an angry red mark in its wake. She always did like me in red.
She speaks as she drags the nail down my body, making me squirm and bite my already swollen lip.
"As am I, dear, but you will not enjoy my games."
"And yet here I am." I whisper.
Brown eyes snap to meet mine.
"Why?"
"David was calling for you." Red says as a greeting when I walk into the diner, the 'closed' sign is displayed in the window, but she leaves the door unlocked, expecting me.
"What did you tell him?" I ask absently, as I hang up my coat and make my way over to the counter where she's pouring a cup of coffee.
"That you were doing something other than what you were doing." She says with an arched eye brow and the slightest hint of an accusing tone, while I sit down on a stool in front of her. Despite the fact that she hates what I'm doing with Regina, her loyalty always lies with me, not David.
Though it only takes a few sips of my coffee before she asks.
"Do you think he knows?"
Because something like this would seem obvious to Red. She knew the first time, and it was mostly because of my own stupidity, walking into the diner to meet Emma not even an hour after Regina staked claim in me once more against the wall of her office. Red smelled it all over me, and nearly dropped the tray of food she was holding when we made eye contact.
Being half wolf has its advantages, but she assured me that day, that this wasn't one of them.
"He probably suspects something." At least I wish he did, I wish he knew so I would have nothing left to hide. I wish I was strong enough to tell him. But denial is such a good defensive mechanism. It twists realities to make it something bearable, with control and comfort. It's a powerful thing. "I never told him about her, though."
"Why not?"
I sigh, in mild frustration.
"Because I know how it looks." My eyes meet hers. "How he would look at it—the same way you look at it."
"That she was your step-mother, and she took your innocence?" Red states more than asks, her voice has a haughty casual tone. I know she's just trying to show me Regina's fault in this, but it only makes me feel more guilty.
"I gave it to her." I whisper, my voice thick with an unexpected emotion. The sigh she gives at that sounds like defeat as her fingers fiddle with the placemats on the counter.
"You're always defending her. You're just as crazy as she is for always blaming you."
Regina leans down with her eyes on me, and runs her tongue along the long red mark, over the muscles of my torso until her mouth settles between my breasts, and she bites at my collar bone before moving higher to my neck.
"A hero's fault." I say, and it causes her to freeze above me, her breath hitting my neck. "It leads me to you, every time."
Regina finally raises, looking at me with a curious suspicion, a look she carried often when we were younger. Her mind's there now, I can tell.
"To be defeated by you." I kiss her lightly, raising up to meet our lips, before whispering against her cheek. "You won, Regina. Claim your prize."
And that may as well have been the greatest romantic gesture ever given, what with the way she moans at the words, her lips claim mine with such passion.
It's not a lie, because it's been a long time since I came to her because of love.
I'm here because she is my fault.
"Have you talked to Leroy and the rest, about the caves?" I ask Red, trying to distract her from topics that go around in circles and to no avail. It works, her body visibly relaxing as she leans down on her elbows, and fiddles with her hands.
"The fairies are still working, they don't know how much magic it will take, let alone how long it will take to get it." Not many know of the plan we set in motion, to find a way back to our land. And it's only kept that way, in case we fail in finding a way to open the portal.
"Right. We won't get a team together until we know more though." I say specifically, because she already is hinting that I should be the one who leaves. I understand that she thinks it'll be better if I'm away from Regina. I just know that it won't be, I know that it'll only be that much worse. I can't leave her, now that she's back in my veins, because every time she burrows in, more and more. Soon enough they'll be nothing left of me, only her.
I can't leave her and she won't let me go.
"…Please," The word is one of her favorites coming from my mouth, "My Queen." And that's her other favorite, because she's unpredictable sometimes, but those words work on her when I need them to. When I need her to finally finish my torture.
"I think I can keep you begging all night, don't you?" I moan again and look down at her smiling up at me from between my legs. Her lips wet from their efforts moments ago, teasing me with her tongue but never enough to allow me to finish. Her mouth always drives me crazy, and my voice is already raw from crying out. "Fitting punishment tonight, wouldn't you agree?"
She thinks this is a punishment. She'll tell me it's mine, but I figured out some time ago, that being with me is just as much about her punishment. It hurts her to do this, to lie to henry, to tell him that she tries and she wants to be good. I make her want me more though, and the pain behind her eyes is something that she can't hide most of the time.
Regina hates what I do to her, and she needs me to hate it too, so she makes sure that I do—every time.
"For a hero's fault and a villain's fate." She says quieter this time, her hands gripping tighter to the inside of my thighs, nails digging in as she wraps her lips around my core and I'm crying out once more.
"I wish Rumple didn't hate fairies so much, he might help." Red said absently, and half joking, both of us brain storming about things we really had no idea about.
"Yeah, in exchange for your soul, I'm sure…" I think about talking to Regina about it, but the thought quickly dissipates, already knowing what kind of reaction that would illicit. "And Regina's too stubborn to send us back home. It would admit defeat."
There's silence at that, and it's heavy. I look up at her and see her staring at me.
"…She's still using magic? Henry said she stopped."
I quickly try to amend, because I can physically feel her tense, wanting to overreact to my words.
"It's not a lot. Just sometimes—…" Her sight narrows, and I feel a blush running up my neck. "I see her use it."
The faint purple glow coming from her hand illuminates the dark space between us, as I stay lying on her bed. It moves over me, painlessly fading all the light bites and shallow scratches, making better the reddened and bruised skin. The light of her magic makes her look pale and sick, creases and lines, dark circles under her eyes shining as her energy depletes from healing me. It takes a lot out of her, I can tell, this land is not meant to sustain magic, so her powers are nothing compared to our old world.
When Regina's hand moves over my torso, over the long red mark, I grab her wrist gently, breaking her focus and letting the glow fade around us.
"Leave that one."
She practically growls at the request, fingers wrapping in my hair and kissing me deeply, setting me on fire and causing us to start all over again.
"Jesus, Snow, does she use magic on you?" The waitress demands, shocked and disgusted, and my face is glowing in my embarrassment and shame.
"It's not like that. She just…" I pause and Red waits, but my eyes break contact and look away, knowing that nothing I say will make this any better. "Uses it to cover the marks she leaves." I finish quietly.
"Oh, how silly of me to be worried." There's a heavy sarcasm in her voice, and it makes me roll my eyes.
"It's complicated." I swig the last of my cold coffee, getting up from the stool and preceding to collect my things while she talks.
"Yeah, it's actually not. She's a walking victim complex, but you need to stop trying to save her, Snow." I don't respond, because that is the reason why I do a lot of things, but it's not why I find myself in Regina's bed. Then Red says something that makes me freeze right before I'm about to step towards the door. "The last time you tried, we all paid for it."
And I look at her then, the meaning in her words are not at all vague. Because I had defeated the Evil Queen, once, hadn't I? She was tied to a pole and arrows ready to tear holes into her heart. Everyone knew of that, because they were all there for her public execution.
My weakness exiled her instead, and it was because of that she was able to curse us.
"I didn't mean it like that." Red whispers, obviously seeing the hurt and anger on my face from her words. "I just mean—"
"That I should've killed her." I interrupt, because of course that's what she means, but of course she won't say it out loud. Not because she's like them, or because she's like me, with some sense of moral superiority. She'd never say it because she's killed before.
"You were right not to kill her, Snow." She says quietly. "But what you're doing now. That's not right, and you know it."
Still upset and suddenly very tired, I only nod once and walk out of the diner.
Sometimes we talk, and it never ends well.
"I did love you, once." She freezes at the words, as Regina's sitting up in bed and facing away from me. Her hands pause on the buttons she's redoing, and slowly they drop and I see the back of her head raise to stare out the window. I did love her, but I couldn't possibly any more, not after everything that's been done, all the betrayals that can never be made right. And her cruelty, it was there then as well, so I don't even know what made me think it was ever love. I don't want to know, so I don't think about it. I dwell on those memories as little as possible, because everything will be so much worse if I remember. If I ever feel that again for her.
"I never asked if you loved me." She replies with a crack in her voice that takes away from its cold indifferences.
At that, I have no choice but to focus on the memory, but just one, and it's not a good memory, it's one that was filled with betrayals, and secrets kept. And my father was murdered only days afterwards.
"You did…" I whisper, then felt the cold numbing feeling of her demeanor soak into my skin, making me roll off the bed in search of my cloths. She still won't look at me. "Once."
