After (51 page)

Each day, every morning and evening, they went a little further, sometimes along the road, sometimes into the woods, and even though she was confident of her limits, even though she'd thought one of the reasons she'd wanted so badly to get out was to get away from Artel, just for a little while, they always went together. Feeling her strength, trusting her independence, his presence didn't weigh on her, now, as it had.

She liked their walks together.

* * * *

She'd let it happen. Even willed it, maybe. That unfamiliar, sweet heaviness low in her belly when he came near to look at the tiny blue egg flecked with browns and grays she'd plucked from the lifeless nest that had fallen from the elm and lay askew at their feet amidst serrated yellow leaves. The warmth of him, the faint feel of his breath playing over her skin, heating and vibrating her body. His smile that made her think, at that moment, of a child, because she hadn't seen a smile like that since she'd left the school. She'd thought it before it happened.

She'd watched his eyes turn from the delicate, almost weightless egg cradled in her palm, toward her face. While he looked at her, his smile had changed. Then faded.

Her heart thumped once, hard, then seemed to go still. Then Gareth had bent toward her and his lips had parted and then he'd stayed very still, just an inch away, and she'd known but she hadn't moved. Knowing, she'd just waited. And then, lighter than the weightless, lifeless thing in her hand, his lips had touched hers. They lingered for a second, then left her.

It was bad. It hurt. This feeling—like melting—eroding everything. Her.

“Nix?” His asphalt voice didn't like asking questions. Her jaw ached where her molars were crushing down on each other. “It wasn't a threat, Nix. It was just a question.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you crying?”

Fuck that. She wasn't. If she didn't blink, no tear would touch her cheek.

“All this time, Nix, I've never once seen you cry. Even that first day. How could you hold up through all that, everything they did to you, never once crying, until I . . . ”

Another of his aborted questions.

“You,” she started. Then stopped.

His face was blurred, and there was no fucking way she'd give in. She bit down harder and pulled in her breath until the pain in her chest stole from the other pain.

“You make me almost want...”

God. Fucking. Dammit. She hated that feeling she hadn't let herself feel in almost twenty years. It made her feel like such a fucking girl, that revolting, nauseating tickle running over her cheeks. The muscles of her face out of her control.

“But I can't.”

“Then we won't, Nix. I won't.”

He didn't get it. It wasn't fear of him wearing her down. Erasing her. Making her cry like a fucking girl. She made everything hard—her jaw, her tight fists, her stomach, all her body's muscles. She'd win this.

“I'm sorry,” he said quietly. “I meant to be careful of you. Not to hurt you. You're so strong, it's hard for me to keep it in mind, how awfully you've been hurt.”

He touched her hair, and she made everything even harder.

“Nix. It's safe to let go. For once.”

The tips of his fingers were still close to her face, but not insisting on making up the inches she'd drawn back.

“Promise me something, Gareth.”

“Alright.”

“Promise you won't touch me again.”

Behind his eyes something seemed to break, and for a moment his expression contorted with some large feeling, but then his eyes dimmed and his face went strangely blank. Like a corpse.

“Alright. I promise.”

“If you break that promise, I'll be gone.”

* * * *

She should have gone anyway. From the way he looked at her, the way he spoke to her, she knew he'd seen something. That he believed that she wanted what he wanted, at least in some small way. Now his eyes and his voice were filled with a tender hope, palpable and sickening. But even with that pain filling their hideout like a fog, she didn't have the strength to walk away from an existence there, in that little ghost town hotel, with him, that was the only kind of peace she'd known since childhood.

Day after day, though, it got worse. His eyes following her, tracing her every gesture. If she had to go near him—to pass by on her way to another room, to reach for some thing she needed—he seemed to be waiting for her to deliver herself to him, to yield to that kiss.

So when she returned one afternoon from her elms with their serrated yellow leaves and her ferns and moss and her warm, hard ground and blue sky to find Artel at the kitchen sink, next to naked, doing his washing, it felt as though she'd been snared in a trap. Flushed, breathing shallow and faster second by second, he confronted her, then watched as she noticed. He was getting hard.

“You're usually gone longer,” he said, just audibly.

Now she had it. Proof of what she'd known since the kiss. Before that. All along.

He wanted to fuck her.

Shaking, her mind wiped blank by rage, she cornered him. As she moved in, he pressed himself back, into the V of the counter, his gaze leveled on her like he was working her out, his erection angling blatantly upward under the snug white cotton of his shorts. Close, just a few inches between them, the smell of him in her nostrils, his heat firing her nerves, she ran her fingertips over the bulge in her pocket, fingering the hard oblong shape of the knife against her thigh.

She locked eyes with him, then curled her fingers over the waistband of his shorts. His hands flashed toward hers, then stopped.

Just a breath. “Nix.”

The want driving her, flooding her veins, pumping her heart wasn't desire. Not that warm, sweet want that had writhed through her belly as she'd felt his kiss before he'd given it. This was the white-cold, red-hot want of battle, the fierce need to punish.

To annihilate. To hurt. To make scream.

When she tugged his shorts down his hard cock bobbed free, looking red and dark against the background of his pale hip and belly. That spear of flesh, ready to stab.

To open and hurt. Their weapon. Their cause. Their need. He wielded it, just like them.

All of them. Driven to hurt with it. Because of it.

Again she caressed the hard weight of the knife in her pocket. But something made her hand change course.

Strange, she'd never seen it, thought it before. That weapon. That fierce hardness. Counterpart to her wound. Her vulnerability.

An impulse jolted through her, and behind it a surge, a vast, euphoric wave, a certainty of power. She smiled.

“Nix. Please.”

So, so soft against the tips of her fingers, that flushed flesh. Delicate. Vulnerable.

Artel flinched. “I don't want this.”

“No? What do you want? My mouth? You want between my thighs?” Her touch changed the contours of his face, made his gray eyes go bright.

“Please, Nix. I don't want there to be anything ugly between us.”

She hardened herself against his words and his pleading look, and slid the tight circle of her hand over the hot, hard length of his erection, watching him shudder, hearing him clamp down on a groan. Locking eyes with him, she began fisting his cock in a slow, determined rhythm.

So, they could be torn open, too. Invaded. Heat throbbed through her sex. A tingle tugged at her spine.

It wasn't long—less time, even, than she'd expected—before his lips parted and he gasped and swallowed, and just before she knew he'd have flexed and shuddered, and in the next convulsion a squirt of cum would have spurted forth, she stopped. Her fingers still wrapped tight around the base of his cock, she watched him. The slouch of let down anticipation, the panting through unmet need, the eyes demanding answers.

Redress. But the hands were still, gripping the counter hard enough to whiten nails and knuckles.

She waited.

He didn't let go. So she started again, sliding the ring of her fingers up and down, watching something like fear creep through his look of focused control before everything was wiped out by hopeless, needful anticipation. This time when she had him there, he groaned and maybe he said, “please,” but she ceased her stroking and watched him crumple a little more than the time before.

Three more times she took him to the edge and left him there. Finally she was about to let him slip through her fingers and walk off, but a fresh angry surge tightened her grip, and this time when his body went taut, when his belly flexed and his breath rushed then caught, she pried his hand from the counter edge and held it between them. The next second he groaned out loud and she watched the first spurt of white launch into his cupped hand. A hot, violent rage was shaking her. She yanked her hands from his wrist and his twitching cock and ran for the woods.

* * * *

“I'm glad you came back,” he said as softly as his growl of a voice could go when she stepped in from the porch, ready for a brawl. “I didn't think you would.”

She dodged him, went to the kitchen. It was her turn to make the meal, but she saw that he'd done it while she'd been gone. From the foyer she heard the old couch springs groan, then his footsteps. Coming near. When she turned, he was standing a couple feet away, looking at her. The fight would come now, but she wouldn't fight it.

For the first time.

No. The second.

“I think I know why you did it.”

He hadn't come any closer. She waited.

“Living here with me, you're beginning to want something. You're afraid to want it, I think, and even more scared to have it. It would be easy for you to get it. Having it would be hard, though. But no matter how terrified you are, even though you're too scared to take it, you can't get yourself to walk away from it, either.”

Like a bellows, her chest was pumping. She tried to look calm, to smooth her breathing.

“A quiet place. Not a prison. No one hurting you. How can you run away from that? Knowing that a day or a week from now you'll get caught in the woods or some town and wind up chained to a tree somewhere with five or ten guys tearing you apart.

Or locked up, working a barracks or a factory. Maybe even if you manage to stay safe, maybe living alone in the woods or a cave or even a little house like this somewhere on your own is starting to look lonely and scary. But you're still so afraid of this thing you want that you need something to force you out, so you won't take it.”

Hot tears burned her eyes and stung her somewhere deeper.

“You're out of luck, though, if you think you can provoke me into giving you an excuse to run off. My dick gets hard. I don't have much control over that. But I promised I wouldn't touch you, and I haven't. I won't. Until you say I can. Not to hold you down and satisfy a need, no matter how cruelly you've aggravated it. And not to shove you off me when you've got me backed into a corner, since that's probably all the excuse you'd need to disappear.”

She felt small and weak and queasy.

“I don't like it. Feeling this way,” she whispered, not looking at him. “Ashamed.

Guilty.”

“It's a bad feeling. And it sticks. But you can use it. Like a lesson to yourself.”

“What do you feel guilty about?” she seethed. “That bastard Dorset?”

“If you want me to,” he said, his voice low, quiet, “I'll tell you the thing I'm most ashamed of.”

Artel leaned back against the mahogany molding framing the doorway, rough and faded from lack of care, and began to speak quietly.

“When I came of age, my dad told me it was time for me to become a man. I had a vague idea of what that meant, that it had to do with my cock, and with lying down with a woman. I'd grown up mostly on the road, so we didn't get to know many people, anyway, and in the towns where we seemed to settle a little longer, segregation was almost total. I'd seen a few women, but I'd never been close to one, or even heard a woman talk.”

“You were born after the dying?”

“Four years after.”

Just twenty-two. She'd thought he was older. More like thirty-two. The men didn't usually age like that.

He told her his story in the tone of a painful confession given without hope of absolution.

“That night of my birthday, my father took me to the sex hotel. It wasn't the worst example, by any stretch. The women there each served maybe five or six guys a day. A pricey place. I guess my dad wanted me to be able to take my time, and with someone not too badly broken.

“The girl he bought for me was no older than I was, but she was already branded for public work. Dad got me in there with her, and right away I sensed that she was afraid, like a boy cornered by bullies, who knew he was about to get an awful beating. I was so ignorant. I didn't know what it was she was afraid of, exactly. I had no idea what she'd probably been through, what she probably went though every night in that place.

And it didn't occur to me to ask. The way I'd heard women spoken of all my life—you've heard it all, I don't have to tell you—she was supposed to be just a body. Even though I realized, right away, she was reading me, feeling things that I might feel, I was too dumb to get that she was like me. A real person.

“So I started, like my dad had told me. Undressed her. I wasn't rough. I wonder sometimes, if she'd fought, if I might have been worse. I really don't know. But she was quiet and still while I got her things off. And you can imagine, or maybe you know, a man, hardly more than a boy, his first time . . . even though I didn't know, going in, what I was doing, my body got it. I was hard and scared and frantic, but trying to go slow and do it right. My dad had told me what to have her do, what would feel good. He'd told me since I was young and hadn't done anything, the first time would be quick, but that I could go two or three times. So first, I had her get on her knees and use her mouth.

She did that the way she'd let me undress her—quiet and easy. Even with how worked up I was, and how unprepared I was for how it would feel, I don't think I touched her, except to feel her hair with my fingers, because the most delicate touch of her mouth got me off so fast it never occurred to me to try for a different rhythm or anything else.