Jeremiah Quick (24 page)

She squeezes, pressing our bodies together,
chest to chest. It's a careful, gentle hug for the first few
seconds, but when I don't pull away her arms tighten more, so
fierce it feels like she'll never let me go.

And for the first time, I let her hug me,
hold me, and lean into her embrace rather than fight to get
away.

After what feels like an entire school year
of lunch periods and chocolate, she steps away and stares into my
eyes, completely without guile. She gives me silence and I give her
the same, and she stares into me for long, long minutes.

I wonder what she sees.

She's so innocent. No. I know better. She's
so much light, that it looks like innocence.

No one stares into my eyes for more than a
second or two. No one but Corrie. Jamie. Sunshine.

The Three.

That's all.

The third of Three will end me.

Chapter 25

H
e let her make
love to him.

She knew it was wrong, considering the rest
of her life, but in the here and now it wasn't wrong, it was
perfect, and absolutely what had to happen next.

Afterward he spooned himself around her.

"Corrie kept working with me, kept track of
me, right up until I met you. And then she basically said she'd
taught me everything she could, and the rest was for me to figure
out.

"And then there you were, so shining and
light and innocent and helpless. And, unfathomably, you liked me,
liked my Dark, tilted your head that tiny bit and listened, really
listened, as if what I had to say meant something to you."

"You changed everything for me. No one had
ever been that honest. No one ever taught me to think for myself.
What you gave me, those moments, that ability to look beyond the
surface, has been priceless to me."

"And yet… you didn't go Dark."

She shook her head. "I adore the Dark, revel
in it, love to be near it. But no, I'm too... me, I guess... to go
all the way Dark. Surely you see this?"

His eyes – oh. They had sudden color now,
black as night, but only for an instant. He shook his head. "I can
make you Dark. It's what I'm supposed to do, why you're here."

She shook her head, not understanding.

His next words were a frustrated rush. "I
can't leave you helpless, undefended. I can't. Don't you understand
that? I have to help you find your magick so you can protect
yourself when I'm gone."

"Jeremiah," Pretty said. "You've been gone
for years, and I've been okay."

He shook his head, violently. "No. You don't
see. I've not been as gone as you think. I've been protecting you,
all along. Every day. Every year."

"Tomorrow will be hard," he said, as he
wrapped each of her wrists in coils of that silky white rope again.
She watched this binding and wondered how many hundreds of times
he'd done this. He hardly seemed to even pay attention as he
knotted the ends smartly, one wrist to the other, until her hands
were secured in front of her belly. He then twined the rope around
her waist, snug but not tight, wound between her wrists, securing
her hands to her waist so she could neither raise nor lower
them.

"Tonight will be ceremonial, important. You
might be scared or revolted, but it can't be helped. It's part of
all of this, and it's... just what comes next."

He brought her into the kitchen and spent an
hour dyeing her hair the lightest blonde ever. When it was dry, it
was almost white. Then he led her into a black and white bathroom.
She recognized an enema kit waiting in the sink, and sucked in a
breath. "Jeremiah." She stopped. Words failed. This… too much, too
intimate. Too controlling.

"It's not kinky," he said, then amended
himself. "Well, yeah, it is. But that's not the purpose."

"What is, then? Embarrass and humiliate
me?"

He shook his head. "I… don't know if I can
explain it. It's a feeling, and you'll come to understand why,
tomorrow." He shrugged. "That's the best I can do right now. It's
not a choice. Does that help?"

She shook her head. No, it didn't help at
all.

He shrugged again. "Then I'm sorry, but it's
very simple. Don't worry about anything, just do as I say. It's
like... a submission thing." He pressed her down to her knees as he
spoke, and folded her upper body over her thighs until her breasts
and shoulders touched the floor, then guided her head until her
cheek rested against cold tile.

"Please, oh please," she whispered, but
didn't expect her plea to change anything. She felt it, too, a
chill breeze like a living thing between them, twined around them,
and a sense that forward momentum was inevitable. Whatever this
was, it couldn't be stopped now.

His hand smoothed along her back, then one
finger traced the line of her spine all the way to the tailbone,
the cleft between her buttocks. She shivered.

So intimate.

His finger traced past her anus, plunged
into her pussy, and she shuddered and moaned because she was still
wet, and still, remarkably, aroused. She'd expected a lot more sex
than there had been, to be honest. And it wasn't that she was
disappointed, exactly, but then, yeah, kind of.

He loved Jamie, she knew that, and felt
ashamed for being turned on, for wanting him in a way that he'd
never wanted her.

"You're so light," he said. "But you like
the Dark." His voice was soft. "You crave it. Come with me. Say
you'll trust me to lead you into the Dark."

She did trust him. More now than ever. And
she knew it was a betrayal of everyone she left at home, but she
couldn’t help it. He'd trusted her with important stories, and the
only way to honor that was to trust him with herself, her whole
self. All of her. She understood that much, kneeling on the floor
in this obscene position, every part of her open to him except her
soul.

And he was asking for that, now.

Here, was her body, naked and drawn on to
make it his.

Her heart – she'd given to him piece by
small piece with those little squares of chocolate so long ago.

There was only her soul that she kept from
him, that bit of autonomy.

"Say it," he coaxed. "You have to mean it.
It's... important."

She thought she would feel silly saying it,
awkward and melodramatic, but no, the words fell from her lips like
they'd been waiting to fall for an eternity, waiting for him.
Waiting for this.

They left her mouth, her throat, and floated into
the air, hung between the two of them for the longest set of
seconds in the universe, and then something intangible just...
clicked... into place.

She'd just given him permission.
For everything.

His fingers stroked the inner walls of her
sex, a brush, a curl, and then withdrew, scraped along her clit,
paused there and pressed until she whimpered just the tiniest
whimper, and then he withdrew them, leaned over her, and held his
fingers to her lips.

She took them in her mouth, tasted the
familiarity of herself, and it was like tasting her thoughts. She
wasn't salty, she was creamy and musk, a taste intangible and
difficult to describe, difficult to compare to anything else.

Like... Essence of Me
, she thought.
She liked it. She'd always liked it.

He pulled away and was gone, and for a span
of seconds nothing happened. Then wet and cold between her ass
cheeks, and she flinched, tensed.

"Breathe," Jeremiah said. "Take in a deep
breath, then let it out, long and slow."

Pretty sucked in air, letting it fill her,
feeling her lungs expand against her rib cage, and then, as if
reading her mind, his hand was there, his fingers drumming an
intimate beat along her ribs, and she let the breath go in a slow
stream from pursed lips.

"Do you trust me?" he asked, and there came
a pressure at her asshole, a steady determined press, and with a
little sobbing "Yes," she pushed back and was breached.

The intruding object was long and slim, and
it snaked itself deep until she thought she would choke on it.

"Just keep breathing," he said, and she
cringed as the water flowed and flowed into her. She cried out as
her guts cramped and clenched, and his hands came around to massage
her stomach below the ropes.

In the middle of the worst cramp of all, his
fingers dipped even lower and he tapped her clit, drew circles
around it, then tapped again, and Pretty found herself clenched
tight all over and for too many reasons all at once.

She shifted her knees, which dragged her
nipples along the floor, and they tightened into hard nubs.

She was undeniably aroused.

She'd expected complete humiliation, and she
had that too, in spades, but something about his hands, his gentle
murmurings against her complete vulnerability, electrified her.

The water seemed to stop.

Jeremiah was on his knees behind her, and
she felt a couple of tugs, heard a swishing noise, and felt a
sudden increase of pressure that made her release a little cry of
alarm.

"Shh," he said, and then curved his body
over her back, sheltering her."Don't cry. It's just the inflatable
part that keeps the tube in."

She writhed beneath him, intensely
uncomfortable because her body was telling her to empty.

"It can't stay for long," she said, trying
not to whine."

"A few minutes," he answered. "You can do
it."

She didn't know if she could.

He petted her and talked to her, and told
her how much she mattered to him, how he devoted a great deal of
his life looking for people like her, who were interested, not
afraid; who were open to learning to question, open to change. "Be
open to me," he said, a plea in his voice. "Please."

There was a part of her standing off to the
side again, watching this horror show, that wanted to laugh right
out loud. How could she possibly be
any more open
?

He made her wait there, on the floor, until
she was begging him to let her finish, although she fought the
actual tears because she still didn't like him licking her eyes,
and because it felt like he was taking something from her.

He finally, finally helped her to the toilet
to release the water and everything else, and then he put her
through the whole process again.

This time she did cry, and he crouched down
in front of her and tilted her face up, so he could capture her
tears with his tongue. There was a sound coming out of him that was
nothing like Pretty had ever heard before. It was a whining groan,
filled with pain and yearning and the biggest sense of loss she'd
ever felt. It made her guts clench, not from the water, but in pain
for him, and she didn't even know what he was grieving.

She tried to stand, after, but collapsed,
legs too weak to hold her up.

Jeremiah cleaned her up, then carried her to
his bedroom. She wanted to protest the carrying, but she felt
child-tiny in his arms, fragile and insubstantial, as if she only
existed in a dream.

He set her on a padded bench and unwound the
rope, untied her hands. He opened a dresser drawer and handed her a
pair of white panties and a white tee shirt. "Put them on," he
said, voice soft, eyes kind. She did, grateful for the cover, for
this tiny reprieve from nakedness that felt like privacy.

When she was dressed, he tucked her into a
soft bed with an upholstered black leather headboard, said, "Just
rest," and went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Pretty felt strange and floaty, so she
snuggled into Jeremiah's blankets and drifted for a while.

Jeremiah returned wearing only a towel,
which he stripped off as he came to the bed. Pretty's eyes caught
on bumps of bone, ridges of rib cage, and that fall of long black,
black hair.

He slid underneath the sheet and blanket,
long pale nakedness, and she was embarrassed to see him that way,
embarrassed that he put her into clothing and took himself out of
it. It was strange and wrong and she didn't know what to do
now.

Her arms sticking out of the armholes of the
white tee shirt looked like odd sticks that didn't belong to her,
unrecognizable, the limbs of some brave tattooed woman, all twined
with fine lines of ink, so fine her skin was gray with it.

Her legs, the same, her feet, her toes for
gods' sake. She hadn't braved a look in the bathroom mirror at her
face, just… not wanting to know. She looked the way he wanted her
to look. That, ultimately, was what mattered.

Again, for the
she-didn't-know-how-many-times time, she wondered what the point
was. Whether he let her shower or not, his little pen drawings were
going to fade and wear off from sweat, oil, what have you – they
weren't going to last, no matter what he did or didn't allow.

He erased the space between them with a
combined motion of moving toward her and pulling her toward him by
an arm hooked over her waist. It was as startling as it was
awkward, and she laughed out loud at the awkwardness, the
ridiculousness of this whole situation.

She was supposed to be at home, in bed with
her husband, not here with a man who used to be a boy she loved. It
was like a fantasy, a fiction, not real life. Certainly not
Pretty's real life.

She cut off the laugh, wondering if this was
it, if she was now certifiable.

"I love your laugh," he said, his voice low
and intense. "It winds itself inside me and uncoils something
there. If things had been different, if
I
had been
different, I think I could have lived forever on your laugh."

Something in his expression was wholly open,
unmasked.

And no makeup.

"Where's your makeup?"

His clear eyes widened for a second, and
then he grinned. "Part of the ritual. I have to be all the way
naked for this part of the magick. But later… I'll do makeup again.
It'll be like… formal."