Kiss Me in the Dark Anthology - Monica James Page 0,59
reply, “Yes.”
“Try to relax.” He fills me up, stretches me, makes me whole. He starts off slow, gentler than I think he would have done if he hadn’t just deflowered me. After a while the pain subsides, gradually transforms until I’m no longer tensing with every thrust, but leaning into it. By the end, he’s fucking me like a freight train—unstoppable and raw with need. He comes so hard, he practically roars.
I don’t, of course. It’s my first time, and the pain just about outweighed the pleasure. My mind is too fogged to understand what’s going on as he climbs off me and slides down my body. His lips caress the inside of my thigh, and I shiver as his fingers carefully stroke over my core. The touch isn’t designed to excite me—it’s more of an apology. He moves around in the dark, undoing my wrists and my ankles.
“You enjoy that?” he rumbles, and the depths of his voice make my legs press together.
“Yeah, I—I did.” The most startling thing, the thing that makes me most sick, is that I’m telling the truth. What the hell is wrong with me?
He grunts, unthreading his belt from around my neck. The release of pressure makes me feel like I’m floating two feet off the bed.
I’m immobile as he packs up his things. I can sense him next to me pulling on his clothes. Then, when he’s dressed, he stands beside the bed looking down on me. He brushes his fingertips against my cheek again, so soft it’s almost not a touch at all.
“Be seeing you.” He heads for the door, and the light from the hallway nearly splits my skull apart when he opens it. And there my mystery man pauses, and I catch the one and only glimpse of him I ever get. Wearing a worn leather jacket, his back to me, a black duffel bag in his right hand, he tips his head down to his shoulder. He doesn’t look back at me. He hovers there long enough for me to make out the silhouette of his profile, his dark, mussed hair, the bruised pout to his full lips.
And then he goes.
I never find out his name.
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“That’s it. Get it all up. Christ, girl, how much did you fucking drink?”
The tiny blonde kneeling in front of the toilet bowl makes a sound that tells me exactly how much she drunk, and the answer is way too much. She’s gonna be paying for this for days. Frustrating, because Lacey cannot be left alone at the best of times. Like this, hurling her guts up over the side of the bathtub, groaning and shaking like an overdosing addict, it’d be a horrible mistake to leave the warehouse for even a second, and I have somewhere I need to be. Charlie pinged me a job over an hour ago now, and he does not appreciate delays. If I’m not out of the door and across Seattle in the next forty minutes, there’s gonna be hell to pay.
Lacey heaves, the column of her spine flexing beneath the thin cotton of her Barney the Dinosaur t-shirt as I awkwardly rub my hand up and down her back. A fresh torrent of vomit splatters into the bottom of the tub. “Nurrrgghhhh!” she moans. “This…wasn’t…it wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was having…a good time. It’s not good anymore. Now, it’s bad. Really, reeeeeeealllly bad.” She sags back, propping herself up against my leg, the base of her skull resting against my kneecap as she toys mindlessly with my boot’s loose shoelace. I’d been about to tie it when I heard her puking from the living room.
For a drawn-out beat, I don’t say anything. I’ve lost count of the weeks that I’ve had the pleasure of (and the untenable levels of stress that have come with) Lacey’s presence. She showed up soaking wet and half-dead on my doorstep, and there wasn’t much to be said or done about it. It was clear that she was going to stay and that was that, so I accepted it, adjusted my reality and lifestyle to accommodate her as best I could. And now here we are.
I’ve grown accustomed to her, I suppose, but there are still things about this weird new arrangement that still take me by surprise. For example, she’s not afraid of me. Not in the slightest. And it isn’t that