outside these walls can’t be stopped. It can’t ever be stopped.
Holly shifts closer to the edge of the cot, and my hands come up. Force of habit. I stop myself from touching her at the last moment as she eases herself onto the floor. “Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?” Her legs tremble with the effort of standing, and there’s high color in her cheeks, pain she tries to hide, but it’s so clear. It’s sketched all over her brown eyes like lightning across a dark sky. “Don’t move? Don’t talk? Don’t be a person?”
“Don’t hurt yourself.” It’s not often that I feel even an echo of desperation. I learned not to feel that a long time ago. But I feel it now, like a distant wave.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispers, and my heart clenches. Stops. Starts again.
I don’t know how to tell her that we won’t survive.
The right combination of words will never come. We’re sinking, drowning, and I’m going to smile and nod and reassure her all the way to the goddamn ocean floor. I’m not going to tell her that we’ll probably die. “I never said I knew how to love.”
Her eyes flash, surprise in the lift of her eyebrows. “You love me?”
“Why the fuck do you think I’m pushing you away?” This hurts more than the guilt and the shame. It’s an awful, tearing truth and it feels like sandpaper leaving my lips. It feels like fire in the lungs and steel through my gut.
“I thought it might be the other thing.” Both corners of her mouth turn down, vulnerability flickering through her expression and disappearing.
“Hate?” Every muscle reaches for her. Longs for her. My palms ache. “Yes, I think I hate you too. For making me want you. For making me weak. And most of all, I hate you for putting yourself in danger.”
Holly takes a quick step forward, too fast, and the hate detonates into fear. I grab for her without thinking and pull her between my legs. She gasps.
“That hurt.” She steadies herself with her small hands on my shoulders, and I’ll be damned, I’ll be fucked. She sounds wondering. Relieved. Not like I’ve just done the unthinkable and kicked her when she was down. “Finally.”
“Finally? Finally?” I’m so pissed at her, so righteously enraged, that I do the only thing I can think to do and wrestle her into a kiss. Damn her for being so reckless. Damn me for putting her in a scrap of cloth that’s barely a bra so I can see her peaked nipples pushing up the fabric. Damn us both to another circle of hell.
Holly kisses me back hard, groaning into my mouth. I have to be killing her.
I stand her up again, trying to push her away, but she digs her nails into the backs of my hands. “No,” she says. “No.” Then she reaches for me again.
“I’m hurting you.”
“Yes.” She follows this with a bite and I bite her back, then soothe the bite with my tongue. It’s been torture, not kissing her. Not taking her mouth. Not taking her. I’ve taught her plenty of lessons about the way she should behave, the way she should not fucking push me, and she hasn’t learned a single one.
With the taste of her on my lips my restraint shatters. It’s been weak for days. Weak since I brought her down to this crypt knowing that we were never coming out alive. I have felt every second pass us by. All of them. Ticking down to the moment when death takes us and wishing I could do this to pass the time.
I sink my teeth into the flesh of her shoulder and this time the noise she makes is so dirty, so filthy, that I do it again just to hear it. “The fuck is wrong with you?” I murmur into her skin.
“You’re what’s wrong with me.” She rakes her nails under the collar of my shirt. Four bright lines against my skin. I hope she scars me. I hope I never stop feeling her touch, not until I draw my last breath. “Hate me even more, sweetheart. Make me feel it.”
“I hate you so fucking much.”
“More than that.” I try to catch her by the wrist but she’s determined to get to my pants.
Which she does.
To my belt and my zipper, and then she’s fumbling with the waistband.
Damn us both.
I help her.
I help her because I don’t want her to move any more than she has to. At