Курок Дуглас Пенелопа

She.

She was next. After I was done with Winter, I’d do it for him.

“I’m not afraid of you,” he said, even though his voice was laced with defeat. “I’m not afraid of anything anymore. If you don’t kill me, I’ll keep pushing you until you have to. And I will fuck you over any way I can.” He bared his teeth, growling. “In ways she’s gonna love.”

I slammed him into the wall again, but he still didn’t fight me.

“You wanna watch?” he egged me on. “Come on. She won’t even know you’re in the room. You can see if she likes it with me. See if she responds to me better than she responded to you.”

Stop it.

“See how hard I make her sweat and moan and how fast I can make her come on my dick,” he sneered.

I glowered at him, my fingers digging into his neck. She wouldn’t want him. And so help her God if she did.

“So do it then,” he urged, finally shoving his palms into my chest and pushing me back. “Kill me before I can fuck her, because I won’t stop.”

He pushed me again, and I stumbled back, my fingers tightening into fists.

No. Stop, just stop.

“Because I have a passion for self-destruction, and you always knew it, and you always knew we would end badly.” His voice cracked. “This won’t end any other way.”

Was he right? Did I think our friendship would survive our future?

Be with me. Just be with me. Not against me.

But he shoved at me again. “I’ll take her from you.”

“Don’t,” I choked out.

The walls were closing in. I couldn’t breathe.

But he pushed me again, and I winced, my chest now aching. “And she’ll take me away from you, and then you’ll be all alone. Like you always should’ve been.”

My stomach churned, and I seethed, and then he hit me, fire spreading across my cheek and sending my head jerking to one side.

“You’re gonna deal with me!” he yelled and then hit me again, sending me stumbling. “Kill me. Fucking finish the job and kill me, because I’m fucked, and I hate you, and if you don’t take me out, I’ll take you out, because it’s fucking over!”

He shoved me again and again, and I was losing it. I shot out my hands to stop him, “Don’t. Stop.”

A tear streamed down his face, but he wiped it away, growling. “Do it,” he bit out. “Snap my neck, rip out my throat, or strangle me, you sick fuck! Just do it!”

He punched me across the jaw, pain shot through my head, and I clenched my fists so tight my nails dug into my palms.

“Will…” I breathed out, unable to catch my breath. “Don’t.”

“I’ll never stop.” He shook his head, coming in again. “Never.”

He pushed me. “Kill me.”

Stop.

His hands slammed into me again. “I’m going to take her away from you, so kill me.”

You can’t have her. I’ll…

“Kill me, so I’m out of your way!” he bellowed. “If you did it right last time I’d be at the bottom of the fucking ocean, so finish the job, and then you can have her!”

An image of him sinking below the deep, black surface of the sea crawled into my head, and I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to get rid of it.

He would’ve been gone forever.

“Fucking kill me,” he said, his voice even and suddenly calm.

“No.”

“Kill me. You’re going to have to.”

I shook my head.

He grabbed me by the collar, screaming, “Do it!”

And I grabbed his neck in my hands, ramming him into the wall of the pool house. “I can’t!”

He grunted, breathing hard, and I dropped my forehead to his, unable to swallow the fucking needles in my throat.

“Fuck, I can’t,” I whispered. “Please, stop. Please.”

“I can’t,” he mouthed, and tears streamed down his face. “I can’t.”

I moved my hands to his face, just holding him, and ready to say so much, because I never had to hide anything from him. He never saw weakness when he looked at me. I wanted to tell him things.

I wanted to tell him that I never would’ve hurt him. That I didn’t know what Trevor was doing, and it wasn’t supposed to go down like that, because out of all three of my friends, Will was the one I would always save first. That my pride and anger wouldn’t let me retreat, and that if he had been pulled to the ocean’s bottom, out of my reach, I would’ve followed him.

I would’ve fucking followed him and rotted down there, close to wherever he was, because nothing I would’ve acquired after that—my inheritance or my vengeance on Winter—would’ve been worthwhile without him.

His breath fell on my mouth, and his wet hair behind his head grew warm under my fingers. He needed me. I dug my fingers into his scalp. He had to realize he needed me. No one was going to hold him up like I would.

No one.

I dove in, catching his bottom lip between my teeth and pushing us both through the pool house door.

He stumbled back, snarling and ready to fight me, but I rushed in, sinking my mouth into his and pushing him down onto the couch. I covered his lips with mine, gripping his throat with one hand and holding myself up with the other.

“Fuck you,” he sneered, pulling his mouth away.

I grinned and flicked his lip with my tongue. “Only if you want to.”

Releasing his neck, I yanked his jeans open and slid my hand down inside as he grabbed at my hand, trying to stop me, but I gripped his fucking cock, feeling it was already a little stiff.

“What is she wearing?” I started, stroking him, not giving him time to think. “What is she fucking wearing for you, huh?”

He stopped breathing, closed his eyes, and tipped his head back, letting out a groan. “Damon, stop.”

I hovered my mouth over his, stroking him a little faster as I nudged my knee between his legs, parting them. “What is she wearing?”

He grew full and hard, and I traced my tongue along his bottom lip. “She wants you in her mouth.” I tightened my grip on his cock. “She wants this in her mouth.”

“Yeah.”

And I had him.

“What the fuck is she wearing?” I stroked him again and again, his skin smooth and hot in my hand.

“She sleeps…” He paused, gasping at what I was doing to him.

“Yes?”

His body shook. “She sleeps in these…in these sweet, little panties,” he said, his eyes still closed and imagining the object of his obsession. “There’s the smallest triangle of fabric in the front, just covering her.”

“Red?” I bit his lip again.

But he shook his head. “Blue. And a T-shirt. She sleeps on her stomach, and her hips move in her sleep. God, her ass…”

“Mmmm…” I felt a little cum drip out of him. “She’s grinding that cunt into the bed, huh? Her pussy must be nice and warm.”

“Fuck, it’s hot.” He grabbed the back of my neck, our mouths centimeters away from each other. “Harder.”

“And wet?” I teased him, jerking him faster and harder how he wanted. “Is it wet?”

He nodded, his breathing growing heavier.

“And tight?”

“Yeah.”

“Lick her, Will,” I told him, giving him what that bitch never did. “She loves you in the dark. She lets Will Grayson III, star of the basketball team, come over to her house, climb into her room at night, and come inside her whenever he wants.”

His abs contracted, he got lost in the images in his head, bared his teeth, dug his fingers into the back of my neck, and then…released, spilling into my hand and down his long cock.

He moaned, sweat glistening across his neck and chest, and he kept his eyes closed, because he knew once he opened them the spell would be broken. It wasn’t her on top of him. It was me.

After a moment, his breathing had calmed, and he opened his eyes slowly. His shoulders were relaxed, and he was done fighting.

I climbed off him and stood up, yanking a pool towel out of the wardrobe. I finished with it and tossed it down to him.

“That’s all you can do, isn’t it?” he said, cleaning and zipping up. “You can only fuck people or fuck with them. That’s the only way you can connect.”

He threw the towel down, calmer than before but still… still not with me.

“Thinking back now,” he mused solemnly, “I wonder if anything I got from you was real.”

I didn’t know if he was right, and I didn’t care. I maneuvered, he maneuvered, and I moved again, always with my win in sight. I did what I had to.

The trouble was, I didn’t want to annihilate Will, and if I won whatever game we were playing, would I destroy him in the process? Was what he said true? Was it impossible for us to end any other way?

“If you hurt Winter, you’ll deal with me,” he said.

I righted my clothes, swiping the rain off my lapels. But I didn’t respond. He knew I wouldn’t heed his warning. I let him dole it out anyway.

“And Michael,” he added. “And Kai.”

“And Rika and Banks?” I threw in.

“And Alex.” He shot me a sinister little grin, meeting my challenge. “Our army is bigger. You have no one.”

“All I need is me. One person willing to do what none of you will.” I paused and added, “You don’t have the stomach for this, Will. Don’t doubt that I will do whatever I have to keep what’s mine. That little girl belongs to me.”

He hesitated, looking me up and down and then meeting my eyes with resolution. “She doesn’t want to belong to you, Damon.”

 

 

I planted my hand on the gray-tiled wall, letting the hot, rainfall shower water cascade down my neck and back.

She doesn’t want to belong to you.

She doesn’t want to belong to you.

Oh, I knew. And I was going to take great pleasure in delivering lots of what she didn’t want.

But every muscle in my body tightened and knotted anyway, unable to let go.

She doesn’t want to belong to you.

I closed my eyes, hearing the words echo in my ears.

 

“You belong to me,” my mother says. “You belong to me, and I belong to you.

She lays beside me, slipping an arm underneath my head, looking down at me as she holds me close. “We’ll always be each other’s, Damon. Mommy will be yours no matter what. For the rest of your life. I’m yours, baby.”

I nod, but absently, I close my fists, the sheets of her bed bunching in my hands. I sleep with my mom a lot. She likes to keep me close, but I don’t tell anyone. I’ve been to other peoples’ houses—other kids my age—and I know this isn’t how they do things in their homes.

My mother’s silk nightgown caresses my chest, and her black hair tickles my arm. She gazes down at me with a small smile.

“I don’t belong to your father,” she says. “Not the way I belong to you. I was only thirteen when he first saw me. Did he ever tell you that? I was only a couple of years older than you are now.”

She dives in and tickles my neck, and I let out a little laugh before turning my head and pushing her hand away.

“He came to see my ballet troupe perform,” she goes on. “He came a lot, and I would see him watching me from the audience. All the other girls were so jealous, because I got flowers and presents, and I never did before. He called me his little princess, and I would dream he was going to take me home and make me his little girl and take care of me, so I didn’t have to live in that cold theater anymore with so little to eat.”

She looks off for a moment, her smile falling. I know my mother was young when she married my father. I hear people whisper when they find out she has an eleven-year-old son.

“And then one night,” she continues, “a big, black car came to get me. I was told to dress in my prettiest costume, they did my hair and makeup, and I left the theater. I was taken to his house, outside of Moscow, and he asked me to dance for him.” Her face lights up again, and she dives in, whispering as if it’s some secret. “And I did. I twirled and leaped and danced under the chandeliers on the marble floors of the hall, feeling like I was in a dream. He let me eat cake and drink champagne.”

One finger of her hand trails down the center of my torso, and then all of her fingers fan out across my stomach, making the little hairs on my body stand up. That feels good.

“And when I fell asleep,” she says, watching her hand caress me, “I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten to the bed. To his bed.” She stares off, lost in the memory. “I’m not sure when I woke up. Maybe I’d only been asleep for a moment, but when I opened my eyes, he was pulling my costume down… baring my little body…and ripping off my tights and slippers.”

I freeze, listening to her and surprised but not surprised, either. I haven’t heard this before.

But my father does awful things.

“I started to cry,” she tells me, “scared and screaming when he kissed me all over and bit my body so hard, and when he pulled down my panties and shoved himself inside me, I…” She breathes hard, still locked on the images in her head. “I liked it, Damon. I liked it.”

I know what she’s talking about. What he was doing to her. I’ve seen it before.

But she was thirteen. Her ballet studio in town had girls who were thirteen. I can’t imagine any of them…

“I liked being ravaged by him,” she continues. “I was a big girl now and he was so much rougher than the men I’d seen taking some of the other dancers when I would peek in the rooms of the theater. This is what men do. They ravage. They’re strong and they ravage, Damon.

She looks down at me, and that’s when I snap out of it and realize her fingertips are trailing down the front of my sleep pants.

“And it’s time you start practicing,” she says.

She reaches inside my pants and takes me in her hand, rubbing it.

I shake my head, squirming as I try to inch away from her.

“Shhh, it’s okay,” she croons, kissing the corner of my mouth and moving her hand faster on me. “Do you feel that, baby? It’s getting hard. That means you like it. You like what Mommy’s doing.”

No, I don’t. She’s not supposed to do that. She’s not…

I still, closing my eyes as it pumps with blood and sticks up straight.

No, no, no, no…. I don’t want this. I want to leave. I want to leave.

“Enjoy it, baby. Just enjoy it.” She leaves little kisses all over my mouth and face as she strokes. “You’re a strong man and strong men get as many women as they want to make them feel good.”

I don’t want…. I don’t want…

I squeeze my eyes shut and let out a groan. No, no, no…

 

I grabbed the soap from the dish and lathered it up, washing my chest and stomach again before soaping up my cock and getting it clean. Cleaner.

That was the first fucking time my mother ever touched me like that. The first episode of what turned into years of her on me.

My throat swelled with the vomit rising, and my shoulders slumped as I tried to turn inward, making myself as small as possible. It was an old feeling, but one I knew well. It made me hide in the fountain. In the maze. In showers and in closets, because if no one saw me, they wouldn’t see the shame.

She’s gone, I told myself. She’ll never take from me again. No one does.

But looking back over the years, I realized now it started long before that night. She took me into the shower with her long after I was able to take them on my own. She washed me and dried me and stayed in the room when I dressed and undressed.

And after months of doing everything she could with her hands and mouth, she finally came to my room one night and…

I used to brag I had my first woman at twelve, reveling in how other guys either thought I was lying or I was so lucky, because of all the whores my father kept around the house. But I always told the truth.

My father had to know what was going on. In his head, though, it made me a man.

And it wasn’t like he was against raping children, either. Considering how young my mother had been when they met.

I rinsed and shut off the water, grabbing a towel and drying off. I wrapped it around my waist and stepped out of the shower, walking to the mirror and wiping the condensation off.

I stared at my dark eyes, a little darker than hers, and the same black hair. A shadow lay on my jaw, and I picked up my straight razor, running it under the faucet to make sure it was clean.

What did Winter feel when she thought about me? Was the anger so thick that was all there was?

He asked her to dance for him.

He asked her to dance like I’d asked Winter to dance for me.

He watched my mother as I watched Winter.

Was that it then? Did I do to Winter in high school what my father did to my mother? Did I groom her?

I looked up, meeting my own black eyes in the mirror.

The secret of life that everyone knew and everyone forgot was that we weren’t alone. We thought we were unique. We thought we were the first.

No one has been through what I’ve been through.

No one else is feeling this.

No one knows what it’s like to be me.

This is the first time anyone has endured what I’ve endured, right?

They’re lies we tell ourselves, because we think we’re special. Because it would lessen the entitlement to suffer to know what we’re going through is not uncommon. It was a secret I never forgot and was able to use to keep things in perspective, so I could get through the shit in my head, but now...

Now I wished I could forget it. I wanted to be alone.

I didn’t want to know that I was like him or he was like me or that life followed patterns and history repeated itself. I wasn’t him, and Winter wasn’t my mother, and no one has been where we were.

This is special.

It’s different.

It’s unique and all mine.

She and I…we’re alone in the universe. No one was us.

And unlike my mother at thirteen, Winter fucking deserved everything that would happen to her.

I shaved and finished in front of the sink, knowing any doubts I had wouldn’t make me feel any better than being right where I was.

So I would stay the course. My mother was right about one thing. I liked everything when it was hard.

Walking into the bedroom, I spotted Arion right away, sitting on the bed with another girl, but I didn’t slow as I walked to the table with the bowl and dug out my watch.

“Did you bring me something, Arion?” I fastened the watch to my wrist, not looking at either one of them.

She wasn’t supposed to be in here, and she fucking knew it. The master bedroom was split into two rooms, conjoined by a walk-in closet in the middle. She had her space, I had mine. Maybe I’d invite her in one of these nights, but that was my call.

“A present,” she answered. “Just a little one.”

I spared a glance to the bed again, seeing her sitting behind the young, black woman, her arm draped over the girl’s shoulder and both of them looking at me like they were here for my feeding. I couldn’t see what Arion was wearing, but a strap of silk fell down her arm, while her other hand reached around, caressing the girl’s bare stomach.

“How old is she?” I picked up my cigarettes and shook one out.

“However old you want me to be,” I heard the girl answer for Arion.

I lit the cigarette and pinched the bridge of my nose, blowing out smoke. Jesus, fuck. Will would run into that bed, already hard and ready to fuck.

I didn’t like being fed. I needed to hunt.

“Her pussy’s dripping,” Arion cooed. “Young, tight, and hot. So hot.”

My cock started to throb a little, diving into my head and envisioning the feel of her.

“Really tight,” the girl taunted. “My foster daddy used to say I’m tighter than his hand when he would do me.”

Smoke poured out of my mouth as I laughed under my breath. Jesus, honey, you’re barking up a tall tree with that shit. Whatever little taboo story Arion fed you to get me hard is clearly too tame. My version of naughty is off most peoples’ grid.

“Fuck her bare,” Arion said. “Look how wide she spreads.”

Despite the games they played, I couldn’t help but look over. The young woman sat at the edge of the bed, her wide open pussy bare, and her tits peeking out of the bottom of a little half-shirt.

Scenarios popped in my head, instinctively searching for what I needed to make this work.

A threesome. Girl on girl. Tying them up. A gag.

Yeah. A gag.

I took another drag, not taking my eyes off them as the pictures played in my head.

“Fuck her bare,” Arion said again. “Fuck her as hard as you want, and make me watch. When it’s time to come, come inside me.”

And there it was. What she really wanted from me.

 

 

 

Winter

 

Present

 

“Where are you taking me tonight?” I asked, leading Isabella and Jade up to my room, so I could finish getting ready.

“It’s a surprise.”

“I’m blind,” I shot back, heading to my closet and running my fingertips over the braille on the markers to find the black shirts. “Broken glass on a floor can be a surprise for me. I’m not game unless you get specific.”

“It’s Halloween-y,” Jade offered.

But Isa hurried to shut her up. “Shhh…”

Great. It was almost Halloween—and worse, Devil’s Night—but my house already felt like a Fear Fest. I wasn’t in the mood.

And I wasn’t sure I’d be allowed to leave.

“You need a girls’ night,” Jade chimed in again. “Especially with that freak show sleeping right down the hall. Let’s have some fun.”

I forced a small laugh, Damon immediately coming to mind, but I knew she meant my sister. All the dancers at the studio I grew up with—including Isabella and Jade—had plenty of Ari’s antics over the years as she waited on me at lessons or sat through recitals and performances.

I sifted through my black clothing, not finding the black, leather pants with zippers down the legs. Where were they? I hadn’t worn them since last winter.

A phone rang, and someone moved on my bed. “I have to take this,” Jade said. “I’ll be in the bathroom.”

I continued searching for my pants, diving into the white, blue, and every other section of clothing.

“So, how are you?” Isabella asked.