ೇ Dollette ˚ৎ

ᥫ᭡ Strawberries, cherries, and an angel’s kiss in spring.

Pearl ౨ৎ twenties. s/her. psalms of girlhood. rosaries n’ ribbons. powdered sugar afternoons. flushed cheekbones. coquette kisses. dollette dewdrops. wishes you tucked under your pillow. growing pains you can’t quite name. memories you miss even before they’re gone. ˚ৎ

ᥫ᭡ Most Recent Work ˚ৎ

rules visuals masterlist FAQs anons

(or, How to Calm a Cotton-Brain with a Criminal's Hands.)

a series by heaventarnished ©

where Rafe's got a serial killer’s grip and a sugar addict’s weakness for her stupid little grin.

word count: 8k

ᥫ᭡ CONTENT DISCLOSURE...

toxic relationship dynamics | dub-con & non-con undertones | physical aggression | recreational objectification & dehumanization | psychological manipulation | extreme size difference & power imbalance | degradation & dark praise kink | overstimulation | somnophilia-adjacent themes | general filth & rough handling | etc.

Patience was a muscle Rafe Cameron hadn't ever needed to flex before, purely because nobody had ever bothered him enough to force the issue. If something, or someone, annoyed him, he cut it off at the root. Simple. But Pamela Marmont hadn't quit pouting since the valet handed over the keys, and fuck if that stubborn little minx wasn't a damn good invitation to put that theory to the test. Or maybe just shove her head through the sunroof.

Quiet wasn’t Pamela’s default; usually, she occupied the passenger seat with so much babbling it started sounding like static emanating from some froth-riddled radio station. Disjointed little stories she never quite finished, questions he never fretted too much to answer, branching asides that looped on themselves until even she seemed nauseated from the verbal gymnastics. The sort of shallow, sugar-pink, empty-calorie commentary that left him half-listening and half-planning what he’d shove in her mouth to shut her up. Or better yet, wrangle her by the jaw and staple those pretty lips shut once and for all.

Tonight, though? She was quiet, which, for her, meant only about forty per cent less output than usual. Rafe had chalked it up to the food coma she swore she always got from crème brûlée, but she wasn’t scrolling her phone, wasn’t babbling about the lobster bisque or how pretty the bathrooms were — she was glued, concentrating out the windscreen like she’d been wired to inattention all along.

They left the Island Club late, Pamela tottering alongside him in heels she’d complained about three times but refused to take off, particularly after he'd begrudgingly offered to hold them for her. He'd even tossed in a grin, a quiet "C'mon, doll, you know I'd carry you if you asked nicely enough," but she'd only given him some limp-hearted smile that didn't quite touch her pupils. A smile so thin it looked pasted on.

The banquet had been textbook Rafe Cameron: shake a few hands, flash that too-white smile, and be just charming enough to make people forget every unpleasant thing they've heard about him. Pamela had been on his arm like a decorative accessory, all bows and bare shoulders, sipping a drink she’d chosen solely because it matched her nails.

She’d smiled where she was supposed to, laughed where it was expected, but she’d seen it… the way women leaned in close enough to smell him, eyes hovering over his mouth like they were thinking about how it might taste. Men too, sometimes. It wasn’t anything he did; it was just how he was. Rafe could have anyone in the room if he wanted. Rafe could have anyone, period.

And now that thought was stuck in her head like gum in her hair.

She settled into the passenger seat without a word. No commentary on the valet, no obligatory dig at the cushy interior of his Mercedes, nor some fawn-eyed quip about the exorbitant bill he'd just fronted. She merely… sat there, stiffly perched and fastening her seatbelt as though she were auditioning for some driving safety PSA. Or perhaps a hostage negotiation.

Rafe noticed, of course. The way she propped herself up close to the passenger door, knees angled toward the glazing instead of fronting him. He licked his lips, thinking. He’d grown up with two sisters, meaning he knew girls could just… spiral for no reason and throw out some random insecurity in the middle of something else entirely. He chalked it up to one of those bouts, even if she didn’t look particularly teary or tragic about it.

But it was so contrary to her that he kept glancing over, one hand loose on the wheel, just to make sure she was still breathing, presumably to gauge if she was just timeworn or if there was something brewing in that cottony head of hers. She didn’t pitch anything, which was another outlier — and Rafe wasn’t the type to press. That'd imply he actually gave a fuck about the answer. He only cared about the information. If she wanted to talk, she would. Or she wouldn’t, and he’d prong it out of her when he felt like it. Every last miserable syllable.

But she hadn’t stuttered out more than two syllables. For Pamela, silence wasn’t precious — it was suspicious. And if there was one thing Rafe couldn’t stand, it was not knowing what she’d gotten lodged in that cotton-stuffed skull of hers. Like a bug in a jar.

He drove one-handed, the other palm locating her thigh automatically, his thumb stroking over the hem of her little silk skirt. His touch, a proprietary weight. Normally, that was all it took for her to melt sideways into him, chatter bubbling out of her like champagne. About how manly his hands felt, or how her legs always softened to butter whenever he touched her like that.

But not tonight. Tonight, she just glanced down at his hand, gave him that same paper-thin smile, and went back to staring out at the passing streetlamps. Tonight, she was a locked safe, and he didn't have the combination. Yet.

"You flatlining on me or somethin'?" he asked eventually, casual but clipped, petting her thigh absentmindedly as he drove. His fingers dug in moderately, just enough to leave their imprint. “You’re awfully quiet for somebody who spent the last two hours making me pretend to care about the difference between sorbet and sherbet.”

Her mouth inclined, but it was only an inkling of a smile, gone before he could pin it down. Too quick to imprison, like an inquisitive insect. “M’fine,” she murmured, the words flat and scant as paper doll cutouts.

“Don’t give me that,” he groused, squeezing her thigh just forcefully enough to make her flinch further into the upholstery, her hip knocking against the console. “What’s going on in that little cotton head of yours? You got that sugar crash thing you always whine about?”

Again, another tiny quirk of glossed lips, but it wasn’t the beam he was used to coaxing out of her with that tone.

She gave the tiniest shrug, a shrug of dismissive, infuriating ignorance. "I told you, m'fine."

“That’s not a ‘fine’ fine,” he countered, drumming his fingers on the gearshift. “That’s the ‘I’m thinking really hard, and it’s probably about something dumb, and now I’m going to make it your problem’ fine.”

"Then I'm tired," she supplemented naively, her voice a tiny, muffled sound against her crossed arms, as if the bones-deep hassle of speech were simply too burdensome after a long day of, well, existing beautifully. She slumped feebly into the leather, like someone firmly convinced that being admired by an entire dining room qualified as manual labour.

“Mm-hm. 'Tired.'” He gave her an unconvinced nod, mouth twitching. “What, all that sitting in a chair wore you out? Should I call you a doctor? A veterinarian, maybe?”

Pamela huffed, all tight-lipped, and granted him the faintest sidelong glance, more concerned with avoiding his probing gaze than with preserving her dignity. Not that she had any left.

“C’mon, what’s in that little head?" Rafe retained, narrowly cocking his head. "Usually takes me half a second to get you smiling. Did you forget how, darling? What is this — delayed reaction?”

Pamela let out a small sigh, her shoulders slumping slightly. A sigh so delicate it might have been manufactured. "Nothing's the matter, Rafey."

Rafe's palm coaxed higher, his pressure softening to something a little more coercive. "Pammy…" His voice gravelled almost fondly so, the tone he adopted whenever he wanted to pry something out of her without her noticing. A predator's purr. “You’re killing me here. If you don’t tell me, I’m just gonna start guessing. And you know I’m gonna make 'em horrifically stupid.”

She snorted quietly, a feather-soft huff accompanying her breath, but didn’t bite. A tiny, pathetic defiance. Still, he considered it a partial win.

“Fine. Let’s see…” He pretended to think, drumming his fingers smoothly on the steering wheel. "You upset 'cause I didn't give you my tiramisu leftovers? Or maybe 'cause I forgot to tell you you looked 'soooo pretty' for the twentieth time tonight?"

Pamela smushed her lips together, trying to suppress a smile, too unwilling to give him the satisfaction of having responded. A game she was far too simple to play well.

“See, normally this is the part where you roll your eyes and tell me I’m an asshole,” he prodded, giving her thigh a little pinch. "C'mon." He leaned a little closer, his voice softer now, with that particular brand of condescension that made her eyes go all dewy when she was in the mood for it, like a lamb offered a poisoned treat. “Tell me. You mad at me? Somebody say something to you? You eat a bad scallop?”

She stubbornly shrugged her shoulders, still avoiding his line of sight, her chin tucked just so, like a toddler refusing to make eye contact after a forbidden cookie. A pout so ingrained he wondered if her lips were physically stuck that way.

He frowned. “Not gonna tell me?”

His voice held a false note of disappointment, perfectly pitched.

Something about how dismayed he sounded made her heart soften just a bit, and she finally looked up at him with a papery-thin smile. "'S nothing to tell."

"Alright," he sighed frustratedly, fixing his attention to the road ahead of them. He cranked the AC colder, letting the rugose air bite at her bare arms, as if the chill might shock a coherent thought loose. "Keep your secrets then. Just remember, you’re gonna crack before I do. You always do.”

Her half-smile twitched again, but she maintained her quietness the whole drive back. Quiet the only manner that Pamela could manage, which meant the occasional absent “mm” or muttered agreement to whatever offhand remark he made, like a wind-up toy running low on batteries, but none of the usual chirpy nonsense he’d gotten accustomed to.

By the time they got to his place, her strange little cloud still hadn’t lifted. She was still tight-lipped, he was still irritated, and the simmer had tipped into a boil. It simply so happened that Rafe had the sort of temperament that handled a boil by flipping the pot over. Or maybe just plunging his hand straight into it.

Pulling into his driveway, he’d decided to drop it, or better yet, to postpone it until she was pliant and flushed and too cock-drunk to guard whatever was rattling around in there. Then it would be easy. Too easy. He’d wring it out of her one way or another. Like squeezing juice from a limp fruit.

Pamela's footsteps barely cleared past the threshold before Rafe had corralled two fistfuls of her. Her skirt bunched like a napkin in one palm, the other clasping her jaw with the sort of permissioned grip that implied, 'You're mine,' in a way she’d be too airheaded to clock. His thumb coaxed her cheeks to blossom into a sullen, pinkened glare, like he’d just watered something purely for the pleasure of watching it wither.

Whatever pout she'd been fermenting since dessert, that sour little hitch parked between her teeth like a stubborn pebble she was too stupid to spit out, Rafe figured it'd spring loose quicker if he rattled her from the root up. The same way you'd loosen change from a vending machine. No sweet-talking, no “You alright, doll?” routine. Just a harsh plant backwards until her spine kissed the partitioning and his mouth latched lithely over her jaw like he was stamping an inventory.

She was still distracted enough to miss her cue. No little gasp, no kittenish “hi” when he crowded in, and it needled him like a splinter under the nail. If she were gonna keep acting like a locked safe, he’d just crack her with blunt force.

Pamela let loose a startled squeak when he hauled her astern by the waistline, steering her into the master bedroom like a misbehaving shopping cart.

“Careful, Rafey—”

“Mm, no,” he murmured, nipping at her earlobe. "You had all the banquet to be careful. We’re past that now.”

Her giggles were soft and a little breathless, like she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to take pleasure in it. That was fine — he’d get her sorted.

The mattress took her in one graceless bounce, her body hitting the coverlet with all the elegance of a felled coat. Heels almost surgically attached, a little silk skirt garroted so far up her spine it could've been mistaken for a hair ribbon, and panties strangled halfway to her ankles. Rafe never probed a zipper or clasp; he didn’t have to. Didn’t want to. There was something gratifying about leaving her partially clothed, like a toy he could prop back on the shelf the way he found it, except now it wouldn’t pass for something novel.

Rafe knelt behind her like a butcher preparing to truss a bird, knees hitting the mattress with a thump that made her jolt slightly. Not because she was alarmed, but because she was never quite sure when the foreplay ended and the consequence began.

Though Rafe never bothered with teasing, not properly. No feathery traceries upon her thighs, no preliminary fingering meant to tenderise her up like meat for marination. Not when she had already gotten herself so worked up, so slick and silly and soft-brained with need, all doe-eyed and dumb from the friction of her own tantrum. So primed and oversensitive, and she didn’t even know it — twitchy as a touch lamp, brainlight blinking out behind her eyes the second his breath grazed the nape of her neck.

No, his suggestion of foreplay was strong-arming her into submission. One stiffened hand smoothed over the supple stem of her backbone's arch like he was settling out a sprung vine — flattening the flinch, taming the twitch, coaxing that chaste vertebrae bow into something more servile, more pretty for plucking. She angled for him like some trussed-up alley cat, back bowed and quivering at the base, a bouquet of nerves in full bloom. His other hand dipped over the plump of her hip, palming like an orchard arm catching purchase. Thumbs notched into the peach-pit gullies of her pelvis, prying her open with all the patience of someone splitting figs at their seam. He arranged her like something to be eaten, knees parted like peel, elbows caving, cheek sticky-sweet against the mattress as he made a pretty little handling of her. Softened, spoilt, split for the taking.

He didn’t climb onto her so much as close in, waiting her out the way a wolf loped after something it already knew was cornered. One knee pitched to the mattress alongside her thigh, and the other pried her legs apart in mind-numbing, mollycoddled increments. Mercilessly unhurried, as if coaxing the halves of an overripe apricot. She resisted, sort of. Her hips ankylosed like a rusted garden gate, too narrow and needy for the stretch he was angling her into. She wasn’t made for this. Not for him. Not certainly.

But Pamela was nothing if not tragically obliging. She melted pliant, a soft, squishy thing reluctantly giving forth under his hands. Arms folded limply like withered flower stems cushioning her cheek, breath already hiccupping in syrupy little puffs. Watery sweet whimpers, almost a purr, as if she'd mistaken his aggression for a more provocative form of petting.

His palm didn't amble; it pounced, apathetic and anarchic, along the notches of her spine like he was thumbing over the pages of a lop-eared novel. Not to soothe; Rafe wasn't sweet. Just to smush her out flatter, stupider, softer. One knee notched up between her twiggy thighs, the sleety kiss of his belt buckle taunting the swell of her ass.

“You still mad at me, pup?”

She didn’t answer. Just quarrelled her head laterally along the pillow, all belligerent and babyish, her lip puffed plumply from worrying it between her teeth. If she were aiming for adorable, she overshot it into something merely pornographic.

He huffed a quiet, scornfully patronising scoff deep within his lungs. Almost a chuckle, more of a hum. His fingers wrenching at the bunched-up silk near her hips until the hems whined in protestation as he bared the slant of her spine. That sweet little tailbone, dimpled like a dented candy, thirsting for his teeth. He only pinched at it ‘cause he liked the pathetic little peep she made. Like a browned berry splitting at the seam, all sugared skin and no structural integrity.

Hands skimming up the candy-pale slope of her hips, Rafe grunted something approving under his tongue. He palmed one cheek and let it gyrate stupidly in his grip like a peach past its prime viscosity. Too ripe, too pliable, too eager to please. She remained posed like a punished pet, all goosebumped plasticity and downcast posture, a near cartoonish imitation of time-out. Pamela on all fours looked less like a girl and more like some sadistic parody of submission, a grotesque caricature of servitude: long lashes batting blithely at bedsheets, backbone bowed like a ballerina in rigour mortis, thighs trembling not from want but from mere ornamental muscle deficiency.

"Christ," he muttered, nudging her ankles a little farther apart with the heel of his palm. “You’re built like a fucking Polly Pocket, y’know that?”

She gave a whimper in response, not too certain whether she'd just been insulted or complimented. But her body obliged like always, tensing, trying.

Rafe brought his palm down flat against her ass, a wet-sounding slap more scold than flirt.

"Say thank you."

"…Thank you,” she hiccupped, and it was so automatic, so prettily ingrained, he almost laughed.

“Good girl. Stupid girl. Lucky, lucky, lucky girl.”

He was already hard. Had been since she started sniffling in the car like a piteous little puppy. But he didn't move to fuck her just yet. Rafe didn't do rushing. Not when she was like this: all jelly-limbed confusion, creamy-glazed panties and confectionery-coated comeuppance. Not when she was this quiet, pliant, and pink-mouthed.

“Y'know,” he drawled, now kneeling behind her like he was preparing something sacrificial, both hands palming at the gelatinous globes of her ass the way a grocer might navigate squaring off a melon, “you get so stupid when you’re upset.”

“Do not,” she pouted, face still mushed into the pillow, half-garbled and petulant as a child denied dessert. “I’m, like… contemplative.”

“Oh, now you wanna play philosopher?” he ridiculed, thumbs nibbling into the lush, custard-cream give of her backside, parting her with blind indifference. “You’ve had your tongue stapled to the roof of your mouth all night, but now you remember how to whimper. What’s the magic word, huh? Is it cock?"

“Mmnh…”

“Yeah, I think it’s cock.”

Rafe didn’t so much as undress, just unbuttoned the necessary with the sophistication of a man no stranger to cinching a noose. Button by button, zipper by zip, loosened with that minimal, practised precision, like he’d done it a hundred times to a hundred girls who didn’t know better. No haste, just habit. He fished himself free with the cold-blooded grace of a killer coiling his favourite garrotte. Something silken and sentimental turned sinister, like winding fine ribbon through a pretty girl’s hair only to strangle her with it later.

His fixation was kept to her and her alone. That half-lidded, laden-lashed concentration while he worked himself over with ponderous, protracted passes from root to ruddy tip. Listless. Lascivious. A punitive pace. The primordial urge to get her squirming without so much as laying a finger on her properly, like a pet begging at the table for scraps.

He didn't bother with ceremony, just spat into his palm, lazily, and slicked himself up with the nonchalance of someone preparing to jam a key into a lock he’d long since stopped checking for splinters. One palm splayed flat between her shoulder blades, thumbing her downward until her tits dented the mattress, the other cuffed snug around the base of his cock. One last, gloating drag of his fist like it wasn’t already hers to take.

Pamela had barely gotten herself up on her elbows, still gathering her breath in syrupy little puffs, when Rafe notched himself between the plush swell of her thighs like a pit nestling into the soft soil of an orchard, thumbs harvesting her ripened flesh apart to gorge himself on something that wouldn't fit prettily. Not at first.

"Hold still, Pup," he muttered, the pet name bitten off with that velvet and verdigris drawl that always brought her bones to butter. "You start twitchin' and I'll miss."

She gave a tight, tremulous little mewl. Not resistance, not acquiescence either, just some startled sort of squeak a rabbit blurts when it realises the fox is already in the burrow. A biological warning. He grinned like he’d been handed a gift.

A prize-winning porcelain doll with a wet little hole.

Her body was a succulent geography of pulp and pith, soft pockets of yielding ounces stitched between stubborn ridges. Supple where he wanted her to melt, stolid where he wanted to pry, all glistening under his orchestrated occupation. She was plicated and partitioned. Parted like a blood orange cleaved with a thumb, baring the caramelised coronary inside. Nectarous and helpless, and his to bite into.

He admired it, that aching little cloven pocket of hers, already pearly from the drive home, no doubt, and hummed like a jam-maker considering the merits of a plump, fecund fig before chewing it.

"You're not even stretched," he tsked flippantly, voice mild as weather talk. “Christ. What were you doin’ all dinner, sittin’ there lookin’ pretty, thinkin’ about dessert, and not once about how I was gonna be inside you?”

The flat crack of his palm across the meat of her ass was more punctuation than punishment, and she bucked forward with a petulant little gasp.

“S’not my fault you’ve got a dick like a goddamn wine bottle,” she spat, though the syllables wobbled strainingly, stupidly, with need. “Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you—”

“Open your mouth again, and I’ll use it,” he warned lowly, the promise a sugar-coated shiv that blanched within his bite. “Wanna keep talkin’ shit, baby? You got such a pretty throat for it.”

Pamela didn’t answer. Not with her mouth, anyway. Her hips gave a slackening hitch, a back-arching impulse that contradicted her more compliantly than any confession. Coy, she could play with her lips, but not with the honey-glazed cunt between her thighs.

Rafe smiled. Cruel thing.

"Mouthy little doll," he cooed mockingly, angling his cockhead along the taut seam of her sex, nudgingly, with the same absent attention a man gives to a honeycomb, his cock combing the glazed lattice before cleaving into its gushing gold lining. “Bet I could stuff your throat and cunt both and still hear you runnin’ your mouth through your nose.”

"Rafe—"

"Shh. Contemplative girls get rewarded, don't they?"

A soft, preoccupied mewl pittered out of her. A pathetic little whine from the back of her throat, like her brain was still fumbling through flashcards to understand.

"You don't even know how lucky you are," he muttered, more to himself than her, coaxing the head of his cock along the slick folds of her slit like he was penning a love letter in Braille. “Get to act all fuckin’ weird at dinner… Give me that sour little puppy face… and still wind up here.”

It was patient, cruel, sadistic, and so, so much. The bare tip of him kissed her entrance, already twitching, already leaking. A too-large seed for such a small flower. Stretching her open took time, took patience, both of which he falsified, if only because watching her succumbing felt like the sweetest rot imaginable.

Pamela mouthed out something strangled, a pip popping. Her breath hitching between a gasp and a plea, she let out a wheezy, whiny little "Rafe," not so certain if it was a complaint or a thank-you note. Nails denting into the coverlet, one dainty palm stretching back, boneless, as though she might snatch him more closely or shove him away. It wasn't clear which.

“D'you even remember why you're pouting?” he asked idly, one hand palming the swell of her ass, thumb absently tracing a stretch mark like reading the rings of an aged apricot. "Or did it evaporate the second you got a little airflow under that skirt?"

Her face was crammed into the comforter, cheek squished and lips swollen with spit. She answered only with a whimper, unsure, her hips battling weakly against his hold.

He clicked his tongue. “Nah. Don’t do that. You wanna act out, you don’t get to help now.”

With one palm at the small of her back, he nudged the head of his cock right up against her swollen seam and gave a shallow push. Not even an inch, just enough for the pinkened crown to breach, and her whole body stiffened up, sucking in air like he'd stabbed her with something serrated.

“Oh—oh my god,” she gasped, forehead burrowing into the duvet, her back bowing like she hoped the distance might help. It didn’t.

“Yeah. Told you,” he snorted, groaning low through gritted teeth. A hiss between them like steam escaping a vent. “You’ve got zero prep. You’re choking me already. Fuckin’ greedy little silk sleeve.”

That provoked a pathetic little mewl from her. Not quite a protest. More like a pre-whimper, and he answered by bunching her up—just so—fingers sewn into her hipbones like hooks, yanking her onto his cock inch by inch until the stretch climbed past discomfort into something near delirium.

“Shh, shh,” he crooned, that smug, soothingly salt-rubbed rasp that meant nothing of the sort. “You wanted this, remember? All quiet and pouty in the car like I’d gone and hurt your feelings. This what you needed, pretty girl? Needed me to fuck some sense back into that cotton brain?”

Pamela’s mascaraed lashes fluttered against the sheets. Her brain had gone staticky, something between a heart attack and orgasm, and he hadn’t even moved all that much yet.

“What?” he asked, mockingly polite, his voice sugared over with that haughty affection that always melted her backbone into something obliging. “You want me to go slow?”

A frantic nod, fawn-eyed in proportion and in panic.

“Mm. Don't think you do,” he went on, forehead lowering down to her spine's middle for a second. “Because if you wanted slow, you’d’ve said something when I was dragging you outta that restaurant like a prized lamb on a leash. But you didn’t. So either you want it like this..." He relished the little quiver in her calves, like she was ashamed of herself for pinching around him, “...or you want me to pretend you don’t.”

He made slow progress at first. Too slowly. The stretch flowered in her belly, a helpless little whimper climbing up her throat. A throb, a burn, a bloom of bittersweet ache she tried to outrun with little hip jolts, like she could circumvent the sheer stretch of him. Poor thing, all plush and miniature, packaged in a sweet little plaything size.

“Christ,” he groaned, not even halfway in; her walls were already strangling, like she was rebuffing the whole premise of him. "You tryin’ to squeeze me out, sweetheart?"

Her only response was a whimper and a twitch.

“Yeah,” he cooed purringly, “there’s my girl. Tight as a sealed jar.”

He didn’t quit. Not when the resistance tightened up all taffy-like, not when her breath hiccuped, and not when the fit clearly didn’t favour her frame.

“C’mon. Take it. All of it.”

His fingers splayed snugly over her stomach like he wanted to feel himself pump the air out of her lungs, smoothing over the tremble in her abdomen like he was trying to iron it flat. Hips stuttering just enough for her to gasp, high and startled and a little wounded, like she’d been tricked. Because she had. He always promised he’d go slow, and he always meant slow in theory, not practice.

“That’s it. Little more,” he murmured patiently, nosing into the sweet spot under her ear, the way you’d coax a skittish animal to eat from your palm. “S’okay. Just breathe. You’ll take it for me. Know you will. You’re sweet like that.”

“Fuck,” she hissed. Her palms scrambled forth to latch at the pillows. “Rafey—wait, s’too—”

“Shh, shh,” he cooed, not slacking in the least. He rutted once more, shallow and impatient, making her hips scoot an inch up the mattress. “C’mon, baby. You’ve done it before.”

“Not this deep—!”

He grinned. There it was. That crumpled, pulp-brained panic in her voice. Always adorable.

“Mm. But you want it deep, don’t you? Want me to get all the way in, fill you up like the needy little doll you are?”

She hiccupped out a sobby moan, the sort that had no clue whether to be miffed or aroused. Probably both. The wet squelch of her body trying to take him should’ve humiliated her, but he made it worse, his thumb coaxing bone-idle circles at her creamy, sweet tailbone like he was winding her up.

“C’mon, sweetheart. I thought you were s’posed to be good for me. Thought you were my perfect little doll,” he goaded, pushing more deeply, even as her folds were resisting like cling film. “Don’t tell me she breaks this easily."

“Y’don’t have to be so big about it,” she mumbled, more a pitiful grievance than a plea.

“Yeah, well, that’s not changing. So breathe, Pamela. Or keep whining. You know I like that, too,” he purred dryly, bottoming out with one closing, bruising buckle of his hips that made her weep into the duvet. “Take it up with whoever thought it was cute to make you fun-sized.”

Pamela’s fingers were tightly bunched in the coverlet, her back twitching as she adjusted to the stretch. Her breath came in soft, ragged huffs, like she was battling to breathe around a balloon in her chest.

Rafe was leaning over her, hips flush, cock nestled all the way in and throbbing against the pretty, pulsing grip of her walls. And still, still, she was pinched up around him like she hadn’t made room at all.

He planted a kiss at the nape of her neck, sweet as pie.

“There she is,” he murmured. “All stuffed and silent.”

She sniffled. A real one. And that had him cocking his head, mouth wrinkling with faint amusement.

“Aw, don’t cry, baby. You’ll short out the pretty little circuits in that bimbo brain.”

Pamela whimpered again, though he couldn’t tell if it was from the pressure or the insult or both.

Her thighs were spattered already, glistening with an oncoming squall of wetness. She was so petite like this, adorably so, folded lopsidedly under him. Only a little clearance between her front and the mattress for his hand to manoeuvre through. Which he did, slowly, flattening his palm beneath her to feel the give of her stomach.

“Let’s take a peek, yeah?” he rasped cooingly. “Knees, baby. Wanna show you something.”

She didn’t protest. Couldn’t. Pliant, though sullen still. He coaxed her upright into a little kneel like she weighed nothing more than a plush toy. Her spine arched prettily, like a strung-up cat, balance wobbly on her heels and her head lolling back against his collarbone. Pamela blinked dumbly over her shoulder as he flattened his palm to the taut plane of her stomach, nails barely raking his forearm. The pout cemented to her lips drooped helplessly, like she might weep if he teased too much, which only made his cock twitch.

"Not at me, pretty girl," he tutted, smoothing at her bottom lip with his opposite thumb. "Look." He shoved forward a little more, just enough to make her squeal, and patted flat against her abdomen.

Sure enough, a bulge, obscene and pronounced, distended just beneath the papery-thin silk of her torso like a swallowed fist. Her mouth parted in a slack little “oh,” pupils blown as she stared downward at the ghosting of him against her lower stomach.

“Feel that?” he breathed along the rind of her ear, hand guiding hers lower, lower. “’S me in you, baby.” He kissed her temple, just to be cruel about it, rocking forward just enough to press it harder against her own hand. “All that space in a little thing like you. Pretty sure this means I’m part of your digestive tract now.”

She let out a breathless, mortified giggle, the sort that sounded like she didn’t know whether to cry or come.

He let her glance down, let her behold the ridge of him pinning cruelly against her tiny belly from the outside. Obscene proportions against her malleable little dollhouse frame. He thumbed the bulge through her navel gently, mock-soothing.

“That's all me, pup. You can’t take that, can you?” His voice went softly raspy. “You’re way too small. Built for dolls, not dicks.”

“‘S too big—” she whimpered, squirming against the mattress, feet kicking a little like a wind-up toy on its last sputter.

“I know, pup," he cooed, and it dripped with pity, saccharine and smug, like he was consoling a toddler for failing a spelling bee. "S’why I like you like this. So little. So fucking soft.”

Pamela mewled a watery, confused gasp, the kind of noise usually reserved for dentist chairs or failed wax strips. Her skirt was still hitched up over her hips, pink panties bunched like a bow around one knee. It made the whole thing feel play-pretend, like she was being dolled up for someone else's idea of obscenity. His palm came to rest above hers, his fingers dwarfing hers, flat and possessive, as if her belly were already rounding with it. With him.

“Gonna fill out that tiny tummy real soon," he promised darkly, nosing along her temple. "Put a baby in you, stretch that pretty little bump proper. Make you all swollen and sweet f'me.”

His hand smoothed over the angel's cut of her spine. “Bet that’d shut you up, huh? Walkin’ around full of me, dumb and dripping — might actually be too distracted to pout.”

Pamela sniffled. Not from tears, but from the sheer dumb overwhelm of it.

“Mm-mm,” he tutted, nudging her back down onto her tummy like a wayward foal. “Don’t go getting shy now. You know how this works.”

A long, coaxing rock of his hips. The first one wasn’t much of a thrust, more so a test of tension, withdrawing; watching the wet glisten coat him; and then bottoming oh so softly, like he was measuring how much she could take before buckling. The second was meaner, more imposing, until her toes were bunched and her fingers muddled for purchase on the pillowcases. He kept his tempo soft, stirring, and creamy smooth, like a chef folding in whipped cream to a delicate mousse. A stretch she’d never unstretch from.

“You better breathe, pup,” he crooned, all silk and scorn, observing the nervous rippling thrum of her spine. “Don’t want you faintin’ on me before I’ve even gotten started.”

He manoeuvred her hips like handlebars, tempting her tailbone into every contraction of his cock. Soft, sweet mewls poured from her mouth like pillows of cotton, though none of them were quite words. He nudged further anyway, notched impossibly snugly.

“You’re takin’ it now, though,” he murmured, half in awe, half in gloat, nipping at the shell of her ear. “Knew you would. You always give in, don’t you? All it takes is a little sugar and a whole lotta stretch.”

It hurt. Of course it did. He was too thick for her, and she was much too confining for anyone. But she was his, and he favoured her to the point of peril.

Her breath hitched. He coaxed her through every ounce of the ache, whispering nonsense endearments and quiet mockery in equal measure. Whenever she stiffened, he simply folded his hand around her hip, urging her back into rhythm, never quite giving her room to collapse nor to pull away.

“You’re gonna be so dumb after this,” he chuckled, giving a shallow pump. “Not that there was a lot of brain to work with to begin with, but now? Gonna knock the last few marbles loose. Scatter ‘em like jacks.”

And still — still — the stubborn pinch between her brows hadn’t totally disappeared. That little glitch of unease he’d clocked back at the Island Club, the shadow that’d haunted her smile all dinner long like a dirty secret stuffed in her clutch.

Rafe slowed. Just a little.

“Alright,” he drawled, but didn’t stop moving, didn’t stop lagging that thick cock through her soaked, fluttering cunt, grinding in deep on the downstroke until she gasped, legs writhing up to wrap around him. “You gonna tell me what this is about? Hm?”

Pamela squirmed, not from the stretch this time, but from something deeper, dumber, wading in the shallow end of her cotton-stuffed skull.

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t, probably. But he knew her too well: the way her muscles locked when she was petrified she’d say something dumb (as if that weren’t her default setting), the way she had gone quiet at every compliment all night like she didn’t know where to store it in her Barbie brain. It wasn’t subtle.

So he picked up the pace again, just slightly. A little more force. A little more rhythm. Enough to prod the question out of her if he had to squeeze it from her molars.

“No?” he crooned, peppering his lips along her shoulder blades. “You sure? 'Cause I don’t mind if you cry about it, pup. Go ahead. Use your words.”

Nothing.

“C’mon,” he needled. “Tell Rafey what’s got his girl so jammed up, hmm?”

Still nothing.

He groaned, withdrawing just enough to make her whine, then slamming back in with a pace that nearly folded her in half.

“Spit it out before I decide you don’t get to talk at all," he ordered, his voice stern and syrupy. “I mean, you dragged that little attitude around all through dinner. Figured you were gonna burst into tears somewhere between oysters and dessert. And for what? Hmm?”

“Mhh—mm—mm,” she whimpered into the pillow, voice smothered in cotton.

“Christ,” he scoffed, leaning over her, “you’re fucking messin' with me tonight. Sounds like you’re trying to talk through a mouthful of frosting.”

She mumbled something back, but it was swallowed in the pillow.

“What?” His palm planted on her lower back, the other yanking the pillow from under her face and tossing it aside. “Don’t mumble, Pamela. You know I hate that.”

She lifted her head enough for the words to stumble out, her voice cracking as if it had fallen down a flight of stairs. “D’you like me?”

The laugh that left him was sharp, incredulous, and almost fond of how stupid it was. Not unkind, just exhausted by how fucking predictable she was. Like her misery was a bedtime story he’d heard before. His thrusts never stopped. If anything, they got meaner.

“Is that it?” he crooned. “Is that the little thought that’s been rattling around in your head all night? Do I like you? The fuck kinda question is that?”

“Just… wondering,” she murmured, face turning away again like she could hide from her own idiocy.

“Oh, just wondering,” he parroted, his register pitched up into a lame falsetto of hers, condescension dripping. “Middle of getting my dick wet, and you wanna do a little Q&A. That’s cute.”

She squirmed, or tried to, but he palmed her lower back and pressed her down, his cock still seated deep. “Nah, none of that. You’re not weaselling out now.”

Silence — stubborn, sheepish silence.

He let it sit a second, then grinned against the back of her shoulder. "Pamela, talk."

“I just—” she choked out finally, whimpery and muffled around the cry in her throat, all her thoughts spilling out wrong. “There were so many people talkin’ to you, and the girls were all so pretty, and I know you could have any of them, and—”

He stilled.

“That’s what’s been chewing holes in your Hello Kitty brain? That people… liked me?”

She gave a tiny sniffle.

“Ohh,” he breathed, suddenly delighted. “You’re jealous.”

Pamela’s mouth opened, then closed again. She shook her head minutely, cheek scraping against the duvet.

“Oh, shut the fuck up. You totally are. You’ve got that little kicked-puppy twitch in your shoulder blades.” He nipped at the shell of her ear. “What’s wrong, Pup? Get scared you were just a temporary toy?”

Pamela let out a whimper, a little too telling in its tone.

“N-no,” she muttered, voice small and cracking.

He pulled out halfway and slammed back in hard enough to knock a choked gasp out of her.

“Try again.”

“…Maybe.”

“Mhm. That’s better.” His hand slid between her thighs again, fingers expertly finding her clit with the kind of laziness that only came from muscle memory and cruelty. “There’s my honest girl. You see someone look at me and forget you’re the one I go home with? You’re lucky you’re cute, Pammy. You really are.”

Her breath was coming faster now, cheeks flushed, her whole body twitching beneath him as his fingers worked her in time with the slow drag of his cock. His voice went molasses thick with derision.

“What was it? The blond waitress? The one with the ass like a breadbasket?” Another roll of his hips, grinding this time, like he could dislodge the insecurity with the tip of his cock. “Or that bitch in the sequin dress who asked me about my next development?” He chuckled, low and mean. “You know, I could’ve had both. Could’ve taken ’em home. Fucked ’em in the goddamn parking lot. Hell, I could’ve taken ’em against the valet stand.”

Her shoulders dipped under his hands, the smallest giveaway, and it made him laugh. Rafe felt it all: the tightening of her core, the way her breath stuttered, and the little quiver in her calves like she was ashamed of herself for clenching around him.

“You think I’d waste my time rearranging your guts if I wanted someone else?” Another slow pump, like he was pouring the truth into her by force. “You think I’d take you home, baby you, feed you, finger your stupid little feelings out of you if I wanted any of them?”

Her voice dissolved into a sobbed moan. “I just—I just wanna be good enough for you—”

“Good enough for me, hm? What, you think I want someone smarter?” he goaded, fucking her a little harder now, letting the mattress slap. “Some frigid little debutante with dry hands and half the sweetness?”

She whimpered again, eyes rolling, hips stuttering up to meet him. Her brain was slipping. She always got like this when he was mean, when he said things that made her feel cheap and precious all at once.

“I want this,” he hissed, punctuating it with a grind, reaching between them to find her clit — pinching it between two fingers until her back arched and she let out a helpless little wail. “Out of everyone in that room. All the wine-swilling cougars and purse-sized lapdogs in designer heels. I came home to fuck my Pam instead. Wanted my dumb little pup with her dumb little brain, who gets all needy and whiny when she thinks I'm looking at someone else.” He nipped her shoulder, mean and tender all at once. “I like you, Pamela. You’re mine.”

She blinked away tears, but the sting was already fading into something heady as he kept his rhythm, the friction of his fingers making her head loll.

“That good enough for you, baby? Or you need me to hold your hand, too?” he sneered, punctuating it with a particularly deep thrust that made her gasp. “Maybe I’ll get you a certificate. Frame it above your bed, reading, ‘Rafe Cameron Likes Me.’”

She whimpered when he pinched just the right spot, her thighs twitching.

“I am dumb,” she agreed, gasping, totally melting into it now, her voice sugar-dazed and soaking wet. “Just—just wanna be yours, I am yours—”

“You are,” he growled, grabbing her chin from behind, dragging her gaze up to his. “You’re my pretty little toy. Say it.”

“I’m your toy—your toy, your toy—”

“There we go,” he crooned, cruel and proud, and he gave her a little more force. “That pout’s good for fuckin’, but not much else. You wanna be mine, you don’t get to sulk in silence like I kicked you, pup.”

Pamela choked out a watery 'mhm' and let her cheek melt into the mattress, her whole body going pliant, keening with her arms limp and trembling beside her head, her cunt clenching and spasming around him, and her mouth slack and slurring.

“Atta girl,” he purred, hand sliding up from her hip to toy with one of her dangling earrings — little rhinestone cherries. “ Now c’mon. Say thank you.”

And she did, over and over again, a mantra of 'thank you, Rafey' pouring out in whimpery gasps. Not because she’d been shamed into it, but because her brain had liquefied somewhere between his fingers and his cock.

“Good girl,” he muttered, pace building again until the bed squeaked and the headboard rattled, her little noises tumbling out in earnest this time, every scrap of dinner-table paranoia melting out of her as he wrung her empty.

“I f-feel dizzy,” she murmured after, all gone and floaty, her voice trailing off into something thin and discarded. Her eyes were uncoupled, lashes wet and clumped like drowned spiders' legs. “My head’s all empty…”

“Good,” he whispered, licking the salt-sweet sweat from her temple. “I like you better when there’s nothin’ goin’ on in that pretty little head.”

She giggled faintly, a dazed, ruined sound that lacked any structural integrity. “Just pink stuff. And you.”

He rolled them, keeping her slotted on top of him, still nestled deep within her cunt. She squirmed, over-sensitive and twitchy, her thighs spasming as he slid his fingers back between her legs to find what he’d already spent an hour bruising.

“No—nuh-uh, I c-can’t—it hurts too good, Rafey—”

“Yes, you can,” he murmured, soothing but insufferably smug. He began to drag sultry, gentle circles over her swollen clit, watching her whole body jump like a galvanised frog. “You’re such a good girl for me, remember? My perfect little thing.”

She made a small, pleading noise, fingers bunching into the sheets, scrambling for purchase in a room that was fluttering away from her. “Rafe…”

“What?” He sounded perfectly calm, his pulse steady, even as he remained joined to her, his cock a torturously ministrative pulse against her inner walls. “We stop now, you’ll forget every lesson I just taught you.”

“I won’t…”

“Mm. You’ve got the cognitive retention of a goldfish, baby.” His mouth brushed her temple, his tone a warm, terrifying tease. “Better make sure I hammer the message in properly.”

She sobbed something incoherent, her hands clutching his chest as her body lit up again — a messy, overstimulated firework display. Her mind was already liquefying, the last of her thoughts dribbling out like spilt syrup. It didn’t matter what he said anymore. She’d believe any lie he fed her — because he was still occupying her, still holding her together, still cooing filth against her mouth like a lullaby for the lobotomised.

(or, How to Court Your Neighbour Without Committing Homicide… Again)

a series by heaventarnished ©

where Rafe gets so terminally obsessed with her little teeth-baring pout and spindly coquette act that he nearly bites her nose clean off. But in a cute way. Kind of.

word count: 3k

ᥫ᭡ CONTENT DISCLOSURE...

obsessive fixation | hostile flirtation & antagonistic affection | violent ideation played for dark comedy | possessive behaviour | recreational insults & affectionate degradation | imbalance of emotional awareness | psychological intensity | objectification framed as attraction | touchy/aggressive physicality (non-injurious) | menace-as-courtship | unsettling humour | coercive undertones played rhetorically (not enacted) | bodily fixation & mouth-centric imagery | morally questionable devotion | general filth & rough handling | etc.

To say Pamela Marmont had poor taste in men would be like implying plague-carrying rats were merely suboptimal houseguests. It was a categorical understatement of the highest order, the kind of psychological blind spot that made seasoned therapists lean back in ergonomic chairs and reconsider their hourly rates, that made insurance adjusters begin drafting preliminary reports before incidents technically occurred. Her romantic history read less like a pattern of unfortunate choices and more like a longitudinal study in self-endangerment, annotated with restraining orders and scented stationery apologies.

Still, even her rose-tinted vision had to squint a bit when she chanced upon the revelation that the boy-next-door — yes, quite literally next door, with nothing but a garland of wrought iron fencing between their plasticine pomp estates — was, in fact, the notorious Silken Strangler of Kildare.

“Oh,” she’d hummed, punctuating the thought with the preoccupied, slow-motion blink of someone being told their organic milk had expired… sometime late last fiscal quarter. “Is that… serious?”

He’d killed men for less than the blank stare she was currently offering him. It was offensive, really. The way her survival instinct had clearly been swapped at birth for a lifetime supply of flavored lip oil.

And Rafe Cameron had never once been accused of being a sentimental man, but there was something undeniably, profoundly erotic about the agonisingly slow way Pamela Marmont parted her lips.

They always opened so slow, so plushly and oh so purposefully. Loosened like a marionette's jaw on inconspicuous strings, her mouth quivered with the patience of a puppet pursuant to letting loose one last, exhausting soliloquy. It was a subtle, subconscious slackening of the jaw, as if each syllable were plucked from her palate by some sardonic puppeteer who enjoyed watching Rafe’s temper flake just a little more. She was a wind-up plaything with cotton batting where higher reasoning should have been nesting, her mouth perpetually puffed with impressively poor thoughts waiting to spill.

And every time those lips parted — slippery with some tacky, satiny pink sheen, bitten just so, and trembling with whatever half-baked thought was soon to arise — the most insufferably stupid words imaginable would come toppling forth in a graceless heap. Some sugar-glazed idiocy about cloud formations or which specific colour of silk bowstring suited the butcher knife she’d borrowed from his kitchen. Idle theories delivered with devastating sincerity. Rafe would feel something behind his eye twitch, a microscopic muscle spasming with evolutionary warning. He’d watch her tongue dart out to collect gloss she hadn’t earned and feel his temples throb with something primal, deeply confused, and violent. It was like witnessing a baby bird try to sing through a snapped neck. Soft, pitiful, and utterly doomed.

He wanted to sew her mouth shut. Or better yet, puncture her vocal cords so she could never prattle another mindless syllable again. Possibly both.

But, God, she was pretty.

Like a choking hazard. Like something sold with an explicit warning label no one bothered reading.

Still, miraculously, she hadn't fled at all. Not even after the laundry line of macabre warnings he'd strung up across her psyche like nauseating lengths of bunting for her to bear witness to. Not after venturing into his attic of morbid mementos, where she’d chanced upon a chipped porcelain doll cradling a human jawbone in its lap like some grotesque child's plaything, its eyelids half-lowered in demureness. Not even after the newspaper clippings he’d Scotch-taped to her mailbox with attentively penned notes circling the headlines, the pigment mottled where raindrops had peppered the papers, deteriorating into sickeningly dark prose.

Apparently, so long as he didn’t strangle her personally, she didn’t consider the matter applicable to her.

He didn’t know what to do with her. Didn’t know how to metabolise the constant fluttering, teasing, be-ribboned shit she kept pulling to hold his attention. Like putting a heart-shaped sticky note on his trash bin that read, 'Take me out, mister,' or glueing googly eyes to the bowie knives she borrowed and brought back.

It was constant. And it was absurd. And it was criminally adorable.

And he hated her.

No, he loathed her. Biblically. Obsessively. In the can't-stop-thinking-about-how-shallowly-she-breathes kind of manner. In the "I hope she trips over her own unlaced shoelaces and plummets straight into my waiting lap so I can throttle her like a lovesick maniac overcome with bloodlust and a half-bottle of cheap brandy — weep into her hair, rattle her once for good measure, and then ask if she wants to split a cigarette" sort of way.

Pamela Marmont, the freshly plucked puppet-girl next door, with her maraschino liqueur mouth and doll-hinge joints and a little swan neck that looked like it ached for a thumbprint or two. She operated like she'd been trained to flutter and flinch on cue. She made men go awry. She made women go vegetarian. She made Rafe go... well. All-consuming.

She popped the latch of her front door with her customary delicacy for the unsettling: one pinky first, then the rest of her palm, and eventually her whole fleshy self, coated in a slip of silk that looked like it cost $800 and measured significantly less than a mild insult. Her lips were moistened like she’d smeared strawberry syrup onto a fresh collagen bruise and pursed like she’d been suckling on an innocuous pacifier.

"Oh, Rafey," she purred, nasal and flat, with that paper-cut voice of hers, sounding as if she’d forgotten halfway through the greeting how phonics actually worked. "You're here."

He squinted at her, his eyes tracing the line of her throat. “...Wasn’t I supposed to be?”

"Think so," she giggled, a feathery, foolishly adorable prattle that made his molars pinch together like tectonic plates. "Maybe. I was just doing lip gloss math."

He watched her with the grim fascination of a scientist observing a single-celled organism attempt to solve a Rubik’s Cube. A Darwinian failure.

“Lipgloss math.” He repeated the words as if they were a foreign language he had no intention of learning.

“Mmhm. You do a single swipe on top, two generous ones on the bottom, then smush ‘em together like this—” She pursed her lips demonstratively, testing the sticky viscosity of her own mouth like she was analysing melted Jolly Ranchers, looking so idiotically pleased with herself that Rafe genuinely considered the logistics of hurling himself into the nearest body of water.

He watched the gears in her head turn with the detached horror of a man watching his own house burn down. A rusted, glitter-clogged mechanism that worked twice as hard to achieve a quarter of the output. It was a fascinating, structural failure. Her mind wasn't a library; it was a junk drawer filled with broken hair ties, half-eaten macarons, and a single, flickering marquee that read VACANCY.

Rafe, for lack of any functional brainstem response, simply blinked. Opened his mouth. Closed it again. Felt his cognition promptly leaking out of his eardrums.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered under his breath, “I am one minor inconvenience away from biting the tip of your nose clean off.”

She just grinned. Like he complimented her. Like he hadn't just actively threatened permanent bodily harm.

"You're so silly, Rafey," she hummed, openly attempting to innocently pinch his cheek. "And late. I was about to assume you got, like… murdered or whatever. Which is dumb 'cause I already mourned this week. My grief quota is full."

A grief quota. Of course. Her emotional range was apparently regulated like a data plan, and he was currently roaming in a dead zone.

"Yeah? Mourned what? Your sense of spatial awareness?" he grunted, narrowly avoiding her attempted cheek pinch by shouldering past her into the foyer. Her entire premises smelt like melted Barbie dolls and powdered arsenic. Like a Claire's that got condemned by the board of health.

"Funny. You're the one who looks all, like, embalmed and stuff," she sing-songed, glancing at his drawn face as she latched the door with her heel. She was in those damned kitten heels. She always was. He tried not to stare at her ankles, but he also tried not to fantasise about spoon-feeding her cough syrup, and here they were.

"Smells like a My Little Pony graveyard in here," he muttered, wrinkling his nose.

“That’s my new candle,” she sighed, dreamy. “It’s called 'Birthday Brat'."

“Of course it is.”

Pamela padded after him with the unsteady grace of a baby fawn on tranquillisers, her feet barely making a pitter-patter on the flooring. Her gait was nonsensically floaty, like someone had taught her locomotion yesterday using a diagram someone had pencilled in lipstick. She was wet-mouthed and chewing loud, watery little chomps like her jaw had been replaced with a pneumatic piston. He narrowed his eyelids, suspicious.

"What are you eating, pup?"

“Hm?”Pamela blinked. She glanced downward like she’d forgotten what was in her mouth, her expression a little glazed over from the staggering labour of chewing and thinking all at once. “Oh. Um. Gummy bears?”

“You’re gnawing,” he corrected, stepping closer to inspect the damage. “They sound like gravel hitting a hubcap.”

"Well… they're kind of hard,” she pouted, lips smooshed and spittle glistening on the corners.

Rafe stared at her like she’d just confessed to licking lead paint.

“They’re not supposed to be—” He paused. Stared at the packet in her palm. The label didn’t say Haribo. It said Staedtler.

He stepped forward and plucked the packet from her hand with a harsh tug, inspecting it closely before grabbing her jaw between two authoritative fingers and tilting her chin up like he was inspecting a stray cat who may have contracted rabies.

“Chew again.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

She obeyed, jaw crunching once more — crrrkkhh. The unmistakable grating of industrial plastic between molars.

“Jesus Christ,” he hissed through gritted teeth, then pried her mouth open with the ruthless brutality of a man who staunchly believed he held the deed to every inch of her.

Pamela blinked, all fawn-lidded innocence and utter incomprehension. He glared into her gloss-slicked mouth. Red. He pinched the "bear" between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it from between her teeth. It didn’t give like candy. It resisted.

"Pamela," he started, dangerously calm. “You’re not eating candy. You’re chewing on goddamn erasers.”

She lowered her attention to the packet pouched in her palm. Squinted. Then gasped like she’d just discovered she’d committed tax fraud.

"Oh my god. They’re... erasers?!” She squeaked, holding them up to the light like they’d personally offended her. “I mean, I got them from the stationery aisle ‘cause they were shaped like lil’ bears and they smelt fruity—”

“Spit it out,” he ordered.

“Huh?”

“Spit. It. Out.”

Her pupils widened like those of a scolded preschooler. With all the wounded dignity of a toddler relinquishing contraband, she opened her mouth obediently and, with a dumb little hiccup of guilt, plopped the mangled, half-chewed eraser straight into his awaiting palm with a wet, rubbery squelch.

It sat there.Glistening with her spit. Chewed nearly heart-shaped. Gummy bear-faced. Faintly pink.

“This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever—”

“I thought it was candy!” she protested, all blank-eyed, lips wobbling like a lamb fresh from a lobotomy. She looked so offended, so dumb, and so soft that something short-circuited in his brain. “Don’t be mean to me! I was trying to concentrate real hard!”

She looked inhuman. A little wax doll someone left too close to a radiator. Beautiful in the uncanny valley way. Too pink, too precious, and too unaware of the consequences she had on his nervous system.

“You’re gonna shit rubber cement.”

She shrugged, unapologetic. “At least it’ll smell nice.”

Rafe glanced away, resisting the urge to compact the eraser into dust between his fingers. He wanted to scream. He wanted to smother her with a pillow and then kiss her back to life. He wanted to zip her into a duffel bag and haul her around like mental baggage.

“You’re going to die before twenty-five,” he deadpanned flatly.

“But, like… in a cute way?”

He remained silent. He just wiped his hand on her silk-covered thigh and shoved the eraser packet deep down into the couch cushions so he wouldn't have to look at them anymore.

She blinked up at him, her head angled like a lamb learning calculus. All guileless and open-mouthed. The tilt of her head was just fallacious enough to trigger a fight-or-flirt response in his nervous system.

“What’re you looking at me like that for?” she asked, a half-whine, half-pout, as if the notion that she might be annoying hadn’t occurred to her in the past nineteen years of her existence.

Rafe blinked, suddenly realising he’d been standing perfectly still, staring, clenching his fists as if he were about to write a violent manifesto. He didn’t answer right away. He was too busy contemplating what her skull would sound like if he clinked it with a silver spoon. A hollow, ceramic thud.

“You’ve got,” he gestured, vaguely disgusted with himself, “a real punchable… mouth.”

“Oh,” she breathed, doe-eyed, tilting her chin up as if he’d complimented her earrings. “Is it ‘cause I overline? I do go outside my lipline sometimes—like a lil’ bit—‘cause it makes me look, um, kissier—”

He shut his eyes. Briefly imagined being institutionalised. It felt restful.

“Stop talking.”

She did. She just batted lashes that were thick as curtain fringe. Her lips pressed into a petulant little pout, her cheeks puffed out as if she were holding in a giggle and a hiccup both at once.

And he stepped forward. Too close. Close enough to smell her, all pink sugar and strawberry spit and shampoo meant for small children.

“Don’t—” she squeaked weakly, her hand raising with a babyish little flutter as he leaned in, alarmed but not moving. Her limbs stayed where they were, limp at her sides, like a marionette left dangling in a draughty attic.

“Don’t what?” he rasped, his pupils straying from her mouth to the pulse in her throat. “Don’t do this?”

He pinched her cheek. Hard. Thumb and forefinger like pliers testing the ripeness of a plum. Her cheek squished under the immense pressure. She let out a confused little squeak like some fucking cartoonish chew toy. Her lashes fluttered like she didn’t know whether to pout or melt into a little puddle.

“You little freak,” he muttered, grinding his teeth together. “You walk around like this, like some idiotic bimbo in bows, and expect me not to lose every goddamn neurone in my skull?”

Pamela squirmed and tried to pry his hand away, but her fingers were useless little noodles. She only managed to smear a small streak of lip gloss onto his knuckles. “You’re unwell. Stop! You’re squeezing my brain!”

"I should be," Rafe growled, rattling her face between his palms. There was nothing to squeeze. It was like trying to find a pulse in a marshmallow. Just a soft, sugary void where a sense of self-preservation ought to be. "Maybe that's what it'll take to knock some sense into you."

Pamela pawed at his wrist, whining pathetically. "You’re soo disgusting,” she huffed, puffing her pinkened cheeks. “Like, boy-ick. Ugh.”

“You’re like if Hello Kitty got dropped in bleach,” he snarled. “You’re not real. You’re like... edible taxidermy.”

“That’s a compliment, right?”

“No.”

Rafe grabbed her waist and lifted her clean off the floor, handling her like a misbehaving pet. Pamela writhed, her arms flailing like overcooked pasta. “Rafe—put me down!”

“No.”

“I’ll bite!” she whispered, a little too breathy to mean it.

“Good. I wanna see the dental records.”

She wriggled in his grip. Her thighs knocked against his hips. Her perfume was a dizzying, heady cheap sugar and milkweed. He felt like he was about to die of frosting inhalation, and he still wasn't biting her, which felt like a massive oversight.

“Why are you so fucking small?” he growled, disgusted, as if it were her fault. “You’re like a peep with abandonment issues. You weigh less than my guilt.”

“I’m just naturally delicate,” she sighed, looking as romantic as a leak of gas, beaming as if she’d just won a tiara for being the most breakable object in the room. Her hands patted gingerly upon his chest, more kitten paws than protest, as if she’d already forgotten what she was supposed to be protesting about.

“You’re detainable. I want to fold you in half and bury you in a mailbox,” he grunted. "Parcel class. No return address."

She tilted her head, glossy lips puffed out into a thoughtless pout. And in the softest-brained, air-puffed, idiotic baby voice imaginable, she blinked up at him and murmured, “That’s… kinda romantic?”

“No. It’s not.” His voice splintered on it. With exasperation. Or yearning. Or both.

Pamela looked at him. Really looked. Like a sleepy cherub who’d just witnessed the last of her neurones pack its belongings and walk into the sea. All sugar-glazed eyelids and guileless baby-bird sincerity, like the mouse in her head had thrown up its paws and said, 'You know what? Fuck it.'

Her whole cotton-candy consciousness seemed to be oozing out through the clefts in a mind too modest to hold it, dribbling down in patient, pearl-rind globs of half-thoughts and misplaced fondness. She had the vacuous, lip-glossed gaze of someone whose inner monologue had long since been succeeded by the sounds of wind chimes and canned applause.

Like she’d finally surrendered the posturing. Peeled back the pout and the priss and decided the outlandish, perverse affection between them was actually sort of cute. Like yeah, okay, maybe it was nice to be wanted so hard someone had to squeeze you like bubble wrap just to cope.

He stared at her nose, that little, upturned point of interest, and felt the urge to finally follow through on his threat. To just snap his teeth shut and mark her as his most confusing acquisition.

She batted her lashes. Once. Twice. The gears in her cranium quivered, quaked, and then quit wholeheartedly.

And after a beat of glacial cognitive load — a pause so lead-footed you could’ve planted winter crops and harvested them before she reached a conclusion — she tilted her head like a confounded parakeet and murmured:

“Wanna kiss me?”

“Desperately.”

ᥫ᭡ House rules for my little lace-lined corner...

read me like a prayer before you play

ᥫ᭡ GENERAL INFO:

This is a strictly 18+ blog — no exceptions, no loopholes, no baby angels allowed.

Be lovely, be polite, be a doll.

This is a space for softness, silk, and sometimes sin… not cattiness or cruelty.

I don’t entertain drama, asks about other blogs, or anything less than sugar-dusted civility.

Nasty girls get blocked.

We keep things sugar-sweet or not at all.

ᥫ᭡ REQUESTS: Don’t take it personally if I haven’t gotten to your ask. please know:

ᥫ᭡ it’s either in the queue,

ᥫ᭡ waiting for a proper moment of inspiration,

ᥫ᭡ or patiently tucked behind my ear like a flower I’ll come back to later.

Don’t worry your pretty little head; I haven’t forgotten you.

ᥫ᭡ Please don’t ask when your request will be done. I’m not a machine, darling. I have a busy life and a fluttery attention span.

ᥫ᭡ will not write: anything that makes my lashes wilt.

If you’re unsure whether your idea fits, just ask politely—I won’t bite (unless asked nicely).

ᥫ᭡ WRITING NOTES: All posts come with warnings, tags, and little ribbons of context, especially if they're NSFW.

If you’re under 18, this space isn’t yours yet — come back when your halo’s a little more tarnished.

Now that we’ve powdered our noses and gone over the rules…

Kiss the cross, say a prayer, and make yourself at home. This is a dollhouse, a diary, a little chapel of lace and longing. play nice — or not at all. ♡

ᥫ᭡ MY TAGS:

letters to heaven ࣪ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ : all musings, daydreams, diary entries, & curated moodboards !

rosaries n’ ribbons ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ : answering your asks with a lace-trimmed touch of devotion !

hymnal ೇ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ : anything ultra-soft, sugared, and dreamy (positive musings, self-love, pure bliss) !

psalms of girlhood ⋆˚ᥫ᭡˚⋆ : fic recs, girlish reading delights, and swoon-worthy stories !

a series by heaventarnished ©

ᥫ᭡ CONTENT…

˚ৎ Introducing Marionette!Pamela Marmont (+ PuppetProvocateur!Rafe Cameron) ˚ৎ Chewtoy ˚ৎ Overstimulated & Under Reassured

ᥫ᭡ CONTENT DISCLOSURE...

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT (+ PUPPETPROVOCATEUR!RAFE CAMERON)

(dumb little darling, dangling like she doesn’t like it.)

No strings attached? Try again.

Sugary Strangeholds & Soft-Serve Spitstrings. Hinged Mouths & Hand-Pressed Pleas. Velveteen Gags & Ventriloquist Kisses. Sugar-Wound Sobs & Stockholmed Screws. Preened Flesh & Puppeteered Consent. Dollhouse Debasement & Director’s Cut Carnality. Gore-Dipped Garter Belts & Gut-Ribboned Obedience.

PUPPETPROVOCATEUR!RAFE CAMERON... who stalked for sport and decried it as anthropology. Who watched girls like he was tuning into segments of something better than his own private affairs, which, admittedly, were mostly just backroom dealings, unmedicated episodes, and the ever-occasional fist-against-drywall blackout. Who didn't people watch. No, he person-studied. Positioned himself at café counters and corner alcoves with americanos he never actually consumed, mentally addressing the girls by what he'd assumed they might've been named. The redhead with the mousy walk? Annalise. The one who'd worn ballet flats out in the pouring rain? Effie. He had a whole mental dossier on each one, cherry-topped with unromanticised backstories and cruel motivations he'd curate mid-latte sip. Family histories and humiliating Spotify playlists and the sort of sad-sack soap operas that made them soft. Sometimes he'd follow them out of the café. Never too close, never too far. Like Goldilocks, but if Goldilocks were a creep with a hard-on for control. Accompanied them into bookshops and back to parking garages, just to confirm his assumptions checked out. They ordinarily did. Because he made them fit his preconceived notions. And no, he never touched. Not yet. That would've interfered with the enjoyment.

PUPPETPROVOCATEUR!RAFE CAMERON... who had pursued dating, sure, precisely as well as taxidermists committed to knitting. Clumsy, artificial, cruelly unromantic. He knew the script all too well – compliments, split the cheque but offer first, unassuming palm on the lower back, and stare just a second too long – but whenever she'd utter that oh-so-painful 'I really like you', something in his cerebellum shrivelled. Dried up. He never wanted to be liked. He wanted to be adulated. Enamoured. Redoubtable, even. And the second a girl appeared to be wanting something gentle, something glacial flared up his spine like a spinal tap gone wrong, and he absconded. Parted ways like a stain wiped clean. Texted “Had fun, let’s do it again," and then blocked her. Because subconsciously he knew he wasn't made for anything sweet. He was made for appetites. For an unquenchable ache. He didn't want to make love… He wanted to undo a girl, string by string. He wanted her to cry whenever he stopped looking at her, not when he started.

PUPPETPROVOCATEUR!RAFE CAMERON... who hurt a girl once. Not in a cutesy, oops-didn't-know-my-own-strength sort of way. No, he meant it. Back when he'd made the realisation that if you applied pressure appropriately, people were going to buckle. It was never predetermined, never ritualistic… It was just spontaneity, a fury-wrung impulse, and the curdled milk of his consciousness gushing forth into his fists. He never wished for her death. He thought she ought to feel afraid, and she did. Screamed for help and scratched his forearm and sobbed like a pathetic weakling. And Rafe? He fled. But not for the sake of second-guessing. Not out of guilt or remorse. He ran with the intention of liking it too much. The way she had crumbled. The candidness of her composure while bowing. No filters, no pretences, no blush powdering at her cheeks. Just her. Bare and petrified. Like God intended. He'd never forgotten that night. He had photos to help with that.

PUPPETPROVOCATEUR!RAFE CAMERON... who jerked off in the dead of night like it was an act of war. Never to porn… No, that'd be too simplistic, too posturingly mundane. He rather got hard on ownership. On secrecy. On the way a girl's whimper sounded out on a muffled recording, or how she'd comport herself when she assumed no one was watching. He'd rub one out while crouched in someone's attic crawlspace, surrounded by their forgotten belongings, monitoring them through the flooring vents. Absentmindedly, his teeth blanched into his palm, quivering with restraint. It wasn't even about getting off. More so having something she'd never have known she gave him. About appropriating her comfort, her safety net, her propriety, one pump at a time. And when he finished, it wasn't a moan. It was a snarl. Because he wasn't in it for pleasure. He was in it for power.

PUPPETPROVOCATEUR!RAFE CAMERON... who kept a casing of keepsakes underneath his crawl space. Labelled, categorised, sentimentally abject. One girl's sock (powder pink, frilled to frothiness), a friendship bracelet that once smelt like coconut sunscreen (now just mildew), a tarty button he swore loosened off a blouse she had been fucked in. There were hair ties. A chewed pen cap. Panties folded neater than a flag at half-mast. All vacuum-sealed in Ziploc'd baggies, stamped with nicknames and the date he'd acquired them. Underneath the lid, there were Polaroids… none artistic. None accumulated for the gram. They were sentiments. Mementos. Of bite marks he'd embedded. Of mascara tears. Of gags tacked too tight. Things that proved he was there. That he had existed in someone else’s timeline, even if just to extirpate it. He told himself he kept them in case he forgot who he was. But in actuality, he kept them because it made him feel more himself. Like an endorsement of some worsening, essential self.

PUPPETPROVOCATEUR!RAFE CAMERON... who wore swartened clothing not as a modish preference, but as a manifesto. Not because it obscured bloodstains, nor because it made him look all the more muscular (though it did), but because it was nothingness. Because it was a culmination. He adorned it like a crime of his own making. Like absence. Black hoodie, black gloves, and black boots that left no prints of his passage. Black never stains. It slithered. It absorbed. It was what he wore when he was crouched behind her azalea bushes at 11:54p.m., watching her light a wax candle and work lotion into her collarbones. He'd seen girls dress for bed. Seen them cry into their pillows. Seen them strip and scratch and stretch. To Rafe, the black wasn't just a colour of attire. It was permission. Invisibility. It was the closest thing he had to a superpower. If he ever wore colour at nighttime, he might as well have been parading a white flag. And that? That wasn't him. He wasn't the sort of guy who came prepared with flowers. He was the sort to come up behind the flowers. At her back. With scissors.

PUPPETPROVOCATEUR!RAFE CAMERON... who would meet MARIONETTE!PAMELA on some evening he wasn't even meant to be watching. Not hunting. Not touching. But something about her would just… click. Not in a sweet rom-com sense, but in a lock sense. Like, 'Oh.' She's the lockbox, and he's the crowbar. And she was going to let him mess with her. She wanted it, even if she didn't particularly know so yet. Even if she thought of him as a wicked man, and she would be correct. He was. But she was a dollette, which gave Rafe an itch to tie strings where there used to be bones.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who was born with beauty, and thank God for it, because it spared her the indignity of having to be much more than that. The sort of girl whose appearance excused the actuality that her mind was two gemstones and a gumdrop wrapper rattling around in her cranium. She was the prettiest thing on Figure Eight. A dollface paraded in ribbons and pastel skirts, so universally adored that she’d never once needed the friction of a personality to keep people interested. When she opened her mouth, she didn't speak; she merely refracted giggles, oh-my-gods, and airy affirmations that meant precisely nothing, yet acted as a Rorschach test for every man who looked at her. They apologised for doubting her simply because her face was a moral argument they couldn't win. Because she was beautiful. Kildare Island's baby, its princess, its innocent little lamb. A porcelain toy whose value was measured in the taper of her thighs and the symmetry of her pout. She never suspected the truth, of course. She mistook the island’s obsessive tallying of her features for genuine affection. She didn't realise she wasn't being adored; she was being appraised.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who had never harboured a single cognitive impulse she couldn’t shrink-wrap in a pout and a flutter of her eyelashes. 'Stupid', they hissed. A rhythmic, sibilant mantra whispered behind palms, through telephone cords, and into the ears of boyfriends she’d already tasted and discarded. It wasn't like she hadn't heard it all before. It just never mattered. Not when she looked like that. Not when she was Pamela fucking Marmont. She was a girl made of blush velvet bows, sugar-spun bubblegum, and legs that had once been actuarially valued at six figures by sponsors who treated her quadriceps like fine art. She might not have known who the vice president was or what came after “preheat” on the oven dial – but she knew how to pout just right until someone else figured it out for her. It was a parasitic grace. She didn't need to be smart; she just had to be pretty enough to manipulate the world’s smartest men into her personal errand boys.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who was the kind of girl people called moronic with a smile because they couldn’t deny she was too pretty for it to matter. A universal amnesty. She was the girl who failed her driver’s test twice yet left the DMV with the instructor’s phone number and a standing invitation to a steak dinner – a transaction of incompetence she didn't even realise she had brokered. The one who couldn't navigate the simple chemistry of boiling pasta yet possessed the monastic discipline to pirouette en pointe until her toenails shed their strength like rotting petals at the end of a long winter. She existed in a state of sublime negligence – forgetting to pay bills, forgetting to eat meals, forgetting to lock her doors – yet her lip gloss remained a permanent, lacquered fixture. If she dropped her keys in the gutter, it wasn't a mistake; it was an incitement to violence. Three different men would wrestle each other bloody just to be the one to press the cold metal back into her palm. And Pamela? She’d just giggle, thank them, and forget to ask their names.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who rattled through her parents' heirloom estate like a poltergeist in pink satin. It was a monument to old-money decadence nestled in the soft, rotting corners of Figure Eight, a spacious, string-tied trust she had inherited but never truly occupied. Orphaned, yes, but too bubblesome to mourn properly, she just flitted through rooms in tiny skirts, ballet tights, and push-up bras, nibbling taffy for dinner because ovens were scary and stoves made precarious noises. Pamela didn't mind. She adored soaking in bathtubs bigger than most people's kitchens and pirouetting in empty ballrooms until the chandeliers spun with her. The fridge was stocked with sugar, sparkling water, and champagne. She had no clue what taxes were. She never learnt how to vacuum. But she knew how to apply lipstick without a mirror and which wine glasses made her waist look thinnest when holding them. It never occurred to her that someone might have been watching, because of course they were. she was used to it. she just thought it was admiration, not obsession. she thought the taps leaked on their own.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who didn’t know her neighbour in the estate over. Rafe something. Only that he was supposed to be some big-deal CEO, something to do with buildings, something boring she’d never bother to understand. She just knew he looked hot whenever he smoked out on his balcony at midnight like it was 1952. While she stretched at her barre, her hamstrings taut and trembling, she would track the grey plumes against the glazing and imagine the precise pressure of his mouth against the pulse of her neck. Sometimes she'd watch him through the gauzy curtains with her knees pulled up to her chest, lip between her teeth, thumb pressed hard against her peeking lace panties, eating frosting straight from the can and thinking, God, he probably had a huge dick. He had this look. Haunted. Indifferent. A little too still. She’d seen him lean against the railing, bare forearm flexing, and thought, Oh, I’d let him defile me. She didn't realise the defilement was already a thing of the past. Didn't know he’d already been inside. Metaphorically. And not. Didn’t know the dreams that soaked her panties were actually suppressed recordings of his midnight visitations. Didn’t know her strings were already tangled around his wrists.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who was the most wanted girl on the island, though not for her intellect. She had the sort of tits that made professors linger when she asked for extensions, the sort of giggle that made wives grab onto their husbands' arms tighter. She dated older because older boys never told her she was stupid – they just patted her hair like she was sweet. Like she was innocent. And they didn't mind when she pouted through conversations and forgot their names mid-dinner. Except they did mind. They just pretended not to, because her tits were big and her voice was small, and they assumed stupidity meant safety. She wasn't offended by being underestimated. She'd just file it away. Sometimes she'd use it later. Not for revenge, but for discount codes and get-out-of-trouble kisses. She'd let them take her to dinner, let them put their hands on the small of her back, and let them tell her she’s “too young” with a grin that meant just right. They thought she couldn't tell it was condescension, but she did. She just didn't care. She'd take being called "pet" over being called "Pamela" any day. Affection was affection, even if it was dipped in insult. Pamela, who’s nineteen and still thought “naïve” was a compliment. Who'd giggle when men called her innocent, but didn’t get why it was followed by a sigh.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who didn’t understand why older men treated her like she was stupid when she let them put their hands up her dress. she knew they thought they were being sweet, gentle, generous. Like talking down to her was a kind of foreplay. But she wasn't stupid. She just played the part. She said things like "What's an IRA?” with a pout and a giggle because she knew it'd get her extra gifts. Still, she preferred it when they shut up and just went down on her. And they always did.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who never needed a personality. never needed wit or depth or bite. Not when she had a body like hers. Not when she could get out of speeding tickets by shrugging her hair over one shoulder and saying, "Sorry, officer, I’m just sooo bad at maths." She was the most wanted girl on Figure Eight, and it wasn't close. People talked about her like she was a collective fantasia they all had at once. Like she was something you'd spot underwater or below coatings of glazing. Too pretty to be real, too soft to be smart. She was the sort of girl people remembered crying over in high school even though she never noticed their names. If she ever wanted someone dead, all she’d have to do is ask. But Pamela never wanted anything that profound. She just wanted to be loved so badly it hurt somebody. She wanted a man on his knees for her in the dirt. She wanted it like it was a drug.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who had messed around a little. Kissed girls in bathrooms and let boys finger her in the backseat of chevrolets she couldn't remember the colour of. She'd let anyone go down on her if they asked nicely enough (or if they were hot). She liked being adored, worshipped, and tongued until she was giggling and biting her wrist. But – and here’s the kicker – she was still a virgin. Not because she was saving herself, but because every time someone tried to nudge past that uppermost barrier, she’d blink at them, half-lidded and bored, and say something like, 'You're hurting me,' or 'What if it never fits?' in a tone too soft to be bratty and too polite to be provocative. They'd always stop. They'd always leave her alone. She never minded. She liked the idea of sex more than the doing. Liked being the fantasy, not fulfilling it. Because fucking meant vulnerability. Fucking meant risk. And Pamela? Pamela only knew how to be wanted, not undone. And besides, her daydreams were better. Wetter. Stickier. Starring men she didn't even know she had already met.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who thought “cooking” meant spooning frosting straight from the tub. who didn’t own a microwave because it was “ugly” and took up counter space. who thought ovens were purely decorative — like a fireplace, or a husband. There was a Wolf-brand oven in the kitchen that she had once used to store lingerie. She lived almost purely on sugar and diet coke and the occasional maraschino cherry she ate straight from the jar with her fingers. Her fridge was full of leftover cupcakes from charity events she didn’t remember attending, little glass pots of crème brûlée she bought in packs of six, and alcohol she didn’t drink. Sometimes she poured white wine just so she could pose with the glass. Sometimes she left lipstick marks on the rim and forgot about it. Her trash was full of melted popsicles and half-bitten candies. Her fingers were always sticky. Sugar was her food group. She called it “eating like a doll.” Thought protein was for ugly girls. Thought ballet counted as cardio. Thought cigarettes were sexy and orgasms were best when they were gifted, not earned. And maybe she was right. She had never had to try for anything. Not love, not attention, not affection. It had always just happened to her. Because people wanted her. Needed her. Always had. Even if they called her brainless with her back turned.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who was a ballerina first and a person second. Bones like glass rods, ribbon-wrapped in muscle and silk. She danced for hours in her pink-threaded pointe shoes, blood dotting the inside like pearls, twirling until she forgot what she was thinking. Or what she was avoiding. The mirrors in her ballet room all showed the same girl: trembling, perfect, vacant. She was at her prettiest under a spotlight, ribboned shoes laced to the knee, back arched, collarbones bared. Audiences clapped because she looked like something delicate. Like porcelain, prone to breakage. But backstage, when she peeled her shoes off and her feet ached, she giggled. She adored the pain. The soreness. The bruised-to-pretty pipeline. It made her feel real. Every cabernet droplet was proof that she was alive. Every chipped nail was proof someone watched her bleed. If Rafe Cameron ever saw her like that, he'd know she was already half his.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who thought ghosts occupied her home. Not scary ones, Just strange ones. Like the back door that was always unlocked even though she swore she checked it. Like the laundry that always smelt like someone else’s cologne. Like her favourite panties that were missing, and how she found her lip gloss cap tilted just slightly askew. But she never questioned it. She'd just giggle. Tell her girlfriends that the ghost had a crush on her. Left a little cupcake on the windowsill sometimes. Talked to herself in the bath like someone was listening. Because she liked attention and didn’t really care where it came from.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who thought she was the main character in a slow-burn winter romance. she didn’t know the genre had changed. that the boy next door wasn’t the boy next door. That he was the one who had already stolen her panties from the laundry line and kept them in a box beside a switchblade. She thought she would meet someone soft and sweet who would kiss her forehead and bake her cookies. She didn’t realise she was about to fall in love with someone who wanted to crack her open and nest inside. Who knew what colour her coverlets were and how her mouth sounded around his cock.

MARIONETTE!PAMELA MARMONT... who would meet PUPPETPROVOCATEUR!RAFE like every doll met her maker: suddenly, and without permission. She’d smile too big, giggle too much, and kick her legs like a child when he looked at her. Walking barefoot on marble floors, tits bouncing under baby-pink camisoles, and humming Tchaikovsky while he watched from a room over, unannounced. She’d think she was fluttering into his orbit by chance. But she wasn't stupid. Not really. She’d just been spoilt into softness. Wired for pleasure. Bred to be the kind of girl someone corrupted slowly. And when she'd finally meet Rafe — when her dollhouse heartstrings got tangled in his barbed-wire hands — she wouldn't resist. Not because she was weak. but because she wanted to be played with.

and this time, she’d be the one pulling his strings.