“bu' i am apologizing, am i not?” you heard his purring voice, a deep cadence that felt entirely infuriating. yet his face had already dipped to your collarbones, gaze locked onto the angry rise and fall of your plump breasts within the tight corset at your every breath. bristled jaw scruffing across your tender, oil scented skin, looming frame shielding you completely from any passing eyes.

his lips trailed a path upward, pressing lingering kisses towards your bobbing throat, breath searingly warm and carrying the faint, sweet tang of honey. you were still furious, very much so, your fingers straining against his grip to dig your nails into his hand, yet a sweet, melodic whimper escaped your lips the moment his teeth nibbled playfully at your shoulder. his hips shoved firmly against your thigh, leaving no doubt of the hard, tightening swell against his trousers seam.

“i'll bite your nose off” you mumbled, the breath leaving your lungs far too soon as his tongue soothed the bitten flesh at your shoulder. you writhed against him, hips twisting helplessly as sudden warmth flooded your undergarments, cunt dripping slick from undeniable arousal. jaime only laughed, a low, resonant rumble that sent a tremor straight to your belly, knotting in like threads, and pressed on, forcing his knee between your thighs until your legs surrendered to accommodate his weight.

you ground down against the firm muscle roped beneath his trousers, whimpering from the sharp friction against your pulsing clit. feeling his sharp smile against your skin before you tilted your head back, meeting his heavy, almost glazed gaze. blonde brown strands falling into viridian eyes, but there was no masking the way his pupils had dilated like lion's. hips rolling in sloppy rhythm, humping against your leg like some common dog.

the moment he released one of your hands, sore from his grip, your fingers immediately sought his nape, weaving into the thick strands of hair and tugging hard just to hear him groan.

“i'll moan, then” and he does, the low sound vibrating against your skin right as he nuzzles into your cleavage valley. releasing your other hand only to reach down and claim your ass, palming at the swell, hoisting you upward against him. you no longer cared, utterly forgetting what had even made you angry, or how you might look into the shocked eyes of a handmaiden who could stumble upon you two at any moment.

he dropped heavily to his knees with a hasty, loud thud, sword sheath scraping the stone floor, leather boots creaking under the strain.

his golden hair, messy and gleaming where the spilling sun caught it, vanished beneath the folds of your skirts as he wasted no time bunching the fabric out of his way. calloused palms wrapped around your thighs, fingertips sinking deep into your skin, completely obsessed with the plush warmth of your body against his weathered, scarred hands.

you muffle your moans behind a palm as he feasts upon your weeping cunt, crooked nose digging just below the puffy nub, tongue trapped between contracting, spongy walls, slurping at your spilling slick with guttive groans.

barely allowing him to help you adjust your undergarments and smooth the creases at your gown before eagerly tugging at his hand. with your fingers tightly entwined, you urged him down the corridor toward your chambers privacy. wet shimmer lingering upon jaime’s chin as he slowly licked the trace of your taste from his lips, a taste you would share with him, hours later, while straddling his cock in the bed's gloom.

When Mr. Riley first crossed your gaze, it wasn't amid your session. Across the road, he stood, and there was no mistaking the man. Here near the thicket, scarcely a few people wear long sleeves on summer fierce, and even fewer have masks on. Until you stop making a mental prognosis even for a person who is not your client and come back from your tea break -or until the end of your shift if you don’t notice- he lingers around, waits at the bus stop, though not seeming to wait for a bus for countless have come and gone, in the hours long.

He might be any passerby on the street, and perhaps he is. Mr. Riley embodies one of those afflictions, less unique than he imagines, of those pathologies you've encountered before. When you extend your hand to greet him in your office, he offers no response, nor does he ask of you to address him more sincere. Mr. Riley he remains. He's one who knows himself, aware of his inner discord, though its depths remain veiled. From afar, his black eyes turn warm summer, amber in the sunlit pane, his presence yields little beyond than his file's mundane strain. He avoids talking of his past, and names elude the characters as he tells little pieces of his life. No period of self-destructive history, no suicide attempts. No addiction on gambling, alcohol. No signs of cutting, nor track marks -seems you misinterpreted his modest clothing. Many hospitalisations, all classified military field papers, one particular on teenage period, one he speaks not about.

Mr. Riley's visits to the office seem to transcend the usual reasons of any other patient, not for seeking counsel or solace; they carry an enigma you can't quite decode. He adamantly requests your final session on Friday evenings, as if bound by some unseen rhythm of his own. There's no poignant trauma he didn't untangle of himself, no platitude of life's hardships to impart upon him. He has already navigated life's currents, seemingly with ease. There's no sign that he needs a therapist to grasp the stark realities, to know life's not to see through some rose-tinted veil.

He is a patient who possesses a profound understanding of himself, sparing you the tire of the week's closing session. There's no need for medical interventions, no requirements for Risperidone, Prozac, or Paxil, nor any hint of sedatives to dull his senses. At times, his answers are so astute that the roles between therapist and client seem to blur. In the dynamic of your therapeutic alliance, there is no predetermined mould, because Mr. Riley doesn't adopt them.

Not a traditional pathology, Mr. Riley is one where not the patient being ready for the therapy, but the therapy being not ready for the patient, one who needs of you to be creative and bold to unravel him. Of no technique, no book nor rule. So, you suggest roleplay -no voice recorders, not a notepad to write down occasionally. Less practical and even less theoretical, not at all ethical. You even offer to do it on the skirt of the small lake behind the office as not to create social desirability if someone hears beyond the walls -not that he bothers of it.

He accepts.

Now, neither of you are what your roles are defined to be, you are no therapist, nor he is a client. He’s not a diagnosis, a test to report, a scale. Not an alienation, not a compulsive or antisocial disorder. Only Mr. Riley.

When you ask him about his first memory he recalls, you realise you must play the maternal figure in this intricate play. When you settle on the bench overlooking the pond, he approaches from behind, enfolding your shoulders before walking to your front, resting his head to your lap. He does not know much about gods; but he thinks that the water is a way of semblance, his soul’s double winks off the reflection, whispers in your voice as you offer solace. “Sometimes” you begin, stroking gently the blond locks that nestle on your lap, “one must mourn to heal.”

He rises on his knees, clinging to your body as you caress his neck, crying to your chest as your cloth is now pulled down with the weight of him resting on you. …Like a baby, his resistance just melts away.

Mr. Riley requests that from now on the therapies take place in the backyard of the building, and since this change of nature contributes to the therapeutic alliance more than the office setting did, and now that he is sure of you enough to remove his mask, and since now when he looks at you he sees you, you acquiesce.

Mr. Riley is touch deprived... he has not yet spoke about his father, but he revealed in our role play experiences that his mother passed when he was only a child - his deprivation leads to a relentless need for contact, that is, after he started to trust me. He shook my hand today, and came with only a mask that covers half his face, which he later took off also. I feel for much further developments with Mr. Riley, which is heartening. A tick next to this paragraph.

He's by your step as you step around the garden, his presence a silent echo of your every move. His arm wraps around your shoulder as you sit next to one another on the bench. With each sensual step, he surrenders morsels of his shadow, weaving them into your shared space. And when he bids the invitation to walk hand in hand along the water's edge, you accept. Not a drug-treatable depression, rather, it's a serenity born from the tumult of excess violence and the rusty imprints of roads taken, reflected in his eyes. A familiarity in his demeanour, a wash of embrace as if he unravels yourself to you.

When Mr. Riley abandons the sessions for a while, it takes a lot of strength to pretend to be interested in other clients' stories. When you start to wait in your office on Fridays, even though your last session is available, an empty slot, and when you do this for weeks on end, you realise that this bond is a two-way street, nothing professional. For him, you are a person who will listen, for you-

He is someone to listen.

;;

When he does return, the birds are flying south. You find yourself consumed by a gnawing unease of thinking that his routine apathy is back again. Once more, -you prayed so- he seats you into the sanctuary of the bench amidst the garden, yet his eyes no longer linger upon yours with their former intensity. When he pushes you into the water with the strength of one arm, you freeze for a moment, and when he pulls you back in before you soak in the reedy river, he catches you unaware and kisses you harder than you dreamt possible.

One thing you cannot deny, is how his demanding yet sensual kiss is turning you on, leaving not one bit of your responsibility, your authority as a therapist as his hand moves over your legs, circling beneath the curve of your hips. Dipping his hand between your warm thighs, you let his firm touch venture between, supple skin heating cold fingers. His other hand gropes a fistful of your slinking skirt, and you wrap his scent around your loins as he falls to his knees again before the bench. Before you.

Never in all your career you thought you’d be getting into this, to abuse someone who is to solace in the first place; even the thought of it appalled you. Now the thought tightens his fingers on your hips, his tongue rubs idly against your cunt in unrushed fashion, he slowly feasts you out.

Mr. Riley will no longer attend our therapy sessions – I said to him that our sessions are not helping him, gave him another therapist’s card, hopefully his condition will move for the better. My efforts were useless I’m afraid.

Crossing out his initials on your notebook, that's what you wrote down the day after.

But you don’t recall him agreeing.

;;

Three Fridays it takes when he suddenly reappears, he intercepts you locking the door of your office. Adorned with the very mask he tells you he came back to get the other one from you, he’s clad beneath a hoodie, zipper drawn all the way to conceal more than just his torso, hood over his head. You’re not sure what to answer, in a vague indecision, with the haunting realisation that his condition remains as unchanged as ever. Perhaps you should have heeded the warning signs, reconsidered the nature of your occupation, and resisted the temptation to immerse yourself so deeply in his plight— perhaps you shouldn’t have given of yourself to something that won’t heal for the better.

He's your shadow down the corridor, a silent loom trailing behind you as you make your way back to your office. You let out the breath you've been holding as you pick up the pace and create a few steps of distance until you reach your door. Yet, even within the confines of your own space, his presence looms large, casting a pall of uncertainty over your every thought. Even in a place that is yours.

In your room, he follows, his silence heavy in the air. As you retrieve his mask from the drawer, he catches your wrist as you turn.

One sound leaves your mouth, his is on yours again. Pressing your back against your desk, one hand winding tight around your arm as the other tips your chin up for you to meet his height as he looms over you. The caress of his lips draws a tingling heat to your cheek, your lips, your neck. You feel his body against yours deeply as he inclines closer, hand on your jaw tight as he tries his way in with his tongue, both hands cupping your head to his, leaving nowhere to lean but him.

His mouth feeds something inside yours, a smooth little dragée that leaves a ragged earthy taste each second you refuse to swallow down. It’s melted a bit in his mouth as he were keeping it on his tongue. His mouth is on yours to keep it  in your mouth, raw liquorice and a sickly sweet taste in your pharynx, your nose tightens in its taste as you try to pry away with a doleful cry — he only pulls away as he feels it down your throat with his thumb, the other wipes the tear on your cheek as he pushes his forehead against yours, cooing it’s okay as you shudder in trepidation.

You leave the room, try to cough it out your mouth. He lets you take a few steps.

A hit behind your neck is enough to knock you out.

;;

The sound of the tires spinning pierces the asphalt like a restless banshee is what wakes you, the worn leather feels eerie against your back as you sink into its cushions, laid sprawled on the backseat in a short slip gown you don’t own yourself that pools around your hip as the car you’re in hurtles towards the undying disquiet. Cool leather surrounds you, as if offering a hug from the owner on the driver’s seat. The sight outside is a blurred panorama of shifting shadows of a transient night and neon lights racing by in dragging lines before your surly hand moves to feel the ache nestled behind your nape. His gaze grazes your body through the rearview mirror. Deliberately slow is his hand resting over the open window as he drops the stub of his cigarette down, he pulls his mask down before dividing the cold night air mixing with the smoke through the misty window. You don’t know where this road leads, or where he’s taking you. Of what he forced into your mouth or when he wore this negligee on you.

Gentle engine lulls you, to some elusive and ephemeral warmth that starts below your stomach, sprouts where you fear it. You were right when you thought, neither of you are what your roles are defined to be. Now he’s to lead, and you’re to follow this fleeting respite of surreal blend. Something in your blood that gets you warm, or it’s the adrenaline of this unknown place. Only Mr. Riley and you. You’re scared, you’re intoxicated. You enjoy it.

You turn your head to his side, wind blowing in your hair, trails over, snakes through your legs as your hands move to pull the skirt down to cover your hips, holding the satin tight between your thighs. Your own skirt is gone. So are your sheer tights, so are your panties – he must’ve taken them off before he carried you in his car.

The sultry heat pulsates between your thighs, a yawning chasm that stirs an ache inside. Though, there’s no trace of wetness that already smeared on between your thighs, or on your dress, only the searing fire deep inside. Your insides burn but you don't feel any strain anywhere except the pain in your neck. No stretch. You still smell like your own perfume, untouched, without an intrusion of cigarette smoke off his fingertips or the weight of his hands grabbing your skin. Not a single mark on your flesh, not even the faintest imprint that dry, rough fingertips as they graze on supple skin. He seems to only have changed you in this silk, the only piece that’s shielding you from the cool grace of the air. 

You can’t help it. It’s working. As your fingers brush over the tender swell of your breasts, a shiver dances down your spine. The satin wrapped fabric weaves you into a life that is not meant to hurt, and with each breath, a soft moan threatens its way out your parted lips, a melody of surrender to the lethargy that he trapped you in. You now have a few ideas about the pill he gave you.

Leather smells varnish, aroma intertwining with the haze of his cigarette smoke that hangs in the air. His masculine presence stands as a silent challenge to your frailty. With a delicate touch, you place your hands on your kneecaps, the tip of your tongue running over your teeth as your knuckles leave the skirt of your dress, not holding it over yourself anymore. He must’ve done the same, you imagine his fingers tracing a similar path, grazing against your inner thighs as he lowers your panties, taking them off. Grounded by a thick, scorched labdanum, dark and brooding charred wood and burnt sap, floods through you as the air carries his cologne to you, your nose picks up whatever it is that gets your body wanting more, you caress yourself.

Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you? Find nourishment in the very sight of you? You think so. But would you see through the bars of his plight, and ache for him?

You wish you fingers were to be rougher, thicker and that your fingertips would smell of tobacco. Of something grainy and rugged instead of this slipping silk between your legs for you to rub against. Did he made you sit on his leg as he clad you in this dress that leaves none to imagination, had he rubbed you against his trousers as he put you down?

Your breathing gets heavier, and he changes the hand that steers the wheel, now the car decelerates to keep it in control, now slow enough, a person on a sidewalk would have a flash of image if they were to be as the car glides by— you laid spread out barely clothed, and him, in a state you can’t see over the middle mirror. 

You search for his gaze over the rear mirror, laden with unspoken want. You clench around nothing, mutter words of no meaning, but he knows. You whine deeper breaths, and they soon turn to lilting whimpers.

You think about him feeding you the pill with his tongue - does he feel as you do right now? You wriggle your hips, let a moan to get yourself going, his eyelids flutter close before yours do slowly. He’s watching you; did he watch you when he stripped you naked? How long was he watching you? How long were you out and what happened then? Your heart races with the writhing pulse between your legs as you rub your arm along your nipple, your hand moves to your core, brushing against your clit as you move your fingers against your lips, the breeze of the interior now seeping on the slick you play with your fingertips. The car sways a little out the road as you cry out a louder whimper, pebbles rolling under the tires, vibrating the seats, adding you on.

Some part of you wants him to pull the car to the side, come to join you, grab you by the ankle and yank you out the car, do whatever he wants to you against the asphalt. Some part likes this piercing gaze through the reflection, of him biting the insides of his cheek as he groans lowly and shifts himself on his seat. From the little frame of the mirror, his free hand is out your sight, but you hear it. Hear his belt loosening as the metal hits the strap. You hum as you increase the pressure, circling your much thinner finger around your hole before sliding in, clenching around it as you slide the latter finger.

If he were to tell you to call him by his name before, you’d moan it now. But, all that leaves your mouth is loud and lewd sounds as the saliva clicks against your tongue, synching slow with the in-and-out of your motion, trying to reach your spot with the tips of your fingers.

This won’t last long. 

Open your eyes.

Did you even ask? Pill wears off slow in time, fear stings beneath arousal’s guise, your slick skin sticks to your hair, to the now warm and wet cushion under you. Everyone seems to be asleep but you two, as he takes you into the unknowns of the lovers. Your fingers demand release, rubbing and rubbing hastened than your breath, ill imagery fills goosebumps on its way down to your spine, in texture of his icy fingers. Your teeth sentinels at your lips, hard against skin, against the impulse to speak his name— a bare boundary to still not cross on your book. Maybe you could’ve stopped it if you wanted, but you’re not the one driving. Truest valour lies not in defiance, but in surrender. So you do, let it all out.

It's a hushed stillness of something trembling under, the radio scratches before it turns a sepia-tone song spilling cadence, a gentle sway as you massage and pull your soaked legs to your chest, laying on your side as the road keeps hurling forward to an endless terrain.

Everybody knows he’s cruel. Now that you’re tied onto the chair with ropes cutting your joints, you are once more aware. With his figure looming over you, his head almost brushes the light bulb hanging down the ceiling—he could kill you on the spot. He could crush your skull with his bare hands and it would be no sweat to him, he would sickly enjoy it. A monster.

“neun,”

Your body winces in pain, the knife draws down on your skin, a trail of blood follows along. He tuts, such a pity. You shake uncontrollably, fever takes you. Such waste you will be. Blood drips down your chin with every drop of rusty water leaking from the ceiling above your head. They move in sync, both taking the heat off your body, sending you into a frenzy.

The room smells like dust, coppery with blood pooling around your heels. Wall paint and gunpowder. This is the end, you think. Would you even survive at this state even if he were to let you go? You highly doubt that.

“acht,”

…

“It’s infected.” He mutters, digs deeper into the bullet wound on your shoulder with the metal pipe in his hand. It throbs, and you can smell the wrenching liquid if you were to just tilt your head towards it. It feels like your heartbeat pulsates all over your body— “How long it has been, hmm? The bullet, it twists inside you… You would need this arm amputated to live. Ja, that is—if you tell me what I want.”

You’ve lost feeling on your fingertips of your injured arm days ago. Feeling it with your other hand, the skin is cooler, and you don’t even feel a single tingling, not even when you pinch it with all the remains of your power.

It’s obvious that he pities you, he didn’t even bother tying your hands together. He knows you cannot make it.

He’s not halfway done yet.

“sieben,”

Your ears ring as he slaps your face, the leather of his gloves imprinted on your cheek. Your head falls down. You feel the soft flesh bleeding inside your mouth, seeing the teeth once on it now lying on the concrete floor. Tongue sliding over it, now blood fills your mouth too. It’s surprising that you have this much of it in you.

Is it better to speak or to die?

You never try.

“sechs,”

He’s not that gone in the brain, he does not enjoy watching you groan in pain. Or perhaps, for the limitless authority it provides. He can do anything he wants to you. He could waste his bullets on you, he could reload and do it over and over even with one being enough to kill you. He could take the air off your writhing throat, make you go limp with one hand wrapped around your delicate neck. He can just snap—he can just slit it.

“fünf,”

Then, what’s stopping him? You’re not the vision he imagines in his dreams anymore, no. You’re a traitor. A bloody spy with a regret-filled past, tearing things just for the thrill.

Look at you now. Tied helplessly for months.

“Just tell me what I need, I’ll spare you. I truly mean it, to spare you, ernst…“

You think he means it, that he’s beneath you, even now. He does not. And he surely isn’t.

Those days are long past gone.

Still, you’re one tough shit. Never parting lips, never making a word out.

He decides to ask first. He’s been meaning to. Your lips twitch before putting on a smile, as he tries to shake his thoughts off.

“Why?” He asks eventually.

“..Nothing personal, Liebling. Just business—” Last sentence can’t make it vocal, coarse feel of your throat barely makes it above a whisper.

He’s not good at reading people. All his life he believed the words they say are the ones they truly mean. He doesn’t get better this time either. He doesn’t need to anymore.

You’re the monster. A fucking siren that lured him into possessions he never thought he would experience, thinking you would get away without him realising you’ve been fooling him all this time.

He’s recluse indeed, but never is a coward.

You think you win. Can you ever?

“vier,”

He’s in a haze. He knew from the beginning what you are, yet he couldn’t stop himself from partaking in the compulsion you offer. He felt it on your skin, tasted it on your lips. The more venomous the feeling, the more it burned.

Back then. Now he’s aware. That wasn’t love. That was an illusion. He was desperate back then to feel something, and you were there, giving it to him. He mistook it back then.

Not now, no.

“drei!”

Your head moves up as he grabs your chin firmly, lifting your head more than harsh, eyes meeting yours. You see, there’s no remorse when he looks down at you. Once with compassion; now with hatred. You missed the thin line, and you went overboard. You lost.

“zwei…”

You see the slight tilt of his head, and the twitch at the corner of his eye. Forehead meets the muzzle of the pistol, the one you gifted him. It’s cold against your skin.

He’s never felt worthy of love anyway.

“eins.”

A fish, and a man. Both on the surface of the dirty water, both reek of ammonia and disturbed flesh. Both rotting, and stomach inflated, but the man’s are clearer in sight, vivid. More violent, primal, disgusting. As if all the colour is dulled around for him to put on a show of his defeated stage. He’s louder to look at. Skin unnaturally yellow, arms sprawled out, the body still intact with his skeleton in blisters. Deranged, a man who stains the water he’s in. And a fish. Both dead, but the fish saddens her more. Both are dead, and both by her, but the fish saddens her more.

For she didn’t even notice it as she killed it, for love is violent and much kills, but she was young enough, or maybe such emotion is foreign, novel to her. She killed it at last. The fish obliges, tastes the attention, in a symbiotic affection with her. But it swims more around the edges on the tank as days go by, swims higher on the surface, until one fin lays smooth on its side, not moving, until it can’t swim straight, and until it dies.

The man is still in the water, his face down. She can see what he would look like in a few weeks, that he would decompose slower in cold, no vultures around to dig on his skin. She can imagine the soapy glaze his flesh would have, and the green, and the violet. Hypothermia. Petrification. Bisection. And a hound, it’s mouth wet and sticky, dribbling in red and saliva. She can see the skeleton sneaking out the flesh as the hyenas around shake their furs, off the blood and the water. Loyal and starving, a rabid dog in need of someone to find its way back to —

Her machete, on the other hand, is very much so alive, painting red rivulets on the snow-white ground. Sharp colour stripes off the chrome, turns into a deep velvet on earth, her hair is soiled, and her body is covered in red splotches, on her knees as she eyes the handiwork, trying to stay conscious, alert. She kicks her feet to clean the bits of the man off herself too. A roar in her ears and her temples feel like it’s her brain that’s splintered with a machete inside, eyes twitch as she stares at the man’s gouged one. And she tries to cough it off, coughs and coughs until she starts to gag, looking away from the scenery which she is the master to. She rubs her palms, rips the dead man off his gloves for hers are soaked in blood.

She’s better a gun than she is a person. Horror in her bane, she’s a better swordslayer than she is human. The man proves it. The fish punishes it.  A little girl with fish food, or another with a rusty machete, she’s both. Can’t say she takes pride in neither, but the man doesn’t upset her in anyhow.

;;

It takes one more night to look up without a ceiling, before you get your way back, before the static of your comm buzzes again, the familiar voice, and the authority he embodies mercilessly. The Lieutenant. A pleasant sizzle follows his voice through, your eyes shot close as you feel through the gear with both hands to reach the radio, pressing the cold plastic to your ear. He disperses the smoke in your mind that dwells about the throes of your own demise, the thought of if this is how death will feel for you. He guides you, the way through the fuming howl of the tundra, becomes your sun chariot, your servant of peace and light, meeting you halfway, and when you encounter he doesn’t ask you to cradle you, does it naturally as he sees you. Sleight of hand, you don’t bother. You need a trace to make you believe in him, a keepsake of the times where he had done it so willingly. Something to hold you back to routine, to life. You’ve been sleeping long enough, he notices. He wakes you gently, rocks you kindly with hands you’re sure that has seen much more than yours did. But he wakes you kindly, a soothing hand lands on your nape, steadies you into this realm. You don’t pull back, and you don’t notice the build-up, the tension on you. But only the release.

You don’t know why you cry. He doesn’t say it to you between countless mantras over and over of how he thought he lost you, again, but you know it eases him to see an emotion on your face, and you feel it too, however ugly you think you wail. You need to breathe to cry. You breathe to cry. You said you don’t want him anymore, but no one would breathe in your scent like he survives on it with his head heavy on your shoulder, no one would kiss the dried blood on your brow and your matted hair. You know no one would blow warmth on your cold-stiff palms, not like he does. No one would waste himself, on you. No one would lend their blood to heat yours. You never said someone would anyway.

Adrenaline imperceptibly loses its grip on you, subsides and alters into pain. It creeps under your skin, trembles on your chin and prickles your eyes, making its presence known. Your step loses momentum as you lend your weight on him, and he grabs you with very capable hands.

After wails turn into mulled cries, and they turn into woeful moans, he lifts your head off his chest, leans his forehead against yours, gives you a few breaths, gives your forehead a kiss, stays a few moments until your heart thumps steadily to his, then pulls back. He nods slowly as you loosen your grip on him. Pulls his mask down again, he walks you through the icy terrain in hasty affection, shelters you in the safehouse.

;

He kicks the door shut behind him with the heel of his boot, the sound dull and final against the howl outside. The air inside is stale, laced with metal and frost. He doesn’t bother with lights yet. Doesn’t need to see you to feel you. 

He sits you on the furs of the bed, kneels before you after he throws his mask on the cushion beside you. Peels the foreign gloves off your frostbitten fingers with a wet rip. The stiff, blood-caked fabric sticks to your skin, and when it finally rips free, thin strands of red pull away with it. He balls them up and flings them straight into the rusty barrel fire. They land with a hiss, flare up bright, and start smelling like burnt hair.

He’s a dirty blonde, hair messy and dark with sweat and meltwater, face scarred rough across the left cheek and jaw as if someone once tried to cut him open and didn’t quite finish the job. Those scars pull tight when he leans in. With his bare, blood-smeared hands when he starts wiping your face. The cloth scrapes over your skin, dragging at the dried clots tangled in your hair. You hiss through your teeth at the sharp sting, but you don’t pull away. You sit there in quiet compliance, letting him clean you. One hand at your jaw gently turning your head towards the firelight, the other wipes it clean. 

Then he gets to your hands.

He takes one at a time, slow, like he’s got all the night, and the tundra can go fuck itself. His rough, ungloved fingers close around yours, thumb pressing deep into the centre of your palms, circling hard, working the cold and the stiffness out with steady, almost mean pressure. He digs into the meat of your hands, rubbing slow and forcing the blood to move again. The base of each finger he squeezes, rolls the joints, and slides his thumbs back up the tendons with a kind of brutal tenderness that makes your throat tighten. Every callus on his hands scrapes against your palm as he kneads deeper. He doesn’t rush. He worships. 

He does the same to the other hand, never looking away from your face for too long. The firelight flickers across his cheek, catching in the pale stubble and the tired lines around his eyes. His own hands are dirty, streaked with red that’s drying dark, the warmth of his skin bleeds into yours, he keeps rubbing until the sting turns warm, slides his fingers between yours until the ache loosen and something very close the alive creeps back under your skin.

His bare fingers are now stained with the same mess that covers yours. He doesn’t wipe it. Instead, he takes out his spare gloves from his pocket and slides them onto your hands one by one. the leather is still warm from his body. They’re too big. The thick fingers sag and swallow yours completely, the cuffs hang loose around your wrists. 

He doesn’t ask for a thing in return, and you only watch the tail of his tattoo through the exposed skin of his wrist as his hands hover over your elbows. He lowers his gaze, frees his messed hair out his balaclava, his throat bobbing as he swallows. He bites his cheek as of holding back a thought, and you slither your palm up to his cheek. He goes still before he looks up at you, big brown eyes and fanned lashes melt golden under the fire burning at the middle of the room. He blinks, then his bare fingers skate between yours, interweaves his fingers through the gaps between your own, he nudges at the fabric that coats your wrist, pushing the cloth up with his nose so his lips meet the inside of your wrist. You let out a faint breath, and it flutters his hair as he lays his head gently on your thighs, sitting on the concrete.

You play around with the little beads of the metal of his dog tags, and he moves his unoccupied hand around the side of your leg, pressing his cheek further onto the warmth that slowly comes back to your body. Under your imperious gaze, he rests his eyes, and you sink back onto the mattress, finally breathing the way you should.

;

The plume of the dusty sheet swells in your nose, thick with the scorched, bitter stink of bloodied gloves still curling in the barrel fire. The reek claws down your throat. You wake slow, eyes burning, the safehouse bare and dim around you. The cold outside whispers through the uncaulked edges of the wooden window, and you rest your eyes a moment longer before searching for Simon’s warmth,

Only to find him sitting on a thick log next to a woodpile outside, elbows nested against his knees, mask half up, minding the floor as he smokes. 

You walk over without sound and slide your hand over his shoulder from behind, fingertips dragging slow against the warm skin of his neck. He twists immediately, eyes locking on you, never letting you out of his sight as you circle him and sink onto the smaller log beside him. 

He turns fully toward you now. The cigarette hangs from his lips like an afterthought. 

You lean in and brush your mouth just above his jaw, right where the old scar cuts across the stubble. He exhales sharp through his nose and drags the log closer with a rough shove of his boot until your thighs press together.

When you start pulling his spare glove off your hand, he only takes one and slips it onto the hand farthest from you. The other stays bare. He threads his rough, ungloved fingers through yours, gripping hard enough that you feel every callus scraping against your skin. Then he drapes his heavy arm along your shoulders, cigarette still burning between his fingers, and lifts it straight to your lips.

His eyes never leave your face while you drag on it slow.

You take what you want. Then you reach up, fist the collar of his coat, and pull him in. Your lips graze his scarred cheek in a long, deliberate caress, drifting closer, slower, until they hover just shy of his mouth. A silent, filthy thank you pressed into his skin. You feel his throat bob hard, a low, broken sound escaping before he can swallow it.

 He crushes the cigarette against the log in one violent grind.

Then both his hands are on you.

One rough palm cups the back of your neck, the other slides along your jaw, tilting your face up to his. He pulls you in until there’s nothing but a trembling breath between your mouths. His scarred face is so close you can see every line, every old cut, every tired shadow under his eyes. He stares at you like you’re the only real thing left in the world, drinking in your half-lidded eyes, your parted lips, the small desperate whine building in your throat.

How easily you got him wound up.

He surges forward, the cold tip of his nose digs on your cheek, and you taste your name as he groans it on your parting lips.  The kiss is slow, deep, and devastatingly tender in its hunger. His mouth claims yours like he’s trying to crawl inside you and stay there. His lips are rough, warm, slightly chapped from the cold, moving against yours with deliberate, aching pressure. He kisses you like a man who’s watched too many things rot and die, and finally found something he refuses to lose. His tongue slides slow and heavy along the seam of your lips, coaxing them open, then pushes inside with a low, guttural sound that vibrates straight into your chest.

He tastes like smoke, salt, and something darker. Something that belongs only to him.

His bare hand tightens on your jaw, thumb stroking rough circles over your cheek while he deepens the kiss, tilting his head to fit better, sucking gently on your lower lip before sliding his tongue back in, slower this time, more possessive. Every stroke is deliberate, filthy, reverent. He drinks down every small sound you make, swallowing your whines like they’re oxygen. His fingers thread into the hair at the nape of your neck, gripping just hard enough to tilt your head exactly how he wants it.

Your hand on his collar falls down to his knee, and he turns fully towards you as you slither it up to his thigh, kissing as you hook your bare thumb around the clasp of his belt, feeling the band beneath the trousers. The rough surface sends frictions between your thighs when he pulls you towards him on the log you sit on, and you cling onto him tighter.

He parts with a sound of your wet lips separating, for a moment, brushes his thumbs on your gentle eyelids, warm cheeks. Searching for any sign on your face that disapproves, that doesn’t want this as much as he does. You only slip your cold palm under his t-shirt.

“God…”

A firm grip encircles your waist, and he scoops you bodily, rushes back in the one-room safehouse in tenacity.

You’ve been sleeping for long enough, and he always noticed. And a grasp, he pulls you forward, insistently rocks you off your sleep.

“Come here.”

;

Forever, just one more try than never. Maybe there is a way for you, not one of pleasantries, one without him if you try hard enough. For now, though, you stay engrained in the facets of his life, between whorls of his fingertips and everything else that caresses you of him. There is no way for you to leave, no way that you are not embedded in his devoid heart. His heartbeat mirrors yours and he has your breath to breathe in, and you feel it. You feel him everywhere, under the yellow hue of the barrel’s fire, under his body, over the lilting shadow on the wall, fingers deep inside you. Where his silhouette ends, yours begin, and he means it. Promises it, prays it, beneath honeyed words, in rhythmic intonation as he gives you every inch of his love. And you give such sweet noises that trickles down his earlobe, gently grazing with your teeth, drawing out antsy whimpers. “That’s it. That’s my girl.”

You were going to kill him one day. All with this exaltation he willingly offers at your feet, with the idolatry that evokes within him in your cashmere walls, if not with the way you suck him in, hold and pull his digits deep inside you. You overwhelm him, exhilarate him. “Aren’t you?”

He keeps on, keeps on until you don’t feel like you are the ruler of your body, until you feel nothing but the transcendental bliss as you let out your high on his fingers, feel the coil in you arch, tighten and snap like harp strings. No one in the world has ever missed anyone like this. Lucky you.

And you do. And you are. 

—

Life’s a bar at 2 a.m. with the lights overhead buzzing like a bee and the whores gone home. The world owes nothing to you but a kick in the balls and a hangover that makes you swear you’ll never drink again, after tomorrow.

Jobs are slow suicides with insurance. And money is a girl with a heart of rust. Will let you in, spread her legs, show you the raw pink underneath, then laugh at you while you’re wasting on your own loneliness. Waking up in a penthouse. But damn if it doesn’t feel better than staring at the ceiling of an empty house waiting for the mailman to bring you another eviction slip. Both smell the same when the whiskey’s gone.

Four men— small, mean, horny, scared. Controlled, intrusive, violent, devoted. They’ve slept in worse places than a place they can’t pay the rent of, they don’t care.

But Bonnie does.

She’s got them circling around her like dogs around a bloody steak. Not one loyal fool, but four. Different types of the same stupid hunger. Tuesday. She smells all like them. But not quite. She’s not the town bicycle. She just lets them in just enough to smell her possibility. But not quite. One queen on a chess board and four pieces trying to knock each other off the board trying to reach her.

One Bonnie and four Clydes. They called her by your name, but she was Bonnie in every way that mattered. She’s quiet here, deadly, and impossible to look away from. Her skin glowing under cheap motel neon, and her lips, that back... she’s unfixable. She sits there at the centre of their ruined black hole wearing something stolen from one of them, hands always clean and always still.

John drove with white-knuckle control, jaw tight and eyes on the road as if he could be the one who saves you all. But every mile he felt her in the rearview, the way she breathed, the way her thigh pressed against Kyle’s, the way she existed without needing any of them and still owned all of them.

Johnny rode shotgun with fear and lust twisting in his gut, knee bouncing, fingers itching to touch her again like he had a two nights ago, when she had sat on his face in the motel, grinding her soaked pussy against his tongue, intrusion, until he was choking on her, while the others listened through thin walls. She came hard, flooding his mouth, then stood up and walked away dripping down her thighs, leaving him edged and feral for days. Now in the car he kept glancing back, cock aching hard it hurt, pre-cum leaking steadily as he remembered her taste.

Simon sat beside her, cock half-hard from just the smell of her hair and the knowledge that she saw the violence in him and didn’t flinch. In the last safehouse she sat on the edge of the bed wearing only his mask, legs spread obscenely. She had let him drop to his knees, then lifted one bare foot and pressed it against his mouth. Suck, and he did- desperate, groaning, tongue licking between her toes and sucking each like it was her clit while she rubbed yourself inches away from his face. She came with a soft sigh while he humped the floor like an animal, then made him cum all over her feet and lick every drop off. Now in the car he was rock-hard and broken, staring at her bare ankles, ready to kill the others just to have her alone. He found her first. He took her, brought her here.

Kyle, believed she and him were secret lovers. She made him believe it completely. When money spilled across the motel bed like confetti, she would sit with him. Late night when the others were asleep, she would pull him into the bathroom, or the backroom, kiss him slow and deep like he was the only one, whisper that he’s the only one who truly sees her. And nothing more, because it doesn’t need to rush. A man that doesn't know his mind, it's okay, baby, take your time, we're gonna make it, wanna enjoy it.

One Bonnie and four Clydes. Robbing banks like it’s foreplay. Counting blood money on motel beds. Dawn on the desert highway. Ford V8 humming low and tired through Bienville Parish, packed tight with five bodies and the last of the money. John’s back is straight, hands at ten and two.

Up ahead, a truck sat crooked on the shoulder of the lonely road, looking stranded in the pale morning light. Johnny saw it first.

“John—”

John slowed. Just enough.

The world exploded.

Gunfire ripped through the car in a sudden, merciless storm, metal punching through metal and flesh. Of men. Windows shattered in bright sprays of glass. The car swerved violently as John’s head snapped forward, sharp-red-three blooms opening at his chest. His hands slipped from the wheel. Control died instantly, body slumping heavy over the steering column.

Johnny didn’t even finish turning. His eyes went wide with the fear he had felt coming all night—then a burst of bullets tore across his temple and throat. He folded sideways against the door, breath gurgling once before going still.

Simon moved instantly, gun coming up, mask hiding the snarl as he fired back into the blinding hail. He got three shots off before terror answered louder, rounds slamming into his shoulder, his chest, his neck. His body jerked hard against the seat, gun dropping from dead fingers as he froze mid-defiance, eyes still open behind the mask.

Kyle didn’t reach for his weapon. He reached for her. His arms wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her down with desperate strength, but the bullets kept coming. The car caved inward. Glass and blood and torn money in the air. Her body jolted once, twice, as rounds found her too— clean hands stained red for the first and only time. His grip tightened around her for one final second. Then it weakened.

Finger by finger.

His hand slipped away.

The engine ticked softly as the Ford rolled to a crooked stop on the side on the desert road. Smoke curled lazily from the shattered windows and the barrel of Simon’s gun. Cash fluttered out through the broken glass like white butterflies in the morning light.

The desert wind whispered through the ruined car, lifting a few loose bills and letting them dance across the blood-soaked seats.

Four brothers and one woman.