#junkbox

He knows you know better, so when he follows, it is willingly and adoringly, but still your pulse flits in your chest. Your breaths draw tightly, like drawing back the taut string of a bow, pulling into a knot in your chest.

Assuming the role of observer, you sit in your own darkness, far enough to be out of sight as he makes his way across the porch, but still only a generous stride or two away from the door. You watch a gloved hand reach out and sit on the handle of the door, waiting a beat. Two, three. It could be five minutes or your impatience stretching out the seconds painfully. The fingers curl, drive the door open somehow silently, a feat you could not replicate. 

Another pause that makes you despise his tremendous supply of patience. Your legs burn with restlessness. 

Finally, one boot inside, he manifests in the doorway, resembling his namesake; he is a phantom against the backdrop of a bleached moon. His white, howling face is expressive but unreadable. The leather of his boots is old and crisp and hardened with wear, and yet somehow every step is soundless, even when his movements become comfortable and comparatively careless. He knows your house well; the initial chill of the water warms. 

There is no indication that he is breathing until he inhales a long breath, taking in smell of your home. Neutral, woody, maybe the afterthought of your dinner the prior hour still in the air. 

He steps forward again and scans the room. When his mask then fully faces you, the gaping expression bordered by intruding moonlight, you lunge. 

Your palms press against the muscle underneath his collarbones, tight with knots and fitted with scars. You make eye contact briefly before he’s tipping down towards the floor with you after him. His back thuds hard against the wooden floor and he exhales, almost gasps, as you push yourself above him, your hands moving instead to restrain his wrists and pull them above his head.

For the most momentary second he panics, thrashes and rapidly flexes his fingers upon finding them captured. Not a cornered animal, but a hunter disarmed. He recovers quickly and falls still, chest heaving slightly.

You’re smiling. Finally, he laughs croakily, hinges on an old door. 

“Hi,” you say, leaning forward onto your wrists. You rub your thumbs over the veins in the tender skin of the gap between his gloves and sleeves. He’s as cold as a body long dead—always is, if you did not feel his pulse under your fingers now you could believe he was not alive at all. 

“Did I get you? A little?”

Your conversations, if such a casual word could be applied to your bizarre dynamic, are frequently one sided, but you really don’t care; on the occasions he does open his mouth, it’s never the most charming dialogue, so you appreciate his inclination for silence.

“I missed you,” you mutter. Your voice sounds so brittle, splintering in your throat. 

He jerks his wrists aside to signal his impatience; never the one for fond words. You’re a little saddened by his dismissal of your vulnerable, tender honesty, but you’re forgiving tonight. 

You lead this wraith through your house and to your room. He’s soundless, drifting behind you—one day you’ll ask him what oil he uses on his boots. You glance back only once to confirm his presence, then stare, watching the way he phases in and out of protruding shadows, discernible only in brief gaps of moonlight. 

His white mask—the awful specter—somehow intrudes your thoughts and dreams affectionately. Feverishly, too, in visions where he squirms under you and smiles open-mouthed, inviting you to devastate him. He’s cold as you hold him right now, but in those scenes his skin sears you, hot on your tongue when your teeth sink in the vulnerable bridge between his neck and collarbone. 

Now in your room, you draw the blinds tight. They were only ever open so late to invite one intended voyeur; you need no more.

You turn around and watch as he breaches the threshold of your doorway. His hand goes for the belt you know holds a lineup of small knives—you reach him first, taking him suddenly by the shoulders down to the floor. He folds to his knees so hard he gasps. Up to this point in this interaction, you’d been very restrained about jostling him around, not that he could easily stop and just as easily overpower you if inclined, but this sudden harshness is 

Before you fully feel the intrusion of guilt, even if it is unrealistic to have hurt him any significant amount, he laughs. 

“You’re so good,” he commends you, stopping to laugh some more. “But don’t you want to do more?”

It’s very transparently an invitation. By the way his chest is lurching with each breath you can tell he’s excited. How he loves to badger you, perhaps that alone supplies him with pleasure. 

He extends his arms outward then makes a show of twisting them and securing them behind him. 

“All yours,” he says, a statement as much as it is a request. 

You pet him and he nearly lets himself lean into it, but does not.

“I had something specific in mind,” you prompt. You jerk him back up to his feet and he happily relents.

Leaving him in your bedroom to step away to the bathroom feels mildly bizarre. As you turn your hands under the run of cold water, you envision him, this phantom, sat patiently in the room over, on your bed and on your sheets, cross-legged. If you had been anybody else, emerging from their bathroom to drag themselves back to bed, he would’ve stood, silently, then jolted forward, dug his knife up into your stomach and still smiled when you dropped. 

It’s a discerning thought, one that reminds you who he is, who he had almost been to you, too, until you step back into your bedroom with the intention to ruin him.

He’s where you expected him to be, sat on your bed like it’s just as well as his. 

“Your boots,” you scold as you settle down next to him, moving his knee aside. He ignores you and presses his mask up to your neck eagerly, listening to the hot throb of blood. 

“You missed me,” he says. His hands crawl over your thighs and then grab for your own, but you take them and return them to his lap. He’s disappointed, but you give him a reassuring smile before darting down and retrieving a plain box from beneath your bed. It’s only really distinguishable by the white crust of a sticker you unsuccessfully tried to scratch away. He tilts his head at the sound of items shifting inside. 

You retract the lid and unfold a layer of crushed gift paper.

He laughs noiselessly when he sees the strap, but then falls still, fingers curling in on his palms. A second later, Danny is back to clawing at you, shuddering, encouraging your hands to search him. 

“You’re so impolite tonight,” you say even as you relent, rubbing up and down his strong thighs.

“Hurry, hur—ry,” he beckons, the syllables drawn out and curling mockingly. 

He lets you wrestle him into a position you can work with—pushed onto his stomach and knees, hips tilted up so you can work off his belt. 

“Ahaha.”

His laugh is airy but cruel and makes you feel like the exposed one as you tug his pants down to his knees, boxers next. The sound stutters to a stop when you run your thumb up the curve of his thigh. 

“Ah.”

You graze his hole and he jerks forward, sucking in his gut and holding the breath. It would be hard to get any amount in when he’s so tense. You stroke his thigh as you lean away. He tries to play it off with a laugh but there’s no air in his lungs to produce the sound.

You reach for your nightstand, pushing past the clutter and unopened mail, as well as your own embarrassment, to tug open the drawer. Various things are rattled; pill bottles that couldn’t find space in the bathroom, your hairbrush, loose pens, dog-eared sticky notes, and lube. It’s new and still has the plastic seal on it, which you pick at before successfully peeling off. 

You hear him sneer.

“What?” You turn to him, accusatory, but the mask only stares back, and you can envision the amused smile just beneath it. 

You pour a quarter-sized portion into your hand, then more, and rub it vigorously between your palms in an attempt to warm it up. Still, he flinches when you push a single, slick finger in his entrance. He flexes his hands into fists then lets them uncurl. 

“Cold?” you ask, sympathetically but entertained. Now presuming the role of the voyeur, you almost get how he finds satisfication in watching someone squirm, just as he does, delightfully, under you. 

His eerie giggling makes it hard to focus as you push further in in the smallest of increments, waiting between each for a sign to stop. It never comes, even as he twists and huffs and even laughs or sobs at one point. You’re about to pause and ask outright, but he leans back into your hand and snorts.

“Get back to it.” It sounds like a threat disguised as a suggestion, but you know that’s just how he is; he’s not one to earnestly request something, he needs to sound like he’s still the one in control. 

“Are you asking for more?” you stop and laugh. You take him by the thigh and work the soft flesh under your thumbs. You’re surprised it’s so soft and not rugged and shredded up with the same distinctive, serrated scars that you’ve seen all up his forearms. There are a few thin, almost white streaks of scarred skin, like long, stray stitches, which you give special attention—otherwise, the skin not tight with muscle is soft and welcoming.

The pace of his breathing waxes as he tries to even it out. You retract your finger to push in two. He’s silent, this time, but squrims still, rocking himself with the motion of your hand, mimicking the curve and pull upward as you curl your digits. 

You continue like this for another minute until you feel him fully untense, a little put off by his impossible noiselessness. You focus on the pattern of your bed sheets warping as he twists them into his palms in fistfuls. The wood of your bed thumps like a steady, solid heartbeat.

He leans forward, away from you, initially you think it was too much and go to apologize, but a second later you feel him press a knife to your side. It’s a somewhat funny sight, the way he’s resting on his side, leisurely, robe flipped up to his waist and a knife angled almost casually up your abdomen. 

“Get it on, put it in.” For someone with such an expansive and colorful vocabulary over the phone, he’s notably more blunt in person. Sometimes you’re thankful for this, other times it’s that much more unnerving. 

You laugh, mostly, as he guides you back onto your knees. It’s still a real threat, but somehow you’re comfortable enough to get in a chuckle at his expense. You take the time to peel off your shirt, tastefully slowly, but don’t extend the same tentativeness to your pants when the blade sinks further into your side (not yet breaking skin, but intending to remind you of the sting of it).

Dealing with the many bands of the strap is not such a graceful scene, fiddling a lot less patiently with buckles. Now he laughs, slower and much more cruel. 

“Pretty thing,” he says, strung out, maybe mocking. You take him by the hip and he shuts right up.

You turn him so both knees meet the mattress and push him down, forwards, onto his elbows, filling in behind him. 

“Tear me up, get in my guts,” he encourages. Such a grotesque way to put it, but there’s a pleasant hotness in your core as you drag your hand up his thighs and watch him watch you. 

There’s no noise when you first enter, but it all comes when he must, inevitably, release the breath that had coiled high in his chest. Half a cry, a dying snicker, a sound of excited pain, he howls and cries.

You rock and drag against him until you find a comfortable nook to saddle up against him and he shudders. 

“You’re doing good,” you say as you stroke his thigh. He hisses at you and laughs when you’re taken aback, but it looks as if the handle of the knife will snap in his hand with how fiercely he clenches it. 

Soon you have to hold him by the thighs to keep him in place as you distinguish a steady rhythm, fucking into him, forgivingly, for now. Your own breaths start to match his own, heavy and tight, a deepening pressure low in your belly, in your guts. 

He’s forgotten the knife as he grips instead at the pillow. The mask looks back at you offering no guidance, no context, but his dizzy mewling tells of sickening pleasure; heaving and panting already but unrelenting, fucking himself back against you even as his head spins and vulnerable insides burn. He loves the ache and the fullness, he thinks, as his eyes sting with smoldering tears, thankfully hidden. It’s nearly as intimate as a knife. 

Your face begins to glitter with sweat. It takes more than a moment for the both of you to adapt a shared rhythm. You tangle your fingers deep into his robe until you’re pulling on the tattered coattails like reigns. The friction you get in return as you fuck him is slight, nothing susbtantial on its own, yet still manages to burn tenderly. Sweat glosses his thighs, your brow, the line of your collarbone. 

“I thought about you inside of me, before,” he confesses dizzily. You’re not surprised. You lean further over him and bring a hand around the back of his neck and hood, adjusting him to your liking.

“Not always in this way,” he adds with laughter. You must not get it, perplexed by the statement and the heaving chuckling he incites in himself. A long, deep thrust chokes it out of him like a strike to the back.

You think he’s shaking, but the darkness of the night does wonders to hide him, quilts of shadows draped where his own robes don’t hide scarred skin. Your fingers twitch (the want to pry his mask away), but you only dig them further into the nook of his hips against his thighs. 

You can’t decide if his eyes would be wide, all watery whites, or heavy and lidded, drowned in the color of blown pupils. You press the hand on his neck further in, curl your fingers around it so the nails nearly meet. The excited flutter of blood in his veins beats against your fingertips.

“You could kill me,” the Ghostface says, “and I’d—ahahaha.”

Does he find himself so amusing, or is it your puzzlement he finds entertaining? He does love those stern, tight looks you give him. He groans. 

Abruptly, you ask, “am I the only one you do this with?” You say this from both a feeling of confidence, of ownership, but also with genuine interest and shame over it all. That most others who touch him must not live long after, yet time and time again he is in your house at your allowance. His hands, with blood soaked into the creases, yield to you or even move to stroke you. 

He’s said nothing in the moments since your question. He appears to, at this point, be fixated on the ceiling, lost in the motion, the crude sound of skin, the pleasure. You tighten your grip and hope it leaves aching marks. 

The Ghostface grabs suddenly for you. His knees jerk inward, a keening, stretched sound curling from his tensed gut. He shakes relentlessly and sobs just as much, clawing at your thighs, gripping them, attempting to twist into the flesh. You rub his sides and his arms and the tight muscle of his back, fucking again, hard and thorough and good into his hole. You see the white catch on his legs, on your bedsheets; the sensation carves into him, all too much, but he still attempts to draw you further inside. It’s all raw and romantically, scarily visceral. His own panting has made the inside of his mask boil, and his eyes steam with tears and euphoria and body heat. You feel so deep in him, but he wants to drag you farther. 

Then he collapses. Heaving and gasping like a sailor washed ashore, coughing out spit but laughing still. You pull out slowly, an inch or so at a time, watching the twitch in his legs.  

“Thank you,” he rasps, mask buried into your pillow, hands back to pulling at the sheets. Tears and sweat run splotchy streaks down your pillowcase. It was about time to change them out, anyways. 

“You did good,” you reply, softly.

He motions you over. You oblige, essentially, shuffling next to him. He grabs you by the back of your neck like you had done to him, fingers pinching between the discs in your neck. He takes you down next to him, not an embrace, exactly, but so you both lie there, faces in your pillows, breathing heavily. You have to angle your hips uncomfortably to the side, lying crooked, panting as if it was you entirely, in body, inside of him. You look deserted, lost in your own house, bedroom, tangled bedsheets. 

“What do I get back?” you try to say, but well accustomed to his routine, you know he’s swift and curt in his departure once he gets his relief. You can only sigh out, before you lift yourself to slide out of all the straps of the harness.

“You’re the only one to live this long,” it says, not the mask with the frigid expression, but the man underneath. He says it with his own tongue and lungs and throat. You raise your brows at him, before you realize it must be an answer to your earlier question. He chuckles hoarsely as the realization breaks across your face, nightly frost cracking under morning sunlight. The declaration must not have been meant to be sweet, even with his bizarre, off-putting idea of romance—it’s cruel, but a reminder, never a threat, seemingly. 

You stand. The Ghostface follows you with his eyes (you think; he doesn’t move, but you know the distinct feeling of his dedicated gaze.)

You’ve discarded the toy on your desk chair to clean when you forget and stumble across it later and retreat into your bathroom. Drowning yourself in yellow, humming light, you duck under your sink into the wooden cabinet to fish for a washcloth. You avoid your reflection in the cloudy square of a bathroom mirror and duck back out the door once you’ve snagged one. You return after soaking it in warm water to see the intruder has sat up and saddled himself on the edge of your bed, hunched over like someone wounded. He sees you approaching and the off-white cloth balled in your hand. He used to flee before you would ever get to this point, but it appears either he’s come to trust you or has resigned himself to your coddling. 

You clean him up, dabbing up his thighs and the back as well, blotting away sweat and stealing glances at shadowed skin all torn with intersecting scars. It’s nearly intimate.

“Where do you go, after this?” you ask. He turns the mask to you. Silver catches on the rim from the moonlight that pushes through your window shades, blue on the white of his ghastly faux face. 

“You want dinner, too?” he asks, another joke. A pause starts, so instead he pushes his mask up against your nose and the angle of your jaw, almost a kiss but cold and momentary. He stands, pants and the assemblage of all those belts and straps back in place, all black as the stillness of your dark bedroom again. 

“Maybe,” you answer after what is surely an inappropriately long duration, but you thought about it, about the premise of something so casual and gentle, it nearly seems more intimate than what had just unfolded, and what will and will again when he makes his next appearance, something that has become nearly weekly. It doesn’t fit him, the image of a relaxed night out, of genuine tenderness, it can’t. 

There’s a second where he thinks about it, then he simply chuckles.

“When will I see you again?” you ask before he can fully move to leave. He looks at you and you know instantly and with certainty that a wide smile is pulling across his face.

“Check the news tomorrow, yeah?” 

He’s swift to your window, pulling it open with little resistance and hiking up a leg to set a heel on the frame. The sting of cold nighttime seeps in rapidly, a torrent that’s practically glacial on your burning body.

“You should’ve locked it,” The Ghostface says, low and suddenly serious, with what he must believe to be dark humor.  “Haven’t you been reading the headlines?”

Was thinking of you, you wish to say, but the words never leave your mouth, just jitter on your tongue, rearranging themselves like perching birds. You only smile, far less exposing than flustered words might be. He hoists himself out of the window and into the dark expanse of the backyard (it’s only a short drop, but the night appears to consume him whole, bones and all). His departure is somehow quieter than even the distant, clicking chorus of crickets and slowly churning wind.