jennifer ✭

But it's only when he's shoving you against the wall of his condo—a place much nicer than the dilapidated basement with nothing except a dirty mattress covered in suspicious stains you'd expected—that it occurs to you that you've never actually said yes. Don't even really remember him asking for consent at all during the short walk (or pull, rather: as soon as he seemed to make up his mind that he'd much rather be spending his time bullying his cock into your pussy instead of bullying you for your terrible choices outside of a bathroom that reeked of old vomit, cigarettes, and stale piss, he'd dragged you out of the bodega) to his car, parked illegally outside. Or at all during the short drive to his condo where he'd spent the time with his hand buried between your thighs, toying with your swollen clit through the lace of your panties, and you—mortifyingly enough—seemed to oscillate between drunk, slurred moans and openly weeping about your shitty night after being stood up by a tinder hookup, of all things—

You scored this really great job, you remember babbling out as he sinks his teeth into your neck—the pinching, awful sort of pain makes you gasp, makes you try to pull away, but there's nowhere to go when he's stupidly big, and his bicep alone is probably wider than your head. Trapped between the wall and a thick body; his knee kicking out until your thighs spread over the top of his—the width making your hips ache from the stretch, and you have to wonder how thigh-riding could ever be a real thing outside of smutty romance novels when you're already getting a cramp by just this much.

And he's just as mean then (did i ask? shut up and spread your legs wider for me—) as he is now (gettin' fuckin' snot all over my scrubs, crybaby), but the sight of his pristine condo cuts through the haze of too many bad decisions in one night, and it's only when you're thrown on a bed, but can still see your panties on the floor in the hallway (right next to the crumpled pile of your clothes, his trousers), does everything start to feel a little too real. Like something you might regret later. A bad decision playing out in real time—

But he's not stopping. And you can't stop panting his name long enough to say no.

Everything condensed into some amalgamation of panic and want: like being seconds from a disaster you know is going to happen, but you can't stop watching it unfold. Except your car crash is the sight of a cock being pulled out of black boxers—a cock that looks nothing like they do in porn: it's too thick, too heavy. It droops, hanging between his thighs when he lets go of it to wrench your clenched thighs apart until your hips ache anew, and it feels like your pelvis is about to be snapped. 

Pre-cum beads at the tip of his fat, engorged head—the ugliest shade of purple you've ever seen, like a bruise; like something made to hurt, to ache—and dribbles down between your knees in a long, milky strand.

Everything inside of you seems to recoil at the sight of it—of that thing, that hideous monstrosity—dangling between his thighs. A warble echoes in the quiet room, sounds like a hurt mouse, and it's only in the twitch of his jaw, the slow tilt at the corner of his mouth, lips pulling up into a crooked smirk, do you realise the noise from you.

But beyond the queasy horror, the dread, is the stark realisation that, as he grips the base and shuffles forward to crowd you against pillows that have no business being so soft and comfortable in comparison the horrorshow oozing thick, milky droplets of cum, he's actually going to try to stick that thing inside of you. And, like he knows what is about to form on your numb lips, he bends down, taking your mouth in a blistering kiss—one that's more of an eating, a devouring: all teeth and tongue and deep, throaty growls used against you in a way that hurts more than it soothes—swallowing your protests as easy as he had the tentative i, i don't know that spilled out after he asked if your cunt was ready for him before dragging you into the bedroom.

Ignored—like everything else from the moment you caught that dark, brooding stare from the table near the entrance when you stood up on fawnlike legs, half-hoping to hobble into the bathroom and drown the embarrassment of being stood up by a man who spent the last week wearing you down until you said yes in the grey-tinged toilet water. Ignored, like the nervous looks you sent over your shoulder when you caught him downing his drink in a quick, heavy swallow—the shift of his throat, the flex of muscles working; shadows under his adams apple bobbing under the gauzy, warm glow of golden lights—with his eyes wide open, something that made your mouth go dry, your stomach churn; like watching a predator gulp down a torn off piece of meat. Predatory. The unease that skirted like a knife along the insides of your belly when he brought the glass down, cleared his throat, and stood up—all without taking those dark, piercing eyes off of you once. Ignored, like the stutter in your step when your body tried to react to two different instincts at once: stay put and run.

(that, too, ignored.)

It's on the tip of your tongue—both his teeth and the word wait—but he scrapes it off as easily as he parts your thighs, wedging the thick spread of his waist between when you try to snap them shut.

It feels like being pried open. Held down. You spare a silent thought, a keening apology, to all of the poor butterflies whose wings you pinched between clumsy, chubby fingers—too busy marveling at the beauty of their patterns to notice the way they flailed and kicked, unable to escape the grubby hand of a child, innocently unaware of its own cruelty, as he bears down above you, wrenching you open further. Trying to squeeze inside a space too small for him to fit.

But something has to give.

And as his cockhead bumps against your spread cunt—bruisingly hard, notching against you in a way that hurts—you know, without a doubt, that it'll be you. 

(and really—how could it not be when he has almost double the muscle, the strength, behind his insistent pushes than you, with your comically small hands against the broad stretch of his chest, do with yours.)

It's a battering ram to a paper door, and you feel the give like a pop. A sharp, sudden ache in the pit of your belly as that fat, oozing head catches on the sensitive rim of your unfathomably wet hole, sinking in until the tip disappears inside of you. The glands swallowed by your swollen folds.

It's almost too horrifying to look at, and nothing at all like the porn in you've seen—zoomed in images of smooth, pale cocks; a soft, wet cunt stretching around it—or the things you've thought about. Imagined. a hard, heavy thing inside of you, thicker than the width of your finger. Longer, too. A fullness. 

That's how it's always described, isn't it? Something filling. didn't know how empty i was until he was inside of me, filling me up... A delicious stretch. A good sort of hurt.

You don't feel empty at all when he grunts, pushing just that much more of his cock inside of you. You feel—

Like an open wound. Something ripped open. Torn flesh. It hurts too much for you to think about anything except the ache of it. That terrible, too full feeling in the pit of your stomach as he keeps working his hips in these insistent, merciless rolls. Breath humid, too warm on your cheeks, your temple, as he bears down over you, grunting all these ugly, awful things out between clenched teeth—things like fuck, you're too tight, gonna strangle my cock, loosen up, that's it, just like that, let me in, you know you want it, baby; gotta break in this baby cunt, don't i? never had a cock this big, huh? cunts too small for my cock, but you're gonna take it anyway, aren't you? gonna take all of it. every fuckin' inch. but i haven't even popped my fuckin' head in yet. yeah, keep crying, honey: i wanna see all those pretty fuckin' tears—

He's unrelenting. Won't give any quarter, any respite—even when you're whimpering for mercy, begging him to stop because it hurts, Brendan, it hurts so much, but you can tell from the way his eyes seem to spark in the midnight black of the room that he likes that. Likes knowing he's hurting you on the stretch of his cock. Bears down on you harder for it, giving you all of his weight until you're crushed into the mattress, smothered beneath his bulk. Everything narrowed down to the ache between your thighs, where all that you are is just a too sore, too small cunt being pried open by something as thick, as big, as your wrist.

His hands slide beneath your knees, pulling them open further before he drags them up. It changes the angle. Let's him sink just a little deeper—like a knife cutting through tendon, muscle. A white hot, pulsing pain that gets worse when he bends down, forcing your knees against your shoulders, drilling into the wide, spread split of your bared, aching cunt—seething against your jaw, let me in, fucking... let me in—until something breaks. Something gives way, and then he's sinking deeper on a low, throaty groan, pushing until his balls slap against the curve of your ass, and—

"there we go—balls deep in crybaby's pretty little pussy, huh?"

—the look on face, something hungry and primal, an animal, eclipsed in the heavy, heady greed of a man, shifts. morphs. Something like shock, like surprise, flickers across his expression, shuddering over the pointed slope of his nose, the harsh, tense line of his lips, still twisted in mocking amusement. A lock of hair falls limp across his forehead, shaken loose from the slicked back style he'd worn it in when he leans back on his haunches, lifting off of your body. He tips his chin down at the same time your reeling mind catches up with the tickle sliding down the crease of your ass.

His jaw clenches tight. A muscle jumps, ticking beneath his skin as he looks—keeps looking: dark, lidded eyes locked on the spot where he's buried inside of you, drilling into the sight where you split around the thick of him; your swollen, puffy lips stretched obscenely around his cock as buries to the hilt inside of you, grinding his hips in this heavy, aching rolls until the base of his cock is swallowed up by you, leaving nothing visible except a messy spill of wry curls sticking to your folds, dusting across your mound.

He grunts again. something dark, biting. A low, snarl that makes the nape of your neck prickle—

"Poor baby," he rasps, sounding angry. Aounding savage. Beastly. His hips work, then; jerking in tight, choppy pumps. Grinding the head of his cock into you, bullying it into something just behind your navel that pulses, aching like fingers pressed into a fresh bruise. A bone-deep hurt. A pain that makes you keen, vision blurring around the edges until he's just a smeared, hazy shadow snarling down at you.

And it's only when the pain tips into too much, when the eight (maybe mine) sour cherry margaritas catch up to you in a dizzying rush, tipping the world into a haze of drunken delirium, that you think—maybe—you made a mistake. That you might have bitten off more than you can chew. 

But as the sob builds in the back of your throat, a wailing cry drumming against the walls of its esophageal prison, you catch the predatory glint of teeth before he bends down, dragging them over the skin of your jaw, scraping against flesh.

A dangerous shadow crests over the smooth topography of his face; a dawning—a dark glint, something hungry, full of flint—just before he reels back, sliding out of your sore cunt until only the fat head keeps you stretched open.

His fingers dig into your calves tight before he adjusts his hold, pinning your knee to the broad expanse of his warm, sweat-slicked chest. Letting the other slide down your leg, trailing across the back of your knee, tickling soft, sensitive skin with the scrape of a dry knuckle—his eyes, that single strand of oiled hair cutting across one of them, devouring everything in his slow, careful journey—before dragging them over your thigh, and falling, finally, to your sore, hot cunt.

Rough, calloused fingers scrape across your folds, sliding from your throbbing clit to your swollen, taut rim stretched around the thick of him, pausing there as your breath hitches in the back of your throat. Caught between a whimper and a plea when he presses down on tender flesh, letting out a deep groan when your hole clenches tight around his head, squeezing. Flexing. Somehow so fucking eager despite the pain, the burn of being forced open so wide around something so unforgiving. Just as hungry when the muscles in his stomach tense, shifting under the milky spill of moonlight through the open window. The bulk of him, the sheer expanse, doing strange things to your head, to that sore, bruised spot behind your navel. A pull; this grabbing, greedy thing—

"Fuck," he grunts, jaw ticking again as he slides his finger over your clit, feeling the flutter, the pulsing twitch of your cunt around him. His stomach shifting again; muscles flexing. It's the only warning you get before he rocks forward, sinking that fat, thick cock back into your cunt—like a knife sliding to the hilt, knicking bone. "No wonder your cunts so goddamn tight—"

It's mean, the way he says it. A cruel line slanting over his lips, teeth gleaming in the pale glow. Twisted, goading, and—

Surprised, maybe. but just for a moment. A brief second—and then he's grinning, wolfish and mean, pressing into you with his teeth bared and his muscles straining.

"Never had a cock this big before, huh, crybaby?" huh? go on, then, go on and cry about it—

And you do.

You wake up in an unfamiliar bed, nestled in thick cotton sheets that smell of sweat, sex, and loam. And beneath that, something deep, masculine—charred oakmoss, crushed black pepper, smoked leather, vetiver, damp moss, and suede—and dizzyingly familiar.

The night before is tangled in your periphery like a bad dream—your panties laying in the hallway. Clothes a discarded heap over his floor.

The him in question buzzing in the back of your head like a distant memory, a throb. Something sticky and wet between your thighs. Cum, you think. Cum, and—

It's smeared across his sheets: a deep, dark red stain the same colour as sour cherries. Fitting, you think, since that's what they call it, right? What the older man you'd been talking to for a few days called it, when you told him. 

gonna let me pop that cherry, babygirl? 

It was gross then, and it's gross now, thinking about it—feeling it. The ache between your thighs, in the core of you. Sore, sensitive. Hurting—like something was popped, split open. Or wrenched, more like. Pried. forced. But—

not really.

The slickness, too—which, you suppose, is more cum than blood because he didn't use a condom; didn't even bring it up—is gross. Uncomfortable. Too—too wet. Too sticky. Too...full. The sensation when you sit up, move, and can feel it dribble out—oozing—is somehow worse than the pain. The embarrassment of losing your virginity to a stranger. Then being stood up by the man who was supposed to do it instead. Then being one at your age. Caring, even, because it's just a social construct. An immaterial thing. Pointless and stupid and—

and real.

Very real. You're sitting in the aftermath of a bad choice (of another bad choice). Can feel it smeared over your thighs. Across the sheets. And there's so much of it that it makes you a little sick to look at because he didn't just pop it, did he? No he—

He butchered it.

It's stupid. You're alone in a bed with blood sheets and cum-stained thighs—feeling like a child pretending to be an adult. Thirteen going on thirty except the man waiting to catch you when you stumble in heels that don't fit isn't Mark Ruffalo but—

a stranger. 

His name is drenched in sour cherry margaritas. Park, you think, feeling your head pulse. Your stomach churn. Park, he'd said. Just Park. A man who was mean, and rude, and didn't bother pretending like he was going to wait for a yes. A man who took. Takes—

You shiver, teeth chattering. Wishing suddenly you were in your own bed. But you blame it on the chill creeping in through the window where dawn waits; a bleak smear of soft lavender and turpentine across a pale blue sky. In the hazy yellow of mid-morning—early still, your alarm hasn't gone off yet—the penthouse looks bigger than it did last night. Sleek and modern. Parquet floors in a dark, rich brown. Cream coloured walls. The sparse furniture is practical. The epitome of a rich man's bachelor pad.

And with your discount panties and chipped nail polish, you realise, suddenly, that you don't belong. Don't fit. Not here—where Pittsburgh is greener than you've ever seen it, more lush and vibrant and full of trees than it is where your single bedroom apartment is cradled between crumbling bricks and dilapidated storefronts. It's a jarring dichotomy—one you want nothing more than to run from.

And so you do.

Twisting out of the cotton sheets without looking back. Hand bracing against the sleek end table as you stand, glancing around at the rest of the bedroom now that you can see it clearer in the mid-morning spill of a hazy sunrise.

All dressed up in—in Anthropologie Home, something in the back of your head fills in. Five hundred dollars for eight pieces of wood that barely reach your knees. The rest of the catalogue is already branded in your head because you baulked at the price tag of the Isla Fluted Wood collection when you saw it. Twenty four hundred (a piece) for the three dressers he has lining the walls. A two thousand dollar rug. Two hundred dollar curtains.

(three grand for the bed he fucked you in. two hundred just for the sheets you stained with blood. another three for the bedding.)

It makes you a little sick, stomach churning. Pinching in nausea. Discomfort. A feeling that grows worse when you stand on shaking legs, wincing on that first step—half from an ache in your belly, and the rest from the feel of unpolished toes touching the too soft area rug beneath your cold feet.

There's a sharp pain—one that feels too much like an open wound.

you're torn, you think, and fight the urge to reach down to feel, press shaking fingers to ripped skin. Soothe the sting. The bonedeep ache that blooms when you move. Fighting the thickening sense of shame, regret (really—how could you be so stupid?) when you hobble on sore thighs, desperate to escape. To leave—

unnoticed.

because you're not sure what you'd even say to him. thanks? how could you? your shame sits in your throat, a burning lump of coal that you can't seem to swallow around.

you're an adult—more of an adult now your friends back home might joke—and you made you a choice. A dumb one. It was just—stress, you think. Moving to a different state to finish school, struggling through the motions of keeping your head above water. And then—

got laid last weekend. kinda sucked, but whatever. he was hot.

your old coworkers at the cafe you worked part-time—only twenty and somehow more adult than you ever felt—brought it up. it like, totally helps destress, yknow? and maybe you were a little lonely. A little scared of the city you were dropped into and told to survive—somehow. Loneliness and stress and embarrassment curdling in your belly until you downloaded tinder. who cares, you thought. who fucking cares.

It doesn't matter. It's just sex. just—de-stressing. A one-night stand. A mistake.

You're already over it, aren't you?

But you still think you'd break down and cry if you saw him—if he saw you like this. Sore and sorrowful. Mouth pinched tight, jaw clenched. The worry in your eyes that if you unhinged it for just a second, you'd throw up all over his expensive rug.

You're spared the experience, slumping against the wall when you hear the hum of the shower. Light spills out beneath one of the doors you missed in the hallway, painting it a soft, gold glow. Your panties sit in the middle, illuminated by the light.

A furious pulse behind your navel kicks up when you bend down to swipe them off the floor. Holding your breath as you gingerly pull them on over sweat-slicked, cum-stained, blood-smeared skin. Gross. But—

but not.

Because you think you liked it last night. When the muscles in his arms began to twitch, when he bore down over you with a sweaty, flushed face, lips turned up into a snarl, and growled m'gonna fuckin' cum, gonna cum in this pussy, fuckin'—beg me not to cum inside your pussy, crybaby, beg me not to knock you up—

You didn't even think about that. The man you were supposed to meet wanted to do the same, didn't he? gonna pop that cherry and cum inside that sweet little cunt. but it was just—just play. He'd sent you his test results, co-signed by a colleague he worked with. clean bill of health, baby. Then, a day before he was supposed to show: you shouldn't let dirty old men fuck you bare, sweetheart. i'll bring condoms.

With a stranger’s cum leaking into the gusset of your panties, belly—and cunt—aching like an open wound, you wish, suddenly, that he'd actually shown up. That your night was spent being pampered, like a goddamn princess by daddy—gonna spoil my sugarbaby rotten, instead of being ripped apart by an animal.

One you hope never to see again as you grab your purse off the ledge above a glass partition separating the mudroom from the kitchen, and make a hurried escape out of his penthouse.

(but life has a way of snapping its jaws around what you wish for until what you get leaks down its maw instead—)

The clock reads half-past five when you slip your phone out of your bag to call a taxi.

You have a few notifications from tinder. A message. A new match. A superlike. hey gorgeous, how you doin'? but nothing from the man who stood you up.

But—

whatever, right? It's not like it matters anymore. It's just a boxed ticked off your list, and another that'll be checked in three and half hours. A few more down the line—student loans starting to be paid off (by yourself, even if the goal of meeting the man from tinder was to snag a sugardaddy who’d pay for your things instead), buy cute furniture from somewhere that isn't Walmart or Ikea, move out of your shithole apartment and into somewhere nice. it doesn't matter. You’ll do it all on your own. 

You delete tinder just as the taxi turns the corner, meandering past the silent street where the bodega sits, quiet and lifeless, in the pale, lazy dawn of downtown Pittsburgh.

next time you date, you think, breathing through the ache in your stomach, between your thighs; you'll meet someone at work instead. Face to face. No chance of being stood up again.

Or going home with the wrong man.

The orthopedic ward is strangely quiet.

A fact you'd noticed when they first brought you down, dressed in a new, starched pair of blue scrubs. shiny badge gleaming in the fluorescent light—a new hire. The hospital's own orthopedic technologist. But it's not your place, really, to question why everyone seems so subdued. So hushed.

Not yet, anyway. Not when you're only an hour into your new job and about to meet the orthopedic surgeon you'll be working closely with. A man who, from the wayward glances and barely concealed grimaces from the other staff, doesn't seem like a man you want to piss off.

but—

It'll be fine.

The mistake from last night has been washed down the rusting drain of your shower, leaving nothing behind by an ache and a squirming sense of regret—and elation. Despite the experience, fucking—or maybe just fucking Park—was good for you. A first step into getting over your hangups and finally dipping your toes into the adult world (one that want confined to a college dorm, a college classroom, tests, and boys with too much body axe and don't waste it on one of these losers, baby, save it for someone who matters). With your new job, one that promises to finally let you start paying off your student loans, you could, maybe, breathe for the first time in four years.

Despite it all, despite the mix-up, things were starting to look up—

(something you wish you did, too;)

—but you don't see the broad chest, the flash of blue, until it's too late, and you end up nose-first into a man who is technically your boss. Meeting on a blinding pain rocketing through your skull—a yelp, a grunt (a low, biting Jesus Christ—) in lieu of a handshake. Greetings exchanged in another curse, a flurry of motion, and the sickening feeling of something hot, sticky dripping down your nostrils and onto starched blue—

bleeding on the man too—as if you haven't lost enough blood in the last twenty-four hours. A thrum of morbid humour making you huff on a reedy giggle, sticky and wet.

"s'rry," you slur, eyes stinging. Flooding with tears. "m's'rry—"

Another curse is bitten out into your crown. A weight—warm and firm—encases the scruff of your neck, forcing your head down. Blunt, rough fingers pinch the bridge of your nose. The pressure soothing the ache between your eyes as unseen hands grab at you—

"doesn't feel broken—despite your attempt otherwise. But c'mon. Let's get you checked out—"

You really can't handle this. The twofold embarrassment. The double hit—

but you're pulled into a room before you can make another escape. Pressed into a firm, broad chest. Protests shushed when they spill out of your sticky, blood stained lips. Things like why are you touching me like this, and hey, wait drowned in the thick, iron tang of blood. Humiliation, too, because where do you even begin trying to salvage some face after this?

A fireable offense, you're sure—for being a goddamn idiot. Left floundering, crying in front of your boss, as he dabs tissue around your nose. Prodding at sore flesh. You can't even look up, can't even begin to fathom what you're supposed to say—

"Well, you sure like making an impression, don't you, crybaby?"

crybaby. Every muscle in your body pulls tight. Only one man has called you that more times in less than twenty-four hours than anyone else in your whole life. Through the buzz of motion (are you okay? what happened? do you need anything, Dr Park—) the sound of his clicks into place. The words rough—even now, in the middle of a hospital. Goading. lemme see the damage, crybaby, c'mon—

You pry your sticky lashes open, glance up, silently hoping that you're wrong. That men in Pittsburgh are just mean. Rude. Like manhandling and calling weeping, terrified girls crybaby—

Up close, under the glaring, fluorescent lights, he's ridiculously intimidating. Broad. boxy. Utterly void of all warmth. They called him the shark when you asked about him. When you scanned your badge for the first time and turned to the woman leading you to the ward and said:

hey, what's he like?

and she blinked. who? oh, you mean Park the shark?

You can see it. The arrowhead shape of his nose. The list of his eyes—dark, gleaming; slightly beady under the cheap spill of the harsh light. His mouth, too—

cruel. flat.

His eyes narrow, lips slanting into something that might be derision, but skirts closer to sadism. A wicked sort of amusement at your expense. At meeting you here.

and—

and a hunger—

one you try not to think about.

"Couldn't just leave your blood smeared all over my cock and my sheets, huh? Had to get it all over my scrubs, too, didn't you?"

bold way to stake your claim, crybaby—

You flinch. "wh—what? i don't—" a nightmare, maybe. A dream. You reach down to pinch yourself. He scoffs when he sees it. Rolls his eyes.

"Oh, you're wide awake, don't worry. Cryin' all over yourself—" he leans in, then, and to anyone else looking, they'd just assume he was looking for damage. Assessing. Watching you with a clinical keenness and not the devastating hunger, the anger, draped over his brow that only you can see. Can feel. His fury simmering in the air until you can taste it, wet pennies, in the back of your throat. "Just like you were crying all over my cock last night."

and then you ran away. The accusation sits in the air, heavy and inescapable. You're not sure how to answer it. How to justify what you did, or why, even, you feel the need to.

"I'm—I, I thought you'd want me to be gone when you got up," you lie. Partly. A half-truth that makes him scoff. "I didn't know—"

"Took you home, didn't I?" he sneers—like it means something. "Took you home, fucked you, popped—"

You're tired of that phrase. "Don't!" your hand snaps up, lashing across his mouth, eyes-wide. burning with tears. "That's not—don't say that."

He growls against your hand—the only warning you get before his teeth sink into the meat of your palm. Words slurring around through his teeth: "I took you home, fucked your cunt—" he says fucked, but it sounds like punched. Ruined. "And you were gone when I got outta the shower, weren't you? I didn't say you could leave."

You're not sure what to say to that. What could be said. So you stay silent, unsure. Still sore and bruised and—

Bleeding on him. Your fingers, sticky with your blood, leave smears across his sharp cheekbones. His jaw. A tick throbbing beneath the tip of your finger as he bites down on your flesh again, and you know he's holding back, tempering himself. Can feel it, too. 

Your flesh pulls between his teeth when you pry your hand off his maw, smarting from the bite marks he left buried in the meat of your palm. more blood, you note, staring down at the vessels he split, the way the bead up, pooling beneath your skin. Fingers, tacky with drying blood, fold over the impression of his teeth, snapping it shut in your fist.

he watches through heavy, angry eyes; gaze volleying between the trickle of dried blood smeared over your nose and lips, and the tight ball of your fist in your lap. Lips tugging into a quiet smirk. A little tip of his stained maw—more of that mordant amusement; the gaping grin of a saw-tooth shark.

"It wasn't supposed to be you," you murmur, feeling mean. Miserable. "I was supposed to meet—"

The list of his mouth flattens into a scowl. "I know—" the look on his face—the flash of irritation, the slip and fall of that cruel amusement—is almost worth the flash of blood-stained teeth, the biting squeeze of his hands—one still wrapped around your nape, the other squeezing the meat of your thigh. but it's waylaid by the slant of his mouth pressing hot, hungry, against yours. An eating more than a kiss—a punch with teeth and tongue instead of bone and cartilage; bruising. Claiming. It hurts—disturbs the sting in your nose, the cut in your nostrils.

Your fingers dig into the thick, hard stretch of his shoulders, pushing. A whimpering, wet stop spilling out against his canines; a noise he groans into, greedy.

hungry.

Something that glues in the black of his eyes when he pulls back, digging the pointed tip of his nose into the sore bridge of yours. A cruel, merciless tease. A punishment, maybe; for leaving him. Denying him—

"I know," he huffs against your kiss-bitten lips, eyes lidded. Heavy. Blunt nails digging into your flesh. Another hurt to add to the growing pile. "I know. But that doesn't matter, does it?"

It's only in that bold, raw growl that rattles your teeth that you realise the severity of what you got yourself into. A foreshadow in the smouldering heat of his heat gaze. The pinch of his fingers burrowing into your skin, possessive; a portend. Bruises in tender meat, spackled under your skin like loose tea leaves. 

You could reach down, touch the flesh that aches, clutched in his knifelike hands; read it—fingers pressed against braille. Divining tasseography: the madness of his design, crushed into ash, laid bare as it smears across the palm of your hand. 

But you don't.

Not yet. 

The worry will come later—when you feel pieces of yourself, your resolve, being scraped off, stuck under his blunt nails. Dragged away. Tossed. Sloughed off in chunks, in pieces, because what you'll learn, what you'll always know, is that Park is not so much a man made to put things back together again, but rather one who perfected the art of taking them apart. Knows, intimately, how everything fits. So much so that reassembling the pieces is second nature to him—

Second. But never first. 

No. First is a butcher who knows nothing of romance except the sweet whisper of knife kissing skin. A cartographer who knows the world, knows people, only in bisecting lines; cut marks buried in meat and bone. 

You're not an exception to the rule—not even close—but you make him want to dip his fingers into topography all the same. 

And—

You said you'd date a coworker, didn't you? And from the look in his eye—rapacious, brutal; wanting—you doubt you’d ever get a chance with anyone else, anyway. 

A fact, a new truism born from history you can discern, that he reinforces when he leans in, mouthing along your neck, lapping at the blood drying on your chin, and growls: