Page 90 of Ruin
The evidence of it coats my fingers, slick and undeniable, and the humiliation that flashes across her face is worse than anything the knife could have done to me.
"Don't," she says.
"Don't what? Don't touch you?" My thumb finds her clit, traces a slow circle that makes her spine arch despite everything she's trying to hold together. "Don't prove what we both already know?"
"Fuck you."
"That's the idea."
I free myself with my other hand.
No warning, no foreplay beyond the violence and the blood and the three days of silence that were their own kind of torture.
I enter her in one hard thrust that punches a sound out of her lungs—shock and pleasure and rage compressed into a single syllable that I swallow with my mouth on hers.
I set a rhythm that's punishment.
For her, for me, for the lie I kept all these years and the truth I told three days ago and every ruined thing between us that we keep choosing to hold instead of drop.
Every stroke drives deep, angles up, hits the place inside her that I mapped eons ago with the patience of a man who understands that knowing someone's body completely is its own form of power.
She grabs the headboard.
Both hands wrapped around the iron bars, knuckles white, and I understand the choice she's making.
She's holding onto the bed because if she holds onto me—if her arms wrap around my neck or her fingers twist into my hair—she'll lose the last wall she's still standing behind.
Touching the headboard is touching something that isn't me.
It's the final lie she's telling herself—she's enduring this, not wanting it.
I bury my face in her neck.
My mouth finds the collar and I groan against the diamonds, the vibration traveling through the metal into her skin, and her hips jerk against me in a response she can't suppress.
"Ihateyou," she says. The words come out shattered. Broken edges where composure used to be.
"I know." I change the angle. Hook her leg over my shoulder, fold her body beneath mine, drive deeper into her until she's gasping and the headboard is slamming a rhythm into the wall. "Hate me louder."
She does. She screams it.
Hate and rage and grief pour out of her in a sound that should break something, should shatter glass, should bring the walls down around us.
She screams it while I fuck her into the mattress with everything I have, everything ugly and desperate and feral that lives in the space between what we are to each other and what we've done.
The orgasm takes her against her will.
I feel it build—the tension ratcheting through her thighs, the flutter of her around me, the way her breathing fragments into sharp, desperate bursts—and I feel her fight it.
She fights it the way she fought me, with everything she has, clenching her jaw and squeezing her eyes shut and willing her body to disobey.
It doesn't.
She breaks apart.
Her back arches off the bed, her thighs lock around me, and the sound she makes is my name and the word hate and something between them that might be please, all of it tangled together in a single wrecked exhalation that takes every wall she has left with it.
I follow her.
