A night beside Levi begins with a silence that is filled with tension. I stare up at the ceiling, careful not to press myself too far towards the middle and accidentally graze his searing flesh, but it makes me appear stiff. I know he can tell.
He sighs, and shifts so he’s pressed against me, silencing the questions of whether it’s acceptable to touch him in a way that isn’t chaotic – in a way that’s more intimate – which makes me more alert and on edge.
Intimacy is only ever violent when it comes to him.
I sigh, attempting to settle into the comfortable mattress, but sleep doesn’t reach out to caress me with its alluring embrace, it stays hidden, from a monster like Levi.
My monster.
That thought makes me laugh because he isn’t anything. He will never be. I am only his. A piece of property. Something to be monetized and possessed.
When the awkward silence stretches to the point I’m practically choking on it, I speak into the night sky, words angled up at the ceiling I let my gaze linger strictly on.
“My father was incredibly abusive,” I admit, with a shiver that rolls down my spine and practically commands my limbs to jerk uncomfortably until the painful nostalgia has passed. But it’s not going anywhere. Not now, when I’ve acknowledged it aloud in the darkness that attracts all horrid things.
“I am familiar with that,” He replies softly into the night. I frown, but I doubt he can see much of it in the darkness that has settled upon his room. “With abusive men that is.”
That admission makes my heart swell, and I inwardly curse myself for that gravity of emotional connection that pulls me to him.
He’s been abused too.
So many people have.
It shouldn’t make him special, shouldn’t make me feel for him in a way that’s disgusting for a captive to feel for the incredibly toxic man, but it makes him special in my eyes. It makes him more relatable, and in that, more approachable if for only this moment, stowed away in his darkroom.
“He’d drink and drink and drink. I swear the only thing I can remember from early childhood is the smell of schnapps,” I say softly.
He chuckles at that and the sound is so mundane and confusing, I blink a few times, wondering if I’ve truly heard him laugh. Like truly laugh.
“Schnapps? He sounds soft.”
I raise my brows and scoff.
“Um, yeah, tell that to broken furniture all over my house, and the bruises.”
I shouldn’t be laughing about abuse, but something about Levi’s amusement is infectious. As if I’m desperate for this version of him to stay, even if it means joking twistedly about our trauma.
“I never knew my real parents,” Levi states, and just the melancholy in his voice is enough to make me turn on my side to stare at him. I narrow my gaze to see if he’s angered by my observant pose, but he continues to stare straight ahead and speak.
Almost as if I’m not even in the room.
“All I knew were the monsters they left me with.” He blinks, his chest unmoving – his breath held captive in his body – like if he releases the air from his lungs, the pain will escape from its cell and consume him.
“My father … now I wish I could say that he was the most sadistic part of my childhood, but his abuse didn’t even fucking compare to her.”
He shivers, and involuntarily, I reach out and rest a hand on his chest. He stiffens, grabbing my wrist with a firm hold that causes pain in the tendons of my forearm, but I let him squeeze it for a moment as he tells a particularly awful story of his past.
I’ll let him comfort himself for now, regardless if I’ll have a functioning hand afterward.
“He would beat the shit out of me. With his fists, beer bottles, fucking anything he could get his hands on. He worked a lot, so I suppose he needed an outlet, and the illegitimate bastard of another man sufficed.”
I observe the way his jaw tenses, and he swallows, a small piece of the frightened little boy he once was, but that’s probably all that’s left because what lies before me is a man of reckoning. One who doesn’t cower from the abusive sons of bitches in his life but exudes power and dominance over them all.
“Are those cigarette burns from him?” I question because I’ve been dying to know from the beginning of this conversation. He nods, twisting his head enough to glance at me before I feel his grip loosen for a moment.
Then he continues, and that bit of softness escapes and the crushing weight of his grasp returns in full force.
I inhale a sharp breath at the pain but don’t protest. Not when I’m so engaged. I want nothing more than to know what makes this man tic. What makes him who he is.
“The cigarette burns were nothing. I guess it was her who did a number on me.”
“Her… your foster mother?”
He huffs angrily when the word ‘mother’ leaves my lips.
“I was her freedom,” He states simply, blinking a few times before he licks his lips and closes his eyes. “Freedom comes at a price and she was willing to use me as a bargaining chip. Six-year-old me. That’s when it started when I was placed with my “forever home”.”
He says that with such venom, my instinct is to lean away from him, he’s that malicious, but right now I am not the target.
Someone in his past is.
“Levi,” I begin, flexing my fingers in search of circulation before I decide it’s better to roll with the punches, so I move against the side of him, so I’m so close, my breath cascades his face. “What happened?”
“What happens when you don’t want to be the focus of someone’s anger? You find another target. But what’s worse…. She’d tell me to make him angry. Tell me to do things that would get him so fucking irate, he’d beat me unconscious, because then he was too tired to come after her. And I had to do what I could to protect “mommy” she’d say afterward. Always making sure I didn’t die, she wouldn’t want to lose something as valuable as a punching bag.”
He laughs mirthlessly, humor vacant from his eyes when he opens them and turns his head to bore into my soul.
“I was fucking powerless… and what’s even worse, she was the antidote to my agony.”
“What do you mean?” I press when his words die away and there’s a silence that fills the air, silence that’s heavy with the burden of his past. Heavy and suffocating.
“Levi?” I question again, and this time he yanks me over until I’m on top of him, and I cannot escape that bottomless gaze.
“Make it a game… she said. When I finally tried to kill myself at the age of twelve. Make it a game, where pleasure is pain.”
He releases his grip on my wrist. I don’t move. I don’t even fucking breathe as I lay atop him, gaze leveled with his. I’m appalled. The bile in my stomach rises until it’s almost up to the top of my throat.
She said that to him? The woman who was supposed to protect him? It’s sickening. It’s … explanatory.
It’s why I won’t come out on the winning side of this arrangement.
I am that which has scorned him so long ago. A helpless woman looking for a way out.
“I ran,” I admit.
“What?” He hisses because he’s in defense mode. Sighting through your trauma will do that to you. That’s why the urge to flee begins to spread, causing all the hairs on your body to stand on end.
“I ran when I could. Even after my father became sick. I ran from all of it. Maybe it’s why my mother killed herself a week after he died… I didn’t attend the funeral. I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to face him ever again. She probably felt alone, just like my sister had. They all died alone….”
My voice is sad, quivering along with my lip as I recall that guilt inside of me. The guilt of leaving my problems behind. Of fleeing them like I’ve wanted to do with Levi the day he bought me at that club.
“In a way, I feel almost as bad as my father was. Abandoning my family proved more detrimental than anything he’d ever done,” I whisper, afraid to alert the ghosts of my past as if they’ll come for me while in his arms.
But he wouldn’t let me go without a fight. That’s for sure.
Not his pawn.
“Everybody is guilty of something, Sasha,” Levi admits as he reaches up to stroke the side of my face. It’s such a soft caress, I feel my cheeks warming, along with my whole body. He stares through me. It’s strange. I almost believe he’s looking at someone else.
“Are you talking about her? The woman here before me?”
I am so desperate to know more about her because I am living her life. If she were still here, she’d be in his arms. In his bed possibly. Claiming the damned parts of him as I find myself doing this very moment.
He doesn’t acknowledge my question. Instead, he arches his head up until he’s hovering a centimeter below my lips.
“You want the truth about the club? About my frivolous spending when I saw you…..” He trails off, and I hold my breath. A small smile rests in the corner of his mouth. “Because I took one fucking look at you, and I saw her. I had to have you right there, and I would’ve killed anyone who tried to say otherwise.”
I am her replacement.
This knock off of a woman who has filled his heart in a way no one will ever.
I glance down at his lips, and I can’t help but lean forward and press my mouth to his, spurred on by the shared pain between us. I kiss him softly, but that doesn’t last long. Something awakens inside of me, a hunger, the repression of my emotions, or who knows, but I find myself kissing him hard.
I consume his pained groans as I bite his lip and slip my tongue into his mouth. Passion overcomes me, and I begin to grind myself against his throbbing erection because alike he felt that first day at Gentleman’s club, I have to have him now.
I have to.
The harder I grind, the more desperate my kisses become until they are all teeth and tongue, and despair.
I feel every emotion in him by the way he touches me. A firm, possessive grasp that knows exactly where to squeeze to get me amped for more of his touch, but he avoids that chaotic painful embrace he usually has.
It’s strange – his idea of gentle.
It makes my head spin, trying to keep up with all of these versions of him, but I enjoy the rush.
The friction from my hips pressing me down onto the crotch of his sweatpants has built so quickly, I feel my orgasm creeping around a corner, stealthily. His pants are soaked by now from all the juices of my pleasure, and all it does is turn him on more.
He grabs a hold of my hips to guide each gyration until I’m quivering and shouting and shaking atop him with an unyielding orgasm seconds away.
“I’m gonna –“
“Come?” He interrupts. “I know. Not until I’m inside of you,” He adds, before he skillfully thrusts his hips to bounce me upward so he can slide the pants down enough to get his cock free.
The moment my pussy makes contact with his voluptuous length, and the tip of his cock glides over my clitoris, down my slick slit, to my entrance, he thrusts hard.
He fills me without restraint.
Pounding me hard enough to break me in half on him.
Anything that will wash away the footprints of the abuse he’s just welcomed back by a bitter story he’s told to a woman he’s bought.
I bounce atop him, skin slapping together viciously. My inner walls stretch to accommodate the invasion of his thick member until I am incoherent and panting above him.
He feels too…. Filling.
Too detrimental.
Something I will die from; a perfect poison drafted for me alone, and fuck, if I don’t enjoy every single bit of it on the way down.
What do I have to lose?
I try and wait for the okay.
But it feels too good.
I have to come.
I’m going to, whether he gives me permission or not.
My emotions are running too wild.
I peer down at him, his brows furrowed, mouth agape in ecstasy, and his eyes closed briefly.
This is the Levi I can never deny.
The one hungry for another taste.
“Come for me, Sasha,” He goads, his eyes opening with sincerity and even …
No.
Not care.
Something else.
I don’t push too hard to focus on it, because with a few enthused thrusts of his cock inside of me, I explode around him, coming furiously like it’ll be the last time my body endures pleasure.
He’s not finished with me yet. He pummels my pussy, angling himself so he can thrust wildly up inside of me until I feel that familiar swelling of his length inside.
He’s there.
He’s coming.
He empties himself inside of me, a rush of warmth I’ve begun to crave, which makes me lower my mouth to his once more and claim another kiss, but just as I do he speaks a word between my lips that has me growing cold.
“Baileigh.”
He groans my sister's name, and I feel reality crumbling around me.