Cason
As soon as the word comes out of my mouth, I see Lily’s face grow sad. To everyone else in my life, the word collateral simply means those people who aren’t the targets for me or anyone else I know. But to her, I see she doesn’t understand it’s not meant to hurt her. It’s just the fact of who she is in all of this.
“Collateral,” she squeaks out around a sob that chokes the word into her throat. “That’s all I am.”
I stare up at her not knowing what to say. I’m not unfeeling. I’ve just never felt anything for someone like this before.
When I don’t respond, she walks away to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. I watch her and wish I knew something that would help. I just don’t.
For a few minutes, I stare at the bathroom door as I wait for her to come out. She doesn’t. After a while, I begin to wonder if there’s some way she can escape out of the bathroom, so I hurry over to the door and put my ear to it to listen.
The sound of water running in the shower calms me, but only for a second or two until I wonder if she turned it on to make it seem like she’s still in there. Flinging the door open, I walk into a room full of steam so thick I can barely see through it.
A quick glance at the bathroom window doesn’t tell me if she’s slipped out through there or not.
“Lily?”
I hear the panic in my voice coming through loud and clear. I shouldn’t care if she leaves. She’ll just go back to her house to be with her father, so it wouldn’t be like I couldn’t find her.
Not that I should want to find her either. She’s collateral, pure and simple. A means to an end. The method I decided to use to get her father to pay his debt. Nothing more. Nothing less.
She pokes her head out from behind the white shower curtain and scowls at me. Her hair is soaking wet and pushed off her face, sort of like when I’m on top of her and fucking her hard. Still, even as she glares at seeing me, her eyes are wide and innocent like usual.
“What? Why are you in here?” she asks in a hurt tone that’s as unmistakable as my panicked one a moment ago when I thought she’d left through the bathroom window.
I don’t answer her and simply stand in the middle of all that steam as it makes my skin damp. She doesn’t need to know I thought she left or that I cared if she did.
But she’s too smart to not realize what I’m up to and shakes her head. “Come to check on me to make sure I didn’t squeeze through that tiny bathroom window? I guess it would be a problem if your collateral slipped away, wouldn’t it?”
Before I can think of something to say, she yanks the curtain closed, leaving me standing there with nothing to do but not wanting to leave. I can’t explain why her being hurt about that collateral comment bothers me. It shouldn’t. It’s what she is.
Yet, I hate how it makes me feel.
“I’m sorry for that collateral thing. I didn’t mean it that way, Lily.”
The words come out like foreign objects my body doesn’t know what to do with. I’ve never apologized to a single person in my life. At least not since I was eleven years old and I stood watching my mother take the last breath of her life.
I don’t say I’m sorry because I’m not. I am what I am, and for that, I’m not sorry. Still, something about Lily makes me need to let her know I didn’t mean to hurt her.
When she doesn’t say anything, I wait for a minute and then pull the shower curtain open. My eyes fill with the sight of her body covered in bruises, and rage bubbles up inside me at what Doc did. Lily pushes her hair off her forehead and simply stares at me in surprise as my gaze catalogues the harm he caused her.
“You told me he didn’t hurt you.”
Water runs down over her head in streams that trail over her tits and onto her stomach. Every place it touches has purple bruises. I feel my hate and rage grow by the second as the water makes each of them glisten, highlighting them for me to see.
“Why are you staring at me like I’m some broken thing? I don’t need to see that in your eyes, so close the curtain and go away.”
I don’t want to look at those marks on her body anymore. The evidence of what he did gnaws at me, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to think of anything else with her.
That’s not how I want to remember her, though.
Stripping out of my clothes and shoes, I leave them in a pile on the bathroom floor and pull the curtain back one more time. Lily stands with her eyes closed letting the shower drench her and doesn’t see me step inside with her.
I shouldn’t want her now. I’ve hurt her and let her be hurt by someone else, but something in my brain pushes me toward her, needing to soothe her pain. I want to touch her and cover those purple marks with my hands and my mouth, making what he did disappear and what I do all she thinks of when she looks down at her skin.
Drops of water hit my face and turn into streams pouring down on my head as I lean in to kiss her. She opens her eyes and looks up at me at the first brush of my lips against hers, and it’s all I can do to control my need for her when I see the hurt in them.
My tongue slides over her lips and into her mouth to mingle with her tongue. At first, the kiss is tentative and unsure, like neither one of us knows how to handle what we feel at this moment. Every second that she doesn’t pull away ratchets up my need to have her again.
Lily pulls my hands up to cradle her face and tilts her head back to look up into my eyes. Jesus, I can’t hold back for much longer when she shows me the pain in them, like she blames me.
She has every right to. If it weren’t for me, she’d be safely in her home living her life and not recovering from nearly being raped in this shitty motel with a man who’s done little more than threaten to kill her.
So again, the words in my head come out like ragged thoughts I don’t know how to express, torn from my throat by the need to show her how I feel. “I’m sorry, Lily. I’m sorry about all of this. What he did. What I’ve done. All of it.”
They’re the most honest words I’ve uttered in more years than I want to admit. Once they’re out, I stand there with the water rolling over me down onto Lily as she stares up at me like she can’t believe any of them.
Like with my promise not to kill her, I don’t blame her for not believing me now either. My life has been a long series of acts that make believing anything good from me next to impossible.
She takes a step closer to me and presses her hand over my heart. “Tell me I’m more than just a thing that means nothing to you. Tell me that when this is all over that you won’t just think of me as collateral.”
Every syllable cuts me like a knife through my skin, slicing through years of cruelty I’ve used to justify not feeling anything for anyone. She is not a thing. That my actions have made her think I see her as nothing more is something I’ll carry long after she’s back home and has forgotten me.
“You are not a thing, Lily.”
She kisses me in response, and I taste the forgiveness in her. It’s utterly foreign to me, but I instantly love it. I don’t know if I deserve it, but I could spend the rest of time reveling in it.
My hands slide from her face down her body to cup her ass. Pulling her into my body, I lift her to just above my hard cock and ease her down onto it. Her cunt is wet and warm, and with each inch I push into her, I feel some of the rage inside me ebb away.
When I’m completely inside her, she slides her lips along my jawline to my ear and whispers, “I want to be someone to you, if only for this very moment.”
Need for her consumes me, and I shove my hand into her hair to tug hard. My body aches for her, like being balls deep inside her cunt isn’t enough. I want to taste her, hear her cry out, feel her body surrender to mine.
I sink my teeth into her shoulder, biting into her tender flesh as I push her back against the wall and begin fucking her. She pulls me in, her legs wrapped tightly around my waist and her heels pressed hard into the base of my spine, and I plunge my cock into her cunt as deeply as she’ll take me.
It’s raw and ragged, but so are we. I need to feel that forgiveness she offers, and she needs to feel that I need her for just what she is.
The water turns much hotter, scalding my back and legs as Lily and I get lost in one another. My skin stings, and when she rakes her nails across my shoulders, I rear back like an animal in pain.
Still, I can’t stop fucking her. I’d willingly let the skin on my back be flayed off to feel that moment when her body begins to milk my cock and she becomes mine completely.
She’s mine to do with as I want. She’s mine to keep. She’s mine.
Those thoughts march through my brain with every time she moans in to my ear, begging me not to stop and saying my name like it’s some promise or prayer she needs to make her whole. I don’t know if the thoughts are true or not, but in these last moments when she cries out my name and clings to me like I’m the only thing that can save her from all the bad in the world, I believe them.
I have to.
With one last thrust into her, I fill her body with everything inside me. Her thighs quiver against my sides, a feeling I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget because it’s such a pure example of her surrender. She can’t control it, so her legs shake from her release, and as she holds on to my neck, I hear her let out a sigh full of contentment.
I don’t know how long we stand there, but when she rests her head on my shoulder, I can’t imagine another place in the world I’d rather be at that moment. She is not just a thing. Not now. Not ever.
Not to me.
“I feel you slipping away already, Cason. It happens every time. I hold on, but you back away.”
She’s not wrong about the other times. I barely finished coming before I needed to put that distance between us. Even a few inches let me remain far enough from her. Killers don’t let themselves get close to anyone.
Not even beautiful girls they want to hold on to forever.
But this time, I don’t want that distance. I don’t need it. I want her next to me, her skin pressed against my skin so there’s no end or beginning for her or me.
There’s just us.
Pressing my lips to her forehead in a kiss, I whisper, “No, not this time. I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
I’m rewarded with a gentle smile that lights up her face, and for a moment in time, I’m not a killer and she’s not my captive. We’re just Cason and Lily, two people surrounded by circumstances that make the two of us being together impossible, and yet, somehow we’re there in that motel bathroom with me still inside her and hating the moment I won’t be.
