by T. L Smith
“Why?” I can feel the blood running over my hands like it happened minutes ago, but it didn’t, and he knows it. He knows my weaknesses, and I hate that about him. His eyes look down to my hands then back up to my eyes.
“We never had a proper goodbye,” is all he says.
“Tomorrow.”
He attempts to hand me the lilies again, and I shake my head.
“You loved them, Mil.”
“I used to.” I hope he gets my meaning that I used to like him as well. That’s all in the past now. He walks away and as he does, Nicole steps out of the salon and looks to me then to him. I don’t care about her reaction because I start running as fast as my feet can take me, all the way home.
The moment my stairs come into view relief washes over me. Then as I draw closer, slowing down my pace, my heart doesn’t stop beating erratically. Connick is sitting on my stairs, his black eye gone, the black cap he used to wear sits on his head covering his eyes.
He stands when I walk closer, and he looks like shit. Like he hasn’t slept for days. I must have stolen his sleep with all of mine. I try walking past him and up to my door, but I can hear his boots on the stairs as he follows me, and I can feel his breathing behind me.
Unlocking the door and stepping through I turn to shut it, but the moment I set eyes on him, I start to fight a war raging within myself. I’ve wanted him from the moment I laid eyes on him. I’ve wanted him even after he’s lied to me. I’ve wanted him when he’s trapped me. And I want him right now. I didn’t think I could have one partner—sex with one person. I could fuck him for the rest of my life and be happy with just him. That’s what this means to me. He sees my resolve and takes it as his opening by stepping inside my house, and straight back into my heart. The moment his hands touch me I know I’m fucked yet again. I’m about to give myself to him. I’m about to let him take me and do with me as he pleases.
“Milanka.” The way he says my name has always bugged me, it’s always so straightforward and formal, except when he says it because he wants me. It holds an allure to it then.
Within moments I’m stripping off my clothes, and as he shuts the door, my sense and sensibility leave me.
He waits until I’m fully undressed before he descends, catching me at my weakest then he whispers into my ear, “Tell me you won’t leave me again?”
I nod my head fast, pulling at his shirt then yanking on his pants. He leaves his hat on, it won’t get in the way. We never kiss on the lips anyway. His beautiful mocha skin comes into contact with mine. It’s like we’re a canvas and we’re about to do dirty, dirty things.
He doesn’t waste any time picking me up, kissing my neck. A lot of the time our sex is hard and fast, but it’s never the last time as he always fucks me more than once. Usually twice, and sometimes up to three times in one night, and every time he makes my knees weak and my legs shake.
I’ve been with a lot of men, I’ve never denied that. But being with Connick, it’s like standing in the rain with lightning strikes zapping all around you, and you know any second that one of those lightning strikes is about to hit you and you’re going to love every minute of it. He bruises my back slamming me into the wall as he fucks me, I try not to look at him because if I do, I’ll be zapped and taken under his spell.
My hands run up and down his biceps to his shoulders. His arms, they’re so strong, so powerful. His hand comes between us and he applies pressure to my clit, it’s not long before my nails start digging into his skin. He moves me up the wall, keeping me around his waist. Then he threads his fingers through my hair, and he pulls at it making my neck snap backward, and he licks a long line from between my breasts to the top of my neck. We’re both exhausted, mentally and physically, but he manages to carry me to my bedroom and he lays me down with him next to me. I’m too tired to tell him to go, too exhausted to remove his hands as they circle around to me, comforting me when I know he shouldn’t be.
Connick is savage, I’ve come to learn this.
He doesn’t relent, even when he should.
I’ve left him.
I tell him to leave me alone, but he doesn’t listen to any of it. He makes up his own mind and does as he pleases.
He scares me.
He frightens me.
He steals me.
I let him.
That’s a part of love, isn’t it? We’re all blind to it. We forgive, even when we shouldn’t.
I would never tell him.
Ever.
My love for him will be locked tight and he’ll never see it. I’m good at keeping secrets, and I would lie straight to his face if I had to. If it’s to protect myself, I’ll do it. I’ve been fighting a game of survival all my life, and just because a man with a black hat walks into it, doesn’t mean I won’t stop fighting. It doesn’t mean I’ll hand over my heart on a platter. It’s mine. Even if it calls for someone else.
He can’t have it.
Chapter 23
Waking with him in my bed is very strange, I’ve never had him in my bed all night. He’s always up and walking out the door, but he’s still asleep and I take a moment to stare at his face. It’s so different when he’s asleep. He looks gentle, not hard. His eyelashes fan across his cheek and I want to run my hand across his face. He opens his eyes sleepily, looking straight at me.
I wonder what he sees when he looks at me. Is it the same girl I see when I stare in the mirror? Or is it someone completely different?
His hand reaches out, and he brushes my hair back.
“I’ve missed you.”
Okay, so they’re not words I expect to hear from him.
“You need to leave.” My voice is small.
He drops his hand from my face and sits up to look at me. “I owned her, for the sole purpose to own you, Milanka.”
Jumping up and out of bed, I look down at his calm face. “You wanted to own me?”
“Yes.”
“How can you say that, and lay in my bed as if you’re my lover?”
“I don’t want to own you anymore, Milanka. Not in the way I owned her. I want to own you in every other possible way.”
“I’m not your thing, Connick, I’m a person. And you can’t be this stupid…” I wave my hands around “… this idiotic. I may let you into my bed because I am just as much of an idiot as you, but that’s as far as this will ever go. You and me… we’ll be nothing more than bed partners.”
“You’re lying.” His teeth grit hard as he stands, naked, looking at me.
I shake my head.
“You’re mine, Milanka, and just because you don’t like the meaning of that word doesn’t make it any less true.”
I feel like this is a merry-go-round, and we keep on coming back to the same problem again and again. Will it ever stop? Will either of us actually decide to get off, because the way it’s going now we keep jumping back on? One of us is going to have to say enough is enough. I’m afraid that won’t be me because I’ll keep on riding it until I can no more.
“Please leave,” I almost whisper.
He bends down to pick up his clothes, and I can do nothing but watch as he gets dressed. The minute the hat slides back onto his head, guilt starts washing over me and then he speaks.
“I’ll be back later, Milanka. We haven’t finished speaking.” He walks out the same door I let him in last night, leaving me standing there on the ride, spinning.
***
Derrick wants me to go back to that place, that place where I left him. I know exactly where it is, exactly the moment I knew I was going to leave him. My car sounds like it’s about to die any second now as I reach the destination. Coming to a stop, I look ahead. The place I once called home no longer stands, in its place is another beat-up trailer.
I wonder if the people who live in it now hate it as much as I did?
The door opens, and Derrick steps out. Maybe he loves it. Maybe I was wrong. If this is his, he’s sicker than I thought.
Opening my door with
shaky hands, my shoes hit the dirt ground, the same dirt ground I left on all those years ago. He thought he was taking me to be helped, to stop some of the voices that were screaming in my head that night. Instead, he gave me hope. He just didn’t want to think that hope didn’t include him.
“Mil…” The door stays open behind him as he strides down the steps. Walking toward me, he stops halfway and holds his hand out. Taking a step forward and closer to him, but without touching him. “Smart girl, Mil.” His eyes roam me up and down.
“Where’s Nicole?” He clucks his tongue at me.
“You don’t want to talk first? Do you even remember? I know you must recall some of it… if you’re here, that is.”
“Yes.”
“Ahhh… so you do. You remember, Mil. You remember our love then?” He starts moving now, he’s circling me while I stay exactly where I am.
“We didn’t have love, Derrick, you used me for your own sick purposes.”
“I love you, Mil. I saw it that night, that night you showed me who you really are.”
“I was sick, Derrick. That was not me.” He stops back in front of me now, looks behind him to the trailer then back to me. I look around and see that the trailers that were previously there look like they haven’t been lived in for years. It’s too quiet, everything is too quiet.
“She told me she could help you. Calm you down that night. That doctor you still see. What’s her name? Marina?” His eyebrows rise. “She didn’t see that she made you a shell of the person you once were. The you before that night was quiet and giving. The you on that night was ruthless and unforgiving. The you now, is shy and quiet, always holding yourself back. I want to bring her back to me, and I will.”
My head starts shaking slowly before his next words leave his mouth.
“You can have it back, Mil. But to have it back, I need something from you in return. I want you back.”
“I’m not yours to have.”
Anger floods his eyes. “You think you’re his?”
I don’t answer him. His lips curl up in disgust. Derrick pulls the knife out, the same one that was in my dreams, the same one I killed that man with.
Blood on my hands, blood in my heart.
It’s all real.
All of it was real.
He wasn’t lying to me, he was there, and he saw the aftermath of what I’d done. Is he as evil as I am? He must be if he covered it up and held it in for so long.
“You’re mine, Mil, and I’m about to prove that to you yet again.”
Before a word can leave my mouth I turn to try to run from him, but I hear his footsteps and know he isn’t letting me go. He has other plans and it was all a lie. His hand grips my shoulder and something hard lands at the back of my head. My hands go up to it to protect it, but it’s too late because my vision becomes blurry and my hands drop as my body does.
My last vision is of him. The last person I want to see.
I wake with my hands tied to my side, sitting up against a wall, in the trailer he stepped out of. I know exactly what it is, because I have lived in one all my childhood life. I look around to see if I can find him, but my vision is still blurry, and I can’t make out everything in the room. I hear his footsteps then his hand touches my face the minute he’s in front of me. He lifts my face up so I can see him as my vision stills.
He is my devil.
Of this I’m sure.
I let him in as you let in sin, easy and smooth.
Then it rips you to shreds.
“You’re awake. I was afraid she’d knocked you too hard over that head.” He touches my scalp and it hurts, and I flinch trying not to focus on the pain. My hands are in cuffs again like the last time.
“Who?” My voice is raspy, and my mouth is dry.
“Your mother.”
My eyes shoot up to his, and he likes that because he smiles wider. He picks me up by the cuffs and makes me stand, then he pulls them hard, so I have no choice but to move with him.
“I made her leave. The stupid bitch thinks I want her, over you.”
“Why?”
His breath comes hard on my face as he pushes me into a room that was just like my mother’s, and my feet trip as I fall backward onto a bed.
“I only have a taste for one woman, Mil, you should know this.” He begins undressing by pulling his shirt off over his head. That’s when I notice my name which is branded on his chest over his heart in large black writing.
I bet Nicole would have loved seeing that every day, I think to myself.
Then it clicks what he’s doing, he’s going to have sex with me. He’s going to rape me. And I will have no way to stop it.
“Don’t… don’t do this.”
His shoes come off next. “It won’t be as bad as your head is making it out to be, if you remember our love, Mil.”
Lies, all lies.
Shaking my head, he keeps going, removing each piece until he’s naked in front of me, and I’m in a ball on the mattress waiting to see what he’s about to do next, and wondering how I can stop it.
Upon hearing a clanking noise, he looks behind him, walks away then slams the front door, locking it before he reenters. I try to slide my hands free to remove the cuffs, to get myself out of here, but it’s no use, my hands can’t slip through.
“Don’t! Untie me, and I’ll fuck you, Derrick.”
He looks down at my hands then back up at me again.
“You fucked him with cuffs on. I see it, Mil, in that place he calls a business… you fucked him.”
Shock again. He was there?
“You liked it, so you will like this.”
Closing my eyes, a single tear drips free.
Lies, all lies.
Chapter 24
He pulls at my clothes, hands coming everywhere, fast and ripping. He wants me, this is evident in the way he looks at me and what’s happening between his legs as his cock is hard and ready. Not wanting it anywhere near me, I push away until my head hits the wall and smacks against it hard, hurting my already bruised scalp.
“Think of me as one of them, Mil,” he whispers when he manages to remove my pants and my underwear.
I cringe as his hands skim my bare legs, wanting them gone, then his mouth comes down kissing his way up, past my belly button to my breast pushing my shirt out of the way. I lay stock still wanting nothing more than him gone. Then the unexpected happens, his hand touches me there and I feel wet.
Screaming at myself for even feeling this way, I hate it. I hate him right now in this moment. Right at this moment I want him dead, with that same knife he’s hiding from me, the same knife he lured me here with.
“Relax, Mil.”
My body does so on his command. He purrs near my ear, and I hate the sound of it. I hate him. But my legs spread when he comes in between them.
Evil.
Sex.
This is my punishment for wanting it all the time. For being a whore just like her. Is this the reason she was one? Because no matter how much you hate the person you’re fucking, you’re able to forget about the person who touches you, and forget about the world around you, and lose yourself in the act itself?
Fighting that thought away, I start to kick him. When he leaves my body, my hands are tied together, but they attempt to fight him off. He pins my legs down, but he isn’t fast enough to catch my hands. I hit him with all I have, straight into his face, making him reel backward losing his grip on me. I squirm to the back of the bed, putting distance between us.
He stands to hold his face, and his forehead scrunches in anger. “You’ll pay for that, Mil.” He walks away leaving me naked and alone in the room, his clothes staying where they are on the floor, and I hear the door lock. How did he get a lock on the other side of the door? How long has he had this planned? Then I hear items being moved around.
Is he barricading me in here?
There’s a window in this room but it’s completely covered up by boards on the outside. There�
��s nothing to escape through. The only way to get out is through that door he just went out of. Collapsing on the dirty mattress, I curl myself up into a ball and close my eyes, listening. I hear a car leave and I know he’s just left me here to rot. This is my punishment for not wanting him when he wants me. My eyes focus on the stain on the wall, water drips slowly into the corner of the room. It’s apparently raining, and I didn’t even know. I loved the rain as a child, the way the sky darkened and the clouds took hold. Now I’m a prisoner listening and counting each drop.
***
The rain stopped sometime after I woke the first time, it stopped and never came back. Giving me nothing to do but to think. Everything has run through my head. Should I just seduce him when he comes back, pretend to want him so I can try to escape after he’s done with me? Then my fight would kick in, and I wanted to kill him and even smashed myself against the wall thinking I could break it to be set free. All I got for my trouble was bruises that now litter my back.
The only thing in the room other than the mattress is a cup, and I guess that’s the only place I can relieve my bladder.
Now, all I can smell is urine everywhere.
How long until someone searches for me?
How long until someone actually misses me?
Will Connick think I’ve just run again?
Does he know I wouldn’t run a second time? I didn’t want to run the first time.
***
Another day passes, my stomach is so sore now.
So sore.
My hands feel weak. It’s an effort to lift them, so they lay exactly where I am, next to my side to try to save my energy. So much of my body is sore, it’s not just my stomach, it’s like a pile of things, everything hitting me all at once. My stomach, though, that cries, more loudly than the cries that leave my own mouth.
To die of hunger would be an awful thing. My eyes search the ceiling of this old trailer—nothing is there but mold, a light, and chipped paint. I wonder if I could have been someone else, someone who didn’t fall for a demon by the name of Derrick.
Connick has his own demons, but for some unknown reason I still haven’t quite worked out, I want to be near him all the time. Even when I know I shouldn’t. He has evil, there is no doubt about that, but so do I.