Vorn nodded again, his golden eyes blazing down into hers.
“Exactly.”
“Oh,” she whispered, looking back at him. Their eyes locked and suddenly her head was filled with images—images of the big Kindred between her thighs…thrusting his long, hard cock inside her…filling her up completely…making her his…
“So do you want it or not?” the clerk asked and Jodi realized she’d forgotten all about the other woman during her intense conversation with Vorn.
“We’ll take it,” he growled. “Add it to the bill.”
“But—” Jodi started to protest. She’d seen the price tag—the Kindred-sized dildo was crazy expensive.
“No buts,” Vorn told her. “Think of it as a memento, baby,” he told her. Leaning over, he murmured in her ear, “Something to remember me by when this is all over.”
Just a few hours before the idea of her time with the big Kindred being over would have filled Jodi with relief. Now she somehow didn’t like to think of Vorn leaving. But she nodded, anyway.
“All right,” she murmured. “Thank you, Vorn.”
He flashed that white grin at her.
“Anything for you and your pussy baby.” Then he looked at the clerk. “Ring it up.”
Nineteen
Liosh sat in the darkened living area, tapping disconsolately at Melinda’s laptop. He hadn’t wanted to disturb her after she ran to the bedroom and shut the door behind her, but it broke his heart to hear her muffled sobs through the thin wooden panel.
What had happened to her to make her so certain they could never bond? What did she mean when she said she was “broken?”
Liosh didn’t know but he wished he could find out. Right now, however, he didn’t want to intrude on Melinda’s private misery. So he was “checking his e-mail” as she had told him to do any time he wanted—not because he thought he might have anything interesting but just for something to do.
There were a lot of emails that were what Melinda called “spam”—apparently junk content full of offers that were untrue or outright falsehoods. There was one, however, that intrigued him.
Girls broken by a cruel Master! screamed the e-mail. See these fresh young hotties—barely eighteen—put in their place!
It was the “broken” part that caught Liosh’s eye. It made him think of what Melinda had said—that she was broken somehow. Could this have anything to do with what she had told him?
Though she had warned him not to click on any links, he decided to chance it just once. Anything that might give him more information about what the woman he loved was upset about was worth risking.
The link opened a site called Bound and Broken. The screen was filled with small boxes, each of them with an arrow in the center, indicating they would play a vid when pressed. The pictures in the boxes were small and grainy and it was difficult to see exactly what was going on in them.
Out of curiosity, Liosh tapped one of the boxes and it expanded to fill the whole laptop screen.
The first thing he saw was a girl who looked to be Melinda’s age or a little younger. The girl had long brown hair and her arms had been yanked up behind her back and tied to a hook in the ceiling above her. It looked like a painful position to Liosh—it forced her to lean over at the waist so that she couldn’t see clearly because half of her hair hung into her eyes.
Her very frightened eyes, Liosh saw, with a growing sense of unease. She was naked and her whole body shivered with fear, her brown eyes rolling as she tried to look around her.
Then a male came into the camera’s view. He was big—much bigger than the girl—and there was a cruel smile playing around the corners of his mouth.
“Hello, you little slut,” he snarled, looking down at her. “Looks like you’re all ready to be raped today.”
Raped? Liosh recoiled from the screen. Surely this couldn’t be real, could it? Surely it was some kind of a joke? If it was, it certainly wasn’t a very funny one. In fact, it was awful but somehow he couldn’t look away.
The girl on the vid certainly seemed to react in a realistic fashion. She moaned and clamped her thighs together tightly, shaking her head.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, I just…just want to go home.”
“This is Bound and Broken, slut—you’re not going home until you’re broken,” the male said, leering at her. “And we have the legal right to break you—remember, you signed a consent form.”
The girl shook her head wildly.
“I thought this was just regular porn! Nobody said anything about tying me up and…and hurting me!”
The male laughed harshly.
“Guess you should have read the fine print, whore!” He slapped her hard across the face, causing the girl to whimper as tears came to her eyes. “Now spread your legs—you’re about to get broken.”
Melli turned over in bed, wondering what Liosh was watching on TV. She’d just about cried herself out by now and all that was left was a dull, heavy ache in her heart.
She and Liosh could never be together, but she supposed she couldn’t stay in the bedroom the rest of the time he was here. At some point she would have to face the big Kindred.
Maybe they could just watch some TV together and chill, she thought. It was better than hiding in her room, trying to wish her past away.
With a sigh, she got off the bed and opened the door, meaning to ask Liosh what he was watching.
But the words died on her lips.
The Blood Kindred was sitting on the loveseat with her laptop on the coffee table in front of him. Playing on it was a scene that looked like it was straight out of Melli’s recurring nightmares.
There was a girl with tears in her eyes, her arms tied behind her back to make her helpless. She was crying openly as the man on the screen slapped her and spat on her and called her awful names like “whore” and “slut.” Then he went around behind her and started shoving himself inside her with what were obviously hard, painful strokes.
“Is this what you like, slut?” he demanded as the girl screamed and cried, the tears running down her face. “You want to be raped? You want to be my little cum-dump?”
Oh my God, I can’t believe Liosh is watching this! Melinda felt herself shaking and shivering and suddenly she couldn’t get a deep enough breath to fill her lungs. I thought he was one of the good guys. How could he like this kind of thing?
At that moment, the big Kindred bolted off the couch and pushed past her without even saying ‘excuse me.’ He ran into the bathroom and barely made it to the toilet before he started to heave.
The sounds of him being sick seemed to do something to Melinda—unfreeze her somehow. Automatically, she walked to the bathroom, grabbing a towel along the way. She waited until Liosh had finished being sick and offered it to him.
He took it and nodded at her gratefully. She noticed that his eyes were red. Had he been…crying? Or were his eyes watering just a consequence of him being violently ill like that?
Melinda didn’t know and she felt too cold inside to care. She watched as he rinsed his mouth out at the sink and blotted his face on the towel she had given him.
“Thank you,” he said and his deep voice was shaken. “What…what was that?” He nodded at the laptop screen, where the video had mercifully come to an end. “Why did he treat her that way? Was it real? Should we call the authorities and ask them to try and find her?”
Melinda shook her head.
“That was…just porn,” she said flatly. “I warned you, didn’t I, that you might run into it on the Internet?”
“That was human pornography?” He looked at her disbelievingly. “You mean humans masturbate to that? But it’s sick! And wrong! He was hurting her.”
“I know,” Melinda said. She still felt far away and cold—detached from her own body. Mechanically, she went to the loveseat and closed the laptop. Then she sat down, thinking nothing in particular. Most especially not thinking of the night after her Junior Prom with Jason S
ykes…
Liosh came and sat beside her.
“Surely this kind of thing has to be outside the norm,” he said, his deep voice still sounding shaken. “Shouldn’t we notify someone to take it down?”
Melinda gave a humorless laugh.
“You’d have to take down half the Internet if you did that,” she told the big Kindred. “That video wasn’t that unusual, you know. It’s just another part of rape culture.”
“Rape culture?” Liosh sounded more horrified than ever. He took Melli by the arms and stared down into her face. “I don’t understand this, Melinda. How could any male make a vid about…about raping a female and how could other males be aroused by it? What’s wrong with your people?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know. I don’t know why men want to do that. I don’t know why Jason Sykes did it to me.”
“What?” Liosh’s pale blue eyes got even wider. “What are you talking about? Someone hurt you like that? Who was it?” His eyes narrowed in murderous rage. “I’ll fucking kill him.”
The big Kindred’s anger seemed to break through to Melli in a way nothing else could have. She jerked away from him, her breath tearing in her chest.
“It was a long time ago. I shouldn’t have said anything about it. I don’t know why I did!” she cried, wrapping her arms around herself. “I’m sorry, Liosh. Please…please forget I said anything. Please.”
“Melinda, you’re shaking.” His voice was gentler now and his eyes had gone from murderous to concerned. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said automatically. But then the years of therapy she’d undergone came back and she whispered, “No. No, I…” She shook her head, trying to rid it of the awful images she’d seen. “I’ll be okay in a minute. That video just…just triggered me.”
“Triggered you?” Liosh sounded confused.
“It sent me back to a bad time…a dark place in my past,” Melli explained. “To the time I was…was raped,” she finished in a voice so low she could barely hear it herself.
Liosh was silent for a long moment, as though trying to think what to say. At last he asked,
“Is this what you meant when you said you were ‘broken’? Is this why you think you can’t bond with me? Do you believe I would hurt you like that?”
“No—no of course not.” Melli shook her head. After seeing his violent reaction to the awful rape video, she could never think such a thing about the big Kindred. He had been triggered too, in a way—he had cried and puked when he saw it and now he was apparently disgusted with all human-kind.
Not that Melli blamed him. She was pretty disgusted with it herself, sometimes.
“Melinda…” Liosh reached for her hand tentatively. “Please…talk to me. Do you want to tell me what happened to you?” His eyes were filled with pain. “It will be…difficult to hear, but I will hear it if you need to tell it.”
Melli looked down at their hands—his so much bigger, enclosing hers gently, keeping her safe.
“I don’t really want to tell it,” she said at last. “But…but I think I need to. So you can understand why we can’t…can’t ever be together.”
“Tell me,” he said gently.
So Melli told.
Twenty
“I was fat in high school,” she started. “I mean, plus-sized, or whatever you want to call it. More than I am now. And the other kids—Amanda Brannigan and her friends—used to tease me about it. At the same time, everything in my home seemed wrong. My dad was distant and my poor mom was trying to hold things together for me and Jodi, but it was clear she and my dad were having a bad time of it.” She sighed and shook her head. “I just wanted to be loved, you know? I just wanted to be cared for by someone who mattered.”
Liosh squeezed her hand, not speaking but letting her know without words he was listening.
“So, Amanda and her friends teased me so much I started starving myself. By the time my Junior year rolled around, I was actually a lot thinner.” She sighed. “Which seemed to attract the attention of some of the boys, you know.”
Liosh squeezed her hand again.
“So one of the boys was Jason Sykes.” For a moment the name seemed to stick in her throat but somehow Melli made herself go on. “He was…what you call the ‘big man on campus.’ The quarterback of the football team, you know? Everybody thought he walked on water. And then Amanda came to me and said that he wanted to take me—little nobody Melli—to the Junior Prom.”
“I take it he was not all he seemed,” Liosh said, with a growl in his deep voice.
“No.” Melli shook her head. “But I didn’t know that then. I thought he was amazing. He was so big and tall and handsome and popular and suddenly he was paying me all this attention. He walked me back and forth to classes, held my hand in the hallway, told all his friends I was his girlfriend…” She shook her head, remembering how completely her younger self had been taken in by Jason’s load of bullshit.
“He got you to trust him,” Liosh said in a low voice.
She nodded. “Unfortunately, yes. And…” She cleared her throat. “And he got me to agree to give him my virginity on the night of the Junior Prom. That was important to him—that he got my consent,” she added. “So I couldn’t say afterwards that he’d taken advantage of me. He swore he would make it so good for me—swore that my first time would be special—unforgettable.” She shook her head. “He was right—I can’t forget it, no matter how hard I try.”
Liosh looked down for a moment at their clasped hands as though he was dreading what must be coming next.
“I am guessing he was not…not gentle with you,” he said at last.
“No,” Melli whispered. “No, he…he wasn’t.”
She took a deep breath, trying to continue. She had never told anyone all the details of what had happened to her that night. Not even her therapist—not even Jodi, though she had told her sister more than anyone else—and now she wished she hadn’t.
She had an idea that her own experience had somehow messed up her older sister too, in a way. It wasn’t long after the rape that Jodi had started dating that awful, stiff, buttoned-down James who seemed so completely wrong for her. It was like she was repressing a part of herself in response to what had happened to Melli, if that made any sense.
Jason Sykes had ruined more than one life on the night of her Junior Prom, she thought distractedly. She wondered if he’d be proud, if he knew.
“He took me to a hotel room after the dance,” she said, surprising herself by abruptly continuing her story. “He kept talking about how I would never forget what he was going to do to me. I was getting really nervous and wishing I could back out but he kept reminding me that I’d already told him yes. ‘You promised, babe,’—that’s what he said. ‘You promised and you can’t back down on a promise.’”
“Of course, you can!” Liosh sounded angry. “A female has a right to change her mind at any time about giving herself to a male.”
“I know that now,” Melli said calmly. “After years of therapy to process what happened. But back then I was so young—I didn’t know anything. Hadn’t been with anyone.” She shook her head. “I didn’t feel like I could say ‘no.’ So I let him take me to the hotel and that was where…” She had to swallow hard. “In the hotel room things got…rough.”
“He hit you?” Liosh’s voice was flat, as though he was trying to state the facts without giving way to fury.
“Among other things.” Melli looked down at their hands again. “He tied me up—tied my hands behind my back and when I started to cry, he gagged me. He laughed at me too—called me a ‘stupid little slut’. ‘You really thought I liked you, you stupid little slut?—that was what he said. He told me the only part of me worth a damn was what was between my legs.” She shook her head. “He acted like he’d earned the right to that…that part of me by treating me so nice around all the popular kids the past couple of weeks. Like being my ‘boyfriend’ earned him the ri
ght to do anything he wanted.”
She spoke in a cool, unemotional voice now—just a robot telling a story that had happened to someone else. She knew she was disassociating from the facts, but that was all right—sometimes you needed to disassociate—sometimes you needed to take yourself away.
“He ripped my dress open and forced my legs apart,” she said, thinking of the lovely lilac lace gown she’d been wearing that night. She’d been so proud of it when she left the house—she’d felt like a princess.
When she’d come back home that night, she felt like a whore. Less than a whore.
“I tried to get away,” she told Liosh. “I was scared—terrified. But he wouldn’t let me go until…until he got what he came for.” She ran a trembling hand through her hair. “It hurt so bad I screamed and screamed—but I was gagged, of course. So no one heard. No one came. Jason slapped me and spit on me and laughed at me when I cried. He told me he had the right to do anything he wanted to me—he told me I asked for it.” Her robot voice was wavering now, breaking down. But still she kept talking. “When he was done, the sheets were all bloody. Some of it was because it was my first time. But…but not all of it, I don’t think.” She shook her head as Liosh squeezed her hand convulsively.
“Oh, Talli…” His voice was thick with pain.
“He let me go to clean myself up,” Melli said. “And he kept reminding me over and over that I’d given him consent—that I had asked him to…to fuck me.” The word tasted ugly in her mouth. She looked away. “And I believed him. I didn’t think I had the right to say anything just because I’d said yes earlier. I know now how wrong that was, but back then I was so young and I just…just had no idea.”
“Melinda…” Liosh shook his head, clearly not knowing what to say.
“He wore a condom, so at least I didn’t have to worry about being pregnant,” Melli heard herself tell him. “Of course, as it turned out, I never had to worry about being pregnant again.”
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