Skin (44 Chapters #1)

by B. B. Easton

  “Will you show me how it works?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Knight said, reaching around me with both arms and plucking the closed knife from my hand. “It’s called a butterfly knife, because the handles open like wings.” He slowly spread the two hinged metal pieces apart, exposing a nasty looking six-inch blade inside.

  I thought it was funny that somebody so tough walked around with a “butterfly” anything, but once it was in my face that fucker was anything but funny.

  Knight closed it and offered it back to me, but I didn’t accept.

  “Now will you show me how you really open it?”

  “What? Like this?” Knight’s arm slashed back and forth while his wrist made several quick figure-eight-style movements. The silver blade and painted black handles became a spinning blur of glinting metal, then came to rest as a knife. It was the coolest fucking thing I’d ever seen.

  “Do it again.” I was mesmerized. Knight opened and shut the blade a few more times, slower so I could see what he was doing, then handed the closed weapon to me again.

  My first few tries were disastrous. I kept leaving out a spin, causing the sharp side of the blade to bounce off my knuckles when I flicked it open. Knight laughed as I floundered, but once I worked in that last spin in I got the hang of it—at least a simplified version of it.

  I flipped the knife open and shut while we talked and smoked and drank and breathed in our last gasps of fall.

  I noticed that Knight seemed distracted, which wasn’t like him. Whenever we were together he usually clung to my every word as if I were about to tell him the next winning lottery numbers, but his eyes kept leaving my face to watch the knife in my hands. Licking his lips and swallowing hard, Knight finally said, “Punk, you gotta stop.”

  Something in his tone made me stop immediately, mid-flick. The blade kept going though, and the extra momentum from my quick stop caused it to slice across my knuckles far worse than before. It hurt like a bitch. When I looked down I noticed that my knuckles were covered in several tiny little bloody cuts and one large gash that cut across my index and middle fingers and was bleeding freely.

  Jesus. I guess that’s why Knight wanted me to sto—

  The next thing I knew the knife was gone, my wrist was behind my head, and one of my bloody knuckles was in Knight’s mouth. As he tongued and sucked my wounds his grip on my wrist tightened and his cock swelled against my back.

  Holy shit.

  I wanted to be freaked out that my boyfriend was drinking my blood, but the feeling of his tongue on my skin, darting in and out between my knuckles, lapping up every scarlet drop, had me thinking about his mouth on other parts of my body. It also made the cut feel better, so I closed my eyes, leaned my head back against his shoulder, and let him go at it.

  I flashed back to the night he pierced my nipples. Knight had said that making me bleed had been the best gift he’d ever gotten. I’d thought he was just being dramatic. Who knew?

  So, my boyfriend is a vampire, I thought. No big deal. Hey, maybe this explains why he’s so pale.

  Then I felt teeth.

  “Ow!”

  I pulled my hand away, and felt Knight’s body go completely rigid behind me. I turned around, slowly, and peered into the face of a goddamn madman. Knight’s eyes were crazed. His muscles were so tense it was as if he was using all his strength to keep from morphing into a fucking werewolf. His cock was hard. Oh, and he was holding a knife.

  “Knight…”

  His jaw snapped shut. I knew what that meant. I was about to get the silent treatment.

  “Are you okay?” I asked anyway, in my most soothing tone.

  Knight was breathing hard. His nostrils flared with every exhalation, and his jaw muscles flexed. Something seriously fucked up was going on inside that head.

  I was not safe. Knight knew it, and I knew it.

  But what could I do? Where could I go? It was just me and one freaked out skinhead—who may or may not want to eat me—in the middle of the woods.

  I had to figure out how to calm him down. STAT.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I said. “It didn’t even hurt. You just…surprised me. That’s all.”

  Heaving chest. Dilated pupils. No response.

  I turned around completely so that I could talk to him more easily, but that forced me to straddle his legs and confront his seriously uncomfortable-looking tight-jeans-massive-bloodlust-boner situation.

  “Knight?” I reached up and put my hands on his shoulders. “What’s going on with you?”

  Knight locked eyes with me so intensely it felt as if he was willing me to look into his soul. Begging me to see his secrets so that he wouldn’t have to speak them out loud. So, I tried. I peered in to those two expanding black portholes, but all I could see was darkness. Darkness slashed with red.

  Blood.

  “Blood turns you on,” I said, trying to sound as nonjudgmental as possible. His jaws were still clenched shut, so I knew he wouldn’t talk, but I thought maybe he would at least nod.

  He didn’t.

  “Do you…want to make me bleed?”

  Knight looked so angry, so hateful, the way he was staring at me. Again, he refused to answer, but he didn’t have to. His thoughts floated to the surface of the blackness like some kind of fucked up Magic 8 Ball. One read, Yes.

  The other, Run.

  Knight wanted to hurt me.

  Knight didn’t want to hurt me.

  “What if I do it for you?” I blurted.

  Fucking whiskey.

  Knight’s eyes went wide but the rest of his body remained rigid. He was exerting a painful amount of self-control, and I wanted to give him some kind of relief. Some kind of pleasure to counteract the lifetime of pain he was reliving before my very eyes.

  Taking my right hand in my left, I spread apart the seam of my wound until it began to bleed again. Thanks to the whiskey, it didn’t hurt that bad. I kept my fingers pointing downward as I reopened the gash so that the red rivulets would run down toward the tips. I felt Knight’s hands grip my thighs, hard—one of them still holding the knife.

  Once the blood began to drip from my fingertips, I pressed them against the tightly closed seam of Knight’s mouth. Red smeared across his lips, making him look even more vampiric. Knight’s black pupils swallowed his pale irises as they bored into mine, and his jaw flexed beneath his skin.

  Open up, baby. You can do it.

  Knight’s body was practically vibrating with rage and shame and self-restraint, and if I didn’t do something to get him to calm the fuck down there was a good chance he might actually explode and kill us all.

  I reached down with my left hand and clumsily unfastened his jeans. Knight’s cock instantly spilled out of the opening, the elastic waistband of his boxer shorts unable to restrain it.

  Jesus Christ.

  It was like one of those gag gifts where you open the lid and a fucking snake pops out. Only this one was a king cobra. And it was real.

  I said a silent prayer, reached into his boxers with my left hand, and wrapped it around his venomous appendage. His skin was buttery soft, and it slid like silk as I slowly worked my hand up and down his length.

  That was the thing about Knight. He was hell on the eyes, but to the rest of my senses, pure heaven.

  I looked back at Knight’s face for some kind of, I don’t know, encouragement? Validation? But his eyes were closed and his brow was furrowed in pain. It broke my heart. And it fueled me.

  I worked Knight’s smooth cock until his lips parted in defeat.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered.

  Then I slid two bloody fingertips inside.

  Knight’s eyes rolled up into the back of his head, and he grabbed my wrist with his free hand. An appreciative moan rumbled in his throat as he swirled his tongue around each dripping digit.

  The action made my clit throb.

  I could do that to him, I thought. For him.

  Feeling brave, I scooted backwards a
little, leaned over, and took the scary cobra snake into my mouth. Teeth instantly clamped down on my fingers again, but that time I didn’t flinch. I was focused.

  I didn’t have use of my right hand, and I couldn’t take him very far into my mouth without gagging, but I persevered. The way Knight was dragging his tongue along my wound, sucking the blood directly from my body, had me dragging mine up the length of his cock and increasing my suction with every pass.

  Soon Knight’s hips began to thrust as his already hard shaft stiffened in my hand. I’d seen enough porn to know what was going to happen next, but nothing had prepared me for the actual event. I heard the knife clatter to the bed of the truck just before the first spurt of hot cum exploded into my mouth. Knight’s hands found their way into my super short hair and held my head still as he came. I struggled to swallow it all, between gags, but he just kept coming. His body convulsed. His hips jerked. And I marveled at my power. I wasn’t just making Knight come.

  I was performing an exorcism.

  When I tucked Knight’s thoroughly wrung out cock back into his boxers and sat up it was clear that whatever had been haunting him, holding him captive inside his own body, had been expelled. His muscles were putty. His black, hateful eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell in a slow, sleepy rhythm. And across his face, an easy, contented blood-smeared smile.

  I kissed that little smile, and the gesture made it blossom into a full-blown grin. With teeth. Perfect fucking teeth. Figuring out how to get a glimpse of that particular freckle-faced, teenaged boy smile had become my reason for getting up in the morning. That and all the cuddling. And the cunnilingus.

  Knight sat up and wrapped his arms around my waist, then rested his sated head on my boney shoulder. “You’re still here,” he said, squeezing me harder.

  His words made my heart constrict. “Of course I am,” I said. “Where else would I be?” I squeezed him back and ran my licked-clean fingers over his fuzzy blond head.

  “With somebody who’s not so fucked up.” He spoke the words into my neck. Fucked up. The words I’d used to describe him weeks ago. The words he hated.

  “Maybe I like fucked up,” I said, surprising myself with the amount of truth in that statement.

  Knight sat up and scanned my face. His pupils had gone back down to a more natural size, and all traces of hate were gone from his chiseled features. He looked…normal. No, better than normal—he looked fucking cute. As long as you ignored the evidence that he’d just been feasting on human blood, of course.

  Deciding that I was not full of shit, Knight leaned forward and kissed me. I could taste my coppery mark on his lips, and I’m sure he could taste himself on mine, but neither one of us cared.

  Pressing his forehead against mine, Knight said, “I love you, Punk.”

  “I love you, too, Skin.”

  Just like every other milestone in our relationship, Knight took those three little words and fucking ran with them.

  The next week he showered me with love notes at school. I was used to him shoving little folded pieces of paper into my hands between classes. They usually contained intricate drawings that I’m sure he thought were romantic—anatomically correct hearts and bloody daggers and little notes about how he missed me, scrawled in his psychotic, all-caps, no-curves handwriting. But these notes were the real deal. They were sweet and honest and more vulnerable than I’d known Knight was even capable of being.

  On Monday, Knight presented me with this one:

  DEAR BB,

  I KNOW WE'VE SAID IT A FEW TIMES NOW, BUT I DON'T THINK YOU WILL EVER FULLY UNDERSTAND HOW MUCH I FUCKING LOVE YOU.

  I'VE NEVER BEEN CLOSE TO ANYONE, BUT FOR SOME REASON I CAN'T STAY AWAY FROM YOU. I LET MYSELF GET CLOSE EVEN THOUGH I KNEW YOU WOULD RIP MY HEART OUT AS SOON AS YOU FOUND OUT HOW FUCKED UP I REALLY AM. I DIDN'T EVEN CARE. I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE WORTH IT JUST TO BE WITH YOU FOR A LITTLE WHILE.

  BUT I REALIZED ON FRIDAY, WHEN I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO RUN AWAY FROM ME, JUST HOW FUCKING STUPID THAT WAS. THERE IS NO WAY I COULD TAKE THAT KIND OF PAIN. IF YOU LEFT IT WOULD FUCKING DESTROY ME.

  I LOVE YOU MORE THAN I LOVE MYSELF.

  KNIGHT

  I got this one on Tuesday:

  DEAR BB,

  I REALIZED SOMETHING LAST NIGHT AFTER I DROPPED YOU OFF AT WORK.

  I'M FUCKING HAPPY.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE I'M FUCKING HAPPY AND IT'S BECAUSE OF YOU. YOU PROBABLY DON'T UNDERSTAND BECAUSE YOU'RE HAPPY ALL THE TIME, BUT I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT FELT LIKE UNTIL YOU KISSED ME IN THE PARKING LOT THE DAY AFTER I PIERCED YOU. I COULDN'T STOP SMILING FOR THE REST OF THE WEEKEND. BOBBY THOUGHT I'D LOST MY MIND.

  AND NOW I CAN'T STOP SMILING AGAIN. THESE FUCKERS ARE GOING TO THINK I'VE GONE SOFT.

  I LOVE YOU.

  KNIGHT

  Knight stuck this one in my back pocket on Wednesday:

  DEAR BB,

  I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS REAL.

  I KNOW TO YOU THIS PROBABLY SEEMS REALLY FAST, BUT I THINK I'VE BEEN IN LOVE WITH YOU SINCE WE WERE KIDS. YOUR DRAWINGS HUNG ABOVE MY DESK IN THE BACK OF THE ART ROOM, AND THEY WERE SO FUCKING COLORFUL. EVEN YOUR SUNS AND MOONS HAD LITTLE SMILEY FACES ON THEM. I WANTED TO LIVE IN YOUR HAPPY LITTLE WORLD INSTEAD OF MY OWN.

  NOW I DO.

  I LOVE YOU.

  KNIGHT

  And Thursday:

  DEAR BB,

  I CAN'T FUCKING CONCENTRATE. IF I FAIL MY SENIOR YEAR IT'S YOUR FAULT. MAYBE I SHOULD FAIL JUST SO THAT I CAN COME BACK NEXT YEAR. I CAN'T HAVE THESE MOTHERFUCKERS FORGETTING WHO YOU BELONG TO.

  I LOVE YOU.

  KNIGHT

  When I sat down in my fourth period class on Friday to read my final note of the week, I was practically giddy. No one had ever written me love notes before. Especially not one every single day. Knight had me feeling like a magical fairy fucking princess.

  I was also giddy because it was the last day before winter break. I so needed those two weeks off. Between school, work, my after school “activities,” and staying up late talking to Knight on the phone every night, I was exhausted.

  I opened the note—which had been intricately folded into the shape of a heart—slowly, savoring the experience, while my teacher began to drone on about the results of our end-of-semester exams.

  DEAR BB,

  I CAN'T FUCKING WAIT UNTIL THIS AFTERNOON. I HAVE SOMETHING PLANNED THAT I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT SINCE THE DAY WE MET. PLEASE DON'T WORRY. I KNOW YOU PROBABLY THINK I'M JUST USING YOU FOR SEX, BUT I'M NOT.

  I LOVE YOU.

  KNIGHT

  Sex?

  Sex.

  SEX?!

  No matter how many times I read it, the only word my virginal fifteen-year-old brain could comprehend was sex.

  Knight wanted to have sex with me. In, like, two hours.

  Ohmyfuckinggod.

  I didn’t even notice that the bell had rung until most of my classmates had vacated the room. Shoving the now sweat-drenched piece of paper into the pocket of Knight’s jacket, I stumbled out the door. For once, I was thankful to be swept up in the current of exiting teenagers because my impending panic attack had hijacked even the most basic of brain functions. Such as walking. And forming thoughts that required words.

  I still had access to images though, because the sight of Knight’s massive cock falling out of his jeans the week before was playing on a loop behind my eyes.

  The river carried me out the C hall door and practically dumped me at his feet. Knight was leaning up against the flagpole as usual, wearing his Lonsdale hoodie and a sneer. He closed the distance between us and kissed me in a way that was far too intimate for school. I pulled away when I felt his cock begin to thicken against my belly—my face a gorgeous shade of mortified, I’m sure. Without releasing me Knight asked if I’d read his last note.

  I nodded.

  Please don’t make me talk about it. Please don’t make me talk about it.

  “I meant it.”

  I know.

 
Knight stripped me of my backpack and practically dragged me by the hand toward his truck. Although I was used to him carrying my stuff, on that particular day it felt more like he was using it as collateral.

  I scanned the parking lot, looking for some kind of distraction, some way to delay the inevitable decimation of my hymen. It came in the form of August Embry. He was up ahead of us, cutting across the parking lot towards the woods. That was weird. August usually rode the bus home.

  I should invite him to Colton’s house! That’s it!

  “August,” I yelled.

  No response.

  “August!” I yelled louder, cupping my free hand around my mouth.

  He turned around and waved at me that time, but he didn’t stop walking. In fact, I think he might have even sped up a little bit.

  Maybe he’s mad at me. I have kind of ditched him for Knight. Or maybe he’s just walking home for exercise. He does look skinnier. That must be it.

  Out of ideas, I surrendered and let Knight boost me up into his passenger seat. We didn’t speak the whole way to Peg’s house. I stared out the window and worried the edges of the note in my pocket as Mazzy Star coached me on the ways of loving someone who lives in shadows.

  When we arrived, I followed Knight inside with knocking knees and trembling hands. We’d crossed that splintering, rotten threshold dozens of times before, but on that eerily warm December day, I knew going in that part of me was never coming back out.

  It was time to grow up.

  Knight disappeared into the kitchen while I loitered on the four-by-four square of parquet just inside the front door—Peg’s “foi-yay”—immobilized by indecision.

  What should I do? Should I sit? Should I head outside to the back porch? Should I grab a beer?

  Before I could formulate a plan, Knight reemerged from the kitchen, looking all too pleased with himself. He stalked toward me in bare feet—When the fuck did he take his boots off?—grabbed my hand without saying a word, and led me up the sagging, squeaking stairs to Colton’s old bedroom.

  I’d only been up there once before, but it was exactly the way I remembered it—sparsely furnished, impersonal, and kind of sad. Colton had never stayed long enough to decorate, and Peg was either too depressed or absent to bother. Colton tried to make out with me up there once, but being on a bed with a boy kind of freaked me out back then.