Rough Edge

by CD Reiss

  I watched her go, gartered ass waving as she climbed. Alone for a second at the base of the stairs, I put my hand on the bannister to steady myself.

  “You ready?” I whispered. “I’m going to fuck her so hard you disappear forever.”

  For the second time, the ambient hush of its voice made words.

  I’ll never leave her.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  * * *

  She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands folded between her knees. The part of me that I’d let loose, the emotion and uncertainty, wanted to take her right there. But I didn’t. I had another piece, a cold, calculating piece. He was more methodical.

  She watched me undress and put my clothes on the chair.

  I stood in front of her, already erect as a fucking flagpole. “You’re the only one, Greyson.”

  Her brown eyes were sad, open, honest. I couldn’t comfort her. Not now.

  “You’re different sometimes.”

  “I know.”

  I pushed her down and jerked her legs open. I could smell her sweet pussy through the strip of underwear. I ripped them open. She tried to get up on her elbows, but I pushed down on her chest, leaning my weight on her as I put two fingers deep in her cunt.

  “Get your knees up. Show me everything.”

  She did it, and the Thing’s rage and sadness mixed with desire.

  “You’re so fucking wet for it.” I rubbed her until my fingers were lubricated, then I stuck them in her ass.

  The Thing ran from between the place we touched as if it was burned.

  “Oh, God,” she cried.

  We’d had anal sex before. Gentle, slow anal. I couldn’t guarantee this would be either.

  I held her down and twisted my fingers deep inside her. “Beg for it.”

  “Please, Caden. Fuck me. Please.”

  “Where?”

  “My pussy.”

  I flipped her over and yanked her to the edge of the bed until her toes were on the floor. Then I wiped my fingers on the handkerchief she’d refused earlier.

  I couldn’t believe what I was about to do.

  No. I could. The Thing couldn’t.

  She saw me hesitate. “What are you doing?”

  Holding her arms together behind her back, I kicked her legs wide open. “Say stop if you want me to.”

  “I just want to know.”

  I slapped her ass. She yelped.

  I expected the whirlwind with the shredding of another boundary, but it didn’t show.

  Gripping her arms hard, I hit her bottom hard enough to leave a red mark. “Where do you want me to fuck you?”

  “My pussy.”

  Slap. And again, harder. She yelled again, wiggling.

  “Here’s a hint.” Four fingers gathered moisture, circling her cunt. She rotated with me. “It’s not this.”

  Three fingers in her ass. She tightened down.

  The Thing was in deep distress. It felt so good to beat it, but there was no whirlwind. I needed it. I didn’t know what it did or why it was important, but without the second of spinning confusion, the Thing wouldn’t hide completely.

  I took her by the throat. The winds appeared and waited, like gods called by an offering.

  “Beg,” I demanded.

  “Fuck my ass, Caden. Take it.”

  I tightened my grip on her neck. “You want four fingers in your ass?”

  “Please! Please put your cock in my ass.”

  “Good girl.”

  I took her cunt instead.

  She made a sound between a gasp and a grunt.

  Letting her arms go, I pulled the lube from the night table drawer and let it fall from her back to her crack as I fucked her.

  “You want to come?”

  “Yes.”

  “Later.” I pulled out and slid the head of my cock along her ass.

  She was nervous. I didn’t want her to be nervous, but the whirlwind spun into my perception, whispering promises.

  “Breathe.”

  She nodded.

  “Inhale,” I continued.

  She did. I watched the four-inch scar on her chest rise to expand with the air, and on the exhale, I slid inside her, watching her pucker expand into an O around the head. Maneuvering myself deeper, I stretched her into a tight ring around my shaft. Her face contorted in pain.

  I stopped.

  The Thing was still there, confused, using my love as a vulnerability.

  The centrifuge slowed, waiting.

  I pulled out and turned her over, pulling her knees up. She exposed herself willingly, and the love I’d been hiding was nearly crushed by the spinning in my mind.

  She pulled her cheeks apart, mouthing, “Fuck me.”

  That was it. I didn’t need to be told twice, but I needed to take more than was offered. Mercilessly, I took her ass with every inch, burying myself in her.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Beg or say stop,” I said.

  “Please. Take it.”

  I put her hand between her legs. She circled her clit. I slid all the way in, burying myself in her. Wrapping my arm around her, I put my weight on the base of her throat, just above her sternum, until she was immobile.

  I spun, a slave to my sickness, flipping from the man I was to the man I am.

  To ring that throat.

  To hold her high.

  To own her completely.

  I lost it. In a swirl of me, her, my love, my control, and the Thing I couldn’t name, screaming out and away.

  Chapter Twelve

  Greyson

  I had bruises on my left wrist where he’d held me down. He had been more gentle with the right side, which had never really recovered from the break I got in basic training, but the left took what was left over. I couldn’t let patients see it.

  The first time he fucked me with brutality, we didn’t talk about it. I woke up thinking he’d been half asleep and it wouldn’t occur again. Three weeks after that, he’d done it again, pushing me harder, demanding more, taking me to the edge over and over.

  Last night, two weeks after the last time, he did it again. He’d fucked me in the ass, in the shower afterward, on the floor. He’d been rough, and the rougher he got, the more I came.

  I wanted him to push me hard. I liked it. But this was slipping out of control.

  There’s a name for this.

  It was spring. Long sleeves would be too hot, and the AC in the office was spotty. I rummaged in my drawer and found a loose coil of bracelets. I slid them over my bruised left wrist. That would have to do.

  I checked myself in the mirror. I looked fine. No one could see the bruises or the soreness between my legs. No one could see the aches or the pleasant, peaceful satisfaction. Looking at me, you’d never know I’d had my fourth orgasm of the night with my husband’s massive cock buried in my throat and four of his fingers inside me.

  Masochist.

  The word shot through my mind, and for the first time, I let it. I mouthed it in the mirror.

  Masochist.

  “Where are you off to today?” he asked from the bathroom doorway, arms crossed over his bare chest. His pajama bottoms hung low on his hips, the waistband cutting across the V-shaped indent of his pelvis.

  “Collecting data for the Tina thing.” I leaned over the vanity and put on lipstick.

  “Are you okay? From last night?”

  “Uh-huh. Are you?” I snapped the tube closed.

  “Yeah.” His nod was serious. It was not an enthusiastic agreement as much as a simple affirmative.

  “You seem more animated.”

  His arms unfolded. I’d startled him. “Animated? What’s that mean?”

  I faced him. “The coldness is gone.” I put my hand on his chest and drew it through the patch of hair in the center, down to his abdomen. “Is something going on you want to talk about?”

  “No.”

  I shrugged. I wouldn’t normally gesture like that any more than I�
�d roll my eyes. Normally, I’d acknowledge his feelings without validating or dismissing them. But I didn’t feel normal. I felt a little less in control, a little more impulsive. Less like a professional psychiatrist and more like a wife who knew her husband’s boundaries.

  “You on call today?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He took my hand and kissed inside the wrist. “I’ll call you.”

  I kissed him in typical married-person way. A punctuation between activity. A comma in the day. I didn’t get to the bedroom door before his voice stopped me.

  “Greyson.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I can’t take this back once I say it.”

  This couldn’t be good. Anything he might want to take back wouldn’t be a statement to celebrate.

  “Okay?”

  “You might want to cancel your appointment.”

  “Caden. Is everything all right?”

  Sucking his lips between his teeth as if he wanted to hold the words back, he tightened his jaw and tilted his head. We were frozen in his moment of decision while the currents of his courage swirled and gathered together.

  “I think.” Hands though hair. A pause. I stayed absolutely still. “I think I’m going crazy.”

  Part Two

  HOMEBREAKING

  Chapter Thirteen

  GREYSON - DECEMBER, 2006

  Caden’s hands, what they could do, how careful they were in doing it, were always different in my memory than in real life. I forgot them every time they were out of my sight. They were always wider, more articulated than I remembered. When I saw his wedding ring on the fourth finger, tying him to me, I stood in awe of that single band taming a force so powerful.

  “Hey,” he said, meeting me at the desk at the front of the administrative offices of the hospital. He was crisp and showered in a suit with a textured silk tie. He always smelled of alcohol when he got out of surgery. He covered it with cologne and sex, but it was deep in his pores.

  When he signed out, his gold ring wiggled with the letters of his name.

  “How are you feeling? Since this morning?” I asked, remembering the taste of those fingers.

  “If I wasn’t fine, I’d let you know,” he lied.

  I let him have that particular deceit because it was to protect me. He was painfully honest in everything else. We started down the hall.

  When my heels clacked on the floor, he looked at my feet. “Are you all right in those?”

  I turned my calf so he could see the outline of the shoe and the stockings under it. “Do you like them?”

  He walked again. “I like them over my shoulders.”

  Stating facts. Clear and concise. Cold because he was nervous, not because he was losing his mind. He wasn’t lying about feeling better, only that he’d tell me.

  “How’s your thigh?” he asked when we were alone in the elevator.

  “Nice contusion.”

  “Muscular or dermal?”

  “Subcutaneous.”

  He nodded, hands folded together in front of him. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

  We got out at the doctors’ level of the garage, which was nicer than any of the others, and had valet. His Mercedes was waiting. He let me in.

  “Where are we meeting him again?” he asked.

  “Gotham.”

  “We should have taken a cab.”

  The car pulled onto Central Park West. It was the week between Christmas and New Year. Traffic was on a break.

  “It was a cutting day,” I said with a playful curl to my question. Surgery left him raw and potent. We usually fucked on cutting days.

  “Just a quad. Easy. He was young though. So we had tertiary distress.”

  He made a left, crossing hand over hand, his attention always sharp, even when the streets were empty.

  “You don’t want to go,” I said.

  “To dinner?”

  “To dinner with Ronin.”

  “I like Ronin.”

  “To dinner with Ronin to discuss the new protocol.”

  “No.” He faced me when he made the denial, and for a second, I saw his raw power. “I don’t want to go to dinner with Ronin to discuss this at all. Ever.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yes, I do, Greyson.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Yes. I. Do. For you.”

  “Don’t lay this on me.”

  “Jesus Christ. If I wrote you a check for three hundred bucks, would you listen to me for fifty minutes? We’re married. I do things for you. You do things for me. We make sacrifices.”

  Before I could talk about agency, autonomy, and acceptance, he grabbed my hand and squeezed it. For a month, his touch outside our home had gotten rare, and it froze me.

  When I squeezed back, he put his hand back on the wheel to pull the car up to the valet. My fingers were left alone to make their own sense of him.

  * * *

  The hostess led us through the cavernous space. Pillars of changing light held up the thirty-foot ceiling, and the sounds of conversations and music were muffled by careful acoustics. Caden put his hand on my lower back to guide me through, and I kept pace in six-inch heels.

  Ronin had finished basic and been stationed in Maryland. He wouldn’t say where, but I knew it was the Aberdeen Proving Ground. He knew I knew and neither confirmed nor denied what he did for a living.

  He was alone at a table in the corner, reading a magazine. In the folds, I saw half of President Bush’s face. He stood when we approached.

  “Colonel,” Caden said.

  “St. John,” he replied, shaking Caden’s hand first.

  I envied the public touch, then I gave my own handshake and let Caden pull my seat out for me. We ordered drinks. Wine for me. Whiskey for Ronin. Water for Caden.

  Ronin had been a handsome man in basic training, but his eyes had matured from simply piercing to devastating, and his conceit had ripened into confidence.

  “We haven’t seen you since the fundraiser,” I said. “Are you still with that girl?”

  He leaned back to let the waitress place the glass of whiskey in front of him. “Nah.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Not a big deal. It takes a certain type to deal with me.” His eyes met mine, then Caden’s, and he smirked. He asked about Caden’s residency, my feelings about private practice. Usually we wouldn’t ask about his job, but this time was different.

  “I mentioned we wanted to talk to you about something specific,” I started.

  “You had me at ‘secret.’”

  The waitress came and took our order. It took forever to hear the specials. I didn’t have much of an appetite, even though I hadn’t eaten all day. I needed the feeling of being at a peak of tolerance.

  “To old friends,” Ronin held up his drink, and we clicked.

  Caden looked as if he’d rather be cut into small pieces than sit at that table.

  “So,” I said, “I’ll get right to the point.”

  “Please,” Caden said.

  I leaned toward Ronin. “I hear Aberdeen was working on a heightened sensory perception protocol?”

  Ronin made no sign he was surprised. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “To increase the accuracy of scopaesthesia. The feeling you’re being watched.”

  “He knows what scopaesthesia is.”

  I ignored my husband. “For troops on the front line. If they can perceive when they’re being watched, they can kill first.”

  Ronin leaned back, crossing his legs while he fingered his glass. “And this is interesting to you because?”

  I looked at Caden, and he looked at me. This was the moment we broke the shell we’d grown around ourselves. For me. For us.

  “Caden has a persistent condition.”

  Back to Caden. He wasn’t looking at me. He was touching his water glass with his left hand, and that ring, those fingers, the way the index finger tapped once.


  “He thinks someone’s watching him.”

  “Not watching,” Caden cuts in. “It’s not malicious.”

  “It’s trying to get inside him.”

  Ronin uncrossed his legs. “That sounds pretty malicious.”

  “It’s—”

  Caden put his cold fingers on my arm, and I stopped. “It wants to join with me. I don’t have a feeling it wants to hurt me. It is, just so you know, crazy. It’s not normal. It’s fucking insane crazy talk and I’m embarrassed to be sitting here telling you about it.”

  “Having a wife will do that to you.”

  They shared a male moment and I let it slide.

  “So,” Ronin continued, “you’ve checked environmental causes?”

  “Had the house checked for carbon monoxide,” he said.

  “And you’ve considered PTSD? I mean, your wife’s a card-carrying expert.”

  “It’s not PTSD,” I interjected.

  “Really? You were in Fallujah. Anyone who didn’t go crazy already was.”

  We sat in a triangle of silence with our own memories of the blood, the screaming, the smell of gunpowder and meat. The food came. I was sure it smelled great to a person who was interested in eating. None of us were. When the waitress asked if we wanted anything else, no one answered.

  I broke the silence. “It’s not PTSD. No flashbacks. No disrupted sleep. No emotional outbursts.”

  No emotion at all. I didn’t say that. It wasn’t relevant, and it wasn’t one hundred percent true.

  “It’s a nascent dissociative disorder,” I continued.

  “Wait, wait, wait…” Ronin threw up his hands.

  “It’s not—” Caden tried to get a word in.

  “Have you tried antipsychotics even?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’ve tried everything. But every few weeks, the feeling comes back. We get it under control, but it’s been every week, and now it’s every five days or so. It used to be every few months, but last time, we had a four-day spread.”

  Ronin looked from me to Caden, then back to me, twisting his hands out to show us his palms. “You do what to get it under control?”