by BB Easton
Beautiful.
Perfect.
Lucky.
Every word he spoke fluttered into my ears, lit up the darkened, self-critical corners of my mind, and attached itself to my heart like a bandage, healing me from the outside in. I pushed up onto my tiptoes to kiss the source of those words but was met with an unexpected obstacle.
When I looked down at the bulge between us, then up into guilty gray-blue eyes, a smile split my face. “Hans!” I giggled, smacking him on the chest.
“What?” He shrugged, both dimples on full display.
“You get emotional boners. Do you know how fucking cute that is?”
If his cheeks hadn’t been covered in three days’ worth of stubble, I’m sure they would have been bright pink. “Kinda ruins the mood.” He chuckled as I unbuckled his belt. Even on my tiptoes, Hans had to bend down to meet my expectant kiss.
Unfastening his pants, I took him in my hands and whispered, “I love you,” against his parted lips.
“I love you too, baby,” he whispered back, his cock swelling in agreement against my palms.
“I love you, too,” I cooed at it, bending over to kiss its smiling head.
Hans let out a tiny moan, and I suddenly knew exactly what I could do for him. What I could give him in return for all that he’d done for me.
I didn’t stand back up to resume our make-out session. I sank to my knees instead. The tile felt cool under my bare shins—all I was wearing was a thin tank top and a pair of Hans’s boxer shorts—but the soft candlelight, the flirty banter between Drew Barrymore and Edward Norton, and the flesh beneath my tongue were velvety and warm. I took my time, knowing with absolute certainty—and for possibly the first time in my life—that I had nowhere better to go and nothing better to do.
I had arrived.
Long, rough fingers wove themselves into my choppy hair as I slowly worshipped Hans’s manhood with my tongue. My lips. My hands.
“Fuck,” he hissed, gripping my head. Hans’s hips began to thrust slightly, and his entire body tensed.
He was holding back; I could tell. He wanted to fuck my mouth, but he was too big, and I was too inexperienced.
Or so he thought.
I gripped his hips with both hands and looked up at him from under my lashes. Hans was watching me. Night had fallen, and the room was now shrouded in darkness, but his eyes burned like blue flames. I’d forgotten how villainous he looked when he wasn’t smiling. How intense. There was another side to Hans that I hadn’t seen yet; I could feel it.
Goose bumps raced down my arms as I took him all the way to my throat, letting him know that he didn’t need to hold back.
He couldn’t break me.
He wouldn’t.
Hans held my tear-streaked stare as he tested my resolve, taking control, guiding my movements. I dug my nails into his hips as he pumped into my mouth, each thrust a little deeper, each withdrawal a little less restrained. I gagged and wrapped my right hand around the base of his dick, holding on for dear life yet encouraging him to continue. Just as I felt his cock stiffen in my fist, Hans pulled away.
“Fuck, baby,” he panted, running a hand through his tousled black hair. “You’re gonna kill me.”
I smiled with swollen lips at my flustered boyfriend, his angry cock jutting out of his open jeans. We stared at each other, eyes wide, chests heaving, then, at the exact same time, we both looked over at the bathtub.
Tearing our clothes off, Hans and I scrambled into the now room-temperature water. With the touch of a button, eight powerful jets roared to life, turning the serene basin into a hurricane of stimulation. Hans sat with his back against the far side of the oval to allow room for his long, muscular legs. I went to straddle him but was stopped by two strong hands around my hips.
“No, baby. Turn around.”
My heart crashed in my chest almost as hard as the rapids breaking on the surface of the water as I did what I’d been told, standing back up and turning away from him, slowly. Two massive hands palmed my bare ass, kneading the only ample part of my body. I held my breath as Hans parted my flesh and gasped in surprise when I felt his tongue slide along the seam. It started at the front.
And ended at the back.
My knees almost buckled when he did it again. Releasing my ass with one hand but continuing his sweet torture, Hans slid his palm up my lower back and pressed forward until I bent at the waist for him. I gripped the edge of the bathtub in front of me with both hands and whimpered as he lavished me with his mouth. Nothing was off-limits to Hans. He wanted all of me, and I was more than willing to let him have it.
Sweet, sucking kisses gave way to long, torturous licks.
Kneading hands turned into curious fingers.
Curious fingers filled me, becoming slippery fingers.
Slippery fingers massaged the place no one had ever touched before.
A warm, flicking tongue followed them there.
A trail of desire flowed down the inside of my thigh.
My mouth watered.
Stubble like sandpaper scratched my tender, oversensitive flesh.
An eager tongue filled the place where I was aching.
Hans’s thumb, slick with a combination of my lust and his saliva, teased my puckered flesh as he fucked me with his tongue. I arched my back and pushed against it, begging for more with my posture. I’d had no idea anything could feel that good. There were so many sensations all building at once that, when Hans finally gave me what I wanted, when he pressed against my tight little ring and filled me in a completely new way, my core spasmed on contact.
A strangled cry began to climb its way out of my throat, but before it could escape, Hans withdrew, wrapped both hands around my hips, and pulled me into the roiling, chaotic water with him.
With my back against his front, Hans kissed me sideways as he groped me with his hands and filled me with his impossibly hard shaft, allowing me no time to adjust as he pumped into me from underneath.
He swallowed my cries as I came, my insides clenching and clawing at him, struggling to accommodate his size but wanting more all the same. I gripped the sides of the bathtub and bit his lip as the hurricane we were dancing in passed through me and into Hans. Once the fury inside me began to subside, Hans wrapped both arms around my ribs, lifted his hips, and filled me to the hilt with a curse and a kiss.
Water splashed over the edge of the tub and onto my backpack as we fell back down to earth.
Hans kept his arms around me and tucked his stubbled chin into the crook of my neck. I pressed my cheek against his temple and smiled, completely content, perfectly at peace for possibly the first time in my life. People were singing and dancing on the glowing TV, but I didn’t pay them any attention. I was floating in my love bubble built for two.
Until it popped.
Until the dark thoughts crept in, like spiders, re-spinning their webs of doubt in the dusty corners of my mind.
No one will ever top this. Do you realize that?
You will never be happier than you are right now. And you’re only seventeen.
You’re so fucked.
Hans just ruined the rest of your life. All eighty-three years of it. Shot to hell.
You’ve only been together a month, and you already can’t live without him.
What are you going to do if he leaves you like Knight did? If he cheats on you like Harley?
You’ll fucking die; that’s what.
So you’re looking at a life of suckage or death.
Congratulations.
“Hans?”
“Mmhmm?”
“That was…” Intense. Transcendent. Life-ruining. “I mean, nobody’s ever…” Loved me like this. “I…” Can’t lose you.
“I know, baby,” Hans murmured into the tender flesh behind my ear, reading my wayward thoughts. “I know.”
Hans and I snuggled deeper into the pulsing lukewarm water. Over the din of the jets and the thrumming of my racing heart, I began to make o
ut the unmistakable sound of bad singing. Looking up at the television glowing on the counter, I saw Tim Roth, aggressively serenading a very posh Drew Barrymore while dressed like some kind of vagabond.
“It’s a fucking musical?” I spat.
Hans snorted. “Are you serious? It’s almost over.”
“It’s so bad,” I marveled.
“Yeah. It’s fucking terrible,” Hans agreed.
“We should go put it on in the living room and make Trip watch it as payback for the bukkake porn I walked in on earlier.”
“Oh shit!” He burst out laughing. “Trip busted out the bukkake! Are you gonna be okay?”
“No. I’m fucking traumatized. All I see when I close my eyes is—”
Hans lifted his hand and pressed a wet finger to my lips. “Shh. You’re safe now.”
I giggled and kissed the callused pad, feeling the weight of that statement settle into my bones.
“You’re safe now.”
For a moment, I almost believed him.
“We need vegetables in our lives, baby. Like, literally. To stay alive.”
Hans wrinkled his nose as he scanned the produce section. “But they’re just so…vegetabley.”
We’d been living on pizza and Hot Pockets for weeks. Well, Hans had. I’d been living on Diet Coke, whiskey, and cigarettes, per my usual.
“Just pick one vegetable. And a fruit, too.”
“A fruit, too?” Hans pouted, absentmindedly slipping his left hand into my back pocket as he considered his options.
We were never not touching. If we were in the same zip code as one another, we were touching.
It was disgusting.
Hans and I wandered through the colorful, foreign wonderland of fresh food until he finally settled on a bag of baby carrots and a large container of pre-cut fruit salad.
“Not that,” I said, intercepting the container and putting it back on the shelf.
Hans’s eyebrows pulled together in confusion until I pointed at the price tag.
“Twenty bucks!?”
“Right? I always wanted the pre-cut shit, too, but my mom would never buy it for me because it’s such a rip-off. I’ll just make you a fruit salad if that’s what you want.”
“You’re gonna make me fruit salad?” Hans beamed, leaning in to give me a peck on the lips. “You do love me.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I just want to save enough money to buy a carton of cigarettes while we’re here.”
Hans gave me the side-eye and smirked. “I thought you were trying to keep me alive.”
I smirked back. “It’s called balance, Hans. You have to eat your fruit to get your cigarettes.”
After I went around collecting everything I needed to keep my boyfriend from dying of malnutrition or scurvy, I pulled my pen and grocery list out of the shopping cart and crossed off HEALTHY SHIT.
Hans looked over my shoulder as I studied the list and rested his hand on the shopping cart handle. I glanced over at his forearm and looked straight into the eyes of Count Dracula himself. I didn’t appreciate his creepy, bug-eyed stare, so I reached over and drew a blue mustache on him.
“Hey, what did Bela ever do to you?” Hans chuckled as he inspected my work.
“Who?”
“Bela Lugosi, the actor who played Dracula.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. You must be mistaken. There is only one true Count Dracula, and that is Gary Oldman. And Gary Oldman’s version has a mustache. Actually, gimme your arm. I need to add his goatee, too.”
I lunged for his forearm with my pen, but Hans clapped his opposite hand over it, shielding poor Bela from further desecration.
“I love Bram Stoker’s Dracula too, but that movie wasn’t out when I was a kid,” Hans said, defending his choice in body art.
“So? It was out by the time you got that tattoo.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the point,” Hans said, dropping his guard when I finally put the pen away and began pushing the cart toward the deli section. “I’d been planning this sleeve since I was, like, ten.”
I stopped in front of a case of deli meat and shivered violently from the cold. “Um, not to sound judgy, but where were your parents while you were busy watching”—I looked his arm up and down—“Hellraiser and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre?”
I grabbed a package of Oscar Mayer sliced turkey. I had a coupon for it. Fifty cents off. That was like two-and-a-half cigarettes’ worth of savings.
“Fighting.”
I dropped the processed meat into the cart and looked up at Hans.
“I went upstairs and watched movies whenever they were fighting,” he clarified.
I studied his face, searching for clues, but Hans’s dark features were neutral.
Glancing at his arm again, face after horrifying, deranged face staring back at me, I said, “They must have been fighting a lot, huh?”
When I lifted my eyes to his, it was like looking through the portholes of a ship during a hurricane. A tiny glimpse at an ocean of turmoil.
“Yeah,” Hans said, holding my stare.
I felt my adrenaline surge, my fight-or-flight instinct kicking in. The only other boy who’d ever talked to me about his traumatic past was Knight, and handling him in an emotionally activated state had been like learning how to charm a snake through trial and error. One wrong move, one wrong response, one wrong fucking look, and he’d strike.
But these eyes weren’t serpentine; they were sentient. They didn’t warn me off; they welcomed me in. This was Hans, my Hans, the man who wore his heart on his tattooed sleeve. I didn’t need to be afraid anymore. I just needed my brain to realize that.
“So, when your parents were fighting, you would go watch horror movies?” I asked, trying to implement what little I’d learned in my Interpersonal Relationships class so far.
Summarize. Validate. Lean in and nod.
“Yeah,” Hans said, furrowing his brow and chewing on his thumbnail. “That’s weird, huh? I don’t know why I didn’t just watch cartoons. I guess, maybe, because I was scared? You know, like, maybe it tricked my brain into thinking I was scared because of the movie and not because my dad was downstairs, putting his fist through the wall.”
My heart ached as I imagined a terrified, wide-eyed, wild-haired little boy hiding in his room, replacing one nightmare with another. It wasn’t fair. Hans was the kindest, most loving person I knew. He deserved to be tucked in and read to every night. He deserved to be cuddled and reassured, like I was, that monsters weren’t real. Instead, he’d turned to them for comfort.
My sympathy bubbled over into rage. My thoughts began to race. I pictured myself destroying all the precious bullshit in their house. The framed art. The porcelain vases. The fine china on the formal dining room table that no one ever used. I imagined myself yanking Hans’s phone out of his pocket and calling them up, telling them they were pieces of shit who didn’t deserve him.
Stop it, BB. Nod your fucking head and validate that man’s feelings.
“That’s not weird,” I said, choking on my anger as I placed a gentle hand over Bela Lugosi’s new blue mustache. “I think it makes perfect sense.”
One of Hans’s dimples deepened, but he didn’t quite smile. “It worked. After watching the scariest shit I could get my hands on for years, I realized one day that I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was only twelve, but I was already almost as tall as my dad. So, instead of hiding in my room when they started fighting, I decided that I was finally gonna go downstairs and break it up.”
Hans swallowed and looked off into the distance. “When I got down there, I saw my dad slap my mom across the face. I’d never seen him hit her before, and…” He looked back at me. “She’s so tiny, BB. Wait until you meet her. She’s, like, barely five feet tall. And my dad is this fucking angry giant German. I don’t know. I just…snapped. I jumped on him, and we basically wrestled on the ground and beat the shit out of each other until the cops came and broke it up.”
“Oh my God, b-b-baby.
I’m so s-s-sorry.” I was vaguely aware that my teeth were starting to chatter.
Hans wrapped his arm around me and pushed the cart with his free hand away from the meat cooler.
“Don’t be. That was the final straw for my mom. She let him spend the night in jail and told him that he couldn’t come home unless he stopped drinking. He’s still a fucking asshole, and he and my mom still argue a lot, but it’s definitely better than it was.”
“So that’s why you got the tattoos?”
“Yeah,” Hans said, stopping to grab a few dozen boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch from the cereal aisle. “I used to have a lot of anxiety. At school I was always fucking up and forgetting shit because of my ADD, and then I’d be worried about how my dad was going to react when he saw my grades. I couldn’t even take Ritalin because it just made my anxiety worse. The only thing that ever helped me get over my fears was watching those movies when I was a kid, so the day I turned eighteen, I went to Terminus City Tattoo and started working on this piece.” He smiled and looked down at his arm. “Having these guys with me wherever I go…it sounds crazy, but it, like, cured me. I haven’t had a panic attack in over a year.”
I wanted to lean in and nod, summarize and validate, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t fucking breathe. I was the one who was about to have a panic attack, and it was all because of three little words.
Terminus. City. Tattoo.
A flood of memories overwhelmed me at once. All involving Knight. All involving pain. His tattoo chair where he’d fucked me, pierced me, inked me, got drunk with me, slept with me. The way it looked, lying on its side, stuffing flying everywhere as Knight ripped it to shreds with his butterfly knife in a fit of PTSD-induced psychosis. The fire-escape stairs where Knight had told me he loved me—the same ones he’d shoved me down a few months later. The wallpaper in the restroom, covered in busty naked she-devils that always made me feel inadequate and self-conscious while I peed or puked after drinking too much on an empty stomach.
“Stop.” I snapped my fingers and blinked my eyes.