by Jackson, Meg
And it did.
It was only when she saw it, when she knew he wasn’t yet dead, that Honey let herself collapse. And it was only for a moment; hands digging into her pocket, she pulled out her phone.
“Endo, I need you and anyone you can gather, right fucking now, and get that fucking doctor out of bed, we got a real fucked situation here…”
End of Part 3.
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Epilogue
His hands? Whose hands? They were pulling, my hair, or everything, pulling me apart like… and then the cage – not the cage again, I couldn’t take the cage, not another second, oh God, not the cage, please, please, not the cage, I was screaming but it didn’t matter, they were just laughing – laughing at me, at my pain, I couldn’t breathe, and they were laughing so hard…
I woke with a gasp. The nightmares – they were persistent, to say the least. Beside me, Reign stirred, rose onto his elbows, reached over and brushed the hair from my sweating brow.
“Baby,” he murmured, half-sleeping, rolling over to face me.
“It was just…” I started to say, closing my eyes as the terror wilted inside me.
“I know what it was,” he said, and his mouth closed over mine, his hand falling to my mound, parting the lips gently and stroking my clit. I moaned into his lips; he knew this was the one thing that could calm me down, get me back to sleep after one of my nightmares.
And boy, was he ever happy to oblige.
His finger dipped lower, my pussy immediately awakening at his touch. He moaned his own appreciation at my wetness; the dream still had my heart racing, but now it raced from pleasure, as well. Pulling his mouth away from mine, my head dropped back onto the pillow.
His mouth travelled down the length of me, my body naked, nerves sparking with each kiss he planted on my breasts and stomach. My body shuddered, thighs parting for him as his head disappeared under the light sheet.
I felt his fingers move from my clit, down to my open slit, pressing inside me just as his tongue darted out to lick my swollen nub. The adrenaline from the nightmare carried over into real life, made his tongue on my clit feel that much better, my flesh crawling with sensitivity, with pleasure, as he lapped at me.
His fingers inside me pulsed, probed, seeking that place inside me as his tongue circled my clit, then flicked over it. His lips closed them, sucking it between his teeth, my body responding immediately, hips thrusting upward.
“Reign,” I whimpered as his fingers plunged downward, finding their target and pressing hard, a dam breaking in my pussy as his tongue enveloped my clit in a warm bathe of ecstasy. He knew everything that made me squirm, could make me come in seconds, but he would always draw it out, keep me on the edge, perched on a cliff of pleasure, begging to be released.
He liked me to beg.
Now, he kept his fingers pressed lightly against that sacred spot inside me as his tongue circled my clit, over and over again. My hands found his hair, fingers digging in to his scalp, pressing him forward, needing him to give me the satisfaction I knew was waiting for me.
“Please, Reign,” I begged, pleading into the pillow, my thighs shaking as they clenched around his head. He pressed harder with his fingers inside me, taking my clit between his teeth once more, only just slightly grazing it, and with a cry in the night I came, rolling waves of bliss washing over my addled mind, calming me even as it brought my soul back to life.
This is real, I thought, this is real, nightmares are not, this is real.
I panted, still shuddering, as I came down from my climax. I let my thighs fall to the side, releasing Reign’s head. He licked tenderly at my juices, his tongue lapping up from my slit, before crawling up to lay beside me.
“Baby,” I moaned, grabbing him tight to me. “Do you…?”
“Mm-mm,” he said, and I knew that he’d already fallen asleep again. I smiled, nuzzling my head into his chest, eyes closing, the last wisps of horror from the dream blowing away like strands of a spider’s web. I could sleep again, now.
They didn’t happen every night, the dreams. A few times a week. They were horrible, they felt like they ripped me to shreds each time. But I’d wake up, and Reign would wake up, too, as though he could sense my dreams. Lord knows little else wakes him up. He can sleep through an earthquake. But when I jolt out of a nightmare, shaking and sweating, he’s up in seconds, and pressing me back down to the bed, touching me in every perfect place, washing away the dream with pleasure I could never have imagined before I met him.
I wondered, as I listened to his heartbeat, felt the rise and fall of his chest, when they would end for good. When would I be free of the terrors? It had been a year already…
It had taken long enough to quit jumping at the sight of my own shadow. Hell, it had taken long enough to find the courage to leave Reign’s apartment. It wasn’t just the aftershock of being beaten and captured. Jeremy was dead, the man was dead, and both their bodies had been disposed of somewhere in the desert – where and how was never disclosed to me. Not that I really wanted to know.
So if I wasn’t messed up enough from my personal ordeal, I was in a constant panic about someone coming to look for Jeremy, or for coming to finish that man’s dirty business. But months had helped to heal that wound: when half a year had gone by with no queries into my ex-husband’s whereabouts, I finally had to calm down and realize that I might actually be free. Free from him, free from worry, free.
My hand found the scar on Reign’s torso. I traced it with my index finger, thanking God for the millionth time that he was still alive. My man, I thought, and the words were like a lullaby. I let my mind drift, holding him tight, willing him to be safe for the rest of our days. I had come so close to losing him once…
He snored softly. The sound was music to my ears. You should be freaking out about your paper, my mind told me, wanting to occupy itself with something other than my worries about Reign’s safety and my desire to be rid of the nightmares.
I should have been worrying about my paper, after all. After enrolling in an online Master’s program, I’d found myself happily absorbed in the old routine, the old comforting feeling of research and reading. It had been Honey’s suggestion, actually, and it had been the best thing anyone could have suggested. I nuzzled closer to Reign, re-thinking the premise of my paper, letting the thoughts swirl and collide in my brain, percolating the ideas that would emerge fully-formed once I started writing.
But my mind kept drifting back to him, as always. His chest under my cheek rose and fell, rose and fell. The wind shifted outside, blew in through the open window, the desert winter still warm.
Beyond the window, I knew without looking, you could see the jagged mountains in the distance, the Rockies that I’d driven down so many months ago with nothing but the clothes on my back and a bag full of cash. They were constant, the landscape never shifting, a reminder of where I’d come from, how different everything was now. I loved them for that. But I preferred the landscape of Reign’s muscled chest, the slope of his chin, the peaks of his ears, the river of his hair. He was my mountain. He was my home. And I wasn’t goin’ nowhere.
THE END
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- Meg Jackson
Rough Love
~ 1 ~
The last thing I remember before my life ended is smiling. That sounds like a nice last memory to have, but you don’
t know me – or at least, you didn’t know me then. When I smiled back then it was for one of two reasons: I had bought something shiny and new, or I had done something bad to annoy my father.
I was not a nice person back then. I guess I’m still not a very nice person. I don’t know if everyone has it in them to be a nice person; I just know that it’s never worked out for me. For me, being bad has worked wonders. For me, being bad comes natural.
Of course, there are degrees of being bad. There’s the sort of bad that comes from genuinely wanting to do harm to others; I’m not that kind of bad. I just like to get what I want; that’s what I’m used to, and that’s what I expect. Or, at least, that’s what I used to expect.
That’s why I remember smiling: it’d been a great day. Not only had I scored some new Prada shoes, I’d also managed to piss of my dad by shopping at Saks, which was a client of one of his biggest competitors.
My dad runs one of the most exclusive and successful marketing agencies in the United States; he’s got Bloomies, Nordstrom, Benneton, Harry Winston, Tiffany’s. Most of the big names on Fifth Avenue are under contract with Pop’s agency.
But Saks is contracted to Dad’s rival agency, and he’s told me time and again that he doesn’t want me using his money to support the competition. So, of course, I shop there whenever I can. Because he gets the credit card statement at the end of the month, and because I know that he’d never cut me off, no matter how much I push his buttons. He may want to, but he doesn’t have the heart to. He’s not that kind of guy.
No, he’s the kind of guy who’ll do everything else he can imagine to make your life miserable: ruining relationships, squashing hopes and dreams, all with a smile on his face. The backhanded compliment is his forte. The pat on the head that says “I know you can’t do anything productive, I know you can’t survive on your own, I know you need me” is the most affection he can give. I guess he’s not a nice man, either.
So I do what I can to get back at him, in little ways. Looking back now, I can’t even consider myself being that bad – after all, the only thing I was doing was shopping for expensive crap and trying to make Dad angry. That’s like, the sort of “bad” that a teenage girl is. I wasn’t a slut, I didn’t party all the time, I never graced the pages of the tabloids with a martini in my hand, coke under my nose, and a new boy on my arm every week.
But Dad always made me feel like a bad girl. So that’s what I considered myself. Now, of course, I guess I’m more of what you expect from a bad girl. But how that all came to be starts on that day as I walked into my apartment, smiling as I locked the door behind me.
~ 2 ~
“Juliana,” I remember calling out as I entered the apartment, bags in hand. “Juliana, can you make me some coffee? Then come see what I scored at Saks…you’re gonna have a cow, I swear, you can even try them on!”
Juliana was my maid, but also my best friend. Really my only friend. You know the stereotype of the poor lonely rich girl? That was pretty much me. My only confidante was a woman I had to pay to keep around.
When I heard no response from Juliana, I called out her name once more. Turning around to face my apartment, I remember my heart stopping. The coffee table in the living room was overturned; the couch cushions were on the floor, and a broken vase was leaking water all over the carpet. For some reason, I remember thinking the water will ruin the rug. Pretty shallow, right? But that was the first thing that popped into my head. I don’t know why, but it was.
The next thing I thought was HOLY CRAP I GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE. Obviously, something was wrong. I grabbed the door handle behind me, but before I could make my getaway, I had another thought: Juliana. My heart pounded as I realized that she would have been home when all this happened, that if there was a struggle, it was because someone hurt her.
I wanted to just leave; I wanted to just bolt out the door and down the hallway and call for help. But I couldn’t leave my only friend. Not if she was hurt somewhere in the apartment. I closed my eyes and prayed that it was a simply burglary, that whoever was in here was gone, and that Juliana was holed up in one of my many, sizable closets, intact and alive. Opening my eyes again, I took a deep breath and released my grip on the doorknob.
There wasn’t a sound in the apartment; no hint that anyone was in any of the rooms. Not a cough, not a whisper, not a breath. I started to pull my phone out, meaning to call the police while I searched for Juliana, but remembered that it had died while I was shopping. I have got to stop leaving the house without a full battery, I lamented before realizing just how serious the situation was.
If someone really was in the house…well, I didn’t want to think about it. For a moment, I considered leaving again, asking a neighbor to use their phone to call the police, but then I thought of poor Juliana again, scared and alone – or hurt. The thought made my heart ache, and I knew I couldn’t leave the apartment until I knew she was safe.
Thinking quickly, I opened and shut the door loudly. I’d already announced my presence, so if anyone was still in the apartment they already knew I was there. But I hoped that by making it sound like I’d seen the damage and left, it would conceal my presence. I kicked my shoes off quickly – if there was someone still around, the clack of stilettos across the hardwood floors would be a dead giveaway that I was still there.
I was only wearing a short, light dress because of the brutal Manhattan summer, and I felt exposed in my own apartment as I tiptoed towards the living room and hallway. At the living room, I tried not to look at the overturned furniture; I didn’t want to see if there was blood anywhere. I couldn’t bear it.
I looked down the hallway; there were four doors, two on each side. One side had a closet and my bathroom. The other had my room and Juliana’s room. The kitchen was at my back as I stared down the hallway; the kitchen was small, so one glance had told me that there wasn’t anyone there. Gathering up every ounce of courage in my body, I began to walk down the hallway. I strained my ears, listening for any sign of life. Pure silence. The first door I came to was the closet; I grabbed the handle and didn’t even give myself time to count to three before yanking it open.
Empty. Except for mounds of shoes and piles of expensive clothes, nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief, even though my heart was still pounding out of my chest. I turned around to face the door to Juliana’s room. I always told her to keep it locked because it was her room, not mine, and even though it was my apartment, I wanted her to feel like she had a private space. I prayed that it was still locked. Reaching out for the handle, I closed my eyes and turned.
Locked. My heart skipped a beat and I started to feel safer; two down, two to go. I hesitated, not sure whether to try the bathroom or my room first. The momentary hesitation allowed all my fear to flow back into me and I stalled from panic.
Sure, the first two were clear, but if I was a murderous lunatic I’d probably hide in the main bedroom, or the bathroom. If Juliana’s door was locked I wouldn’t be able to get in, and what sort of hiding place is a closet you can’t even stand in comfortably because it’s full of shoes?
I knew I couldn’t just stand in the hallway forever, that I had to either leave or try the last two doors. I didn’t give myself time to consider anymore and lunged for the bathroom door, throwing it open. I stifled a gasp as I looked inside. The shower curtain was shaking slightly and I could see bright red streaks on it. My heart pounded through my chest as I stared at the red marks.
This can’t be happening, God no, this can’t happen to me, oh God Juliana, I have to get out, I have to call the cops, thoughts raced through my head like brutal gusts of wind. I stepped back slightly, then thought about Juliana, scared and alone in the shower, hearing me but unable to speak, bound and gagged, knowing that I’d left her.
I suddenly wished I’d thought to grab a knife from the kitchen. I berated myself for my stupidity and looked around the bathroom for some sort of weapon. The only thing I could find was a plunger. I picked it up and held i
t tightly, feeling the rough wood handle in my palms; it wasn’t much of a weapon, but it made me feel better anyway. I tiptoed towards the quivering curtain. As I got closer, I heard sniffling noises and knew that Juliana had to be in the tub.
“Juliana?” I whispered, approaching the curtain and reaching out with one hand.
“Mmmhm unhhmmm!” was the response, and the distress I could hear in the muffled voice was like a shot of bravery. I threw back the curtain; Juliana was tied up and gagged, a cut bleeding profusely on her forehead. Her eyes shook with fear as she looked up at me. I bent down and undid the gag quickly.
“Juliana, what happened?! Did someone break in?” Even as I spoke I saw Juliana’s eyes fill with terror, fixed just above my head, behind me. I didn’t even have time to turn around. I didn’t even feel the blow to my head. I fell over onto my side as the world began to spin and blur. From somewhere far, far away I could hear Juliana screaming.