by R. J. Lewis
Although, not really.
I didn’t want to die at all.
But my cheeks were flaming red.
This wasn’t how our dynamic was supposed to play out. I shouldn’t be feeling embarrassed under the blankets like this. I should be withdrawn and apathetic and waiting for him to decide what he wanted to do with me.
None of those documentaries touched upon these sorts of moments. Moments when you caught your captor in the nude and ogled him shamelessly.
“Your turn,” he said, breaking the silence. “Get up.”
With my heart in my throat, I stiffly removed the blanket and slowly slid out of bed. I couldn’t meet his eye as I stood up and made my way over to the tub. From my peripheral, I noticed he’d thrown his pants back on, but the zipper was undone the whole way, and he wasn’t wearing any briefs. He remained shirtless; the water continued falling from his hair, sliding down his shoulders and giant arms.
“I’m going to drain it out,” he told me. “It’ll be a while to fill it. I’ve melted enough snow, we just have to reheat it. You can wash your clothes in the sink up here. There’s a pot inside it with some soapy water.”
I nodded when he finished. He threw some large pots over the stove top to heat, and I sort of appreciated I didn’t have to do that. I felt so weak and tired. I just stood there the entire time, making him do the work.
He’d used the hose to drain the tub. Then he began to fill it with water. I waited patiently until it was halfway full. I felt awkward, unsure if he expected me to take my clothes off in front of him.
Thankfully, he barely glanced in my direction and strode to the tiny table with four chairs. He took a seat on the chair with his back to me and began sharpening his knife against the stone again.
I quickly undressed. My fingers trembled from exhaustion, but I didn’t care how badly I needed food, water and sleep. I needed the heat of the water more than all of that combined.
The clothes were in a pile on the floor when I slowly stepped into the tub. The heat was so amazing, I could have cried. I slowly sank into the tub, feeling the kinks in my muscles loosen. The water wasn’t going to be hot for long, so I quickly dunked my head in and soaked my hair. I swirled the bar of soap in my hand until it foamed and used that to wash my hair. I wasn’t going to complain that it was scentless. I wasn’t going to complain that it didn’t help separate the knots in my hair. I didn’t give a single fuck. I just wanted to be clean. Wanted to feel the horrors I’d witnessed wash away.
Funny what a simple bathing could do to your soul.
I felt more put together. The weight of depression eased as I watched the dirt leave my skin.
I didn’t take long. When I finished, I glanced around the room, looking for the nearest unused blanket. I had to step out of the tub to get to it. I looked warily in Nixon’s direction. He was still seated, back still turned to me, sharpening that knife without a break in between.
I got out of the tub and raced to the blanket. I wrapped it around myself quickly and took my pile of clothes to the sink. I had to use one hand to scrub my clothes otherwise the blanket would fall from me. I half-assed it and then hung my bra and panties next to the heat of the fire. I was lazier with my skirt and sweater; they were in a shitty pile beside the stove.
I returned to my bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. I kept the blanket tight around me as I glimpsed periodically at Nixon. His face was visible to me from where I sat. His face was flat, expressionless, his concentration enveloped solely on the knife and sharpening stone in his hand.
It didn’t seem like he gave a single fuck I’d bathed feet from him, or that I was naked and wet, hidden only beneath a thin layer of wet blanket, on the bed in direct view of him.
I may as well have been invisible.
Nixon…
She was wet, naked, her body hidden beneath the thinnest layer of blanket to ever grace this fucking earth.
Nixon tightened his jaw as he swiped the blade back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
She’d been staring at him when he’d bathed.
She’d stared at his naked body.
She’d stared at his cock for the longest fucking time.
This wasn’t normal captive behaviour.
Yet, when he glimpsed at her from time to time, he’d seen the way her shoulders tightened. The fear returned to her eyes.
She was terrified.
So, if she was so fucking terrified of him, why did she keep staring at him? Why did her eyes follow his every move and journey down his body without any effort to be discreet about it?
This shit was mind-fuckery to the extreme. Nixon couldn’t play into it. He couldn’t pay it any attention. He just needed to make it through the week ignoring that maddening impulse he felt for the girl.
He could do that.
Maybe.
He wasn’t entirely sure, if he were being honest with himself.
He’d savagely killed the crew because they wanted to touch her, and god-fucking-dammit, he was adamant they had no right.
But now that he was alone with her, now she was so close to him, so accessible, he felt wrought with the same urges they had.
Only…he felt like he had every right to it.
Which was ludicrous.
Right?
It was ludicrous?
Why didn’t his body feel that way, then?
Why didn’t his own brain condemn him for his hypocrisy?
Where was his self-fucking-control?
When he was sure his cock wasn’t bursting at the seams, he got up and made food. The girl was starving. He’d heard her stomach growling. She was just too scared to move, to capture his attention. She didn’t know what he was going to do with her.
Frankly, he didn’t know, either.
He boiled a food pouch and made her some tea. He set it on the table, and when she saw that he had made his own pouch and tea, she connected the dots and took a seat at the table, that thin as fuck blanket still wrapped around her.
She was so fucking tempting, it was madness.
They didn’t speak while they ate. She didn’t look like she had the ability to. She was ravenous, all etiquette from before completely gone as she shoved giant mouthfuls of beef and rice into her mouth. Nixon kept his gaze fixed to his pouch, but he caught the way her blanket slipped. He knew her tits were kind of visible, and suddenly, the rice tasted rancid.
This was hell, wasn’t it?
To want something so fucking badly and not be able to have it.
To feel the urges all the way to the tips of his fingers.
This fucking tempting beauty, with her brown fucking eyes, with her visible tits, with that sad excuse of a blanket…
His appetite disappeared.
His cock stiffened in his pants again, and he felt angry at himself.
This reaction was elementary school shit. He should not have been so effected.
But he was.
He had never wanted a girl so bad in his life. He had never looked at one and gone made with need.
Not like this.
Never like this.
To have shed so much blood – to have murdered men in cold blood – all because on some base level, at the core of him, he felt…
Oh, fuck…
He felt she was his.
What a horrifyingly fucked up admission.
It didn’t come as an unsteady thought like before.
He was resolute about it.
He threw the pouch down on the table and bolted out of the cabin, dragging a hand through his hair, gripping it so tight, he wanted to rip the strands to dispel the aching he felt in his balls. When that didn’t work, he scooped a handful of snow from the ground and rubbed it on his heated face.
He needed to be sensible.
He couldn’t have the girl. His world demanded she be erased. She was against the fucking rules. No one would allow this. Not even Hobbs would protect him.
He fucking loathed complications.
*
He had made sure to stay outdoors for several hours in the cold. He simply didn’t trust himself.
He might touch her.
Truly.
It was a harsh truth.
Leona would be disgusted by him.
He sat with his back against the cabin, watching the snow fall around him, trying to talk sense.
“If I could make this feeling go away, I would,” he whispered aloud, like he was talking to her. “Leona, I would. I’m not that far fucked, angel.”
He wasn’t.
Right?
But that wasn’t true, was it?
It would have been so much easier to have been the bystander. To have let the men do as they pleased. He wouldn’t have witnessed it. Really, he could have walked away telling himself that they had outnumbered him, that he had been powerless, that they could do such an abominable act to an innocent girl was completely of their own volition. He would have been able to go on with his life and be untouched by the dirtiness of it.
“Maybe I could have done that once,” he murmured, numbly. “I might have walked away.”
He might have, true.
Maybe a few years ago, when he was desperate to prove himself. Now that guy, though, he wouldn’t have been able to have cleansed an entire crew. That Nixon was weaker, not yet hardened or skilled enough to outsmart others.
Now, though, now it meant nothing to kill.
He’d thought he was all the way gone. Too far gone to feel any bearing on right and wrong. Even when Leona was alive, his feelings weren’t as intense.
“Victoria,” he whispered.
Fuck, the name alone made him go mad with lust.
This wasn’t normal.
This was something else entirely.
This was a girl he hardly knew that had anchored him back down to the real world after being detached from it for so long. He felt so utterly human, so utterly weak, and what disturbed him the most about that was he liked feeling that way. He liked knowing he might still have something to lose.
Nixon was certain he’d never come across the chance at redemption again if he were to let her go.
The act of saving her from the men wasn’t going to outweigh the act of taking her for himself, but he reasoned that if she were to be let go, she would be dead regardless.
His world was filled with people that would not allow her to exist past this point.
It was a problem he would have to sort out when the time came.
He got up just as the sky began to darken. He returned to the cabin, aware as ever that he might have spent too long overthinking it. He might see her and the urge might be gone entirely.
When he stepped into the cabin, he found her asleep on the bed, wrapped tightly in that blanket. He didn’t come too close, but he watched her from across the room, unable to shake the feeling she was meant to be here.
She was meant to be his.
38.
Victoria…
I couldn’t believe I was feeling this, but the silence was maddening. It was a different sort of torture.
For two whole days, there had been literally no interaction. We’d sort of fallen into the habit of communicating with little gestures. Like, if it was bath time? A gesture with your chin in the direction of the tub. If it was food time, Nixon placed my plate and drink on the table and took a seat across from me with his own plate and drink.
He didn’t even look at me.
I was non-existent.
If I happened to get too close, his nose would flare. Other times, he’d randomly storm out of the room like I’d done something to piss him off.
At this rate, I was certain I would be dead in a ditch by the end of this. I was not winning him over. I had silently accepted this too, because trying to win him over required the balls to break the silence between us, and I didn’t have it in me to do that. I was aware of what he was capable of.
What if I pissed him off enough he’d gut me with the knife he’d been sharpening?
And on that note, he was always sharpening his knife, and it made me shiver at times because he’d sharpened that fucking thing right before he killed Roz and Beckett.
Was this some ominous foreshadowing?
Mentally, my brain had exited the building when it came to confronting I might die at the end of this. Honestly, my body had gotten sick and tired of being afraid. It just went sort of numb, like, “hey, if you’re gonna die, we’ll get scared again when we finally cross that bridge, Victoria.”
Living in fear every second of every minute was so exhausting. I was just going through the motions now. Enduring the long ass days with this tense fucking silence felt like my soul was being grated slowly.
I’d just brushed my teeth and bathed for the third day in a row. I didn’t feel uncomfortable stepping out of the tub because Nixon kept his back to me every time I bathed. I wrapped myself up in the blanket and returned to my bed with my bra and panties. My shoddy job of drying my skirt and sweater had been unsuccessful. They ended up smelling from sitting in a pile, and now I preferred to just hide under the blanket.
Just as I went to slide my panties up my legs, Nixon abruptly stood up and began undressing for a bath. I immediately hid under the blanket and threw it over my head. He didn’t even drain the water. He just stepped into the tub with the water I’d used and scrubbed.
His movements were louder than usual.
I formed a little hole in my blanket and peeked at him. He was on his knees in the tub, going over his body so hard, his skin was red. His face was tense, his expression angry as he dragged the sponge over every bit of him.
I should have been wary that he was angry, but my attention was drawn to his body and the way it flexed with his movements. I was entranced by it, had come to know every inch of his body by being the peeping tom that I was.
Plain and simple, he was fucking delightful to look at.
He was losing a bit of weight. His muscles looked more distinct. He’d do a million push ups before bed, so his arms were still bulging. He seemed to try to work himself to the bone until he was so tired, he’d fall into the other bed and pass out within minutes.
When he finished, he stepped out of the tub and didn’t bother drying himself off. He paced the room, dragging a frustrated hand over his head. I noticed his dick was harder than I’d ever seen it before. It felt wrong to be looking at it so much.
It was especially wrong for the jolt I felt in my body in response.
Jesus, I was riled up, dizzy with the shot of lust I got every time I saw him like this.
I covered my face again and shut my eyes, breathing deeply. It was fucked up to feel turned on. It was fucking weird to be capable of that after everything. I felt ashamed of myself. I admonished my body. I loathed how wet I felt between my legs. I almost cried because of how helpless it made me feel.
It didn’t help I couldn’t keep my eyes off the guy.
It didn’t help I couldn’t seem to stop myself from keeping my eyes off the guy.
It also didn’t help the silence between us was torture. Every time he spoke in that deep voice, it stirred something unfathomable in my chest.
While I knew fear was the right and most appropriate response for me, I also felt warmth when I reflected on how he’d saved me.
Time and time again.
From Beckett.
From Mills.
From Roz and Tucker’s sick intentions.
It was possible Nixon had his own agenda. He could have done it for reasons that were selfish. But he hadn’t raped me. He hadn’t touched me. He hadn’t even looked at me.
Which meant…
He didn’t have to save me from any of them.
Maybe, on some base level, my brain had rationalized that, and my body responded with some false sense of safety.
Maybe, at the end of the fucking day, he was all man and I was all woman, and we
were stuck in a cabin, nude half the time, bathing half the time, filled with a silence that I sensed he might have wanted to break too.
It was quiet for a while now. I slowly removed the blanket from my head and found Nixon seated on the wooden chair. My heart sped in my chest because he was still naked and wet. The chair had been placed facing my bed, and he was sitting there, staring back at me.
What the fuck?
I blinked, shocked.
I blinked again, burning inside.
This was the most attention he’d given me in days. I didn’t know how to react. I lay tense and unmoving, looking back at him, noticing how heavy his gaze was.
I knew a look like that.
Had seen it in the others.
My breathing slowed. I should have felt panicked, but I was too stunned by his attention. My body hadn’t caught up yet.
He was holding his knife and stone, but he wasn’t sharpening it. As I looked him over rapidly, I noticed his dick was still hard and visible to me now. I squirmed; my cheeks heated at the gush of wetness I felt pooling between my legs.
I swallowed and looked back at him. I swear he knew what I was feeling. I was sure of it. His eyelids drooped lower as he watched me. His expression morphed. He appeared self-assured, a quiet sort of confidence in him now as he said curiously, “Has anyone ever sucked your cunt, Victoria?”
I was shocked.
Mortified.
Gob smacked that he could say that to me after days of zero interaction.
Well, I made sure to look that way. It was the appropriate response. To hang my mouth open in dismay. To frown and look disgusted.
Yet my body was as hot as the fire.
“I can’t stop wondering what you taste like,” he whispered, thoughtfully, his gaze so intense, it left me breathless. “I’m curious if you’d let me near you. Would you, Victoria?”
He didn’t wait for my response. I watched him as he slowly set the knife and stone down on the table. He stared at them for a beat longer, a thousand thoughts blazing through his mind, before he redirected his focus to me.