Lethal Treatment

by S A Gardner

  “You don’t know it’s no use….”

  Matt’s eyes gentled even as his tone hardened. “You do. You’ve known it all along.”

  He tugged the defibrillator. I let it go, sagged, inside and out.

  Yes. I’d known. I just had to do everything in my power before I let go. Before I added another defeat, another horror to my ledger. Another scar.

  And it was far from over.

  Twenty-Nine

  Stifling night and impaling cold ambushed me the minute I staggered out of the STS.

  I’d been in surgery for eighteen hours for two days straight. We’d saved eleven out of the fifteen casualties.

  But saved was a self-congratulatory and cruel word. Those kids would live with severe handicaps, when surviving here was barely possible for the able-bodied. I couldn’t imagine what their lives would be like. We might have consigned them to a worse hell by “saving them.” I no longer knew if we weren’t doing more harm than good. I no longer knew anything, or wanted to do anything.

  I just want to go home.

  Was it some sort of answer to my mental plea that Damian materialized beside me now?

  I had to be beyond finished, if I was equating Damian with home. When I had no home. As for Damian…

  He made me wish I had one.

  Okay. That was it. Hallucinations had set in.

  I was wishing I had a home? Complete with picket fence, two and a half kids and a cat/dog? With Damian in it?

  Yeah, sure. Individually, no one had less homelike potential than us. As for our combination…

  What more perfect combination is there?

  Nuts. I was going nuts. Going to pieces. I could actually feel stuff crumbling inside my skull, my soul.

  I didn’t do crumbling, didn’t go to pieces. Sleep. All I needed was to sleep… With Damian…

  Damn this. Damn this whole vile, ugly, horrific world.

  And most especially, damn him.

  Why was he hovering over me? Another show for the patrols? They’d been coming earlier, staying longer. Watching us struggling with the macabre fallout of their implanted evil.

  So what was he doing? Playing the considerate boyfriend for our monstrous audience?

  I didn’t take my eyes off the ground. Didn’t want to see them. Or Damian’s eyes as his hand glided up my arm, sinking soothing talons into my rawness. Then his arm was around my shoulders, snaring me into his body’s protection, stripping my last remaining tatters of armor.

  I twisted, pushed against him. “Go away.”

  “No.”

  Just no? Oh, there was nothing just about it. What he did to me, when he didn’t even try.

  There was only one way to make him leave me alone. To make the pain subside, the suffering stop.

  I punched him.

  Not a good idea, punching the man of steel in his abs. A surprised intake of breath was my only effect. Then I made the mistake of looking him in the eye, saw his resolve hardening.

  Sorry, not playing.

  His balls. Be predictable. As he said you are.

  I went for them. His sidestep was that of a seasoned matador evading a bull on its last breaths. My unexpended momentum made me stumble. I would have fallen flat on the gritty ground if he hadn’t caught me. Then he had me in his favorite grip where I was concerned, my back to his front. An inescapable clutch. And the gentlest damned embrace.

  His whisper poured straight into my quivering brain, overflowed in my splintering heart. “You did all you could. You lavished your genius and dedication on them. They died in the hands of someone who fought for them to the end, who valued and honored them.”

  “What about those who lived?” I whimpered. “Those I consigned to unimaginable suffering by saving?”

  “You could do nothing else. And even if it won’t be soon, one day they’ll be thankful for the second chance you’ve given them.”

  Tears burst out of me under pressure. An image of a cartoon character with tears arcing out filled my head.

  I giggled. Sobbed. “Oh, God, Damian, have mercy. I can’t deal with solace right now. Not from you.”

  He crisscrossed his arms against my body, squeezing beneath my breasts, in the exact place where the ache drilled.

  “Shut up, Calista.” His indulgence poured over me like hot caramel when I was freezing and hypoglycemic. “You need my comfort, so take it. You just dragged yourself through hell, and your soul is bleeding out of you.”

  “So you think I have any left? Or any to start with?”

  He pressed me harder, taking me from gravity’s hold into his. “You always had too much. That’s your danger, your curse. Your power. You’re overloaded with caring and compassion. Hell can’t rival your righteous wrath, and your passion—Dios, Calista, your passion…”

  It was that Dios. The testament to his profound turmoil, the only time his mother tongue bypassed his premeditated protocols. It snapped the last tendrils of my sanity.

  An explosive twist he’d taught me made him set me down. Then I pounced on him. Mouth and teeth and arms and legs, climbing him, biting his lips, bruising mine against his jaw and neck, clamping his head, his shoulders, his buttocks, with everything left in me, kneading, needing, now. Now.

  With the lethal rumble of a starving lion, he crushed me back, returned my onslaught, letting me fight him for equal frenzy.

  In breath-shearing silence, I tore at his hair, sank my teeth in any part of him I could. My blood hurtled like a train tearing off the rails as his response rammed into my demand, hit the perfect edge of violence I needed, that did our six years’ worth of pent-up denial justice. Our long-standing, white-hot war blazed out of control in a showdown for harder, deeper. All.

  “Damian—my tent…”

  “No—mine.” I bit into him harder, and he grunted, “Condoms.”

  The word sounded alien. I was that far gone. Then it made sense. And didn’t. Why did he have those on this mission?

  Next moment everything evaporated, leaving only relief. That he was ready, had remembered. I wouldn’t have.

  But he’d said condoms. In the plural. How many would we use? Before we came to our senses? Would we?

  It wouldn’t be now. I’d expire if I didn’t have him.

  Have him.

  I tried to dismount him so I could drag him and his large hands plastered me harder around him. The throbbing between my legs became pounding, rubbing against him almost driving me to orgasm with his every move. Shivering on the edge, I tightened around his waist, unable to stop undulating and tangling our tongues and breaths.

  His tent was the nearest to the STS. Another critical advantage. He tore the hinged door open and closed, growling something volcanic when I tried to make him take me down on the insulated floor, the steps to the airbed unendurable.

  “I’ll take you on the ground when it’s not craggy and I’d slam you right into your ER,” he grunted, his voice a starving predator’s as he spilled us on the mattress, twisting mid-fall to take me on top.

  My eyes fogged, my brain swelled, pushing against my skull. The ache between my legs, the emptiness spread, imploding me. I writhed over him, kicking out of my uniform’s pants as he heaved beneath me, reaching for his toolbox. His toolbox…

  A manic giggle gurgled in my throat as I launched at him, existence shrinking to one purpose. To free his erection, have it. Have it. Him. Inside me. Now. Now.

  His zipper snagged on the enormous obstacle pushing against it. An agonized chuckle reverberated in his chest, in my bones as his hands crushed mine, stopping my yanking.

  “Not in your best interest, causing me irrevocable damage now.”

  I pushed him on his back, let him free himself, get ready for me. So ready for me.

  The moment he slid the condom over that massive weapon he had for a cock, far more daunting and beautiful than my wildest fantasies of it, I swayed to my knees, then higher to scale his length.

  Trembling, my blood a roaring tide in my ears, I
opened myself over him, grabbed his hardness, felt the heated steel sear my palms. From a spiraling distance I heard his dark groan as I wrapped both hands around him, felt him shudder beneath me when I rammed his sheathed crown against my swollen, weeping entrance.

  It had been so damned barren. So tight and shriveled up. Never relieved or quenched. Because I’d never had him.

  I’d have him now.

  Have him.

  I bore down on him, using his burning girth to forge a path inside me, open my agonies, fill my void. Pain seared me. His passive invasion split me wide open, flesh and psyche. Beyond my capacity. My endurance.

  “Damian.”

  The scream scorched me on its way out. Everything collapsed inside me, around him. Everything I was. Everything I’d committed. All I felt and feared and wanted. My insides compacted around him to a pinpoint of monstrous gravity. Exquisite. Excruciating. Had to find an outlet, an escape…

  Sobbing, desperate, I rose. Crashed back on him. My melting, shattering flesh engulfed him whole this time. Felt like a comet crashed in my core. Detonated. Released all agony in an agony of release. Squeezing all of me around all of him. Wringing me dry of sensation, of essence.

  I think I ceased to exist.

  Thirty

  I’d only been asleep, I realized.

  Okay. I’d been knocked out cold. More like comatose.

  Interesting part here was my bed. Damian. Sprawled under me, massive enough to sleep on comfortably. Luxuriously even. How could anything be so tough and unyielding, and soft and resilient at the same time?

  And if I needed confirmation of my memories of ravishing him, he was still inside me. Still hard, filling me to an edge that sliced into discomfort, hovered on delirium. An acute amalgam of pleasure and pain.

  His large hands were containing me by a loose grip on my buttock and head. As my pulse picked up from its stupor, they started to caress up and down my numb, hypersensitive body. My heart started to ram against his chest. His hands met over the point on my back where it hammered, pressing down, as if to subdue it into calmness again.

  His movements were soothing, but my body only cared that with my every quickening breath, he was getting larger and harder inside me.

  “Settle down.” His hypnotic baritone reverberated in the perfect acoustic resonance of his chest under my ear. “It’s only been two hours. Go back to sleep. I’m here.”

  So I’d gotten my two hours. And he was still comforting me. This had all been a Comfort Calista campaign, it seemed. I should be grateful. I was. How I was. But I was also ashamed as hell.

  As the woman who had something for every contingency, some comeback at every occasion, I had nothing now. Waking up with Damian still inside me, cosseting me even after I’d used him to get off, was one situation my most outrageous fantasies of him hadn’t been able to conjure.

  “No can do. Once I’m awake, that’s it.”

  The sound of my voice startled me. I didn’t sound as devastated as I felt. Only matter-of-fact. Almost light. As if my world hadn’t spun out of orbit.

  His hands resumed sweeping havoc over me. “As long as you’ve rested, it’s all good.”

  “Oh, it certainly was. For me. For you, I doubt it.”

  Needing to set this right, I raised a head that weighed half a ton, squinted down at him, struggling to adjust to the light of the dual-fuel lantern set on minimum. My heart flailed harder at the sight he made spread beneath me. If I’d woken up to find myself split open over a god, the view wouldn’t have looked half as incredible.

  Unable to support my head a second longer, I let it flop down, impacted his chest cheek first. It was beyond me not to rub my face all the way up into his hot neck, to catch his scent and trap it into my lungs as if it was as necessary as oxygen.

  “Sorry for the premature orgasm.”

  Okay, so this wasn’t how I intended to apologize for riding him like a dildo. But my synapses weren’t connecting yet.

  It didn’t seem he took exception to my lack of finesse, then or now, as he continued to stroke his rough hands over every inch of my tingling flesh, through my loose hair…

  Hey, when did I get completely naked? When did my braid come undone?

  My questions and realizations dissipated when he said a simple, “You needed it.”

  Everything squeezed inside me, and around him, in confirmation and gratitude.

  I had needed it. Still needed it. Him. Us.

  As if he heard my clamoring, his hands settled on my buttocks beneath the heavy thermal covers that must have materialized sometime during my coma, spreading me wider, drove up into me fuller. I gasped, every nerve slackening under the onslaught of pleasure.

  I’d never known anything could feel so good. Didn’t think my body came equipped to feel anything this incredible.

  His lips moved against my feverish forehead. “But you don’t need to worry about the level of my satisfaction in this momentous incident. I have proof it was ‘all good’ for me, too.”

  This made me raise my head. “What proof?”

  Those chiseled lips twisted in that way that made me want to sit on him and chew and suck on them for hours. “Are you still talking in your sleep, Calista?”

  So I’d talked while I was asleep? What had I said? But why was he saying that now that…?

  Oh. Oh. Proof. Okay. Got it. Good to hear. Great. Phew.

  Not that it made what I’d done to him okay. Just better than the alternative.

  But there was no doubt here. He was inviting me to lighten the mood. I grabbed at his offer.

  “So you enjoy it rough, huh?”

  “Seems so.” A full smile spread his lips, amused and scalding at once. “Never tested it before. No woman has ever pushed me down, had her way with me then collapsed on top of me without as much as a ‘thank you, sir.’”

  I chuckled. Who would have thought? Damian taking it so lightly that I’d used him as an outlet. But then I realized now that he had offered himself for me to do with as I pleased, for my relief. It took someone supremely confident in his sexuality to have a sense of humor about it, to not worry about his perceived…position in any given encounter.

  And Damian was sexual supremacy incarnate.

  But though he was innately superior and phenomenally…equipped, that level of assurance must have been developed as his other ultra-human skills had been. Through extensive training and application. Wondered how many women, how often…

  No. Stop. None of your business. Outside this tent, these hours, you don’t get to even think what he does with his body. Or the rest of his life. If you want to maintain your sanity. Such as it is.

  Struggling to adopt his teasing attitude, I let the curtain of my hair fall over him. “Not that my lack of proper gratitude put you out or anything, huh?”

  “It sure didn’t.” Smugness purred out of him on a frequency that lodged right in my sex. He wrapped a swathe of my hair around his hand, rubbed his face into it. What was he sniffing so appreciatively? I hadn’t showered since yesterday, and it must stink. His groan was clearly one of enjoyment as he gave it a tug, his expression tightening, smoldering.

  “Just seeing you losing all inhibition as you came, hearing your abandon, those desperate soft screams and all those other mind-messing sounds you made, feeling your orgasm wrenching my cock, drenching it in your hot pleasure as you exploded around me—I almost blew an artery.”

  I almost did, too, just hearing him describing it.

  Groping for lightness, I unwound my hair lock from his hand, teased his arrogant nose with its tips. “Good thing your safety valve worked. I’m so not having you as an emergency. In fact, I forbid you to ever need my medical intervention ever again.”

  Before I kicked myself for bringing up the time when he’d needed it, he stunned me all over again, pledging to do his best. Not only without a trace of his usual angst, but he actually laughed. God, his laugh. I never thought he could sound that relaxed, that carefree. It had to be
the best sound in existence, drenching me in relief and joy.

  Uh—relief was obvious, but joy?

  But why not? This was all surreal, after all. Me and Damian, indulging in lighthearted pillow talk, bodies still joined in the ultimate intimacy. Maybe about to have sex again.

  No. No maybes about it. We’d have sex again. We’d have sex for real. That clumsy, self-absorbed prelude didn’t count. But if it was anything to go by, I couldn’t even imagine sex for real with him. If he’d devastated me just lying there and letting me take him, when he really gave it to me, all that power and hunger and dominance, I might not even survive.

  And it would be a hell of a way to go. Death by Damian would be my method of expiration of choice.

  But he wasn’t making a move to decimate me yet. Maybe he didn’t think I was ready for it, for him. Time to disabuse him of any gentlemanly considerations.

  Tightening my weeping core around him, I rubbed my stinging breasts over him, and met only clothes. Apart from his open fly, he was still fully dressed. An emergency if I ever heard of one.

  In my urgency to be rid of our last barrier, I spilled off him. And regretted it. His thickness wrenched out of me, had a bolt burning through my swollen inner flesh. His growl and bared teeth said I’d hurt him as much.

  Boy, was I ever terrible at this. Added to the penchant he said I had for targeting his groin with incapacitation efforts, there’d been the zipper close call, treating him like a sex toy and now this. The man would only be self-preserving if he got up and never let me near him again.

  Not that he seemed in any hurry to escape, or even any less aroused. If I’d caused him pain, shouldn’t his erection deflate? Even a little?

  Maybe he did like it rough. Only from me? Like I’d take anything, only from him?

  Sure hoped so. Now wasn’t the time to learn sexual finesse. Even if I tried, it was proving impossible to temper my greed for him.