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December 6 - December 9, 2023
“I lived eight years without that affection and I still think you’re the best.” Admitting that was so vulnerable, like laying down willingly on an autopsy slab and cutting open my own chest. Here, I wanted to say, look at the way my loneliness has corroded my internal organs.
How funny that I’d always considered myself a rebel, yet I obeyed Axe-Man without thought, even to my own detriment. It went beyond atonement for my sins to something deeper that lived in my blood and bones, in the hardwiring of my circuitry.
He rolled the tension from his shoulders, letting his hot palms slide down my arms to rest on my thighs. Each palm was nearly the width of the meatiest part of my leg, and I worked out. It always made my mouth dry to see the size difference between us. To know, now tangibly, how easy it would be for him to bend and shape me into position for his pleasure.
He was probably wondering what I’d steal from him next. Three years of his life. His art inked on my skin. Now, his face popularized in my seriously well-known graphic novel series.
It’s fuckin’ exhaustin’ tryin’ to stay mad at you.” “Even when I steal from you?” When he locked eyes with me, he was wearing that special smile he used to have just for me. A curling of his ruddy mouth, a softening around his eyes. Like something about me warmed him from the inside out. I hadn’t seen that expression in such a long time, it momentarily took my breath away. “Especially then.”
I guessed a little part of me had hoped Axe-Man might want to finish my canvas himself. But just because we’d been getting along better, just because we’d hate fucked twice, didn’t mean everything was forgiven. Of course, he wouldn’t want to put his own mark on my body. There was something utterly possessive about it, an act of ownership. And he didn’t want to own me. No matter how much I longed for it.
He shot me a dismissive glance and started the machine, pressing the buzzing gun to my skin. I hissed at the tenderness on the thin skin, at the new knowledge that it was Axe-Man tattooing me and not Nova. That it was Axe-Man who’d put the final finish on my canvas of his artwork. That I’d wear his art done by his hand for the rest of my life.
I bit my lip to stop the shudder that threatened to roll through me and then groaned a little when he palmed my opposite ass cheek and growled, “Be still, Mei.” “What are you doing?” I asked again, breathy with arousal. I could feel my pulse move between my thighs where it grew steadily stronger, a drumline of arousal beating through my core. “You don’t stay still, you won’t find out,” he warned in a harsh growl. Fuck, that was hot. Being pinned down by his big hands while he inked whatever he wanted into my skin. Like he owned me. Like I was his to do what he wanted with.
“Stay still while I fuck you,” he reprimanded when I automatically started gyrating on his hand. “Show me you can be a good girl.” I cursed as I pushed my ass back into him. “More, please.” “Greedy,” he accused, but he didn’t sound angry. He sounded pleased.
His grin was wicked when he tested them and realized I was pinned and at his mercy. “I’m gonna play with your sweet cunt for a while,” he told me, almost conversationally. “Work you open so you can take my cock. Then I’m gonna use you to make myself come and when I do it, I’m gonna blow just under this sweet new tatt I’ve given you.” “Yes,” I hissed. “I have an IUD, and I’m clean. I want to feel every inch of your naked cock filling me up.”
His groin was at my eye level as he slowly undid his belt, flicked open the button on his jeans, and slid down the zipper. I was panting by the time he peeled open the denim to reveal the thick length of his cock behind the black cotton. When he stepped forward to press himself to my face, I groaned as I breathed in his scent through the fabric and mouthed at the ridge of his dick. “As much as I’d like to come down your throat,” he told me as he pulled away and moved around behind me. “I need to feel your tight pussy around me.”
“Fuck, you’re a vision,” he praised as he got on the big chair and straddled my legs, sliding his naked dick between my wet thighs. “Better than any fantasy.”
“Love seein’ my ink on you,” he admitted on a groan as he tunneled in and out. “Love it way too fuckin’ much I got carried away puttin’ my mark on you.” “I want whatever mark you want to give me,” I confessed as I pushed back with every thrust, mindless enough with pleasure to be honest. “With your tattoo gun, your teeth, your tongue, your cock. I’ve always wanted to be your canvas.” “You’d even wear my cum with pride, wouldn’t you?”
The hot splash of his seed felt like a baptism, like acceptance after years of praying for absolution.
“My cum and ink look fuckin’ beautiful on you,” he told me, quiet and rough as gravel. There was a captivated quality to his tone that told me how genuine those words were. “You were just a girl before, and the moment you came to town and I saw you were a woman, you awoke this fuckin’ beast in me.”
“Don’t know what I’m doin’ with you,” he admitted, patting my cheeks until they jiggled. “But I can’t seem to fuckin’ stop. Lovin’ you feels like a curse, so why don’t I want it to end?”
The fact that he’d deigned to tattoo his art onto me himself spoke volumes. It made me…ache with hope. Stupid, wonderful, dangerous hope.
I didn’t beg him to kiss me because I’d had his cock in my mouth and my pussy but not the simple profound pleasure of his tongue in my mouth. I ached for it more than I’d ever ached for anything else.
I couldn’t deny even thinkin’ about my mark on her skin gave me some kinda primal satisfaction as she stood across the room from me. Settled somethin’ in me that’d been seethin’ for eight years.
Even though you could argue it was stupid to love her when it was so fuckin’ unlikely we’d ever find peace together, I was brave enough to try.”
“Sometimes, sayin’ somethin’s stupid is just a cowardly way outta takin’ a chance on bein’ brave.”
And when the door to the garage swung open, and Mei walked in as if she had a right to be involved in Fallen business ’cause it was my business and I was hers in a way I realized now I’d always be, it soothed the last of the violence inside me that had me frozen on the sidelines.
There was a Chinese concept of the red thread of fate, a string that connected souls that was unbreakable, one that could stretch through time and distance without falterin’. It was hard not to apply the theory to my relationship with Mei when I’d felt linked to her inextricably, undefinably for years, even after an eight-year separation. I’d never healed around the wound of her absence, I realized now that she was back in my life and lodged under my ribs like a second heart. I’d just learned to breathe through the pain. I hadn’t been in love with her before, but there’d been somethin’ there
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She looked like an angel of death, something dangerous and capable, someone whose very kiss might be lethal. And it was. Lethal to my willpower.
I wanted her to burn me down to ash and raise me up like a phoenix, reborn in the fires of her all-consumin’ love. It was reckless to be loved like that and love like that in return.
Only when she was thrashin’, a wild thing in my arms seekin’ more, did I drop carefully to my knees and lay her back on the drop-clothed floor, her hips still hooked over my lap. Arranged like that, black hair like the halo of a dark angel around her delicate face, I felt my heart come to a complete fuckin’ stop.
“Every inch of you is fuckin’ gorgeous. Inside. Out. Covered in paint. Covered in cum. Covered every day in my ink like a livin’ breathin’ fantasy. All of it, any which way, is mine. You get that, little dragon?”
Her breath hitched as she realized why I’d painted her all in red and white, makin’ her into the red dragon I’d once won for her at the Calgary fair, showin’ her what I’d seen beneath her skin all along. She was a dragon, fierce and beautiful, and I wanted every fuckin’ inch of her, even her sharp teeth and hooked claws.
“You’re mine,” I told her, and I wanted it to be an order, but somethin’ in me was howlin’ and roarin’ to hear her say it back. “Yours,” she agreed.
“You take my cock so fuckin’ well,” I praised her, watchin’ as the words made her shiver and drove her higher. “Always knew you were made to fight, but God, were you made to fuck, too.”
“There,” I proclaimed. “Now, every inch of you is mine.” “In case it wasn’t clear, I always was,” she said through a smile that was more at peace and lovelier than any expression I’d ever seen before on that exquisite face. “I’d be yours forever, if you asked. Even if you never do, I already am.”
I’d never felt so wholly possessed in my lifetime, so seen and desired. It was everything I’d ever wanted.
If I’d believed he ever could have fallen in love with me, maybe I would have told her. Maybe I would have fantasized about it. But already, this new reality felt too good to be true, more than I’d ever really hoped for. It felt like bad luck to be greedy for more when, for eight years, I’d believed I’d never have anything at all.
Besides, even though Axe-Man had said he’d forgiven me, even so far as to say there was nothing to forgive, I knew in my bones I’d never be worthy of his love that way. Both because I’d hurt him so badly before, and because he’d loved before, a woman much better than me, and I knew I could never replace her.
“It’s a tracker,” he explained, voice rough with emotion that also shone from his turquoise eyes. “Not losin’ you again.” Then ask me to stay, I wanted to say, ask me to be your Old Lady, and I won’t let anything in the world take me from your side again. But he didn’t ask, and I didn’t beg.
Maybe I was a different kind of girl, but knowing I had a predator dropping to his knees behind me, ready to turn that big body into a tool for my pleasure, was the headiest thing I’d ever experienced.
She was inside me now. Lodged under my rib cage, beatin’ like a second heart. Or maybe, she’d always been there, hidin’ in the dark recesses of my chest, waitin’ for me to recognize her for what she was and give her the light she needed to thrive within me.
Hope could be lethal in the wrong dosage, and I was dangerously close to my max consumption.
yours.”
“But all those mistakes were pieces in the puzzle that brought us here, to this moment, and there is nothin’ more beautiful to me than this. You and me. This love I got for you that fills my lungs like air, pumps my blood through my body like you own every beat of my heart.”
“Each piece of that torn paintin’ is a chapter in our lives that one or both of us fucked up ’cause of recklessness or pride or just bad fuckin’ timin’, but look how goddamn beautiful they are bound together by gold. By love.”
“We paid the price of this love, Rocky,” he murmured into my hair, holding me close again so his entire torso was flattened to my back and curled around me, a human shield. “And I wanna spend the rest of our lives reapin’ the rewards of our labour. I’m not gonna ask, ’cause I got the feelin’ you’d scoff and I’m tryin’ to make this romantic. So, I’ll just say, I wanna marry you. Not next year, not in six months. Soon. Fuckin’ tomorrow. ’Cause I’m nearly forty-one years old and I finally got the love of my damn life and I don’t wanna waste another second. Marriage, babies, if you’ll have them
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She’d lost so much to The Prophet, including her womb. From the earliest years of our friendship, I could remember Cleo playing house with her dolls, dreaming of her future family. It seemed somewhat cruel now, to be pregnant when we hadn’t even been trying, when I was actually on birth control.
I wanted her to be my wife, to be whatever word or symbol that had ever existed as long as it signified her as mine and me as hers.
