Bad Wrong Things

by C.P. Harris

“I can’t get deep enough inside you, or close enough to you. I want nothing in our way. Not even skin.”

“Where are you right now, Clint? Tell me so I can kill shit and rescue you from there.”

No one knew me better than me, and I wore my trauma like a badge of honor because if life didn’t hurt sometimes, we wouldn’t have a frame of reference when things were going good. I didn’t want to be fixed, I wanted to be loved for my brokenness.

“I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t fallen for me. I was at my breaking point with loving you.”

“I don’t know how to make it better. I don’t know if I want to.” “Because you don’t want to forgive yourself for the role you think you played in Brandon’s death? Because you don’t want to hear her say it wasn’t your fault? Because then all the years you spent punishing yourself, avoiding another Adam, and forfeiting a life of your own, would’ve been for nothing.”

Adam was a symbol in all this, no longer a person. He symbolized what happened when I put my self-interests first. When I chose my happiness over the happiness of someone I loved.

I flattened his chest to the floor, hiked his rump into the air and face-dove into his spread ass, sucking and using his hole like a straw. “Fu-fuck,” he groaned, rearing into my mouth. I slurped up the leaking cum loudly, pausing a few times to sniff him because I couldn’t resist.

We complemented each other, because I wanted to take selfishly, and he wanted to be selfishly taken.

He was the devil over my shoulder, and with no one there to stop us, falling victim to temptation was a given.

I should’ve kissed him longer, harder. I should’ve made love to him properly. I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed at all. I should’ve treated that moment like it would be our last. Because after that morning, everything changed.

He was hurting, so I didn’t take the war on my character personally, but it was fucking hard not to when his words were driving my body underground.

“No.” He shook his head. “I won’t get past this. I won’t choose you. I’ll burn myself where I stand before I hurt him in that way.”

“He won’t be losing you because of me, Raven. Do you think I could live with that? This ends now, and you will tell him nothing.”

“You didn’t seem to have a problem being loved by a whore, Clint. Does it scare you to know no one will love you more than me? More than this whore.”

“Bad things happen to me sometimes, and good things are taken away because of it. I just don’t know if you’re the good thing taken, or the bad-wrong-thing that’s happened to me.”

“I’m so angry I can’t see straight. I don’t want to love you anymore, and I’m trying not to hate you for it.”

I craved. I obsessed. I cried. I fucking bled. I thought I might die from all the pining.

No one would ever belong to him the way I did. So completely and without conditions. No one would know me like him. Not without an endless amount of instruction and a roadmap to my missing heart. A roadmap to him. I promised I’d love him forever.

He was guilty of carelessness, not deception, although the repercussions were the same.

I had my jealousy to contend with. My loneliness to tackle, and an addiction to kick. Because Raven didn’t only ensure that I fell for him, he’d made breathing impossible without him.

I couldn’t prevent the car crash twenty-four years ago, and nothing could stop this collision now. I was a ruiner of beautiful things.

“I’m saying we need to find a way to move past our love because I can’t forgive you, I can’t forgive myself, and I won’t choose you. I can’t. I promise.”

“When you get over this, and I’m gone, it’ll be my love for you that’ll linger forever. That is what you’ll die wishing you could forget,”

Dirty talk wasn’t new to us. Unlike other times, his dirt now held an edge. His words were mean, meant to injure, not turn me on. I let go of the last vestiges of what made me good. Of what made me good to him.

“When I’m done with your body, it’ll repel anything that isn’t me, Raven.”

Our lovemaking in the dungeon was feral. We were fifty-shades-of-illegal, and if the cops came, they’d have no choice but to put down one of their own. That would’ve been the only way to haul Clint off me.

Were we warring because of his obsession? Because of mine? Ours? Or maybe we were doomed to this sort of outcome from the moment I became unsatisfied with anything less than his total consumption of me.

I didn’t want to recall a life where he wasn’t in love with me, even if it meant my future recollections would be of the scraps we’d now been left with.

It’s your love. The way you make us believe we can be and do anything. The way it protects us… I bet he never saw it coming. He’ll never get over you. Never.”

“I wish I’d known I would have had a chance with you, Clint. I would’ve saved everything for you.” I traced a heart into the condensation on the windowpane. “I had to watch you almost die, and it would’ve been the saddest death-tale ever told.”

“I get to choose now. I get a turn at making things right.” We couldn’t go back, but we couldn’t go forward together either.

I couldn’t speak on how it felt to be a father, but if his love for Joey was anything like my love for them both, then I understood Clint. His identity was tied to being the perfect parent, much like mine was tangled up in loving him. But unlike Clint, my past was worth a repeat performance because it brought me to him every, fucking, time.

“I can’t live without you isn’t some fucking cliche,” I said, drying his tears as his eyelids drooped and his hold on my jacket slackened. “But I’m going to do it, anyway.”

“Took me a long time to move on. Not from loving you. That’ll never go away. But it took some years for me to start moving again.”

“What’s wrong?” “Nothing, it’s just… Seems we did better apart.”

“What started as something to do in between waiting for you both turned into the thing that saved my life.

I’d helped create the mess and then escaped without having to sweep up the pieces.

“I want you back, and I don’t want to pretend I don’t. It’s been eight long years. I won’t spend another eight seconds beating around the bush or lying to you or myself.”

“No more sacrifices. I fight for the both of you. I’ll fight for us all, Raven.”

“Our love was ours to do with as we saw fit. We didn’t need our jagged edges smoothed. We didn’t need to be unbent. I just needed to be brave enough to be broken,” he whispered, chipping away at my resolve. “Brave enough to love you through my brokenness.”

Five days with Clint pulled the curtain back on eight years of waiting, of living as a tourist in my own life.

There was beauty in that, too, because even at our worst, I was loved. Only love could breed such hate.

I’d left Mansfield against his will, but not as his enemy, even if by then our love had been gnarled and overshadowed by the constant spasm of pain.

I can’t see us as friends, Clint. Too much has happened to pretend it hasn’t. That’s what I imagine being friends would feel like. Pretending.”

“I’ll never sacrifice you again. For nothing and no one. No one,”

“You’re my dream, and my fantasies, and my heart. We’ll make it work.

“I need you now,” he said frantically, sitting up to capture my lips. “Need to be inside you. Need to be home.”

Clint was my map, my compass, my way out of the dark. I’d learned that I could live without him, but that I didn’t want to, and I no longer had to.

Without him, how good was a good life, anyway? How incredible could incredible be if I was only living it with half of me?

I needed to be different. I needed to love myself enough so you wouldn’t have to love me enough for the both of us.