Hold Me Under

by Riley Nash

I wish, as I disappear into the darkness, that I didn’t live in a world where the only way not to hurt was to shut everything out and live among your dreams.

And maybe I’m doing this just to humiliate him, but deep down I want to know if being hurt by someone who hates you makes cleaner, sharper wounds than the hideous scars love leaves behind.

You know you’ve fucked up when they send God himself down to yell at you.

Something has changed. He’s not hiding anything from me now because we made the hate real, wove it like a covenant between our bodies. As long as he’s here, nothing bad can come near me because there’s no room for anything but him and me and the ways we hurt each other.

Many people have loved me, with many kinds of love, and that love has been all the worst days of my life, all the darkest nights. I’ve learned to shut myself off, to do everything that’s asked of me without feeling a thing, and I can’t stop because my body’s only purpose is to be used. But he’s not here to love me, and that promise has filled me with a dangerous hope.

His fingers find my hair, rub the back of my neck, trail down to trace my lips as he looks up at me with eyes full of lonely, distant stars and, so far behind them he isn’t even aware of it himself, something unbroken. “Your body knows what to do,” he whispers. “It’s already part of you.”

“I’ve been fucked more times than I could ever remember. I’ve been used, passed around.” He swallows. “But deep down, you think that no one in this world can give it to me the way you can. You think you know how to fix me, how to make me as good as you.” His finger brushes my bulge, trails along it as the corner of his mouth turns up. “You’re gonna have to prove it, because I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care how any other asshole fucked you, Victor Lang. If I’m going to do this, I’m gonna do it my way.”

One second I’m grinning, the next it feels like my heart is breaking. Out of a thousand men, none of them have put his shaft in their mouth or licked his hole, anything tender and giving. “No one’s been good to you, have they?” I whisper. I massage his hole with my thumb, up and down, circles, feeling the tight rim loosen up a little. He doesn’t answer, but I feel one of his hands wrap around my leg, hold on. “I’m gonna erase them all.”

He looks so happy it kills me. “I was put on this earth to ruin your life,” he breathes in my ear. “Fucking right.”

I want to know what he dreams about. I want to know what demons chased us here in the first place. I want to invite them to chase me instead, because he’s worn out from running so far and I’m strong enough to take it.

I can’t get enough of those flashes of protectiveness, even when they drive me insane.

“I’ll be fine,” I say soothingly, avoiding his eyes. What’s another lie when you’re already drowning in them?

“Do you want things to get better?” I snap. “Or is starving yourself in a fucking dog bed in a bathroom everything you thought it would be?”

Our bodies fit together perfectly, every hill and valley contoured to each other like we were one person who got broken in half before we were born.

Ethan looks over his shoulder at me, and I see the truth in his eyes, pure and absolute. He would never pity me. He fucking worships me. And I believe he would kill for me, if I wanted him to. He’d probably cry his eyes out and spend the rest of his life beating himself up about it, but it’s the thought that counts.

He’s all the things that drive me crazy and all the things that lead me home.