Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

Why couldn’t she remember?

She was pressed up against the cold hard door of the pickup and maybe they’d be better off inside, the truck’s bench seat would be good enough on a night turning cold fast like this one was, when chilly air found its way up her skirt and inside her denim jacket. She ran her fingers through his hair as he nuzzled her neck, found it greasy and lank, wondered what she’d seen in him.

But his mouth on the sensitive dip between her collarbones: insistent and hungry, his beard scraping against her soft flesh. Only tonight the man’s touch wasn’t doing what it usually did. It wasn’t lighting tinder up and down her body, setting the scene for a brush fire that would burn out of control until it pushed her into forgetting territory.

It felt wrong, all wrong.

Cass slid her hands between her body and his and shoved, and he left off his sucking and biting with a growl of irritation, and then she was staring into his face in the sickly light of the streetlamps mounted on galvanized steel poles.

And what stared back wasn’t human. Its flesh was pocked and torn. Its lips were chewed to crusts. Its eyes were unfocused and confused and when it saw the look of fear on her face it crowed with excitement, a sound that paralyzed her with unspeakable terror, and as it lowered its face to her neck again she knew that this time it meant to tear her skin from the bone, to rip it and chew it and swallow it even while she screamed.

And screamed.

And screamed, except that it clapped a hand over her mouth and she was left gasping for breath and flailing and struggling to get away but the next second the thing became Smoke and she realized she was in a tent, in a tent in the Box on a leaking air mattress with crazy thoughts crowding the dreams from her mind and replacing them with a nightmare made of every fear born in Aftertime.

She stopped screaming and whimpered instead and Smoke lifted his hand from her mouth slowly, tentatively, ready to clamp it back down if she didn’t stay quiet.

She stayed quiet.

“You had another nightmare,” he murmured.

She nodded, testing the inside of her mouth with her tongue, finding it metallic.

“Was it a bad one?” he asked, and Cass opened her eyes and found that she could see nothing at all in the dark tent and she suddenly wished she could. Wished she could see Smoke’s face, his eyes, his mouth. A mouth that was a bit too generous, but without it his face might have been hard, unapproachable. Instead she realized she had memorized the shape of that mouth, and in the dark she reached for him and found his chin, rough with stubble; his eyelashes against her fingertips; and finally, his lips. She brushed against them gently, and he was very still, so still she couldn’t even feel him breathe.

“They’re all bad,” she said softly.

“Cass.” If she had expected sympathy she was mistaken: his voice was steel. He clamped his hand over hers, squeezed her fingers together until they hurt. “I can’t-I don’t-”

He didn’t want her. Cass had only been looking for comfort but the knowledge cleaved her anyway. He held her hand away from his face as though it was a blade poised to slice through him, and Cass felt shame flood her like poison rushing through her veins.

She had wanted comfort. But he didn’t want her.

She knew that if she explained, if she could find the words to describe the emptiness that could never be filled, the chasm edged with cliffs of fear and longing, that he would provide comfort after a fashion. Because he was a good man. And only a good man would have come this far with her, taken the risks they had taken.

A good man. A prince, in fact. A damn Boy Scout. In the killing emptiness her last, best defense stirred. A wrecked and battle-hardened thing, it had been born long ago when she first discovered what her need demanded, when she first recognized her body for what it was.

That innocent, frightened girl had become a temptress, a serpentine thing, all enticing, all willing, all temptation and can’t-say-no. Years ago she had been clumsy, uncertain of her power, but realizing she had nothing to lose gave her strength, and she learned to twist and beckon and lure and ride until the men she found were all used up, until she had sapped them of everything they had to give her. Which wasn’t much, after you discounted the terrible convulsions of their bodies and the momentary vulnerability in their glazed eyes: other than that small gift they didn’t even realize they gave, there was nothing but release.

But she’d have it now. The angry girl had pushed off the bottom of her heart, hurtled through the wavery place where Cass had consigned her, and crested the surface with a momentous burst of need. And Cass let her take over.

Smoke had offered her kindness when kindness could kill her.

He deserved this .

Cass didn’t really believe that last conscious thought, but she pushed the phrase through her mind nonetheless, pushed it through and bit down on it and held it as the need took over. He deserved this because he didn’t want her after he’d let her want him.

She yanked her hand back and she heard him take in his breath. She crawled across the makeshift bed, the hard ground through the limp air mattress hurting her knees, and shoved the cheap blanket and sheets aside as she straddled his body.

“Cass…” His voice was alarmed. But she had set this in motion now, and it would not be stopped.

She bent over him and let the t-shirt slide up over her thighs, her hips, leaving almost nothing between them. She pressed herself against him and found him hard, fiercely hard, and he shuddered involuntarily and seized her wrists.

“Cass.” He said it again, through gritted teeth. He held her wrists so hard she felt her bones pressed together, and sucked in her breath in pain, but she didn’t fight him. He was stronger. But she had other ways.

She let him hold her wrists. She gave control of her arms over to him, his for the moment. But she had the rest of her body and she used it.

She rubbed herself slowly, lightly-to Smoke her touch must have felt tentative, but it was the farthest thing from tentative-over him, feeling the outline of his hard cock through the layers of cotton that might as well have not been there at all. She closed her eyes and concentrated on letting everything else fall away, because the more she gave herself over to the rush the less of her that was left behind. It was a battle for control, and the only way for her to control herself, to control the chasm with its jagged cliff edges, was to control him. The man below her, the man who she was trying to make into not-Smoke, to make into a stranger, to make into no one, because the old equation required a man who was nothing to her.

But he kept saying her name and that would wreck it.

“God, Cass,” he choked out, as though she was strangling him with the languid caress of her body against his.

“Shut up,” she commanded, and pressed into him harder. The shock of the contact between them, hard meeting soft, sent sensation through her, a riveting jolt that emanated through her body but burned itself out long before it could reach her mind, her legs, her arms. “Shut up, please just shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up…”

She ground out the words in time to her movement against him. Through her anger she felt her need grow and bloom. He found her rhythm and moved with her, this man beneath her, this man who in the dark could be a stranger; if she just tried hard enough he could be a stranger. She felt his grip on her wrists weaken and she twisted her hands savagely and he let go, his reflexes were slow, too late he realized she’d freed herself and tried to catch her again but she was quicker.