Tabula Rasa(35)

I had never really gotten off with him, but at times, there had been a comfort in warm body grinding against warm body, of embraces under down comforters near a warm roaring fire. I hadn’t wanted to f*ck up the tiny bit of not terrible that had defined my life in the park.

I don’t think I’d ever once thought that I needed Trevor to f*ck me—as if he were the only source of water that could put out my flame. It had never been so dramatic as that. But standing shoved against the wall with Shannon’s rough jeans pressing against my heated raw flesh, I thought I would climb out of my own skin if he didn’t put his dick inside me.

I would never say this out loud. I was still waiting for a man who wasn’t a monster to bust in and rescue me off to a clean suburban politeness where everything was safe and smelled like lemons.

And yet every raw nerve ending screamed for Shannon to possess me and keep me forever, and now that he’d paddled me and I’d reacted as I had, I suspected in the darkest well of my being that I didn’t do polite sex. I couldn’t say it was Trevor’s sociopathy that had kept me from being excited by him. Because Shannon was a sociopath, too.

He sighed against my hair. “It’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

“What?”

But I knew.

“I like your pain and fear.”

I tensed beneath him, but inexplicably the excitement between my legs didn’t fade away.





Chapter Six





Shannon released me and began to pace, lost somewhere inside his own head for the moment. I just stood there, except now I was facing him. I leaned against the wall, memorizing the pattern of the wallpaper pressed against my bare flesh. I’d lost the will somehow to feel self-conscious about my nudity. He’d drunk it up like peach tea on a hot summer day, so it seemed weird to be self-conscious after all that appreciative ogling. There was no question he was attracted.

Or that I was, no matter how desperately I’d tried to ward those impulses away.

“Go to your room,” he said, refusing to look me in the eyes.

“Why? I thought...”

He took a long, deep breath as if he were one of those toys that had to be wound up before it could express itself. “Until very recently, the only person in the world I cared even a little bit about was myself. I can fake empathy pretty well under the right circumstances. Most people don’t notice because most of their empathy is just as fake. Everybody’s wrapped up in their own shit, so maybe we’re all just pretending, and it’s not just me.”

He stopped and seemed lost inside that thought for a moment. Finally, he managed to untangle himself from it to continue. “I don’t trust myself with you if I like hurting you... given the other things I like.”

As if he had to spell that out for me. He thought murdering people was fun. He thought hurting me was fun. He loved it when I cried and begged him, so exactly how little would it take for him to cross over to the thrill of killing me?

If I was a smart woman, if I had any brains inside my head at all, I would have done what he asked. You’d think without memory to take up much space in my brain that I’d have more room for deeper cognitive reasoning.

But instead, I went to the bed and picked up the rope, then I went back to Shannon and pressed it into his hand. This was insane. I was insane. My captivity with Trevor must have broken me. In a sense I’d been born in captivity. I didn’t remember a time I had ever been free. Now I needed the ropes and the cage to feel safe—even when I knew I was anything but.

Shannon’s hand closed over mine and the rope as he looked hard into my eyes. “If you cross this line with me, we aren’t going back.”

“Is it going to end in my grisly murder?”

“I hope not.”

I believed he meant it. But how could I know? He was so good at faking everything.

“I thought you weren’t a Halloween monster. I thought you were always in control.”

“I’m going on past performance. I might be wrong.”

And I might never get my memory back. I might always live in this gaping void, this endless eternal twilight, this space where lost souls wandered and moaned in hallways in the dead of night.

He seemed to consider the point we’d reached for a moment, as if he could rewind the night to before I’d walked in on the orgy, as if we could go back to the happy roommate illusion we’d been living in.

There was no time for me to change my mind, as if I could bring myself to. I was terrified of him and what he was capable of, and yet I needed him to f*ck me more than I’d needed anything since I woke in the pirate ship.

He tossed me on the bed and began tying my hands to the headboard much like he’d done in the motel room that night. I still couldn’t believe I’d handed him the rope. But in only a few moments he’d created a gnawing hunger inside me that I knew only his cock could satiate. I needed him inside me like I needed air.

I was certain that no amount of touching myself in the darkened room down the hallway would ever calm the desire he’d ignited. I needed to be perched on the knife-edge of living and dying. I needed to be so swept up in the present moment that I had no time to worry about the giant pieces of nothing inside my head or the giant pieces of lies Trevor had put there.

This was the only space and place in which I could be free of all of it.