The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(79)

But hurt required feeding. Like a drug habit. It slid around corners of the bedroom and demanded more. Hurt was the lord God and they would have no other verbs before it. Hurt stood over their beds, exacting devotion and sacrifice.

“Tie my hands,” she said one night. And he did.

“Pretend you’re raping me,” she said another night. And he did.

Then there came a night when Erik, higher than he’d ever been in his life, heard his own harsh whisper in the sludgy dark. “I want to f*ck your ass.”

She didn’t say a word. He only heard the scrape of a drawer, some rifling around and then a condom was in his hand. His drugged brain could barely keep up with his body, registering what was happening five beats after it had happened. In this surreal fugue state, he was stretched out on her back, pushing into her unyielding body.

“Let me in.” He didn’t recognize his own voice. “Let me hurt you.”

Her fingers twined with his beneath the pillow, clenched to the breaking point. Her neck arched in pain. He took a small, reverent taste of the tight, hot agony and had to fight not to come. He moved further into her and she moaned. With his mouth he moved her hair away from her neck, set his teeth at her nape. “Let me.”

“God it hurts,” she whispered, her voice thick with arousal.

He dug in with his teeth, admiring his own controlled skill. He slid one hand beneath her body. She spread her legs for him, opened up slick and swollen. Her lips caressed the tattoo on his wrist. “I feel alive when it hurts.”

“So do I. Only when it hurts”

“I want to come.”

“Come. Let it hurt. Let it come.”

“Hurt me.”

“Come, Dais. Come for me. Come until it hurts.”

He came just as she did. Brain joined body and he came so hard he saw the rear side of his skull, saw back to yesterday and out into next week. He lay on her, breathing hard, wondering if he had pushed himself too far and he was cut loose in space, his sanity roaming lost around the universe, never to return.

It wasn’t such a bad notion.

Gradually a tingling returned to his limbs and a dull ache between his eyebrows convinced him he was indeed present.

“Get out of me,” Daisy said drowsily, as if asking for an extra blanket. Erik carefully got out, chucked the condom, then lay down again and didn’t move. They sprawled there, passed out, sated and spent.

They woke up and turned to each other, fingers seeking each other’s faces in the dark. They couldn’t see, but by touch they knew no joy was in their eyes.

“We make love and it’s horrible afterward,” Erik whispered. “We’re sweet to each other and it makes us physically sick. But if you bite me or scratch me or draw blood, it’s fine. If I pin you down or pretend to rape you or f*ck you in… We go right to sleep. It’s peaceful then. And I don’t understand.”

“What’s happening to us?” In the dark, her voice was small and lost.

“We’re better than this.”

“We used to be.”

“I can’t do this anymore,” Erik said. He got up and flung open the curtains, flooding the room with weak light from the street. “No more. I’m not hurting you in bed again. I won’t.”

He plugged in the Christmas lights and Daisy began to cry. Erik drew her out of bed and into the shower. She cried as he washed her hair and her body. He cried over the welts he had raised on her back and the fingerprinted bruises on her upper arms and thighs. Back in her room they stripped the linens off her bed and remade it. Lay down in the clean sheets, weeping tired, defeated tears.

He held her all night. She slept all the next day. Erik could not get her out of bed. He came downstairs after his third attempt, sat on the bottom step in the living room with his head in his hands.

Will and Lucky came in the front door. Lucky took one look and squeezed past Erik to go upstairs. Will sat on the step next to Erik. Put arms around him.

“It’s all right, Fish,” Will whispered. His cheek moved against the top of Erik’s head. His hand rubbed circles between Erik’s shoulder blades. Squeezed the back of his neck. “It’s all right.”

“I feel like it’s all falling apart,” Erik whispered.

“It’s this place,” Will said. “I can’t stand being here anymore. We all need to leave. And we will. Soon. It’s almost over, Fish. You’ll get out of here with Daisy and go somewhere new.”

Whatever Lucky said or did, Daisy got up. She pulled strength out of some hidden, bottomless reservoir and rose to do what she had to do. Her mouth was set and her eyes flat blue. She was in the war room. She went to class and studied for finals. The curtains of her room remained open. She and Erik lay in bed at night, clasped in each other’s arms and staring. It was all they had left. They stopped feeding the hurt and found they weren’t hungry for anything else. So they stopped having sex.

Just stopped.





Fishy, Fishy In the Brook


It was hot the May afternoon when Erik went to David’s place, looking for coke. He found David in bed.

With Daisy.

No words. No altercation. Not then. Erik stood in the doorway as David flipped a handful of covers over his and Daisy’s bodies. Then the three of them had simply stared at each other, frozen, as the world exploded in slow-motion.