Page 114 of Once Upon a Fable

“What are you—?” Her confused question halted as I tipped the bottle over my cock and gritted my teeth against the grotesque sensation of touching myself.

I performed a perfunctory cleaning. That was all. Wrapping my hand around my hardness, washing away the dirt and mud from rolling aroundin the storm.

A crest of sickness tried to push up through my guts, shoving aside cocoa and sugar, replacing good with bad, tainting everything with sordid reminders.

I tore my hand away, tipping the rest of the bottle over my length, letting droplets trail to my balls.

The second I was clean, I tossed the bottle to the side, crawled into the tailgate, and didn’t stop until I kneeled before her. Kneeled with trembling muscles and rapid heartbeats. Kneeled with desperation and a shitload of pain.

I kneeled before her.

Now, it’s her turn.

My voice had gotten lost in the darkness inside me, echoing through my chest as I growled, “Kneel.”

She froze. Her chocolate bar fell from her bound hands. “No.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to sleep with you.”

I merely shook my head. “You’re wrong. I’m already inside you.”

She gasped.

For the longest second, we stared at each other. I physically felt as if her eyes were chains, slinking around me, holding me immobile as locks snapped into place. Padlocks with no keys, chains with no weaknesses, a cage of knots and fastenings that would never be undone.

I couldn’t catch a breath as heat filled my heart.

A heat filled with knowing that she was right about our connection. That it burned bright, despite our war. That it was more powerful than the both of us.

The longer we stayed together, the harder it would be to undo. Even now, pieces of me were being erased—for good this time, not just behind a wall I hastily erected. It erased fragments of the cruelty inside me, the distrust, the violence, the heavily conditioned boy who knew death better than he knew living.

For a single heartbeat, everything feltright.

Easy.

Peaceful.

God...peace.

She gave me peace after a lifetime of distress.

She gave me the silence I sought every second that I was awake. I didn’t need to run around the valley. I didn’t need to absorb myself in a book. I didn’t need to hide from the mania inside my mind.

All I had to do waslookat her.

Be with her.

Sink inside her.

A sudden pain struck me in the temples, making me wince. My vision blacked out for a second, the weird vertigo I’d suffered from her striking me with the shovel returning.

The worst headache I’d ever felt came then faded, leaving me swaying and turned upside down.

What...what had I been thinking about?

I’d been...happy.