Page 55 of Vile Bastards
With a scowl, I yank the knife from his grip and then make as if I might actually stab him with it before releasing my fingers and allowing it to fall to the ground.
“You stopped fucking me for this? Get your shit together and get your dick back out. Now.” I get up in his face just as the clouds part, and a violent deluge comes down on us, like the heavens aren’t just crying but screaming.
“I have abandonment issues,” he says with another laugh, reaching up as if to swipe the water from his face. Only, there’s no helping it because everything is wet: this damn graveyard, my dress, my aching pussy. “Kill me now and let me go or—”
“I upgraded you to boyfriend, didn’t I?” I query dryly, offering up a shake of my head. I can hardly hear; the rain is so fucking loud. It’s like the world is crying out for us both to get past our shit, to embrace our inner darkness, to entwine our shadows. “What more do you want?”
“I want you to let me be your monster.” He takes my hands and puts them on either side of his neck, his own eyes closing as he puts pressure against my palms. “Leash me. Please, Scarlett. Hold me hostage. Keep me captive.”
He opens those hauntingly beautiful eyes to stare at me, and I feel my heart thundering like crazy behind a cage of ivory ribs. It’s a reminder that I’m alive, that I’m different from these people buried beneath our feet.
“Bohnes …” I trail off, but then my gaze hardens and my lips purse. I can see a flicker of terrified curiosity in his eyes as I squeeze my hands just a bit harder around his throat, not choking him, but collaring him. I walk backward through the rain, and he follows me, into the empty mausoleum with the stone altar in the center.
I’m not sure what it’s for, exactly. To hold a coffin during a funeral? For flowers? It doesn’t matter. Bohnes seems to know what I want, reaching down to snatch up those fucking leather thigh straps again. With my hands on his neck, he uses the straps to lift me up and spread my legs at the same moment, stepping between them as I keep my grip against the throbbing pulse of his carotid.
“Make me a Nightmare.”
“That’s sacred Prescott shit,” I whisper, even as he’s unbuckling his slacks. “Most people don’t even know what that means anymore. Likely, we’ll be the last senior class to even recognize the term.”
“Do it.” Bohnes is panting now, and I can feel the hot, slick tip of him pressing against my folds. “Give me your word, Scarlett. Quickly. Now. Let’s stop pretending this is just a game.” He takes a step back, pushing his slacks down even further so that I can see the fresh ink beside his tattooed cock.
There it is, the shape of my teeth marked in black ink. A branding. A claiming.
I should’ve known what I was doing when I got involved with this crazy bastard in the first place.
“You are vile,” I tell him, and he grins. “Absolutely vile.”
I sigh.
I sort of wanted a normal life, ya know? Well, not like normal-normal, not all financial portfolios and mortgages and picket fences (shoot me now), but like some slight resemblance of normal. No girl gangs or police chases or murders. That’s the part of Prescott that I wanted to shed, but it’s a poison. It’s a toxin. It’s an infection the likes of which even Alexei Grove could never fully understand.
It sinks into my blood, and it makes me crazy.
I want Bohnes to do these things, to encourage me to collar him, to fuck me in a cemetery, to buy me a mausoleum. Because, as I mentioned before, I’m not a heroine in a grand adventure. I’m not a lesson in morality. I’m … I’m just human.
Fucked-up and flawed and always making wrong decisions, confused about life but trying my best. What did Bohnes say about normal? That it was complacency, that equating common ailments to normality was the same as accepting the world was right and everything else was wrong.
“I don’t accept that,” I murmur, and he releases his slacks, letting them fall to the stone floor. Bohnes grabs onto my thigh straps and yanks me even harder against him, his teeth gritted, his face crestfallen. I’ve confused him by mumbling under my breath. “I don’t accept that the world is right.”
He pauses then, exhaling and allowing his eyes to close.
“I’m going to haunt your dreams.”
“You’re going to haunt my everything.” I pause, he pauses, but the rain is coming down in a sheet outside, and I want him so badly that I’m just about willing to agree to anything to encourage him to keep going. “Okay, yes. Be my Nightmare, Bohnes. Be my monster.”
