Keep Me: A HERO Novella Read Online Free Page B

think I won’t?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I’ll keep you in this mansion forever. I’ll lock all the doors.”
    “You won’t have to.”
    He grunts and closes the inches between our lips. He can never escape his evil; it’s there even as he makes love to me, with fingernails that dig for blood, teeth that nip at skin, and honest, sharpened words. I crave him this way. My keening for pain is because he lets me show mine, lets me have his. This is why I cut my skin, to feel him again, but when he’s here, he cuts deeper than any blade and licks the blood away. The thought of him slicing me open and drinking every drop of my life crumbles the earth under my feet and I fall. I come harder than I just did as he holds my hair with firm fingers, never lessening the swiftness with which he drives into me. I wrap my arms around his neck and cling to him while he rumbles against me, words lost in our heavy breaths and the smack of our skin. He’s relentless, his weighty balls slapping against my ass and my breasts bouncing. If he needs the same thing I do, I give it to him by clawing my fingernails into his back.
    “I’m going to come inside you, Sparrow, so fucking deep.” He doesn’t even get the words out before he buries himself to the hilt and convulses, pumping me full of his cum. His neck is taut, his eyes won’t release mine. He collapses, panting, giving me all of his weight. It’s not long before he tries to pull away, but I won’t let him.
    “Don’t,” I plead. “You won’t crush me.”
    He will, but I want to labor for every breath because of his body. With him covering me, inside me, I’m closer than I’ve ever been to him, to anyone, and it’s still not close enough. I want to crawl inside of him. I think I might be obsessed.
    My hands slide down and grasp his shoulders. “What was I like?” I ask after a while. I close my eyes when I ask, even though it’s dark, even though he can’t see my face.
    “As a little girl?”
    It’s not what I mean, but I let him answer.
    “I wanted to keep you. You were quiet, but there was a whole universe inside you that you never showed.”
    My lids flood, liquid threatening to seep out. “How do you know?”
    He kisses my temple, the hollow of my cheek. “Were you happy?” he asks. His voice is thick, he wants so badly for me to say I was.
    “I was grateful. I had no one else. Bad girls went to bad homes, they told me. I tried to be good every day so they wouldn’t send me away.” I pause, inhaling back tears. “Will you keep me, Calvin?”
    He nudges his nose into my hair. “I’m a selfish bastard. Yes, I will keep you, even if it kills us both.”
    My heart expands and loosens as if his words were scissors that snipped away its restraints. “Maybe instead of killing us, it will keep us alive.”
    I think he smiles against my skin.
    “I’m so tired,” I say. “But I don’t want this night to end.”
    “Sleep, Little Bird. Nothing is ending.”
     

Before Cataline fell asleep and I rolled off of her last night, she drowsily muttered, “Maybe we should stay .” I’m choosing to ignore the suggestion that we start our life here, in a place that likely still haunts her days and nights. She blindly tossed in my bed until I pulled her close against my side and only seconds after, her body relaxed into mine.
    She’s still here, curled against me, a ball of soft skin and tangled hair. Will she remember the things I said last night as she so willingly let me back inside? In the daylight, will they scare her? They’ve always been just within reach— you’re mine, I own you, I want to possess you like an object . She’s no longer a duty, and her safety is only a fraction of what I need now.
    She opens her eyes suddenly as if from a nightmare, but her lids fall half shut and she gives a tiny smile.
    I squeeze her against me. “Morning.”
    “I forget how it was sometimes beautiful to wake up in this house. It was always so dark that it made