Page 66 of Locke

He read her confliction and her innate desires.

How was it that two broken beings such as them had found each other?

He did not believe in divinity. He was not deluding himself by believing she was made specifically for him, or that fate hand delivered her to him. But he did think that there was something humans did not understand about their species that continually had them crossing paths with others they either fell victim to, or people they were too eerily similar to.

On this, it was not to do with fucking. His cock was hard for her, but it was not what pushed him to such great lengths to take her. Fucking was not Locke’s sole mission.

It was something at his centre.

Something primeval and raw.

He’d never believed in mates. He didn’t think it was possible for someone to feel drawn to one being. Humans weren’t monogamous creatures by design. Evolution dictated that they fuck and breed, the animal kingdom a vicious circle of life and death, fucking and fighting.

Humans tried to distance themselves from their primordial urges. Tried to pretend that they could live in an engineered society under strict law and order, but they were still animals. Exceptional animals with the power to imagine, plan, and execute.

Locke learned first-hand how broken and unforgiving the system was. He was a direct example of what power could get away with. His voice was stripped from him after the Hole, and he had to live in the same town occupied by his abusers who were worshipped for their charity. And there he was—the fucking freak—with bruises on the outside and scars on the inside. Ostracized and bullied. Tormented and forgotten.

His abusers did not disappear from his life, either. He was the little boy that got away. They watched him for years. They made sure he didn’t get into good schools. He was not employable. He did not develop close relations beyond the three boys who had still accepted him, each in their own way. Even then, he couldn’t step out of the darkness. He needed to be hidden and invisible. Like a wounded animal who found a hole to die in, he sought solitude where he could turn on himself to expel the madness he felt within.

He could have easily descended into crime. He could have disappeared from the system and became a vagabond, floating on the streets to escape them. He could have used drugs to forget the feel of their hands on his skin. He could have just as easily hanged myself when it got to be too much. Locke understood the allure, and it was tempting. All of it. Escape sounded like the ultimate freedom.

This was what they counted on.

But dead, in the grand picture of things, would have made it easier on them. And that was what gave him pause. It would be so easy to give up, but that meant they won. It meant they got to keep hurting kids who were just like him.

Locke couldn’t fathom it.

Not when he witnessed the hurt his mother had endured by similar men. She died, and her killer was never caught. Out there, he lived, he won, he got to continue stroking his cock as he abused more people in hopeless predicaments. He would never taste justice, and even if he was found out, the judicial system was a trainwreck that might set him free.

Locke could not leave this world without knowing that he at least made one of his abusers suffer. Oh, how he longed to make them suffer. To become the very monster, to inflict upon them the same hurt—it had become his all-consuming desire.

He left Blackwater. He went to a place they could not find him with the sole objective of returning to this black town with its black beating heart. To take them down.

Every last one of them.

Never in his wildest dreams did he see this sort of derailment in his plans. To find his drive for revenge balanced out by his desire to take a fucking girl with the courage of a lion, but the eyes of a doe.

Obsession whispered in his ear, “You’re an animal. Listen to your instincts.”

*

Trenchcoat Man

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