Page 44 of The Boy Who Loved Wicked
On my haunches with my palms on my thighs, I almost told him the truth, but I wasn’t ready to lose him. Not without at least having all of him. In every way. “I want all of you.”
He opened his arms. “You have all of me. My heart is yours. Forever.”
I ate up his words. Savored the way they slid down my parched throat, nourishing me no matter how temporary. Sebastian didn’t do right by his child once before, he wouldn’t make that mistake again. He would leave me bloodied on the floor, as much as doing so would kill us both. He would do it.He will.I bowed my head. It was all I could do. The lights dimmed, and the lyrics to “Falling” filled the room. How apt, because I was down and out. I was falling.
On my back now, Sebastian slid between my legs, every pound of him weighed heavily on top of me. “You’re beautiful, you know.”
“Am I?”
“The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” His cock nudged in and didn’t stop. And when I shoved my heels into the bed, running away from the intrusion, he shushed me and kissed the side of my mouth, wiped the sweat from my hairline and kept going. “You won’t break,” he reminded me, love spilling from his eyes, infatuation solid in his hands. I felt it with every caress to my skin, every pluck of my nipple, and every finger that entwined with mine above my head. And I kept onfalling.“You have everything now,” he whispered as his pelvis met my bottom.
“I can take it,” I repeated, and after hours of feeling him so deep inside of me, a permanent trench had been carved out just for him. Cum mapped every inch of our bodies. Inside and out. The sheets clung to us like paste, and my tears worked to wash the sweat away.
“I love you, Phoenix Michaelson.” With my hair bunched in his hands, he licked me from shoulder to ear. I sat in his lap now, ass flush with his bulging thighs, my feet planted flat on the bed as I rode him.
“Why?” I couldn’t get enough of his platitudes. I kept adding them to my bank to draw from at a future date. To sustain me when I inevitably felt like I couldn’t go on.
“You’re the first choice I don’t regret making.” He flattened me and fucked me with purpose then, holding my wrists in a lateral raise as if I were nailed to a cross. I lay crucified for him. I’d asked him not to take it easy, and his eyes saidyou get what you ask for.
After, we dragged ourselves to the top of the bed, and Sebastian pulled the sheet over us, vowing to stay with me forever. But Sebastian was a man defined by his guilt. A man that lived to wish he could’ve done things differently. A man that craved to right his past wrongs. Leaving me would be yet another failure that he added to his load, but for him it would be the lesser of two evils.
I sucked in his scent. Filling my lungs and holding for as long as I could. I drifted off wondering why everything that killed us made us feel most alive.
Thursday
I let myself into Sebastian’s. He wasn’t there. I waited for hours, wearing down the carpet in the living room. He never showed up. His phone went straight to voicemail, and my texts went unanswered.
I went home and fell asleep that night with my head resting on my arms on the ledge of my windowsill, waking with a crick in my neck. I wiped the side of my mouth and raised my head in time to see Emily reach over and turn her lamp off. The room plunged into darkness.
The red numbers on my alarm clock reflected some ungodly hour, and my phone vibrated, a text from Sebastian popped up on the screen.
Sorry, I had some business to attend to today.
I got my passcode correct on the third attempt. Again, his phone went straight to voicemail.
Friday
I half listened to Theory talk about her parents’ latest demands for her life with my gaze trained on the classroom door, hoping she didn’t know they were trained there with intent.
“Are you listening to me, Pheeny?”
“Huh? Ah, yeah. Can they really make you marry him? This is America not India.” I went back to monitoring the door.
“Oh, Pheeny. You’re so naïve,” she sighed, falling back in her seat. My heart dodged a beat thinking she’d seen through my fake interest. “Of course they can make me.”
Sebastian entered then. The class quieted, books were pulled from bags, and students darted back to their seats. He retrieved the attendance sheet from his satchel before placing it on the desk of a student in the first row near the wall. He always started from my side of the room. At the board he wrote notes in his tidy scrawl. A small notebook was then removed from his bag. He flipped to a page and read it in silence, his lips moving. My fingers curled against the sheet of paper from my open textbook, ripping the page from the top of the spine.
Our mornings always began with eye contact immediately upon him stepping foot into the room. A silent acknowledgment that although in this space he couldn’t treat me any different from the others, I was special. He wouldn’t look at me now. Seemed incapable of facing my side of the room. And normally an immaculate dresser, today his dress shirt was buttoned incorrectly.
We were nearing the end of class, and I still couldn’t say what hue of blue his eyes were that morning. The shade of his eyes revealed a lot. I felt small, a shell of myself. Fear morphed to internal hysteria, then desperation. I raised my hand to answer his question. I was the only one with my hand up. He’d have to call on me.Look at me. Be proud of me for being the only one.But he didn’t see me, and it wasn’t because he was being malicious. He just couldn’t look me in the eyes. He was physically incapable.
“Mr. Sawyer,” he said, and my hand lowered like a deflating balloon. Mr. Sawyer flailed for words and in the end Sebastian had to answer his own question.
Sebastian was silent for an uncomfortable amount of seconds, staring down at his notes. He hesitated before saying, “I’d like to discuss allegories, which can be summed up as metaphors. Something that reveals deeper meanings.” He smoothed down his tie. “I’d specifically like to begin our discussion with the allegory of Moby Dick.” He did look at me then, however briefly. And when my pen slipped from my hand and rolled along the floor, he turned away, but not before I witnessed his skin turn translucent.
Moby Dick was a whale, and the story followed Captain Ahab’s maniacal pursuit of him. The allegory of Moby Dick reveals the stupidity in the chasing of something that could never be captured. And my desperation was consumed by anger.He promised.
“Why are we discussing Moby Dick?” I said, fuming, shaking in my seat. “It’s not even on the syllabus. It has nothing to do with the subject!”
