Page 17 of Bonepetal
A soft metal cough, and I’m in.
I slip through, boots hitting the worn wood with barely a sound. Her place is small, just a few steps and I’ve crossed half of it. I move slow, silent.
It smells like her. Not the cheap vanilla candle shit she burns, or the detergent she drowns her sheets in. Underneath all that? The truth. The part no amount of store-bought cover can fucking hide.
Her.
Nightshade and warm skin. Ghosts of charcoal and ash from her sketches. The sharp tang of old ink, wilted petals crumbling in a jar by the window.
The air is thick with her—decay made pretty, death made soft. Everything in here whispers the same thing I already know—she was never meant to smell clean. She was meant to smell like me.
I pass the couch, thrifted, stuffing bleeding out like a wound. The coffee table, crooked, scarred with scratches and cigarette burns that aren’t hers. Candles everywhere, glass crusted over with wax drips pooling thick at the base. I run my hand along a shelf as I move, fingertips brushing sketchbooks sprawled open, the margins full of charcoal crows, twisted trees, my eyes and fucking jawline.
In the corner on a small bookcase sits a vase of dead flowers. Brown, brittle, stems snapped but still standing like skeletons. Next to them, a dish of bones—sparrow, or rabbit maybe, threaded neat with dried petals, some of them strung into chokers and bracelets, her little habit of making the ugly holy.
It all feels like a shrine no one admits is a shrine. Like she’s been waiting for me even while she tries to convince herself she hasn’t been.
And then—Her.
Curled under my hoodie, chest rising slowly, the tooth I gave her years ago still strung around her neck. She’s never taken it off. Not once. It hangs there now, resting just above the hem of my hoodie where it rises and falls with her. A relic of the vow she broke, the one she thought would bury me, but only dragged me back to her.
The sight hits me low and vicious. My cock twitches hard against denim, sharp enough to ache. She doesn’t even fucking know what she’s doing to me—lying there drowned in me, dreaming in me. Wearing the vow she broke like it isn’t choking her every breath. Thinking death erased me. Thinking moving on made her free.
The skull strapped to my face fogs with every breath. Hollow sockets drink her in, greedy, like they’ve been starving for this, and they have. Hell was nothing but hunger and silence, walls offire that didn’t speak back. I watched her there, through cracks in the dark, through the eyes of crows that didn’t even know they were mine.
I saw her sketch me. Saw her sob into her pillow like her grief could drown me twice, then crawl into my hoodie like she belonged there, spreading her thighs and touching herself while my face stared back at her in charcoal.
My jaw.
My hands.
My shadow.
She thought it was mourning.Cute. It was worship, and she didn’t even fucking know it.
Even in hell, I heard it. Her soft little gasps. The way she moaned my name like it was still stitched under her tongue, like no one else would ever taste it right. I stroked myself raw to that sound, laughing, because she really thought she’d buried me. But nothing she did—not the tears, not the sketches, not her hand between her legs—was ever enough without me. Only I can make her come like she’s supposed to.
I fucked myself raw to the memory of her more times than I can count. Shackled in chains. Burning in fire. Alone in a kind of silence that etched its teeth into my ribs. But even that never touched the edge of this. Never close enough. Stroking my cock to the sound of her laugh echoing in my skull, to the ghost of her nails carved into my shoulders, to the promise of her mouth, it was survival rations. Kept me breathing, but never sated me.
Because it was never her breath ghosting my throat. Never her thighs tightening around my hips. Never that shudder that rips through her when I sink inside and she forgets how to deny me.
Now, her lips part on a soft sound. A sigh. A whimper. Maybe a dream. Maybe my name. Doesn’t matter. It’s mine.
Always was.
Always fucking will be.
I move closer, step by step, boots whisper-quiet on her floor. My pulse steady. My cock straining. My hands aching with everything I’m holding back, every filthy thing I want to do to her while she sleeps wearing me.
God, she looks like a sin I clawed my way out of the dirt for.
I crouch at the edge of her mattress, lean close, close enough to drink the heat off her skin. Her lashes twitch, caught between worlds, but she doesn’t wake. She never does. She’s always been a heavy sleeper—unless it was my mouth at her throat, my hand buried between her thighs, forcing her body to confess what her lips wouldn’t.
Memory hits like a blade to the gut. Her back to the tree line, moonlight painting her throat. My hand over her mouth to keep the cult from hearing while I shoved her dress up and split her open for the first time. Her nails carving trenches down my shoulders, blood warm and slick in the grooves. Her body quaking, begging for ruin, and me giving it without mercy. That noise she made into my palm—the one that wasn’t pain, wasn’t fear, but the rawest edge of want she tried to bury.
Now I look down at her, lashes dark against her cheeks, and I see the ghost of that sound trembling in her full lips. The hoodie’s hem rides high, exposing a strip of pale stomach begging to be marked. My teeth grind. My cock jerks. My hand aches with the urge to touch.
So I do.
