Page 170 of His To Erase
“Stop it,” she whispers. But her hips tilt forward.
“Then talk.”
She bites her lip—hard—and finally breaks. “I don’t remember, okay?” she bursts out. “I don’t fucking remember.”
I go still.
“What do you mean, you don’t remember,” I echo, lower this time. Her eyes are wide and glassy in a way that tells me she’s barely holding it together.
“I—I don’t know,” she stammers. “There’s gaps. Nightmares. Things I can’t explain.”
My pulse kicks hard, there’s now a dull throb at the base of my neck.
Fuck.
She doesn’t know.
She really doesn’t know? I watch her carefully, masking everything. The urge to react, to speak, to tell her she’s not crazy—that she’s not wrong about the silence or the missing time. But I can’t. Not yet. Because if she doesn’t remember… that changes everything.
It shifts the weight of the game I thought I was playing. She’s sitting there unraveling in front of me, and all I can think about is how far this goes. It’s not just an obsession anymore, this is something else.
I let the silence drag. Enough to prove I heard her. Not enough to admit it mattered. Because caring gets messy.
“What kind of nightmares?” I ask, carefully.
She exhales, “Hands. Strangers. My body not listening. Sometimes it feels like I’m screaming but nothing comes out. Sometimes I wake up and I’m already crying.”
I clench my jaw so tight it aches. That would explain the things she says when she’s sleeping. Now I’m burning—because for a moment I wanted to hurt her, to punish her for slipping away. But now I want to kill whoever put that look in her eyes.
She keeps going, oblivious to the storm tearing through me.
“I just—” She wipes her face with her sleeve. “Sometimes I get flashes of being dragged. Of motel lights. Of blood. And I never know if they’re dreams or—” She cuts herself off, her voice cracking. “It doesn’t matter.”
It does. It matters more than anything. But I can’t say that. Not when I’m this close to losing control. Not when the only thing I know how to do is take. Instead, I grab her chin,tilting her face toward me—rougher than I mean to. Her breath stutters, and fuck, that sound undoes something in me.
If she keeps talking, I’ll say something I shouldn’t and I can’t afford that right now, so I slam my mouth down on hers.
It’s not gentle. It’s rage, heat, and punishment tangled into one. A feral, unspoken demand—because I need something I don’t have the words for. I need to remind her exactly who owns every fucking inch of her body. That if I take her hard enough, maybe—just maybe—she’ll stop slipping through my fingers.
I kiss her like I’m trying to win a war I already lost the second she looked at me.
She gasps, and I use it—swallowing her whole, pinning her against the tree like I’m staking a claim. My hands are already everywhere—fisting in her hoodie, yanking it up, dragging across bare skin and making her whimper.
“Steven—” she breathes.
“Shut up.”
I hike her thigh up around my hip, pressing between her legs—and she moans, desperate and broken.
“You want something real?” I growl against her throat. “This is it. I already told you, you’re mine.”
Her nails dig into my back. She’s shaking and angry and half out of her mind, but her body arches as her mouth finds mine again, like she’s trying to punish me in her own way, for every question I asked.
I shove her pants down and rip open my own. When I push inside her, she screams.
It echoes through the trees like a warning as I slam into her again and again. My hands are tight on her hips as her back scrapes against the bark, her gasps are a broken prayer in the cold.
“You feel that?” I grind out. “That’s what the truth tastes like, sweetheart.”
