Page 21 of Dark Ink

My mother didn’t do anything of those things as far as I knew. Her greatest crime, her only crime, was dying too soon. But that didn’t matter to a wounded, pained heart like my father’s. Nothing mattered. Nothing but hurting someone. Lashing out. Striving to make the pain go away by any means necessary.

“Is that why you won’t give me the money, Eithne?” Stewart shouted, now pacing back and forth, fingers fidgeting, twisting in his damp shirt. “Because you only take money? Is that it? That stream only flows one way, eh? Money in, dicks in, cum in. But nothing fucking out! Not even for your own flesh and blood!”

He upended the coffee table and I flinched even though I knew he would do it. He’d done it to a dozen different coffee tables in a dozen different apartments.

“I bet that’s what you’re doing,” he said, looking more and more like my father with each passing word. “When you say you’re off taking classes. I bet you’re just finding easy cock to suck. I bet I’m right.”

I shrank back against the wall the way I’d done that terrible night years ago. It had been my father then. My father huffing and puffing. My father red-cheeked and wild-eyed. My father breaking things. It was Stewart now. But the words were all the same. I felt just as small, if not smaller. Just as timid, if not more. And just as shamed, if not more.

Because back then my father’s empty accusations were only true in theory. In the confines of my mind I’d done the things he was accusing me of. In my dreams, too. In the hesitant, fluttering, and then retreating fingers between my legs beneath the sheets. But never in real life. Never truly. But now I had. Now it was true. Now there was tar for Stewart’s, for my father’s hurled words to stick on.

I didn’t even know Rian. Not really. I’d only ever exchanged a few words with him. He hadn’t ever taken me on date. Hadn’t ever even asked. He stalked me. Stepped over a million boundaries. He was not only much older than me but a college professor. It was wrong. It was wrong.

And yet with hardly any hesitation I’d let him drag him into a classroom. I’d let him push his fingers inside me. I’d almost come around those fingers with his hand around my throat.

I’d risked my scholarship, my place at the college, my future. For an orgasm with an older man I didn’t even know. Shouldn’t even know.

“Look at you,” Stewart said, laughing again. “You know I’m fucking right. You know it. You know you’re a slut like Ma. You know you’re a whore. You know there’s something nasty inside of you. Dirty and rotten and perverted. She spoiled you. Ruined you. You, whore!”

My face was hot. My skin seemed to burn as I remembered Rian’s fingers curling around to press at that spot inside me. I wanted to curl in on myself. To ball up on the floor. To run to Rian’s arms and let him do it again. If I was doomed, I wanted to be doomed with him.

“And now you won’t even help your own brother,” Stewart said, collapsing once more onto the couch. “Because the one thing you want, I, as your flesh and fucking blood, can’t give. Or is that your price, Eithne? Is that how demented you are? Is that what you’ve wanted this whole time?”

Silence came again at last. I couldn’t stop thinking of Rian. Waves of shame rolled over me. I needed a shower. I needed to run away. I needed to run to Rian. I was exactly who my father said I was when everything went to shit, when Stewart and I ran away. I was who I told myself all these years that I wasn’t. I was a whore. I was a slut.

“I’ll just get it somewhere else,” Stewart said in a softened voice.

He’d lost his fire. Detoxing takes it out of you, I guess. Small fucking mercies.

“The money,” he said. “I’ll just go get it somewhere else if you don’t give it to me.” He added, “Whore” as a last blind swing.

I watched as shivers wracked his rounded spine. He moaned softly as his eyes searched the living room in caged panic. His body needed a fix. And there was none. My brother was in agony. And I was all he had. That was it, plain and simple.

“Come on,” I said, pushing myself away from the wall. “Let’s get you comfortable.”

I helped Stewart lie back down. I arranged a blanket he immediately kicked off and then immediately whined for. I pushed his hair back from his forehead. It was going to be another long night.

“Rest,” I whispered as a tear ran down my still burning cheek. “I’m going to go find something to hold your water.”

Eithne

Perhaps Rian wouldn’t come to class today.

My eyes twitched constantly toward the clock on the wall as the minutes, seconds ticked away. He’d not show. He’d not come. He was leaving me alone. I’d not seen him since he’d fingered me against the blackboard last week. I’d avoided the campus for days until I’d not been called to the dean’s office, not been expelled. The student who walked in on us mustn’t have seen me. I’d been given a second chance. A reprieve. I would not screw up again.

And it looked like Professor Merrick was making sure he wasn’t going to screw up again.

I thought I might cry when the door at the base of the auditorium opened. To cry in relief, to cry in frustration? I don’t know. Both.

I gripped the edge of my desk as Rian stepped into the class. I hated how my lungs constricted at the sight of him, gasping for air already like I was close to climax. My heart thudding erratically in my chest as I drank in the tousled hair falling over those hooded eyes, followed the dark lines along his bare forearms to where they disappeared under his cable knit grey jumper, knowing where they led underneath his clothes.

His gaze found mine and I was trapped underneath the weight of his stare.

“I’d like everyone to leave,” Rian said.

There was a seriousness to his voice that wasn’t quite like him. Rian was passionate, intense, probably a little crazy. But here was a man set on a straight and determined path. No wandering, no musing, no stops along the way. Here was a man not searching for what he wanted, but going after it with blinders set against everything else. Here was a man that had nothing left but a singular goal.

At first nobody moved. Was this another of Professor Merrick’s unconventional lectures? Another strange start to some profound end thanks to “Professor Merrick”? Hearing my mind muse on this enigmatic “Professor Merrick” almost made me laugh. “Professor Merrick”. It was funny. It was fucking funny. Because his tongue had been in my mouth, his fingers had been inside my pussy. And he was always inside my head.

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