We leave a few minutes later.
We’re both silent on the drive back to the house, Cole gripping the wheel with a rigid expression, and me replaying every taunt Shaw threw at me.
You know we had a fling once …
Don’t worry, Mara, I forgive you …
You must have been in a terrible mental state …
The moment we step inside, into the dark, cool interior of the house, the tension between us snaps. Cole jumps on me and me on him.
Black Out Days – Phantogram
Spotify → geni.us/no-devil-spotify
Apple Music → geni.us/no-devil-apple
He tears off the deep plum gown I was wearing, ripping the straps so that the expensive beading scatters across the hardwood floor.
I attack him back just as hard, yanking open his shirt, ripping the material, losing the buttons.
We’re kissing each other with more than passion. We’re exorcising our anger, our resentment, our fear, and our rage.
It’s not directed at Cole and it’s not directed at me. It’s a dark, swirling energy between us. A bitterness that has to burn out before it consumes us both.
Cole hasn’t even got my dress all the way off when he throws me over the arm of the couch and takes me from behind. He wraps his hand up in the long rope of my hair, jerking my head back, using it as reins while he mounts me and rides me hard.
He’s fucking me ruthlessly, roughly, the slap of his hips against my ass punctuated by actual slaps from his hand.
“More,” I moan. “Harder.”
I deserve this.
My guilt over Erin can only be assuaged by punishment. I want to be spanked harder, faster, meaner. I need the sadist in Cole. I need the psychopath.
And Cole obliges.
He forces me down on my knees, the back of my head against the arm of the couch. He shoves his cock into my mouth, my head pinned, no way to escape.
He holds my head between both hands, fucking my mouth. His cock is iron-hard and relentless, tunneling into my throat. I’m choking on it, drooling around it, trying to steal gasps of breath before he drills into me again.
There is something so satisfying in this. Something that I deeply need, that I’ve never been able to ask for before.
The more I come to trust Cole, to believe that he won’t actually hurt me, the more I want him to push the line.
This is the broken, fucked up part of myself. The part that’s furious over every time that I was hurt or used, but still craves the freedom to seek out roughness and even violence when I want it, on my terms.
I’m a tree that grew in cruel wind, twisted and bent by it. Sex and violence, passion and intensity, are inextricably entwined for me. I can’t have one without the other. Right or wrong doesn’t come into it. I am the way life made me.
Only this satisfies: biting, clawing, scratching, struggling. Cole and I fuck on the couch, on the floor. He slams me up against the wall, bodily lifting me off the ground.
I need to experience his strength, his power, his ruthlessness, because that’s what I need in a man. It’s the only way I feel safe. He has to terrify me so I know he’ll terrify everyone else. I’ve never met a real hero, I don’t think they exist. Only a monster can protect me.
We’re fucking in the dark so we can unleash the demons inside of us.
Anguished sounds come out of me: sometimes sobbing, sometimes begging for more.
Our clothes are all gone now, torn to ribbons on the floor. Cole’s back is a mass of scratches as if he’s been whipped, his skin under my nails. His teeth marks print my shoulders and my breasts.
Still I moan in his ear, “Don’t stop. I need more …”
“You fucking lunatic, I’ll kill you,” Cole snarls. “You don’t know what I have in me …”
“Show me. You promised to show me.”
He throws me down on the floor, so hard that all the air slams out of me and I see stars on his ceiling.
He climbs on top of me, our bodies slick with sweat. It’s dripping down from the inky tips of his hair, from the sharp planes of his jaw. It splashes on my face and my breasts. I open my mouth to taste the salt on my tongue, I lick it off his throat. I want his sweat and his cum all over me. I want to be filthy.
He rams his cock inside me. The harder he fucks me, the harder he gets. His cock is on fire, I feel it burning all the way up inside me. My wetness could be pussy or blood. I don’t fucking care anymore.
I look up into his face and I see the naked Cole, that real, true creature. The devil himself. Eyes as black as pits, always burning. Face as beautiful as sin. Mouth forever hungry, swallowing me whole.
This is Cole unleashed. Full of fury and passion and hunger. His control was always an illusion. The real Cole takes what he wants.
He’s taking me here and now. Pounding me into this floor. Fucking me mercilessly.
And still he wants more. I can see it in those eyes. He wants something from me that I still haven’t given.
His hands close around my throat.
At first I think he’ll only squeeze for a moment, the way he’s done before: cutting off blood flow so my head spins and my pussy throbs. Turning sex into delirium.
This time he doesn’t stop. He only squeezes harder.
“Stop,” I gasp. Then, more frantic, “Stop!”
The word comes out in a croak. My throat is too constricted for speech. No air, no blood can get through.
Still he chokes me.
He’s looking down into my face, his eyes dark and pitiless.
I try to knock his arms away, but they might as well be iron bars welded in place. His hands close relentlessly, real pressure now, real weight.
Black moths flutter into view: first one, then two, then dozens. Blocking out my sight.
I’m hitting at his arms, scratching at them, clawing. Trying to tear his fingers off my throat.
I’m too weak and he’s too strong. I’m helpless in his grasp, floating, slamming back into my body, floating up again.
Now Cole speaks and I can’t see his lips moving, but I hear that low, insistent voice burying into my brain:
“This is what it will feel like if you wait for Shaw to finish the job. This is what it will feel like when he’s on top of you. This is what it will feel like to die as a victim.”
“Stop it! Stop fucking around!”
The words are a rasp, a whisper.
It doesn’t matter if he hears them or not: Cole isn’t fucking around. He’s never been more serious.
He chokes me harder. Fucks me harder. Holds me there while he beats the lesson into me.
“This is your way, isn’t it? Hoping for mercy? Never fighting back? Trying to do the right thing? You want to be a good person … good people die every day, Mara. Goodness never saved them.”
I’m clawing at his arms, desperate and dying. Black moths carry me away …
He’s looking down into my face, as cruel as Shaw as he taunts me. “Do you want to be a victim, or you want to be a fighter? I thought you were a fighter, Mara?”
I am fighting, I’m hitting him with all my strength but it’s not enough, I’m only a girl, a skinny girl, it will never be enough against a man …
I hate that I’m small. I hate that I’m weak.
The anger, the hurt, the goddamn fucking unfairness wells up inside of me. I’m the volcano now, I’m the fucking lava.