Leighton Mia - Hero

His tongue is a warm plea, licking along the inside of my bottom lip, and then back across the edges of my teeth. Finally it connects with my tongue, and my arms squeeze around his neck, trying to pull him deeper, because I want us to fade into each other, merge into one. His fingers dig into my back, his erection into my stomach. Calvin my captor isn’t altogether gone.

He walks us backward until I hit the edge of my desk. He pulls his head away to watch as he slides his hands in my top, feeling me everywhere. They are calloused, memories burned into his palms, his fingertips brash as he runs them over my body. I’m panting up at the ceiling while his thumbs glide up the length of my throat and under my chin. He puts his mouth to my ear and whispers. My moans are soft with his hands around my throat, his teeth sharpening themselves along my jaw.

“Can you?” he asks.

“I already said I do,” I respond in a short breath.

My heart beats in my ears and between my legs. He touches the tip of his nose to mine. “For everything? Can I have your forgiveness?”

I see the word in the air, letters flashing in front of me like they’re spelled out in fire. They break off and fade all at once, and the room is spinning. The hairline cracks inside of me are shifting and widening, my blood spilling through them, turning everything red.

His touch is disappearing.

Was he ever here?

Forgiveness?

There’s complete silence, and it’s possible I’ve dreamed the whole thing. But I jerk back to reality where the world is a blur, and all I hear is, “No, no, no, no, no . . .”

“Cataline.”

Calvin’s back, and there’s fierceness in his green eyes. His features are sharp enough to scrape my skin open like shards of glass, and that’s what I want. I want to cut myself open with Calvin.

“Where’d you go?” he whispers hotly, my face in his hands. He looks into my eyes for so long, I think he’s counting the flecks of grey.

“Take me home,” I tell him.

We walk the five blocks to my building in silence. When we arrive, I take his hand and lead him up the stairs, our only contact the tips of our fingers. As I unlock the door to my apartment, he stands so close that I feel his nose against the back of my head.

The door slams shut behind him. I leave the lights out and walk to the bedroom knowing he’ll follow. The moonlight flooding the room reminds me of the mansion, the way it turns the comforter into rolling hills of light and shade. I never close the blinds.

At the foot of the bed, he gathers my hair in a fist and inhales. “You,” he says. “Your smell.” He turns me around and spreads his hands over my scalp.

His kiss is like a drug, feeding me, quenching my thirst, my never-ending thirst, my infinite void, and planting himself inside me again. He pulls my dress over my shoulders and strips it away so I’m in my bra and panties. We fall back on the bed where he covers my body with his. His lips leave shining circles of saliva over my collarbone and the mounds of my breasts. He stops in the valley between them and taunts me with the tip of his tongue. My back arches to meet his mouth when he sucks my nipples through my bra. He splays his hand over my belly, skating it down over the lace, the only kind of panties I wear now. He grabs my pussy as if to possess it and lets it go just as quickly.

His body slides down the bed to explore my hipbone. I’m already trembling, imagining how it will be when I blissfully smash into pieces underneath him. He always knew how to touch me.

“What’s this?” he breathes. His finger is inches below my panty line, at the very tops of my thighs. I don’t need to read it for him, but I do anyway.

He traces the cursive ink as I say, “You’ll always be—”

His finger falls away, reappearing on the inside of my upper left thigh and swiping across it.

“—my superhero,” I finish.

He stops. The ceiling I’m staring at becomes blurry, and I know he’s watching me.

“Oh, God,” he whispers into the air. “And this?”

His touch on the small, careful scars below the words is the only thing I can feel in this moment. “That,” I say, “is so I know I’m still alive.”

“No,” he says.

I nod. “You protected me from everything, Calvin. Everything but myself.”

He buries his face between my legs, his hands spread to grip the outsides of my thighs. “Cataline,” he says over and over into my pussy. His nose pushes into my clit, his weighty words vibrate deep in my stomach. My body is convulsing in silent sobs, heat knotting deep and low, desperate for release as he whispers, “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

It feels like hours later when I rise onto my elbows, but it’s only been minutes. Calvin lifts his head to look at me, so differently than he used to. I reach and gently pull his hair, sifting the silky brown strands through my fingers. My hand runs down his cheek, and his eyes close when my thumb touches the corner of his lips. “I want this,” I say.

His eyes are still closed when he says, “I can’t. Look what I’ve done. I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”

“Then why did you come here?”

My eardrums threaten to explode from the quiet that follows.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “But I think I need you.”

I sit up all the way and he does too so we’re facing each other, cross-legged on the bed. I lean over to my nightstand for a blunt and a lighter. Even in the dark I feel the heat of his stare as I sit up, spark it, and put it to my lips. I take a drag and close it up inside myself, letting it work its magic. When I open my mouth, he distorts behind the smoke.

“It numbs,” I explain. “But you know that.”

“I don’t want you smoking that shit, Cataline.”

“What are you going to do? Forbid it? Tie me to the bed so I can’t?”

He inhales loudly and asks, “Do you want me to tie you to the bed?” His rumbling voice is so thick that it fills the space between us, and for a moment, I think I can touch it, put it in my hands, and roll it around.

“No,” I lie. The truth is, since he walked into the gallery, I’ve been aching all over, gaping like a wound I want him to Band-Aid himself over. I cut my skin because I haven’t felt anything real since the last time I felt him. Because the only thing that makes it better is watching the pain bleed out. I want him on top of me, inside of me—I want him to make himself a part of me again. But instead we sit in silence, the smoldering orange embers of my blunt the only sign of life as I take another hit, blowing more smoke in his direction.

The cloud surrounding us is pungent, thick, and elucidating. What Cataline’s numbing should be healed by now. “You’re not ready for this,” I say.

Her eyes close as she sinks deeper. She’s more assured than I’ve ever seen her, as if very little truly matters to her. I might as well be watching her from outside the window.

She sighs, coaxing her hair over her shoulder. “I’ll never be ready,” she says. “But I don’t want you to go.”

Leaving her to find peace would be the right thing to do. But I can’t convince myself, after tonight, that she’s better off without me. I might be the piece that’s missing. I’m definitely the reason that piece is gone.

Time is slow as she brings the orange light to her lips. Her eyes are lidded, and she’s peering at me over the joint, sucking and watching. After a beat, smoke leaks from one corner of her mouth. “I haven’t been properly fucked since the last time you were inside me.”

“Christ, Cataline,” I say, standing from the bed. The image of her body flush against the dining room floor as she took every inch of me is burned into my brain. I could do it again right now, take her just as hard. But another part of me, a new part, wants to remove every article of her clothing and touch her everywhere at once, slowly and as fast as possible. I haven’t felt out of control this way in years.

“Where are you going?” she asks as I back away.

“I don’t trust myself.”

She sets the joint in an ashtray on her nightstand and just looks at me. When enough time has passed that I think she’s going to let me go without a word, she blinks. “Why did you come here? To screw with me some more?”

“You know that’s not what I want.”

“Just get out. I didn’t even know until tonight that I’ve been waiting for you. How fucked up is that? And now that you’re here, you’re leaving? Have you been hiding in the shadows, waiting until I’d put some parts of myself back together?”

“That isn’t fair,” I say, crossing my arms to allay my reaction. “This is new for me too. I didn’t come here to hurt you.”

“Goddamn it. I’m so tired. If you’re going to shatter me, then be a fucking man and do it already.”

“That’s not—”

“Do it, and get out.”

“I don’t want to break you. I want to heal you.”

“You’re not a healer,” she seethes. “You are everything that’s wrong with me, but I still love you. Is that what you want to hear? I love you, even though you’re the worst part of me.”

I push the heels of my hands into my eyes. “I know I am. I know.”

“Finish what you started. Break me for good. Tell me you don’t love me and that you never will.”

My heart pounds inhumanly hard. I want to throw her on the bed, hit her, fuck her, and make love to her all at the same time. “I can’t tell you that,” I say, “when the truth is that I do.”

“No, you don’t,” she says through her teeth. “You want to control me. That’s not the same thing.”