Chapter 23
His Bloody Elbow
“Annie, try this.”
“Try this” turns out to be a route marked 5.10a, a far more difficult route than I’ve ever climbed before.
I just look at Charles.
“It’s balance-y,” he says.” I think you’ll like it.”
I don’t just like it; I flash it. I mean, I go right up it on the first try, without falling or having to take a sit even once. It’s difficult, the handholds small and the footholds positively minute—in one place there isn’t even a foothold; you just have to stand on the wall—but I do it. And the whole group—Tara, Charles, all of them, cheer for me as he lowers me back to the ground.
“You’re getting stronger,” Charles says as I undo the figure-eight knot.
I grin at him. “I’m getting better at using the strength I have.”
“Six of one,” he says. “Right, miss, tonight’s the night for your ego. Watch this.”
We swap ropes, I tie in to the anchor rope, and I belay him on the same route.
He struggles mightily.
“Balance-y,” he calls down. “I’m better at the brute-force routes.”
“You gotta get your feet up, man,” Tara calls.
I turn to look at her. “What does ‘get your feet up’ mean?”
“Bugger!”
“GAHH!” While my eyes are turned away, Charles slips off the wall and I’m pulled off my feet.
“Sorry!” I call, dangling between the top rope and the anchor.
“No problem,” he calls back, rubbing the elbow that got knocked in his fall.
I dropped him.
He has never dropped me. Not once. Not even close.
Instead he showed me a route I could do that he couldn’t.
And I dropped him.
“I’m really sorry,” I call again.
“No problem,” he repeats.
“Sorry,” I say again when we get home and he’s cleaning off his bleeding, grimy elbow. “I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off you.”
“No problem. No harm done.”
I wonder how a bloody elbow counts as “no harm,” but I can’t bring myself to ask out loud. Instead I say, more obliquely, “I don’t think you’re letting the monster out very much right now.”
“Okay,” he says, dabbing at his elbow. “Suppose I do that, and my hypothesis is the correct one? The monster’s not a depressed eight-year-old but a vicious man, full-grown, who’s been rock climbing for half his life and swinging a cricket bat for the other half?”
“Whatever. Fine. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“The worst? I could kill you.”
“You would never do that.”
“Are we having an argument now? I only ask because I’d like to finish with this first.” He gestures with his elbow, on which he’s pressing a wet cloth.
“It’s not an argument,” I argue. “It’s a discussion.”
“Right. Well, toddle over to the sofa, and I’ll join you for our discussion just as soon as I’ve put a bandage on this.”
I do. And he does. Once he’s done with his first aid, he sits at his end of the sofa and says, “You were saying I would never kill you. I never would, no. But my father would, and that’s what we’re talking about.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re exaggerating.”
Charles scratches his nose and says lightly, “He put my mother in hospital for two weeks when she was pregnant. That was the first miscarriage. She thinks I don’t know about it, but he told me.”
I look at him, my mouth open, not believing him, not wanting to believe him. “Why would he tell you?”
“He was complaining about her inability to sustain a pregnancy. I was twelve.”
“What?” I whisper, stunned.
“I’m sure he’s raped her too, multiple times. And I’m sure she’s not the only one.”
I’m sitting there, the blood draining from my face. I feel cold and prickly, nauseated.
“I’m telling you this because you asked what was the worst that could happen if the monster got loose. This, by the way, this right now, is me genuinely trying the Monster Deal. I would never tell you these things otherwise.”
I nod and think about this, actually having a discussion now, rather than an argument. At last I say, “I thought it would be noisier. Yelling.”
“I don’t have to yell to be scary,” he says easily.
“Is not being scary the point of the pit and whatever?”
“Not hurting the other person is the point. The Monster Deal asks me to do things I know will cause you to suffer, and to trust that you are strong enough to withstand it.”
“Huh,” I say. “A wall is a wall is a wall.”
“What’s that?”
“I had this professor who used to say that. ‘A wall is a wall is a wall.’ You built a wall to keep the monster in so you wouldn’t hurt people, but that same wall keeps people out, keeps them from being nice to you. You’re trapped behind the wall with the monster.”
He raises an eyebrow at me. “And fool that I am, I’ve spent the last month teaching you to climb.”
A long time later I put my arms around his neck and roll on top of him.
With one hand on my butt, he finds his way inside me and then puts both arms around my waist, bracing me down. He kisses me and fucks me, and I feel more fragile than I ever have before. When I attempt to pull away from the kiss, to come up for air, he moves one of his hands to the back of my head and forces my head down beside his, my mouth on his neck, and I whimper into the heat.
“Fuck. Annie,” he grinds out from between his teeth.
My body is locked against his, my arms trapped under his neck. I soften my body and relax into his thrusts, letting my body bounce against his, at his will.
Very gradually, my relaxation transforms into arousal, arousal into desire, and, very gradually, with the push of his pelvis against my clit, desire into desperation. I’m hovering at the edge, hovering there, and I recognize at last that he’s doing it on purpose, holding me at that edge. He knows my body, knows how to keep me there, suspended indefinitely.
As soon as I see the trick, I smile.
“Charles, I want to come now,” I say firmly into his neck.
“I know you do,” he grunts back.
“So let me, you jerk!” I laugh, and he grips me harder to him with a rough noise, and fucks me harder. I groan luxuriously into his neck.
“Beg me,” he says, still fucking me.
I laugh. “What? No way!”
And he stops. He just stops. He’s breathing hard under me, his arms gripped like iron bands around me, but he’s lying still inside me.
I squirm as much as I can against him, saying, “Hey!”
“Beg,” he commands.
“No!” I say, struggling more fiercely now. With effort, I pull my arms out from under his neck.
When I get them free, he grabs my wrists and wrestles me onto my back. I laugh as he does it, but when he pins my wrists to the mattress, next to my shoulders, and slides his cock back into me, he looks into my eyes, my neck arches back, and I’m not laughing anymore.
He says, “Beg.”
“No.”
He fucks into me hard, once.
“Do you want to come?”
“Yes!”
“Beg me, and I’ll let you.”
“No.”
And he slides hard into me, twice.
“Do you want to come?”
“Yes, Charles,” I say in my most sex-kitten voice, but it does nothing.
“Beg.”
I whine instead, and he slams his cock in me three times. Hard. I grunt with each one.
“Do you want to come?”
“Yes.”
“Beg me.”
I press my lips together.
Four times. Hard. Steady. I breathe, “Oh god,” after each one, as my arousal seems to cross threshold after threshold without ever approaching the final edge.
“Do you want to come?”
“Yes.” A broken whisper this time.
“Then say it.” He fucks into me.
“Oh god, Charles.”
“Beg.” Again.
“I want—”
“Now.”
“Please, Charles.”
“Don’t stop.”
It comes out of me in a soft, high chant, “Please make me come, make me come, please, Charles, please, Charles, let me come,” and he moves perfectly, perfectly, pressing and moving against my clit, moving inside me as I surrender and plead, until I can’t breathe—but as soon as I stop, holding my breath with the approaching orgasm, he’s still again.
“If you stop, I stop,” he says, gasping as much as I am.
“Please,” I whisper. It devolves into a desperate, wild, “Please. Please. Please,” with each focused thrust, and when I come, my whole body spasms, my arms and legs wrap themselves around him, and I lift myself entirely off the bed, closing all the distance between us. I’m clinging to him, dangling from him, thrusting myself against him, rolling and gripping and half-blind.
He drops off of his elbows and presses me into the mattress, silently thrusting those three hard, sharp thrusts of his orgasm.
“Ow, my bloody elbow,” he says as we lie there, panting. He kisses me cheerfully, rolls over, and laughs, while I feel shattered and raw.
It marks a change in the way Charles touches me. There is an exigency in him, and a demand. He asks more of me—more orgasms, more surrender—and I give it. There is an intensity, as well. Though he always begins tenderly, his touch escalates to real force, so that by the time I’m coming, he may slap my ass or my thigh or my breasts to a hot, stinging peak. Friday morning he finds bruises from his fingers on my arm. He kisses the marks and asks softly, “Hurt?”
“Nah.”
And it doesn’t. It feels like he’s trusting me to be strong enough to withstand the inevitable bruisings of wide-open connection, and I feel myself earning that trust.
I will not drop him again. Not if I can help it. Not even if he drops me.
Which he does.