Axis, noun
An imaginary line about which a body rotates.
The world was spinning and I was its axis.
I danced with the blurry people around me. I hugged bodies I didn’t know, kissed lips that felt too soft to be a man’s. I danced and danced and danced until I was so dizzy I could barely move anymore. And then I collapsed on a sofa and felt my feet twitching in time with the music. I laughed to myself, not giving a shit what anyone thought because all that mattered was my blurry dizzy world where there were no threatening voices and no angry faces.
Someone pulled me up a while after, and I danced again. Then, I started to feel my trip going from amazing to fucked-up beyond belief.
The blurry faces turned into monsters, their features mashing together in grotesque masks of pain and rage, all snarling at me, demanding things, asking for things I could never give them. They wanted answers, they wanted apologies, they wanted me to feel like shit, but all I wanted was to keep dancing forever. I didn’t have time for worry, or for pain. I didn’t have time for fucking Posy and her overdose and the mess she’d made of us when she left.
The monsters screamed for justice, but I couldn’t give it to them. I danced and danced, and now my feet felt like they were touching hot coals, burning the soles of my feet while I cried desperately for someone, anyone, to save me.
Then I saw his beautiful face through the ashes and the night, his ink-covered muscles and his tall frame towering over me. I made a desperate grab for the man in front of me, but stumbled into thin air. And I knew it couldn’t be real. Miles didn’t care about me enough to show up and save me. If I was lucky enough, maybe Arden would come. Arden still cared about me. She had to. We’d both had our hearts ripped apart by the same hurricane named Posy.
Arden appeared through the curtain of nightmares, her eyes as disappointed as ever. She stared at me and I cried and held out my arms, hoping she would be the one to help me. She shouted through the fog, screamed and demanded answers, but the only thing I could do was laugh and cry at the same time.
I could tell Arden was crying too, but I couldn’t help her. The fog was too thick to reach her, and I struggled to keep up with her words. To my ears, they sounded slurred and helpless, and they only made me panic more. There was only one person I wanted, only one man who could make it all better. But now I couldn’t remember his name. All I remembered was his voice, whispering my name, telling me I was a good girl, begging me to come for him and come apart in his arms. I begged Arden to call him, kept pushing my phone into her hands between sobs and soft pleading whispers.
She raised the phone to her ear and I saw her calling someone, but I didn’t understand the words coming out of her mouth. She was trying to help me, but I wasn’t sure whether I was too far gone to be helped. I needed him. Needed to see his lips open when he said my name, and needed to fall asleep in his arms, where I would finally feel safe.
The haze from the drugs and alcohol was mind-numbing, at the same time making me weak yet energetic as hell. But every time I tried to get up, I ended up tumbling back down. Arden was gone, the fog too thick to reach her. I screamed for her to help me, but no sound came out, and now I was lost, utterly lost, without a single soul to help me.
And then, suddenly, I felt his presence like an electric current in the room. I shakily got off the sofa I was lying on, and looked towards the place where the sparks flew the strongest. His eyes connected with mine, and I tried to stop the whimper that left my lips the next second. I was hooked the second I saw him. He made me feel like I was the only person in the packed room that reeked of sweat and spilled alcohol. I was all that mattered, and he was going to make it all better. He was going to fix me.
I reached out to him, and he came to me.
He looked like a god up close, and I shivered in fear and anticipation. He was so huge, towering over me, his body a mass of muscle and ink I wanted to taste with my tongue. He wore a white Henley shirt, the ink beneath the fabric peeking out at his sleeves and collar. His hair was dark and closely cropped, his eyes just as dark. He was handsome as hell and built like the devil. He could crush me with a single move of his strong, inked fingers.
“Miles,” I breathed, his name coming to me easily now, as if I’d never forgotten it at all. “Help me, Miles, please help me.”
He reached for me, wincing when his fingertips made contact with my skin, and I stared at him like he was my only salvation. I understood, despite my condition, how special this moment was. I knew it would change everything between us the second sparks flew from his arms to my naked flesh. It only took me a second to understand that after that first touch—I belonged to this monster of a man completely, and there would be absolutely no going back.
I watched him speak to Arden who appeared out of nowhere, but I didn’t hear the words. I just wanted him to take me home. I wanted to be alone with him, so I could explore the lines of his tattoos with my fingertips, so I could kiss the vein in his forehead and find out if he had more throbbing parts like it underneath his clothes. Pure childlike curiosity hooked me in its grasp as I stared at the man, the monster. I wanted to leave with him. I wanted to lay all my worries and troubles on his broad, capable shoulders, and beg him to carry me right along with them. And I was sure he would let me, because when he looked at me, I saw exactly how he felt about me. The same way I felt about him.
Once their conversation was over, he came back towards me, my eyes deceiving me and making him dance before them. He grabbed me, and it all happened in slow motion, so painfully slow I wanted to scream and beg him to hold me, save me, fuck me, but my mouth wouldn’t open, and the words wouldn’t come.
“Let’s go,” he muttered in my ear and held me close in his arms.
I inhaled his scent, leather and musk and pine, and I wanted to cry. Something in my fucked-up head, a tiny little voice of reason, was telling me I’d been waiting for this for so, so long, and now that it was finally here, I was too drugged-up to make sense of it. But I couldn’t stop my fingers flying up, tearing at the fabric of his shirt, sending buttons everywhere. My mouth latched onto his throat and he groaned as I sucked him, desperate for more, to drink down the unique scent of him that was making my head spin.
We stepped outside and the cold hit me like a fucking slap in the face, but I couldn’t stop, gasping around his skin and leaving red and blue marks all over his flesh. He told me to stop but I couldn’t.
“I can’t,” I cried out, “I need to taste you because you won’t be here tomorrow.”
I could feel his eyes on me as he carried me down the street. I knew where I’d been at some point, but now our surroundings didn’t look familiar at all. It was a dark forest, the branches of evil trees reaching for us, strangers standing behind the curtains of the broken windows in the buildings that lined the forest. I felt them staring, felt their gazes trying to hurt me, so I dug my face into Miles’ chest and cried like a little girl afraid of the dark.
Time was passing in ways I couldn’t understand, and he was my only anchor. I clung to his clothes, his skin, his body like it was my lifeline. I’d never been more afraid than that night.
I murmured things neither of us understood against his skin when my body started rebelling against the shit I’d put into it. Convulsing, shaking, sweating and swearing, he had to stop and put me down because I’d started scratching and biting, so fucking scared of him letting go I tried to do it for him.
“Don’t,” I screamed at him, my fists pummeling against his chest. “Don’t let go, you bastard!”
He grabbed my wrists and pinned them behind my back against a streetlight.
“Stop,” he growled at me, his voice all molten honey and dark intent. “Stop fucking fighting me, sugar.”
Sugar, sugar, sugar, it was so sweet, it made me melt for him, and I stopped fighting, stood there feeling everything and nothing and let him pull me back into the safe haven of his arms.
“Beautiful girl,” he whispered into my hair, his lips so close to mine but so far away, as if there was a whole galaxy separating us. “My beautiful broken girl.”
This time, he just threw me over his shoulder and carried me away, his hand dangerously close to my ass. The nightmares kicked back in as we kept walking. I saw my apartment building in the distance, but we didn’t go there. Miles carried me to the building next door, past a grumpy old doorman whose mouth hung open when he saw us, and up so many flights of stairs I wondered how he didn’t collapse under my weight.
But he didn’t let me go, didn’t stop holding me as he unlocked the front door.
The scent of his apartment was clean, sterile like a hospital with a faint hint of his own perfume. He carried me inside, kicking the door closed behind him, past the pristine living room and into a sparse, barren bedroom that contained nothing but an enormous bed and a framed painting of the color white on the white wall in a white frame. I felt like I was in a dream, my heart pounding and thumping with fear and expectations.
He let me down on the bed, and took a step back, taking deep breaths as he stared at me. I sat up on my knees and stared back, my head cocked to the side and the drugs making my vision spin.
“Miles,” I breathed. “Miles, you saved me.”
“No,” he said roughly, his breaths so ragged I was afraid something was very, very wrong.
“Come closer,” I begged him.
“No,” he said again, looking at his hands as if they had betrayed him. “No, I can’t be near you. Can’t stand it, can’t take it, can’t fucking deal.”
“Miles,” I whispered, the darkness reaching for me and trying to pull me under yet again. “Miles, I need you.”
He looked up from his shaking hands, this mountain of a man reduced to trembling wreck as he stared at me.
“You have me,” he said softly, and I crawled closer on the bed.
“I love you, Miles,” I whispered again. “I love you so much, Miles Reilly, anything for you, anything for this, anything for us.”
My arms gave out and I fell down, tendrils of darkness pulling at my consciousness. I was so close to passing out, but I needed him to know.
“Tell me you heard me,” I begged him.
“I heard you,” came the strangled answer. “I heard you, Bebe.”
“Closer,” I begged, and he dropped to his knees, came to me slowly and brokenly, his legs scraping the hardwood floor. “I need you to know. I need you to understand.”
“I do,” he promised. “I do, Bebe, I do.”
I reached for his beautiful face and he shook uncontrollably when I touched him.
“Not like with the others,” I whispered. “Just me.”
“Just you,” he nodded. “Just you, fucked up and just with you.”
“It’s okay,” I promised, my mind drifting. “Because I love you.”
“You do?” he asked, his eyes big and scared. A broken soul in the body of a monster. Of a god.
“I do,” I promised, and let my eyes close. “I love you, Miles Reilly.”