Page 87 of Retrograde

“You don’t have to know anything. Just do as you’re fucking told.” When I hum in what’s neither a refusal nor an agreement, a softer note mingles in his rough voice. “A filthy thing like you, you’ll enjoy choking on my cock. I can tell you want it, you know? You’re dripping all over my face.”

He’s right. God, is he ever. I feel ashamed and depraved for wanting to do that. For wanting to serve my captor—a man who has hurt me and was planning to kill me until recently, a man who’s made it his personal mission to degrade me in any way imaginable since the day he met me.

But I want it. I want to see how far he can take it, how unrecognisable to myself he can make me. It’s like I can no longer tell the difference between flying and falling, like I want him to push me into a free fall, no longer believing in the rock bottom awaiting me when I land.

But it’s more than recklessness. Deep underneath, there’s a mad belief—one that defies all logic and yet feels so true. The belief that if he pushes me, it’s because he, too, wants to see me fly. The belief that perhaps we are both liars.

“Last thing, Riley.” Aron’s voice pulls me away from my thoughts. “When I say I want your pussy in my face, I want it in my face.”

He knocks my knees off the hammock, my legs sprawling to the sides. His mouth clamps around my core. Not giving me a second to recover, he reaches forward to grab my hair at the base of my skull, yanking at it urgently.

I barely manage to wrap my lips around his shaft before he pushes my head down, thrusting his hips forward at the same time. His tip hits the back of my throat, the piercing colder and harder than the flesh, irritating the area. I gag violently, tears springing to my eyes. My jaw feels on the verge of being ripped off from the sheer size of him wedged between my lips. My throat constricting, I claw his thighs with my nails, but he doesn’t care. He lifts my head up, then pushes it back down, over and over, his hips meeting me halfway, my screams muted by his cock.

I can’t take it, I’m realising in a panic, my face wet and my heartbeat rapid. It’s too much. His size is too much, the discomfort is too much, and the pain is unbearable.

But just then, he starts sucking on my clit, tracing it with his tongue rhythmically. Pain fades into the background. Everything falls away in the face of the savage pleasure unspooling deep inside of me, an overpowering ache that drives me to meet his thrusts in my mouth and to rub myself over him as he fucks me with his tongue, until we’re both moaning against each other.

His thrusts grow erratic, and his grip on my hair tightens, his length twitching in my mouth. His piercing grazes the back of my throat, and the gagging becomes unbearable again—but for only a heartbeat. Then his cum spills, and the intense taste drives me over the edge. With one more expert flick of his tongue over my clit, I shatter too.

“Swallow everything,” he orders me, his voice low and husky. “That’s it. That’s a good fucking girl.”

With my eyes closed and breathing deep through my nose, I suppress the urge to heave, sucking the last remains of his release from his cock.

My vision is still blurred, my chest aches with the lack of oxygen, and all my muscles feel weak and spent. But I barely get a moment to recover.

“Come here. I want to see your face. I want to see how much you enjoyed having your throat fucked raw.”

Just as easily as before, he turns me around and pulls me close. I’m lying on his heaving chest, and we’re face-to-face, both slick with sweat.

“Yeah, you fucking loved it, didn’t you? I can see it in your eyes. You look completely drunk, Hotshot. You love it when I use you like a thing that belongs to me.”

“Maybe I just enjoyed washing your face with my orgasm, asshole.” The retort comes without thinking. “My mess is all around your mouth, and you’ll spend the rest of the night smelling like me.” I swipe my tongue across his chin, tasting the truth behind my words. “Right now, you look like something that belongs to me.”

His eyes widen, and I brace myself, expecting his anger, his raised voice, the slap of his hand against my flesh. I cower instinctively, preparing for anything but the thing that he does: he roars with laughter. Not in a cruel, anticipatory way either. Still, I don’t trust it, digging my fingers into his chest, my whole body tense.

“Relax,” he tells me when he catches his breath. “I won’t hurt you for having a smart mouth. Not when it served me that well. But fucking hell, Riley, I wasn’t prepared for that.”

He rubs my back, and still not quite believing my luck, I settle against him. Nestled in his warmth, I start getting sleepy and comfortable. But I don’t want to close my eyes. I don’t want whatever moment we’re having to be over yet. And so instead I ask a question that’s been on my mind since his screams woke me up.

“Will you tell me about Haqif?” I feel him stiffen beneath me, and apprehension ripples through me. “You were crying out his name. Was he a friend?”

I’m half expecting him to refuse to tell me, if not to push me off the hammock. But he does neither.

“Heh. No. Haqif was my school bully.” He chuckles, fingers running down my spine. “Fucking typical of him, out of them all, to be the one to come back and haunt me.”

“What do you mean?” Without lifting my head up from the firm cushion of his chest, I glance up to find him looking at me and into an unreachable distance at the same time. “What happened to him?”

I rise when he breathes in heavily, then sink when he exhales, the sound laboured.

“We were in the army together. Our base was blown up during a raid. His leg got torn off. I was only uninjured because I went for a piss at the luckiest possible moment. Just a fucking coincidence. No merit.” He scoffs. His heart speeds up, its thrum reverberating deep inside his ribcage.

“All the medics were dead. The nearest city was ten miles away, and all the jeeps were gone too.”

“There was nothing you could have done,” I tell him mildly. “You couldn’t have carried him for ten miles, Aron.”

“I did carry him for ten miles,” he counters grimly. “But I stopped right at the edge of the city, not half a mile away from the hospital.” He pauses to take a breath before uttering the next part seemingly without breathing at all. “That’s when he died. Fifteen minutes away from help. Because I had to stop.”

My throat constricts, and the corners of my eyes burn with salt.