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The taste of copper fills my mouth as he slides two fingers across my bruised lips. In vain, I try to move my hips, needing something I can’t even name. Each press of his fingertips feels like an electric shock, painful and sweet at the same time.
He moans as his hand slips down my body, tracing every curve until he’s claimed all of me.
And as blood continues to pulse from my wounds in time to the fluttering beat of my heart, he thrusts inside me, splitting me open.
* * *
I wake with a jerk, sitting up so fast it makes me dizzy. Cold sweat drips down my back as I take in my surroundings. The room is dimly lit, but familiar. I’m back in my bed, in my apartment, in the shitty little complex on the west side of Halston.
Far away from that awful night so long ago.
So why the fuck doesn’t it feel like it?
Why does it feel like the past is in this fucking room with me, breathing down my neck?
My skin goes cold, and I clutch my covers to my chest, wrapping them around my body with my good arm. I drag my lower lip between my teeth, half-expecting my lips to feel bruised and swollen from kisses that aren’t even real.
Fuck.
It’s not the first time I’ve dreamed of the night I got shot. It happens all the fucking time, although sometimes the dreams are so ephemeral that I barely remember them. But it was more vivid last night than it’s been in months. I swear I could feel the weight of the stranger as he settled into the cradle of my body. I could feel his hands on my skin. I could practically breathe in the scent of him, and it filled me with a strange ache.
Attraction and revulsion.
Pleasure and pain.
Desire and fear.
My dreams of that night are always a confusing mix of polar opposites, as if I somehow crave the very thing I’m trying to flee from.
Ignoring the goose bumps that rise on my skin, I throw the covers off and pad to the bathroom. The dark ink of my tattoo stands out starkly against my pale skin, catching my gaze in the mirror as I wait for the water to heat up in the shower. I got it done almost a year ago, a month after I started working at Duke’s. The image popped into my mind fully formed, but I’m a shit artist, so I described it to the guy at the tattoo parlor and he sketched it out for me.
But he captured what was in my head perfectly. The ink covers my entire right arm—what’s left of it, anyway. Brilliant, deep red roses bloom on my skin, their petals shiny and smooth. Their stems bend delicately and gracefully, as if a wind stirs them, and a dark gray-blue ink fills the background of the image, growing lighter as it moves toward my shoulder.
The tattoo artist said it was one of the best pieces he’d ever done, but when he asked me why I picked it and where I came up with the image, I couldn’t tell him.
Just that I needed it.
Just that it felt necessary.
Steam starts to creep across the edges of the mirror, and I slip into the shower, letting hot water pelt my skin.
A face flashes in my mind as I lather my body with soap and begin to shampoo my hair. This can’t be the first time the man with mesmerizing eyes and I have crossed paths. It’s too much of a fucking coincidence that he and his friends were there to step in before the meth-head could hurt me last night.
How could they have known I needed help?
There’ve been moments over the last couple years where my skin has prickled oddly, where I’ve had the strange sensation of being watched. But the skin of my damaged arm often prickles where the nerves never healed quite right, and paranoia has been a constant companion as I’ve tried to overcome the lingering PTSD symptoms that followed in the wake of almost dying.
So I never took those odd feelings seriously. I always assumed they were products of my messed up mind, just another thing I would need to eventually overcome if I wanted to live a semi-normal life one day.
But what if it wasn’t all in my head?
What if that wasn’t the first time my path and the men from the club’s have crossed again?
What if last night was only the first time I knew about it?
* * *
The next few days are a blur as I stick to my routine: library, work, and then home. Despite my best attempt at pretending everything is fine, I can’t help but jump at every odd noise or any footsteps that seem to follow too closely. And I’m burning through money faster than I should by taking cabs to and from work and to the library.
