Gaze Locked Until Courthouse Dawn

I sank my teeth into the thick, salted muscle of Benjamin’s shoulder until the skin gave and the iron bloom of him filled my mouth, my right fist already buried to the knuckles in his dark hair, wrenching his skull backward so his throat arched and his eyes had nowhere left to hide. His skin slid under my teeth, slick with everything the room had wrung out of both of us, and I had to bite down harder just to keep purchase, the sweat pooling under my grip until his hair was sodden against my knuckles. I held him there, jaw locked, tasting him, feeling the tremor travel down his spine and into the mattress as I pulled harder, exposing more of that long, vulnerable column of neck. Tomorrow he would sit in a witness box and unmake us both with his mouth. Tonight that mouth belonged to me.

His breath hitched, a raw, startled sound, and the rest of him confessed what the sound only started: the rigid lock of his hips against the sheet, his hands lifting off the mattress and hovering, closing on nothing, not knowing whether they were allowed to land on me. With my free hand I dragged my nails down the slope of his shoulder, carving four burning tracks, then brought that same hand across the side of his face hard enough that the crack of it cut through the thick air. His cheek went dark red. I used the fist in his hair to yank his face back to mine before the sting had even finished arriving, forcing those wide, dark eyes to stay on me while I bit him again, lower this time, at the join of neck and shoulder, sucking until I knew the mark would last past dawn. Past the courthouse steps. Past the moment he opened his throat and ruined us.

I shifted my weight, letting the full, heavy press of my body pin him. The sheets were already damp, clinging to the backs of my thighs, to the small of his back. Every shift of my hips made the mattress groan. I could feel the exact temperature of him: fever-hot, almost painful where we touched, cooler only where sweat had begun to run in thin rivers along his ribs. I pulled his hair again, a slow, grinding torque that turned his head exactly where I wanted it, so that when I spoke it was against his mouth, our breath mixing in the narrow, overheated space between us.

You don’t get to look away, I told him, and the words came out thick, half swallowed by the humidity. Not tonight. Tomorrow you can look at the floor of that witness box all you want. Tonight you look at me. His lashes fluttered. I felt the change in his breathing, the way it went from startled to something deeper, shakier, the inhale catching like fabric snagging on a nail. I rose up on my knees over his hips, the mattress giving under each one, and reached back between us with my left hand to take him in my palm, hard and slick and jumping against my fingers. I did not rush it. I lined him up against myself and held him there, the blunt heat of him pressing without entering, and I tightened the fist in his hair until his eyes watered and stayed open. Then I let myself down. The first inch was a slow, thick stretch, my body opening around him by degrees, and I controlled every one of those degrees with my thighs and my hips and the simple downward fact of my mass. His whole body seized under me, his heels skidding on the sheet for purchase they could not find, and I pulled his hair harder so he could not break the stare while I sank, so he had to watch my face as I took him to the root and settled, grinding down, pinning him with everything I was. His hands flew to my hips, not to stop me, just to have something to hold. I knocked them away with my left hand and then sent that hand up to join the other, fisting his hair with both now, one at the crown, one lower at the nape, using the twin pull to arch him, to expose, to own the angle of his skull completely.

The room smelled of salt and sweat and the faint metallic ghost of the blood I had already drawn. I could feel every complaint of the mattress springs under us, every small, involuntary twitch in his thighs as I moved. I made it slow. I made him wait. I lifted and dropped in increments so small they were almost cruel, feeling the drag of him on every rise, watching the color climb from his chest into his throat into his face, watching the tendon in his neck stand out like wire, watching the way his mouth fell open without sound. Tomorrow’s testimony sat between us like a third body in the bed. I thought of the fluorescent lights, the recorder, the way his voice would sound when he said my name in a room full of people who wanted us broken. I thought of it while I used his hair like a rein, both hands working, turning his head left, then right, then back to dead center so he could not escape my eyes.

When they swear you in, I breathed into his mouth, you’ll have this under your collar. Right here. I let the lower fist slide out of his nape and pressed that thumb into the bite at the join of his shoulder until he hissed, the other hand holding his head exactly where it was. You’ll feel it every time you swallow before you answer. His eyes shut against it, and I slapped him for that, the flat of the freed hand across the same cheek, the sound of it wet and sharp in the thick air, and before his head could even finish turning the fist still knotted at his crown had it back, his gaze dragged open and nailed to mine. Say my name in that box, I said, and you’ll taste this.

His breathing had gone ragged, a wet, open-mouthed rhythm that matched the thick pulse I could feel where I held him inside me. I leaned down until my breasts flattened against the hard plane of his chest, my free hand planting beside his head to take the weight, the heel of it sinking into the soaked pillow, until the sweat of us became a single, indistinguishable slick, and I bit the underside of his jaw, not breaking skin this time, just holding, just making the point with pressure. The one fist in his hair never loosened. I used it to lift him into every downward drive of my hips, to make him meet me, to make the physics of it inescapable. The slick catch of skin on skin. A single drop of sweat rolling from my temple onto his cheek. The faint rasp of the sheet as his heels dug in. The sound he made, barely a sound, more a breath pushed out of him, when I tilted my hips by a fraction and his jaw went slack and his heels lost the sheet entirely.

I did not look away. I would not let him look away. This was the proof. This bruising, this stinging, this dense and consuming grip of my body around his. I owned the man who was going to destroy us. I made him feel it in the roots of his hair, in the throb of the bite marks, in the way I refused to hurry even as his body started to shake under me, helpless, overrun. The air had gone almost liquid, a heavy medium we were drowning in together. I could taste my own pulse. I could feel the exact second his fear turned over into hunger, the way his hips finally, belatedly, tried to rise into me, and I pressed down harder so he would understand that even that was mine to allow.

Still I used the hair. Always the hair. A sharp pull to expose the other side of his throat so I could mark that too. A twisting grip that forced his chin up when his eyes tried to roll. A steady, grinding tension that kept every nerve he had wired to the simple fact of my hand at his crown and the other braced beside his skull, caging him. Tomorrow you walk in there and you end this, I thought, and the thought ran cold under the heat, a constant, sick pull toward the fallout. Dawn would come. He would stand in a courtroom with my teeth in his skin and swear to tell the truth. I drove that into him with every slow, heavy stroke, with the second slap still red on his face, with the unrelenting lock of my eyes.

When I decided it was time, I did not ask. I pushed up off the pillow, brought that hand back to his nape, and gathered both fists in his hair again, hauling his head up off the pillow until we were forehead to forehead, breath to breath, the wet air compressing into that last inch of space. I looked him dead in the eye and I took it, ground down onto him with my whole weight and chased it with no regard for his rhythm, his hands, the small desperate adjustments he was trying to make under me. It came up through me thick and heavy, my thighs locking around his hips hard enough to feel the bone, my body clenching down on him in long, crushing pulls, the salt of his sweat on my lip where I had pressed my mouth against his cheek. I did not close my eyes. I made him watch. I felt the brutal little smile pull at my mouth and did not bother to hide it. See, the look said. See who holds this. See what you are walking into that courtroom still wearing on your skin. And the instant I had finished I stopped moving, stopped entirely, sat heavy and still on him with both fists in his hair while the last of it drained out of me and left him stranded.

He followed anyway, a few seconds behind, with a sound like something caught in his chest, a cracked, airless groan that broke in the middle, and I held his head exactly there, refusing him even the privacy of looking away from his own undoing. Then the weight of us collapsed inward, his head sinking back into the pillow under my grip, my spine folding until my cheek lay against his throat. Sweat-slick, shaking, the mattress a wreck beneath us. I felt the smile still on my face and felt, in the same breath, that it had settled nothing. It had been a shape my mouth made. Underneath it, where I had expected to find the score balanced, there was only the same dense, unfinished want, sitting exactly where it had sat before I started.

I did not let go of his hair. I opened the lower fist, planted that hand on the mattress beside his ribs, and dragged my right leg back over his hips, the sodden sheet peeling off my thigh, his softening weight slipping out of me with a wet pull that made both of us flinch. I rolled onto my back in the narrow strip of mattress beside him, my shoulder jammed against his, and kept the other fist knotted at his crown the whole way down, so that when I was flat he was still flat too, and his head came with me, wrenched sideways on the pillow, his face turned to me by my grip and nothing else, his breath hitting my jaw in hot, uneven bursts. My body was heavy, emptied in the narrowest sense, and the ache underneath had not moved an inch. It sat in my chest, in the bite marks, in the sodden hair wound around my knuckles. Tomorrow would still come. He would still walk into that room and open his mouth. All I had done was make the cost more specific, more personal, harder to survive. I stared at the ceiling and felt my fingers tightening again without my asking them to, felt my teeth already wanting the same bruise, and I knew we would not sleep. Dawn was a pressure building in the walls. We had taken everything we could take from each other, and it was not enough.