withdraws and comes slowly back, watching my face. Then he lowers his head, his sandpapery cheek against mine, and begins to thrust in long, elliptical strokes, a gradual acceleration. Each rotation of his hips drives us on.
It feels safe now, to be under his control. The harder he pushes, the more securely I am held, the more relaxed I become. I am inside his space. He’s strong and lethal and he is all around me and he is mine. I want to get as close to him as it’s possible to be. I want the weight of him, the anchor. I want to live under his skin, inside his heavy bones, with all of Jack around me. I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer, following his rhythm, rising to meet him with each long stroke, until he grows too fast and strong to keep up with, too ragged to follow, and I can only let myself be carried by him into a last blinding surge of pleasure. His cock throbs like a heartbeat and his teeth close on the underside of my shackled arm, and he comes silently, shivering, buried inside me.
When the last pulsing convulsions have stilled, and he’s begun, finally, to soften, he unlocks the handcuffs and rubs my wrists, kisses the angry red marks and apologizes.
“I don’t know, baby,” he says, laying my hand across his eyes. “I don’t know.”
But he never explains what he means.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I keep the box Jack gave me on a shelf in the far corner of my closet. It contains my treasures now, too, separated from his by a wooden divider down the center. It’s a beautiful object, too pretty to be set aside this way, with this motley collection of battered shoeboxes and boot boxes and one flimsy pie box full of odd bits of writing that I’ll probably never use. But when I leave it out on my dresser, the box seems to reproach me.
Secrets are nothing to be careless with. Molly taught me that.
She taught me many things. We spent that summer at the Center in a strange groove, immediately more intimate than I had ever been with another person. The impermanence of our friendship was one of its draws; I knew she’d carry away my secrets as I would carry hers, and there might be a measure of relief in letting them go.
Not that we thought of it that way. We were kids; we moved and played as children do. Most days we went next door to the Pax Nursery, a family-run business with flowers and herbs at the front of the lot and inside the main building, then shrubs and rows of ornamental saplings running out to the edge of the property, behind which was a peach orchard and a slow-moving river. It was something of a haven to the Center kids––a safe, cheerful place that smelled of orange blossoms and clean soil.
Lyle Pax worked there with his father, restocking the plants and transferring the seedlings to bigger pots. At thirty years old, his body was thin and strong as wire, but you could see the disability plainly in the rubbery wetness of his mouth, the way his lower lip hung and twitched as he repeated things over to himself. We learned from his father that Lyle had been in a car accident when he was fifteen and had spent over a year in rehab before his family was able to take him home.
Years later, this disability was stressed by his lawyer. Medical records were produced, showing the extent and location of the brain damage, and expert witnesses were called to explain how little he was to blame for what happened that summer.
No one had the heart to argue. Blame was assigned to those soft white spots on the MRI, those dead little pieces of Lyle Pax’s brain where conscience and self-control should have resided.
Watching him with the late-summer flowers, so gentle with the water on their blossoms, you’d never think he could hurt anyone. Even right afterward, after what everyone called “the incident,” with his spade still dripping blood, with blood on his hands and splattered on the ground, he seemed baffled and as docile as ever. He kept saying tearfully that he didn’t know what had
It feels safe now, to be under his control. The harder he pushes, the more securely I am held, the more relaxed I become. I am inside his space. He’s strong and lethal and he is all around me and he is mine. I want to get as close to him as it’s possible to be. I want the weight of him, the anchor. I want to live under his skin, inside his heavy bones, with all of Jack around me. I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer, following his rhythm, rising to meet him with each long stroke, until he grows too fast and strong to keep up with, too ragged to follow, and I can only let myself be carried by him into a last blinding surge of pleasure. His cock throbs like a heartbeat and his teeth close on the underside of my shackled arm, and he comes silently, shivering, buried inside me.
When the last pulsing convulsions have stilled, and he’s begun, finally, to soften, he unlocks the handcuffs and rubs my wrists, kisses the angry red marks and apologizes.
“I don’t know, baby,” he says, laying my hand across his eyes. “I don’t know.”
But he never explains what he means.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I keep the box Jack gave me on a shelf in the far corner of my closet. It contains my treasures now, too, separated from his by a wooden divider down the center. It’s a beautiful object, too pretty to be set aside this way, with this motley collection of battered shoeboxes and boot boxes and one flimsy pie box full of odd bits of writing that I’ll probably never use. But when I leave it out on my dresser, the box seems to reproach me.
Secrets are nothing to be careless with. Molly taught me that.
She taught me many things. We spent that summer at the Center in a strange groove, immediately more intimate than I had ever been with another person. The impermanence of our friendship was one of its draws; I knew she’d carry away my secrets as I would carry hers, and there might be a measure of relief in letting them go.
Not that we thought of it that way. We were kids; we moved and played as children do. Most days we went next door to the Pax Nursery, a family-run business with flowers and herbs at the front of the lot and inside the main building, then shrubs and rows of ornamental saplings running out to the edge of the property, behind which was a peach orchard and a slow-moving river. It was something of a haven to the Center kids––a safe, cheerful place that smelled of orange blossoms and clean soil.
Lyle Pax worked there with his father, restocking the plants and transferring the seedlings to bigger pots. At thirty years old, his body was thin and strong as wire, but you could see the disability plainly in the rubbery wetness of his mouth, the way his lower lip hung and twitched as he repeated things over to himself. We learned from his father that Lyle had been in a car accident when he was fifteen and had spent over a year in rehab before his family was able to take him home.
Years later, this disability was stressed by his lawyer. Medical records were produced, showing the extent and location of the brain damage, and expert witnesses were called to explain how little he was to blame for what happened that summer.
No one had the heart to argue. Blame was assigned to those soft white spots on the MRI, those dead little pieces of Lyle Pax’s brain where conscience and self-control should have resided.
Watching him with the late-summer flowers, so gentle with the water on their blossoms, you’d never think he could hurt anyone. Even right afterward, after what everyone called “the incident,” with his spade still dripping blood, with blood on his hands and splattered on the ground, he seemed baffled and as docile as ever. He kept saying tearfully that he didn’t know what had
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