Page 9 of Lost and Bound
“Lube,” he said casually.
My heart stopped for a second. “What?”
“The blond asshole dropped it off with the food. I think he likes you,” he said, his tone so sardonic it could’ve dried out an entire ocean.
I didn’t know what to say to that. If the guard was showing his soft spot for me by bringing lube so the psychotic bastard he’d thrown me in a cell with could use it to tear me up a little less when he raped and killed me…who needed enemies, with friends like that? And if I was going to die, and Blondie knew it…well, who needed lube?
My eyes stung. I thought I’d been beyond anything resembling tears, that they’d dried up permanently after the first few months here.
“I’m not going to use it,” he said abruptly.
“There’s more than one way to take that,” I muttered.
That drew out another of those deep, blood-freezing laughs. “Always the optimist, aren’t you? I’m not going to fuck you. So I’m not going to use it.”
“Why not?” The words popped out of my mouth before I could think. I could almost see them hanging in the air in front of me, taunting me with their stupidity. I froze.
It was a reasonable thing to wonder; I didn’t know how long he’d been here, but he clearly had a sex drive—he’d jerked off after biting me. And here I was, totally at his mercy and available. He’d drunk my blood and didn’t seem much concerned with the fact that he’d kill me, now or later. I didn’t think compassion or morals had much to do with his forbearance.
But there were a lot of ways this conversation could go wrong. My cellmate didn’t laugh at me, though, or say, ‘You know what? You’re right, why don’t I?’ like I half expected.
Instead, he shrugged again, and said dismissively, “Not interested.”
Not interested.
Not fuckinginterested?
Okay, that was a good thing. A very fucking good thing, that even though this bastard was literally going to be the death of me, he was one of that percentage of men who apparently…what, stayed a through-and-through heterosexual even after being deprived for the gods only knew how long?
But this still represented a new goddamn low. He’d been alone for probably years, if he’d been here long enough to be experimented on to the point that he was…whatever he was. He had lube. No one would stop him. He’d had a hard-on and the will to do something about it before, so presumably he could get it up again. Maybe I wasn’t the handsomest guy in the world, with my reddish-brown hair and dark blue eyes and average features.
But still.
Not interested.
Yep, new low. Ninety-five percent of me felt nothing but relief. But that other little chunk of me withered away and died a bit, at the insult and the dismissal and the knowledge that even this insane fellow-prisoner thought of me as nothing more than a bag of blood.
Fuck this. I couldn’t deal with consciousness anymore. “Can I sleep here? Instead of on the floor?”
“Don’t care,” he grunted.
I lay down again, curling up in a similar position to the one I’d occupied before.
I thought I’d be awake for a long time, but I fell asleep between one breath and the next.
Chapter 3
They’re Not Paying Attention
I woke to the sound of the door opening. Reflex, born of long experience with what happened when I didn’t respond quickly enough to a guard, had me almost popping up off the mattress.
But I forced myself to be still, with my eyes closed.
Because I’d started to get a theory, before, and I wanted to test it.
There was a soft thump as some kind of food, probably another sandwich, hit the floor.
“Is he dead? Has he even moved?” Baldy’s voice, mostly unconcerned, but with a slight undertone of annoyance. He’d probably hoped I’d die on someone else’s shift so he wouldn’t need to deal with the corpse.
