Page 58 of Make Me Pretty
But maybe I fucking do—who knows. It’s been so long and has happened too much. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s conditioned.
Sparks of their erratic conversation bleed through the cardboard door—and none of it makes fucking sense as it pings all over the place. Talking about drugs, then of FBI agents stalking them, preparing to ambush. Their plans to jump someone. Wires the government has planted in the T.V. and in the fucking walls.
It’s so chaotic, it makes my head hurt more than it already does.
When something hard knocks against the wall, I jolt, scurrying back into the living room where all is quiet.
My half-smile is wobbly but genuine as I find Mo exactly as I left her, curled up so small and innocent.
I’d do it a thousand times just to protect her.
My knees creak, throbbing just below the bone as I drop down beside her with my back to the wall. With my eyes staringforward, I catch my soiled reflection in the glass door of the stove. The vague form that stares back at me is unrecognizable. Dirty and ugly and decayed. Everything I am, right on display.
I hate the bitter taste stuck in the back of my throat, the awful smell clinging to the both of us. I hate I have to make a choice—and that I can never choose me.
It’s not her fault. It’s not mine either. We’re just damned to survive in a life we were forced into. One of malice and hate, abuse and torture.
Some don’t make it. And those that do are never the same, coming out the other side angrier, splintered, and severed. Unrecognizable as something human. Something so far from purity.
And even though I’m not out yet—still cinched in the center of it all—I’m already dirtier. Nastier. Taking each new splintered piece and molding it into the vile person I am at my rotten core.
My tragedies have made me.
And I’m a fucking abomination.
CHAPTER 18
PERIS
I’m caughtin a mangling dream, each strand wrapped like a web around my consciousness. I’m hyperaware of the heavy weight of my body sunk into the mattress, of the droplet of perspiration trickling down my temple—my ear—where it falls to the pillow below. Of rigid muscles and pulsing veins.
I’m paralyzed.
Memories of Luke still linger, a snake slithering in and around my mind, but the core of sensation has shifted. It’s no longer him on top of me, but…
Abel.His name is one of sick reverence. Heat burns across my palms, fingers sunk deep into the hollows of his bony hips, pinning him in place. I can’t stop blinking, a rapid flutter of lashes in an attempt to morph the little body above me back into what was. To go back to sickening smells. Crushing weight. Searing pain.
Anything but this.
Heat envelops my cock for the first time in years, and I lose everything around me. My ears ring on a silent scream as my vision bleeds black. Heavy pulses ripple inward, constricting my heart as flames engulf.
Muscles contract, my thighs bulging under the strain, but I’m suspended in a place too far to grasp. Damp cotton clings to the skin of my back as I sink in, my blunt nails embedded into my neck. I gasp, unable to breathe as I choke on nothing. Everything. The heat. An inferno.
Asphyxiating me.
It tastes so real, more vivid than any terror I’ve felt before, and I’m clawing at the wall of oblivion, nail beds shredded and dripping crimson. Flesh on flesh, smooth and coarse. Slapping and shifting. Scorching friction.
My hair scrapes against the pillowcase, a resounding echo in my ear. The sharp whistle of breath between my teeth. Toes scraping against the sheets as they curl.
Perfunctory breaths punch out of me in quick succession, bringing awareness to the curve of my fingertips, nearly numb from how deeply they’re buried in satin. More muscles twitch as they rouse from tenebrous depths, tingling against cotton. My ear drums pierce with every pant, breath like hot steam.
I rebel against the sensations, screaming as the hellfire licks outward and down, tingling in my toes before diving in and wrapping around my veins. They pulse with newfound warmth. My limbs lock, tensing in preparation for the onslaught... one that never comes. Only endless ecstasy. Better than anything.
The sting in my eyes accompanies a damp heat on my cheeks as the sound barrier shatters, and I’m flooded with reality.
I don’t want to wake up. I can’t?—
“Peris.”
