69

Portia
“What did you mean when you said you just remembered the tunnel?” I ask Callahan, thinking how strange the statement had sounded. We’re sitting in a hot bath after the episode downstairs. He’s behind me and doesn’t answer right away so I turn my head to look at him.
He meets my eyes. “I don’t remember things.”
“What do you mean?”
He looks thoughtful, far away, his forehead furrowed. “I don’t remember things. People,” he pauses.
“I don’t remember them, Portia.”
“What?”
He shakes his head.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I say.
“When I woke up, I had no memory of anything before the massacre. Nothing. Like the first seventeen years of my life didn’t happen.”
I feel my forehead wrinkle as I try to follow.
“I can’t remember my own mother.”
I’m trying to process, trying to make sense of this thing that makes no sense.
“None of them.”
Something he said comes back to me then. When he gave me his mother’s dress, he made the comment he’d given it to me to see if he’d remember. I hadn’t understood what he’d meant.
“Oh my God.” I can’t wrap my brain around the scope of it. He must feel wholly untethered. Lost. What does he hold on to when he has no past?
He shakes his head, moves to stand. I watch the water slide down over him, see the muscle, the scars, the tattoos. The wreck of the jagged script along his arm. I squint to read it, but no, that can’t be right.
He wraps a towel around his hips then holds one out for me. I stand and he wraps me in it, then lifts me out of the tub and carries me into the bedroom. I’m surprised again by how gentle he can be.
We stand at the edge of the bed as he dries the water from me.
“Do you remember the first day?” he asks. “When I brought you in here?”
I nod, trying to keep up when it often seems like he has half the conversation in his own head.
“You made me remember the Creme Caramel. My mother’s. It was your eyes. They’re the color of burnt sugar.” He smiles but it’s gone in a second. “You made me remember, Portia. That’s never happened before.”
“You have no memory of anything at all?”
He shakes his head. “I know every detail from the day I woke up from the coma to now. And that night. The night of the murders. That I can’t forget. Can’t stop seeing.”
“Have you talked to a doctor or something?”
He gives a sad little laugh. It’s more of an exhale. “No. No one can know. Well, apart from my uncle. And I. think Lenore suspects.”
“What about your brother?”
He shakes his head. “No. And he won’t know. I can’t let him down again.”
“Let him down again?”
“He had to deal with it alone. I was in a fucking coma. May as well have been dead for all the good I did him.”
“Callahan, I don’t think he’d – ”
“He can’t know, Portia. Ever.”
I study him, but I don’t argue this. Not now. “Maybe it’s your brain trying to protect you or something. Maybe you should talk to someone. A professional.”
“No. Drop it.”
“But what if they can help? Maybe -”
“Drop it.” He opens the towel to look me over and I know what he wants. I see it in the way his eyes have darkened. Feel it in the hardness that presses against my belly.
I lick my lips, open my mouth to say something but he leans down to kiss my lips, the curve of my neck, the shell of my ear.
One hand slips down my back over the curve of my hip to cup my ass. His kiss deepens and he slides his hand over. A moment later, I’m on tiptoe, my eyes wide open.
He looks at me but doesn’t move his hand. His fingers.
“I want this,” he says, watching me as his fingers play with my back hole.
“Callahan.”
“Turn around,” he whispers.
“I – ”
He turns me, not giving me a chance to comply. Sliding his hand up between my shoulder blades, he bends me over the bed.
“I haven’t looked at you like I want,” he says, crouching behind me.
“Callahan,” I start, moving to straighten.
He stretches a hand between my shoulder blades. “Stay.”
But he lays the tip of his tongue on my sex and I gasp.
And stay.
With his hands on my thighs, he spreads my legs wider then sets them on my cheeks to splay me open. Dipping his head, he reaches his tongue to my clit before licking the length of my pussy up to my other hole, then back.
Embarrassed, I begin to pull away.
“I said stay,” he repeats, low and commanding.
Again, I stay.
“You’re very responsive. Always wet for me.” His tongue teases me, dips inside me then circles my other hole again. “But this right here,” he starts, straightening to stand and keeping one hand on my ass while opening the nightstand drawer with the other. “This I haven’t had a chance to make mine yet.”
I swallow, liking his dark eyes on me, liking how big he is, how much bigger than me. How much in control of me he is like this.
He gives me a lop-sided grin and opens the tube of what I guess is lotion or lubricant. I hear the pop then feel the cool sensation of it as squeezes it onto my lower back.
“What are you doing?”
“Making you mine. Every part of you.”
“Callahan, I don’t think – ”
“Down.” His hand splays between my shoulder blades. “I’ve taken your pussy. I’ve taken your mouth. But I haven’t taken your ass yet and I want to, Portia.”
I shift my gaze to his cock and panic has me trying to straighten again. “You can’t put that in there.”
“Why not?”
“Because… I… well, because…” I don’t know. “It won’t fit,” I blurt.
He laughs outright at that. “You’re good for me, you know that? You make me laugh.”
“I don’t think it’s a laughing matter. I really – ”
But he leans down over me to kiss the corner of my mouth, swallowing the rest of my words.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make it fit,” he says, and, eyes on me, smears the lotion around and then into me. I gasp, every muscle tightening.
“Relax,” he says.
I try. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just I’ve never had anything in there.
“Okay?” he asks.
I nod as he moves his finger slowly in and out while the fingers of the other hand slip between my legs to tease my clit.
“Good little Kitten,” he says, and I lay my head down and close my eyes and feel. “Just relax, Kitten. We’ll go slow. There, like that, does it feel good?”
I nod, eyes still closed.
“Open your eyes and look at me.”
I do and with two fingers of one hand deep inside me, he guides his cock to my pussy with the other.
“You’re tight. Tighter now,” he says as he dips inside me once, twice.
I moan, arching my back, wanting more. “I want to come.”
“Not yet.” He pulls out and I watch him fist his cock again, jerking it. I see the little drops of precum on the thick, rounded head and I find myself biting my lip, wanting it. Wanting him to watch me. To touch me. To take me like this.
“I think you’re ready,” he says pulling his fingers out and placing his cock at my back entrance.
I place my hands on the bed, back ramrod straight. “Wait! I – ”
“Relax. Lay back down. I want to take this last piece of you. Don’t you want to give it to me?”
I’m not so sure.
“I want to feel you come with my cock in your ass, Portia. And you’re going to come hard. I promise.”
As he says it, he presses in. He works slowly, taking his time, stretching me. When he slides his fingers to my clit, I begin to moan.
It feels good, really good. And he’s giving me just enough to keep me on the edge of orgasm, pulling his fingers away when I’m close, claiming more of me as I relax.
“It feels good,” I manage.
I hear rather than see his satisfied smile. “I’m almost all the way inside you. Just a little more. Give it to me, Kitten. Push against me and let me have you.”
I do. I want to. And so, I close my eyes and do as he instructs, and I know a few moments later when he’s fully seated inside me by the deep, low moan that comes from his chest. I look back to watch him as he watches me.
“Christ. I wish you could see how you look. How beautiful you are stretched around me like this.”
I slip my fingers between my legs. “I want to come.”
“Greedy little Kitten. Come,” he says, beginning to move inside me, slow at first, then faster as he shifts one hand between my legs to cover my own. Our fingers are wet as we stroke that hard little nub and only moments later I come apart, my body pure sensation, pure ecstasy.
“Fuck,” he mutters. “You are so tight.”
He makes a sound that seems to be ripped from his chest. He grips my hips and takes me in long, deep strokes as he holds me tight the sensations different than anything I’ve ever felt making me come again, slipping from one orgasm to the next as I watch him watch me. As he takes one more piece of me. As I belong to him in one more way.
“Callahan!” I call out, collapsing breathless and worn out as he thickens and throbs and empties, my body pure sensation, my awareness only of him. Him inside me. His weight on top of me. Him.
And I know this is where I belong. I never want to be without him again.
Because I think I love him.