Gorgeous Misery (Creeping Beautiful)

She hisses, then laughs, her hips squirming. I slowly push two fingers inside her, easing them deeper and deeper as I watch her face. Her breathing is ragged now, her back still arched, her neck stretched taut. I pump my fingers in and out and then her muscles contract around them as she lets go. A small gush of warm liquid spills out past my fingers and drips down into the palm of my hand.

“Now you.” She says it again. Insisting. “Now you.”

I would stay here between her legs for hours if she’d let me. But she’s come several times already and she won’t settle until I’m inside her and get my release too. So I crawl my way up her body, pausing to suck on her breasts and kiss her neck. Then I knee open her legs as she takes my cock in her hand and guides me to her entrance.

When my cock slips into her pussy we both moan.

She feels so good, I want to spend the rest of my life inside her.

She urges me to go fast. To fuck her hard. But we’ve tried that a couple times and it’s too much for her to handle, so I don’t do that. I go slow. I push deep instead. I make her gasp as I fill her up and then I pull back and do it again.

She drags her nails up and down my back because she knows me, same way I know her, and this drives me crazy. She likes to drive me crazy.

I kiss her a little bit harder and she bites me. A moment later, I taste blood, but I don’t stop and I don’t go faster.

One day maybe I will fuck her hard.

But then again, maybe I won’t.

It doesn’t matter to me.

I will take Wendy Gale any way I can get her.

She lifts her legs up and begins fucking me back. I let her, but only for a few moments. I kiss her as I pull out and then she’s squirming around on the bed, trying to put my cock in her mouth so she can suck me off as I come.

I want to come inside her, but I don’t. Won’t.

There are no kids in our future.

Not genetic ones anyway.

She can’t take birth control. The hormones are very bad for Zero girls. And yeah, I could use protection, but the condom might break and we can’t even take that small chance that she gets pregnant.

There are no abortions in Wendy’s future either—her mind would not recover from something like that—so if it happens, it happens.

And it can’t happen.

We settle next to each other on the bed when we’re done. She snuggles herself up to me, assuming the position, her head on my shoulder, her hands on my chest, one leg possessively over my hip.

I know she’s sad. She’s always sad after we have sex.

But I also know what to do to make her feel better.

“Dear Wendy…”

She huffs. “You don’t have to do that. I’m fine.”

“Dear Wendy,” I say again. “It has been eight months, four days, seven hours, and eight minutes since I last saw you and I miss you terribly.”

“Dear Nick. I’m gonna start writing Dear Nick letters.”

“Bitch, do not tease me like that.”

She giggles.

“I would kill for a Dear Nick letter.”

“Well. I’ll write some then. You need to make a little drop box outside your house.”

“Our house,” I correct her.

“Whatever. That way I can drop them off when I’m passing by.”

We’re both silent as we think about this. How our lives have been for the past seven years. Well, we were always two ships passing in the night while she was growing up too, but it was different. I didn’t write her any Dear Wendy letters until her eighteenth birthday. Because that was the year I thought there would be no Dear Wendy letters in her mailbox when she came home for her birthday and that could not happen.

But of course, there were letters that year.

I don’t understand the letters. I’m just glad she had them.

Wendy and I were a little team when she was a kid. She helped me, I helped her, but trust me when I say this, we were not in love. There were no secret looks between her and me when she was fifteen. She didn’t flirt with me and I certainly didn’t flirt with her. She started hating me at thirteen, I guess. It’s a typical girl thing. I looked it up. I was a little hurt when she started throwing me attitude but that was nothing compared to how she felt about me when I sent Lauren away. She wanted to kill me and it took almost three years for her to forgive me for that.

Even on her seventeenth birthday, right after Chek died and she was at her most vulnerable, she still didn’t really like me. She was still mad about the change in our previous routine. Because she didn’t know that I was gonna send Lauren to live with Sasha. I couldn’t tell her. She had a job to do when that was going down.