Already up behind her, voice devoid of feeling, the captain ordered, “Spit on your hand. Rub it between your legs.”
Shifting to balance her weight so she might look at her palm, so she might try to make her dry mouth produce saliva, she obeyed. She smeared her opening.
Not that it mattered.
He was in—a solid thrust that lurched her body forward and snapped her teeth together.
Tangling his fist in her hair as if she might disobey and turn her head, he fucked her. Too hard. Too fast.
And it was awful.
But she bore it: his size, his coldness, the sting on her scalp.
How there were no comforting caresses or any type of intimacy.
And on it went, rocking her breasts forward, leaving her wrists aching so she might hold position in the onslaught.
He didn’t come.
Releasing her hair, he took her hips. Pounded faster.
And when she couldn’t take another moment of the captain punishing himself for the sins they shared, she braved a glance over her shoulder.
And found a man in abject misery.
A man who loathed every moment of friction on his cock.
Who’d screwed his eyes shut and thrown back his head as if concentration might make it end sooner.
“Aaron, stop.” Softly said, full of pain for the both of them.
The mechanical pistoning of his hips slowed, those hazel eyes opening to the world he’d created—eyes bloodshot and aged by the hollow, terrible fissure just like hers that ate him from the inside out.
“Didn’t I tell you to keep your head forward?”
She said it again, barely a whisper. “Stop.”
His dick was half hard when he pulled out, when he marched naked to where she’d left her dress on the floor next to a pile of towels covered in human piss.
Picking it up, he threw it at her. “Sleep on the couch.”
There were so many things she could have said.
I don’t understand what’s happening between us.
A lie. She knew exactly what happened. He’d offered her the best world he might create, cobbling it together despite ugly circumstances and personal loss. And she’d rejected it.
Where is the man who wooed me last night?
Gone, literally, barely having pulled up his jeans before he slammed the door.
Please don’t make me sleep on the couch. I can’t be like them.
Who would stop her from sleeping on the bed? No one. Because she was alone in the nicest suite on the ship.
But she lay on the couch anyway, naked, her dirty dress her blanket.
And Aaron didn’t come home.