FOGBOUND
Nolan
“I HAVEN’T DRIVEN IN A long time,” Harper says, her eyes fixed on the rearview mirror as she adjusts it. She chews on her lip, ribbons of light erupting from each bite. I need to stop staring at her mouth. It’s just fucking hard to do when she’s so beautiful that my heart implodes every time I’m forced to look away. She’s like an angel, her skin illuminated with shifting colors, glowing from within.
She’s not an angel, for fucksakes. She drugged me. She’s a fucking demon. But don’t think too much about that because then I’ll probably see fucking demons everywhere and freak the fuck out.
I peel my gaze away and press my eyes closed, leaning my head back against the passenger seat as the world seems to pulse around me. “I can’t
imagine why.”
“Not for the reason you think.”
I turn my head just enough to see her face. “It wasn’t reason enough?”
Hurt erupts in Harper’s eyes before she shutters it away and keys the engine. It never feels the way it should when I manage to slip an arrow past her defenses. I keep expecting satisfaction for hitting my mark, but the closer I get to a bull’s-eye and the deeper I strike, the more it feels like I’ve missed the target entirely.
She doesn’t say anything in reply, just puts the car in drive and coasts away from the abandoned lane where I hid the rental, just in case Sam happened to pass by the Ballantyne River property as we were working.
Fucking Sam Porter. He’s getting too close to her. I could rip his fucking
face off. It would be so satisfying too, feeling the flesh pull away from his bones, stripping his skin off with my bare hands. That would probably be a bad idea though, and I need to keep my last wits about me. So I take a deep breath, closing my eyes again as I press myself back into the seat until it feels like it’s absorbing me.
“Well,” Harper says, her tone grim, “I guess I’m not taking you back to
Capeside in that case.”
“Why not?”
“Because you just said you wanted to rip Sam’s face off with your bare
hands.”
“I said that out loud?”
Harper’s eyes dart to me. I think I see a blush in the pink light that rises in her cheeks. She doesn’t answer me as she slows the vehicle and navigates the turn that leads to Lancaster Manor.
It might take us six years to reach our destination, or maybe only moments. Time makes no sense to me anymore. The one thing I’m sure of?
Harper Starling is my lifeline to the planet. If I’m not with her, I might end up stuck in this other dimension. I need to touch her. I couldn’t help myself at the river. I can’t help myself now either. So I reach out, laying my hand on her arm, moving with her as she startles.
“We’re here,” she says, turning off the car. She pulls away from my grasp. Why do I feel the loss of her heat in my hand? Why am I trying to touch her in the first place? She’s clearly sticking to the plan. Enemies until death or destruction. Why can’t I do the same?
I trail after her as she leads the way from the street to the gate of her cottage, holding it open for me. When she gets to the front door, she unlocks it and doesn’t look back to see if I follow. I’ve seen her house through the windows, of course, but this is the first time I’ve been inside.
It’s exactly how I’d expect Harper’s place to be, aside from the way I’m pretty sure the shifting geometric pattern on the stone floor has enveloped my feet, anyway. It’s simple. Practical. The decorations are sparse, but I’m sure that each one is meaningful. A chessboard whose pieces I’m sure are moving on their own. A carved wooden orca. A brightly colored macramé of a southwest desert landscape. A photo of a man and a woman with a
blond girl, maybe four or five years old. I pick it up and stare at their faces.
It must be Harper and her parents. There’s an ease in her smile, a lightness to it that just doesn’t exist in the version of her that stands in the kitchen.
The woman I know is forged by destruction. Maybe that’s the only way to survive this world. To become the destroyer.
I look over at Harper, tracers of light following every motion as she strips off her coat. She glances my way over her shoulder as though she can feel me watching. “I’ll get you a robe and we can wash your clothes,” she says, unbuttoning her plaid shirt. I’d give anything in this moment for her to turn and face me. To see if the bioluminescent glow covers her whole body.
To see the curve of her breasts as they rise and fall with unsteady breaths.
To see the light on her skin. The flare of her hips. The softness of her flesh.
To see if her pussy glistens with arousal for me.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“Okay,” I say as I drag both hands down my face, my cock aching with sudden need.
Harper gives me a perplexed look, one that seems to linger. The light within her deepens to shades of red and orange. For a moment, I think she might turn toward me. But she doesn’t, heading up the stairs instead. I’m still standing there with my hands on my face, trying to will my erection away when she comes back down in a robe, another one draped over her arm, her wet clothes clutched in her bandaged hand.
“Here,” she says as she comes close enough to offer the garment to me. I take it with a tentative hand. “Follow me.” She leads me to a short hallway off the kitchen, pointing to a bathroom as she throws her wet clothes into a washing machine in the closet on the opposite side. “You can put your clothes in when you’re done getting changed. Just close the lid and it’ll start.”
I nod, doing as she says, though the simple task takes a lot longer than it should to execute when I end up staring at my reflection, trying to make sense of the person staring back. I’ve come all this way and waited all this time to avenge my brother. And now I’m standing in his killer’s house with a hard-on for the woman who took his life?
It’s just the mushrooms, I tell myself. They’re just clouding your thinking.
The problem is, every time I tell myself that, it feels more and more like a lie. What if they’re not clouding anything? What if they’re peeling back the fog?
By the time I come out of the bathroom and start the washing machine, Harper is cracking open a beer, an empty one already resting next to where she leans against the kitchen counter. She’s got a bottle of tequila out too, and chases a sip of lager with a shot. “You’re going to have to stay the night here, because I’m not driving you anywhere,” she declares as I approach.
“So I guess I’ll be looking after you. Joy of joys.”
I chuckle. At least one of us can stay focused on our situation. I need to do the same. “Seems fitting,” I say as I pull the tequila from the counter and take a sip straight from the bottle. The smoky burn slides down my throat and I hold on to that feeling. I need to scorch her right out of my veins.
“You kill Billy. I come to kill you. You steal my book and drug me. Then you look after me. Seems full circle, doesn’t it,” I say as I raise my arm to show her the ouroboros tattooed there. I know she’s looked through my scrapbook. She’s already worked out who gave me this tattoo and what I did to him when it was finished.
I take another sip from the bottle and she watches every motion with haunted eyes, the luminescence in her skin cooling to a blue light. Her voice is firm, but I detect a melancholy edge beneath it, the tremor of something deeper and hidden when she says, “I don’t want to argue with you right now, if that’s what this is.”
“What argument could you possibly make? You did what you did.”
“Oh, I could make plenty of arguments.” She rolls her eyes before taking a long pull of her beer. “Problem is, you’re the kind of person who would argue with me if I told you the sky was blue. If you want to believe it’s green, you’re going to be fully committed to your bit. It wouldn’t matter if you’re dead fucking wrong. You’re going to believe what you want to believe, and no one is going to change your mind.”
“Since when have I given you the impression that I’m that unreasonable?”
“I don’t know,” she snarls, the volume of her voice rising with every word, “how about the time you left a severed head in my fucking bird feeder? Does that seem like something a reasonable person would do?”
“And you’re some bastion of morality? You called the old man killer up on the hill to ask if it was his doing, then promptly yanked that head out of the feeder to sniff test it and give it a little cuddle. Quite possibly, that’s something that a hit-and-run murderer might do, don’t you think?”
She rips the bottle from my grasp and takes a long drink before slamming it down on the counter. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Right.” I step closer to Harper, hemming her in against the counter. She doesn’t balk, doesn’t back down. Not even as I lean in until I can smell the tequila on her every exhalation. Her eyes drop to my lips, and when they rise to meet mine once more, I swear I see more than just fury in their mercury depths. “You run away from everything, don’t you? You run away from me.”
“Do I? Because you’ve threatened me, you’ve intimidated me, you’ve spied on me, and yet I’m standing right fucking here.”
She’s right, but she’s also wrong. And I don’t just mean the accident. I mean now, in Cape Carnage. In Maya’s shop. Every night that we dig and she insists on walking home. In the car, when she pulled away from my touch. Just moments ago. I know she saw the way I was looking at her. She let her gaze rest on me until I felt the undeniable tug, an invisible cord that seems to pull taut every time she’s near. Even now, she’s staring up at me with her fucking intoxicating defiance, but on the inside, I know she’s retreating, folding in on herself. Running away.
And if she thinks I can’t find her there, she’s wrong. Because I’m in her thoughts, just like she’s always in mine. I can see it in the shifting flecks of silver in her eyes. It’s in the rosy hue that illuminates her cheeks. It’s in the pulse that strobes currents of light in her throat, and the unsteady breaths that tremor in her chest. It’s in the desire that haunts her features when her focus drops to my lips and lingers.
There’s a single beat of time where I just stare at Harper Starling. It’s a moment that might stretch to infinity, balanced on the cutting edge of a blade. It’s an ouroboros, consuming itself, violence and desire intertwined.
And in the next moment, we’re crashing into a brutal kiss.
There’s nothing tender about it. There’s no kindness. No mercy. It’s teeth biting into lips. Nails digging into skin. Blood threading across tongues. It’s pure fight and sheer want. When I frame her face with my hands, she clamps down on my bottom lip. When I grip her hair and wrench her head back to expose her neck to my bites and kisses, she rakes her nails down my chest hard enough to draw blood. And when I push her back against the counter, she moans and tears the robe from my shoulders, shoving her thigh between my legs to feel my erection against her skin.
“If you hate me so much,” she says as I cup her breast and pinch her nipple to draw a gasp from her parted lips, “you’d better fuck me like you mean it.”
In a flash of motion, I whip her around, caging her in with her ass facing me, the terry cloth robe still covering her body. “Do not say that to me unless you mean it.”
“What makes you think I don’t?” She presses her ass against me like an invitation, one I should be trying to resist. But I can’t. I tug the robe down her back to expose her to me fully, keeping the tie balled in my hand as I let the rest drop to the floor. She shivers as I run my other hand from her neck to her ass, not stopping until I reach between her thighs and cup her pussy.
Arousal, silky and warm, coats my palm. My cock grows impossibly harder.
I don’t know if it’s the drugs scrambling my brain or if it’s just her, but no woman has ever felt as good as Harper. Her heat, her scent, the way she seems so soft and pliable in my hands despite all the lethal barbs that fly from her mouth. I’ve never needed anyone as badly, the one person I should never want.
I close my eyes and take a long, deep breath, forcing my hand away from her heat. I’m sure I feel the softest whimper vibrate through her spine.
“You’re going to have to ask me nicely,” I say as I loom over her to speak in low tones against her ear. “Because I might be here to kill you, but I’m not the kind of man who would fuck a woman who doesn’t want it. You need me to fuck you? You tell me. You want me to stop? You tell me.”
She trembles as I bite her neck and soothe it with a kiss, but the gentle press of my lips lasts only long enough to bite her even harder for keeping
me waiting. “Fuck me like you hate me,” she breathes.
I chuckle, running my hand down the length of her body to smack her ass. She yelps, but it dissolves into a moan as she pushes harder against me.
“That wasn’t very nice.”
“Fuck me like you hate me, please.”
“That’s a little better. But you still sound like a brat.”
“Fuck you.”
I smack her ass harder and she braces her hands against the edge of the counter, her knuckles bleaching. “I can do this all night. And I mean that, seeing as how I probably have another six or seven hours’ worth of mushrooms in my system. I wonder whose fault that would be?”
My palm connects with her flesh once more, waves of light erupting from the impact to spider across her hip. Every sensation is magnified. The sound of pained pleasure that escapes her lips becomes a wave of color in my vision. She’s softer than cashmere when I glide my palm across the globe of her ass to soothe the sting. Even the network of tiny moles across her shoulders becomes fractal patterns, a constellation of desire mapped
across her skin.
“What do you want?” I grit out.
“I already told you. But as usual, you aren’t fucking listening.” I smack her again. “Jesus fucking Christ, just fuck me, for the love of God, you stubborn asshole.”
My voice is saccharine when I press my lips to her ear and whisper, “But
I don’t have protection.”
“I’m on birth control. And I’m clear.”
“How do you know that I’m clear too?”
“I …”
She stalls, her words lost to a silence that pulls tight around us like a film that clings to this moment. My hand folds around her throat, and though some distant thought urges me to squeeze until she begs for air, I keep my touch gentle, little more than a warning. “Tell me.”
“I …” Her throat shifts beneath my palm as she swallows. “I trust you.”
The breath stalls in my lungs. Maybe Harper doesn’t mean what she says. I shouldn’t believe her. But though it might be a lie, even the slim
possibility that it could be the truth still ignites every cell in my body.
I was right when I said I’d need to scorch her out of my veins. I just didn’t expect it would be impossible. That she would claim every piece of me first.
I grasp the base of my erection, kick her feet wider, then thrust into her pussy with a single, brutal stroke.
Nothing has ever felt as good as Harper’s warmth enveloping my cock.
Breaths saw from my chest. Her heartbeat rages through her back as hard as mine resonates through my chest, and we haven’t even started. We’re stalled, unmoving, trying to come to terms with what we’re doing, this detour from fate that we’ve both accepted, even if it only lasts for a fleeting moment of time.
I’m supposed to fucking hate her. I hate how she tore my brother away.
He was everything to me, the person who made me want to be a decent man. I hate how she’s eroded every plan I’ve had since arriving in this town. It was supposed to be easy. Come to Cape Carnage. Kill Harper Starling. Feed the vengeance that consumes my thoughts until it’s finally sated. Then get back to the business of living. Find a nice woman, someone friendly and easygoing who fills a few of the holes left by Billy’s absence.
Go on to live a normal, healthy, productive life. I was never supposed to be here, buried to my balls in the woman who nearly killed me. And most of all, I hate myself for my weakness. Because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
But I can still punish us both for that.
I pull out to the tip of my erection and thrust all the way in again. God, she really is a fucking angel, the way her cunt grips tight around my cock.
Her moan is so otherworldly that I see it, ripples of colors that surround me.
Another merciless thrust and her freshly bandaged hand lands on mine. She tugs at the tie bunched in my fist, the one I forgot was even there in my mindless need to bury myself in her pussy.
When I loosen my grip on the fabric, she pulls it from me to lay it across her throat, draping each end across her shoulders. I’m unmoving, my cock still lodged to the hilt in her channel, trying to process what’s happening when she turns enough to give me a sidelong glare. I see everything in that
brief connection. All her bitterness, her acerbic rage. But I see pain and loss and grief too. Even a hint of the guilt that I’ve been searching for, there in the glassy sheen that gathers at her lash line.
“Like you mean it,” she says, dropping a weighted look at the tie lying over her shoulder before she turns to face forward. “Punish me. Fuck me
like you’ll never forgive me.”
I’m sure I leave my body.
I wrap both ends of the tie around my hand and twist until it’s flush against her neck, and then I pull out of her, banding an arm around her waist, and lift her away from the counter. I carry her to the living room and drop her on her knees on the couch, leaving just enough slack in the tie to not choke her. She lets out a whimper when I lay my free hand between her shoulders to press her chest down, keeping her ass up, her pussy glistening in the dim light. I settle behind her and twist that tie again, just tight enough that she shudders, but the breath still flows unobstructed through her lungs.
“You heard me earlier,” I say as I notch the crown of my cock to her entrance. And I don’t think it’s just a reminder, but a veiled plea when I say, “Tell me to stop. Tap out.”
A dark, mirthless laugh escapes her. “And you heard me. You loathe me.
So go ahead. Try to fucking destroy me. I deserve that much after everything, don’t you think?”
With a growl, I smack her ass hard and then push into her tight heat as deep as her body will take me, her moan rippling through the tie clutched in my hand.
I glide out to the tip and slam back in, picking up a punishing rhythm of deep, merciless strokes. Her pussy cinches tight around my girth as though she can’t bear to let me go. Arousal smears down her thighs. My palm hits her ass, connecting over and over until it reddens. Her sounds of pleasure rise around me, lingering in the air on the musky scent of sex. Every time I grip those loops of fabric tighter, she somehow still matches my thinning restraint and dares me to take everything I can. With each brutal thrust and every impact of my hand against her ass, I’m the one who is shredded apart, destroyed by my desperate desire for her.
“More,” Harper grits out as I reach around to swirl my fingers over her clit. Sweat shimmers over her back, illuminated by the glow in her skin. I swear I feel every one of her heartbeats pulse around me as she climbs closer to an orgasm. “Give me more.”
The tie tightens in my grip and she moans out a breath. “I”—I thrust so hard she pitches forward with a yelp—“fucking”—I do it again, and her moan fills the room—“hate”—another vicious thrust and her arousal coats my hand—“you.”
“I fucking hate you too,” she rasps as I fuck her mercilessly. “And if you don’t make me come, I’m going kill you with my bare fucking hands.”
I thrust faster. Harder. I work her clit with slick fingers and she lets out an agonized cry of need. A hiss escapes my lips as an electric current crackles at the base of my spine. “Goddamn. I could fuck you right into the afterlife.”
Her channel tightens around me. She loves those threatening words that could be a promise as much as a fantasy. So I tell her more, leaning closer to her ear to whisper desires shaped by darkness and sin. Maybe I should grip your throat between my palms and squeeze until you can’t breathe. Is that what you want? To beg me for air as I fill your pussy until it fucking overflows? Maybe I should spin you around and tighten this noose as you choke on my cock. You’d look so pretty with your face all red and your eyes bloodshot as you swallow me down. You want my cum to be the last thing you ever taste?
It’s not just my dick stretching her pussy or my touch on her clit that throws her over the edge. It’s those fantasies I whisper. She screams my name as she comes apart, and I fall over the cliff with her, my length pulsing, my cock lodged deep as I fill her. I don’t loosen my hold on the tie until the last ropes of cum have been spent and my heartbeat riots in my ears, muffling all the sounds in the room. Only then do I let the belt around her neck go, but still I remain buried in her warmth, not ready to leave. I’m not sure I ever will be. And that thought terrifies me, because as exhilarating as it is to be embraced by her warmth, it still feels forbidden.
Like I’m taking something I never should have. Like I’m betraying
everything I’ve set out to do since the day I woke up in that hospital bed four years ago. But I still want it, as much as I want justice. I want her.
And I have no fucking idea what she’s thinking.
Her back still to me, her forehead pressed to her arm as she recovers her breath. I’m trying to find a way to ask when a chime sounds from the direction of the hallway. The washing machine. It’s a dart of the mundane that bursts this cocoon of sweat and skin and unsteady exhalations.
I pull out of her slowly, riveted by the sight of my glistening cock sliding out of her swollen pink flesh, tracers of light and color following the motion. “Stay there,” I say when I’m free, watching as the first drops of cum gather at her entrance to slide down her thighs. “I’ll be right back.”
She doesn’t answer. I leave her to transfer the clothes into the dryer, then head to the bathroom to gather a warm washcloth and a towel so I can clean her up. I’m distracted a second time by my reflection. I don’t recognize this version of me. One who is motivated by something other than revenge, if only for a moment. One whose purpose seems fogbound. This moment seems so far away from the cataclysm that propelled me here. Maybe I want to see where I end up when the fog clears, if it’s somewhere different than I thought I would be.
I give myself a final once-over, then return to the living room. But Harper is already gone. Her robe is no longer on the floor. Mine is laid neatly across the back of the couch alongside a blanket and towel and two pillows. There’s a glass of water and a bottle of ibuprofen on the side table.
I hear a creak upstairs, and I know by the position it must be coming from her bedroom.
I stand naked in the center of the room for a long while, the washcloth cooling in my hand. I don’t know what I wanted in the aftermath, but it wasn’t this.
Eventually, I put the robe on and sit in the armchair, staring at the geometric patterns that shift across the floor. Maybe the mushrooms are starting to wear off a bit, because that’s the only thing that seems strange around me. There are no more vibrant lights, no sounds that become colors across my vision.
I don’t move at all for a long while, not until the dryer beeps to snap me out of my daydream as I try to relive every moment of this night with Harper, from the way her eyes drifted closed when I touched her face and told her she was beautiful in the river, to the one where I pulled free of her pussy, staining her thighs. With a deep sigh, I head to the closet and fold the laundry, setting mine on an armchair before I hesitate at the bottom of the stairs with her clothes balanced on my palm. And before I can talk myself out of it, I’m carefully taking every step in silence until I’m on the landing of the second story.
Her bedroom door is ajar, light pouring through the crack. At first, I think she might be awake, but she’s not. Her deep, even breaths spill out into the hall. Just like the night when I killed Jake, she’s sleeping with not one lamp on, but two. It seems strange, like it did then, to sleep with not just a night-light to guide her way if she wakes, but two lamps to keep out the shadows. Her life seems surrounded by darkness, and as I slip into her room, I can’t understand why she would find discomfort in it when she sleeps.
I stand at the threshold of Harper’s room and watch the rise and fall of her chest beneath a patchwork quilt. The things I would have done in this moment if it happened mere weeks ago.
And now, I feel as though I shouldn’t enter her private space uninvited.
Every step I take closer to her, I know I should stop. I shouldn’t set her folded clothes on the dresser, or stop beside her bed to loom over her sleeping form like a specter. I shouldn’t be lowering to my knees, my face so close to hers that I can smell the mint of toothpaste on her breath, or lifting my hand to shift a lock of damp hair away from her neck. I definitely should not place a kiss to her cheek. But I’m as powerless as the sea is against the moon. I’m caught in the gravitational force of her despite the dark chasm that spans between us.
I lay my lips to her skin so gently that she doesn’t stir, doesn’t wake. But when I pull away, Harper glows.
