Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye
Chapter 26
My book got pretty good,with a third act twist I wasn’t expecting, so it’s after midnight by the time my eyes start to close. I’m propped up with pillows, snuggled up on the end of my bed in my PJs.
It took me a couple of hours just to get over the fact that my best friends are hanging out and having fun a couple of feet away from me. The fact that my life has changed to this extent. But now that I’ve had a shower, eaten a little chocolate, and absorbed myself in my fantasy world with loud music playing, I feel better.
Especially when the noise outside subsides to nothing. I am just settling in, getting ready to try to sleep, when there is a soft knock at my bedroom door.
My heart jumps, but I don’t move to open it.
“Andie,” that gravel voice travels through the door, clear and rumbling as if he is leaning his head against the wood. I move onto my knees, wondering why I don’t have a lock. “What the fuck are you listening to?” His voice is a mumble.
I ignore him. There’s a long pause, and I wonder if he moved away without making any noise, but then there’s another light knock. Then the handle turns. “Gunnar,” I say quickly, drawing my duvet up and over myself for some reason.
“What is this?” he asks, going ahead and letting himself into my bedroom. When he shuts the door behind himself, squinting over at my speakers, he sways slightly on his feet. I swallow.
“What are you doing in my room?”
“Just tell me the name of the song,” he says, low and impatient like I’m the unreasonable one.
“And then you’ll leave?”
He looks at me for the first time, his eyes still narrowed as if he’s annoyed, and sticks his hands deep in his pockets. He’s wearing a grey Radiohead tee that says ‘You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking’. Tight around his shoulders and upper arms in a way I don’t remember it being last year. “That’s rude,” he rumbles, and then his lips turn up into a cocky smirk that makes me roll my eyes.
“It’s Phantogram.”
He looks around my room, scanning over everything and taking it in, and then he nods. “OK. I like it.”
“Good to know,” I say, pressing my lips together. Even after everything, it feels wrong to be so short with him. “You should go back to your friends.”
He waves me away, strolling around my room and leaning in to get a closer look at the few photos I stuck to my wall. It’s me, my mom, and I recently added a silly selfie I printed out of Hero, Ulla and I before we went to that party.
“They left,” he says. “You don’t have any photos of California. Where did you live?”
“For those few months?” I ask, not sure why I’m engaging. He isn’t even looking at me, or acknowledging my question. “Why?”
“Thought you might have had friends there you wanted to remember.” He straightens up. “Maybe a boyfriend.”
“I did have a boyfriend,” I say. He turns and frowns over at me.
“A real one or a fake one?”
I can’t help but smile. “A real one. My first real boyfriend.”
“Why did you break up?” he asks, sounding a lot like my friend, but I can’t let myself get pulled in. I want him to leave, but even more than that, I really, really want him to stay.
“Because I moved back to the East Coast,” I say, dryly. He raises his eyebrows in understanding, rocking back on his heels. I swallow. “Why are you in my room, Gunnar?”
He smirks again, raising his shoulders and resuming his strolling, inspecting, of my new bedroom. “I miss your old room.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He huffs. “Fuck, Andie,” he mutters, and runs his fingers through his hair. “Stop asking me questions.” That makes me laugh, for some reason. He’s never let anyone else see this side of him. That uncertain, unconfident version of himself. Even now, I still get to see the real him. “What is this?”
“Don’t ask me q—” I begin, but then I gasp out loud when I see what he’s looking inside. The freshly-opened box. When he turns around to look at me, he has a wild, perplexed look on his face, and my mouth falls open.
“Is this a box of sex toys?” he says, very slowly. His eyes are still heavy with alcohol, but they’re wider now.
“No,” I say.
“It clearly is, though.”
“It’s not.” I wait, not dropping eye contact with him. What is my plan here, exactly? Hope that he’s drunk enough to believe me? To forget this? I can’t even imagine the kinds of things that are going through his head right now. All the different ways he could use this to hurt me, to embarrass me.
He rummages around, pulls out something long and pink, and he pushes a button at its base. It starts to vibrate. He’s laughing, twirling it around in his fingers. “Why do you have these?” Then his face darkens slightly and he switches it off. “You miss your boyfriend?”
“In California?” I chew my lip. “No.” A part of me wanted to push him, see if it bothered him for me to talk about another guy like this, but a larger part of me just wants to stop lying for the rest of my life. Even if they would be my greatest weapon against him.
“Have you used them?”
I squirm under my comforter, twisting it in my hands. “No.”
He inspects it from all angles and then he kicks off his shoes and climbs into my bed beside me, getting comfortable and handing me the vibrator. “Why not?”
I don’t take it, so it just stays in his hand, a bright pink shaft looking right at me. I’m not sure what the right answer is. “Because they just arrived today.”
His eyes are lusty, dark, and his tongue runs over his lower lip. “You want to?” His voice is deep, almost pained. I shift, inching away from him and squeezing my thighs together. But that just adds unneeded pressure between my legs, and I have to look away from him. The expression on his face is going to make me do something stupid.
“You’re an asshole,” I say, instead of letting him talk to me about sex.
“I’m drunk.”
“You’ve been a sober asshole to me since—”
“I know,” he interrupts, turning onto his side and pulling the covers over himself so we’re under them together, inches apart. “I don’t want to talk about that. Let’s just take the night off.”
I don’t know if I’ve ever scoffed before, but that’s definitely the noise that comes from me right now. I tug the covers away from him, and point at the door. “Screw you, Gunnar. You don’t get to do that. Go home.”
“No.” He reaches out and pulls me close, kissing my cheek, nose, forehead, and I squirm from his hold. He wraps his arms around me and nuzzles into my neck, and locks me in place by bringing up his knee and resting it on my leg. “I miss you so fucking much.”
Those words shiver through me for a second, but then I try to pull away again. “Fuck you,” I mumble. His eyes have shut, but his grip doesn’t loosen, and my words make him laugh a little.
“You have no idea,” he says. “You have no idea what this has been like.”
I stop struggling in vain and twist my wrist out of his grip, rotating it against his thumb like I learned in one of my classes. He opens his eyes, reaches out and grabs my wrist again. Before I can twist again, he yanks me close until our chests are pressed together, and he laughs again when he sees the look on my face. Whatever it is, however he thinks I’m looking at him right now, I don’t want to know.
“You called me ugly,” I say. He uses his grip on my wrist to run my fingers from his belt up to his stomach, catching his shirt and pulling it up until we trace a line between his pecs.
“I called you a five. That means average, not ugly.”
“Are you serious right now?”
He leans in and bites my collarbone, and I press my lips tightly shut so I don’t make any noise. “If I’d called you ugly, it wouldn’t have hurt as bad,” he adds, as casually as if we were discussing schoolwork. “You’re obviously not ugly, so you would have known I was just being a jerk.” He pulls back, looking me in the eye and brushing hair from my face. The vibrator is a weight on the comforter between us, hopefully forgotten.
“I’m average,” I repeat. He’s right. It does almost sting more. I know plenty of guys wanted to see if I really liked rough, barely-consensual sex, but I don’t necessarily know that anyone has ever found me attractive.
“You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he says, and closes his lips over mine. I pull away immediately.
“What are you doing? I said get out.” My heart is pounding, and I’m sure he can feel it against his chest. I can’t stand this, though. Either he’s messing with me, which is going to hurt whenever he reveals his plan, or he’s not, which not only still means he’s an asshole — it also means he’s crazy.
“You mean because we said we’d stop? I guess I was lying.” He leans his head back and gives a dark laugh. “I thought you knew by now that that’s what we do to each other.”
“I don’t want to,” I say. I want to struggle free, but equally I want to wrap my legs around him. “So you were trying to hurt me as bad as you could.”
“When I insulted you? Of course. I wanted you to leave.”
“Why?” I shove at the solid wall of his chest. “Even if you don’t like me, I can be at a party.”
“No,” he says, releasing his tight grip on my wrist and then interlacing his fingers through mine. “Ransom updates me on where JJ is. He told me they might turn up at that party. I wanted you to leave.”
I freeze. JJ Waller. I keep forgetting I’m supposed to be afraid of him. The prospect of somebody I thought of as my little brother playing the part of this looming specter of vengeance is so laughable. “But you couldn’t just talk to me about that?”
“I want you to leave town. He’s fucked up, Andie. I’ve never seen anyone like that. He’s not a person anymore. He’s walking, talking anger wrapped in skin. What if he’d seen you and Chris Barkley hanging out and laughing? Ransom says he carries around the suicide note wherever he goes.” I watch his throat move when he swallows, staring at our fingers interlocking while he speaks. “I really want you to leave.” His dark, heavy eyes flick up to mine. “But more than that, much more than that, I don’t.”
My hands are trembling, and I don’t realize until he squeezes them. This time, when he leans forward and brushes his lips over mine, I don’t stop him. I don’t open my mouth, either, when his tongue lashes against the seam of my lips. When I turn away, he traces kisses down the line of my throat, and laps his tongue across my collarbone. His grip on me tightens and he groans.
Something possesses me to bury my face in his dark hair and breathe him in. His ear is pressed against my chest, my pounding heart. I’m stuck in the middle of something and I can feel myself being torn, pulled in two very opposite directions.
“I wish I knew if you were lying to me now, or lying to me before,” he says after a moment.
“I don’t know what to do about that,” I say. “I know I lied a lot. I know I don’t really deserve your trust now. I don’t know what to say. You got some pretty good revenge, though.”
He touches my chin and looks at me for a while. I’m expecting something harsh, or blunt, about our ended friendship, but when he finally speaks, he says, “I’m sorry.”
“Will you still be sorry tomorrow?” I ask him. My thumb traces the line of his jaw and his eyes close at my touch.
“I’m sorry for the way I did what I did,” he says, low. “I’m sorry it didn’t work, because if it didn’t make you leave, then it was for nothing. I’m sorry for that, and I will stay sorry for that.” I swallow the lump forming in my throat. It’s almost a real apology, but it isn’t one. I still don’t know what to think.
“We’re still never going to be friends again,” I say. It’s not a question so much as it is a personal mantra. I need to stop thinking of him as an ally, even if he does almost apologize. The more he confirms it, the easier it will be.
“Yeah,” he says, but then something awakens behind his eyes and he moves on top of me, pinning me on my back in the bed with his weight, and then sitting up. “But that can be a good thing.”
I try to move, but he’s sitting on my thighs, his fingertips on my cotton tank top, and then under them, skimming over my belly and pushing the fabric up to my chest. I stop his hands before he gets my shirt up any further, but I can’t think of anything to say.
“Do you want to know something I’ve always wanted to do?” he asks, staring down at my body, pinned on the bed, like I am cool, clear water and he has wandered the desert for days. I shake my head no, silently pleading, and he smiles down at me. And he starts to crawl backwards down my body.
“Gunnar,” I say, but my voice is small, breathy. He hooks two fingers on either side of my shorts and pulls them down, over my left hip and then my right hip. He kisses my hipbones, one after the other, and tries to pull my shorts down lower. I stay there, heavy like a stone, for a second longer.
Then I close my eyes and lift my hips. I see his eyes twinkling in the dark, his teeth on his lower lip, as he pulls my shorts off and throws them onto the ground. “Shouldn’t …” But I have no idea what I want to say, or what I should be saying, so I trail off.
“You want me to stop?” he asks. Before I answer, I feel his hot breath on my inner thigh, strong hands forcing my legs apart, and then his tongue on the crease between my thigh and my pubic bone. He licks me slow, starting a quarter of an inch away from my pussy lip and stopping where I can feel the gust of his breath on my clit.
“Stop,” I say, and cover my eyes with the back of my hand. “You don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to what?”
“Be with me. Do this.”
He laughs, soft and low, and then I feel his fingers very gently pull me apart, exposing me to him in the dark. His tongue flicks over my clit and a throb of almost alarming need courses through me. I try to squeeze my thighs, but his hands are stronger than my willpower and he keeps me spread open before him.
“I want to,” he corrects me, and flicks his tongue again. I suck in a breath, feeling my legs shake against the weight of his hands. “I need to.” This time his tongue starts between my lips and drags all the way up my slit, circling the clit. The vibrations when he moans against my pussy make me clench. “Fuck. You taste good.” His voice is cracking, something that I don’t think he can fake. Whenever he is imperfect, it’s real. His fingertips dig into my soft skin and he licks me again, then drives his tongue inside my pussy. I whimper, squirm, but he doesn’t let me move away. “Tell me to stop again and I’ll leave.”
A tear slips from my eye and I press my lips together. He laps at my pussy, groaning, nuzzling deeper, and then wraps his lips around my clit and softly sucks. I cry out, clamping my hand over my mouth, and I feel the tickling of his laughter. “You’re so wet. So fucking wet.” He groans. “Fuck.”
He lets go of one of my thighs, and slides his fingertip up and down me while he licks, sucks and kisses. “I always wanted to know what you tasted like,” he says. “No one has ever smelled so good to me as you do. I wanted to know what your cunt tasted like.” His words are so filthy, my body reacts and I can’t stop it. He licks me again, sucks his finger like I’m his last meal. “You taste so fucking good.”
I can hear the jingling of a belt unbuckling then, and my eyes open. “Don’t,” I say suddenly, and then bury my face in the crook of my elbow when he starts a focused and aggressive assault on my pussy again with his lips and tongue.
“I won’t,” he says between long and careful makeout sessions with my poor soaked and swollen lower lips. “I need some kinda relief or I’m gonna go too far with you.” I look down to see his right arm has disappeared off the end of the bed, where he’s kneeling, and after a frenzied motion to free himself, it starts to move in slow jerking motions and he rumbles relief against me. His other hand is flat on my thigh, gripping tight, and my breathing is ragged and shallow as he licks into me, his tongue dancing and lips roaming, hot and wet and careful but aggressive.
“Andie, pass me the thing,” he says, pulling away.
The thing?
“I need to fill you up with something or I’m gonna fuck you.” His voice is a growl. His eyes are wild, hungry, his lips full and damp, his hair messed up. I take a second to look at him, kneeling between my thighs, shoulders rising and falling, looking like a man possessed by the devil.
I don’t move, but my eyes trail over to the pink vibrator lying unused and untouched between us on the bedsheets. He follows my gaze and snatches it before I can push it away. His head dives between my legs again and he licks me until I’m aching, desperate, wetter than I think I ever have been before. Then he pushes the wide head of the vibrator between my lips, letting out a soft noise from his throat as he watches the tip disappear inside me.
He fucks me with the first two inches for a second, alternating between watching and lapping at my clit. It’s agonizing whenever he moves his head away, and I buck my hips, letting an extra inch slip into me. He’s pounding the toy against my G-spot, angled just right, as he clamps his lips over me and circles his tongue. Again and again, until my eyes roll into the back of my head and my thighs squeeze against his head. He pulls away right when I climax, using his fingers instead of his tongue so that when the orgasm rolls through me, my muscles pulsing and squeezing, he can watch the vibrator ride the waves. Now his breath is ragged, and his hand goes from my pussy back down beyond the bed; beyond where I can see, jerking himself again.
“Shit,” he says, muffled against my thigh. He bites at my skin and groans. “I’m gonna come.”
A part of me wants to stop him, somehow. After everything, I feel like he doesn’t deserve a single orgasm, especially from me, even by proxy. But the rest of me is still riding the aftershocks of the deepest, most intense climax of my life. Usually after I manage to come, I’m done, but this time is different. It just made me want, need, more.
“Not yet,” I say, commanding and raspy and unlike anything I’ve ever heard from me before. He looks up at me and pants, but his arm stops moving, and he presses his forehead to my inner thigh, catching his breath.
“What do you want?” he asks. He brings up both of his hands and grabs my hips, digging his fingernails into me. I angle myself up at him, reaching down for his hand and brushing over his fingers with mine.
“More.”
“Do you want my cock?”
Fuck. More than anything. So bad. But I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head. He can stay right there. He can kneel at the end of my bed and make me come. I’m not going to be his fucktoy.
He bites my thigh again before he returns to my pussy. Hungry, desperate, he licks up every drop he drew from me with his hands, his tongue, the toy. Then I hear a soft buzz noise. He turned it on. Gently he alternates between his tongue and the vibrating tip of the rubber toy, and then he drives it inside me in one forceful thrust. I groan, squirming underneath him at the feeling of being suddenly filled to the hilt, and the vibrations set in, quaking inside me.
“You are so fucking hot,” he’s panting against my clit. Then he licks me again, sloppier and clumsier and more and more desperate, groaning as his own need grows. “Fuck, I wanted to do this so bad.” He’s fucking me with the vibrator, sucking and flicking his tongue over me, and obscene wet noises fill the air when the playlist I had on comes to an end. I can just hear him, the toy, my soaked pussy, and his tipsy chanting of phrases like, I want you, I need you, and Oh god, fuck, come for me.
The sensation of being filled, being fucked, at the same time as being licked drives me over the edge so fast. I come even harder, and this time once it tears through my entire body, I’m so sensitive I have to pull away from his mouth, trembling at his touch. The vibrator buzzes at the foot of the bed for a while as he kneels, lips parted, watching me come.
Then he stands, his jeans and boxers pushed down and his cock obscured in the darkness and by his fist. He grips it, barely, and leans over me, overtaken completely by lust and need in a way I’ve never seen before but after what just happened, I understand. His hand draws up from the base to the tip just once, twice, then on the third pump his cock throbs and shoots jets of hot come over my red, swollen pussy. Over my stomach, beading across my thighs and belly button and glinting, pearlescent, in the moonlight. He groans and squeezes my thigh while he gathers himself, then shoves himself back in his boxers, pulls up his pants, and rubs his face with his forearm. His chest is rising and falling, his eyes closed, and on every exhale he breathes the word ‘Fuck’, but he says nothing else.
Then his eyes open and his gaze rakes over me. Suddenly it feels like the other Gunnar is in the room with me. Piercing, intelligent golden eyes no longer hooded by desperation. I squeeze my thighs shut as he takes in the sight of me, quaking from the ruinous orgasm he put me through, and covered in his own. He trails his fingertip across my leg, silently, and then he turns away.
I close my eyes, trying to catch up to whatever the hell just happened here, but then I feel the bed dip, and a light tickling touch on my lower stomach. He grabbed a couple of tissues from the box, and he is wiping up his come from my skin. He balls up the tissues, though I still feel wet and sticky, and throws them into the wastepaper basket from here. Then he gathers me up with one arm, pulls off his jeans with the other, and pulls me close under the covers.
“W—” I start.
“Don’t say anything,” he interrupts in a whisper. His eyes are closed. He’s holding me tight, breathing me in. “Please. Let’s just pretend. For a while.”
“Pretend what?” I whisper back.
He cups my cheek and presses his lips against mine, softly licking between my lips until I part for him. He kisses me so gently it makes my chest hurt, his thumb on my cheek and then moving down my body, squeezing my bare leg. When he pulls away, he looks sad. Not angry, not lusty, not scheming. Just sad.
“That this is something we can have.”