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She feels a little out of her depth, walking up to the house. The lights flicker between red and purple and blue, bass throbbing like a bruise come alive, and it’s a noise complaint waiting to happen.
Her costume is itchy against her hips and under her arms, but she fights the urge to readjust it because she’s already pulled her top down three times since crossing onto this block and the girls sitting on the lawn are staring. They’re all wearing some sort of cheerleader costume, covered in blood, and Annabeth isn’t exactly a slasher film expert, though she doesn’t think they’re dressed up as anything in particular. It’s not like she’s in any place to judge a generic hot cheerleader costume when she’s done herself up as Sexy Lemon Meringue.
The skirt hugging her hip bones is ruffled in shades of yellow, extending just far enough to cover her ass if she stands upright and still. The rest isn’t much better. Her top is about the length of a bra, with puffy polka dot sleeves that are tight on her skin and given that she’s basically a twig, she isn’t sure who this would have fit better.
The pavement is wet, mud clinging to her Converses, and the bitter wind slices through her like a knife with ample purchase. She’d really only covered the parts that matter.
Her hair saves her, curls climbing down her back in the way she usually hates in the summer, when they turn into a personal furnace. Now, she’s grateful for it as she walks past the cheerleader girls, hair longer than her skirt and hiding her behind.
Thank God she didn’t listen to Silena about the pigtails.
A boy spills out the front door just as she reaches the steps, hurtling down the side to the porch and hunching over the railing. She doesn’t look long enough to see him throw up, zoned in on the cracked open door and momentarily elated. The music booms—something noisy and obnoxious she’s sure Percy would be into—and the chatter inside is loud enough to make her think she can slip in relatively unnoticed.
She’s only just planted her feet on the scratchy welcome mat when the door swings half open, a lithe figure cloaked in black filling the space between the frame, blocking the inside of the house from her view.
Familiar, she thinks at first. Pale skin and glossy hair, dark eyes and a smirk tugging at his lips that makes her fold her arms to hide some of her bare skin.
Familiar, yet she can’t find a name and it’s clear he doesn’t recognize her either.
“Here alone?”
Annabeth swallows. “My friend lives here.”
He’s grinning now, eyes dragging lazily up and down her body. The neck of a beer bottle is tight in his grasp as he knocks it against his thigh, and she can tell he doesn’t buy it. “I think you’ve got the wrong house. If you’re looking for a Westlake party, that’s down nearer to the park. You are a high school kid right?”
She shakes her head. “My friend’s in there. His name’s—”
“Do you have an invite?”
“Huh?”
He cranes his head forward, expression stern and unforgiving, but Annabeth stands her ground. “I don’t give a fuck if your friend is here. You’re like—what? Fourteen? Go home, don’t be stupid.”
She’s wondering whether or not it’s immature to say she’s not fourteen when his face suddenly lights up. She realizes there’s someone coming from behind only as a group of college kids push past her body like they can’t even fucking see her, strewing her nearer to the drunk, passed out now, slumped into himself in a puddle of vomit.
He lets them in without any hassle, clapping the whole lot of them on the back as they rush in. A Party City bride of Frankenstein lingers in the doorway to kiss his cheek, leaving the trace of her shimmery dark purple lips. He’d shuffled a little further to the side to give them room to enter, the door opened a little wider, his head turned.
Annabeth takes her place in front of the door again, making out the familiar form deep in the kitchen. A head of blond hair tipped back against the ugly orange wood cabinets, flask shimmering in his hand.
She doesn’t shout for him. Because just a second after she spots him, his head turns and his eyes go wide and she knows he’s seen her too.
The guard dog whips his head back and forth between her and him, approaching in his recycled Michael Meyers costume from two years ago, though without the mask it does just look like a bloody janitor-blue jumpsuit. Not that he doesn’t look good. Despite the cold wind, Annabeth knows she’s blushing. His hair is a mess and his eye bags are horrendous and his scar looks so nasty with the fake blood streaked on his face—and he’s beautiful.
His eyes are solely on her when he gets to the door, but he reaches behind the other guy and flips over his hood. Ghostface, she realizes. Not just a black cloak.
“Luke,” she breathes, drinking him like it’s the first time they’ve ever met. Starry-eyed idiot in her frills freezing her ass off on the front porch of a college party.
“Hey, bug.” He smiles softly. “Ethan giving you trouble?”
He wipes the mask off his face. “Oh,” he says. Flat, but also like something’s just clicked and she wonders how much Luke’s friends know about her. About as much as her friends know about him, if she had to guess.
“I need an invite,” she tells him, finding her composure.
His lips part and his eyebrows shoot up, and she’s not just being full of herself when she swears this has to be the first time he’s had fun all night. “And here I thought cute girls always get in for free.”
“This isn’t a fucking frat,” Ethan says, rolling his eyes. Good natured, but there’s a crease in his forehead now that wasn’t there before as he continues to shift his gaze between them. “It’s supposed to be for friends. And I didn’t know she was yours. Get off my dick.”
He must have a shit ton of friends, she thinks.
With that, he turns and steps further into the house, looking at her at least two more times before he ducks out of view.
Annabeth knows she’s being judged and she wishes she could let it pass, but her costume is so itchy and she is, actually, from Westlake High and she wants to be older just so she can stop feeling like a child playing dress up.
Luke reaches for her, cold hand to cold hand, and she realizes he must not be that drunk yet. It’s only ten o’something, anyway.
He shuts the door behind her, reeling her in.
Maybe it goes without saying that this is Annabeth’s first real party. Her school friends don’t exactly have the house that house parties require, and they have at least one logical parent each who’d never let something like that happen in the first place. She’s been to birthdays and “parties” at the beach and homecoming dances—and she’d come to the conclusion a long time ago that she loves all things of the sort.
She’s never been somewhere like this and she doesn’t even think it would be classified as a rager by any means, but there are so many people and she swears they’re all staring at her.
“Luke…” She can’t get herself to look away from the crowd as he drags her through them and into the kitchen.
There’s no one else here, thankfully. A clutter of booze decorates the countertop and Luke drops her hand to uncap a bottle of Maker’s Mark without a word. She watches the amber liquid pour into his flask, trying to ignore the sensation of eyes burning into her cheeks and Annabeth wonders if she had just let Silena do her makeup like she’d insisted, if it would have made a difference.
“Luke,” she repeats, voice coarse, shuffling closer to him to be heard in all the noise. He throws her a distracted look before busying himself with the bottle again, settling it down gently like a baby.
“Hm?”
“Why is everyone…” her words trail off weakly and he must catch her panic because he finally looks up.
For a curious second, his eyes harden as he scans the crowd. Then they melt back into his normal easy expression and he bumps his knuckles against the itchy band of her puff sleeve. “You’re fucking pretty, Annabeth.”
She shakes her head, feeling annoyed and restless at his supposed lack of understanding, when she knows Luke has to get it. It’s why his friends have never fucking seen her before.
Annabeth frowns, fingers gripping the counter and she spots ants crawling through the alcohol bottles and it’s so loud and the music is so horrendous not even Percy would like it and she wishes he were here because he’d understand. He’d take her outside and sit with her and they’d pretend they could see stars in the smoggy sky and he’d ask her to tell him about the constellations, half because he wants to hear it, half because it calms her down to explain things, and he’d interject with stupid commentary, but be a good listener all the same and he’d hate to know she’s here right now.
She doesn’t know what she must look like, watching the partygoers unwaveringly. Pretty fucking insane, probably, because Luke takes her face in one hand and directs it back at himself.
She’s looking at him, and she’s seeing nothing.
“Hey.” His voice is underwater. “Annabeth, hey. Breathe. C’mon. It’s okay, no one’s judging, you’ve just gotta breathe.”
Except, they are judging and he sounds like a liar.
Briefly, she considers hiding behind him, but the angle isn’t right and they’d still see her so instead she wraps her arms around her midsection, which doesn’t really do anything because, seriously, her whole torso is on display and they can definitely see the rapid rise and fall of it as she searches for air. The windows are open so why isn’t there any air?
Luke’s hand is warmer now, radiating on her cheek. She tries to look at him, really look at him, and she tries to imagine that boy in the alley, who’d saved her. Who’d held her until her sobs dwindled into a runny nose that he let her wipe on his own sleeve. She’d turned that boy who wanted to be her brother into her ex-boyfriend and he’s not nearly as helpful now as he was then, and everyone is staring at her like she’s the one who has to take the fall for that.
“Can we leave?” she rushes out between two very shallow breaths.
He doesn’t respond to that. Or maybe he does. She can hear him saying you chose to come here in her head, but that could just be her own conscience kicking her down. Sometimes that voice sounds like him.
“Right,” he says to himself, like he’s done with all this. He untwists his flask and brings the rim to her closed mouth. “This is ridiculous, Annabeth.”
“Stop,” she whines, pulling away.
“It’ll make you feel better,” he coaxes, using his sweet voice now.
“I hate it.”
Patiently, he says, “You’ve never tried it.”
He holds the flask against her chest, above the neckline of her top, the cold metal going straight through flesh and to her heart.
“I know you trust me,” he says, and later she’ll recognize that this was probably the cruelest way he could have phrased it.
He holds her head firmly in one hand, thumb reaching out to pry open her bottom lip, undoubtedly smearing her lip gloss. Annabeth doesn’t know what to expect when the alcohol hits her tongue.
It's the worst thing she’s ever tasted. It startles her. So maybe in that way it does its job.
Luke, she learns, only intended to give her about a teaspoon’s worth. It’s her own hand that reaches for the flask, that lets even more of it fall down her throat because anything is better than feeling laughed at.
After the initial shock wears off, Luke quickly tugs it back. Annabeth tries not to throw up into the sink, gagging, barely looking over at him. If she did, she’d be able to tell that he’s angry, territorial over his vices.
“What the fuck.” He tucks it into a pocket on his costume, now holding onto the whiskey bottle itself.
“Sorry,” she rasps through the disgusting aftertaste, turning her back on the others finally . She sinks to the floor, the wood cold on her naked legs, trying for a successful breath.
He isn’t feeling like Nice Luke anymore, apparently. “What are you doing?”
Annabeth heaves. “Just…need a moment.”
“You had a moment. If people weren’t staring before, you got their attention now. Can you get up?”
She shakes her head, tuning out the bass and his harsh tone as she settles into a steady rhythm.
“We can go upstairs and you can do this in a bathroom—whatever. Get up. This is so dramatic.”
“Please wait,” she croaks.
“What do you think I’ve been doing?”
“I know—just. I don’t want to get up yet.”
“You’re going to have to eventually. It’s just gonna be with or without me.”
Her head shoots up at him in panic. “Where are you going?”
He nods over to his left, though she doesn’t remember the house’s layout and can’t see anything from down here. For a pathetic minute, she just blinks up at him, scarily tall when she’s at his feet and even worse when he’s dressed like a serial killer. Luke taps his fingers on the bottle. He’s given her more than the moment she’s asked for at this point, even though he did bitch about it, so really, it shouldn’t be surprising to her when he finally straightens and turns away.
It should be impossible to actually hear his steps. Still, to her they’re louder than the music and resounding. Like a lost duckling, Annabeth scrambles up from the floor, following after him without even letting herself balance first and she can only hope that her skirt isn’t flipped up when she flees the kitchen.
Luke stands at the first step, waiting. Of course, he wouldn’t have actually left. He’d only wanted to light a fire under her; get her to brave being seen while she worries about something else.
His lips twitch, satisfied and when he pulls her into him his embrace is relieving. “There’s my girl.”
He leads her up the stairs before Annabeth has the opportunity to check if she’s being watched, again.
The carpet up the steps leading to the second floor is stained with shoe prints and whatever else. Annabeth watches her own sneakers, caked in wet dirt, add onto the collection as she follows Luke. He’s let go of her, but it barely makes a difference. He speeds up half-way up the steps and so does she. He pauses at the top and she stills herself at his heels.
The party isn’t so intimidating from up here.
Behind her, Luke knocks on what she assumes is either a bedroom or bathroom door. No response. It creaks as he opens it, though she doesn’t hear his footsteps so she knows he’s watching her, watching the party.
“You’ll get used to it,” he says.
“I don’t like being a spectacle, Luke.”
“You’re not really the kind of girl who can go unnoticed. And that’s even when you’re not dressed like this.”
She sees Ethan drop onto the couch in the living room, cheeks red and expression wanting. Another boy stands between his knees, feeding him more beer. The girl from earlier has taken off her Bride of Frankenstein wig, dancing between the friends she’d come here with, blending in with the pool of bodies and college Halloween is so different from scary movie night with Percy and Sally. She’d thought the costume was her trick to fitting it. Evidently not.
No one watches her anymore, but she can’t peel her eyes off them. Girls in tiny dresses and ripped tights and fake blood dripping between their thighs. Bows in their hair and schoolgirl outfits that look nothing like her private school uniform, actually. She spots a Little Bo Peep and Red Riding Hood in the crowd, sporting gingham bloomers and lace and Annabeth is certain her costume plays its part well. It only feels childish on her because she’s a child, and everyone can tell, apparently.
She steps away. Her top is riding up again, but she doesn’t adjust it.
In the bedroom, she slips out of her Converses, bare feet making their way to Luke, who stands in front of the TV, frowning as he tries to bring the vintage junkbox to life. Luke’s room, she notes. He’d moved in just last month, and about as decorated as his room in his mom’s apartment.
She shuffles between him and the screen, wrapping her arms around his waist. Immediately, he holds her to him, too, and she feels the remote in his hand brush her shoulder blade. His arms constrict, tighter and tighter, and she wants to take his clothes off him now, if only to feel his skin on hers.
“Missed you,” she mumbles, nuzzling her face into him, probably ruining her makeup.
He presses a kiss to her head. “I didn’t go anywhere.”
This is her cue to do—something. Apologize for breaking things off. Tell him she wants him back, that she regrets it. What else had she spent hours scouring for a costume and even more getting ready tonight for?
She thinks back to two weeks ago, when she had thought—hoped—she had ended this. Closing the door on him as he stood at her doorstep and Annabeth rushed up to her bedroom and watched him walk away through her window. It was daytime. Sunny, especially for October, and the orange leaves crinkled under his shoes like the breaking bones of summer. It was good, she swears. It was good enough right up until it wasn’t anymore.
He’d been so angry with her.
“You pushed me away,” she says, surprising herself when it doesn’t come out like an accusation.
Luke pinches the skin at the dip of her waist. “I wish I didn’t. You’re all I’ve got.”
She rests her chin on his chest, watching his Adam's apple. “Not a lot, then?”
“Enough for me.” He taps her ass with the remote. “Look.”
The TV is blue static when she turns, straining her neck. “What?”
He pulls her down onto the floor, crossing his legs and pulling her into the center, carpet scratching her skin. She wonders why they didn’t sit on the bed. And then she sees the DVD collection.
“You wanna pick this one, bug?”
She skims over the stack, snug between the carpet and the underside of the old TV stand’s first shelf. Scream and its sequels. Halloween, Carrie, The Exorcist. The Titanic DVD box.
Frowning, she leans back against his stomach, slumped in horrible posture. “I don’t feel like a movie.”
His fingers drag up her arms, down her chest and the polyester of her top. Treading to the itchy, lacy hem of her skirt, teasing. “What do you feel like?” he asks, raw and quiet.
He flicks the little bow that sits at the center of her panties—underwear, really. She’s not sure panties is a word that can be applied to what she wears from a value pack labeled ages nine through twelve. Annabeth breathes with conscious effort and her heart is exhausted. She’d come here for this and worse. That’s what she’d felt like, when she stepped into her clothes and onto the doorstep, missing what it had felt like to be numb beneath him. Exhausted, unburdened, loved. Even if it killed her, she wanted to lose time with him.
Especially if it killed her.
She’s caught playing a fruitless game because that isn’t exactly the kind of thing you admit to your ex boyfriend, even if he can see the truth plain as day. She only holds her breath and keeps her thighs firmly together, pointing lazily at a movie with her toe. “That one.”
Luke folds forward to reach it and she finds herself sandwiched in him as he makes use of the DVD player. He smells like her old lotion, the one she’d left at his mom’s house, never bothering to return and claim it. Lemon and earthy, and it upsets her because he’s supposed to smell like him— not her.
“I’ve tried to show you this one before,” he comments, fast-forwarding through the beginning commercials until the menu screen animates into bloody graphics. Friday the 13th.
Annabeth shrugs, immediately tugged back down from the tightness of her sleeve and she wants it off . “I don’t remember.”
“Yeah, it was a long time ago,” he says. “We got in a fight during the commercials and you stormed out of the theater before it even started.”
A halo glows around the word play. Luke’s finger hovers over the remote button. Extending her own, she presses down on his nail and the screen gives way to the opening scene.
She wiggles back into him, trying to find some comfort. “What did we fight about?”
“Me being drunk. You feeling ignored.”
“Sounds right,” she mumbles, the cool press of his flask against her hip and if she’s more tolerant of it now than she was then, it’s because she’s less of the girl she used to be. That Annabeth would certainly never desecrate something as sacred as Strawberry Shortcake.
“How do you feel?” His voice is a whisper as the movie crackles through the dodgy speakers. “Now?”
Annabeth doesn’t say anything, eyes glued on the movie. She always likes the opening kills the best.
“Your heart’s going crazy,” he muses, hand flat over her top, palm dragging the itchy fabric over her nipples. She shivers, but doesn’t squirm. Luke keeps his hand there, soaking up her pulse. “Still scared?”
“I wasn’t scared.”
“So shaking on the kitchen floor was…what?”
“I just hate being judged.”
“Because you’re scared of what they’ll think of you.”
She doesn’t respond to that. Eventually, his hand drops and he leans back on the carpet, holding her up with just his abdomen. On screen, two counselors are sneaking off to have sex while the kids sleep.
“Annabeth?”
She slumps down further. “Hm.”
“You’re never gonna see them again,” he says, like it should make her feel better.
His fingers crawl up from her heart, tracing the protrusion of her chest bones above the neckline of her top, tracing up her neck. He holds the side of her face, rubbing his thumb behind her jaw, and she remembers he’d held her just like this when they met in the alley. Five fingers and a pulse that beat next to her ear and Annabeth couldn’t stop crying for the life of her, even though she was no longer afraid. Looking back, she thinks she might’ve kept crying so he wouldn’t let go of her.
“They’re not my friends. You’re my whole life, you know that?” He’s not watching the movie at all. “I don’t give a shit what they think, and neither should you.”
“Ethan’s your friend.”
“Ethan’s my roommate. That’s not the same.”
She wants to say she misses when he lived with his mom. That she misses sitting on his front steps, a book splayed on her lap while she waited for him to come home from work. The way the world slowed in his bedroom, the bugs that begged to get in through the window screen, the whir of his old ceiling fan he had to fix every other week. When he was hers and hers alone.
She doesn’t think he’d appreciate any mention of his mom right now.
“He was looking at me weird.”
“There are worse ways for men to look at you.”
The boy counselor gets stabbed first. Knife to the chest, sputtering blood, and Annabeth imagines the blood pumping under her skin when Luke finds the tender spot of her neck and grazes his teeth.
“You’re not any better,” she whispers, voice thick.
He makes sure she’s looking when he grins, teeth sharp and begging to bite. He shuffles her on his lap, shoulder to his, their legs perpendicular. The girl in the movie is crawling back, uselessly fighting for her life and Annabeth’s always heard people liken sex to death, in books and the locker rooms before gym class. An arousal of its own right.
“No,” he agrees mournfully. “I’m the worst.”
His kiss, however brief, is hot and consuming, and Annabeth is fast to give it back. A year’s worth of muscle memory, nerves coming to life like this is what she’s meant to do, leaning into him, neck craning back as his height crowds her, and she can’t ever explain how much she’d missed this. His form, over her, overpowering her, dancing under him like a puppet on a string. Her head hits the bed frame and Luke hisses like it hurts him, too. He cups the back of her head, pads of his fingers soothing the spot.
He pulls away, lips slick in her saliva, and Annabeth watches him work his jaw as he looks away from her. Searching for his alcohol.
She gets on her feet before he can push her off.
Her skirt is rumpled and it had moved too far up her ass and she doesn’t think Luke would have spared her a glance at all had he not caught the sight of it, eyes darting around the room manically. She grips the hem with angry fists and pulls it down, which doesn’t do anything. It’s so short, and he’s right there under her.
“You’re so lucky it was me who picked you off the street,” he says, eyes dark and she doesn’t know why she pulled the skirt down when he’s looking at her like that . She thinks she’d take it off completely just to keep his attention on her—they’d both forgotten about the bottle, but Luke remembers first.
He fishes it out from under the bed, undoing the cap and tossing the contents back into his mouth the way you might drink water after a run in the summer and Annabeth stands tall over him, curls tucked under her crossed arms. Lemon Meringue’s green bows trail down her hair, a little disheveled now, but she’d tied them tight in preparation.
“Would you have fucked another girl if I didn’t show up?”
He laughs. “You’re serious?”
She nods, holding her breath and she feels like she’s back in the kitchen again. He’s laughing at her.
“No,” he responds slowly. Sensing her panic, he sits her on the bed, kneeling in front of her. Clean above his head, the movie rolls on in faux-peace, unsettling when you know what’s to come and Annabeth doesn’t, but it’s not hard to guess. She’s most drawn to the disruption, she’s figured out. The moment everything goes wrong.
Luke’s gaze catches on a bow that’s come undone. Second to last, a curled lock resting on her thigh. His fingers are quick to loop it back together. One bunny ear over the other bunny ear, the way her father had taught her to tie her shoes.
“Look at me, bug.” His palms are flush on her knees. “I haven’t been with anyone else since I met you. That’s the truth. It’s up to you to believe it.”
She doesn’t.
(Which isn’t fair of her, maybe, when she’d cheated on him herself not that long ago. And more than the cheating itself, she regrets who she did it with.)
His hands spread her legs, massaging up her thigh, squeezing too hard but she wouldn’t ever tell him to stop. “You don’t know what you’re like,” he muses.
No, it takes a unique cosmic mess of a girl to agree to be in whatever she’s in with him. She taps her toe on the glass bottle, sitting on the carpet by his legs, never too far out of reach. “Not better than this.”
Luke curls his fingers into the waistband of her underwear, toying, breath warm on her skin and it smells like alcohol. She can’t remember the last time it didn’t. She thinks every kiss she’s ever had with him since the first has tasted either like smoke or whiskey, and how can she compete with a dependency like that? When she can tell him to stop, but the bottle will never.
“I’ll get better,” he drawls, a promise like foreplay. Stringing her along, parting her legs further, and if nothing else, Annabeth can count on the release. “I miss you.”
Her mouth feels dry. “How much?”
He bites the tender inside of her thigh, softly. “I drink at night the way I used to fuck you to sleep.”
The heat rushes up to her cheeks, down to her center. Memories playing on the film reel in her brain, the nights she needed to slip out of consciousness. In the pitch dark of his bedroom, his face right above hers yet impossible to see, sure of nothing except for the sensation deep inside her. Waking up full of him, the sticky mess between them desperate to keep him glued to her.
“What do you now, hm?” he says, rolling the soaked cotton down to her ankles, onto the floor. “When you get in bed?”
“Shut my eyes and wait for sleep to come.”
The corner of his lips quirks up. “Yeah?”
She nods stiffly. “Yeah.”
His eyes find the spot between her legs again, exposed and swollen, and there’s a wishful moment where she’s so sure he’s going to do something. Instead, his body, between her legs, is replaced with cool air and she tosses on the unsteady mattress as he situates himself behind her again. And then his hands tug under her knees, spreading her wide. The screen goes dark between scenes and she sees her reflection staring back at her, open and wanting and so, so weak.
He drags his knuckles down her wetness, and she hears him suck in a breath, something between admiration and disbelief. The music lowers into silence, and he pushes in two fingers.
Annabeth startles. “Luke—”
“Hey,” he says firmly. “You’re okay. Eyes on the movie.”
She writhes, trying to create some friction, but he holds his fingers still. “I told you I don’t care about the fucking movie.”
Camp Crystal Lake looks nothing at all like the summer camp she met Percy at. The trees are all wrong and the drab cabins shouldn’t house anything but termites and roaches. It’s daytime. It’s daytime and the sun is so bright but the camera angle is shaky and out of way, like the eyes of an onlooker. They call this place Camp Blood, some boy says to the other new counselors.
“I think you were lying earlier,” Luke says, voice hoarse.
She frowns. “About what?”
“About not being scared. I think you were. And I think you like it.” He starts working his fingers, crooking them up into her walls. “You know you look too young to be here. You know this little costume would catch their attention. And you came anyway.”
She didn’t quite catch the girl’s name, but she’s in the car with a driver the camera won’t let you see and he’s missed the turn for Camp Crystal Lake. She’s not worried quite yet, but the music is. It builds and turns into a high whine and the girl grows frantic. Stop, she says. Mildly distressed at first.
Luke’s fingers are moving with fervor now, and she grows warm and too sweaty to still be in this stupid fucking costume. She shakes in his arms, but she’s a good listener. Annabeth keeps her eyes on the movie.
He says, “Being scared makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”
Stop, the girl in the movie repeats. Stop, stop, stop. Her fear swells with the music, and Annabeth knows her heartbeat is going crazy, that Luke can feel it inside her. The girl launches out of the car, but the music doesn’t let up and you know that running won’t save her. It’s the same through-his-eyes angle, and it’s like the movie agrees with her, about the discomfort of being seen. A hopeless little spectacle.
The word stop sits on her tongue, as his fingers move inside her, building speed and pressure and this poor girl has been trekking through the woods for so long, but she’ll never be safe and it’s not the body she bumps into that scares Annabeth—it’s the flannel-clad girl and the doom that crashes over her face as she sees the knife. She murmurs no.
And for the first time Annabeth considers that no might be different from stop. It’s definitive, she thinks. To refuse what’s happening to you, rather than begging for it to end. She’s never said no before.
Then again, it’s not like she’s ever really wanted him to listen.
Luke brings her to her peak just as the killer slashes the girl’s neck. There’s not enough blood, she notes dizzily, clenching around his knuckles as the room spins. Trying to ground herself on him, but he slips out, her own juices smeared over her cheek when his kiss devours her. He’d eat her alive if he could and she’d let him.
Finally, he pulls her top over her head, and it scratches every bit of skin right up until her scalp. He doesn’t bother soothing it this time, set on tearing her apart now. Annabeth gets on her knees, the mattress bouncing beneath her and Luke holds her hips as she’s about to tug the skirt down.
“It hurts,” she complains. As if he cares.
His teeth catch around a nipple, skimming, and her hands shake as she tries to get him out of his jumpsuit. The summer tan has faded completely, tugging at her heart because watching him work out in the sun had been her favorite way to spend mornings, before Percy would get out of summer school. A different skin, but the same boy, she reminds herself. The same scars that run down his back. From life on the streets, from nights with her fingernails digging and drawing blood.
“Looks good on you,” he mutters, jumpsuit split open, exposing his broad shoulders and toned stomach. “Wore this just for me?”
“And every other wandering eye at the party.”
On cue, someone bangs at the door, and she swears the entire house shakes. “Luke!” Ethan’s voice.
He tilts his head back and groans. Her hands settle around his neck, holding herself up, holding him here. “I’m busy,” he calls.
“ You said you’d kick everyone out.”
“Just turn off the music. They’ll leave.”
“I fucking did.”
Both of them frown at this. They hadn’t even noticed.
She grips his throat. He closes his eyes, breathing about as well as he can with her hands around his neck. The movie rolls on in the back, ominous music cresting and falling. His eyes are rueful when he opens them.
“Give me a minute,” he says to her, removing her hands, kissing them in apology.
He walks to the door with his jumpsuit half undone. He undoes the lock and opens it just enough to squeeze out, without letting Ethan see in. At least, she hopes so. Either way, she covers her chest with her top, tucking it beneath her arms to keep it up.
Faintly, she hears Luke’s voice. Angry and low, screaming for everyone to get the fuck out. He says some other things and he must’ve been telling the truth when he said they’re not his friends because she would hope he doesn’t talk to his friends this way. She imagines him standing out there, shirtless and disheveled and achingly attractive, and she wishes she’d left scars on his chest, too, for everyone to see. Faintly, she hears partygoers groaning, their footsteps falling closer to the other side of the house and out to the front porch. And then she hears something closer. Ethan, voice loud and meaning to be heard through the door.
How old is she ? he asks.
Annabeth scoots back on the bed until her back hits the wall. She doesn’t know what Luke says and she doesn’t want to hear. She only wants for him to come back.
He does, after a beat, looking significantly more pissed off than he’d left as. She straightens unsurely and Annabeth misses the fleeting power of being above him, having his breath locked in her hands.
Some movie character screams through the speakers but she isn’t watching anymore.
She sets the top down hesitantly, covering her breasts with her hair instead. Her finger catches on one of the green bows and she pulls it out, frustrated and she doesn’t even fucking care that Ethan disproves of their relationship, she just wants to get what she came here for.
“Over so soon?”
He stands at the foot of the bed. “Drunks make quite a mess. Ethan hates vomit.”
“I can stay though?”
His expression softens a little. He climbs over to her, kissing her sweetly with his hands braced on the wall around her. “If you don’t run away in the morning.”
She smiles. “Depends how well you do.”
His mouth finds her neck and he kisses his way all the way down, sucking her skin between his teeth, biting just enough to make her whimper. Lower, lower, lower. Catching the skirt’s waistband in his mouth, hands rumpling the lace in fistfulls, mumbling words she can barely make out through the movie’s nose and her own heartbeat in her ears. Cutest little costume, he says. Picked it thinking of me?
His head is snug between her thighs and it saves her the embarrassment of having to say yes. Worse, that she’d made it thinking of him. Slutty Strawberry Shortcake costumes are easy to find on the market—Lemon Meringue, not so much. She’d found a puffy pale yellow mini skirt in the kid’s section at Goodwill and added her own lace scallops to the edges, dipped a round sponge brush into a darker gold to make the polka dots. The cropped blouse and all its ruffles had been the work of a thread, a needle, and too many pricked fingers.
(All while thinking of him, younger and sweaty with summer, fresh off a game of basketball with the neighborhood kids while she drew inside the lines of her Strawberry Shortcake coloring book. Annabeth liked to play, too, but she didn’t like the other boys. She only ever wanted Luke alone. The Luke who ran up behind her between games, and leaned down to kiss her cheek and praise her drawings even when they looked like shit because her markers were too dry. You look just like that one, he’d said, finger dancing over Lemon Meringue’s curls. Smell like lemons too. )
He takes his time with his tongue, fingers gripping the soft flesh of her waist as her legs curl around his neck, locking him in place. The pleasure ripples through her like an old friend. Familiar, even when he trails even further down, tongue warm somewhere else and Annabeth has a hand over her mouth now. She’s not a moaner, but she might sob at the anticipation. Luke circles his tongue, getting it wet, and she knows he’d never actually push even a finger in with nothing but his saliva sweetening the deal, but she’d take it. She thinks…she thinks she’d even prefer it.
“Luke,” she whines, tossing her head so her other cheek will feel the cool press of the pillow. There is no cool press and the entire bed is so warm and the movie is boring.
He makes a shushing sound, muscles flexing in his arms as he pushes himself up, her legs extending with him, her white and green striped knee socks looking awfully silly on his shoulders.
She frowns. “Is it bad if he hears?”
“Do you want him to?” He shifts himself forward, his frame like a cage around her.
“No, that’s not…” Her chest expands with her heart, both too open for her own good.
“You always have to be so quiet, hm, baby?” He comes closer and she imagines this is what being stuck between enclosing walls might feel like. A knee presses against her cunt, the rough fabric of his costume so unforgiving on her clit and why is he still wearing that? “Always so quiet and sweet. Do you even know how to be any louder? Even when I fuck you bloody, you can’t scream.”
She grinds down on his thigh, finding relief that he’s merciful enough to let her have. She digs the harsh end of her nail under his cheekbone, watching his skin give, feeling him grow even harder. Jason Voorhees has a knife, and she has her hands.
If he wants to fuck her in her ridiculous skirt—fine. She turns her hips, stealing herself away from him, feet pawing at his jumpsuit. “Take it off, Luke.”
To her surprise, he listens. She curls her knees into herself as he strips free. The tattoo she did for him on his thigh is a little blurry now, her line-work shoddy but coherent enough to still look true.
Stitches.
Black ink woven like stitches in his pretty skin, covering a real scar she’d given him with nothing but a fingernail.
He catches her staring. “Proud of yourself?”
Annabeth is afraid she’s smiling.
She gets on her hands and knees, working through the stiffness of her limbs in real time as she climbs over to him. Sitting on folded legs, she reaches for his boxers, pulling them down, exposing another tattoo. A key on his hip bone, the head a hollow circle like a compass with her initials where north should be.
“I can’t believe you let me do this,” she whispers, but she can and she’s grateful for it.
“I’m sicker than you.”
He tucks her hair behind an ear, thumb running up and down the side of her face as she tugs the boxers all the way down. His dick is flush against his stomach, the vertical line where his abs split, and she knows how this looks. Annabeth on her knees, on the bed, while he stands tall. They’re sick, and yet. They’ve never been here before.
“What are you thinking?”
Her eyes meet his, confused and worried and she thinks he’s the only man in the world who’d be distressed by the prospect of a blowjob.
“I just want to try.”
“You’re not gonna like it,” he says, voice coarse. His thumb finds the crevice between her lips.
“You don’t know that…”
He drives a finger into her mouth, her tongue flat under his intrusion. Too far, proving his point successfully when she gags, sputtering and drawing back.
Breathing in messily, she wipes her mouth. “Okay, I won’t go that far.”
“Just the tip,” he says.
She restitutes herself, wrapping her hand around the base of his thick length, making him hiss. The movie’s soundtrack is getting to her, she thinks, nerves swirling in her belly. Watching the camp counselors run for their lives, watching Luke from below. Eyes darkening with want.
Two strokes, and she still hasn’t worked up the courage. She hates the way he makes her do these things on her own. She wishes he’d brace his hands behind her head and push himself in.
A bloody wound on the TV, a knife penetrating it. Annabeth parts her lips and takes it. Just the tip.
Luke groans, and she doesn’t think there’s a feasible amount of courage that would make her want to look up and see him. She imagines she looks pretty fucking stupid from this angle.
It’s not weird, the feeling. Her mouth is only opened about as wide as she’d need it to be to suck a particularly big popsicle. She flicks her tongue over his slit, tasting the pre-cum. Which isn’t anything new, really, but she’s never had it like this before. Her hand gives attention to the rest, on its own until Luke closes his on top, encouraging her to grip him tighter.
She hollows her cheeks and sucks and he groans fuck while the movie comes into a suspensful lull. It’s too loud when she comes up for air, the sound of her spit and his skin so lewd, and she’d rather watch innocent teenagers be torn apart by a masked killer than tilt up her chin and face him.
Lucky he does it for her. His knuckles graze her jaw, fist against her throat. “You look cute with me in your mouth.”
She leans forward into his fist, licking up from the base of his cock to the head and Luke is too startled by the sensation to realize she’s cutting off her own airways.
She takes him back in her mouth, sucking deeper, feeling dizzy. His hands grip her hair and she feels him tangle his fingers in the little bows. Jason makes one more jumpscare before Luke pushes her off him.
Cheeks red, eyes hard and so blue. She would have never gotten away with it for long—he’s always been partial to doing the ruining.
“More,” she mumbles, her tongue feeling weird.
He chuckles, rounding the bed to get something from the nightstand’s drawer. He sits facing her, facing the wall and away from the film. Then he grabs her by the waist, resting her head on his shoulder with a placating hand, the way you might try to rock a baby to sleep. Her knees dig into the mattress and she can feel the boxspring beneath it.
He teases the elastic of her striped stockings, stretching it far and letting it snap back on her skin. She’d jump had her years with him not taken her pain tolerance and stacked it up miles. He bunches up the fabric around her ankles, then pulls them off completely and it’s a lot colder in this room than she had realized before.
Only the skirt covers her and it’s not like that can do very much either. Her ass is out, and the palm of his hand is coarse.
“You’re like a gift,” he says, finger dragging right up her wet center to where she wants him most. She hears the sound of a bottle clicking open and shut, feels the cool gel at her entrance and whimpers into his neck. “Popping up just when I need you. In the alley, on the porch tonight. God just keeps bringing you back to me, huh?”
“You don’t need me…all the time?”
“Of course I fucking do. But I think—” His breath is warm on her shoulder, finger ill-intended when it delves into her tightness. So foreign after all this time, and painful and if she’s his gift, then this is hers, the one she’s been dreaming of since she broke things off. “I think he knew tonight was different.”
She moans, watching the TV, watching the door. Act III, bloodbath.
It doesn't take long for Luke to add another finger. The lube is sparse, but she doesn't mind. She likes the friction of where they meet, even if it isn’t kind to her.
“Why?” she asks, out of breath.
“The thought of you going out for Halloween and me not being there to see.” He moves slowly, building the stretch with no particular goal, and she wonders what’s wrong with her because as far as she knows, anal doesn’t feel this good for other girls.
“It’s different for me,” he goes on to explain. “You’re like my…you’re my—”
The word baby hangs in the air.
His baby, lined up in front of the bookshelf, smiling as wide as she could in her first ever Halloween costume. Princess Belle before she became a princess, when she still liked to read. Immortalized in a collection of photos protected by nothing but a rubber band holding it together, and his old analog clock sitting atop it.
It goes two-ways. If she felt a little more coherent, she’d tell him that. The truth remains: her mind has checked out, and her eyes are watery and she trusts him to make her like this because if she’s his baby, he’s her something—s omething she doesn’t really have the words to find right now.
He shakes his head.
“Here now,” she slurs weakly, pressing her lips to the side of his neck.
Three fingers, all the way in, and it’s still not enough.
“Won’t let you get away this time.”
He tosses her back on the bed like a ragdoll, finally ready to take the skirt off her, revealing nothing he hasn’t seen before, but you’d think it’s the first time by the way his eyes devour her. Eyes, then his mouth. They’re a hungry pair, the two of them. He kisses and sucks and bites and this time when the heat of his tongue trails down her cunt and to her asshole, he does more than just circle it. Well spent and welcoming him in. He holds her hips up, crouched at the end of the bed, and she grabs onto anything she can. The bedsheets, his hair, his ears.
Annabeth kicks his shoulder back, not rudely. Forceful, still. Enough to make him look up and his mouth is smeared in crimson and is she already bleeding?
“Been too long,” he explains, wiping the blood with the back of his hand. Like his vocal chords have been replaced with sandpaper.
She’s already turning herself over, hands locked and forearms flat against the mattress. Spine curving in, melting like candle wax. It’s not her favorite position, but she doesn’t know how else to get the point to him. Her patience is waning thin.
Luke gets the hint. He lines himself up with her, and she feels his dick stroke up and down where she’s the most sensitive. Gathering the wetness of her core and painting it into her ass.
“You don’t touch yourself there?”
Annabeth wiggles, burying her face in a pillow and it’s a little more chilling to hear the screams coming from the movie when she can’t see the screen. Desperate cries of please and no, oh God and if it weren’t for the dramatic music, Ethan might think they’re watching a porno in here.
She mumbles something he’s supposed to take as meaning of fucking course not. It’s different to do it to herself. Not as easy to reach, anyway, when she’s laying flat on her back when her stepmom calls for household bedtime. If there was any way to encroach on the subject without starting a fight, Annabeth would tell her that forcing her to go to sleep before she’s tired is making all her problems worse. And she’s too old to have her phone taken away.
Blinds pulled to the sides to let in the streetlight, door locked, and covers tugged all the way up. Two fingers, sometimes three. Trailing down her midriff and into her pajama pants. Hours, if she had to guess. Hours she could lose herself to it.
“Just me,” he says, more to himself than anything else, she thinks. His fingers pinch her clit as he pushes in the tip and—he hadn’t quite prepared her for a stretch like this, but her mind knew to expect it.
Annabeth whines into the sheets, and Luke mumbles a soft I know, I know, baby, you can do it as he works in the rest of his length. The friction itself isn’t the worst, between the lube and her wetness and their spit. She can feel the lube dripping down to her core. Or maybe, it’s sweat. She doesn’t know what it is, but it’s wet and loud as he pulls his hips back, driving just a little deeper with each slow thrust.
“Luke,” she manages, blindly reaching back for him.
He takes her hand, kissing her knuckles like the gentleman he isn’t. His lips leave the blood he drew from her earlier on her soft skin. Red on pink.
Luke wraps an arm around her waist, dragging her upright. Her head droops on a limp neck and he open-mouth kisses her cheek. For the first time, he makes it all the way in and she doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to the feeling. She hopes she doesn’t. He pauses, deep inside her, and she thinks it’s hurting him, too, how tight she is. He’s letting her adjust, fit herself to him, but Annabeth writhes in his hold, and she doesn’t beg for more even if she wants it because please, more isn’t what Luke needs. Neither is it what she wants to give him.
She holds him by the wrist when she digs her teeth into his palm. Deep enough to hurt like a bitch, even if there isn’t any blood. The mark it leaves is violent and damning and too familiar now. It’s crossed her mind before—that loving him has caused her to know her own appetite well. She bites because it hurts him, and Luke thrusts even harder because of it, whether it be reactionary or compensation.
He never tells her to stop, either.
Gonna fuck you out good, he promises instead. Sap in her veins, her brain, glazing over her eyes and slowing time. She thinks she’s panting, but she can barely hear herself. His voice is muffled in her ears. You miss it, bug? Falling asleep how we used to? And his free hand is at her cunt again, fingers surging up and it’s so much fuller when he’s in both sides like this. Remember you’d ask me to stay inside you all night?
Her face heats impossibly more, embarrassment and the building orgasm roaring.
He chuckles against her neck, teasing her rim when he pulls almost all the way out. Gentle. “No? You were so cute. So fucked out, I’d thought you were gone.” When he fills her up again, Annabeth really is. Gone and dewey and heavy-boned. Her hands fall lonely to their sides as he clamps his own around her chin, pulling her back to look at him. Sweat beads on his hair and his cheekbones have taken on that crude shade of red. “You’re sweet when you’re sleepy. Sweet and spreading your little thighs for me, when I came back with a towel.”
Annabeth isn’t listening to the story, really. Or she isn’t, until he says, “We were at your house.”
“What?” The word startles out of her. He presses a finger just the right way inside her, cock moving in tandem, and she is so, so close.
Luke kisses behind her ear, thumbing at her bottom lip, his groans turning to hot breath on her skin. “Miss ruining you in that bed.”
“Like it…like it here,” she says, beat and desperate and untruthful. She doesn’t like this room at all and she hates her own bedroom, too.
He lets go of her chin and Annabeth plummets to the mattress without grace. On her left cheek, she can see the movie again, but it barely registers in her mind. Blurry shots and scared girls and boys and a night they’ll never see through.
Leaning over her, chest against her back, muscles firm where she’s all bone, Luke drives himself in with three steady strokes before her orgasm tips in a sodden mess, his release flooding into her, his fingers moving the hair out her face. His cloying voice louder than any of the film’s noise, saying good—good, because I’m keeping you here.
Annabeth is not even half-awake for the rest. She feels him pull out. It’s fast and cold and he’s shushing her all while he does it. Sorry, bug, I know. The popcorn ceiling is the same as her room, only she likes to keep hers covered with a grey-blue tapestry. She stares and stares, until her eyelids droop and Luke wipes up between her legs with something that’s also cold and she probably whines again. He laughs.
He pulls the sheets up over her. The movie ends—or, he’s paused it. Either way, it’s silent and after a very patient moment in the sheets and the silence, she realizes he’s not in bed yet.
“A second,” he says softly, just as she begins to open her mouth. Footsteps. A clang of glass. A drink, she supposes.
The lights go out.
This might be the part where she asks to get back together. Granted, that’s not what she wanted when she came here, but Annabeth is not anybody’s friend with benefits and the bottle clatters onto the bedside table when he tips it empty and, well. She is very tired.
Luke is warm and sweaty and whiskey-breathed when he envelopes her. Crushes her, more like. All deadweight. He lays a kiss on her hairline, and he doesn't say he loves her. If he had, she would have said it back. It stands that she refuses to be first. Isn't it enough that she came to him tonight? Gonna keep you here, he’d said.
His hold on her is tight and she knows he means it. It doesn’t make her feel any better.