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Cassie is not in love. She has not been for a long time.
In her youth, her first experience with desire resided in the sting of a needle sticking beneath the veil of her flesh. The fuzz around the edges that every high gave her, those few, fleeting hours of escape.
Her divorce from heroin was ugly and the one from her living, mouth-breathing husband even uglier. Chad claimed many things of hers—her favorite tweed sweater, which still pisses her off—but a piece of her heart was not one of them.
Victoria’s cheeks are marred with tear tracks that glisten under the incandescence of the overhead lamp. Her whole face is flushed warm and her lips are parted open and wanting. Starved. Pleading.
Cassie is not in love, even as she stares down into deep and watery brown irises that look back at her with such a fragile reverence. Her palm does not land at all softly against Victoria’s cheek, and the broken sound it tears from the girl makes her entire body flare with want. She pushes the head of her thumb into her eager mouth and is immediately met with wet heat.
She takes her past the knuckle and hollows her cheeks. It’s too much— the warmth, how easily her tongue glides along her skin. Cassie has to stifle a groan when Victoria spits her out and nuzzles into her thumb, smearing the saliva coating it all around her jaw.
It’s so fucking dirty. Cassie can feel shame pooling in the space between muscle and skin, a guilt that dizzies her more violently than any drug she’s ever allowed into her bloodstream. Victoria leans forward, presses her sticky cheek to Cassie’s thigh with a puff of breath.
“I want to taste you.” Her voice is sweet. It’s nauseating. “Please?”
Cassie is not in love as her trembling fingers tug at the drawstring of her pants, as they’re tugged far enough down that she can wriggle them free from her ankles. The younger kisses the heat of her through the thin fabric that still lies between them and she feels sparks lighting up behind her eyes. Then, that’s gone too, and if Cassie strains, she thinks she can hear God weeping as mouth meets desire.
Victoria is zealous when it comes to her education. No corners cut, nothing ever done halfway or without the utmost effort possible. Whether it be perfecting subcuticular sutures or making a third-year resident come on her face, she is the most eager pupil Cassie has ever had.
She thrusts her hips forward and, despite her usual ability to maintain her composure, isn’t sure what to do with her hands. Their eyes meet and Victoria feeds like she has been starving for this her whole life, messy and lewd and the sight is adding to what’s already beginning to rise in Cassie’s core.
Her fingertips dig cruelly into Victoria’s scalp once she makes up her mind and she finds herself hoping that it hurts. Cassie strangles out a grunt and flexes her hands, tugging on the hair threaded around them with conviction. She feels rather than hears the answering moans into her cunt, watches how Victoria’s eyes glass over from the pain that mixes into pleasure like– well, like a cocktail, but Cassie surmises faintly that she couldn’t possibly have the knowledge to commend the analogy. She hasn’t ever stepped foot into a bar, let alone downed a cosmo or two. She isn’t old enough.
She isn’t old enough.
It’s guilt that pushes Cassie so suddenly over the edge and her entire body stutters, orgasm burning her up from the inside out. Victoria leads her through it with a guiding hand, an abrupt swap in their predisposed positions, and only pulls away once her breathing has calmed to an even wheeze.
“Up.” Cassie traps her wrist under her grip, pulling her from her knees. She slots her mouth against Victoria’s and tastes the salt of her own arousal. A dull thumping comes from somewhere lower. “Get on the bed. On your belly.”
It’s rare that Victoria doesn’t do what she’s told. She obliges fairly quickly, and Cassie comes to realize when she slumps forward into the mattress and the light catches on the slick between her legs that it’s out of sheer desperation.
“Color?”
Victoria sounds a little strained, cheek against the sheets so she can still look at Cassie. “Green.”
She hums and lets her palms run over the expanse of Victoria’s curves. Cassie feels her breath run ragged when she strays nearest to where she needs her most.
“Cass.” She exhales. Her tongue comes out to wet her lips. “Touch me.”
Cassie is far from being in love as she brings her hand down hard against Victoria’s ass. Hollow cries ring out as she repeats the motion, putting more force behind it.
“Oh, fuck–”
“You know better. Use your manners.”
She watches as another gush of slick comes from Victoria and amounts to what’s already beginning to run down the insides of her thighs. Cassie’s own core throbs, dull, when she hears her returning sniffle.
“Please, mommy.” She falters, “Need it harder.”
Cassie coos. “That’s a good girl. Tell me if your color changes?”
She doesn’t wait for a response. Instead, she winds back and slaps Victoria’s ass again, over the same place to guarantee the pain and the shrieks that it pulls from the girl are something she files away in her mind and will certainly come back to with a hand between her thighs, eventually.
Cassie is not in love, but isn’t that precisely what this is? This intimate trust that Victoria puts in her to bring her to her limits, but never stray beyond their edge? It feels like love, conceptually, but it also feels like something rotten. Decaying. Consuming.
Cassie is the one that desecrates her— but she is also the one who makes her whole again. Maybe, that can be enough. For now, it can be enough.
She knows Victoria is close to her orgasm because of the way her thighs quiver. She’s having trouble keeping herself held up but makes no complaints, unless the blissful agony in her moaning is anything to go by.
“Cass– mommy, oh–” Victoria’s face is a sight for sore eyes, a culmination of tears and snot smeared all over in a mess. “‘M so close.”
She lands another blow in a particular reddening spot and Victoria’s body arches off of the sheets with a cry. Cassie aches between the thighs so violently at the way her body shudders when she sobs that it’s making her feel sick. She is sick. It’s an acrid desire that is burning its way up her chest and arms, and she can feel it in her throat, in her mouth. She inhales, jaw trembling, and the air tastes of inescapable shame.
Cassie is not in love. Cassie cannot be in love, because what would that make her? What would become of the reputation that she has spent the better part of the last ten years trying to cleanse of past mistakes? Victoria is not a mistake, though.
No, Victoria is good. Her light refracts in all directions: it’s in the care she takes for her patients, the kindness that is always soft in her eyes even without intention. Cassie is every horrible thing that she is not— the rot she harbors inside is a contagion that is all-devouring and she must keep it contained, sealed off in the space where her heart is meant to be. Where it once was, before the filth.
“Cassie–!”
“So good. So perfect for me, Vic.”
The last hit she leaves is cathartic, in a way. Her palm meets raw, sensitive flesh and Victoria comes with a punched-out whine. Her release runs sticky and hot down her legs and she’s like a broken record, needle caught in the same groove; Cassie, mommy, Cassie, all yours, mommy.
Victoria exhales with finality after the few moments that Cassie watches her with darkened eyes. Squirming, defenseless; a predator and her prey. She’ll bare her teeth another day. Right now, all she wishes for is the peace of sleep.
(Cassie only dares to get up once Victoria is huffing quiet snores into the floral-dressed pillowcase, one of Harrison’s old Thomas the Tank Engine blankets tucked around the girl’s delicate frame.
She avoids her own tired eye in the mirror and undresses the rest of the way, dirty laundry in a disheveled heap on the bathroom floor. Distantly, she thinks of the times she had to be so mindful when she showered, careful to keep her ankle and the device so tightly closed around it out of the spray of water. Times she doesn’t miss.
Cassie draws the curtain aside, steps under the showerhead and turns the dial all the way left. What wishful thinking, to believe that even the hottest of water could ever wash away the things she has done.)