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There are lips near the back of your neck, and when you fully realize them, they leave a kiss from the act of his shushing, pushing forward from the sibilant whisper-warning. “I need you,” he says, his words likewise making his lips and beard tickle against you and arouse the skin as if icy water were injecting into you from the contact, bursting and branching along your nerves. “Don’t get up—just go back to sleep, sweetheart.”
He sounds mostly asleep himself, and he’s clearly not thinking like a man who is dedicated to being awake, because then he might understand there is no hope for you drifting under again. If it were a conscious decision, you would obey, but there is nothing harder in this world than falling asleep when you’re anticipating an experience that demands to be witnessed: sex being an example of one such occasion. Fear and arousal both work this insomniac way, and you suppose so does curiosity. You’re too tired to be physically involved, but you want to know what’s going to happen. It’s a cruel fate to crave adoration of your body when it’s at rest and yet wish to see it for yourself as an outward observer. He could film it sometime and play it back for you, but then the camera would be a third party in the interaction, ever-looming and involved, and you just want it to be the two of you. Regardless, filming creates an aspect of performance that you wish to discourage in Easterman, since he is prone to dramatics. There’s just no pleasing you.
This train of thought fills the gap from his agonizing pause, and you wonder if he’s measuring your breaths to determine if you’ve relaxed enough to be asleep. He must be. He’s taking too long to move. If he dozes off without fulfilling his promise, you might combust just to catch him in the flames. In your frustration you shift beneath the sheets, adhering your ass to his nagging erection and eliciting from him a muffled groan. You feel it reverberate at the base of your skull, and the exhalation stirs the hairs in-between. Still hushed in reverence of the early hour, he chuckles and just as readily rocks his hips forward into you.
“You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created, till iniquity was found in you,” he grumbles, his words sparking no particular or interpretable meaning with the heaviness of your aborted dreams still weighing on you. His lowered voice is perhaps your favorite version to hear, as there is an intimate quality to it and a cigarette-churned ruggedness that’s brought out at this register. You could guzzle his voice if it was something tangible, drown in it. Your demoniac efforts are paid off when his mouth finds your nape once more, his hands your silks. Your pajama bottoms and underwear are maneuvered to your mid-thigh. “I’d hate to keep you up. Won’t you take something?”
“I’m trying to,” you counter mischievously in order to mask your impatience. “To take something.”
“Such a flirt. We’ll never make it out of the bed if you keep talking like that. I’ll have to phone that I’m ill, malinger my way into domestic bliss.” His kisses are intentional now and follow along your hairline before trailing against your artery. He leans back to assess you in the dark. “Two or three?”
There really wasn’t any hope in diverting him from a decision he’d already made. You sigh. “Hendrick, maybe this time we can go without? I’ve been missing you awfully.”
“I think three.” He squeezes your waist to confirm it with himself before setting out to complete the task. “I feel like a monster disturbing your beauty sleep for something so crude. Let’s see if my love can restore the spell, like a fairy tale reversed.”
You lie there, your back frigid in his absence, as pills are rattled and the beside carafe poured. You could laugh at the situation if it didn’t bruise you. Easterman soothes the impact of this transgression by following after your dose with his tongue, either to ensure you swallowed it or to reward you for complying; you are too distracted to care which. The countdown begins. You have half an hour before the tablets knock you out, and this provides ample time to replenish whatever validation you require by skimming it from his current affections. The transitory nature of this interaction spurs him on as well, knowing that he’ll get what he wants as a sort of delayed gratification. You can feel the remaining time melt into his doting mouth, stolen from you. Those precious few minutes are burgled in this manner until you’re left with only twenty. Twenty becomes fifteen and then ten when he guides you down by your shoulders to face the mattress, readjusts your head to the side and your bedraggled hairs to something manageable, and lies atop you. He holds your hair away as he adorns your spine with methodical presses of his lips. His pelvis rests with the relaxed weight of his body, nudging his clothed dick into the cleft of your backside.
“Just for a moment,” you plead as consciousness thickens. You regard him in the low-light through lashes coated with syrup, stuck together by immaterial means and obstructed by an overwhelming resistance, demanding that you take the easier path of leaving them closed. The imminence of your departure becomes clearer to you through this sensation, spiking in you the urgency to have him. You must. “Put it in—please. Let me feel you.”
Although Easterman is not fond of your neediness, he does crave to be desired, and your pathetic display is relating that to him beautifully. “I spoil you,” he muses as he relents. He rummages around on the bed for his pillow and then your own before wordlessly prompting you to lift your hips. Once the cushions are secured beneath your person in such a way that they suspend you at the preferred angle, he adoringly runs a hand along your side. “You can relax. I’ll give you what you want and then you can get some shut-eye. That sound nice, dear?”
He has chosen mercy on you this time; you nod against the mattress and allow your muscles to ease. His thumbs appear at either side of your sex, where one parts it for his viewing while the other idly draws a line through the overflowing evidence of your want. You feel immediately embarrassed now that he has a physical measure of your enthusiasm, but his hum of approval relieves it just as quickly. “All this from kissing me?”
You’re not yet able to respond when he licks from your clit upward to your vagina, inserting his tongue at the apex, pushing the muscle toward the source of your ichor and hooking it to capture the taste of you. His thumbs keep you open during this uncharacteristic lavishing—you are unsure to what end he is debasing himself with the act of oral sex, but you can’t bring yourself to complain or speculate—and your medication is making it so that your waning time is increasingly apparent to you. Your heart sits like a stone in your chest, your hands leaden and dead beside yourself. The energy you maintain is spent making demands of him and grumbling his name, losing half of the sound directly into the bedding where you’ve taken root. “Hendrick, I’m not going to last much longer. Just please, put it in—I need to know it happened. Please… Don’t be so cruel.”
“Seems I’ve spoiled you too much.” He laughs against your ass. His tone sobers as he continues, “Do you see me as a sort of father figure in your life—someone loving and authoritative, that takes care of you?”
“Not in the ways that I would define a father, but in those respects, sure. It’s hard not to. You being an authority figure is integral to how our relationship began.” You can’t help but be frustrated at his changing of topics while your cunt is left throbbing. “Hendrick, come on. You promised.”
“Then why don’t you ever call me daddy?” He inadvertently silences you as he closes his mouth around your clit and applies the faintest suction—pillowy are his lips, manipulative and pillowy and attentive to the ways you’ve enjoyed in the past, for they reminisce their skills in their present strumming, those mnemonic devices that command many and one. His whiskers brush over your inner thighs as he extols you in all but words, his focused breath teasing your skin. He abruptly pulls away to speak again, “I meet all your needs, don’t I?”
“Yes, you do, it just sounds too… authentic.”
“More of a reason to say it, the way I see it. You’re not going to see your real father or mother again, not in this line of work—not after you signed that right away. They might not even be alive, and you’d have no way of knowing. They might despise you. But you know I love you, that’s something you can be certain of.” To emphasize, he kneads his fingers into the muscle of your ass and adores you with his tongue, trying to persuade you by mouthing the request into your flesh. “When the moment calls for it, give it a try. I’d like for you to try. Not necessarily in a sexual context, and not just for my sake—I want you to mean it. I want the situation to merit it, and I want to have earned it each time.”
“You…” You can hardly think straight. “You’ve earned it. It’s embarrassing for me to say, I think. It’d feel foreign and misshapen coming out of me.”
“Well, you want something that I can give you. Why don’t you ask for it properly and test that hypothesis?” The prospect feels akin to placing your palm on a stovetop burner, but maybe he is right. If you could only change your perspective, it could be more like easing into a scalding bathtub feet-first, and eventually you’ll acclimate and learn to enjoy it. Maybe if you reject the idea that it would take a depraved pervert to embrace that mindset, you’ll discover something pleasurable that the two of you can share. He’s just asking you to give it a chance.
You consider how to word the request so that it sounds appealing while sparing you the dreadful burden of shame—all while your sand continues running out, which doesn’t help your mental capacities. He can tell if you’re being insincere, and upon noticing it might deny you your fulfillment. You weigh potential phrasing, but they each sound cliché and performative. He doesn’t want you to say something with the sole intent to get him off. Rather, his thrill comes from your earnestness. The words need to be meant. The very authenticity that elicits a near-impenetrable protective barrier of shame in you is precisely what he’s seeking. The title demands respect, and therefore vulgarity is taboo in association with it. You imagine this has a conditioned psychological cause; after all, one is discouraged from being crude around one’s parental figures. Easterman exists on the opposite end of this dynamic and is consequently not hindered by this formality. He could say innumerable foul, debasing, or dubious sentiments and face no reprimands or judgments from you, as you have also been conditioned to believe such figures exist outside of the potential for these repercussions. In parallel, doesn’t he already have this privilege in other aspects of his life? Reagents are criticized and never criticize; they don’t even have a mode of communication. As your employer, he receives no scrutiny from you, but he could command you to do just about anything for the Project. Cognitively, you might already visualize him as the exact embodiment of fatherhood that he yearns to be regarded as. Unsure of yourself, you speak the phrase that has recurred the most during your brainstorm.
“What was that?”
You’re melting, your mumbling rendered inaudible. You summon more air into your lungs in preparation to repeat it, which you do successfully, still a voice carried on willowy sighs. “I want to be close to you.” Diminished to something forfeited of responsibility, of mind, of defensive structures: “Please, Daddy?”
“Oh, sweetheart.” He is surfeited with your participation for the night. There is a shuffling on the bedsheets and an inorganic crinkle as a prophylactic is summoned and deployed. The warmth of his body returning against your back contrasts with the stark and wet chill of the condom, coated as it is with lubricant and barricading your outer anatomies. He pauses like that, with his dick resting over your opening, watching the vague shapes and just barely breaching with the tip. When he eases in, there is no physical resistance on your behalf. You feel the previously untouched nerves alighting as they’re shifted to accommodate the intrusion. “I’m so proud of you; you did wonderfully for your first time. Let Daddy fuck you back to sleep.”
There is only him and the swallowing, total encapsulation that is unconsciousness, burgeoning, swelling in immensity on the horizon, which you are being ushered toward as if his intercourse is the physical manifestation of this process. He burrows into you, and you are plunged toward that abyss with elation, as there is nothing now preventing you from chasing it. This state of being is your ideal—this haze that dissipates around the edges of pleasure and suffocates any lesser sensation. Easterman is just as lost as you, or rather, he’s in the pursuit of losing himself, as he isolates his movements to short, deep thrusts, moving as slowly as if he were submerged under water. His face buries into the mattress on the opposite side as yours, and his chest lies limp over your shoulder-blades. Between the rocking of his hips, he touches a gentle trail over your forearm to end at a grasp over your paralyzed hand. He parts your fingers with his own, interlacing them.
“I love you,” he whispers. A brief time passes, and he is likely convinced you’re asleep; you might as well be for the disorienting tangle of reality you are willingly succumbing to, but you hear him nonetheless. You swear he says a name, but it’s not yours. This could be a hypnagogic hallucination, a fleeting thought as you transition to dreaming, and you convince yourself of this due to the anomalous nature of such a thing. You also see inky tendrils at the corners of your closed eyes, hear interrupted musical trills, and those are undeniably illusory. A name is relatively pleasant as far as hallucinations are concerned. This conclusion placates you, until you hear it again; he never uses that tone of voice for you. What could it mean? Who is she? You can’t recall concepts too far away right now, can’t pull them from their distant sources back to the forefront of your mind to identify this faceless paramour. Who is she that he loves? Your melting becomes slipping, struggling, clawing against the tide. You groan like a ghoul through an unhinging jaw. He must stop and explain himself. This instant. Get off of me, in your confusion, you channel every fiber of your being into this singular plea. Get off!
“Shut up and go to sleep,” he hisses peremptorily.
There is pressure at your neck and between your legs, one constant and the other arrhythmic. His hips stutter gracelessly as he excites himself, as he clamps harder to impede your circulation and gets off on how you’re unable to react. Your lips and face feel full and stagnant, heavy with trapped blood, and the heel of his palm over your windpipe tapers your breath to amounts inadequate and unreplenishing. He hates me, you think dumbly, for you’re too tired to think or care as much as you otherwise would. If you were sober, would you fight him off, or has he succeeded in sapping you of your self respect? You doubt you would fight. Maybe you deserve this for sleeping with the enemy of all that remains good in this world. You deserve this and more. He’s going to kill me.
It’s too late to fight the medicine. You depart, and the slate wipes clean.
When you wake up, you feel no different than usual; that is part of the perverse appeal to your activities—the discretion and deniability, followed by the partial (if at all) rediscovery of events. You remember feeling loved, but a proper synopsis eludes you, especially of the events toward the end. There’s a foil square in the trash and the condom it once harbored beside it, now wrinkled from use and pooling at its end with a thin, milky substance. You grin dopily to yourself, imagining how it had happened. Had he lasted long? Did he continue kissing you when you couldn’t return the favor? The bathroom mirror is foggy from his morning routine, the room smelling familiarly of aftershave, cologne, pomade, and cigarette smoke suppressed by the humidity. So he’s shaved, you mourn. You wipe your face clean with a hand-towel and then swipe it over the mirror to reveal your reflection. A curious thing staring back at you: little red freckles on your cheeks, a vine of blooming crimson in the corner of your eye, cat-like scratches that start and stop abruptly at the base of your chin and also around your collarbone, an unscathed space left in the middle. The rest of you is much the same. You hope his hand wasn’t harmed too badly. Looking down at the sink, you find a bottle of concealer in your shade that sits atop a handwritten note.
For the petechiae, reads the note.