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The night sky drinks from the sun until it’s finally dark out. You watch the moon burn in the sky, feel the feeble stretch of her fingers down to Earth and into your bedroom window.
It’s a weeknight and you should be asleep, but you find yourself awake, unwilling to sleep to prolong tomorrow from happening. You don’t wander the hall, just in case any of the creaky floorboards screech and wake up your parents.
Instead you sit on your window seat, feel the chill of the night as it seeps through glass.
There is something dreamlike about your street in the middle of the night. A scene pulled out of a story book. The perfect trees that dot the street, the slight sway of a light wind in the branches. Summer has exhaled and an autumn breeze is sweeping through and it only has the slight bite of teeth.
There aren’t many street lamps, and they’re paced out enough that shadow dips in between each halo of light.
You feel the drag of sleep, tugging at you as you watch the road. A leaf falls and skates down the path, catching on the rough concrete before picking itself back up again.
All in order, the way it always has been on this street.
After a few more minutes, you decide to try sleeping again. You shift your legs, unfold yourself like a pinned butterfly, when something catches your eye.
There is a figure in the front garden across the road. You squint at it, certain that it must have been the tree, maybe another leaf falling.
So still, you almost miss it. A blanched white shape peering back at you from the ground. So still, you don’t move as you stare back at it. Broad, almost as thick as a tree trunk, a pale white face and a dark body that blends into the street. Your mind is hurtling down a motorway at breakneck speed to catch up with what your eyes are seeing.
A cold hand on the back of your neck as you realise that you are staring at someone and they are looking back at you. You dart back and into the safety of the dark of your bedroom, curl behind your curtain and peek out from around it. It’s unsettling, like a bug has crawled up the back of your neck and you’re convinced that you can still feel each of those little legs, wriggling against your skin.
Because there is a man on the street. You had assumed that the neighbours had a wider tree than you had ever noticed. It’s not, that is a wide man and an unnaturally pale face perched on his shoulders. You squint, trying to see why his face seems to catch and reflect the moonlight. You’re convinced that he can’t see you now anyway, hidden behind your curtain, only a sliver of your eye revealed to continue looking.
The certainty lessens with each moment that he doesn’t move, doesn’t shift his head in the manner that someone who has lost sight of their focus would.
It’s a mask you realise, his face, unnaturally pale, even from across the street.
Terror, crystalised. A frost in your lungs, a catch on your inhale. Diaphragm stuttering, caught on a hook.
You tilt your head to the side, as if to judge the distance to your parent’s room. Gauge how long it would take you to go and wake up someone and have them come and take a look. Maybe tell you that it isn’t a big deal and you’re imagining things.
Your head turns back to the window but the figure is gone. You stare out, unseeing, but there is no more white face peering up at you from across the street anymore.
You give a glance around, but can’t spot any other sight of him. Hover, one foot in the direction of your bedroom door as if you expect him to appear, all encompassing in your window.
You settle for harshly drawing your curtains and shifting your chair in front of the door. Huddled under your duvet like a child, believing entirely that it will protect you from any bad men who may come in.
Moonlight curls its fingers in the gap that it can sneak through, carving a shape on your floor even through your curtain. Your curtain is so thin, it couldn’t keep anything out. Tissue paper, crumpled in hand. You pull your duvet over your head. It’s much thicker and only when you can barely breathe do you feel safe enough to fall asleep.
//
You feel anxiety like a snake in your belly, gnawing on your organs as you watch the night smear across the sky. It’s relentless, dragging its cape over everything until the light is choked out. You beg it not to, but you’re ignored.
You sit on your bed, back pinched and sore, but unable to lay down. The bed is a trap, no longer a sanctuary. You’re convinced if you lie down and fall asleep that he will appear again, a masked face peering up at you from the street.
Sleep itches your eyes until hysteria almost bubbles out of your mouth and out when you peek out the window. Unable to stop yourself, you stand by the wall and peer from the back of the curtain, to prevent him from being able to spot you if he is waiting for you. Your eye - a target in the window and he’ll jump up, bullseye.
The street is empty, devoid of anything, even a breeze to stir the leaves. Everything is dying, the flowers in your garden are withering and still. The lamp light isn’t warm and familiar, but cold - dipping into the dark between each pole too eagerly. Snuffing itself out until you’re squinting just to see, eyes pinched and sore.
You scan the street and scan it again, convinced that you’re missing something.
There’s nothing, no man peeping in your window. You are a girl in your family home and everything is as normal as it always has been. Your elderly neighbours will be asleep and there is a boy across the street that will smile at you when you step out to go to work in the morning. Cookie cutter life, the same as everyone else on this street.
You go to sleep and wake up, cotton mouthed and alone, your parents having left for the day.
Everything is as it was the day before. You walk to work, and one of the girls who works there is pleased that you’re both working the same shift.
She talks about going into town during the weekend and you agree, tired and waterlogged, staring out of the window. Looking for something even as you tell yourself that you aren’t.
You go to bed that night, jittery but calmer after nothing out of the ordinary for the whole day.
You dream of a needle piercing through the back of your neck and into a sense that you didn't know that you had. You wake up, gasping, and see the man standing at the foot of your bed.
You stare, unbelieving for a moment. It’s impossible to reconcile, the masked man standing at the foot of your bed. It's the type of thing that you imagine happening when you aren’t looking, worst case scenario. Pulse up, nightmare made real.
You inhale shakily, a moment away from screaming but stopping yourself when he doesn’t move.
It’s absurd - he’s just watching you. Your room is just dark enough that you can’t even see his face in the gaps of his mask.
The silence is a weight that pushes you down, suffocating you of any basic instinct. You’re waiting for the pendulum to swing the other way, to crash down and push you into action. For his hand to come up, with a knife, an axe, a fist and harm you. Your return scream builds in your chest, waiting to erupt.
His head tilts, watching you. You swallow, the sound loud in the space between you. He seems fascinated by this, taking a step toward you but stopping when you whimper.
He’s halted, still staring at you. Your jaw trembles with the effort to stop from crying out.
His hand rests against your footboard, curling around the frame. Those are bare, you can see the knuckles beneath his skin turn pale. The creak of metal in his palm, as if he’s going to crush it.
A tear escapes and runs down your face. If he lunges for you, you’re going to piss yourself, and the shame of that has you whimpering again.
As quick as he’s appeared at the foot of your bed, he pulls back and leaves. Your bedroom door is tossed open, rattling against your wall and he disappears into the hall.
You sit, watching the doorway as if he’ll come back, having changed his mind. The knife will come up, intent pushed into you.
He doesn’t. Morning comes and your parents ask you to be a bit quieter if you’re going to get up in the night, alright?
It’s half there to confess, as if you’ve done something wrong. As if you’ve invited a weird, masked freak into your bedroom of your own volition.
You just nod and take the reprimand, eyes darting to your windows as if he’ll be there, peering in through your window to witness your early morning family scene. He’s not but you feel the pressure of his gaze regardless.
//
Things continue like this, until you don’t know what to do with yourself. He’s like a terrible secret, squirrelled away in some recess of your mind.
The man in the mask continues to appear. You’re walking to work and you swear you see him in the distance, peering around a hedge at you. After dinner, moving around your living room, you see him in your neighbour’s garden.
The worst of the appearances are the ones in your bedroom. You find yourself sleeping light, always waking up and finding him there, standing and watching you.
He’s getting closer, but something about the footboard of your bed halts him. His hand curled around it, a battle of wills that your old, rickety bed seems to win each time.
His exits are quieter at least. Footsteps lighter now, stepping into the dark hallway and seeming to vanish.
Your parents ask about that boy across the road that you’d had a crush on for years. You’d completely forgotten about him. You smile, brittle, and murmur some excuse about not having seen him around.
There’s a news segment on a killer in the local area recently, a number to report any suspicious sightings. People found dead in their homes, the old or the young. There doesn’t seem to be any connection but a police officer at a conference bids you to contact them with any tips that may help them catch this monster.
Your parents sit and fuss over it. You stare at the number until your eyes water. Your parents make you swear to let them know where you are at all times and you promise.
He’s in your room again that night. You wake up to a hand down your pyjama bottoms. You whimper, bit down on your bottom lip hard to stifle the noise even though you don’t know why.
It’s almost clinical, the mask tilted down as he studies you between your legs. He’s been dosing you up on his attention, a minute sickness, closer and closer each day until it came to fruition. Here is the headache, the cough, sickness taking hold in some vital organ of your body, and here is the man in the mask staring at your cunt like it fascinates him.
You wait for him to touch you, but he doesn't. One hand on the waist band of your pyjamas, holding them down to your mid-thigh, the other is docile, held still by his side.
This close you can hear his breathing. It’s strange to know you share the same air as him - it’s enough to knock you into silence. The monster under your bed is human.
He exhales and you feel your abdomen twitch, every muscle tense.
This close, you can see the dart of his eyes, dark, the white flashing of his eye as he looks at your face. You stare back at him, terrified.
His head drops back down between your thighs, his other hand striking out, snake in the grass. He reaches between your legs and cups your cunt whole.
Your body ricochets back with your flinch but his hand is relentless, chasing where you try to go. You whimper and his head snaps up to you and watches you again.
You feel like an experiment - all of your responses, squirrelled away somewhere for future study.
His eyes intent on your face, he isolates a finger and traces it around your hole. Your breathing stutters, halts then starts up again. His gaze drops to your chest, as if peering straight down to your lungs.
You’re not wet, but you’re not completely dry either. Certainly not wet enough when you feel how thick the tip of his finger alone is.
He presses it forward, eyes back on your face and you whimper again as one finger pushes through. You’re ultimately the one to give in, parting and his finger is inside of you. You stifle a sob. “Why?” you ask, looking up at the hulking beast beside your bed.
He leans forward as if he wants to catch the words you’re saying as they’re breathed out. He doesn’t answer, but his dark eyes catch some of the street light from outside. A glint of something human, before it’s gone again, borrowed and returned.
He doesn’t thrust his finger in and out of you, doesn't try and cram in another one. It sits, almost idle inside of you, your cunt flexing around it, almost as nervous and skittish as you are.
Minutes pass, until you think you can’t bear it anymore, opening your mouth with a wet sound as if you need to say something, but he steps back and his hand comes with him. He leans back and leaves, leaving you with your pussy exposed and tears in your eyes.
You stare up at your ceiling for a few moments, trying to get your heart rate back down.
There’s a cool breeze and you can feel it on your sex, horrified when you feel how wet it is now when you bring your legs down.
You refuse to touch yourself, even though there is a queer arousal that you can feel, low in your belly. A mission dedicated to self-control but you just end up sleepless, thighs rubbing together incessantly, and everything throbs until you are only a pulse. You thud again and again, hit each step on the way down and into his waiting hand.
//
You spend your days at the library, looking up anything to try and pin down his identity. You’re allowed into the archives, spend your days scanning old weathered paper, trying to find anything that sounds similar to the murders that are happening now.
You find a news article of a young boy who killed his adopted sister. Strangled her when she was a teenager and he was still a boy. Strange enough to make the front page of the newspaper, the police officers were unable to comprehend that something like this could happen.
You get a name - Simon Riley. You would have flicked to the next page, unable to see any of this little blond boy in the man who comes into your bedroom every night and violates you.
What stops you cold is when you look at his dead sister, a picture of her shown beside the house that she died in. It’s your house, the edge of the porch is the same. You wonder if the crack down the middle of one of the steps is in that image, minuscule, as tiny as a fingernail.
She looks like you - the same hair, the same mouth. Like looking at a distorted reflection, a dead version of yourself, peering out at you from the newspaper clipping with the wrong eye colour.
Seeing something that you shouldn’t have, you feel all the hair on your body raise. The eye of God turning to look directly at you, the beam of its gaze.
You slide the newspaper back into its place, and it disappears, innocent amongst all of the other newspapers from years ago.
Your hands shake all the way home, even crammed into your coat pockets. The bone of each finger digging into your stomach until you dart into an alleyway and sick up your lunch.
You wake up that night and he’s there again. Your pyjama bottoms tugged down and his hand between your legs.
He’s not watching your face this time, flat eyes intent on his finger as it moves within you. He slides it in and out of you, you can feel the slickness of it, dragging it out of you.
It’s not enough to make you come, but it’s enough to have your belly tight, the strange intimacy of it. Like he's interested in everything you’re hiding under your skin.
You think he’d hold your hole open and peer up into you if you gave him half a chance.
In his dead sister’s room, wearing her face, you hiss when he works a second finger into you. One of his fingers is like two of your own, two of his fingers pulls you taut, even with the little arousal that he pulls out with them, against your will. The same slow grind of them, back and forth until there’s a wet sound whenever he pushes back into you.
Your clit, neglected, throbs for attention. You stare at him, in his dirty boiler suit, muck and god knows what else on his collar.
Like your stomach bottoming out, you feel a pinprick of neediness. You want to touch your clit, rub it until your back bows and maybe you can pass out after it. You want the anonymity of being asleep. And beneath that you realise that you want to come as well. His fingers skirt on something close to pleasure, just on the precipice and you know you can feel it all if someone touches your clit.
There’s no one else here, there’s only the man from the news.
You swallow, throat clicking and his head snaps up to look at you. Those flat eyes, as if he’s disinterested in anything you have to say, but he doesn’t look away even as you stay silent, blinking up at him.
A moment of clarity, you cannot ask this man for help to get you off, you should be screaming for someone to help you. You should’ve screamed the first night that you saw him on your street, looking up at you.
You can’t say it, can’t drag the rotted words out of your mouth. Can’t ask the murderer with his blood-soaked hands to touch your clit to get you off, you have a limit. And you cannot do it yourself. Your throat bobs with a stifled sob. You want to be sensible again, you don’t want to feel dissatisfaction that’s like a haze over your vision, numbing you down until you’re mindless.
He drags his eyes back down to your cunt and you watch him as continues to finger you through it, but his thumb comes up, petting you through your folds.
He skids along the side of your clit, but with how swollen it is, you have to choke down a groan.
He hones in, blood scented, thumb right on top of your clit. You stutter to a still as he presses down on it, then what that doesn’t get as much of a reaction as he’d hoped, he swirls it around in a circle.
You choke, hips bucking even as you try to hold them still. Your head is flooded with blood, senses drowned out, honed in on the rough pad of his thumb against your clit. Nothing else matters, only the wet sound of his fingers as they slide inside you, your tongue pulling down from the roof of your mouth as you pant.
You’re in his dead sister’s room and he’s watching your cunt as your thighs tense up and you come, hands fisted in your sheets.
Your cunt pulses around his fingers as he continues to pump them, thumb jiggling your clit until you’re biting back a squeal, legs kicking like a pinned animal.
You lie back, his thumb still relentless on your clit. “Hang on, wait, please,” you whine, trying to reach down and catch his wrist but he bats your hand away like you’re an irritating fly.
You sob, hear the wet smack of his fingers as he brings them out and slams them back in.
It’s harder now, even with your come slicking the way. You can feel it pooling in his palm when his hand comes forward and connects with your pussy. It’s like your response has lit a fire in him, you’re a squeaky toy in his hand and he’ll keep squeezing until you break.
You come a second time, like the firing of a gun. Your back bows and you sob through it, each pulse like a crack through you, wood giving way for the cleave of an axe.
He stops for a merciful second, his fingers still inside you to feel each tense of your hole.
He takes his thumb off of your clit, and you stare up at the ceiling, trying to catch your breath and failing miserably. Your muscles loosen for the first time in weeks and you feel like you’re floating an inch up from your mattress.
You go still at the sound of a zipper.
You hold your breath, looking down and feel your cunt squeeze as he tugs his cock out.
He’s got a dirty white vest on, covering his chest, but his boiler suit is pooled around his elbows. It’s undone enough to sag around his thighs, and you can see scar tissue puckering the skin of his shoulders. You’d thought that maybe the boiler suit was doing half of the work for his size, but seeing the stretch of his vest across his broad chest, fabric straining at the seams, you realise that the boiler suit may have been concealing some of the brawn that was under it.
One hand still in you, his fingers starting that slow back and forth again as his other hand grips his cock and matches that same rhythm.
His eyes are intent between your legs, his hand speeding up when your thighs shake.
You’re grateful that he’s staying away from your clit, you can feel how puffy and sensitive she is now, but at the sight of his hand around his cock, just as big as the rest of him, she throbs a little - wrung out but not fully tapped.
His hand is massive, but it only covers half of his cock. Precum drips from his head, slicks the way but you can see it drooling onto your bed sheets.
He grunts at one point and you tremble, inhaling shakily which has his fist twisting at the ruddy head of his dick.
He pulls his fingers out of you and you watch with a dry mouth as he uses that hand to jerk off instead, your wet used to slick up his cock.
His other hand, wet with himself, holds one of your knees to the side so he can continue to look down at your cunt as he continues to jerk his length, breathing getting laboured as your hole flexes. Fluttering under his gaze.
With a final twist of his wrist at the head of his cock, he comes, his gaze snapped up to look you in the face while you blink up at him, flushed and terrified.
His come splatters on your sheets and your thighs, thick and sliding down towards your cunt.
He huffs out a breath, satisfied dog.
He tucks his cock away and stands, zipping up his boiler suit and leaving only a few moments later.
Your door is left open and you jerk your legs shut, stumbling up to close it when you realise that anyone could walk by and see you lying half naked with a strange man’s cum on your legs.
Your legs stick together as you walk and you cringe, swiping a drop before it drips onto the floor.
It’s thick and horrible and if your mouth waters before you wash it off in the bathroom sink, then you brush away the imagined taste with a brush.
//
You climb out of your skin at work, marked by something that you don’t totally understand. People seem to start avoiding you, as if there is a stink on you that they cannot identify.
Your friends skirt around you, alert but unsure what they are looking at. The boy from across the road doesn't smile as you leave in the morning and you pull the collar of your coat up to hide your face.
You curl in on yourself, like a bug. Boots slam past but the one that will crush you is always close by and you can hear it coming up the stairs to your bedroom every night.
You wonder if your parents are going to catch him, wonder what he would do to them.
He has a knife, you know what he must be doing with it. The news continues each night, innocents found stabbed to death, the reason unknown or non-existent. Would he still come in, with your parent’s blood drying in, knock your door open and touch you with the same hands?
You don’t want to think about it, force it out of your mind. Maybe this is the payment to keep your house safe from any bloodshed. Unfortunate for your neighbours, but you only have so much flesh to sell.
You wander your house in the evening, staying up even as your parents head to bed. You lock all of the doors, draw the curtains sharply over all of the windows.
You sit in your bed, back straight and strain your eyes, listening for any sound of glass smashing, the sound of a door getting kicked in.
The night is silent, the house inhales and exhales, fast asleep.
Your bedroom door swings open and you start crying at the sight of that horrible mask.
He doesn’t say anything but it’s quicker at least, his thumb on your clit and his fingers scissoring you open until you’re hiccuping, tears drying as you boil and burn under his touch.
He comes all over your pussy this time - you grimace and force yourself not to think about repercussions of allowing this. Not that you feel that you can stop it, there’s no escape under his vision.
He lingers, soft cock hanging between his legs, still big enough that you wince. His hands hold your knees, callouses scratching on your skin.
He smoothes his hand up until he reaches the edge of your shirt, pushes that up to squeeze at the skin of your belly, oddly fascinated with the flesh there.
He leans down, his hand sliding up to cup your breast. You left your bra on, which he cuts you a look about, before he yanks it up to have access to your skin.
Leaning over you like this, with a handful of your tits, you can feel his cock jump on your inner thigh.
You whimper and he breathes out, as if chasing the sound away. His hands smooth around the curve of your breast, thumbs smoothing over your nipple. An apology? Or a marker for next time?
He leans back again and his cock drags through both of your come before he tucks it away and he leaves again. Silent as he always is.
You wait a few minutes then you trail down the stairs as well. Everything is exactly how you left it. The windows are locked from the inside and so are all of the doors. Nothing broken.
The kitchen floor is cool under your feet and you shiver. From here you can see out your back garden, the grass still, the trees in a perfect line to hide a hiking trail back there. You stare, trying to convince yourself that you can see him, staring back at you as he always seems to be.
You walk back up the stairs to your bedroom, feet exactly where his boots must have been. Perfect, to avoid any creaking.
//
He always comes back to you, boiler suit intact, mask never off. Comes all over you like a marker, like a dog marking its territory.
You find yourself lulled into complacency with it. The expectation that he won’t harm you, that this is all he wants. Other people are for harming with his blade, but you’re the one to sharpen it.
Your parents announce that they’re going away for the week to visit your grandparents and that fear comes galloping back in, heart ricocheting out of your chest. Your parents are your safety net - you always had the option to scream when he visited you. It wouldn’t have saved you if he decided to dig his hands into your flesh and rip instead of take. However, it felt like a protection, the kind that you are granted the moment you were born and placed in your parents arms.
You flutter around them, not trying to cause a scene but asking if they need to go. They must, your grandmother is ill and needs someone in the house until they can get her a carer.
You can’t get the time off of work, a fact like a panic attack - almost setting you off as you cling to the landline. Bakelite creaking under your grip as you force your voice not to break as you thank your manager anyway.
Your parents hug you goodbye and you stand, bereft and abandoned by the door.
The sun drops out of the sky like the drop of a guillotine.
You stay downstairs, television blaring. Some old new story about a girl found in the attic of a sorority house, another girl missing, all 10 years ago. A warning of what could end up happening to you. You watch until you feel a panic attack in your chest. These are warnings, you should heed these.
You stare at the face of the missing girl, imagine what picture will be used when Simon finally wrings you out and you are tossed to the side, dead and used up.
You refuse to go to bed, tightly wound, curled into yourself on the couch.
You don’t hear the creak of a door opening but you know the moment that he joins you. You stare at the TV, screen fuzzy and overused at this hour.
He places his hand on the back of your shoulder, thumb up the back of your neck. His fingers curl around your collarbone. One twist and he’d snap your neck, you can feel the strength in his palm, flat against the vulnerable skin of your neck.
His thumb ticks, a fumbling stroke before he pulls you back. You collapse back into the couch, his hand now under your jaw to hold you there, looking up at him.
He’s ridiculously enormous from this angle, unreal. Some boogeyman you dreamt up as a child, made flesh and real, swallowing up all of your vision.
“What do you want?” you ask. Fruitless, all of your other questions have gone unanswered.
He pets his thumb around your mouth, catching on your bottom lip and dragging. He’s fascinated by the faint wet of your saliva, dips his thumb to pet your tongue, dragging over your taste buds.
Your teeth knock against the curve of his bone as he pushes further into your mouth. His eyes are blank in the faint light from the TV, flat and all pupil but you like to imagine that you can see something in them, something mocking as his thumb pulls back to run along the edge of your teeth.
The meat of his thumb against your canine. A clinical feeling, no flesh. You can only feel the weight of pressure, the urge to bite down and tear. Your jaw trembles and you imagine that there is the faintest crease around his eyes before he pulls back.
He rounds the couch quicker than someone of his size should. You didn’t bother getting dressed for bed, and he yanks your jeans off, making you hiss. His hands pause at the sight of your panties. You expect him to yank them off the same, another barrier for him to get past but he tilts his head at them.
You’re ashamed that you’re already a little wet. Pavlov’s dog at the sight of him parting your legs. His thumb comes up, pets down where the seam of your cunt is under your panties. Thumb pulling back up to where your clit is, your spit cold on his skin by now.
Your thighs twitch and he smoothes his other hand up the flesh there. Catches the jump of your tendon, cradles your artery.
He tugs your panties to the side with two fingers, circles your clit with his thumb. It’s a quick thing, a lesson learned until it’s muscle memory for him. He should be getting bored of it, but he’s as entranced as always, sliding one finger then two then pushing a third while you hiccup, legs kicking out.
It’s more than you can bear, fingers digging into the upholstery of the couch. It’s dirtier out here, outside of the relative security of your bedroom. Your jeans around your ankles, your panties tugged to the side. Like fumbling teenagers, desire so hot that you can’t bear the extra seconds to get fully naked.
You come, cunt clenched around his fingers, nails almost popping the stitching of your parent’s couch.
You lean back, vision liquid as you stare up at your living room ceiling, peering up into your bedroom. There is a mirror scene, identical but parallel to your own. Your mirror lies in bed, her pyjamas askew as the man comes in, stands over her. In the living room, he yanks your jeans off your ankles and you hear the zipper of his boiler suit.
The image distorts and the mirror has his hands around her neck and it’s your face but the bedroom is all wrong and when she opens her mouth to scream, it’s not with your voice.
You jump when you feel his cock press against your cunt. He catches your thigh with his spare hand, his other holding his cock.
Even though he’s just has his fingers inside of you and you know that there barely is any difference to this and him actually fucking you - there feels like a distinction in your mind that snaps when you feel your pussy part around the head.
You’re wet enough that it’s easy for the first few seconds, a slick slide, before the stretch makes itself known. You whimper, hands clinging to his biceps. You blink up at him, tears pricking in your eyes as it stings. “Please,” you beg, voice pathetic.
As if he’s ever listened to you. As if you didn’t watch him set up the dominoes that led to this, watching with the docile gaze of a lamb on its side.
He looks down at you, from this angle you can’t even see his eyes. It’s just a white mask and two black holes, and you’re sucked in when he pulls his hips back just to grind forward.
You grunt, trying to breathe as he works himself into you, inch by inch. You weren’t meant to stretch this much, you refuse to look down to see if it’s as monstrous as it feels.
His breathing is heavy, echoing inside his mask and giving it an eerie quality. He places both of his hands on your waist, digs his thumbs into the soft flesh of your tummy.
You hiccup, miserable as he thrusts inside and all at once, he’s all the way inside of you. You feel like he’s in your chest, ghastly and too big for you to like it.
He likes it though, you can feel his hands squeezing and releasing the cage of your sides. His breath grunts out of him, heavy, in time with each flex of his fingers. He waits, though, head tilted down toward you, waiting for something.
Your hips are strained, spread around the bulk of him. Tendons pulling as your thighs bracket his waist. Whatever he’s looking for, he must get because he pulls his hips back and thuds them back into you. You whine, your backside already aching as there’s no give in his thighs, just muscle thudding into you.
You drop one of your hands to his stomach. Palm flat, pushing. There’s give here, a round belly. An inch in and you can feel the cord of muscle, tucked under a slab of fat. Everything about him is bigger than you, like trying to push back a mountain - ridiculous and futile.
He pulls back again and when he ruts into you this time, you groan. Some part of your body is working overtime, trying to catch something that isn’t just an ache. His hand drops down and circles your clit the next time he thrusts in, and you gasp - high and panicked - as pleasure zips through you.
It’s still sore, your hips spread further than you think they should be able to, the smack of his thighs into the back of your own. However, you can hear it getting slicker, there is no longer the muted clap of his boiler suit against your skin, you can hear his cock drag out of you and slide back in, wet.
He grunts when you flex around him, his thumb skidding off of your clit as you get wetter again. You’re an experiment again, spread out on a table and he’s just as intent on each one of your reactions as he was before.
He rubs two fingers against your clit, rough even with how wet you are. You sob, dig your nails into the muscle of his bicep.
He hikes your hips up, your head sliding down the couch. He ruts into you like an angry bull, breath huffing out of him, strained and coloured with a grunt. You’re almost upside down, your lower half held up for him to buck into.
“Oh fuck,” you manage, voice shrill with alarm as you come again, looking up to see how wet his cock is when he drags it out before slamming it back into you. You squeeze your eyes shut as you ride it out, dig your nails in while you clench down on him.
It’s all too open, you’re spread too wide, in your living room where you watch the television with your parents. Some ancient part of your brain that kicks out at the exposure is panicking, trying to drive you into running or lash out.
His fingers are still on your clit even as you can barely get a breath in to cry out. You whimper, the edge of a breath, and he pulls his hand back and leans down toward you.
His torso is pressed into your own, belly to belly. Your lungs expand, stutter as they reach the limit that he has imposed. Forced into his shape, the tremors of your legs are shaken out until they still.
He’s seated all the way inside of you, you can feel his cock kick at some unknown part of yourself when you look up. Even in the dark, you can see his eyes through his mask when he’s this close. You inhale as he exhales, his hands gripping your waist hard and you realise that he’s coming inside of you, grunting and a vague warm sensation somewhere deep inside of you.
He keeps staring down at you, eyes flat until they aren’t, flickering shut before he forces them open again.
You don’t know what compels you to murmur his name, but you say it, almost a question. He stills, even though he hadn’t been moving before - this is something else. This is something hidden in the grass, making its presence known just before it strikes.
His hands are heavy on you, the hands that have killed people. You’re frightened, but you feel drunk and bottomless. It doesn’t feel like it would matter if he killed you here, he’s done much worse. You’re already knocked off the edge of a cliff, who cares if you’re taken out before you hit the ground. “That’s your name, isn’t it? Simon.”
The second time, and his hand comes up, not overly fast, but it closes around your throat. He holds the fat of your pulse there, thundering under his palm. You don’t move, watching him back, trying to force your breath steady.
He strangled his sister to death. The mirror of you is upstairs and screaming, the pose is the same. You inhale, and he holds it like he’s giving it to you.
You push your fingers underneath the cuff of his sleeve and touch skin that you’ve never touched before. He inhales sharply as if you’ve stabbed him.
The curl of his fingers on the back of your neck could almost be affectionate. Smooth the small hairs there that are damp with sweat.
“Simon,” you murmur, and he drops his head closer to yours, eyes half-lidded. It’s like you’re the one who named him, his hands heavy and on you. “Simon.”
He still doesn’t speak but he knocks his forehead against yours. It’s awkward, silicone dragging on your skin, but you can feel the heat of his skin through it. You peer into the mark and at his strange dark eyes and they pour back into you.
You wince when he pulls back and he sways as if he’s going to push back into you but he sways back again, mind made up.
Your legs close, trap rewound and springs back in place. He peers between your legs before you can fully shut them and pulls your panties back into place for you. Strangely neat.
You curl up on your side, watch with a clinical detachment as he zips his boiler suit back up and stands.
He stands for a moment, and you wonder what he’s thinking. Then he turns and walks away as nothing had even happened.
You stumble up to your bedroom hours later, catatonic and wired. You curl up on your side. The mirror version of you is lying in your bed, dead. It’s not you at all, the nose is all wrong and you don’t have those same clothes. Her eyes are red, staring at you sightlessly.
You turn over but the dead stench of her follows you when you finally fall asleep. She chases you down, shrieking in a hoarse voice until she catches you, acid in your throat when you wake up alone.
//
The next time he comes over, he bends you over the edge of your bed and fucks you with a single-minded intent.
You sob when you come, bucking your hips into him to prolong the feeling and hating yourself.
//
Your heart jumps up your throat when you see him come out of the treeline, dropping your glass in the kitchen sink. Your parents are back and as soon as you catch sight of him in your back garden, you throw yourself up and out the door.
“We can’t.” you whisper, trying to catch his hands as they reach for you. Like trying to stop a car, he bats you away as if you’ve irritated him. He tries to steer you back into the house but you dig your heels in.
Pointless - he pushes and you stumble back and you’re lifted bodily, as if it doesn’t make a difference to him either way.
“Stop it, my parents are back, they can’t see us,” you hiss, whacking his back to get him to stop.
Oddly enough, he does. His hand flexing on the back of your thigh, you feel his head turn and imagine that he must be looking up at your parent’s bedroom window.
He seems to consider this, unyielding when you try to wiggle down.
There’s a moment where you think that you may suggest going back to your room alone, but you can’t find the words to say it. Even though he’s climbed those stairs up to your bedroom, climbing up them with him would make you feel complicit in this whole affair.
Besides, it’s not the dead of night. It’s earlier, your parents may be in their bedroom but they won’t be asleep yet.
He turns around and stalks towards the forest behind your house. His hands tense when you wiggle again, pulse catching up as you realise that fucking the weird masked man in your home is one thing but letting him drag you out to the woods where people die may be another.
He grunts when you knee him in the chest. It doesn’t seem to be out of pain because his steps barely falter, but like an acknowledgement of your panicked wiggling.
He swings you down and around as if you barely weigh anything. You cling to his arms, like he’s the world’s worst climbing frame. You’re in the trees but civilisation is only a few steps away.
Private enough, but not enough for you to stop yourself from snapping at him to stop when he tugs your pyjama bottoms down as if you were in your bedroom. It’s cold enough that you feel a chill settle into any of your exposed flesh. “Stop it, it’s fucking freezing,” you hiss again, trying to wrestle your bottoms back up while still clinging to him so he doesn’t drop you ass first into some pine needles.
He huffs at your wriggling, one hand anchoring you up while he pulls you close to him. His bare hand on the skin of your thigh is warm, the heat sinking in and chasing away the chill before it can settle in.
You curl your arms around his neck and tuck yourself in, shivering, trying to escape the cold. His hand smoothes up your back, beneath your shirt. Palm broad and flat, rough enough to scrape but so warm that you’d purr like a cat if you could.
He somehow manages to unzip his boiler suit enough to work his cock out to nudge it against you.
You like to think that you’ve adjusted yourself for him enough, but taking his cock without any preparation may be beyond you.
You tense, ready to try and throw yourself off and away if he tries to shove it in you, but you don’t feel him try to press into you.
You blink up at him confused, listening to the sound of him beating himself off while he holds you up with his other arm.
It’s ridiculous, but the sound sends a bolt of heat through you, your face flushed.
It’s embarrassing, strangely intimate. His head dips down to peer over your face as he circles his fist around the head of his cock, the edge of his wrist bumping against the curve of your backside.
You wonder if he even sees you or if he’s seeing someone else.
You tilt your head and he follows, greedy for every ashamed expression that you have. He grunts when you avoid his eye, presses his masked face into your own when you squirm.
With a gusty sigh, he comes and lets semen drip down his fist and into the wet leaves of September.
His hand is wet when he brings it back up to your cunt, and you shiver, disgusted and titillated when he uses it to slide two fingers into you at once.
Easy work, now that he knows you enough.
He leaves you standing there, afterwards. Lost little lamb, the light of home is so close by, but you watch the impossible broadness of his back as he leaves you and you crave the slaughter knife.
//
Your parents announce that they are going for a weekend away in a neighbouring town. They flutter around you, nervous this time. It’s a trip that they’ve had booked for a while, but this isn’t a trip out of obligation. The murders in town are getting worse, and the man doing them still hasn’t been caught.
They offer to cancel and you reject that, shaking your head and attempting a smile. There’s an edge of fear in you but it’s close to excitement, and you’re sick with it.
It’s dangerous to think that he won’t hurt you, to turn off the news and pretend you don’t know what’s going on.
You should phone the police, but the first night that your parents are away again, you pick out your only pair of lacy panties that match your bra and sit, docile as a kitten and wait.
He fucks you hard and into the mattress, your nails digging red line in his pale skin, mewling until you come so hard that you pass out for a few minutes. You wake up and he’s still there, rutting into you, somehow still hard even though you can feel his come leaking out of you.
The next day at work, one of your friends wants to hang out while your parents aren’t home. You blink at her, confused. Brain static, two wires disconnected. You’re so dosed up on Simon that you forgot that other people can see you and be in your home.
“Right, um, I was just going to go to bed early, honestly,” you try to hedge, scratching your jaw, nervous tick.
“Oh, come on, you never want to hang out anymore,” she says, raising a pointed eyebrow at you.
It’s true; you’ve become a hermit, seeing people at work before you steal yourself out of sight, hidden in your bedroom where you wait.
Under your friend’s expectant stare you fidget. These things mattered to you once. Being accepted, not being a recluse, being fun.
“Alright, but, I don’t want to be up late, I really am tired,” you agree, and watch the smile on her face. You blink, unsettled at the sight of her expression before you smile back at her.
She agrees to come over to watch a movie that will air on the TV, but will end just before 8PM. Early enough for you to chat and walk her to the door. Simon has never shown up early enough for this to be a problem.
You force yourself to relax even though you feel like you are going to jump out of your skin at the sight of her sitting on your couch and relaxing as if this is a place to be doing that.
The film captures your attention, something that aired last week that she loved but you had missed. It takes half of the film to finally relax, to feel like your old self again. Sitting on a couch, joking around. Your friend throws popcorn at you when you don’t laugh at her joke and when you laugh, you get startled by the sound.
“Is it alright if I get a glass of water?” she asks, already half standing.
“Yes, of course,” you say, nodding enthusiastically.
You’re revived, brought back from the edge of some unknown identity. Like slicking off all of the dirt that has layered on your skin. You were underneath, baby smooth and alive, inhaling a first breath after so long under the ground.
You watch the small screen, flickering for a second when the wind howls and knocks the satellite a little too roughly. Maybe you’ll go out after this. Let the film end and ask if she wants to grab a drink, the two of you could go to the local pub that you haven’t been to in a while.
The idea is sweet, the fizz of excitement. Being alive, really alive, talking and smiling and laughing, like peach juice down your chin when you take that first bite. The crunch of fruit between the bones of your teeth, victorious.
A shriek from the kitchen breaks the illusion, and you sit, stupefied before you throw yourself into action.
You fall off of the couch in your haste, hurtling into the kitchen where you collide with your friend as she tries to escape.
“Move, you have to move!” she screams, trying to push you out of the kitchen with her.
You look over her shoulder and you see Simon, standing in the backdoor of your house, his head tilted as he regards you both.
Something like a quickfire and panicked shame rockets through you as if anyone would be able to tell why he is here in the first place. Which is ridiculous when you look down and see the knife in his hand, dripping red and feel the wet of it as your hand drops down to your friend’s waist.
“Oh fuck,” you start before you are shoved back into the hallway. You stumble back and let her go as she clearly abandons trying to rationalise with you and tries to dart towards your front door.
Quicker than you think he should, Simon eats up the distance and strides past you without a glance. You blink and he grabs your friend by her hair before she can reach the door handle, drags her back while she shrieks again.
You force yourself forward, feet ankle deep in sludge. This is a nightmare, this is a dream, you will wake up and it will be over, happening to someone else or not happening at all.
You jump on Simon’s back, both arms around the one holding his knife, trying to stop him from sinking it into your friend.
He grunts, and you sob when you hear the sharp irritation in it. “Stop it, please stop it, no don’t!” you beg, crying earnestly when you realise that you’ve been crying silently for a while, tears dripping down and soaking your shirt.
He throws you back, and you go hard back into the wall until you’re certain that there’s a shape of your body left in it. You gasp, winded. He hasn’t let go of your friend, his hand knotted in her hair.
You scream when he digs the knife back into her side, and she echoes you, her eyes wide and white, seeking you out. A horrible judgement there, placed at your feet.
“Please, don’t, stop it,” you weep, forcing yourself up and onto your knees.
He lets your friend drop onto the floor and she smacks into the floorboards, her blood spraying out.
He killed his sister in this house, he’s killing your friend, and you realise that he’s going to kill you one day. These events are bound together like pages in a book, pushed together, the ink running together, wet like blood. It’s nothing at all, nothing is different.
Simon comes over to you, his hand on your throat. You cling to his wrist and look up at him.
“Please,” you wheeze. Your fingers on his pulse, steady until it jumps.
His eyes are flat and he blinks at you, slow. The last thing you see before he slams your head against the wall is the flash of blue police lights and they light him up.
//
The nurse monitors the split on your temple with a gentleness that almost makes you cry.
You have a concussion, they tell you. A concussion and a cracked rib. You aren’t allowed to go to sleep, even though that’s all you want to do. Sleep until you wake up and everything is reversed and you can prove that is happening to someone else and not you. You want to drip into the mirror and let her take over for a while. You’d rather be dead, lie in your bed - still - and find some peace.
The police take your story and you chew on your nails down to the quick with a paranoia that they don’t believe you.
“And what did you do when you saw him?” one officer asks, eyes hard as they peer down at you.
“I asked him to stop,” you stammer, flustered, hands whipping as if to construct the scene from scratch for him. “Then I was out in the hallway and he walked past me to get to -”
“He walked past you?” the office asks, his tone questioning but you imagine the intent on it. Loose thread pulled on until you’re a pile on the floor, unrecognisable from what you used to be.
“Yes, I jumped on his back to stop him from hurting anyone else,” you explain.
The officer goes to speak again but is interrupted by another one of the officers. “That was very brave, ma’am. You may have saved your friend’s life,” he tells you, giving you an encouraging smile.
You fidget with the bedsheet, the first officer’s gaze like a hot brand on the side of your face.
“You’re very lucky that they got there in time,” the nurse tells you after they leave. She changes out your IV, pats your other hand.
“Yes, I’m lucky to be alive,” you agree, voice stilted like you haven’t learned your lines yet.
Your friend is alive as well, if worse off. A few surgeries and some scar tissue around her stomach, but alive. Guilt rots you inside out, until you think that you can’t bear to see her.
Your parents are driving back to see you, frantic on the phone. Guilt is eating them as well, but you are the one to blame. Not that you can comfort them with that.
Your friend is finally awake and you’re allowed to visit her. You sit by her bedside, horrified at the sight of her so pallid and weak in her bed.
“I’m so sorry,” you whimper, hands shaking with grief.
“It’s not your fault,” she comforts you, staring you down until you look back at her. “It was him, he’s a monster. I hope someone fucking shoots him and we can all be free of him at last.”
You make yourself nod even though you think you’re going to be sick. “Are you alright?” you ask, then feel stupid.
“I will be,” she vows, her eyes hard and flinty. “He’s going to wish he killed me when I get out of here.”
You nod again, and when you get back to your room, you’re sick in the bathroom until you’re retching up bile. You keep going, wanting to empty everything out into the bowl before one of the nurses finds you and guides you back to bed.
You ask for them to knock you out but they just stare at you like you’re acting insane.
Bashing your head against the wall was the kindest thing that Simon has ever done for you. You stare up at the ceiling, listless, craving that crack of silence that had split across all of your senses.
The wound on your temple throbs, call and answer.
//
Your parents finally get home and they cry at the sight of you in the hospital bed.
You’re a fraud, sitting here. You’re well, you’re totally fine. The effects of the concussion are gone now, but they want to take another look at your cracked rib before they let you go home. Your nurse wants you to see a psychiatrist when you get out.
Your parents talk with doctors, with the police, with nurses, with your friend. You stare down at the blue sheet pulled over your legs and consider pulling it up and over your face.
“We’re so sorry, baby,” your parents weep, their hands on your face, gentle in your hair.
You let them swaddle you and you’re asleep. Your face tucked into the curve of your mother’s neck, your father’s arm strong around your back. Made young again in grief, forgiven without confession.
//
You wake up, night still peering in through your windows.
Everything is still around your hospital bed, the curtain not muffling the sounds of other patients sleeping in their own beds. Your parents are in the chairs next to your bed, fast asleep.
Something calls out to you and you get up, slink out from under your parent’s grip, wandering over to the window with your IV stand in hand.
Down along the line of the woods, is a man. A white face peers up at you, still, as if he knew that you would appear.
You feel marked, a blaring neon that everyone will see. He hones in on it like a beacon.
He turns around and wanders into the woods. Beckoning you. And you follow.
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