Chapter 3: Chapter 3
The silence after was a living thing. It wasn’t peaceful; it was thick, saturated with the echoes of groaning metal and strangled cries. Ben’s hands, which had been instruments of such precise pressure, now lay limp and blood-streaked on the stained mattress. He stared at them as if they belonged to someone else.
Margot drew in a shuddering, wet breath beside him, the sound loud in the stagnant air. She didn’t move away. Her back was pressed against his side, a slick line of shared sweat and heat. The flickering bulb overhead swung in a slow, pendulous arc, making the shadows of the bedposts crawl like skeletal fingers across the floor.
“Christ,” she finally murmured, her voice raspy, used.
Ben said nothing. His eyes tracked the path of a single drop of sweat as it rolled from his temple, down his neck, into the hollow of his collarbone. The metallic taste in his mouth wasn’t just imagination; he’d bitten his own lip. The pain was a dull, distant throb.
Margot shifted, rolling onto her back. The movement made the broken springs complain. She stared up at the bulb, unblinking. “You almost did it that time,” she said, conversationally, as if remarking on the weather.
A cold knot twisted in Ben’s gut. “You told me to.”
“I know.” A slow smile touched her lips, raw and undone. “It was fucking perfect.”
He turned his head to look at her. In the erratic light, her face was a map of extremes: the dark hollows of her eyes, the swollen red of her lips, the livid marks blooming around her throat like a violent necklace. He had made that.