Chapter 3: Will's fingers still smell like her when he plays a melancholy melody on his guitar. Erin's breath catches as she watches from the doorway - until he slams the instrument down and pins her against the soundproof foam, his teeth at her neck as he tears her panties aside and rams into her with three brutal thrusts.
The silence in her dorm room had become a physical thing after Will left the stairwell. It was a thick, woolly emptiness that absorbed the sound of rain and breathing and thought. Erin didn’t move from the step for a long time. The cold concrete seeped into her bones, a fitting counterpoint to the feverish heat still lingering between her legs. Eventually, the shaking stopped. A numb, hollow feeling took its place. She stood, her body feeling both foreign and unforgivably familiar, and walked back to her room like a ghost.
The next two days passed in a blur of avoidance. She attended her lectures mechanically, taking notes in a neat, precise hand that betrayed nothing of the chaos inside. She turned her phone off completely, unable to face the eventual green bubblemessages from Ben smiling up at her, or the terrifying blank space where Will’s name should be. She existed in a state of suspended animation, floating through the mundane routines of laundry and dining hall meals, while inside, a silent, screaming war raged. The memory of Will’s touch was a brand. The memory of Ben’s voice was a lash.
On the third night, the silence became unbearable. The four walls of her dorm pressed in, each one plastered with the phantom afterimages of what she’d done. She had to move. She pulled on a hoodie, not caring what was underneath, and slipped out into the dimly lit evening.
The music building was mostly deserted, a concrete tomb after hours. Her feet carried her without conscious direction, following a pull she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—name. She knew where he’d be. He always went to the same practice room when he needed to disappear. Room 3B, at the end of the echoey hall, with the faulty fluorescent light that buzzed like a dying insect.
She heard it before she saw the door. Not a song, not exactly. It was the sound of a guitar being attacked. A ragged, dissonant chord progression, played with too much force, the strings protesting with metallic shrieks. Then it would stop. A moment of dead silence. Then another violent, off-kilter barrage of notes. It was the sound of something breaking.
The door was slightly ajar. She pushed it open slowly. The room was a narrow, windowless box, smelling of dust, old carpet, and the faint, coppery scent of adrenaline. Faded band posters curled at the edges. In the center of the room, in a pool of ugly fluorescent light, sat Will. His back was to the door, his shoulders hunched over the guitar in his lap like he was trying to strangle it. An empty chair sat facing a cracked mirror on the opposite wall.
He didn’t turn. He just stopped playing. The sudden quiet was more deafening than the noise.
“Go away, Erin.” His voice was flat, stripped bare.
“I can’t,” she said, the words sticking in her dry throat. She stepped inside, letting the door click shut behind her. The soundproofing on the walls seemed to absorb her presence. “We have to—”
“We have nothing.” He still didn’t look at her. His knuckles were white where he gripped the neck of the guitar. “There’s nothing to say. It’s done. It was a mistake. A series of really, really fucked-up mistakes.”
“A mistake?” A brittle laugh escaped her. She gestured vaguely at her own body, though he couldn’t see. “What we did in the stairwell… that was a mistake? It felt like a fucking exorcism.”
Finally, he moved. He placed the guitar carefully, almost reverently, against the wall. Then he stood and turned. The sight of him hit her like a punch. The easy smile was gone, erased. Dark circles bruised the skin under his eyes. His face was all harsh planes and angles, his jaw set so tight a muscle ticked in his cheek. His gaze swept over her, not with desire, but with a cold, analytical disgust that was worse.
“It was a breakdown,” he corrected, his voice low. “A mutual fucking breakdown. We used each other. Like scratching a poison ivy rash until it bleeds. It doesn’t mean anything.”
His words were meant to wound, to push her away. They did. But they also ignited something darker, something that had been festering in the hollow silence. A need to prove him wrong. To prove that the fire that consumed them was real, was the only real thing left.
“Liar,” she whispered, taking a step forward.
He didn’t retreat. “Get out.”
“You don’t want me to leave.” Another step. The small room shrank with her advance. The air grew thin, charged. She could smell the faint, clean scent of his soap underneath the sweat and frustration. “You’re here playing goddamn funeral dirges because you can’t get it out of your head. Any of it. The shower. The stairwell. How I felt around your cock. How you filled me up.”
His control snapped. It wasn’t a slow unraveling; it was a guillotine drop. In two swift strides he crossed the room, his hands shooting out to grab her shoulders. He spun her and shoved her backward, hard. Her shoulder blades slammed into the soundproofed wall with a dull thump, knocking the air from her lungs. Before she could gasp, his body was pressed against hers, pinning her. The anger in his eyes was a live wire, sparking and dangerous.
“Shut up,” he hissed, his face inches from hers. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you came inside me three times in one night,” she spat back, adrenaline and a perverse thrill burning through the numbness. “I know you told me I was yours. Was that just part of the ‘breakdown,’ Will? Just convenient filthy talk?”
A raw, animal sound tore from his throat. His hand flew to the neck of the guitar leaning against the wall. He didn’t pick it up. He just grabbed it and, in one violent motion, shoved its smooth, curved wooden body horizontally across her collarbones, pressing it against her throat like a bar. It wasn’t enough to choke her, but it pinned her head back, forcing her to look up at the buzzing light, at his shadowed face looming over her. The cold, lacquered wood bit into her skin.
“You want filthy?” he growled, the words guttural. His free hand yanked at the waistband of her leggings and her underwear, dragging them down her thighs in one rough pull. The cool air of the room hit her exposed skin. “You want to be used? Is that what this is? Because I’m fresh out of gentle, Erin. All I’ve got left is this.”
He fumbled with his own jeans, the button giving way, the zpper a sharp rustle. He freed himself, his cock already hard and angry-looking, jutting toward her. He was not gentle. He was not seeking permission. The guitar neck pressed insistently against her windpipe as he hooked one of her legs over his hip, not bothering to remove her clothes further. He positioned himself at her entrance, which was, as he’d predicted, already shamefully wet, her body betraying her completely, responding to the violence and the dominance with a helpless, flooding heat.
He drove into her with a single, brutal thrust.
Erin cried out, a sharp, strangled sound constricted by the wood at her throat. The intrusion was overwhelming, a burn and a stretch that melted instantly into a deep, devastating fullness. He was bigger like this, angrier, devoid of any rhythm but punishment. He buried himself to the hilt and held there, his hips grinding against her, his breath hot and ragged on her face. The guitar pressed harder.
“This what you followed me for?” he snarled, his eyes black holes drinking in her pained expression. “You wanted to be a dirty secret in a stairwell? A quick fuck against a wall? Well, here you go. Now you’re just a hole in a practice room. Is that better?”
He pulled back and slammed into her again. And again. Each thrust was a short, punishing stab, powered by fury and self-loathing. The guitar neck dug into her throat with every jarring impact, a terrifying counterpoint to the deep, internal assault. Her hands scrabbled at his arms, his shirt, finding no purchase. Her trapped leg hooked around him tighter, her heel digging into the back of his thigh, pulling him deeper, urging him on. The sensation was obscene, unbearable, necessary. The pain at her throat mixed with the brutal pleasure coiling deep in her gut, a confusing, devastating cocktail.
“Yes,” she gasped, her vision spotting at the edges. “God, yes. Fuck your stupid guitar. Fuck me. Just fuck me, Will. Ruin me. I’m already ruined.”
He let out a shuddering groan, the sound ripped from some place of profound brokenness. The hand not holding the guitar seized her hip, his fingers digging in hard enough to leave new bruises over the old, fading ones. His pace became relentless, a piston-like rhythm of pure, unadulterated friction. The wet, slapping sounds of their union were loud in the small, dead room. The cracked mirror across from them reflected a fragmented, grotesque image: her head thrown back, her face flushed, the dark line of the guitar against her pale throat, his thrusting form behind her.
“Look,” he commanded, his voice hoarse. “Look at what we are.”
Her eyes, half-glazed, found their reflection. She saw a wild animal pinned. She saw a man destroying himself. She saw the raw, ugly truth of it. It was the most honest thing she’d seen in days. A sob mixed with a moan choked out of her. The coil inside her was wound to breaking, the pressure building not from tenderness, but from the sheer, brutal physics of his thrusts, from the degrading poetry of the moment.
“I’m gonna…” she whimpered.
“Do it,” he interrupted, his rhythm faltering for a second as his own climax neared. “Come. Come all over my cock while I hold this goddamn thing to your throat. Let’s see how pretty it is.”
The permission, vile and explicit, was the final trigger. Her orgasm ripped through her with shocking, violent intensity. It wasn’t pleasure; it was a systemic collapse, a seismic shudder that locked every muscle. She convulsed around him, a silent scream stretching her mouth as the guitar pressed into her, her inner walls milking his length in frantic, involuntary pulses.
It tipped him over the edge. With a final, deep, grinding thrust that seemed to press the guitar clean through her neck and into the wall, he came. He stifled his own roar by biting down on the collar of her hoodie, his body jerking against hers as he emptied himself inside her in hot, pulsing jets. He held there, shuddering, his weight sagging against her, the guitar the only thing keeping them both upright.
Slowly, the world reassembled. The buzzing of the light re-emerged from the white noise in her ears. Her throat ached. Her body felt brutally used, hollowed out and filled with lead. Will’s breathing was harsh against her ear. He let the guitar clatter to the floor, the sound a jarring, discordant crash in the sudden quiet.
He pulled out of her slowly. The sound was wet, explicit, final. He stepped back, fastening his jeans with clumsy fingers, not looking at her as she tugged her own clothes back into some semblance of order. The silence stretched, thicker and more toxic than before.
He walked to the chair and sat down hard, the springs shrieking in protest. He stared at the cracked mirror, at the fragmented reflection of the room and the girl still leaning against the wall, trembling. He didn’t speak. He just stared, his expression empty.
Erin looked at the guitar on the floor, then at the deep, red line across her throat in the mirror. A brand. A receipt. She felt the hot trickle of him starting to seep out of her, onto her inner thigh. No shower, no rain, would ever wash this away. This was the punctuation mark. The full stop.
She turned and left the room without a word. He didn’t try to stop her. The echo of the guitar hitting the floor followed her all the way down the empty hall.
The echo of the guitar hitting the floor followed her all the way down the empty hall, a sound that morphed inside her skull into the snap of a bone, the crack of her own moral spine finally giving way. She walked without feeling her feet on the linoleum, her body a vessel carrying the fresh ache between her legs and the throbbing brand around her throat. The physical evidence was a perverse anchor, the only real thing in the fuzzy unreality of the fluorescent-lit corridor. She didn’t go back to her dorm. The thought of that silent room, with its ghostly imprint of their first time on the bed, made her stomach heave. Instead, she pushed through a heavy fire door and out into the misting night, letting the cold, damp air try to scrub the scent of him and dust and shame from her skin.
It didn’t work.
Will remained in the practice room chair, its springs settled into a permanent sigh beneath him. He stared at the guitar on the floor, its sleek curve looking obscene against the grubby carpet. His hands hung limp between his knees, faintly trembling. The anger had evacuated him, leaving a cavernous, ashen hollow. He felt scraped out. The image in the cracked mirror was of a stranger—hollow-eyed, mouth a grim slash, the ghost of her heat still clinging to him. He pulled his phone from his pocket. The screen was blank, dark. No notifications. He had silenced the world days ago. His thumb hovered, then tapped, lighting up the screen. The familiar background—a picture of him, Ben, and Erin from spring break, arms around each other, squinting in the sun—blinded him for a second. Ben’s smile was wide, trusting. Will’s own face in the photo, laughing carelessly, felt like a artifact from a dead civilization.
He swore, a low, gut-punched sound, and thumbed the phone to his camera app. He didn’t know why. It was a reflex, a need to document the wreckage, maybe. Or a deeper, sicker impulse he wouldn’t name. He switched it to video, the red record dot glowing like a single malevolent eye. He propped the phone on the edge of the chair’s seat, screen tilted up, a clumsy witness. He just stared at the lens, his breathing the only sound in the room, waiting for something he couldn’t define.
Two hours later, a soft tap came at the door. It wasn’t a knock, just the hesitant brush of knuckles on wood. He knew it was her. He always knew. The hollow inside him filled immediately with a corrosive liquid, part dread, part desperate hunger. “It’s open,” he called, his voice sandpaper-rough.
Erin slipped inside. She’d changed into a thin, worn t-shirt and soft shorts, her hair damp from a shower that hadn’t worked. The red line across her throat had darkened into a vivid weal. Her eyes went to the phone propped on the chair, the red recording light a tiny hellfire spark in the dim room. She froze. “What are you doing?”
“Documenting the crime scene,” he said, the words flat. He didn’t move from where he now sat on the floor, his back against the wall beneath the cracked mirror. His guitar was back in his lap, but he wasn’t playing. He was just holding it. “Thought you’d left for good.”
“I tried.” She closed the door, leaning against it. The room felt smaller than ever, a vacuum-sealed tomb. “I can’t think. I just… keep coming back to the moment the guitar hit the floor. That sound.”
“It’s a hell of a punctuation mark, isn’t it?” He plucked a single string. The note vibrated, sour and lonely, in the dead air. “So what now, Erin? Another round? You want me to find a music stand to shove up your cunt? A microphone to choke you with? I’m running out of props.”
The vulgarity was meant to push her away. It always was. It never worked. It lit a fuse in her gut. She pushed off the door and crossed the room, stopping a foot from where he sat. She looked down at him, at the phone recording their legs, the space between them. “You’re recording this?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t look up at her. He stared at the phone’s screen, at the fragment of her bare legs it captured. “Proof. For when we wake up tomorrow and try to convince ourselves it wasn’t this bad. That we weren’t this fucking disgusting.”
“Turn it off.”
“No.”
The simple refusal hung there. He finally tilted his head back against the wall to look up at her. The angle was vulnerable, exposing the long line of his throat. The challenge in his eyes was bleak, absolute. The red light pulsed. Erin felt a new layer of violation seep into her, hot and sharp. It should have made her turn and run. Instead, it coiled tight alongside the other aches, a dark flower blooming in the rot. She took the last step, her shins brushing his knees. She slowly, deliberately, lowered herself to straddle his lap, the guitar trapped between them, its hard body a barrier against her core. She felt him stir against the denim of his jeans instantly.
“Then let’s give it something real to remember,” she whispered, her face close to his.
His control was a threadbare cloth. It shredded. He dropped the guitar, letting it clatter beside them, his hands flying to her hips. He yanked her forward, grinding her down onto the hard ridge of his erection. The thin cotton of her shorts was a pathetic barrier. “You’re a fucking glutton for punishment,” he breathed against her mouth, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of her ass.
“You’re the one hitting record,” she shot back, capturing his lower lip between her teeth, biting down just enough to make him gasp. She rocked against him, a slow, grinding torment. “You want a show? Let’s give you a fucking show.”
He kissed her then, a devouring, desperate clash of teeth and tongue that tasted of stale coffee and nihilism. His hands shoved her shirt up, palming her breasts roughly, thumbs scraping over her nipples. She whimpered into his mouth, her own hands fumbling for his belt. This was different from the wall, from the shower. This was slower, more deliberate, a conscious immersion in the filth. The red light watched.
She freed his cock, hot and heavy in her hand. She rose up on her knees, guiding him, not bothering with her shorts, just tugging the fabric aside. She sank down onto him in one excruciatingly slow, wet slide, her head falling back as he filled the devastating, familiar emptiness inside her. A ragged moan escaped her, loud in the quiet room. He watched her face, then his eyes flicked to the phone, ensuring it saw.
“Tell it what you are,” he grunted, his hips lifting to meet her, driving deeper.
“I’m your best friend’s girlfriend,” she panted, beginning to move, a slow, deep ride that made her see stars. “And you’re fucking me raw in a practice room.”
“Again.”
“You’re fucking me,” she gasped, her rhythm building, each rise and fall a slick, perfect torture. “And you’re recording it like the sick bastard you are.”
He groaned, his hands clamping on her hips, taking over, driving her down onto him harder, faster. The chair springs creaked a frantic rhythm beneath them. The angle was deep, unbearably intimate. She could feel every ridge, every vein, the brutal reality of him stretching her, claiming her. He leaned forward, mouth on her throat, licking over the bruised line his guitar had made. “This is all we are now,” he muttered, the words vibrating into her skin. “Just this. A dirty video on a phone. No past. No future. Just this filthy, fucking loop.”
His words unspooled her. Her orgasm built not as a wave but as a sudden, violent detonation, short-circuiting her brain. She cried out, a sound torn raw, her body clamping around him in vicious, pulsating spasms. He followed instantly, his own shout muffled against her shoulder as he jerked up into her, flooding her with a heat that felt like a penance. They collapsed together against the wall, a tangled, sweating heap, the only sound their wrecked breathing and the silent, judging eye of the recording phone.
The aftermath was a new level of stillness. The reality of what they’d done, what he’d captured, settled over them like radioactive dust. Erin, still impaled on him, felt the sticky proof of their mutual ruin seeping out of her. She looked over his shoulder at the phone. The red light was still on. It had seen everything. Her face, her abandon, her confessional words. Her complete and utter destruction.
Will turned his head, his cheek against her damp shirt. He looked at the phone too. His expression was unreadable. Then, with a hand that wasn't quite steady, he reached out and tapped the screen. The red light winked out.
He had stopped recording.
He had saved the file.