Page 34 of One Bad Knight

“I was so scared and alone, I drew more and more until they took my art supplies away. But I'd still trace pictures of you on the floor, on the walls, on the sheets.”

Kat’s hands visibly shook as she wiped away the tears falling from her eyes.

“I learned to stop talking about the demon, and they thought I stopped drawing you. But I kept drawing you in my palm to keep you close, until my uncle pulled me out.” She went on, her voice getting louder as her fists clenched. “They had no right. No right at all to pull these out. They were mine, and they were private. And I never meant for anyone to see them, least of all you.”

We fell into a long silence.

A half hiccup, half sob emerged from her. “Say something. My feelings are literally splattered all over this room. Please say something. What are you feeling?” Her arms crossed over her stomach.

“I don’t know how to feel,” I started, then stopped. “No, that’s not right. I feel… exposed.” My voice came out low, dangerous.

She sucked in a breath on a hiss as if she were in pain, but I didn’t let that stop me. She wanted to know how I felt? She’d have to take the brunt of it all now.

“You realize that all these years, I have never let a single person catch me on camera. And here you are, painting dozens of pictures of me.” As my voice grew louder, her arms tightened farther over her stomach.

I never felt so much as when I was with her. Anger and resentment rotted in me every day, but the things she made me feel… Like there was more than that, like she could see to my innermost pain, to my innermost desire, and in the final painting of me as a man, to my innermost strength. I couldn’t put words to the embarrassment, the raw, primal need I suddenly felt to be the man in that picture she created.

I didn’t want to feel any of this. I wanted things to stay the way they were. Emotion and feeling crashed over me like unforgiving waves of the ocean until I wasn’t sure who I was or what I would do anymore.

“I feel stupid.” My voice boomed through the room with anger now. “Stupid for thinking of you all these years, knowing you probably despised me. But the way you paint me here, like I’m something you want to save.”

“You aren’t something to be saved, you are someone to be lov—” Kat tried to stop herself before she finished.

In a second, I was in front of her, my hand around her throat, squeezing with enough pressure that she could still breathe but couldn’t speak another word. “Don’t say that. Don’t you ever say that. You don’t know what I am.”

Her eyes moved past me in a deliberate motion. I followed them to the picture of me curled up in the darkness. It was next to the one of me as a man. The light sparked bright and hot in my eyes.

Suddenly I was swept away, my anger gone with it.

Then I turned back to face her. She looked resigned to her fate, as if she expected me to break her neck for what she had done.

I released my hold on her throat. A horrid confession I tried to kill and bury fought its way up. My fingers tunneled in her hair as I looked down at her impossibly beautiful fucking face. “I kept you close too.”

Then I leaned down and kissed her.

13

Kat

Gatsby kissed me so gently, so deeply, a fire started at my toes and slowly but thoroughly consumed me.

It was different than the last time. In the dead of night, he’d tried to punish me, shock me. Now a message imprinted from his lips onto mine over and over again.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

A dam of need broke in me. In a minute, I had his shirt off. I sighed in relief when I touched his bare flesh. My hands traveled over the scarred, tattooed surface of his hard, lean muscle.

My shirt disappeared, and then my bra. Gatsby gathered me close, pressing my bare chest against his and a sob of emotion caught in my chest but didn’t go any higher.

He continued to kiss me like I was his salvation. Someone to be worshipped, protected at all costs. We stripped the rest of the way, and my eyes widened as I saw what he’d not been so subtly hiding in his pants. His hand wrapped around his long, thick shaft. A bead of precum glistened at the tip, making my mouth water.

For a split second I worried he wouldn’t fit, but that thought was instantly chased away by the anticipation of being filled until I couldn’t think a single fucking thought.

I needed him. I needed him like air. Like I hadn’t taken a breath since that day he left me.

My hand pushed his aside to grasp his rigid length. I reveled in stroking him, his cock like steel wrapped in velvet. His hands tightened in my hair as his face screwed up like I was killing him. He was completely at my mercy.

Then he pushed me away before pulling my hand, leading me up the three short steps of the dais at the center of the room. It was where the models usually posed for classes. Gatsby sat me down, then knelt before me at the bottom step. The cheap carpet scratched against my sensitive skin, heightening the reality that this was happening.