Page 9 of The Last Feast

HUNGER

She slides off his back without removing the belt, since she enjoys the feeling of controlling where he can look.

This way, when he looks at Odette, Hana won’t feel like she’s competing for his attention with a leash to drag it back to her—especially now that his spit is dripping over the leather, making him a mess for them all to see.

But she wants more information. When hunting, she’s never been capable of asking her prey what makes them tick; it’s something she’s had to determine for herself. Now is her only opportunity to eat up all that knowledge, so she removes her dress to lay it on the wet floor beneath Auguste.

Once it’s to her liking, she rests the tail of the belt on his back then crawls between his legs.

His dick hangs heavy, leaving a trail of pre-cum on her spine as he whimpers at finally being touched by her.

She lays beneath him with the perfect view—a man turned whore gagged for her and the woman being crucified for his sins.

“It's poetic,” she thinks. “A symmetry to life because everyone feels sorry for the woman, like she had less control.” Hana knows firsthand that’s not the case, not when the Sisters of the orphanage would nip her when she tried to run away from the priest. Or they’d take her to the bad room, which wasn’t a room at all.

It was a closet they’d named the bad room as a deterrent, as if locking a child in a dark box with no food, water, or light for a week would do anything other than turn them feral.

“Tell me something about you,” Auguste mumbles.

Hana lifts her hand to caress his cheek with the back of her fingers as she pulls the belt down to hang around his neck like a noose. “You’re my last feast. A beautiful one that will keep me full forever.”

“What does that mean?”

“Have you ever been hungry?” she asks instead.

He shakes his head.

“So hungry that you hug yourself to stop the noises your stomach makes?” She continues mapping his features in her blood. “So hungry that when you hear a fly buzzing, you try to catch it because you’d feed anything to that angry beast roaring inside your stomach?”

“Have you?”

She slowly meets his eyes and simply says, “I have. It taught me that when you do get food, you have to take breaks. And if you keep eating, pushing more and more inside your body, it will hurt. This is your break, my sweet thief.”

He smiles at that. Not the fact she knows starvation or hunger—he smiles because Hana doesn’t want to hurt him.

And she smiles back when Odette stops her mumbled screaming. Everyone can see Auguste belongs to Hana. He’s no longer the same man who walked into this fear factory. Hana has made him better, truer to the man he hides deep within himself.

“We can get something to eat,” he offers.

“No. I’m not done with you yet. Tell me your secrets.”

Hana watches him, taking note of how his eyes dim and his breathing seems to pause. Placing her hand on his chest to feel his heart beating, she slowly lifts her head and licks his cheek.

“A secret,” he whispers, burying his nose in her hair. “I have many, but they’re not what make me.”

“Who hurt you, Jamie?”

“I’m not hurt,” he lies to them both.

Hana knows pain. It’s an emotion she’s closely intimate with, one of the first things everyone experiences.

The baby taken from a warm, secure womb to a cold, harsh world cries out in pain as they grow, only to then stumble when learning independence.

But as they become aware of the world, that’s when they encounter true pain, the kind that burrows through skin, flesh, sinew, and bone to sit in their marrow, forever a part of them.

Forever changing how they understand the world around them.

She may not have been raised with the usual milestones—crawling, walking, talking—but she still had them, from the Sisters teaching her how to clean herself after the priests’ visits, her uncle doing the same when he invited people into the home meant to be her safety.

Her milestones were taken from her body, teaching her that the word humanity is an oxymoron when no being possesses it.

So, she stares at Auguste, waiting for him to admit he’s in pain too because she knows he hasn’t reached that milestone—admittance.

But he shakes his head, lying to her again.

“You are,” she softly argues as she presses her hand harder to his chest. “I can feel it here.”

“Som-someone hurt me a long time ago,” he stutters, each word pained, as though he’s reliving it.

She doesn’t ask for more as she feels the erratic thuds of his heart. They both remain silent—

Hana waiting for what he’ll admit, Auguste telling himself not to say anything further because uttering the words are hard enough, but the heartache of not being believed is worse.

He knows what she’ll say, how she’ll look at him in that way that screams he’s a liar, because being touched in that way isn’t something boys have to worry about.

It’s a fear for little girls and their parents, just like his grandfather said.

All the arguments of a child begging to be believed repeat as he silently pleads with Hana not to ask anything more.

Don’t lie for attention.

It’s ill-mannered to speak about those things.

Stop crying.

Stop speaking.

Stop lying.

You’re not a girl, so nothing happened.

Boys are always more interested in their bodies.

You misunderstood.

Stop crying.

The notion that rape is a feminine struggle is the one that made him question his identity. What else could he do when this thing that had been done to him—this thing that had altered his life—was a lie due to being a boy?

So, he remains silent as Hana massages his chest, finding comfort in the silence.

She has her own demons, although she wouldn’t use that word, not given her upbringing in the orphanage and the learned connotation that the devil is bad.

Not when she’s always believed that the devil is lonely, waiting to find a friend who won’t shun him just like her.

As she watches Odette cry, there’s a thought she can’t keep back. “Is she your girlfriend?” she asks, holding him tighter.

“No,” he answers easily. “I’ve never had one before.”

That makes Hana pause her glaring at the suspended woman. She turns her head, looking at the man who caught her eye when he showed kindness to a dead animal. “Why? You’re not ugly.”

He coyly laughs at her version of a compliment, his heart racing under her fingertips, a faint blush staining the apples of his cheeks. With his heart in his throat, he softly admits, “You’re the first person to interest me. I saw you.”

It’s Hana’s turn to breathe harder as she fears he saw her in the forest. If he followed her, he’ll know her aunt and uncle. It’s just like they said—they’re important people who’ll be able to find her if she ever tells anyone about the abuse.

But he sets her at ease as he gently caresses her cheek with his nose. “Outside. Your face paint got my attention, like you’ve crawled out of a grave. And the ax in your hand made it look like you did it to make those who hurt you pay for their sins.”

The deep analysis of her costume makes her blush. Hana has never had a reason to blush; it’s something innocent, yet the longer he voices his examination of her, the more heated her cheeks become.

“Then you followed me in here, and I felt something other than apathy when you pressed your knife to my back. I’ve never had that before. It’s like you’d ripped through my chest and you were massaging my heart to make it beat faster. There’s something about you, Hana.”

“What?” she squeaks.

“I don’t know, but it scares me that you help me breathe a little easier.”

She knows what that fear is. She feels it too, since she’s questioning the goal she’s had for the last eight years.

If Hana had a guarantee that the next eighty years would be as exhilarating as the last few hours, her decision would be made.

But there is no guarantee, and she’s only glamorizing the moment because it has an end.

Cupping the back of Auguste’s head, she pulls him down to lay on top of her as she relaxes into the floor. “Shh, enjoy your break.”