His Obsession by Ava Lore Read Free Book Online

before it was born.
    Malcolm waited for my quivering body to subside. "Good," he murmured. "Well done." His thumb resumed its pace and I thrashed and strained against my bonds as he traced his hand up to my throat and the tattoo winding over it. Words this time.
    "And this one?" he asked. "What does it say? The script is so elaborate I could hardly make it out." And his fingers trailed over the scar beneath it. The red smile I was supposed to wear down to the grave.
    "It says, 'Might as well live.'" I told him, my voice so soft I could barely hear it.
    He gave a low, quiet laugh. "Dorothy Parker," he said, and with a flick of his thumbnail I was coming, hard and aching around his fingers, my body lost in ecstasy as I yanked against the ropes, but inside everything was tumbled and torn, rent asunder and filled with pain and anger.
    He knew my tattoos. Every single one. I was raw and exposed. He'd seen the scars beneath them, and he knew they were important in some way. We were dancing around them, around their significance, and it frightened me. But all he did was wait for my orgasm to pass before moving on to the next. Gently he stroked each one in the dark and asked me, as he circled my clit with his thumb, what each one meant to me.
    "The leaping koi fish?" His hand stroking the inside of my upper arm.
    Breaking free.
    "The cherry tree shedding its blossoms?" My shoulder, the wafting petals spiraling across my chest.
    Impermanence.
    "The spider? The hand of Fatima? The vulture?"
    Infinity. Protection from evil. Cleansing.
    And beneath each one, he found the scar, running his hands over it as he brought me to orgasm again and again.
    When at last he had received a response for each tattoo and was satisfied, he untied me and he fucked me, gently, as though I were fragile. My exhausted body wrapped around him, clung to him, and we rocked with the ocean and I came around him again and again until at last he found his release and we fell asleep on the swell and fall of the sea.

Chapter Twelve
    Time at sea takes on a new meaning. The hours stretch out into days, and a single night can yawn as wide as a week. The sun comes. The sun goes. The water passes by.
    We sailed south.
    Malcolm and I joined together again and again, and the sea blurred the edges of our time, until it was hard for me to say if we'd been drifting on the water for a day or a hundred days. We met and coupled constantly, and when we weren't fucking Malcolm tried to capture me in art, searching for the elusive thing I carried within me that he thought would reveal the secrets of the universe to him. And when he grew frustrated, angry, enraged at his own inability to speak without words he would throw his sketch pad away, toss his canvas to the ground, squash the small clay statuette he had been fashioning and launch himself at me, wherever I happened to be, and he would force me down to the ground, up against a wall, into the strangest positions, and we would fuck again until we were sore and raw.
    ––––––––
    "When am I going to stop falling over?"
    "When you get your sea legs. You will become accustomed to the rocking of the ship soon. You will be able to walk on the deck as if it were dry land. You simply need practice."
    "Practice makes perfect, I guess."
    "Not, it seems, when we are talking about pastels."
    "I told you, they are a pain in the ass. Stop trying to use them."
    "But the colors..."
    "Color says shit. Work in black and white if you want to tell everyone life is meaningless."
    "Not life. My life. My life is meaningless."
    "Only if you use pastels."
    ––––––––
    I wore his clothes, mine having been left behind in our flight. The sun was warm and the boat was heated well, so I wore his underwear. Malcolm had literally fifty pairs of boxers on board, and they mostly fit me due to my ass being roughly twice as huge as my waist. At the very least they didn't immediately fall down. His shirts hung on me like smocks.
    "You have