Sins On The Skin

XII.

When she offered no response, he knew.

"You're afraid." He stated, studying her body language like it was Plato's Symposium or something equally complex and yet, equally simple. "It all makes sense now." He, too, stood up, not enjoying the distance she had put between them.

"I don't understand what you're talking about." Nathan eyed the golden cross sitting between her breasts before reaching over and holding it inside his fist, obviously not paying attention to the lies that left her mouth. His scalding hot breaths travelled over to her body, causing the muscles in her stomach to tighten.

For some reason, the scene appeared extremely sacrilegious.

"Yes, you do." It was like a switch had been flipped and he, suddenly, turned into the professor, the man disappearing somewhere inside his mind. Just how many people inhabited that body? "You're afraid. Not of me or what I can do to you but of yourself." He gave a tug, pulling the chain with enough strength to leave an imprint on the back of Gwen's neck.

It was only a small taste of what he was offering.

"Have you been drinking?" The look he threw her way could almost be described as deadly.

"You are afraid of how much you want this, of how easy it is to give up control and trust me to do to you whatever I damn well please. It frightens you because you have been powerless in the past and it was used against you."

"You have no idea what you're talking about." He knew exactly what he was talking about and it was terrifying the Hell out of her.

"What happened? You let someone touch you, taste you-" His phone started ringing then, interrupting his train of thought and breaking the trance he had put her under.

Nathan didn't even check his phone to see who it was before turning it off and throwing it over to the other couch. "You could have taken that."

"No, I couldn't. Now, tell me."

"It's more than just that." Gwen admitted, keeping her voice low. "It's more than a few bad men corrupting me and handing me over to the dark side."

"Tell me. Make me understand."

"You wouldn't understand." Translation: you wouldn't like it.

"Wouldn't I? Now, correct me if I'm wrong but someone made you think that what you crave is wrong, that it's sick." That you're sick, he might not have said it but it was implied. Heavily.

He knew exactly what he was talking about.

Perhaps, he'd felt sick, too.

Gwen's head dropped in disbelief as shame washed over her fine features.

It hurt how loudly the word sick was ringing in her ears, how it brought her back to that house that could never be called a home, that could never play the part of a sanctuary and how the evil that lived there murmured sweet promises that it would never keep to her.

It hurt how it brought her back to that room, the one with bleached bathroom tiles instead of regular flooring, the one that had her blood running through the cracks.

Old feelings resurfaced then. The feeling of her raw, abused back and the feeling of hearing the drops of blood leave the body and fall onto the tiles. When her tongue moved around inside her mouth, she could almost taste it. The copper. A feeling of disgust should have followed but it didn't.

There was no disgust, no self-hatred, no nothing.

Just old, long avoided mementos.

"It doesn't matter who it was, it happened." He told her, his voice bereft of any judgment, bereft of any pity.