Follow the River

But then he presses his hips forward, just slightly. It’s enough to start to enter me and I let out a soft cry, no matter how hard I try to keep it in.

“No, no. Ciaráin. You have to keep quiet. That’s what good boys do,” he tells me, “I need you to bite the comforter if you think you’re going to be loud. It’s very important.”

“Why?” I ask, breaking the rules again. But I do as he says anyways. I bend myself over the railing that my hands are cuffed to, taking the silk fabric between my teeth like he said.

Because I’m a good boy, he won’t hurt me.

I feel his hand on my back, gently touching my spine as he shifts my legs further apart. “That’s it, Ciaráin. You’re such a good boy. So good, in fact, I’m about to give you a special birthday gift.”

And with that, he slams his hips forward. Entering me in one, brutal thrust.

I scream out in pain, but the sound is muffled by the fabric in my mouth. It feels like I’m being ripped in half from the inside out. And the pain. It only gets worse and worse as he starts moving inside me.

“No,” I howl, keeping my face pressed into the mattress, but I know I’m loud enough for him to hear me. “No, no!”

Tears stream down my face, staining the comforter below me as I cry and cry and cry some more. My body is quaking in agony, trembling as I do my best to keep myself standing like the good boy he wants.

It doesn’t matter though, I don’t care that I’m not listening. That I’m not being a good boy anymore because I’m shouting at the top of my lungs for him to stop, to please, please stop.

I tell him he’s hurting me, but he doesn’t listen.

He just continues to hurt me, all for his sick, sick pleasure.

“Please stop! I don’t like this. It hurts too much!” I wail into the silk. It’s smoothness is the only thing giving me any sort of comfort. “You told me I was a good boy, that you wouldn’t hurt me!”

But his assault only continues, his pants and groans mixing with my cries and the noise of skin slapping together.

“Stop fighting it and it won’t hurt, my good boy,” is all he tells me.

Then a few minutes later, something happens. The pain stops. The physical pain. It’s replaced with something that feels…good.

Good like it does when he fingers are in there. Good like...like I like it.

But that’s wrong. It’s so wrong and I need him to stop.

“I’ll do anything,” I sob, snot and tears coating every inch of my face. “Please, just stop this.”

But nothing works. He doesn’t stop.

And once I realize my efforts are futile, I cry silent tears. I choke on the bile that keeps rising in my throat. It threatens to spray all over the bed if I open my mouth again.

I fight the pain coursing through my head as his body makes me feel so good, like he promised. It’s confusing, how I can like something I don’t want. It makes me sick. So sick I want to puke all over his fancy bed.

I want to be anywhere but here.

And I can’t help but wonder what I ever did to deserve this.

When all I ever did was obey his every demand like a good boy should.

But suddenly, something shifts, my reality morphing into a new scene entirely.

I don’t feel his thrusts, the pain is gone, and I’m not a twelve year old cuffed to the bed anymore.

No, I’m an adult.

I’m me, the twenty-one year old college student. I look down to see my arms, covered in tattoos.

And a sense of relief washes over me.

That is, until I focus to see…

Now I’m the one...doing the things he did to me.

“Please, please stop,” the voice pleads as I drive my hips forward, fucking him hard and fast. The request is soft coming from his lips, like music to my ears as I ignore him. He says it again, and the tone of voice is familiar somehow.

But I can’t place my finger on why.

“Ciaráin, no. Please,” he says again as I swivel my hips and hit him deeper than I was before. His ass is so tight, it feels phenomenal clenching around my cock.

I could cum at any second if he would just stop his bitching.

My fingers slide into his hair, gripping the brown strands tightly in my fist before pressing his face down in the mattress to shut him the fuck up.

He screams into the mattress as I fuck him, taking what I damn well please from him, from his body. My free hand glides across the smooth muscles of his shoulders and back in a soft caress. I love the way it feels against my skin.

It’s electric.

My fingers slide down to his side and over his ribs, and it’s there I notice a tattoo.

Two lines in a script font.

A quote I know to be from John Muir.

Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.

It’s a quote I’ve seen before, also as a tattoo, in fact.

In this exact same place…

He cries into the mattress again, but it’s muffled, so I can’t make out his words. Pulling his head back, I lean over him and whisper tauntingly in his ear. “What was that? I couldn’t hear you.”

“Rain!” he cries out, a plea ripping from his throat in a guttural sob. “Rain, stop. Please stop. You’re hurting me! I don’t want this!”

My nickname off his lips startles me, causing a hitch in my movement, just for a second, before I continue with my onslaught on his body.

But a word, one single word, snags in my brain.

Rain.

He called me Rain.

There are only two people in the world who call me that name.

Both of them have brown hair. A deep, smoky voice that slides over my skin like perfectly aged whiskey.

But only one of them has that tattoo.

“Rain,” his voice comes out choked, thick with emotion. Barely more than a whisper this time. “Please.”

Horror washes over me, recognition of his voice finally settling in.

I loosen my grip on his hair and cup the side of his face, slowly turning it to confirm my worst fucking suspicion.

And the second those eyes, the color of an alpine lake, meet mine, my whole world shatters.

River.

My eyes snap open as my body jackknifes in the bed. Cold sweat chills me to the bone and my throat aches, in need of water to ease my vocal chords.

Fuck.

Years, fucking years of living with these nightmares and it never gets any easier. I can never seem to fight them off. But they don’t usually wake me from a dead sleep like this.

For some reason, it felt more real tonight. Like I was actually living it.

Again.

But…River being there, that was unexpected. And far more torturous than reliving the horrible things that happened to me.

I allow my erratic heart to calm, taking deep, soothing breaths as I stare at the ceiling, letting the darkness of night bring me to peace. Usually it only takes me twenty minutes or so to get to the point where I can go back to bed until morning, but there is no way in hell I’ll be able to lull myself back into sleep tonight.

With a grunt, I roll off the bed and pad quietly to my door. I might as well take a shower, cool off, and maybe watch a movie before River wakes up at the crack of fucking dawn like usual.