A tired smile eased across Giselle Mercer’s lips as she felt her husband shower kisses along the delicate curve of her neck. Her body prickled with goosebumps as his five o’clock shadow lightly scraped against her pale skin. She snuggled herself closer to him as they rested against each other. Her backside nestled against his front. His strong muscular arm draped across her hip while his digits drew invisible swirls and lines on a slither of exposed flesh between the hemline of her fitted tank top and the waistline of her pajama shorts. She shivered in response, but willed herself to bite back a tiny moan.

“Are you awake yet,” Nathaniel asked, his voice dripped with sleep but there was an underlying tone of mischief that she knew all too well.

“Well, it’s kind of hard to sleep when your husband is molesting you,” she yawned softly.

He chuckled throatily at her answer, his calloused hand sliding underneath her tank top and up her torso until his palm reached her left breast. He cupped it and gave it a playful squeeze before his index finger and thumb caught a sensitive nipple. His fingers gently rolled and tugged at the hardening peak.

Giselle moaned, arching against him.

“As your husband, it’s my right to molest you whenever I want. Whether you’re asleep or awake,” Nathaniel replied, his lips brushing against her earlobe before his pink tongue darted out to flick her earlobe. She shuddered, moaning again.

She willed herself to remove his exploring hand from underneath her tank top and sat up to look at him.

“Oh, yeah?” Giselle arched an eyebrow as she pushed him onto his back with a grin, wanting to give him a taste of his own medicine. “And what exactly are my rights as your wife, Mr. Police Officer?”

Her voice oozed in a mocking innocent as she batted her eyelashes sweetly at her husband. A lazy grin stretched across his lips as she climbed on top of him, straddling his waist and sitting nicely on his morning wood.

“You tell me, Mrs. Mercer,” he spoke throatily, his hands sliding up her thighs and grasping her waist. She opened her mouth to speak, but a sharp gasp tumbled out instead as his hand landed a hard slap on her ass. His green eyes darkened with hunger and she knew that she needed to sate it by giving him something good to eat.

She planted her hands on both sides of his head and dipped her head down, her face hovering dangerously close to his. She brushed her lips against his teasingly. “You got any personal requests for breakfast?”

“Your pussy on my face would be a great way to start my morning, but fucking you in the shower is a perfectly acceptable substitute,” Nathaniel said.

They chuckled together before they shared their first kiss of the day.

Then a chant filled the air. It came from a source down the hallway and rapidly grew louder.

“First day of school! First day of school! First day of school,” their five-year-old daughter exclaimed in a cheerful singsong voice as she burst through the master bedroom door. By then, Giselle had already rolled off her husband.

Valerie hopped up onto the bed and began to jump and down. “Mommy! Daddy! Do you know what today is? Do you? Do you?”

Her curly blonde locks were tugged into a high ponytail that sat at the top of her head like a pom-pom. She wore white pajamas with Minnie Mouse’s face all over. Nathaniel watched his bubbly daughter, a tired amusement twinkling in his green eyes. She bounced up and down on the king-sized mattress with the brightest smile he had ever seen.

The familiar crackle of a firing gun sliced through the air. Valerie stopped jumping and looked down at her pajama shirt. Dark red dot appeared on her shirt and widened quickly as she bled through the crisp white fabric. She pressed her hand against her bleeding belly and gaped her mouth before she looked at him, her youthful eyes wide and shining with horror.

“Daddy?”

Nathaniel looked down at his quivering hand that held the gun. He dropped the weapon, scrambling to catch Valerie as her corpse collapsed onto the bed, but a bloodied hand gripped his forearm.

His head snapped over to his wife who laid beside him with six bullet holes in her chest.

“You’re a fucking monster, Nathan. A fucking monster,” she gasped as she tried to fight for breath. Blood spurting from her twisted mouth, tears streaming down her face. Then her chest stopped moving and her eyes went dull.

“She’s right, Nathaniel,” Juliette said, suddenly appearing at their bedside. She caressed Giselle’s bloodied face. “You’re a monster like me. Like your father. Monsters function beyond the notions of simplicity and normalcy. Even when you wake up from this dream, this nightmare is far from over.”

She leaned over his dead wife’s body, her face barely a few inches from his.

“You can run to your daddy’s little island and make amends with your little black whore, but she won’t accept you, Nathaniel. She’ll never truly accept what you are. She’ll never give you what you need,” she whispered before kissing his forehead gently. “Remember that, my little monster.”

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Sebastian’s eyes snapped open and he jerked himself upright. Sweat coated his flesh, glistening in the yellowish orange morning light. His chest heaved up and down as he attempted to catch his breath. His heartbeat pounded rough and hard in his ears. The taste of copper stained his mouth. As he suffered through the side effects of his nightmare. His eyes were wide with fright and horror. He was overwhelmed with memories mixed with fantasy that consumed him all at once, unrelenting and merciless as he adjusted to reality. He pushed back the bedsheets and planted his bare feet onto the ground, hunching over and shaking.

Valerie. Giselle. Valerie. Giselle. Valerie. Giselle.

A warm hand rested gently on his back, veering him off the path of his psychotic breakdown, but he was still drunk on his emotions and his nightmare. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t remember anything. All he knew was he was a monster—Juliette’s little monster. He reached around and snatched away that hand, gripping its wrist tightly. He froze and blinked at the owner of the hand.

Willow was kneeled behind him, her face twisted in a grimace briefly as he kept her wrist in his possession. Quickly, he let go and she rubbed her wrist for a moment. He caught glimpses of tiny healed cuts on her palms. His mind was clouded and disabled, but there was a spark of recognition as he stared on.

Somehow, he knew it was his fault.

It was always his fault.

Monsters never do anything right.

A deep sense of concern was etched all over her face. In her brown eyes, he could’ve sworn he saw a twinkle of pity. He didn’t like that. No, he fucking hated that. He didn’t want her pity. Pity did him no good. Pity wouldn’t change the fact that he was falling prey to the beast that dwelled deep inside him. A beast he spent years taming, feeding its bloodthirst for cooperation. Now, the beast wanted free and he was becoming more than half-tempted to let it roam.

He didn’t want to her to play witness to that.

Sebastian turned himself back ahead. An ocean breeze blew into the room through the open balcony doors and the soft airy curtains flutter and dance to the warm current.

He felt the bed shift underneath him, but he didn’t budge. He closed his eyes as she rose on her knees and wrapped her arms around him from behind, snuggling her head against the side of his bearded face.

“I’ll protect you,” she whispered in his ear. He thought her promise to be absurd in that moment. She could easily be overpowered. She could easily be destroyed. How could she protect him?

How could she save him from Juliette?

From his father? From…himself?

Yet the delivery of her words...the warmth of her presence was comforting the longer he allowed her near. The longer he allowed her to embrace him. With every passing moment, his hardened nature began to chip and fragment like a glacier gradually crumbling to warming waters, but there was still much left to him. Her soft fingers stroked his bare chest in tiny up-and-down movements that send ripples of subtle pleasure through him. Her lips pressed a tender kiss against his neck’s pulse.

“Anything in particular you want for breakfast,” Willow asked in a whisper against his neck, but he said nothing as he lived a tiny piece of his nightmare that is dressed up as a memory.  

She planted her hands on both sides of his head and dipped her head down, her face hovering dangerously close to his. She brushed her lips against his teasingly. “You got any personal requests for breakfast?”

Willow didn’t probe or pry an answer out of him.

“I’ll figure something out,” she assured before she withdrew from him and crawled off the bed.

He watched her with careful eyes, drinking in the sight of her in her buttercup yellow nightie. The hemline of the nightie ended mid-thigh, allowing him to see the bandaids on her knees. An ounce of guilt prickled him. She moved over to the dresser and grabbed a hairband, pulling her hair into a sloppy ponytail as she gazed into the vanity mirror. She hummed an unfamiliar tune as she left the bedroom.

The room felt empty now.

He felt empty now.

Instead of following her downstairs, he made his way into the bathroom and decided to take a shower. The scorching hot water pounding upon his head is a good punishment and he scrubbed roughly his skin as if he were trying to sand down his jagged edges, but is unsuccessful. He lost track of time in the shower, lost in his thoughts of all the women in his life—dead or alive. Willow. Giselle. Juliette. Isa. Vivien, his mother…

He shuddered.

He didn’t like to think about his mother often, but bitter memories barged into his brain and he couldn’t stop them.

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“You’re a fat fuck,” Vivien hissed in disgust as she watched her twelve-year-old son walk into their beaten-down trailer home’s kitchen. She was dressed in a dingy white shirt with brown cigarette burns dotting the fabric. Both of her feet were propped up on the tiny kitchen table while she took a long draw from her lit cigarette. The clothes the short plump boy wore were a size too small. The fat of his belly peeked out from under his tight green shirt and formed a muffin top over his battered jeans. The soles of his beaten sneakers squeaked as he went to the fridge to retrieve his peanut butter and jelly sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil that he had made for lunch the night before.

He opened the fridge and peeked inside the cool darkened space. The fridge’s light had burned out years ago.

Nathan couldn’t find his lunch.

“You lookin’ for somethin’, darlin’,” Vivien asked innocently from behind. Nathan turned around to find his mother waving his lunch in front of him teasingly. It was nothing more than bait and he knew better than to go after it.

“I’m gonna be late for school,” Nathan frowned. He could see it in her reddened droopy eyes. She had already partaken in some liquor and it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. Along with the strong stench of cigarette smoke, he could smell the potent aroma of vodka.

Vivien snapped her head back and let out a scratchy laugh.

“You’re gonna be late to school anyway. You’re slower than a fuckin’ slug. Maybe if you skipped out on lunch for a while, you’d lose some fuckin’ weight and get to school faster,” she sneered.

One of Vivien’s ‘friends’ appeared at the mouth of the kitchen. “What in the hell is all the commotion,” he demanded to know, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Bill, you hungry for a PBJ sandwich, honey,” she asked sweetly, straightening up in her seat. She tossed the wrapped sandwich over Nathan’s head and to Bill.

“I’m allergic to peanut butter,” Bill replied as he caught the sandwich and handed it over to Nathan. “Go to school.”

Nathan squeezed past Bill in a hurry with the sandwich in his hand and went to the front door where his heavy backpack and his instrument case that contained his saxophone. By then, Vivien had stood up from her chair and went to Bill, kissing him.

 “Go back to bed. I’ll be in there a minute, okay,” she purred against the man’s lips. He obliged her, glancing to Nathan before returning into the bedroom. Nathan was half-way out the door, but Vivien wrenched his arm and snatched him around. Nathan bit down hard onto his bottom lip to hold in the pained cry that was clawing itself up his throat.

“Don’t think you gettin’ off easy,” she hissed in a low voice, glancing over her shoulder to ensure that her lover wouldn’t come back out the room again. “Give me the fucking sandwich now.”

She snatched it from his grasp and unwrapped it, peeling back the top bread slice. She spat into the jelly-peanut butter mixture, shoving it into his shirt with a smirk. Nathan clenched his jaw, narrowing his eyes at his mother, anger building up inside of him. Her smirk deepened as she leaned forward, her face barely an inch away from her son’s.

“You want to hurt me, don’t you,” she asked mockingly as she gripped his chin tightly, digging her nails into his flesh unforgivingly. “You want to hurt me just like your daddy did. I can see it in your eyes. I can see him in your eyes. Hurt me. I dare you. Go on. Give me your best shot, you little shit.”

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Unable to bear the memory, he banged his head against the shower wall until the painful memory faded and there was nothing but pain. He turned off the showerhead with a twist of a knob and stalked out of the shower, much tenser now than he was when he went in. He was naked and dripping wet as he barged from the bathroom, not bothering to grab himself a towel. He made his way downstairs. The kitchen was empty, but the evidence it had been used was there. There were dirty fry pans with tiny remnants of food there. One pan had fluffy yellow bits. Another pan had burnt shredded pieces. The last pan was greasy and smelled like cooked meat.

He surveyed his surroundings with a predatory eye until he caught sight of her through the wide front windows that presented the veranda and the sandy beach. He went onto the front deck, drinking in the sight of his wife curled up on the cushioned wicker couch eating breakfast while gazing out into the ocean. A breakfast spread of eggs, hashbrowns, sausage, and a pitcher of orange juice were situated on a glass-top wicker coffee table in front of her. She shifted her attention away from the breathtaking scenery to him. Her delicate eyebrows shot upward in astonishment, blinking at very nude, very wet Sebastian.

She placed her plate down onto the coffee table and rose from the couch.

“Sebastian?” He could hear it. The concern. The pity. They wormed themselves into every pronounced sound that blended together to utter his name.

Prove to her you don’t need her pity, you little shit.

He went to her with rushed determined steps and pushed her roughly onto the couch. She plopped down with a tiny squeal. He doesn’t waste time dropping to his knees, grabbing hold of her thighs and yanking her ass closer to the edge of the couch. His hands frantically pushed back the hemline of her nightie to reveal her pussy.

No panties.

No obstacles.

“Sebastian, what are you d-ahhhh!”

She tilted her head back and cried out after he buried his face into her pussy and ran his tongue up and down her wet slit, tasting her essence. He groaned appreciatively and snuggled his face deeper in between her legs, covering her snatch with his hungry mouth. He roughly slid her legs over his wet broad muscular shoulders. More access. More for him. More, more, more.

Her fingers glided through his tousled hair, her nails raking across his scalp before she seized a fistful of hair and tugged at it sharply as his teeth scraped against her clit. He grunted in approval—in gratitude—at the pain. A tiny act of punishment she wasn’t aware she has inflicted on him. Now, he was desperate to feel it again like a junkie needing to get high and Sebastian couldn’t deny that she had always been his drug.

The closeness of her, the taste of her, and the pain filled a void inside of him.

He worshipped her clit with suckling lips, a flickering tongue, and teeth. Using his teeth gave him exactly what he wanted again. Another sharp tug of his hair. Another tiny punishment just for him, but there is pleasure there too for him at knowing she loved it when he brushed his teeth against her swollen nub or caught it in between his teeth gently, greeting her clit’s exposed head with the tip of his eager tongue. Her hips jerked when he did that. She ground her pussy into his face when he did that. She groaned and gasped his name much louder when he did that.

This scenario was so unlikely and yet it was unfolding rapidly before them. A husband devouring his wife’s pussy on the veranda of a beach house. The salty air wrapping around them. The roar of the ocean an imposing entity. The morning sun staining them with pure light.

He didn’t want this moment to end, so when she was close to surrendering to an orgasm, he stopped cold and panting warm breath against her clit. Eager green eyes gazing up at her, observing her as she struggled with being denied the right to cum. She whimpered, squirmed, and pouted. After a few moments, his tongue stroked her inner lips and clit torturously slow before eating her pussy like he should, but he was a greedy man and he denied her two more times. Always pulling back before she could fall over the edge. She quivered before him, a victim to his cruelty.

“Please,” she pleaded, finally speaking.

“Please, what?”  

He needed to hear her need for him.

Not her pity for him.

“Please, let me…let me…” She was a broken record, but her words died in her throat as he decided to give into her—giving her exactly what she needed. When she came, her scream was glorious and the pain from her nails digging deep into his skull was exquisite. Her grip is merciless as she rode out of the wave of the orgasm. As her climax subsided, her hand went slack against the back of his head.

“Thank you,” he breathed against her inner right thigh, snuggling and kissing there.

He was fucked up.

In that nightmare, Juliette was right.

He was a monster, but he was his wife’s monster.

And no one would take that away from him.