Amending the End Game, Chapter One
Title: Amending the End Game
Author: domfangirl
Starring: Lincoln and Gretchen
Category: Multi-chapter, but hopefully only 2 or 3 at the most (I can’t have another WIP, I swear to TPTB!)
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Gretchen comes to collect what she’s due.
Author’s Notes: This follows the events of Eulogy and is basically post-series (or at least post-season 4) IMHO. I make conjecture about what will happen in the final six episodes, but I haven’t read any spoilers as yet, and don’t know any details, and this picks up after it’s all over. Many thanks to clair_de_lune for the beta. I’ve made a few additions and changes to flesh out the story more and accepted that this is not going to be just one chapter. *g* [This was written before anyone knew that Christina was such an evil character.]
The beach is silent, serene even, except for the waves moving languidly back and forth over the same outcropping of rocks and expanse of sand. He stands alone, his clothing not what makes him identifiable. In fact, she’d seen him in a suit exactly once, but it had been a dark suit, not a cream, linen three piece, that even from this distance she can tell has to be Armani.
Of course, he’s not fully suited up now, either. The white shirttails hang out of the waistband of the trousers. The vest remains fastened, over the shirt whose buttons have been neglected. His feet are bare, and there is no sign of the jacket anywhere. No telling where he lost that; knowing him, he probably tossed it into the ocean. The way he wears his clothes has often made her aware that there is no woman in his life. Or at least, no woman with taste. Although this ensemble is getting there. He looks good; he looks like he could play the part. His mother must have gotten him a whole new wardrobe.
Gretchen Morgan walks towards him very aware this might be the last thing she ever does. Lying under the hot lights in a Miami hospital operating room, the victim of Lincoln's mercy, she had come to the conclusion that if she was going to die in this line of work, it needed to be at the hands of someone who deserved the opportunity to kill her.
Funny that she’s chosen him to be that person. There is nothing particularly remarkable about him. He’s a good looking man, yes, but he isn’t exceptionally clever like his brother, or even admirably ruthless like the General. He isn’t deceptive enough to fool everyone into believing whatever he wants them to believe like James Whistler was, nor is he so abnormally fond of himself that he thinks his greed can promote his ridiculous agenda like Bagwell or Self.
No, Lincoln Burrows is none of the things that would make him a good partner in crime. But she remembers two moments under the hot Panamanian sun when she’d discovered the thing about him that made him singular, made him stand out from a long line of men who had passed through her life like a caravan of meal tickets. One was when he could have killed her so easily, not just because he had her defenseless, but because of the rage she could feel radiating out of the fist tangled in her hair; he hadn’t because he really thought her henchman would hurt his son. He let her go on breathing on the slim, vague hope that it would keep his son alive. The other moment had been the day she let him have five minutes with his son, a gesture of good faith to ensure that he would keep up his end of the deal. At the time, watching him make promises to LJ, promises he had no idea or guarantee that he could follow through on, hadn’t warmed her heart. Long before that day, she’d been desensitized to displays of familial loyalty or the desperate clench of their bodies as they embraced for perhaps the last time.
But he was a parent, really and truly. And he'd had to say anything, do anything to try to preserve that tie. He had the quality that she did not when it came to her own child. She knew she should feel it, but as close as she’d ever come to it was by giving Emily to Rita. That was her first and only parental gesture.
Lincoln is simple. Lincoln lives for only one thing, his family. He has no grand plan, no hopes to free the world from tyranny or the unjust acts of so many people.
What a horrible thing it must have been to come here and discover his mother was alive, and had been alive all these years. What a horrible realization it must have been to learn that he had hadn’t inherited this trait from either of his parents. Oh, certainly his father and mother both would have tried to sell him on the ‘I-had-to-protect-you-the-only-way-I-knew-how’ angle, but Gretchen knew the truth. Selfishness is what made you walk away from your children-the inability to give what a parent has to give to really be a parent.
Well, that, and a love of money. Wasn't that the root of all evil? She's pretty sure she heard that someplace.
But the reason she knew for sure, was because she was just like them.
His eyes lift as she closes the distance between them. She hasn’t seen him in nearly three months, and their last encounter had been over the length of his arm as he held his gun to her head. He doesn’t have a gun now, she’s sure, but she knows his hands could choke the life out of her. She’ll let him do whatever he wants, as long as he lays those hands on her. She likes to think she wouldn't even struggle as the death rattled in her lungs; she likes to think she'd give him that because he wouldn't torture her. He'd do it quick and easy. He'd be merciful, even in execution.
He seems unsurprised by her presence, but as she correctly assumes, what more could surprise him now? In the aftermath of his mother’s hostile takeover of The Company as her final act of atonement for what she'd done to her children, how can anything that happens ever shock him or inspire him or defeat him again?
He’s still here, on this tiny little island, away from his brother, his son, and little Sofia, the people who love him. The people who want him back whole and unbroken; the people he has not returned to for some reason.
Something Gretchen thinks she understands.
He doesn’t say anything as she comes to a stop before him. His blue eyes examine her face for a moment before moving down over her body, which is clothed in a black button up blouse and matching slacks. She left her shoes in the car because walking on sand in high heels would be beyond stupid, but she doesn’t own any suitable ‘vacation’ clothes. She ought to have found some sort of soft, flowing pale swath of fabric, something inviting and attractive to wear. Something that would compliment him.
But she knows a pretty package won’t make him anymore likely to take her up on her offer than something already pressed neatly inside her suitcase. The only thing she’s ever truly wanted besides power and money and the upper hand stands before her squinting into the sun, and as usual she has no idea what his expression means.
“You here to settle up?” he asks, the gruffness of his voice surprising her. It sounds as though he hasn’t spoken aloud to anyone in a long time.
She nods, not trusting her own voice to sound strong and confident.
“How is it that you’re not dead, or in prison?”
She can’t help but smile at this question. She can hear the admiration in his tone, and it’s the only clue she has that maybe he’ll wait to kill her, at least long enough to get some pleasure out of her first. “I could tell you,” she quips with just enough menace to make it unfunny, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
“And you’re not here to do that anyway?” he questions, one eyebrow lifting sardonically.
She looks away from his face, the feeling in her chest so foreign she wants to turn and run back up the length of the coast almost as much as she wants him. “No,” she answers truthfully. “Not here for that.” The cowardly impulse sickens her a bit, and she flashes back through quick memories of people she's killed who mattered not at all. How can this moment, this possibility, be the thing that she cannot do?
Because once she was ordered to decapitate Sara Tancredi and she hadn't done it. She'd lost all control and then spent days scrambling to cover her ass. It had nothing to do with Lincoln; and everything to do with him. He was unremarkable, except that she cared what he thought. It wasn't anything he'd done, really, it was just her own sick awakening of need and want. Of course, she still had an angle on this, because you should never just ask for one thing when you could demand two.
“Here for the other, then?” he says, the slight inflection making it a question, but the assurance in his assumption drips from each word.
She forces her eyes back to his face. “I want what I want, Lincoln. What I’ve always wanted.”
“Because if I fuck you, I won’t kill you? Is that what you think?” The darkness in his face tells her he hasn’t made up his mind yet himself, so how can she know the outcome?
“I don’t think there’s any guarantee in any action. I’d just prefer one before the other, is all.” She’s practiced this speech in her head for months. Every move she’s made to get here has been for the silliest school girl reasoning she can conjure, unless it works, and then she'll be the most brilliant of them all. She blames years of risk taking and various intervals of untold physical pain and mental anguish for her need for instant gratification. Though, if she finally gets what she wants here, it will just be gratification. Nothing instant about it, and nothing brief either. She’ll stay as long as he’ll have her, as long as he’ll take her, if he’ll take her at all. And in turn, she'll take it all too.
A mirthless sound escapes his lips, something one who has never seen war might call a laugh.
Gretchen hopes it’s the intonation of surrender, though she acknowledges that it could be her death knell. “I prefer the one before the other, too,” he says, though she doesn't know if his preference is the same as hers.
*
The little bungalow he's been living in-where his mother had lived before her real death-is quaint. Lincoln fits there no more than she does, Gretchen muses, as he opens the door and walks in ahead of her. The big house where she parked her car must be for appearance’s sake, but that's where, in her humble opinion, he ought to be living. She follows closely behind him, afraid that he might change his mind and shut the door on her, separating them again.
She doesn't understand why her desire for him makes her feel so weak and why she doggedly pursues it. Any sign of weakness should be obliterated, not amplified, and she ought to be thousands of miles away from this place. It seems, in the end, even self-preservation fades when darkness swallows you whole. But then there was that adage about weak things becoming strong, and Gretchen can't help but think this may be true of her. The one thing she can't let go could lead her to the biggest payoff of them all.
The house is dim, the curtains drawn across the various windows keeping the bright sunlight from touching too much inside the front room. She doesn't have much time to look around and familiarize herself with the size and space and furniture, because as she attempts to close the door behind her, he turns to her and shoves her up against it, effectively latching the lock and immobilizing her. His hands move from her shoulders down, skimming over her breasts, which are suddenly aching, the flood of sexual electricity erupting throughout her body with only this initial move on his part. Unless it's fear she should be feeling instead, it's the most glorious moment of her life thus far.
She has always wanted him; from the first moment she laid eyes on him, she felt the pull, the inner tug that made her want to spread her legs indecently in silent offering. Over time, she realized that Lincoln was very like her-though his ability to love whole-heartedly would always be the differentiation between them-but the other likenesses is what attracts her. An instinctual acknowledgment on a cellular level that grew deeper as time went by, but never made her think she loved him, or could by any definition of the word even feel overly tenderly towards him. However, the animal need to claim, and to dominate him in some way nips at her heels, and the strength of that desire is why she's here now, in the one place she should have avoided at all costs.
See as much as she wants him to claim her, to send her mindlessly into the realm of tactile sensation and to erase everything except the rush and flow of blood under her skin, she wants to do that to him. She wants him to beg her and whimper, and plead, and lose all sense of time and space.
She wants to wipe his mind clear of everything-especially that automatic hatred and loathing that he has felt for her since he first discovered why she'd sought him out.
Now, his hands move over her waist, fingers from one hand unsnapping the button of her pants while his other fingers push her zipper down. Then they separate, moving inside the waistband, each calloused palm smoothing over a corresponding hip to drag the material down as he kneels before her. Using one of his knees to hold her clothing to the floor, his hands run roughly, but caressingly down the front sides of her thighs and then his arms slip between and behind her legs, yanking her right off her feet. His palms brace his stance against the closed front door and her feet dangle over the edges of his elbows as he lowers his head, his tongue arrowing with devastating accuracy between her already trembling thighs. Gretchen's arms fly up without a conscious thought to keep her steady, but he's in total control and her minor effort to grasp the door frame edge is unnecessary.
Her head thumps loudly against the oak behind her and she groans in unexpected delight as he violently and thoroughly sets his mouth over her, sucking and biting and thrusting his tongue at such a rate that she is drenching wet and in the throes of an all-consuming orgasm before she even comprehends totally that he didn't plan to just kill her.
The sudden rush of his assault doesn't sap her of strength in the way that it should-perhaps that had been his intent, though she will never know because she would never ask-and when he abruptly drops his arms so that her feet crash back to the floor, Gretchen doesn't lose her stride. He might have taken her by surprise, but she will give back equally. Lifting one bare foot up-wishing for a split second that she had her stilettos on to make her point more clearly-she kicks him squarely in the chest, and from his crouched position he falls back too easily, so that as she looks down at him, she can see the evidence in his pants that what he just did to her affected him as well.
Straddling him, she opens his trousers as quickly as he did hers, and before his erection thrusts eagerly into her palms, she admires the crisp linen fabric, even more certain of its origin at such close proximity. She cradles him carefully, though she lets her gaze bore into his threateningly, as though her next act might show that the war between them is far from over. Leaning over him, she follows his lead, not undressing him any more than is necessary for what she's going to do. He's large, his girth and length unsurprising to her based on her own imaginings of this moment, but she still takes a moment to inspect him. She wonders if maybe it's penis envy-what various men have accused her of over the years-that causes her to hesitate and not fall on him in exactly the same way he did her; but it's actually the sudden intimacy of the act she's about to perform that gives her pause.
They've never kissed each other's lips, and maybe they never will, but as she takes his cock into her mouth and his tortured groan fills the room, she finds herself hoping that this will empty his mind of the vile things he thinks of her.
Suckling with just enough pressure to give immense pleasure-the associated pain the kind that is only satisfied by a continuation, rather than a cessation of movement-she realizes she is no better than so many other women who give sex to get love. She doesn't delude herself that she wants Lincoln's love, only that she doesn't want his hate. She wants the victory that comes when his fingers tangle in her hair, jerking her head against his body as his hips lift in need of fulfillment, and tears even burn her eyes when he curses her, because it's her name he says as his semen fills her mouth. She swallows greedily, as if it's an elixir for the gross depravity of her life.
His harsh breathing is the only sound that follows, since she's holding her own in an effort to be aware of every detail. It's too bad she couldn't have recorded that for posterity’s sake; she knows he'd probably rather be dead than let Michael, or the precious Doctor, or especially the little chiquita, ever know that he came in her mouth. Or that it only took about 60 seconds for it to happen.
Chapter Two
Author: domfangirl
Starring: Lincoln and Gretchen
Category: Multi-chapter, but hopefully only 2 or 3 at the most (I can’t have another WIP, I swear to TPTB!)
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Gretchen comes to collect what she’s due.
Author’s Notes: This follows the events of Eulogy and is basically post-series (or at least post-season 4) IMHO. I make conjecture about what will happen in the final six episodes, but I haven’t read any spoilers as yet, and don’t know any details, and this picks up after it’s all over. Many thanks to clair_de_lune for the beta. I’ve made a few additions and changes to flesh out the story more and accepted that this is not going to be just one chapter. *g* [This was written before anyone knew that Christina was such an evil character.]
The beach is silent, serene even, except for the waves moving languidly back and forth over the same outcropping of rocks and expanse of sand. He stands alone, his clothing not what makes him identifiable. In fact, she’d seen him in a suit exactly once, but it had been a dark suit, not a cream, linen three piece, that even from this distance she can tell has to be Armani.
Of course, he’s not fully suited up now, either. The white shirttails hang out of the waistband of the trousers. The vest remains fastened, over the shirt whose buttons have been neglected. His feet are bare, and there is no sign of the jacket anywhere. No telling where he lost that; knowing him, he probably tossed it into the ocean. The way he wears his clothes has often made her aware that there is no woman in his life. Or at least, no woman with taste. Although this ensemble is getting there. He looks good; he looks like he could play the part. His mother must have gotten him a whole new wardrobe.
Gretchen Morgan walks towards him very aware this might be the last thing she ever does. Lying under the hot lights in a Miami hospital operating room, the victim of Lincoln's mercy, she had come to the conclusion that if she was going to die in this line of work, it needed to be at the hands of someone who deserved the opportunity to kill her.
Funny that she’s chosen him to be that person. There is nothing particularly remarkable about him. He’s a good looking man, yes, but he isn’t exceptionally clever like his brother, or even admirably ruthless like the General. He isn’t deceptive enough to fool everyone into believing whatever he wants them to believe like James Whistler was, nor is he so abnormally fond of himself that he thinks his greed can promote his ridiculous agenda like Bagwell or Self.
No, Lincoln Burrows is none of the things that would make him a good partner in crime. But she remembers two moments under the hot Panamanian sun when she’d discovered the thing about him that made him singular, made him stand out from a long line of men who had passed through her life like a caravan of meal tickets. One was when he could have killed her so easily, not just because he had her defenseless, but because of the rage she could feel radiating out of the fist tangled in her hair; he hadn’t because he really thought her henchman would hurt his son. He let her go on breathing on the slim, vague hope that it would keep his son alive. The other moment had been the day she let him have five minutes with his son, a gesture of good faith to ensure that he would keep up his end of the deal. At the time, watching him make promises to LJ, promises he had no idea or guarantee that he could follow through on, hadn’t warmed her heart. Long before that day, she’d been desensitized to displays of familial loyalty or the desperate clench of their bodies as they embraced for perhaps the last time.
But he was a parent, really and truly. And he'd had to say anything, do anything to try to preserve that tie. He had the quality that she did not when it came to her own child. She knew she should feel it, but as close as she’d ever come to it was by giving Emily to Rita. That was her first and only parental gesture.
Lincoln is simple. Lincoln lives for only one thing, his family. He has no grand plan, no hopes to free the world from tyranny or the unjust acts of so many people.
What a horrible thing it must have been to come here and discover his mother was alive, and had been alive all these years. What a horrible realization it must have been to learn that he had hadn’t inherited this trait from either of his parents. Oh, certainly his father and mother both would have tried to sell him on the ‘I-had-to-protect-you-the-only-way-I-knew-how’ angle, but Gretchen knew the truth. Selfishness is what made you walk away from your children-the inability to give what a parent has to give to really be a parent.
Well, that, and a love of money. Wasn't that the root of all evil? She's pretty sure she heard that someplace.
But the reason she knew for sure, was because she was just like them.
His eyes lift as she closes the distance between them. She hasn’t seen him in nearly three months, and their last encounter had been over the length of his arm as he held his gun to her head. He doesn’t have a gun now, she’s sure, but she knows his hands could choke the life out of her. She’ll let him do whatever he wants, as long as he lays those hands on her. She likes to think she wouldn't even struggle as the death rattled in her lungs; she likes to think she'd give him that because he wouldn't torture her. He'd do it quick and easy. He'd be merciful, even in execution.
He seems unsurprised by her presence, but as she correctly assumes, what more could surprise him now? In the aftermath of his mother’s hostile takeover of The Company as her final act of atonement for what she'd done to her children, how can anything that happens ever shock him or inspire him or defeat him again?
He’s still here, on this tiny little island, away from his brother, his son, and little Sofia, the people who love him. The people who want him back whole and unbroken; the people he has not returned to for some reason.
Something Gretchen thinks she understands.
He doesn’t say anything as she comes to a stop before him. His blue eyes examine her face for a moment before moving down over her body, which is clothed in a black button up blouse and matching slacks. She left her shoes in the car because walking on sand in high heels would be beyond stupid, but she doesn’t own any suitable ‘vacation’ clothes. She ought to have found some sort of soft, flowing pale swath of fabric, something inviting and attractive to wear. Something that would compliment him.
But she knows a pretty package won’t make him anymore likely to take her up on her offer than something already pressed neatly inside her suitcase. The only thing she’s ever truly wanted besides power and money and the upper hand stands before her squinting into the sun, and as usual she has no idea what his expression means.
“You here to settle up?” he asks, the gruffness of his voice surprising her. It sounds as though he hasn’t spoken aloud to anyone in a long time.
She nods, not trusting her own voice to sound strong and confident.
“How is it that you’re not dead, or in prison?”
She can’t help but smile at this question. She can hear the admiration in his tone, and it’s the only clue she has that maybe he’ll wait to kill her, at least long enough to get some pleasure out of her first. “I could tell you,” she quips with just enough menace to make it unfunny, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
“And you’re not here to do that anyway?” he questions, one eyebrow lifting sardonically.
She looks away from his face, the feeling in her chest so foreign she wants to turn and run back up the length of the coast almost as much as she wants him. “No,” she answers truthfully. “Not here for that.” The cowardly impulse sickens her a bit, and she flashes back through quick memories of people she's killed who mattered not at all. How can this moment, this possibility, be the thing that she cannot do?
Because once she was ordered to decapitate Sara Tancredi and she hadn't done it. She'd lost all control and then spent days scrambling to cover her ass. It had nothing to do with Lincoln; and everything to do with him. He was unremarkable, except that she cared what he thought. It wasn't anything he'd done, really, it was just her own sick awakening of need and want. Of course, she still had an angle on this, because you should never just ask for one thing when you could demand two.
“Here for the other, then?” he says, the slight inflection making it a question, but the assurance in his assumption drips from each word.
She forces her eyes back to his face. “I want what I want, Lincoln. What I’ve always wanted.”
“Because if I fuck you, I won’t kill you? Is that what you think?” The darkness in his face tells her he hasn’t made up his mind yet himself, so how can she know the outcome?
“I don’t think there’s any guarantee in any action. I’d just prefer one before the other, is all.” She’s practiced this speech in her head for months. Every move she’s made to get here has been for the silliest school girl reasoning she can conjure, unless it works, and then she'll be the most brilliant of them all. She blames years of risk taking and various intervals of untold physical pain and mental anguish for her need for instant gratification. Though, if she finally gets what she wants here, it will just be gratification. Nothing instant about it, and nothing brief either. She’ll stay as long as he’ll have her, as long as he’ll take her, if he’ll take her at all. And in turn, she'll take it all too.
A mirthless sound escapes his lips, something one who has never seen war might call a laugh.
Gretchen hopes it’s the intonation of surrender, though she acknowledges that it could be her death knell. “I prefer the one before the other, too,” he says, though she doesn't know if his preference is the same as hers.
*
The little bungalow he's been living in-where his mother had lived before her real death-is quaint. Lincoln fits there no more than she does, Gretchen muses, as he opens the door and walks in ahead of her. The big house where she parked her car must be for appearance’s sake, but that's where, in her humble opinion, he ought to be living. She follows closely behind him, afraid that he might change his mind and shut the door on her, separating them again.
She doesn't understand why her desire for him makes her feel so weak and why she doggedly pursues it. Any sign of weakness should be obliterated, not amplified, and she ought to be thousands of miles away from this place. It seems, in the end, even self-preservation fades when darkness swallows you whole. But then there was that adage about weak things becoming strong, and Gretchen can't help but think this may be true of her. The one thing she can't let go could lead her to the biggest payoff of them all.
The house is dim, the curtains drawn across the various windows keeping the bright sunlight from touching too much inside the front room. She doesn't have much time to look around and familiarize herself with the size and space and furniture, because as she attempts to close the door behind her, he turns to her and shoves her up against it, effectively latching the lock and immobilizing her. His hands move from her shoulders down, skimming over her breasts, which are suddenly aching, the flood of sexual electricity erupting throughout her body with only this initial move on his part. Unless it's fear she should be feeling instead, it's the most glorious moment of her life thus far.
She has always wanted him; from the first moment she laid eyes on him, she felt the pull, the inner tug that made her want to spread her legs indecently in silent offering. Over time, she realized that Lincoln was very like her-though his ability to love whole-heartedly would always be the differentiation between them-but the other likenesses is what attracts her. An instinctual acknowledgment on a cellular level that grew deeper as time went by, but never made her think she loved him, or could by any definition of the word even feel overly tenderly towards him. However, the animal need to claim, and to dominate him in some way nips at her heels, and the strength of that desire is why she's here now, in the one place she should have avoided at all costs.
See as much as she wants him to claim her, to send her mindlessly into the realm of tactile sensation and to erase everything except the rush and flow of blood under her skin, she wants to do that to him. She wants him to beg her and whimper, and plead, and lose all sense of time and space.
She wants to wipe his mind clear of everything-especially that automatic hatred and loathing that he has felt for her since he first discovered why she'd sought him out.
Now, his hands move over her waist, fingers from one hand unsnapping the button of her pants while his other fingers push her zipper down. Then they separate, moving inside the waistband, each calloused palm smoothing over a corresponding hip to drag the material down as he kneels before her. Using one of his knees to hold her clothing to the floor, his hands run roughly, but caressingly down the front sides of her thighs and then his arms slip between and behind her legs, yanking her right off her feet. His palms brace his stance against the closed front door and her feet dangle over the edges of his elbows as he lowers his head, his tongue arrowing with devastating accuracy between her already trembling thighs. Gretchen's arms fly up without a conscious thought to keep her steady, but he's in total control and her minor effort to grasp the door frame edge is unnecessary.
Her head thumps loudly against the oak behind her and she groans in unexpected delight as he violently and thoroughly sets his mouth over her, sucking and biting and thrusting his tongue at such a rate that she is drenching wet and in the throes of an all-consuming orgasm before she even comprehends totally that he didn't plan to just kill her.
The sudden rush of his assault doesn't sap her of strength in the way that it should-perhaps that had been his intent, though she will never know because she would never ask-and when he abruptly drops his arms so that her feet crash back to the floor, Gretchen doesn't lose her stride. He might have taken her by surprise, but she will give back equally. Lifting one bare foot up-wishing for a split second that she had her stilettos on to make her point more clearly-she kicks him squarely in the chest, and from his crouched position he falls back too easily, so that as she looks down at him, she can see the evidence in his pants that what he just did to her affected him as well.
Straddling him, she opens his trousers as quickly as he did hers, and before his erection thrusts eagerly into her palms, she admires the crisp linen fabric, even more certain of its origin at such close proximity. She cradles him carefully, though she lets her gaze bore into his threateningly, as though her next act might show that the war between them is far from over. Leaning over him, she follows his lead, not undressing him any more than is necessary for what she's going to do. He's large, his girth and length unsurprising to her based on her own imaginings of this moment, but she still takes a moment to inspect him. She wonders if maybe it's penis envy-what various men have accused her of over the years-that causes her to hesitate and not fall on him in exactly the same way he did her; but it's actually the sudden intimacy of the act she's about to perform that gives her pause.
They've never kissed each other's lips, and maybe they never will, but as she takes his cock into her mouth and his tortured groan fills the room, she finds herself hoping that this will empty his mind of the vile things he thinks of her.
Suckling with just enough pressure to give immense pleasure-the associated pain the kind that is only satisfied by a continuation, rather than a cessation of movement-she realizes she is no better than so many other women who give sex to get love. She doesn't delude herself that she wants Lincoln's love, only that she doesn't want his hate. She wants the victory that comes when his fingers tangle in her hair, jerking her head against his body as his hips lift in need of fulfillment, and tears even burn her eyes when he curses her, because it's her name he says as his semen fills her mouth. She swallows greedily, as if it's an elixir for the gross depravity of her life.
His harsh breathing is the only sound that follows, since she's holding her own in an effort to be aware of every detail. It's too bad she couldn't have recorded that for posterity’s sake; she knows he'd probably rather be dead than let Michael, or the precious Doctor, or especially the little chiquita, ever know that he came in her mouth. Or that it only took about 60 seconds for it to happen.
Chapter Two