Stryker stared into the darkness down his prone body toward his feet but he couldn’t see them. They were six feet past his face in the vast expanse of nothing he’d been living in for weeks. He wiggled his toes to see if the gesture gave him perspective, but everything was floating. Then Ophelia’s thumbs dug into the left arch – grinding, pressing, rolling upward over his toes, bending each one back in turn - and everything melted into its rightful place.

Fifty-two bones, nineteen muscles and two hundred thousand nerves in each foot and Ophelia was touching every one of them all at the same time. His body went a little slacker with every pass. Even that bonfire of itching under the bandages faded slightly and he wondered how a woman who hated him as much as she did could do that.

“Lay your head back.” Now she was thumbs and a voice that sounded a little husky but not without a scent of melody, even just a distant one.

The back of Stryker’s skull sank into the pillow. Her hands moved around his ankles. Strong. Gliding swift but careful. He told her he was tired even though he wasn’t. He just wanted to hear her talk. Anything to make a swirl in the unrelenting darkness.

She didn’t speak, her hands working his legs now. She felt in a rush even though she paused and came back to his skin with a fresh coat of oil.

“You smell like flowers tonight,” he said.

“No. I don’t. Those are flowers.”

“Actual flowers?”

“Actual flowers.”

“Where’d they come from?”

“I brought ‘em.”

“Oh. Nice. Thanks.”

“Sure.”

She was touching his thighs now, oil-slick glide up and down. Her fingers skirting the edge of the towel across his hips. This was when he always started getting hard.

“You didn’t bring ‘em for me, though, did you?”

“Nope.”

“Still … s’nice.”

Her fingertips dug harder into his thighs like she was punctuating the no. Blood surged into his flesh under her hands. As always, into his cock. Night after night, he wondered, did she ever glance at the swelling she caused or was she just as aloof in every dimension.

“Bandages come off tomorrow,” he said, knowing she already knew.

“Yup.”

Her hands feathered crosswise over thighs, brushing dangerously at the edge of the towel over his distended cock. Jesus fuck.

“Does that mean I won’t see you again?”

“You can’t see me now.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. I do.” There was a half snicker along with the snipe.

“I’m gonna miss you.”

She laughed long and hard. Her hands lay still on his thigh until she recovered, then started moving into his leg meat again. Not even her laughter diminished the aching down the length of his cock. He pulled the towel off, dropping it into the vast expanse of nothing beside the table he was on.

“Da fuck,” Ophelia spat.

“Nobody knows better than you how I really need to be touched.”

“And nobody knows better than me you’re perfectly capable of taking care of that shit yourself.”

“That’s not even close to being the same thing.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

“Then maybe you’re easily fooled.”

“If you only knew what I seen.”

“Lately I’ve been seeing more than I got room for.”

“Imagine you have at that.”

She touched his balls, lightly. He sighed and her fingers began to move, fondling, then sliding up his shaft and curling him into her grip.

“Jesus, Ophelia.”

Her hand was slick from whatever she used to massage him every night, everywhere but his cock. She slid up his shaft and rounded the head a few times before sliding back to the base. He reached into the darkness until he found her waist.

“Nobody said nothing about you touching me back.”

But she didn’t move away and he slid his hand along the curve of her waist, then her hip and back around to her ass, her cheek far overflowing his grip. She was thick and solid as her voice. It was the body that belonged to the hands that led him to and from the bathroom, out to the patio in the afternoons to sit and feel the light of a sun he couldn’t see. The body behind the hands that massaged blood through his muscles night after night before lying in bed where he only pretended to sleep.

Everywhere he touched was naked skin. “Do you always do it like this?”

“Not your business.”

“I thought … so,” he moaned, and she gripped his column tight as if she had a cock of her own.

She was stroking him now and he was trying to ask if she thought there would ever be forgiveness for someone like him, after all he’d done, but her hand was pumping him, just pumping, and his fingers were slipping into the damp heat of that cleft between the cheeks of her ass spidering down toward the slit between her thighs.

She climbed onto the table, tucking her knees into his sides. Her hand was on his cock again, holding him up while the syrup-laced lips of her pussy slid over the blunt tip of his cock and hunkered down his shank.

“I know everything you did,” she said, grinding her pussy along his shaft. “I know you done a lot bad, baaaaad things, and got blinded blowing up all your old friends and trying to purge your black soul coming clean with the law.”

Stryker moaned. Swollen nipples scraped his chest. She rocked him like an ocean of dark honey in the dead of night. Fat breasts, round hips milking and a moan she probably didn’t want to let slip.

“This,” she breathed against his mouth. “’Cause I’m your blessing and your curse, and in the morning when they take the bandages off and you can see, I’ll be gone … you’ll never know who I was, or if I was ever here.”