“Good night, my love,” I whispered, tapping the mermaid on the head just like she did every time she walked by. After swapping out the padlock I’d brought with the one from her gym bag, I replaced the key on her key ring with the one I’d just made. Then I let myself out the side door, snagged a t-shirt off her line, and headed back to my car.
It wasn’t a long drive to my home, to the house my brother John and I lived in. And with her shirt in my lap the entire way, as I breathed in the scent of her sun-soaked skin, it was all I could do to not grip myself and give in to my urges right there.
There was something else I needed to do. Something I’d been dying to do for so long. I threw my car in park and barely took the time to close the door before I was racing inside and down the stairs to my basement.
She was waiting for me, right where I left her. Skin slick with sweat, body glistening as she sprawled across the mattress in the middle of the room. Her blue eyes grew wide as she watched me step closer, and she shook her head frantically as I knelt by her side.
“I brought you a present,” I told her, showing her the borrowed t-shirt that still smelled of sunshine. “I’m going to make you so pretty, and then I’m going to make you mine.”
Her chains clinked as she struggled against them, struggled to get closer to me, to wrap her arms around me and hold me tight. Her screams were muffled around the gag in her mouth, but I could hear every word she muttered around it as I readied her for our night.
“This is perfect, my love,” she’d tell me.
“I can’t wait to finally be with you,” she’d say if she could.
And as I wrapped my hand around her throat and squeezed, as her blue eyes bulged and her body writhed before it stilled, she’d whisper, “Let’s do it again.”