by Megan Hart
A woman’s crying in the front row, both her hands up, her head bowed, her mouth working. Testify, bitch, like that would ever matter. Nothing else matters. Nothing.
Matters.
And I turn on my heel in these ridiculous shoes, you think I don’t know how I look? It’s a gimmick, a game, it’s a reason for any of you to listen to me, because none of you would’ve given me the time of day if I didn’t have some moronic reason for you to pay attention.
“Pay. Attention.”
Pay attention.
I can’t stop coughing, and I bend over, I open my mouth, stuff is coming out of me with every racking heave. It’s dark, it’s red, there’s blood, it tastes bitter.
It smells wonderful.
It was those flowers.
Oh, fathergod, you brought me to this place and you made me do things, you showed me choices, you made me into what I am today, why can’t I stop coughing?
Why can’t I get this crap out of my throat, it’s in my nose, my fucking lungs, it’s choking me.
Why can’t I
17
Ryan had stopped pushing the channel button on the remote. The TV showed a man wearing white from top to toe. Abbie knew him. Renton Foster, standing on a stage in what looked like a tent, in front of what was easily a couple hundred people. She couldn’t hear what he was saying. She didn’t care.
Her ex-husband might be breathing, his heart beating, but he was not alive. There was nothing in his eyes…at least until she sagged and the chair leg knocked against the recliner, and he finally looked at her.
Then, his gaze filled with rage.
Before Abbie could do more than hike up her grip on the chair leg, Ryan was out of the recliner. His hands went to her throat, thumbs digging deep into the sensitive flesh. The only reason he wasn’t able to choke her to death within seconds was because she’d tripped backward as he lunged, taking him down with her, and she rolled so that he lost his grip. Her leg twisted under her. Pain ripped through her, but she could deal with pain.
Her ex-husband was on top of her, snapping his jaws an inch from her face. Abbie gagged on the stink of his breath and turned her face to avoid the silver strand of drool escaping his mouth. His teeth grazed her jaw. His knee nudged between her legs, then up over her belly to pin her. Ryan put his full weight on her. She couldn’t breathe.
She was going to gray out completely, but before that happened, she was going to do her best to get him the fuck off her. Abbie hit Ryan in the back of the head with the chair leg. The wood broke over his skull, barely shifting him even as blood spattered onto her face. He snapped his teeth again, this time catching a good chunk of her flesh in his bite.
She couldn’t scream. She didn’t have the air. But she could bite him back.
Abbie sank her teeth into his throat. She’d tasted blood before, but only ever and always her own. She didn’t know if someone else’s blood was supposed to be so rich and bitter at the same time, but she knew it was wrong for it to fill her nose with the mingled smell/taste of those flowers. She shoved as she bit, and Ryan rolled with her on top of him.
Abbie spat and spat again, the edges of her vision going red. She knew the signs. Unconsciousness was inevitable unless she could calm down and catch her breath. She couldn’t afford to pass out. She took the broken chair leg and raised it over her head.
She brought it down.
It caught him in the throat, pinned him to the floor as he jerked and twisted, and she rode him in a sick parody of lovemaking. He bucked, hands scrabbling first at the stake in his throat, then at her. Abbie batted his hands away, yanked out the chair leg. Thrust it again.
Behind him, on the TV, she caught a glimpse of a close up on Renton Foster’s face, startling enough in its sudden hugeness to distract her from killing the man she’d once loved so much she’d gladly have died for him. The television speakers emitted a horrid, low groaning she’d been ignoring but now saw was not some sort of feedback. It came from Foster’s throat.
And there, in front of a couple hundred witnesses and countless watchers at home, Renton Foster’s face exploded.
Half a minute, thirty seconds, it took an endless eternal lifetime for her to scramble backward off Ryan. He lurched upright, hands swinging and grasping for her, but she knocked them away and kept moving out of reach. His mouth worked, voice a low, guttural shout. Once he’d said her name with love in his voice, but there was nothing but loathing and fury in it now.
“Abbie!”
A string of garbled curses vomited from him on a gust of that sickly sweet flower stench. Abbie coughed at it, her gorge rising. She backed away, not risking even a glance toward the kitchen or her boys. Ryan moved toward her, too fast, still too strong.
He grabbed her, fingers pinching into her upper arms. He shook her until her teeth rattled and she bit her tongue. And then he bent his mouth to hers. She thought he meant to kiss her.
The black, stinking cloud erupting from his nose and mouth covered her face in seconds, and though she tried to hold her breath, Abbie’d already sucked it into her. That taste was back. The stink. She felt small, wriggling things against her skin, and she writhed in revulsion. Whatever had been inside him, whatever was coming out of him with each thick, retching cough, was…alive.
Oh, God, it was alive, she felt the sting of them on her cheeks and forehead and inside her nose and mouth and throat, a myriad of infinitesimal pinpricks. Pain in her lungs, sharp but brief. She spat and fought. One of her fists caught Ryan in the jaw, and he staggered back.
He went to his hands and knees, head down. He didn’t move. He made no sound.
Abbie scraped at her face but whatever had been on her was gone. Absorbed into her skin, she thought with a violated shudder. She spat again and scraped her palm along her tongue but found nothing left there either. It was inside her, that stuff.
Not for the first time, though. And though she waited a minute to see if it would affect her, if she would start to flail and rage, even the taste and smell faded. She breathed in and out, felt the familiar constrictions, but nothing new.
Roaring, Ryan boiled up from the ground. His face was a ruin, eye sockets bleeding and black, mouth split at the corners. The flaps of skin in his neck exposed the pink tube of his trachea. Guttering spurts of blood splashed. His hands had hooked into claws, grabbing for her.
Abbie punched him square in the face. Her fist sank into him, like punching a watermelon gone too soft in the summer sun. It knocked him back but took her with him, her fist trapped in his his runneled flesh. She yanked her hand free with a cry of disgust.
She hit him again.
And again.
She hit him until he stopped moving and she was covered in his blood and scraps of flesh and shattered bits of bone that should’ve been hard and sharp but were soft and spongy, instead. Breathing hard, Abbie stood over the ruined mess that had been her husband and waited for him to pull a Michael Myers or a Freddy Krueger or a Jason Voorhees, to rise up at the last minute. Unkillable.
Ryan didn’t move.
Abbie scraped the gunk off her hands against the couch cushions. She blinked rapidly, focusing on her breathing, keeping herself calm. She didn’t want to faint. Or puke. Oh, God, he was all over her…
“Mama?”
She whirled and ran on stumbling feet to Benji, who knelt by his brother. Jordan was still not moving. Abbie went to her knees to cradle his head in her lap. She smoothed his hair back from his face, which had gone much cooler. His eyes behind the closed lids moved, like he was dreaming, but the lashes didn’t so much as flutter.
“Is he going to be okay?”
“I don’t know, baby. I hope so. Tell me what happened.”
Benji shot a terrified look toward his dad, who still crouched on the ground in an ever-widening puddle of blood from his shredded throat. “Daddy and Jordan went out to check on the shed after the tree came down.”
“Did you go with them?”
“No. Daddy said
I should stay in the house, it was dangerous, but Jordan didn’t listen, and he went anyway. He and Daddy went out to the shed and then when Daddy came back in, he was mad about it. And he got madder and madder. We didn’t have school because the power was out, and Daddy didn’t go to work. Daddy hit Jordan, and he fell down. Daddy was really mad.”
“Honey,” Abbie said as carefully as she could, trying her best not to let her voice tear and shred like Ryan’s throat, “that wasn’t really your Daddy, okay? I know it looked like your dad. But it wasn’t him. It was a monster.”
Benji blinked. He looked so much younger in his exhaustion. He bowed his head, his shoulders lifted and fell. He shook. “Monsters aren’t real, you and Daddy said.”
“We were wrong, honey. I’m sorry.”
In her arms, Jordan quivered, then shook. His back arched, muscles going stiff. His eyes wide without seeing, his mouth yawning, tongue working without words. He gave a single, grinding cough. Black froth appeared at the corners of his mouth and in his nostrils.
“Benji,” she said. “Look away. Look away.”
Abbie took up one of the throw pillows someone had tossed onto the floor. She pressed it to her older son’s face. She kept it there until he stopped moving.
She took the pillow away. She closed his eyes. She closed his mouth. She kissed his forehead the way she’d kissed so many boo-boos over the years. She smoothed his hair and cradled him to her one last time.
And then she let him go.
She stood and took Benji’s hand. “Don’t look, baby. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
They managed to get all the way to the front door before Jordan came after them.
FOUR
18
Ugh, so gross.
She totally should never have eaten that doughnut last week, it had gone straight to her gut and thighs. Total jiggle-fest up in here. Kelsey pinched the flab on her belly and turned to the side to check out the damage in the hotel room’s full-length mirror.
Ugh.
“Dammit.” Her lip curled and she pinched harder, making red marks against the golden sheen of her skin. At least she had a decent tan. Not that it could make up for the stretch marks on the insides of her thighs and on her hips. She’d tried every cream and lotion, but only the tummy tuck had been enough, and that hadn’t gotten rid of all of them. She could fit into a bikini but still had to wear a wrap unless she wanted the whole world to see the proof that once she’d been a fatty.
“Babe, you ready?” Tyler poked his head around the bathroom door, holding his toothbrush. “We’re set to pick up the boat in forty minutes.”
Like it would take her forty minutes to finish getting ready. Kelsey might be a lot of things, but she wasn’t high maintenance. She smiled at him though, no sense in getting bitchy right off the bat just because she had the worst PMS ever, and her boyfriend couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to her grooming rituals.
“I’m ready.” She eyed him. “Are you?”
He grinned, teeth foamy with toothpaste. “Yeah.”
“Got your sunscreen?” Kelsey had her tote all packed. Towel, magazines, camera, phone in a plastic bag, bottled water, one-hundred-calorie snack packs in case she was starving and the boat wasn’t stocked with anything but junk. She had her own sunscreen, SPF 10, because you didn’t get a super tan like hers by getting fried. You had to build it up slowly. She had a lot of time and effort put into this tan.
“I’ll use yours.”
Her teeth gritted together before she could force her jaw to relax. She hadn’t spent thousands of dollars on orthodontic work to have it ruined by too much stress on her veneers. “Baby, I don’t have enough. You should really pack yours.”
Tyler shrugged and disappeared into the bathroom, where she heard him spitting and gargling. “Whatever. Remind me to grab some at the gift shop before we get on the boat.”
Of course. Because at the gift shop it would be three times the price for the tiniest tube. Well, if he didn’t care, why should she? Tyler had enough money. He’d paid for this whole vacation, not just for her, but for his brother Jeremy too. Kelsey didn’t know for sure, but she thought maybe Tyler had also picked up the tab for his buddy Duane and his girlfriend Sheila. Because that was just like him, she thought, watching as he strode naked from the bathroom toward the bed. Generous to the point of stupid.
“Which do you think?” He held up a pair of regular, long-leg trunks. Then a tiny black bikini bathing suit. “Should I go all Euro?”
He had the body for it, no question. Long, lean. A swimmer’s build. He could totally get away with that skimpy suit, even if he’d look out of place on the beach here in North Carolina, where few of the men wore banana hammocks. On the boat it would just be the five of them.
“Wear the trunks,” Kelsey said.
She didn’t like the way Sheila ogled Tyler. And also, it was hard enough for Kelsey to feel confident in a bikini herself without having to stand beside her boyfriend who was looking as fit as a God.
“Tan lines,” she told him. “Your thighs will be totally white.”
Tyler grinned in the way she knew meant he wasn’t going to listen to her. He tossed the trunks on the bed and stepped into the tiny suit. It molded itself to his buttcheeks and his package in the front. It hid nothing.
He thrust his crotch forward. “Whattaya think?”
Kelsey sighed.
“Shit, babe. We’re gonna be late.” Tyler grabbed a button-down shirt he’d left on the floor last night and slipped into his shorts and sandals. “C’mon. Duane said we get charged from the start time whether we’re on the boat or not. Andy-lay, andy-lay.”
Like she was the one holding them up! Kelsey shook off her irritation and grabbed her tote, her coverup and her flip-flops. Too late, she realized in the elevator, she’d taken the pair that had given her a blister. It rubbed now, and she winced.
“Look at that,” Tyler murmured from behind her. He put his arms around her, hands on her belly. He jerked his chin toward their reflection in the elevator’s mirrored doors. “You are so hot.”
Oh, God, why did he have to pinch her belly like that? Why couldn’t he just put his arms around her, why did he have to jiggle her that way? Kelsey watched her expression — she might be grimacing inside, but no sign of it showed on her face. Frowning made wrinkles, and she wasn’t ready to start up on Botox yet.
They bypassed the lobby and headed down to the dock. Tyler left her behind halfway there to run, leaping and whooping, to greet his buddy. They pounded each other on the back, wrestling like middle-schoolers while Kelsey paused to adjust her flip-flop and tried to remember if she’d packed Bandaids.
“They’re idiots,” Jeremy said. “Hi, Kels.”
Jeremy, two years younger than Tyler, shared his brother’s lean build, dark hair and blue eyes, but nothing else about them was the same. He was still in school, working on his graduate degree in education, of all things. He read. Books, even. If he liked or approved of his brother’s relationship with Kelsey, he’d never said so, but unlike their father, who leered over her whenever he had the chance, he’d never creeped her out, either. If anything, Jeremy seemed to understand her better than his brother did.
“Can I get that for you?” He gestured at her bulging tote, which she’d set down so she could soothe her blister. “We need to get on the boat, apparently.”
Tyler was waving wildly. Duane had climbed on the boat, and Sheila was presumably already onboard. Kelsey smiled at him. “Oh. Sure, thanks.”
The dark-skinned man on the dock who took Tyler’s cash counted it very carefully. He pointed at the boat. “You know how to sail this?”
“Um, yeah.” Tyler snorted and rolled his eyes. “Me and my brother, dude, we’ve been sailing since we were kids.”
The man didn’t look impressed. “You go out, you make sure you can get back. I charge extra if you’re out past your time. And if I have to come get you…” He grinned widely. “You pay a lot extra.
”
Tyler clapped him on the shoulder. “No worries, my good man. You stocked it up, right? Everything I told you to get?”
“No problem, fella. Everything you said.” The man slapped the roll of cash against his palm. “Go ahead, have fun.”
“Plan on it.” Tyler matched the guy’s grin, then turned to help Kelsey on board. “C’mon, babe, let’s check out the cabin.”
“You pay extra for stains,” the man said behind them.
Kelsey shivered in distaste and didn’t answer him. Perv. But she did glance over her shoulder to see if he was checking out her butt — bonus. He totally was. All those hours of crunches and squats were paying off.
In the flurry of activity as the men cast off or shoved off or whatever you did with boats, there wasn’t time for Tyler to take her below and show her the cabin. Instead, Kelsey found herself sitting with Sheila up at the front…what was it called? The bow? The prow?
“Hey.” Sheila had a friendly enough smile, even if it was as crooked as her teeth.
“Hi.” Kelsey settled onto the cushioned bench and shaded her eyes to look out at the water.
She had nothing against Sheila. They were “friends” because their boyfriends were buddies and they’d been on this vacation together for four days already, and because the men went off to do man things sometimes and left the girls to “go shopping” and “get mani-pedis.” Fortunately, Sheila hadn’t been the sort to toodle around the junk shops in town or get manicures, so she and Kelsey had spent a few nice afternoons sunning by the pool without really talking much at all. Sheila wore SPF 45 and didn’t tan.
“Some adventure, huh?” It was the chattiest Sheila had ever been.
“It should be fun.” Kelsey shrugged. “I’ve never been on a sailboat before.”
“Oh…you don’t get seasick, do you?”
Kelsey’s stomach twisted at the thought. “God. I hope not. I don’t know.”
“You won’t,” Sheila said firmly. “Don’t think about it.”