Anything for Him

by L. K. Chapman

  ‘I… I killed her!’ Jay said, ‘I’ve killed the… the baby—’

  ‘Listen,’ Mark said more firmly. ‘This is going to be alright. I won’t let anything happen to you.’

  ‘To… to me?’

  ‘She’s got injuries all over her,’ Mark said, ‘on her face, and her body. I’ve seen them. And when I left her she was already losing her baby. It’s not your fault, Jay. I know that it was an accident, but the thing is, other people aren’t going to see it that way. You’ll end up in prison.’

  ‘No!’ Jay said, ‘I can’t… I can’t go to—’

  ‘You won’t have to,’ Mark said, ‘not if you do everything I say. But first we need to go and… to go and look at her. Do you understand?’

  ‘I can’t,’ Jay said, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can,’ Mark said. ‘And you can give her the necklace. You can put it on her.’

  ‘You,’ Jay said, holding the necklace out to Mark. ‘You… do it.’

  Mark took it and held Jay close to him. ‘You’re not a bad person,’ he told him. ‘You made a mistake. I know that.’

  Jay sobbed into Mark’s t-shirt and Mark stroked his cheek. ‘It’s alright,’ he said, ‘it’s alright. You trust me, don’t you? Haven’t I always been here for you?’

  Mark waited a moment, then he felt Jay nod. ‘I look after you, don’t I?’ he said, ‘we look after each other.’

  He felt Jay nod again and he gently pushed him away. ‘I’m going to go and look at Sammie now,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be okay. Tell me you know it’s going to be okay.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jay said.

  ‘And you trust me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jay said, ‘I trust you.’

  Slowly, Mark stood up. He felt frightened to go and look at Sammie’s body on his own, but there was no way Jay was going to get up from the floor and he knew he had no choice. He opened the door out to the hallway and stepped through, closing it behind him with a soft click, and when he saw Sammie he almost cried out.

  She wasn’t dead. She was on her knees gasping for breath, the sound so loud he couldn’t believe they hadn’t heard it, though Jay’s sobs were echoing through the house. But that wasn’t what horrified him so much as the blood, which was worse than when he’d seen it earlier – it was still mainly on her legs, but there was some in a little pool on the floor which had been smeared around. When she saw Mark, Sammie held her hand out in a weak, desperate gesture. Mark took a step towards her and knelt by her side.

  He thought he was going to help her. Up until the last second he thought he was going to help her. Even when he watched himself place his own hand around her throat he didn’t quite realise what he was doing, though she struggled and grabbed weakly at his arm. He continued to squeeze long after she stopped moving and he thought to himself that Jay had probably let go far too quickly – he’d probably got scared. When Mark finally let go his hand was shaking, and her body slumped down to the floor so that she was lying on her side in front of him. He carefully held her wrist and checked for a pulse, and put his fingers up to her nose to see if he could feel any breath. There was nothing. In the kitchen Jay was still crying, and Mark looked down at Sammie. Her dressing gown was undone and he could see all of her body, and though she was a mess and part of him didn’t want to look, he found he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her, not for a long time. Finally, he pulled the gown closed around her, and swept her hair back from her face, before taking the necklace that Jay had given him and fastening it round her neck. Then he took in the sight of her face, tracing his finger down her cheek to her lips, pressing her bottom lip for a moment, pulling it down so her little white teeth became visible, then he let go so that it fell slackly back into place. His whole body was shaking. He felt scared of her, in a way, but strangely excited too.

  He’d felt a little like this once before, when they’d been in the woods, and he’d pretended to leave but had really hidden in the trees to watch Jay rape her. He’d known that what was happening to her was wrong, and that it was happening in part because he had told lies about her, but he’d been both frightened and exhilarated by it, and hadn’t been able to stop looking. He had even imagined himself in Jay’s place, doing to her as Jay was doing, because she was a slut, the worst kind of slut, and no amount of suffering could ever be enough for her. She’d spoilt Jay, turning his head and making him obsessed with her by what she did in bed with him. Mark had found himself wanting to make her understand that, wishing that he could hurt her with sex, hurt her as much as he possibly could. He could remember those moments in the woods so clearly now as he looked down at Sammie’s lifeless body on the floor in front of him. He could remember how she’d been on her back on the ground, her legs splayed awkwardly, skirt pushed up and her school shirt hanging open. Her head had been turned away from where he’d been standing so he hadn’t been able to see her face but she must have been in pain, her whole body moving with the force of what Jay was doing to her. It had made Mark feel sick, briefly. But the longer he’d stood there in the woods the more he’d felt hot, and flustered, and uncomfortable. His cheeks had started burning, and the urge he’d usually managed to fight for the last two or three years had started to nag at him again, and nag him worse than ever. He remembered how his eyes had stung with tears, but the feeling when he had finally gripped himself in his hand had been so intense that he could almost have cried out. Within what seemed like mere seconds it was over, but the force of his orgasm had made him stumble backwards, snapping the twig and making Jay look round and say, ‘what was that?’ Then, even though he’d felt dizzy and his head had been spinning, he’d had to run away through the trees, before he was found.

  Slowly, with the memory of that afternoon still filling his mind, he bent down over Sammie’s body, bringing his mouth close to her ear. Could he really bring himself to say it – the words that had suddenly popped into his mind? It would be sick and appalling to speak them, but at the same time he wanted to so badly that he felt giddy. He looked over her face again; her delicate skin, her eyelids fringed with lashes of the lightest, feathery gold. He’d never looked at her so closely before. Not even when she had been doing the sex thing for him had he looked at her as closely as he was now, and he realised that she was beautiful in her way. When she’d been alive and with Jay, he’d never noticed it before. All he’d felt was hate for her. Hate, and a kind of fascination, because Jay was having all of his first sexual experiences with her, when Mark had always hoped, and wished, that they would be with him.

  Finally, the words could stay inside him no longer, and with a stab of wild, forbidden joy, he whispered, ‘I won.’

  He stayed just a moment longer, then he gathered himself together and got to his feet. He opened the door into the kitchen, and Jay looked up at him with a desperate, stricken hope in his eyes.

  Mark shook his head. ‘She… she’s dead,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry, Jay. There’s nothing we can do. You… you’ve killed her. But don’t worry, I’m going to help you sort it out. I’ll help you sort everything out.’

  Felicity

  52

  I watched what happened next in silence, my hand on my bump, trying to gather the courage to get away. Jay had Mark on the floor in seconds, and punched him two, three times. How Mark could still be able to speak after this I had no idea, but even I could make out his words, said with a horrifying calmness. ‘You can… you can hit me if it makes you feel better,’ he said, ‘but I did it for you. She wasn’t right—’

  Jay raised his fist again. ‘And you are?’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ Mark said, ‘I know this isn’t… this isn’t what you think you want. But I could make you so happy, Jay. Haven’t I proved how far I’d go for you? I… I love you. I’ll always love you.’

  Jay lowered his fist. ‘If you love me so much,’ he said, ‘why didn’t you let me stay with you when I came to you for help back when you were at uni? Why did you kick me out on the fucking street?’

&nb
sp; ‘It was… too painful,’ Mark said, ‘I realised you didn’t… that you didn’t feel for me like I did for you. And I thought you never would. But then… then I discovered you followed me to Coalton. You sent Felicity to me. And I understood then that you’re just scared, Jay. You do feel it, you just don’t want to admit it, and I get it—’

  ‘I came to Coalton because I hate you,’ Jay said. ‘I don’t love you. I never even liked you that much. You just… hung around me all the time, pretending like we were best friends, and all you wanted… all you wanted was to… to have some grubby little fumble with me.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that!’ Mark said. ‘You needed me. We needed each other. You thought I had this big, happy family, but it wasn’t like that! I wasn’t myself with them! I had to be somebody else, somebody I wasn’t. You thought you had… the… the monopoly on feeling like nobody wanted you. You acted like you were the only person who ever got laughed at, and ridiculed. You would never believe anyone loved you or liked you even when they said they did. The only person you ever trusted and wanted to spend time with was me, but then she came along—’

  ‘What did you think?’ Jay said, ‘that I’d carry on wanting to… to play stupid games in the woods with you, when I had a girl like Sammie?’

  ‘We have a bond,’ Mark said, ‘you can’t deny it anymore. You came to Coalton to find me again. You can’t forget about me anymore than I can forget about you.’

  ‘What?’ Jay said, ‘you think I wanted to find you so I could… so I could what? So we could fuck? Is that what you really think? Do you think I want you to… to kill my girlfriends—’

  ‘I’d do it all over again,’ Mark said, ‘I’ve never felt I’ve had a… connection with anyone except you. If you would just admit you love me too I’d be better than anyone else you’ve ever been with. I’d be better even than her… than Sammie. I would do anything… anything for you.’

  Jay watched Mark in silent, horrified disgust for a moment. Then he drew back his fist again.

  53

  Jay carried on kicking and punching Mark long after he must have known that he was dead. I was too scared to move, thinking that if I reminded Jay I was there his rage might turn to me, so I sat and listened to the awful, thick sound of the blows punctuated by the rustle of the wind in the leaves, and the faraway rumble of traffic that just about carried through the trees.

  When Mark had been reduced to nothing more than a motionless heap on the ground, Jay dropped to his knees by the body and started to cry.

  I was still so afraid that my body seemed frozen, but I forced myself to move. Slowly, I got to my knees, and using a tree trunk to steady myself I made it to my feet, fearing every second that Jay would turn and see me. I waited one more moment, taking in the sight of Jay hunched over the body on the ground, then I took a silent step away into the trees, then another and another, only taking my eyes off him for a split second each time. When I was sure I was far enough away, and Jay was showing no signs of even being aware of my presence, I turned my back on him, and made out something of a narrow path through the trees in the distance. I took a deep breath, fixed my eyes on the path, and without so much as a backward glance at Jay, I ran.

  A note from the author

  Thank you so much for buying Anything for Him. I hope that you enjoyed reading it.

  As an independent author, one of the most difficult things is getting my book seen by potential readers, because if nobody knows about it, nobody will read it.

  This is where you can help!

  There is a short survey on my website that you can use to let me know how you discovered my books. (lkchapman.com/feedback/survey/). This will help me to understand where to focus my efforts in the future.

  Also, if you enjoyed this book and have a spare few minutes, please consider leaving a rating and review, as even a short review can make a big difference!

  Thanks again for reading.

  Also by LK Chapman

  Networked

  Too Good for this World

  Acknowledgements

  A huge thank you to Shaun Smith for his vital feedback on the story, and to Carol Barber and Ben Smith for their ongoing help and enthusiasm for both this book and my previous novel.

  For their support through the process of writing Anything for Him I would also like to thank my parents, and for his contributions and encouragement through every stage of the novel, thank you to my husband, Ashley. I couldn’t have done it without you.

  About the author

  Louise Katherine Chapman was born in Somerset, UK in 1986. She studied Psychology at the University of Southampton before working as a psychologist developing personality questionnaires. She published her first novel, science-fiction thriller Networked, in 2014.

  LK Chapman lives in Hampshire, with her husband and young family.

  You can find out more about LK Chapman by visiting her website www.lkchapman.com.

  Connect with LK Chapman

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  Twitter: @LK_Chapman

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  Networked

  LK Chapman

  They thought it was just a video game, but it’s not. Someone is out there. Watching.

  Nick is somebody who needs his life to change. Exhausted, broke, and cracking under the pressure of trying to hold everything together, it begins to seem like there is no end in sight. Then the video game he’s spent two years developing alongside his best friend Dan mysteriously disappears to be replaced with something new, something better, something finished.

  Initially unsure whether to release the game, Nick makes a snap decision when he learns of the impact that his struggles finishing the game are having on his wife, Lily, who has a history of depression. Before long, positive reviews and sales come rolling in, but Nick finds himself in a worse position than ever before. Because the game is not content to simply be played. It wants to change, it wants to grow, and most disturbing of all, it seems to want something from them.

  For more information visit www.lkchapman.com.

  Too Good for this World

  A short story prequel/sequel to Networked by LK Chapman

  Two years after her husband’s death in a bizarre suicide pact between players of an online game, Imogen is still reeling and desperate for answers.

  Struggling to cope with her loss and isolation, she is sure that the strange messages she starts receiving are a figment of her imagination. Except that before he died her husband claimed to have had unusual experiences while in the game – experiences where he had been linked to other people, and heard a voice, and controlled the game with his mind. He’d said that the game was more than just that – that it was a new way to live.

  As the messages Imogen receives become harder to write off as a trick of her mind she begins to think the unthinkable. Could it be possible? Could her husband still be alive?

  Too Good for this World is a short story that will raise questions you’ll definitely want answered, and can be read as a prequel or sequel to LK Chapman’s debut novel Networked.

  Too Good for this World is available FREE from most ebook retailers.

  For more information visit www.lkchapman.com.