Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 89093 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89093 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
He grumbles under his breath the entire walk to the meat house, but not once does he dispute my claim.
As I roll away from the roaring fire, I toss off the deer skin blanket Cecil hasn’t stopped gloating about the past four weeks. I did get a little over envious while stacking tonight’s fire, but my skyrocketing body temperature has nothing to do with the winter arriving early and everything to do with the raging boner I’m doing everything in my power to ignore.
Cecil is asleep in a bed mere inches from me.
Now is not the time to stroke one out.
I usually take care of business during Cecil’s daily trips to the woods, but with them becoming as infrequent as my visits to town the past two years, things have become a little hard, and I don’t mean in a figurative manner.
My dick has been as unused as the hazy memories in my head. I haven’t touched a woman in years, and the memories of those times are nothing to write home about.
I don’t view sex in the same manner as my brothers. After witnessing my father spending more time with his whores than his family, by the time I reached the age where I should have been interested in sowing my oats, I was disgusted by the whole concept.
With my father refusing to raise a gay son, instead of asking about my sexual preferences, he paraded me in front of the women paid to sleep with him. When that didn’t work, he tried to bribe them into ‘turning me straight.’
Mercifully, they loathed his ideas on parenting as much as they did him. When he left me with them to ‘fix me,’ they spoiled me with ice cream and candy and assured me it didn’t matter if I liked boys or girls, I’d be accepted no matter what.
The bubble their guarantee surrounded me with was burst when one of my father’s favorite whores quoted that to him. He slit her throat in front of me and locked me in the room with her deceased body for over sixteen hours without food and water.
I was nine years old.
Nine.
That day almost traumatized me as much as my mother’s death. It wasn’t solely Meredith’s death that maimed me, it was how my father used and abused her for hours on end while I was in the room with them. I could close my eyes, but even with my hearing poor, nothing could block Meredith’s screams from shredding my eardrums.
Even a decade later, I could still hear them. They fucked with my head even more than wondering if the woman I was endeavoring to bed was with me because she wanted to be or because she was one of the props my father forever used to keep his kids in line.
Prostitution isn’t a gimmick most fathers use, but when it convinces your son to run drugs for the family business instead of being locked away for fooling around with a minor, it’s a tactic my father used often.
Roberto didn’t know the girl he was sleeping with was fifteen. She looked a lot older, and since they had met outside of the Hopeton realm, he assumed he was safe.
He learned otherwise only a week after his eighteenth birthday.
When the floorboards beneath me creak in protest to my heavy frame, I give up on my endeavor to sleep. While rubbing my eyes, I swish my tongue around my bone-dry mouth before scampering into a half-seated position. I’m not surprised when I notice Cecil’s bed is empty. He’s been rising earlier and earlier the past couple of months. He knows his time is thin, so he wants to jam in as much as he can every day.
Halfway through the second scrub of my eyes, my hand freezes. There’s a peculiar smell in the air. To begin with, I excuse it as the recently skinned deer hide sitting too close to the fireplace. Winter came early this year, and it’s been colder than a witch’s tit the past couple of days, but this smoky substance doesn’t appear to be natural.
It reminds me of burning plastic—like the scent that plumed through the air when Cecil peeled off the shirt clinging to my back almost four years ago. My shirt was made from polyester, so when it rubbed against my wounds from the inferno that engulfed Ophelia’s car, it gelled us together like we were one.
My brows furrow when a weird taste is the next thing to bombard me. There’s no way the smoke filling the air is natural. It’s riddled with chemical compounds and the smell of melting flesh.
With my heart in my throat and my confusion at an all-time high, I scan the desolate yet full-of-nutrients ground. My mouth falls open when I discover the cause for the unusual scent. The smoke isn’t because I forgot to clear out the chimney at the start of fall. It’s from a raging fire engulfing Cecil’s greenhouse.