Have Love (Have a Life Book 1) by Maddy Wells

Author:Maddy Wells [Wells, Maddy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Blue Heron Book Works, LLC
Published: 2016-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

So sultry nights drifted into mornings where a tang in the air teased me that my misery might end with the summer. Although I didn’t linger too long on that reassurance. Part of the pleasure of youth is the complete conviction that no one has suffered as much or with as few uncaring witnesses.

Lance and I fought every night then made love, if you could call it that. It was almost a game where the rules changed nightly and the stakes grew increasingly frightening. And thrilling. I would instigate a fight and Lance would at first ignore me, then he would slap me, hard, trying to shut me up. If I cried, he would hit me again. He began to take off his belt and whip me with the smooth side, little welts formed up and down my backside. Once he tied me to the coffee table with it. Another time he gagged me with the belt to stop my screams. Or moans. Even now, I can’t tell you which they were.

These were the only times we didn’t talk about Alex, but she was there. Her photos loomed over on us like the statues of saints in a church. Once, when Lance threw me to the floor and I accidentally smashed my head on the end of the coffee table, I swooned and thought I was a sacrifice in a cult mass.

Gradually, the nightly dope parties stopped, whether because the people who came really were friends of Alex and Rick’s, or because they saw nothing in either me or Lance to warrant return visits. I don’t know. Dr. Lombardi, who it turned out was an actual friend of Lance’s, came by once, saw my face, puffy from a battering, and got the hell out of there lest he be accused of being an accessory to domestic violence.

“I have enough shit to worry about,” he apologized. Although I didn’t think he actually did anything with his days, he claimed to have a rich work life. He was just one of those people, common then, who lived on other people’s sofas and exchanged the largesse of their dinner companionship for a supply of pharmaceuticals.

Shel in the button store was startled the first time I showed up with lips bruised and swollen. He peered closely into my face, looking for a confession or a plea for help. Something. He gripped my forearm tightly, holding me until I would look at him. I shook him off.

“I fell,” I said, unconvincingly.

Shel was pulled between absolute indifference to me and humanitarian compassion. On the one hand, he’d lost interest in me weeks ago when he realized that a youth army wasn’t following in my wake, and if he came out of his back room at all it was just to sigh sadly and retreat. Only his Talmudic sense of loyalty kept me employed, because you didn’t have to be an accountant to know I was a losing investment.

He never forced anything out of me. Domestic

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.