House of the Rising Sun by Richard Cox

Author:Richard Cox [Cox, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: House of the Rising Sun
ISBN: 9781949102437
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

It seemed all his life, Thomas had been failing to please women.

One day when he was twelve years old, his mom picked up the phone and found herself talking to her husband’s mistress. The girl, barely out of college, explained how his father had been fucking her every morning while pretending to be at the gym. The way his mother handled this unexpected news was to get drunk and wait for her husband to come home so she could stab him with a broken beer bottle. And though she hadn’t gone through with her plan, she did kick his dad out of the house for a while, and Thomas had spent those terrible weeks doting on his mother even as she verbally abused him for it. She growled and yelled and broke down in angry tears, and all the while he convinced himself she didn’t mean to say those things, she didn’t mean it when she slapped him across the face, she didn’t mean it that one awful morning while she sat in front of her vanity yanking at her tangled hair and hoarsely whispered words he could still hear today: I hate you, Thomas.

With time he came to understand why he fell so hard for women like Natalie and Sophia: It wasn’t true love unless you were forced to work for the tiniest bit of affection. And when he finally met someone devoted to him, Thomas was put off by it. As early as their second date he knew he would never love Gloria the way he should love a wife, but she was beautiful and driven and wanted desperately to be married. They suffered five years avoiding conflict (and eventually each other) before Gloria summoned the nerve to leave him. Because for Thomas to leave her would have meant another failure.

Today smoke loomed on the horizon, and soon flames would reach the shore of the lake, and then what? Would they be forced to leave? Would the water protect them? Would they be overrun by hordes of starving people? There was no way to know. To spend even a single moment thinking of anything else seemed frivolous.

But Thomas couldn’t help himself. He wished he knew how to comfort Natalie. He resented having to order Seth and his boys to remain indoors. And his relationship with Skylar was a disaster. She had flown here, ostensibly, to discuss his screenplay, but her obvious flirting at the airport hinted at a possible romantic interest he never would have imagined. And there was no use pretending he wasn’t flattered by her attention. This was a woman who was every man’s fantasy, who had flown halfway across the country to have an in-person conversation that could easily have happened over the phone. Who now loathed him for refusing to share his food.

She thought he was being selfish. Inhuman. And she was right about him, that was the hell of it. There was an animal side of Thomas willing to share food with everyone in the neighborhood if it meant Skylar would sleep with him.

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