The Gorgeous Slaughter by Christina Hart

Author:Christina Hart [Hart, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2020-08-26T18:30:00+00:00

Twenty-Nine

I am cleaning up my room from the disaster that was last night, sipping on a mixed drink from the Jack that Nikki had left here. And I know, I told my aunt I would stop drinking. But I didn’t mean today. I swirl my glass around and watch the sweat forming around it. The ice is melting. The phone beeps. The room is melting. I stop the timer. Eleven minutes and eleven seconds. Make a wish. I close my eyes.

I want him to be mine.

“Can you talk for a little bit or are you busy?” he asks.

“Sure.” He doesn’t know by now that I’m never too busy for him, that I will make room for him whenever he needs me. That I welcome it, the rearranging of my life to fit him in.

I stop the timer.

Reset.

Sometimes his “little bit” is five minutes. Sometimes it’s two hours. Sometimes I go down that dark hole and wait for him there to find me. He knows it, too. That thing that keeps you up at night. It’s in him, too. It keeps him awake too long. Sometimes he doesn’t sleep at all, and I stay up with him so he isn’t alone. Isn’t that what love is?

During our time getting to know each other, he told me some things, grabbed a flashlight and invited me into his past. Charlie grew up with a father who was too hard on him. Beating him, almost nightly. The scars never healed. His mother left when he was two. And he still feels that his father never wanted him at all. When he was nine, he was placed into foster care after his dad was arrested. The neighbors called the police after hearing the sounds of Charlie’s screams.

He still hates them for it.

As much as he hated the beatings, at least he had one of his parents. Even if that one left terrorized him.

Charlie says foster care can really fuck you up if you let it. Moving from home to home, the shit you experience with the other kids, with the “parents” sometimes even. He told me once that there are all different kinds of abuse. Some are under the surface. But you feel them there, in the way they change you. In the way they shift your reality. In the way they make you hate yourself.

My phone rings and it’s the ringer that belongs to him. I look at the timer, stop it. Twelve minutes and seventeen seconds.

The butterflies swarm in my stomach. “Hi, Charlie,” I say, answering the phone.

“Hey. Sorry it’s so late tonight,” he says.

“Don’t apologize. It’s okay,” I say. It’s 1:13am and really, it’s not that late. Not for him, anyway. He’s called later, and I’ve answered. “Was today a good day or a bad day?”

“It was pretty good. I talked to Tracy about her coworker. I feel like she finally told me the truth about it. At least a little of it anyway.”

“What did she say?”

“She finally admitted that she was attracted to him.

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