Little Deaths: A reverse age gap erotic thriller by Nenia Campbell

Author:Nenia Campbell [Campbell, Nenia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2022-12-01T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The Floors Would Scream

Rafe stood next to the ugly granite counter, keeping the remainder of the wine bottle company. He’d tossed the chambray shirt to the floor in a sad heap and was now in his T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up around his biceps. The taste of Donni coated his mouth like sweet oil. Every time he breathed in, he could smell her, taste her—the musky taste of tropical fruit laced by something bitter. Sweet poison, he thought. One he’d down willingly, if asked.

He tried to remember when his childish admiration for his stepmother had begun to fester and grow dark, like grapes left for too long on the vine. He’d never been particularly social and after his parents divorced, people had started to look at him askance. The son of a crazy woman and the heartless bastard who wanted to start over again without her. Sometimes it felt like everyone was watching him to see how he’d fuck up, too.

It had almost been a relief when his father sent him away to an all-boys’ Catholic boarding school in Mendocino County. He hadn’t been religious and still wasn’t now, but the rigid structure of the school gave form to his thoughts, letting him be more himself and less what other people—like his father—wanted him to be. If he didn’t have many friends, then it was by choice, not failure. He liked being alone, but only on his own terms. That was more than fine with the teachers, who only cared about passing marks and the paychecks that came in like clockwork every quarter.

Since Rafe only came home for the holidays, he didn’t find out that his father had started dating again until he’d already been seeing Donni for several months. She had been the kind of beautiful that made you stop and take a second look, searching for flaws that weren’t there. She had been uneasy and nervous around him, like some of the neurotic teachers at his school who never made it through the term, and with his father giving him looks that clearly said, don’t fuck this up for me, Rafe felt uneasy and nervous, as well, like he’d failed a test he didn’t know he was taking. When she had given him the prop snake from her movie as a gift, he had been so perversely relieved in the face of his father’s sternness that he had nearly cried.

After she and his father were married, though, he saw her a little more often. Donni took on a lot of the tasks that his father had previously outsourced. She drove him to see his mom at the clinic and picked him up from the Caltrain station when he came home for summers and holidays. “How is she?” she always asked, or, “How’s school?” to which he had always provided guarded, short non-answers, until one day, in a bad mood, he had ranted the whole way home about how much he had hated his stupid school and

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