Iflipped through channel after channel before settling on some black-and-white Christmas movie I remembered watching as a kid. The one where the chump on the screen takes all the good shit in his life for granted and thanks to a “holiday miracle” gets a second chance to do that shit over.
Like I said, I didn’t believe in that kind of stuff. Do-overs. Fixing shit that certainly wasn’t fixable. Angels getting their wings.God.
I mean, what kind of god gave kids to people who certainly didn’t deserve 'em?
What I did believe in was that life was fucked. Especially for guys like me. And I guess chicks like Nurse Keller here. Didn’t know what was so bad that the woman thought her only way out was to off herself, but I imagined it had something to do with all the books I’d found hidden behind a stack of shoes in the closet. Books on childhood trauma and how to move on from it.
Or maybe that was just what I wanted to think, soI wasn’t alone with that shit. My shit. The shit that wasn’t fixable.
Without realizing what I was doing, I set the remote down on the nightstand and glanced over at the motionless figure next to me on the bed. She looked like she was sleeping. My good sense and I both knew that she wasn’t. She wasn’t dead neither though. Just unconscious. While her body decided if it wanted to mend itself or not and mine wondered what she felt like. What it would feel like. To play around with her pert nipples. To touch her. Fuck her.
Couldn’t fucking tell ya why now, all of a sudden, my cock was giving me the green light to find out. But fucker was at full mast as I climbed over Juliet’s frame, prying her thighs apart with a knee and pressing myself between them.
She was pale. But not deathly.Not dead,I repeated to myself.
And then I was trailing a finger over her pussy lips, pushing it inside and shuddering when I noticed how warm she was. Not dry, not cold,not dead. I quickly replaced that finger with my cock, inching forward until my balls were pressing against the skin of her ass, before I started rocking back and forth. Her tits bouncing in front of me as I moved slow enough to keep her arms from flopping down but fast enough to get myself off.
I got there quicker than I thought I would too. Thrusting in and out a handful of times before my cum was spilling all over her stomach. There was nothing I wanted more than to come inside her. But I was pretty sure you could knock up an unconscious woman, not adead one. And as off script as everything was going at the moment, I didn’t want my DNA left in either.
Sorry, Georgie Boy, this was no one’s wonderful life. No not-so-immaculate conception. Because in the real world, no one got second chances.
Then again, some people never got chances to begin with. First or otherwise.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HIM
“Look at you, boy.”The familiar voice hissed in my direction.“Awfully cozy, aren’t ya?”
I dropped my cock and grabbed for the remote, increasing the volume on the tv while keeping my eyes glued to the screen as I twisted back around on the bed. I knew it was only a matter of time before she popped up—that didn’t mean I had to acknowledge her. I shoved a handful of pills into my mouth and washed 'em down with the glass of milk I’d left out on Jules’s nightstand. It was slightly sour but I refused to let that shit go to waste.
Growing up broke had this way of settling into your bones, even when you had cash on hand.
“Waste not, want not, right, ma?” Fuck, I didn’t mean to say that aloud. Too late. Now there was no chance the bitch was going away. Not when she enjoyed fucking with my head so much.
“Turn it off.”
I swatted out a hand. Nothing was there but it washabit. Like trying to swat a gnat that wouldn’t stop buzzing in your ear even when you knew it was gonna be back a few seconds later.
“Turn it off. Turn it off. Turn it off.”Now she was chanting it over and over again. I could only assume she meant the tv. The woman hated anything that brought me joy. She also hated anything that took my attention away from her nagging.
I could only imagine what she thought of Jules then.
I glanced down at the nurse in question before squeezing my eyes shut and cupping my hands over the sides of my head. It wouldn’t take long for the pills to kick in. Not that they got rid of her completely, just that they made her a little more fuzzy. Her voice a little less clear. Easier to ignore.
I wasn’t crazy but that didn’t mean I didn’t hear things on occasion. Auditory hallucinations, PTSD, fucked-up bullshit with a label… Whatever you wanted to call it, it followed me. Worse than the Ghost of Christmas Past following that Scrooge guy.
But unlike the sound of their screams, unlike all those women I’d butchered over the years, I couldn’t kill 'em. Drown 'em out. Chop 'em up and bury 'em.
You couldn’t kill things that were already dead. Even if that did little to stop me from trying.
Never told the docs that I was hearing shit, but it didn’t take them long to figure it out when they caught me talking to myself. That was when the treatments started, the pills, the therapies that left her taunting me more and louder. None of them cared about curing me. They cared about cutting my brain open.
They wanted to know when the voices started. If they were trauma-induced or just didn’t have the chance to develop until puberty. They wanted to know if that’s what caused me to slice so deep her hands were almost falling off.
It wasn’t. Because there weren’t any voices. Just one. Just hers. And she didn’t show up until long after I’d killed her…
I pushed myself up off the bed and made my way to the shower, stepping over the puddles of blood and bathwater still covering the tile floor. Then I slammed the door shut and turned the faucet on the hottest setting. Like if I burned my skin off, I could somehow burn her touch away too.
