Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 78487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Afterward, we listen to the rain against the windows, and when Ares falls asleep, I lie in tortured silence and listen to his gentle breath.
Tick tock, Aurora.
Surrounded by his infinite warmth, I fall into a deep sleep where nothing good resides, and all my dreams are nightmares.
We were at the beach. The little cove where my father used to take us on the weekends if he wasn’t busy with work. There were no waves, and I was standing at the shoreline, trying to skim rocks, but so far, none of them had danced across the water, they simply sank a few feet away.
I picked up another rock. But it sank too, and I hung my head with a sob.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Rory, stop being such a crybaby,” my mother snapped behind me. I looked over my shoulder to where she was sitting in a beach chair, a cigarette in one hand and a half-empty glass of wine in the other. Her blonde hair was wrapped in a scarf Daddy brought back for her from one of his business trips, and she was wearing a sparkly top that glittered with a thousand silver stars in the sunlight. “And look at that bathing suit. You’re going to have to lay off the waffles and gelato if you want to wear things like that, Aurora.”
“Ariana, she’s nine years old,” my father said, refilling her wine glass. “She doesn’t need to hear shit talk like that… let her be a child.” He turned away from her and winked at me, his warm smile keeping the chill of my mother’s meanness at bay.
My father was a scary-looking man. His eyes burned with green flames, and bad words often fell from his thin lips, but they’d only ever said nice things to me. I knew men were afraid of him. But not me. He’d only ever been kind and loving to me. I was his princess.
But my mother wasn’t done with me.
“She’ll be two hundred pounds by then,” my mother scoffed, crossing her legs and taking a puff on her cigarette. “If she keeps eating the way she does, it will be like stuffing a piglet into a bikini come next summer.”
I turned away from her cruel comments. I didn’t want to look like a piglet in a bikini or whatever that meant. Anyway, what did she know? She was the one wearing a full face of makeup to the beach and enough gold she’d sink right to the bottom of the ocean if she fell in.
I decided to ignore her. It wasn’t my fault Mom didn’t like our days at the beach, but I was usually the one who ultimately paid for it.
Joey joined me at the water’s edge. “You know, if you want it to skip, you’re going to have to hold it the right way.”
He picked up a stone and showed me how to hold it, flat between the thumb and forefinger. I watched as he bent down and sent it skimming across the top of the still sea water. It bounced at least four times.
“See, it’s all in the angle.” He grinned proudly. A gentle wind came off the water and played in his floppy, sun-kissed hair as he picked up another rock and handed it to me. “Now you try.”
I looked down at the water lapping at our feet and then at the rock in my hand, but when I looked back at Joey, he wasn’t the sweet boy with the dimpled smile anymore. He was a grown man with facial hair and sweaty armpits. He looked strung out and impatient. Drugs had taken their toll, and his skin was pale and his cheeks hollow, his eyes yellow and sickly.
But it was what I saw in them that really sent a shiver rolling through me.
Menace.
There was something not right with him. Something frightening and cruel that I’d never seen before.
I glanced over to my mom and dad, but they were gone.
So had the sun.
Gray clouds gathered at the horizon, and an oppressive heaviness hung in the air.
“This is what you wanted, wasn’t it?” he said angrily.
“What do you mean?”
“You wanted me to be dead.”
I took a step away from him. “How can you say that?”
“Because you know.”
“Know what?” He wasn’t making any sense. “Joey, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And suddenly, we weren’t at the beach anymore. We were in the garage of our family home in Dorchester, standing in a tiny ribbon of light beaming into the room from inside the house.
“Why are you looking so frightened of me, sister?”
The darkness in his voice sent a shiver up my spine.
“I’m not frightened,” I lied.
“You believe what they say about me, don’t you… sister?”
“No, I don’t,” I snapped out.
“Then why haven’t you done it yet?”
“Done what?”
“You know.” He circled me like a predator stalking his prey. “It.”