Red - Jack Ketchum [46]
The woman jerks up and back but makes no sound. No hisses and no cursing — he assumes that was cursing— she just sucks it up. So he twists again. A full one-hundred-eighty degrees this time. Still no sound. Let’s see if she can go all three sixty he thinks and jams his free hand into his pants working her and working himself and he’s just about to come, he’s that close when he hears footsteps pounding on the stairs behind him.
“Brian! What the hell are you doing?”
It’s his sister Peg, closing in on him like a storm cloud. He palms the pliers and takes his hand out of his pants and suddenly he’s scared. He’s not in charge anymore. Far from it. Caught is what he is.
“You’re in trouble now, you little shit.”
“You got no need to be down here, Peg. This is guys’ business. Men’s business.”
He’s trying for indignation, for defiance. But he can see she’s not buying any.
“Men’s…??? I don’t see any men around here you fucking little pervert!”
And that pisses him off. Really pisses him off. He’s no pervert. He’s doing what any guy would do under the circumstances. And what plenty of people do on the net every day. Just who the hell does Big Sister think she is, anyway? His conscience? He doesn’t need any.
“Screw you, Peg!”
He takes a step toward her and it’s as though that single step has created some sort of force field between them because she takes one step back. He does it again and so does she and he realizes she’s seen something in his face, he doesn’t know what exactly but it scares her, she’s a lot more scared now than he is. He’s smiling. He considers the pliers in his hand. He considers his sister.
But no. There’s his mom. There’s his dad. This really is trouble and he might just be making it worse right now. He backs off and the force field disappears like an errant gust of wind.
“Get out of here, Brian,” she says. “Our mother is going to hear about this. Your father is going to hear about this. Get out of here now!”
There’s no choice but to give in. His sister’s got her balls back. But he can’t resist knocking into her shoulder as he passes.
“Good, Brian,” she says. “I’ll tell them about that too.”
He’s already thinking how to explain this — if there’s any way to explain this — as he pounds his way up the stairs.
~ * ~
The girl is hesitant, frozen in front of her. Confused? Frightened? She can read tension but no further than that. She has shouted her brother away. That took courage. Her brother is a coward but he is also dangerous.
Slowly the girl steps toward her and pulls the clothing down off her shoulder to cover her body. It brushes the wounded nipple as it falls.
~ * ~
Peg works at the buttons. Surprisingly her hands are very nimble at this. Surprisingly she’s not afraid at all.
“I’m sorry,” she says. About all of this.”
The woman gazes down into her eyes.
“Go raibt maith agat, mathair,” she says.
~ * ~
“Thank you, mother.”
TWENTY-SIX
He was the product of what his father had taught him to be, who in turn was the product of what his father had taught him to be and she wondered how far back in sheer misogyny and greed the Cleeks actually went. She had married blind into this, impressed by his self-possession as a teenager, even more impressed by him in bed — or in fact for the first year or so, in the back seat of his father’s Caddy. Her first and only lover.
Now, waiting for him at the kitchen table with her children assembled — Peg beside her and Brian and Darleen across from them — she felt like his brood-mare more than his wife. Certainly not his lover. She couldn’t even call herself his friend. These children were the issue of her life. Her only issue. She didn’t count the other. She wouldn’t count the other. These three only. She had nothing else in the world but them.
And of these only Darleen so far had escaped his…pollution. She had to call it that. That was what it was. Something wrong dumped into the stream. And you couldn’t even be sure about Darleen, could you? She was