Total pages in book: 180
Estimated words: 168121 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 841(@200wpm)___ 672(@250wpm)___ 560(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 168121 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 841(@200wpm)___ 672(@250wpm)___ 560(@300wpm)
“Please don’t take your touch away.”
Her hand flew to his bicep, caressed the sinews of muscle. Her other traced his lower back along the waistband. She leaned to the side, put his strong profile in view.
He closed his eyes, a tic bouncing in his jaw. “That first time, I’d done something my aunt disapproved of. I don’t know. The memories are just snapshots. Feelings are clearer. I remember her anger. It warped her face when she locked me in the shed.”
Biting back the comforting words that sprang forward, she massaged his arms and shoulders and pressed kisses through the short strands of hair behind his ear. She knew he wanted her to listen and touch. Not blather on with useless reassurances.
“The film over the window blocked the light and the darkness seemed to freeze time in there. In the beginning, I think the punishments were just short stays. The feelings that remain with me though, the endless hunger and the cold…I was probably in there through the night. Maybe several nights. Toward the end, I wasn’t allowed out at all.” His throat worked, and a quiver twitched along his back. “That’s where they found me.”
Grief and fury swelled in her throat and seared her sinuses. “How old were you?” Her voice broke.
“Six.”
The image of a six-year-old Jay, locked in a shed in freezing nowhere Canada threatened to shatter her outward composure. Why was his tone so indifferent when she was seconds from exploding?
Climbing off his leg, she crawled to a better position to examine his expression. Stretched alongside him, her chest to his side, her hand on his arm, she lay her cheek on the mattress.
Face-to-face, he watched her watching him. “I’ve tried to make sense of my memories, to fit them into the reports the detectives filed…after.” He raised his arm and hooked it around her back, pulling her close.
“Watch your ink. Don’t roll over—”
“She put me in the oven.”
His words echoed between them. Horror numbed her limbs. Her heart pounded. The constriction in her lungs spread through her body. “How…how could…” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t ask how a little boy could fit in an oven. Or the question that wouldn’t have an answer. Why?
“It was an enlarged modification of a vintage single-door Bolo used for roasting flanks of wild game, deer, moose, whatever my father hunted. I was nineteen when I returned. It was still there.” His nostrils flared. “It was barely visible amongst the charred debris when I burned down the shed.” His gaze turned inward, cloudy. “She forced me to squat on a pillow inside, warned me not to touch the walls. The thermostat must have been set to warm. I remember the…burn, but I don’t think it was hot enough to singe my skin.”
The scars on his back rebuked that. Her veins boiled with the lethal hammer of her pulse and her eyes ached, blurring her vision.
“I must have grown taller over that year,” he said softly. “I couldn’t keep my back from touching the wall anymore.”
“The burns accumulated over time.” Layer upon layer over his young skin. She choked back bile.
He jerked his chin, up, down. “The scars might not have been so terrible if she’d cleaned them, treated them. Infection set in. I got sick. I guess she phoned a doctor, asked questions, made him suspicious.” His chest heaved and his hand fisted, digging into her spine.
“And the doctor reported it? That’s how they found you?”
He squeezed her tight, trapping the air in her lungs. “She was taken away in handcuffs. Never saw her again. I spent the next thirteen years in foster care, and the land became mine when I was nineteen…because she died from a heart condition. Everything went to me.”
“She’d have to own a heart to have a heart condition. How could anyone put a little boy in a…” She choked, fought the tears from her voice. He’d said she was manic. Fuck, manic didn’t touch that kind of sickness. Unexamined viciousness? Pure evil was the only explanation.
“She put me in the oven because she said I was cold when she…” His body shook in violent waves around her. He jerked away and shoved off the bed. His fists flexed, his eyes on fire.
She scooted off the bed and followed him at a distance, dread weighting her feet.
He paced to the bathroom, picking up speed, hands in his hair, ripping at the short ends. The sheen of Vaseline accentuated the tension rippling his back.
At the vanity, he splashed water on his face and stared at the drain. “I hated the darkness, the loneliness smothering that shed. More than that, I hated when she visited me, when she made me lay on the mattress.” His knuckles blanched across his grip on the counter.
No. Oh God, no. She recognized that hate. It spawned from the terror of imminent visitations. She wedged in front of him and cupped his face. “You don’t have to tell me the rest.”