Castles by Benjamin X Wretlind Read Free Book Online Page A

do so with clean hands.
    "Are you afraid of me?" His tone was playful and caught me off guard. "I mean, do I scare you being in the house with your mama?"
    "No."
    "You're tense."
    "You're touching me."
    Alfie smiled again. "I thought you liked to be touched."
    I nodded for some reason. I think the answer was obvious: I liked to be touched by people I liked, not necessarily by people who were having sex with my mother. "I do, but—"
    "Then why are you so tense? You're a beautiful girl and you're going to be an even more beautiful woman. You know men aren't going to like you very much if you're so wound up all the time."
    I felt my legs and arms relax. He was right. If I wanted to be liked, wanted to feel the touch of another man—especially a man I was in love with—then I had to let go, relax. "I'm just nervous."
    "Nervous of what?"
    "What Mama would say."
    Alfie stood up. His eyes changed from caring and understanding to wicked and hateful. He licked his lips and I swear I could see his tongue split in two. "You don't tell her anything."
    He grabbed the bottle from my nightstand and held it up, ready to hit me. "Do you hear me? You don't tell her anything !"
    I pushed against the wall again, my body as tense as I could make it. He breathed heavily and stared at me for a moment before finally walking away. I heard his footsteps across the living room then out the door. He was gone.
    I was alone.
    Grandma wasn't going to save me from anything, and I doubted I'd ever see those castles in the sky she told me about. But I had seen the tongue, and it changed.

5
     
    I never said a word to Mama. Alfie made it clear that bad things would happen if I did. I was too scared to even mention anything to Michael. I didn't tell him I spent the night behind the maintenance shed or that the cut on my face was a side effect of Mama's wrath.
    I fell on the steps, that was it.
    I avoided Alfie as much as I could. When I returned from school, I'd go straight to my room, lock the door and do my homework. If Mama would leave without Alfie—go to work or whatever—I would find some way to get out of the trailer and see Michael. I'm sure Michael was aware of my increased need to be around him, but I also guessed he was proud to be my protector. He just never knew what he was protecting me from.
    When I turned twelve, Michael surprised me with a gift: a dog of dubious origin, brown and tan and a little bit ragged.
    Michael handed me the leash. "Picked him up at the pound. Thought you might like a dog."
    I certainly did. As I held the leash and bent down to pet it, I couldn't help but feel a little ashamed: ashamed that I once considered the possibility of Michael's tongue turning against me, ashamed that I wasn't as truthful as I should have been. Michael was nothing but kind, and this gift was out of the blue. I stood up, smiled as best as I could and kissed Michael on the cheek.
    "Thank you," I said. "But—"
    Michael's smile dropped slightly. "But what?"
    "I don't know if Mama will let me have a dog."
    "That's okay. I'm allowed to keep him at my house if you can't. You can come over whenever you want to see him."
    I beamed with pride. A man—and that's what I considered Michael despite his age—had given me a gift without the thought of what he could get in return. Grandma had always told me that all a man really wants is what's between my legs. A man will do anything to get there, wrapping their tongue around you in ways that will make you squirm in delight.
    Once again, I thought Grandma was wrong.
    Michael and I walked to his trailer and we tied the dog against a fence post. The dog looked up at me, his big tongue flapping with every breath he took.
    I blinked. The tongue looked more like a dust eel than anything I'd ever seen. It was long and slender, slightly black and the tip was a little wider than the rest of it. I stared at it, flashing pictures through my mind of the dust eel in the Bus and the way it cried when it looked at