Come Destroy Me by Vin Packer Read Free Book Online Page B

brushed against his lip uncomfortably, and he put his own wrist up and touched his lips against it. “Tell me, Jill. It’s all right,” he said. He kissed his wrist lightly.
    In his imagination, her words came to him in that husky, soft tone. He spoke them aloud as she might speak them. “Charles Wright, I’m glad I found you. My, yes. Oh, my,
yes.”
    An electric sensation of delight shot through him to the ends of his fingertips and he felt strangely warm and tense and — he thought of her word — tender.
    “I’ll always be gentle with you,” he told his wrist. “Ah, Jill, don’t you know the way I feel?”
    “Yes, Charles, I think I do.”
    “There’ll never be a need for words,” he said. He leaned on one elbow staring at his wrist as though it were her face, and he said the way she would say, “Charles. Charles,” and gently he bent and kissed his wrist, bringing his hand up to his own face, caressing it, making it go tight on his cheek. He said with his lips in his own flesh, “Jill, I love you. I love you, Jill.”
    Then he jumped up, startled, at the opening of his bedroom door. Silhouetted in the fork of light, his mother stood looking down at him.
    She said, “Honey, I’m sorry.”
    “S’ O.K.”
    “I was upset,” she said. “Evie’s never done anything like this before. You’ve always been good kids, and I let it get me, I guess.”
    “I don’t care,” Charlie said.
    “Are you all right, honey?”
    “What do you mean?” He couldn’t control the quick anger in his voice.
    “I didn’t upset you, too?”
    “Heck, no,” he said.
    “Good boy…. Did you study hard at the library?”
    “Yeah.”
    “That’s my good boy. Good night, honey. Don’t you worry about Evie. Russ will take care of everything.”
    Charlie thought, Damn Russ, damn him to hell. He said, “Good night, Mom.”
    The door shut and Charlie fell back on the pillow. He grabbed it to him and held it. Why didn’t his mother just leave him alone? Why didn’t Russ just move in? Ah, God, Jill, God.
You’d
understand.
    Her name is Jill.
    “You would! You’d understand.”
    Suddenly he was crying like a kid sissy, muffling the sounds with a big soft feather pillow squeezed against his chest.

Chapter Seven
    I can’t believe it. He was like my own kid. Those two kids, Evie and Charlie Wright — I treated them like they were my own kids.
    — From a statement made to the Burlington Express by Russel Lofton
    A FTERWARD THEY SLEPT , Evie slumped over on the right-hand side of the front seat of the automobile, her head nodding against the windowpane, Jim with his legs stretched out cumbersomely, his shoulders leaning against hers. They were parked a mile from the Golden Eagle, on the flat part of South Hill Road, off to the side of the ditch.
    Lofton found them almost immediately. He saw the car as he drove along and his stomach did a flip. He slammed on the brakes and maneuvered his car to the side, jerked the key off, and sat for a moment dumbly. He was in some embarrassing position, all right, and he had better act fast, but what the deuce was he going to do if … Well, heck, he was going to put a stop to it. Take the bull by the horns and put a stop to it! He thought of Evie and the way she had looked earlier and his nerves curled, recoiled, and shot up again rigid with anger. He clamped his hand down hard on the chromium handle and got out, slammed the door with purposeful heaviness, and began walking up the dirt ditch. They must have seen his headlights, heard the noise of his motor and the slamming door, he thought. They must know. But it was quiet. Crickets were singing and frogs chortling and the wind whispered in the tall grass down in the fields. Otherwise it was quiet. Lofton exaggerated the sound of his footsteps, kicking pebbles and brushing the ground with his shoes. There was nothing for
him
to be embarrassed about if …
    Geehosopher, if he were home now he’d make a super de luxe cheese sandwich