Lure by Deborah Kerbel Read Free Book Online Page A

a priest breathing down my neck. I rolled over and pulled the quilt up over my ear.
    “Leave me alone, William,” I begged.
    For a brief moment, there was blissful silence and I truly thought he was going to go away and leave me be. My eyes closed with relief. But an instant later, William was yanking the quilt from my shoulders and spitting venom into my face. His voice was a cruelly pinched falsetto:
    “Little John, always so afraid. You should have your mother sew you a dress and a bonnet because you’d get on much better in this life as a girl.”
    My stomach twisted into a hard knot. When had William begun to sound just like Father? An owl hooted somewhere outside my window. Hoo-hoo-who will prevail? My eyelids drooped with exhaustion. Dear God, all I wanted was to roll over and go back to sleep. But my pride was at stake. Damned pride!
    “Yes, fine. I’ll smoke the pipe with you.”
    Tossing off my quilt, I got out of bed and followed William out of the room. My bare feet slapped against the cold wooden floor like fishtails against the surface of water. It was a cool night. More than anything, I wanted to run back to my bedroom and put on a pair of stockings but I feared that would invite more taunting from William, so I just kept going.
    “We should do it in the stairwell,” he whispered over his shoulder.
    I stopped in my tracks. “The stairwell? But why? If my parents wake up, we’ll be caught!”
    “Trust me,” William hissed, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me along. “It’s the perfect place. There’s a draft in the stairwell that will carry the smell away from the bedrooms. And if we hear them coming, we can run downstairs and replace the pipe before your father can find it missing.”
    This whole thing was giving me a stomach ache. But, of course, William didn’t care about that. He sat down on the top step and produced a box of matches from behind his back. My eyes bulged with surprise. Apparently, he’d stolen more than just Father’s pipe. William lit the tobacco and sucked on the stem until a wisp of smoke began to curl out of the bowl, like a snake rising out of the charmer’s basket. Then he passed it to me and waited for me to take my turn. I hesitated.
    “Go on, John,” William hissed. “We don’t have all night.”
    Closing my eyes, I took a small drag on the pipe. Right from the first puff, I felt like my lungs were collapsing. Muffling a cough in my hand, I passed it back to my cousin, silently hoping that now I could return to my bed. But William wouldn’t let me leave until we’d smoked every bit of tobacco in that pipe. “You’ll enjoy it when you have more practice,” he kept promising. He was wrong. The whole experience was just awful.
    Our nighttime smoking sessions became a regular habit that summer. Each one of them followed an identical pattern. William would wake me up with Father’s pipe in his hand and taunt me until I agreed to come with him to the stairwell. The smoke would bring on coughing fits every time, which we would be forced to smother with our hands. It was terrible. And yet, night after night we continued to do it.
    At first, I couldn’t understand why my cousin wanted to smoke that pipe so desperately. But after a few weeks I began to understand. And by the time we were finally discovered, I had developed a taste for the tobacco and was enjoying the smooth feeling of the smoke inside my throat. Holding the pipe felt forbidden, dangerous, grown-up. It certainly made me feel like more of a man than working in the forge ever had. But that meant nothing to Father who, as you might imagine, gave me the beating of my life when he came upon me one night with his stolen pipe in my hand. When he was done, my skin was so raw that I couldn’t walk for two days. But my pride hurt worse than anything I’d ever experienced. I had let myself be duped by my cousin yet again.
    I vowed to myself that it would be the last time.

8 - Max
    Ducking low this time