The Wild Zone by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online Page B

Saver quickly into her mouth. Red Life Savers were her favorite.
    “Don’t say anything to your mother about what you did,” he cautioned her as the taste of cherry died on her tongue.
    What you did, Kristin could hear him repeat now, the words jolting her awake as, once again, she stifled the impulse to gag. She checked the clock on the nightstand beside the double bed. It was a little past four, which meant she’d been asleep less than an hour. She tried to lie back down, but Jeff’s body had already shifted in his sleep, and both his right arm and leg were now stretched out onto her side of the bed.
    “What are you doing?” said the sleepy voice beside her.
    “Just trying to get comfortable.”
    Kristin felt his hand curl around her left breast. You’ve got to be kidding, she thought. “What are you doing?”
    “What do you think I’m doing?” His fingers began circling her nipple as he inched himself up on his elbows, drawing her body back down.
    “I thought you were sleeping.”
    “I was. Now I’m up. As you can see.” He grabbed her hand, positioned it on his groin.
    “Very impressive,” Kristin deadpanned as he maneuvered himself on top of her. He pushed his way inside her without further preamble, beginning a series of slow, deliberate thrusts that knocked the brass headboard repeatedly against the back wall of the bedroom.
    Kristin went where she usually went during such moments. To her safe place, a sunny field of high grass and beautiful red flowers. She’d seen such a place once in a book of impressionist paintings that her fourth-grade teacher had been kind enough to allow her to take home one night. Kristin had been leafing through the book when Ron had come home early. Ron was her mother’s new husband, a good-looking out-of-work actor with a big voice and an easy sneer, so when he’d called her into the bedroom, when he’d told her to shut the door, when he’d ordered her to come here, she did. And when he was on top of her, when he was poking at her with his fingers, when he was tearing at her and making her bleed, she’d numbed the pain by focusing all her energy on that sun-filled field and the woman in her long, flowing dress who was standing at the top of the hill, delicate white parasol in hand, watching her young daughter romp happily among the magical red flowers. And because the artist had rendered their faces so purposely hazy, it was almost possible to pretend that she was the little girl running merrily through the grass and that the woman with the parasol was her mother, watching to make sure no harm would befall her.
    It was a place Kristin returned to often.
    And then one day her mother had come home early from her shift at the International House of Pancakes, where she’d been employed for the better part of six months, and she’d found Ron on top of her now almost fifteen-year-old daughter, and she’d started screaming, except she hadn’t been screaming at Ron. “What are you doing, you little slut?” she’d cried as a hairbrush flew toward the wall, so close to Kristin’s head she actually felt a breeze disturb the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. “Get out of here. I never want to see your miserable face again.”
    Kristin hadn’t bothered trying to defend herself. What was the point? She knew her mother was right. It was her fault. She was the one responsible. If she hadn’t been so flirtatious, so seductive, as Ron never tired of telling her, he might have been able to control himself.
    Don’t say anything to your mother about what you did, she heard Norman say.
    What you did.
    First Norman. Then Ron. So clearly it was her fault and not her mother’s bad choices.
    Her fault.
    Kristin felt Jeff begin to pick up the pace of his thrusts, pushing her out of her field of red flowers. This was her cue, she understood, contributing the appropriate soundtrack of squeals and sighs, nothing too loud, nothing that would draw Will’s attention to what they were