DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

to be before she screwed things up here and got fired from this job?

He crept carefully across the wooden floor to his bedroom, moving silently, a trick he had perfected long ago. He could smell the pungent odor of whiskey in the still hall air. He wished he was one of those people who just didn’t care, who could roll with the flow and accept things the way they were. But he was not one of those people; he could not do that.

He closed the door to his room, took off his clothes, and got into bed.

The loud drunken conversation which had greeted him when he’d first come into the house had now degenerated into something else. He could hear the loud squeak of bedsprings through the thin wall, accompanied by short, high, breathless cries. His mother would start her litany soon:

“Oh, God, you’re good!… You’re so good!… Yes!… Yes!… Oh, God! … You’re so big!… Oh, God, you’re big!… Oh, God!” He knew it by heart. It never changed. She never used names, and he’d wondered more than once if that was because she did not know the names of the men she brought home.

He pulled the blanket over his head and plugged his ears, trying to block out the sound, but her cries were getting louder. Did she enjoy this? he wondered. Did she mean any of the crudely flattering things she said, or was it all simply an act? He had never been sure.

He closed his eyes, trying to focus his attention on the earlier events of the night rather than on the show in the next room, but it was impossible to do so.

He hated his mom right now.

It was said that teenagers rebelled against their parents, consciously rejecting their parents’ value systems in an effort to forge their own identities. That sounded good in psych class, but he certainly didn’t feel as though he was rebelling against anything. He had no doubt, however, that his social awkwardness stemmed from, or was a reaction to, his mother’s “overly permissive” lifestyle.

Maybe that was why he’d never had sex.

It was not something which he would ever admit to in public, not something he would share with Kevin, but it was true. He rationalized it to himself, told himself it was better to wait until he had found the right person, but that was just an excuse and he knew it. It sounded good to have such high moral principles, and it did make him feel a little better about himself, as though he was making a conscious decision to do the right thing, but the truth was that he was just like anyone else. He would have jumped at the chance for sex if it had been offered.

Only it had never been offered.

Then again, maybe he wouldn’t have jumped at the chance. People always seemed to assume that the children of so-called “liberated” parents had an easier time of it, were more comfortable with their own sexuality, but he knew from experience that this was not the case. If anything, knowing about his mother’s love life in such detail tainted the sex act for him, made it seem distasteful and repulsive instead of exciting and desirable. He was also privy to his mother’s morning-after comments and could contrast what she moaned in bed and what she said afterward.

And that scared the hell out of him.

“You’re so good!” she cried from the other room. “You’re so big!”

He plugged his ears more tightly.

He fell asleep still plugging his ears.

Dion awoke in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and stumbled out of bed into the hall.

Where he ran into his mom’s “guest.”

He jumped back, startled. “Sorry,” the man said sleepily, grabbing Dion’s shoulders. “Didn’t see you.” He was good-looking—weren’t they all?—and was tall and muscular, with thick black curly hair and a mustache. He was completely naked.

Dion watched him pad into his mother’s bedroom and close the door.

In the morning he was gone, and when Dion woke up and went into the kitchen for breakfast, his mom was already there, reading her paper and drinking coffee. She looked up when he entered, pretending as though nothing was wrong, as though nothing had happened. “What time did you get home last night?” she asked brightly.

“About eleven,” he said. He walked over to the counter, took two pieces of bread from the unwrapped loaf, and dropped them into the toaster, pressing the handle down.

“Did you have fun?” she asked. Did you? he wanted to say, but he simply nodded. He took the butter out of the refrigerator. “I had a hard time sleeping, though,” he said pointedly. His mom seemed not to notice the inference behind the words, and he poured himself a glass of orange juice.

She was being nice to him today, all traces of last week’s hostility gone, but somehow that made him feel even worse. He thought of what a friend of his back in Mesa always used to say about the girls who treated him like dirt, that all they needed was “a good fucking.”

His toast popped up, and he buttered it and sat down across from his mom at the table. She smiled at him. “What do you want to do today?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled.

She folded the entertainment section of the paper and picked up the front page. “We’ll find something.”

He nodded, chewing slowly. He watched her as she read. His gaze focused on a small red stain on the right sleeve of her nightgown.

It looked like blood.

14

Lieutenant Horton looked down at the remains of Ron Fowler.

Remains.

It was an appropriate word. For the tangled mess of red muscle and bone which lay on the stone floor before him was barely recognizable as human. It looked like leftover food, something which had been chewed and rejected by the mouth of some gigantic creature.

He looked away, unable to stomach the sight except in short bursts. A flash went off as the photographer