Page 69 of The Misfits
I was granted permission to have a bath the day of my sixteenth birthday. The water was super cold, so I was rubbing myself to get warm. I nearly vaulted out of the tub when my hand skimmed over a region of my protruding bones I’d never paid much attention to.
Although certain I was summoning myself to hell, I touched myself down there enough times to contemplate how bad hell could really be when my father walked in, catching me mid-twirl.
I didn’t sit for a week after that, and I was never allowed a bath again.
“Good girl, Megan. Concentrate on how good it feels while I… fix… this…” Dexter grunts more than he speaks. I learn why when the coolness of steel brushes against my heated vagina a mere second before it adds to the fiery hotness burning my insides. He cut me with the switchblade. Not enough to make me fearful for my life, but enough to steal my devotion away from the wave building inside my core.
“Oww.”
“Shh…” he comforts me, his tone surprisingly gentle. “It’s just a little nick. Nothing I can’t fix once we’ve done what we came here for.”
When his eyes drift to the driver’s side window, I realize he didn’t stop because he was mad I assumed he was calling me stupid with a less demoralizing word. It’s because we arrived at our destination. Although hidden by a forest that’s even scarier in the dawn of morning, the building his father was murdered in is highly recognizable.
“Charles will be waiting by the west staircase. He’salwayswaiting by the west staircase.” It dawns on me that his last sentence was only for him when he returns his eyes to me. They’re filled with hate, but since it isn’t directed at me, I ignore the snarky voice in my head reminding me that my switchblade is a mere inch from his cock. “I don’t need you to take him out for me, Megan. I just need you to get him out far enough he’s away from surveillance. Okay?”
I nod, more than eager to help.
His smile makes me happy about the voices in my head. If the mean doctors in white coats hadn’t moved me to a facility capable of handling ‘someone like me,’ we would have never met, and I’d still believe that Nick was the love of my life.
I know better now.
“Okay,” Dexter repeats before he removes his bloody hand from under my shirt and curls it around my jaw. It adds to the smears of the clerk’s blood still on my cheeks, but it feels more like war paint than the blood of a dead man.
After dragging his thumb across my lips still aching from stretching to take in his penis, he slips it down my neck and across my collarbone before he stops at the bouncing flesh my father said were the devil’s spawn.
“You look like heaven and hell.” He brushes his hand down the back of my nipple, peaking it more before locking his eyes with mine. “Now let’s show them how wrong they were when they thought either one of us was angelic.” He nips at my lips sharply enough to draw blood before he pulls back, tosses open the driver’s side door of the truck, then slides out with me still in his lap. “It’s time for the hunter to be hunted.”
He pats my backside in a way that shouldn’t feel good considering how many times I was spanked as a child but does before he sets me down onto my feet. He then moves for a crate on the far corner of an old building. When Dexter explained aspects of his father’s teaching, I thought he meant they hunted figuratively but learn otherwise when he tosses off the lid of the wood box. It’s filled with a range of instruments. Some look like fun, like the ax you toss at a fair to win a prize, but others look like they came off the set of an action movie.
Once he is loaded up and ready to fight, Dexter spins on his heels to face me. I nervously squirm when he takes his time drinking me in. It can’t be a good squirm. I look like a wretched mess—even worse than I did after sewing my mother’s eyes shut and scrubbing her mattress clean of her blood. The clerk’s shirt is stained with the blood that seeped from his neck, my feet are muddy from trekking across an abandoned parking lot to the clerk’s truck after walking through the gasoline Dexter poured over the motel’s office to make sure it was well lit before firefighters arrived, and the cut Dexter placed at the top of my thigh has blood leaking down my leg.
“Perfect,” Dexter mutters under his breath, shocking me. “You look every bit the part of my father’s victim.” I yearn to comfort him when he murmurs, “My mother bled the exact same way for almost a week once he was done with her.” He shakes his head as if ridding it of horrible memories before adding, “Charles will believe you evaded his capture, and forever wanting to be in his good books, he will take you straight back to him.” He smirks, mindful that even with my brain a little mushy from the medication I was forced to take, I know exactly where that scenario will lead us—straight to Dexter, who will be lying in wait, waiting to take out Charles.
“Ugh,” I grunt when Dexter stops my endeavor to comfort him by pushing me away.
“We don't have time.” His tone seems nowhere near as harsh when he curls his hand around my jaw and scrapes his thumb over my top lip. “But once we’ve done this, I’ll take the pain away. I promise.” His pledge seems off. It has an edge of deceit to it like he did when he said we’ll leave Meadow Fields together. I thought he was going to leave me alone, and in a way, that is what he did when we first left. He sent me out in the big bad world alone. “Hey…” he murmurs on a grunt when he spots the stupid tears pricking my eyes. “What are those for? Who are they for?” He scrubs at my tears with more violence than he used when he slit the hotel clerk’s throat. “They better not be for him, Megan. You better not be crying for him.”
Before I can determine whom he’s referencing, he grips the back of my head and pulls me forward with so much force, my front tooth almost cracks again when our mouths smash together. Before a wince of pain can escape my lips, his tongue slides across my top lip before he plunges it inside my mouth. His kiss is hungry and urgent—a similar kiss to the one Nick gave Jenni when she returned home from school in New York for the first time. It was like he was desperate to keep her, that he’d do anything in the world not to tell her about the baby I thought I was carrying.
It makes me happy that it seems as if Dexter wants to keep me around. Not enough for me not to whimper when he pulls away, though. I could be kissed by him for days and never grow tired.
Daddy lied when he said kisses were Satan’s tormentors.
They’re much too yummy to be anything bad.
After biting my lower lip hard enough to leave a mark, Dexter shifts on his feet to face the manor in the distance. “We need to move quickly, but once this is done, I’ll fix the injustices he did to you. He will regret the day he hurt you.”
Once again, I don’t know who he is referencing, but once again, I’m too caught up in his wish to protect me to care.
Besides, if he believes they hurt me, they probably did and deserve to be punished accordingly.
After staring at the manor long enough for goosebumps to race across my forearms, Dexter shifts his eyes back to me. “Are you ready?”
I nod, press my lips to his like a peck will keep him out of a psychosis for another thirty minutes, then pivot on my heels and race toward the manor. With my body aching from the naughty activities Dexter and I undertook at the motel, my hobble toward the large residential property hidden by a thick forest is more convincing of the victim I’m meant to be playing. It reminds me of the times I ran and hid from my father in the thick scrub that surrounded our family ranch. It wasn’t brimming with trees wide enough to hide the forest men my father always warned me about. It was merely overgrown because my father cared more about watching sports and drinking than maintaining the property he inherited. But I always loved the freshness of the air out there.
It didn’t smell like death like my bedroom.
It didn’t matter how many times I cleaned my room, it always smelled disgusting.
