Gathering Dark by Candice Fox (best life changing books txt) 📕

I’ll fucking kill you, bitch.

She’d known then that she needed this, that without Goren’s treatment she’d never sleep, never be able to escape the trauma of her day. Sometimes it was her only source of release, distraction. To let go, to have someone take her away from herself without the guilt or awkwardness of mutual affection. She paid the money, he opened the door to sweet relief. She left, feeling warm and light and tired. It was a good system.

“I want to play the game,” she told Goren. Jessica looked behind her and saw a wry smile on his face as he knelt on the ottoman at her back.

“It’s been a while,” he said.

“I know.”

“Will you be in charge, or will I?”

“You,” she said.

Jessica thought she saw the whisper of some kind of excitement run through him, but it was probably just an act. This is what he did, and the women and men who came here would be looking and hoping for that same excitement, dreading the slightest slump of his shoulders or look of reluctance in his eyes. Everyone wanted to be desired. Yearned for. She stood while he stripped her gently, running his hands up her ribs as he pulled off her top. He went to the large dresser and took a blindfold, slipped it expertly across her eyes, and tied it. He led her to a room that was warmer and somehow felt smaller, even in the dark. She had been in this room before, knew the red walls and dark velvet curtains. Sometimes it had been her fitting his ankles into thick leather straps on the vertical table, him behind the blindfold. The big table, she knew, could be adjusted into a range of positions with the flick of little gold switches.

As was his routine, he stood her against the table and pulled the straps tight on her ankles, then worked the belt at her hips extra tight, as she liked. Jessica could feel the tension falling away from her muscles immediately. The simple pull of the straps took the weight of her worry over the Harbour/Orlov case, her guilt about the boy next door, the fury and hatred boiling inside her for Wallert and her colleagues.

The strap across her ribs was her favorite. It constricted her breathing just slightly and forced her to focus on her own heartbeat. Goren guided her left wrist into place and pulled the strap tight there. She could feel his breath on her face. His crotch, hard and warm against her own. Intrusions attempted to break through the rapidly falling relaxation. A distant siren. The screech of tires. She gave a sigh that pulled the strap around her ribs tight as he guided her other hand into place.

Three car doors slamming nearby. Very nearby. At the front of the house. Jessica felt him pause. They both waited.

“It’s nothing,” he said, looping the strap over her right wrist.

A pounding at the door, three thumps, a noise she had heard a million times.

“Police! Open up!”

“Oh, shit,” they said in unison. He let go. Jessica reached out, expected to find him there, bent, unstrapping her. Nothing. She swung wildly. Felt only vacant air. His footsteps in the hall, heavy, running. The cold emptiness of losing him sliced through her. She ripped off the blindfold. He was gone.

“Goren! Goren! Fuck!” She was panting. Near screaming. “Come back! Come back! Don’t leave me like this!”

She knew it was no use. Jessica began frantically working her trapped wrist free of the buckle when she heard the downstairs door slam open.

BLAIR

A punch to the back of the head. Effective. Dulling. My face smacked against the chipped linoleum. My brain told me to sleep. Concussion slipping over me like a hood. A voice pushed through—my own voice, the words I’d spoken to hundreds of kids who’d fallen out of trees or down cliffs, had been pulled from crushed vehicles, were sinking into fever. Stay awake. Stay with me. Listen to the sound of my voice. He stood above me, one foot on either side of my ribs. In a single, surging move, giving it everything I had, I sprang upward, toppled him into the wall and was immediately wrapped in his embrace. We wrestled in the kitchen, clawing, snarling. I heard Hugh Jackman’s ice cream container hit the floor along with a set of knives, a coffee mug, papers. I palmed at my attacker’s face, used the momentum to shift around him, felt the drywall crunch as he smashed me into an embrace again.

“Get off me! Get the fuck off me!”

The howling, snapping words were unrecognizable, even as they flew from my lips. A dog that never barks, never growls, suddenly backed into a corner. We tumbled into the counter. I grabbed what came under my hand, a jar of sugar I kept for guests’ coffee, and smashed it against the top of his head.

It was enough. He slumped sideways in the dark. I danced past him, sprinted across the living room, and threw myself at the door, unlocking it with slippery, shaking hands.

I ran out into the night and didn’t look back.

JESSICA

Footsteps on the stairs. Two men. Jessica’s hands were numb, unusable, all the blood in her body rushing to her heart and her head. She managed to get the buckles at her wrist, ribs, and waist undone. But as she reached for the straps at her ankles the door to the room burst open. She sank into a crouch to protect her naked body, the table too close at her back, tipping her forward so that she had to steady herself against the floor with one hand. The buckles cut into the front of her ankles, painful, a distraction she tried to savor as she felt their eyes wander over her.

“Police! Let me see your hands!”

“I can’t,” Jessica cradled her breasts with one arm, her face turned away