Famished by Meghan O'Flynn (latest ebook reader .TXT) đź“•
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- Author: Meghan O'Flynn
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“Did they agree to die?”
A muffled choking sound.
Choke, fucker.
“I didn’t kill anyone!”
“It’s all over, Jimmy. Let’s work together, and I’ll make sure your sexual escapades don’t get broadcast all over the prison mess hall. Deal?”
“No! I didn’t do anything! I mean, I didn’t kill them! You have to believe me!”
“Too late for that, Jimmy. Enjoy prison.”
He’d let Fredricks sweat and come back later for his confession.
The bell rang again. The white shag rug was too soft under Noelle’s bare feet, as if toying with her, teasing her with nice comforting things while she waded through the knowledge that she had almost been the next dead girl on the news.
“Noelle, open up!” Hannah’s voice. Noelle had called her after Thomas had left this morning because she hadn’t wanted to be alone. Now the pine door to her apartment seemed bigger than usual, alien.
The door squealed as Noelle pulled on the knob.
“I’m so glad you’re okay!” Hannah threw her arms around her. “I can’t believe this.”
“Me either. It’s just…” She really didn’t want to talk about it. Not now. Noelle stepped back, her jaw dropping when she saw Hannah’s face. “What happened to your hair?”
Hannah ran a hand through her blond waves. “Do you like it?” She sounded like she wasn’t sure about it, or maybe she was just unsure of Noelle’s reaction.
“I love it. Now we can be twins.”
Hannah’s face lit up. “I don’t have the boobs.”
“Now that you landed a rich dude, you can inflate those puppies.”
Hannah shrugged. “Eh, Dominic likes them the way they are.”
They sat on the loveseat bought with her late father’s money, the very least he could contribute to her life. Noelle suddenly wondered if things would have been different if he were still alive. Would she have called him to tell him she was okay? What would he have done besides vow litigation and his firm’s involvement in a high profile case? At least she had Thomas. He had stayed with her all night, holding her and apologizing for suggesting she go out with Jim. He’d probably never forgive himself. She understood that feeling.
Noelle’s stomach knotted. “I still feel like an idiot,” she whispered.
“Me too. To think that Jim might have killed Jake, that I might have played a part in that is just…” Hannah leaned back against the couch. “But there’s no way we could have known. That guy fooled everybody. I used to get nervous around him, and I still didn’t suspect that he was…you know…that kind of crazy. And if Dominic hired him, he must have been a damn good faker because Dominic’s no fool.”
“It’s one thing to see someone in a job interview and another to be in the same room over and over again and just not see it. I’m so stupid.”
Hannah searched Noelle’s eyes. “You’re smarter than you think. Give yourself some credit; everyone else does. Hell, Dominic was shocked when he found out. Said you had a good head on your shoulders and that Jim must have been a really good faker.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
Had Dominic really said that?
“Plus, there’s the way you strong-armed your way out of there. Like a freaking kickboxer.”
Noelle almost smiled. “It was kinda badass.” Thomas had compared her to Wonder Woman. “Hopefully I never have to do it again, though I think Thomas might be sticking around. So no more serial killer dates for me.”
“He’s not a no-good murdering psycho, is he?”
Noelle laughed. “I sure as hell hope not. He’d have a hard time explaining his comic book fascination to other inmates. Same with that cat.”
“Thomas might have weird hobbies, but at least he was honest about them. He put his weirdness right up-front. It’s scary how Jim seemed so normal. But he must have just pretended so he could fit in.”
Noelle shrugged. “Even psychos need to have a life, I guess.”
Hannah squeezed her hand. “Everybody does.”
No out, no help, no hope. Robert’s will to fight had disappeared the first day he’d begged his attorney to believe him.
“I’m not sure what to tell you,” the troll of a man had said. “The evidence is pretty compelling. You don’t have one single alibi. Pleading guilty should at least make the process easier on you.”
“I didn’t do anything!” He’d had to clasp his hands together to avoid grabbing his attorney and shaking the shit out of him.
“You did enough to kill any sympathy a jury might have had.” The lawyer had tapped his foot, obviously eager to be dismissed and on to a case he had a chance of winning.
“But I didn’t kill anyone! How can that not matter?” It was more critical than a lifelong prison sentence. It was a matter of eternity, of salvation versus writhing on a blistering bed of coals.
If I can’t get out soon, I will never see her again.
If I stay in here, I am doomed to Hell.
The lawyer had merely shrugged his meaty shoulders. “Consider pleading guilty. It’s your best bet.” Because you’re bad, Robert. His innocence was irrelevant. Any attorney he hired would see his depravity and seek to punish him.
That had been the beginning of the end. Each day his panic was replaced by a hopelessness that wound itself around his chest, growing tighter and tighter as days turned to nights and back to days again. His face itched from the dark hair that crawled across his lower jaw. There was no mirror in his cell, but he knew his eyes looked like hollow orbs, blank and eerily unexpressive as if the life had been sucked right out of him.
And it had.
He left his food tray on the floor of his cell, untouched. He spent his days sitting silently on the cot, searching the cinderblock wall for some answer to his plight, refusing to speak to another soul.
But he listened. He had always listened. And the more he ignored the world that had forsaken him, the louder the voices became.
And into the gates of Hell, the sinners of the world shall pass. A woman from his father’s church whispered the words into his ear, her beautiful blond locks shimmering against his cheek, awakening the lust in his belly.
Those whose hearts are pure are temples of the Holy Spirit. He saw Mindy Jacobs writhing underneath him, her eyes vacant, St. Lucy’s words crackling from her lips with the hiss of hellfire.
He stood in the dark and pulled the sheet from his bed.
Only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love. And it was the girl in the field, her scrawny hip bones sharp under his hands as he threw her over a hay bale and forced himself into her, her insides rupturing, his thighs covered in her blood.
He looped the sheet around the pipe in the ceiling and tied a smaller loop close enough that his feet would not touch the ground when it was time.
And your sins will follow you, casting you down away from those who sought the love of Jesus Christ, your immortal soul to be punished, writhing in agony for all eternity, for the sins of the flesh you cannot escape. Hannah came to him now, his Hannah, smiling as he climbed the bars to the top of the cell. He gripped the pipe with one hand and slid his head through the knotted cotton.
Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us. All of them chorused in unison, each lustful apparition, pleased with his penance as they’d never been pleased before. He deserved this. Always had. He closed his eyes and released himself into the abyss. Tightness seared his throat, and he lurched, his feverish fingers clawing at the noose as his feet kicked air. A rush of blood blistered his face as his airway constricted—demons preparing him for the heat of eternity.
He opened his eyes. Below him, his father smiled knowingly as Robert swung from the hanging tree in front of his childhood home, a final sunset blazing red in the distance like the blood that had been spilled there long before his time. The crimson orb sank silently into darkness. Above him, pinpricks of light twinkled into existence and swelled until he was blinded by
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