Dark Abyss by Kaitlyn O'Connor (top fiction books of all time txt) 📗

He hadn’t known what the hell to do when she offered her lips to kiss him. The only thing he could recall was the sudden realization that he wasn’t going to want to stop if he started … and a sense of panic, as if he was standing on the edge of bottomless pit and about to fall in to it.

“Shit! I didn’t know Roxanne fucked you up that bad!” Ian growled. “If I’d known you were just going to fuck this up for everybody, I wouldn’t have even considered letting you anywhere near her. I want a son before I’m too god damned old to want one anymore! Anna’s the first woman I’ve seen in years that even made me think about it.”

“Jesus! Give it a rest! I fucked up! Alright? I admit it. I’ll keep my distance.”

“You saying you’re out?”

Simon glanced at him sharply, but he didn’t have to think it over. “I didn’t say that.”

“She might not accept you anyway.”

“That’s my problem. If she doesn’t … I’ll deal with it.”

* * * *

Anna felt hellish when she woke up. For a few moments, she considered the possibility that she was coming down with something. Her head hurt and her nose was stuffy.

Unfortunately, she remembered everything by the time she’d finished her morning ritual. It was something of a relief, though, to discover that she could feel almost distanced from it as long as she kept pushing the memories back into her subconscious. Feeling oddly detached, she went to her living room and flipped on the media center and then headed into the kitchen to find something to eat.

Settling at her coffee table with a bowl of cereal, she began a search for a job, preferably something in research for an agricultural corporation.

Of course, she couldn’t leave Agri-corp until she’d finished her current project, but she felt like she was on the verge of tying it up. After all, it fit all the criteria. It might taste like shit, but it was food and it would grow in seawater contaminated soil.

Well, not shit, fortunately—but fishy.

She stopped abruptly with a spoonful of cereal halfway to her mouth, considering that. She’d been trying to find recipes that would mask the taste, but what if she went with it?

Grabbing her bowl, she headed into the kitchen again, dropped the half-eaten bowl of cereal in the sink and took out a couple of her ‘fish’ veggies. When she’d sliced the eggplant shaped vegetables into thin, chip-like disks, she filled the sink with water and dropped the fruit in to soak in the hope that the water might leach some of the salt from it. Making a note of the time, she went back to her internet search and located three possibilities.

She wasn’t about to submit a resume until she’d thoroughly checked them out, but she decided to go check her new sprouts to see how the second batch was doing. Dismay and irritation flickered through her when she’d checked them. They’d hardly grown at all and she could see that a lot of the seed hadn’t even sprouted! After checking the water feeder, she decided maybe she’d put a little too much water to them, changed the rate of drip and the setting on the grow light and headed back inside.

Her resume needed updating, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes to do that. She hadn’t worked for anyone but Agri-corp. When she’d finished that, she went to work on a letter of resignation. After three attempts to come up with something that sounded reasonable and believable, she finally just cited personal reasons for her decision to move on.

It was liable to piss her father off if he read it. He’d have to know it was because she didn’t want anything to do with him either, but she couldn’t very well say she’d had a better offer somewhere else when she didn’t even know where she might be going.

Maybe, she thought as she headed back into the kitchen, she could rewrite it if someone responded to her resume.

She didn’t feel very hopeful about it, actually. She could claim to have successfully engineered a new food source, but if they checked it out ….

Shaking the thought, she took up the floating disks and put them in a colander to drip while she prepared a pan with oil and mixed batter in a bowl. Everything tasted better fried, to her mind. Frying it was bound to improve the taste! She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of that before!

Because she’d been focused on creating highly nutritious meals when she should’ve been thinking taste! It wasn’t going to feed the starving masses if they couldn’t stomach it!

She ended up having to blot the chips to get the excess water out, but the moment they started frying a perfectly lovely aroma began to waft from the cooking food.

Feeling a good deal more hopeful, she finished the batch, blotted the excess oil from it, took a deep breath, and bit into one.

She chewed experimentally for a moment and smiled with pleasure. “It’s good,” she muttered to herself, surprised but tremendously relieved. “It’s actually good! Tastes like some kind of exotic seafood.”

She wished that hadn’t popped into her mind. Her enjoyment took a nosedive, but she was able to dismiss it as she carried her chips into the living area and plopped down to see what she could find out about the companies she was considering.

It flickered through her mind to try to come up with a name for the vegetable—besides franken-veggie, as her peers referred to