Famished - Meghan O'Flynn (learn to read books TXT) 📗

Radio silence. Static. Then the pillow was ripped from my hands.

His face was red, split by a flash of white teeth.

Panic tightened around my throat like a scarf. Run. But I was pinned beneath him.

“No, please—”

He put his mouth to my ear. “Shut the fuck up, you little slut. You’ve been coming on to me for years, and now you tell me that it’s wrong? That I don’t have a right to give you what you’ve been begging for?” Droplets of saliva clung to my cheek, hot and wet.

I am a slut. This is all my fault. “Please, I’m sorry, I—”

His hand smashed into the side of my face. My ears rang. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” It was the quiet, husky tone he’d once used with my mother, and it had made her sit motionless on the couch until he’d left.

I tried to stay still like she had; tried to focus through the wavering orange that had settled across my eyes. I felt my pants sliding over my thighs, but distantly, as if in someone else’s nightmare. He forced my legs apart with his knees. No. I kicked in a futile attempt at freedom.

“You wanted this. Don’t you ever fucking forget that.” He leaned close to me, his breath warm and putrid.

The world twisted and faded. He forced himself into me, and the hurt pounded through every part of my body, hot and sharp and raw until I was nothing but the pain. He laughed, and heat in my chest exploded into furious panic.

“Stop! No! I’m going to tell!” No! Shut up, Hannah! You’ll make it worse! I bit my tongue until I tasted blood.

“If you want them to die too, go ahead,” he whispered in my ear. “Just ask that bitch of a mother how her new husband is doing.”

“You killed mom’s—”

He sneered down at me. “You’d do well to keep that to yourself. Just knowing about it makes you an accessory. Between jail and death, I’d pick door number three.” He moved his hips. I felt like I was being ripped in two. “We will always be one, Hannah. I won’t ever let you go. And if you leave, I will find you. And I will fucking kill you.”

Numbness seeped in, where I once held only adoration. I floated outside my body near the ceiling, looking down at my prone figure draped in the angry profile of my father as he raped me, tearing the tapestry of trust and love and kindness that had taken my entire childhood to build. Blood-tinged semen dripped onto the bed. I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in but understood that help would not come, not now, not ever.

Nothing would ever be the same again. And it was all my fault.

I jerked upright, the air cutting like shards of ice into my sweat-covered skin. My shirt was soaked through. My teeth chattered.

The nightmares. I had thought they were over. I was wrong.

On the end table, the clock glowed three-fourteen.

I should go see my shrink again, maybe on Monday. But I had no words to describe my pain. And when I didn’t know what to say, Tammy would say something like, “Let it out. Openness leads to less difficulty over time.” Complete bullshit. There was no faster way to screw things up than to open your mouth.

Maybe I could tell Tammy about my mother leaving us for her boss, the dentist, the summer before I entered fourth grade. And about her husband’s death the following year from ingesting something he was allergic to, and how my mother never came back to visit, even when she didn’t have some mouth-poking, tooth-filling, wrinkly man to climb on top of. Maybe I could tell her how I had retreated to my father’s room, wanting to ease his heartache. How some days he seemed happy, and I rejoiced as if finally there was something I could do correctly. But what would she say to what came after?

The night he put his hand on my thigh, I had not resisted. When his mouth found mine, I had brushed aside the nervous tingling at the base of my skull and reminded myself that he was the only one who believed I was worth anything. When his fingers parted me gently, I wasn’t sure it was wrong. It felt weird, yet somehow nice. And as I lay naked and felt the searing, intense pain of him deep inside me, he had held me and whispered in my ear: “It’s okay, baby. Daddy’s here. Everything is okay.”

I had believed him, from elementary school and all through middle school, though to say that out loud now seemed insane. Even more so when I considered that the more often I found myself in his arms, the more I knew I was completely and totally in love, a notion that was not contradictory to what I’d been taught in rudimentary sex education classes. Sex was for people who loved one another. Check. Sex happened between people in committed relationships. Check. Sex needed to be based on trust. Check. It all made sense.

In the teacher’s defense, it was unlikely she suspected anyone in the class would be fucking her own father.

It was great until it wasn’t. Sometime in high school, awareness crept up on me like cold centipedes on my arms, a million tiny legs groping me. It was in the way he avoided hugging me in public like other fathers did. The way he hid the cordless phone in his pocket and never let me answer it. The way he sometimes called out my mother’s name when he came.

I knew there were legal penalties for adults who engaged in sexual activities with minors, but I also knew I was already in too deep. It was too late to go back.

I was not normal and never would be. I loved him too much. And I had to remain silent, or he would end up in jail, and I would never see him again. At some point, panic gave way to dread that settled in my chest like a stone, growing heavier with each passing day until I knew it would crush my lungs.

And then I talked. It was such a simple question he’d asked: “Hey, Hannah banana, what’s wrong?”

I could have said I was tired. That I was worried about a test. That I was on my fucking period. Anything. Instead, I sobbed into a pillow.

“You…we’re not supposed to—” I had choked on the words as if saying it out loud would somehow make it true. You’re not supposed to have sex with your daughter. It was applicable to everyone else in the world, but not to us.

Then radio silence. Static. And the pillow had been ripped from my hands.

Honesty gets you nowhere. Openness is fucking crazy.

Focus, Hannah. He’s not here. Not now.

I peeled myself out of bed, the wet top sheet still clinging to my skin. Every night home alone seemed worse than the one before it. Maybe tonight it was because of that electricity I’d felt when Jim’s fingers brushed against mine. Or maybe it was the knowledge that I was now completely and utterly alone. Vulnerable. Small. With no one to help me if he finally came sneaking in from the hallway with that awful hungry look on his face, lips peeled back in a sneer, eyes dark and glittering with excitement. Maybe he even knew about the baby.

Maybe he was pissed. More