Page 29 of Rot

I shut the front door, leaned my back against it, and let out another sigh. Kicking off my shoes, I went to the stairs and headed up. Elias’s door was closed, meaning he was in there—meaning he was busy sleeping or pretending to sleep, and that meant he hadn’t seen the kiss.

Just as well, I supposed. It was nothing spectacular. Nothing to write home about.

Turning toward my room, I yawned and crawled into bed. I’d take off my makeup in the morning. Right now, I was pretty tired. Who knew pretending to have fun with Jordan would be so exhausting?

My eyes closed, and sleep took over. A strange dream plagued my mind, although it was more a memory than a dream.

Chapter Nine

I sat on the bed with my grandfather, staring at him. It was a king-sized bed, so there was ample room. He lay like a log in the middle, his gray-haired head resting on a fluffy pillow. His eyes were closed, his cheeks gaunt—but that was from age. Having me, raising me, had aged my grandparents, or so my grandmother had always said.

I was fourteen years old, old enough to know that my grandfather was dead.

His chest wasn’t rising and falling. It hadn’t for a long time. People said you looked peaceful in death, and as I gazed at my grandfather, I supposed they were right. I’d never seen his features so relaxed, his face without a stern, no-nonsense expression. He’d spent his time frowning at me, trying to put the fear of God in me or something.

My grandmother, as much as I hated that woman, knew how to handle me and the rot in me a lot better.

I couldn’t say how long I sat there, staring at him, but it was a while. I reached out and touched his cheek, feeling the coldness of his skin. Eh, I supposed it was more like room temperature instead of cold, but still; the last thing you expected to feel when touching someone else was room temperature skin.

The air in the room smelled like piss, but I didn’t mind. He’d died and relieved himself, all his muscles having gone slack. I’d tried to move his arm once my grandmother had left the room, but he’d gone stiff sometime during the night. What was it they called that? Rigor mortis?

My grandmother was downstairs, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, which was just stupid. They’d come, inspect him, see he was long dead, and then call whoever handled the dead ones. He’d be zipped up in a black bag and carted off.

I wondered what he looked like, underneath it all. Past the skin. How long did it take organs to shrivel up? Were they still warm, since they were inside him, or had they grown cold, too? Questions I could never ask anyone, because my grandmother had taught me they were wrong.

Those were things the rot wondered, not normal girls. Sometimes, though, the rot won. The rot came out the victor. Try and pretend as I may, I was no normal girl. I never would be. That fact had set in quite early in my youth, separated me from my peers.

As I gazed at my dead grandfather’s corpse, my thoughts morphed, the rot digging deep. What would it feel like to take a knife and cut into him? Would the skin make a sound as it puckered and separated? Would it be like a hot knife cutting through butter, or would there be resistance?

Oh, how I wished I could play surgeon, if only for an hour. Just an hour. Sixty-minutes. It wouldn’t take me long to dive into him, to find his heart and hold it in my hands, to see what had made him tick. No, it wouldn’t take me long at all.

My ears heard people talking in the hall, and I slipped off the bed, going to stand in the corner, away from the body. Within a moment, my grandmother walked in, wearing her Sunday best, her blond hair pulled back in a tight clip.

She was busy telling the first responders, “My granddaughter found him this morning. We haven’t slept in the same room for years, so I have no idea how long he’s been like this.” Her hazel eyes flicked over to me as the men swarmed around the bed. One of them carried a little pack, but he set it down as he took my grandfather’s pulse.

Or his lack of one.

“I’m calling it,” one of the men spoke. He then radioed in.

The first responders didn’t so much as glance in my direction. My grandmother, on the other hand, couldn’t stop staring at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me not to ogle my grandfather’s corpse so much; it’d make it obvious that something was wrong with me.

So, to try to be a good girl, I looked away and tried to seem sad about it. A normal girl would be sad, right? Maybe even cry. But faking tears was something I’d never mastered, as much as my grandmother had advised me to.

No tears fell from my eyes, not ever. I’d never wanted to cry. Not when I got hurt in gym class. Not when I saw my grandfather’s corpse. Crying meant you felt pain or guilt or remorse, and the rot made sure I felt none of that.

A firm hand on my mouth drew me out of my deep sleep, waking me up to view a large shadow crowding over me in the darkness of the night. A low, menacing voice came from the figure, “I told you not to go on that date.”

Elias.

Ah, so he was here.

I said nothing, mostly because I could say nothing with his hand so tightly clamped around my mouth. He leaned over my bed, his wide frame radiating with anger. He went on, “Did you have fun? Did you have lots of fucking fun with Jordan Vito?” The way he hissed out Jordan’s name, it sounded like he really hated the fool.

He lowered his hand to my jaw, allowing me the grace to speak: “Why do you care if I had fun? Why do you care at all, Elias? Are you the only one that gets to fuck a Vito?” That was sure to set him off.

But that was good, because I wanted to set him off.

Elias said nothing right away. He instead crawled onto the bed, straddling me beneath the sheets. His top half bent down, his face lowering to mine. His breath came out hot, large, even breaths blooming across my face as his fingers dug into my jaw.

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