Page 45 of Price of Angels

“It isn’t your fault that you’re full of sin, Holly,” he told her. “You’re a woman now, and your body was designed by Lucifer to draw the evil out of men.”

And then he climbed over her.

He left her tied, after, when he redressed and went to greet his bible study group.

Holly grew exhausted and hungry, waiting, as the shadows lengthened across the ceiling. Her hands had lost all feeling hours ago. Her arms quivered and crawled with awful sensations, the nerves clamping against this constant strain. She dozed. Or maybe she blacked out.

But then there were footsteps coming up the stairs, many sets of them. And Abraham came into the room followed by the men from the bible study. They all crowded inside, bunched in the corners, all of them staring down at her nakedness.

One after the other they climbed up to settle between her thighs.

She closed her eyes and thought of the woods, of the birds, of the deer, of the flowers scattered across her mother’s unmarked grave.

“Holly. Oh, Holly, Holly, Holly!”

Dewey Jessup was her third or fourth cousin. The nephew of some step-something-or-other, a chain of relation Abraham had explained to her while she was drawn deep inside herself, and not listening. He was skinny, and he had clammy, pale skin, and his head was too big for his narrow neck, and his ears should have been pinned back when he was a boy.

He was a virgin the first time he came to join the bible study group, and he’d fumbled and blushed the first time Abraham had urged him up on the bed and given him instructions. Ever since, he’d been fascinated, obsessed, almost rabid in his need, awkward and clumsy still.

“Oh, Holly,” he groaned, fingers digging into her hips as he gave one last thrust and spilled himself inside her. The orgasm stiffened him all over, locked his hands on her hipbones, drove him against her and held him there, still, quivering as the pulses overtook him.

Then he relaxed, his shoulders slumping, so his sunken chest seemed to cave in even farther. He passed his clammy hands up the soft skin of her belly.

“Thank you, Holly.” He lay down on top of her, most of his weight on the bed, his head cushioned on her breasts. “What you give me…it’s so special. Thank you, thank you.”

Holly stared at the ceiling, silent.

“Holly,” Dewey said. He petted her belly, her breasts.

“Hurry up, boy,” one of the others said, impatient. The room was mostly dark, save for the lamp burning on the nightstand. The men were all the same, a blur to her. Only Abraham, Jacob, and Dewey were more than cocks and hands.

“I want to be with you all the time,” Dewey continued, oblivious. “Holly…will you…will you marry me?”

“You’re lucky, just damn lucky is all,” Abraham told her, “that some sweet boy wants to marry you. Wants to give you his name.”

But it’s the same as my name, she thought to herself.

And as her head was forced to the side, and her father leaned over her, she was forced to watch what happened to her in the dressing table mirror.

“It wasn’t a real wedding,” Holly explained, taking another long gulp of Crown and dabbing the amber droplets off her lips with the back of her hand. “Obviously. There wasn’t a preacher for miles in those fucking backwoods.”

It was the first time Michael had heard her cuss. The alcohol was loosening her up, allowing the emotion to shine through, glimmering in her eyes like fever.

Her smile was more of a sneer, lips drawn back hard with pain. “My father presided. In the kitchen. Pronounced us man and wife.”

Michael took the bottle from her, and took a long pull from it himself. The rim was slick with what had been left of her lipstick. He hated the awful taste of the Crown, but he needed some fortifying at this point.

“Your own cousin,” he said, the words brittle with his closely-reined fury. He ground his molars together and passed the bottle back when she reached for it.

“Yeah,” she said, sipping. Her eyes lifted to his, full of misery. “You’re wondering why I never ran away,” she said.

Michael didn’t answer. Yeah, he’d been wondering. But at the same time, he understood how someone who’d been raised amid such violence would think there was no escaping. She might not have even conceived of a world in which there was anything besides slapping and raping and ropes tying her to beds. Too often, the lifelong abused grew dead to the hideousness of their lives, or they blamed themselves for their treatment.

“I did run away,” Holly continued. “Once.”

It was when the mail came. Thank God for those long walks down the dirt track of the driveway to get the mail. If it weren’t for letters and bills, she wouldn’t know her own address, the town in which she lived, not even the state. Sometimes, she would hold an envelope to the sun and try to see the writing on the letters within, but never managed more than a word or two. Save the bible, the advertisement brochures for pest control companies and satellite TV installers were her only reading material, and she read those pamphlets front and back twice or three times on the walk back to the house.

On the day she bolted, she went for the mail early, the three men of the house all asleep in front of the rabbit-eared TV, the evangelical spiel on their only functional channel babbling away to itself. So Holly pulled on her threadbare jacket with the holes in the elbows and walked out into the sunshine to get the mail.

---