Page 6 of Freaks
He studied me for a second, then his eyes went back to the road. He didn’t look at me again. “Sam. He lost a fuck load of money at poker last night. He’s seriously shitty. I’m just sayin.’ You oughta be careful when we get there. He’s already smacked Julia.”
Sam hitting his daughter was nothing new. He banished her to her room every time I came over, and I knew why. Just as he didn’t like seeing the bruises, cuts, scrapes and teeth marks on my body, he didn’t want anyone else seeing the marks he left on Julia’s body either. I didn’t doubt for a second that he whaled on her every night until he was so tired he couldn’t lift his own arm.
I turned and looked out of the window, leaving Peter hanging. What would I even say to him, anyway?
Thanks for the heads up?
Sure, I’ll be very careful.
Sure, I’ll obey Sam and give him absolutely everything he demands of me from the moment I step through the door?
I already did that. I was meek, and I was subservient, and no matter how hard the fat bastard slapped or kicked or thrust his cock inside me, I didn’t make a goddamn sound. It didn’t matter. Sam’s fucked up sexual proclivities didn’t end at girls forty years his junior. He liked them young, but he also liked them bleeding. He liked them crying. He liked to see the despair in their eyes, and at the end of the day, there was nothing I could do to hidethat.
The apartment was buzzing with a tense, uncomfortable silence when Peter ushered me through the door and closed it behind me, locking us inside. In the bar downstairs, numerous palms and fists slammed against tables, a chorus of muffled shouts and cries rumbling beneath my feet—the sound that usually accompanied a local sports team losing an important game. The commotion below did nothing to cut through the wall of deafening silence that filled the hallway I now stood in.
Looked like Peter’s warning had been legit. Sam definitely was in a bad mood. I could feel it radiating through the dry wall, plasterboard, the insulation, and a couple of layers of cheap matte paint from three rooms away.
Peter’s face, usually a deep tan from so much time spent outside running errands for Sam, was ashen. “Listen, Sera—”
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Peter. Really?Now?You’re going to suddenly develop a consciencenow?
I shook my head as I walked away from him, toward the door with the chipped paint on the right, at the end of the hallway. “Don’t sweat it, Peter. It’s okay. If I need you, I won’t shout.”
I could have looked back, but I didn’t. I already knew what frightened, spineless Peter looked like when he knew something bad was going to happen and he didn’t plan on doing anything about it. I knocked on Sam’s bedroom door—three small, timid taps.
From the other side of the door, the word, “Come.”
Sam did that a lot, ordering me to come. When he was inside me, it was his favorite command.‘Do it. Do it, you stupid bitch. And don’t fake it. I can tell when you fake it. Your pussy doesn’t grip my cock the way it would if you were having an orgasm.’
I hadn’t known it was possible to reach climax through sheer terror alone, but somehow I’d trained myself to do it. Mercifully, once he was ready to fuck me, usually after an hour of ‘toying’ with me, as he liked to call it, he didn’t last very long. His pride was insurmountable. He was a piece of shit rapist who forced himself on me twice a week, but he never wanted to come before I did, as if the orgasm he insisted I endure made whatever messed up bullshit he did to me okay.
It wasn’t okay. It was never okay. Before Sam, no one had ever made me climax before, so I had no idea how it was supposed to make you feel, but with him, it brought me no release. It didn’t make me feel good. When that searing, tingling surge of pure sensation hit me, I wanted to rip my own skin from my body. I wanted to cauterize my nerve endings and deaden every single one of them, so Sam Halloran could never make me betray myself so heinously again.
When I entered, Sam’s room was turned upside down. His bedside lamps were smashed on the floor. The garish piece of modern art he prized so greatly, worth well over thirty thousand dollars according to him, had been slashed, the canvas rent wide open like a yawning mouth, it’s frame shattered into pieces. The blue vase that had sat on top of Sam’s chest of drawers for the past year, always containing a bouquet of fresh flowers, was now in seven or eight pieces on the floor, and long stemmed red roses, stripped of their petals, had been trodden into the carpet. The glass coffee table, normally positioned in front of the flat screen TV, was upended and destroyed, and large shards of tempered, smoky grey glass glittered maliciously on the carpet, diamond-shaped and dangerous.
All those broken shards of glass needed was someone with enough imagination and grit to come along and transform them into knives.
I looked away.
I knew better than to open my mouth. Instead, I dropped my backpack at my feet and I dropped to my knees, sitting back on my heels and placing my hands on top of my thighs, bowing my head, assuming the position Sam told me I mustalwaysassume whenever I entered his domain.
I hadn’t even looked in Sam’s direction, where he perched on the end of his bed, wearing his maroon, silk dressing gown and his slip-on house shoes.
Shit. This wasn’t going to be good. I flared my nostrils and drew in a calming breath, closing my eyes.
“Well? Aren’t you...going to say…anything?” Sam snapped. His voice came out rough and slurred. He always drank before I arrived, but this was something else. Today, he was drunk, and from the stale, acrid stink that was hanging in the air, he’d also been smoking too. Didn’t smell like cigarettes, cigars, or weed. The scent was pungent, chemical-rich, and it bit at the back of my throat.
I shook my head. No, I wasn’t going to say anything.
“That’s rather rude. A man’s in obvious distress, and you’re not going to ask him if he’s all right?”
Sam wasn’t all right. He was fucked up and out of his goddamn mind, and any words that passed my lips right then were going to be wrong. If I asked him what the matter was, he’d strike me for being nosy. If I asked him if I could do anything to help him, he’d punch me in the face for being so stupid. If I told him everything was going to be okay, I’d be beaten within an inch of my life for being an uncaring little shit who didn’t take his problems seriously. There was no positive outcome here. I clenched my teeth together, tensed my shoulders, braced myself, and I did not say a single motherfucking word.
Sam’s top lip curled back, revealing his stained, jigsaw puzzle teeth. I saw his expression sour out of the corner of my eye, and it sent a frozen chill of panic skittering down my spine.
“Ungrateful little bitch,” he snarled. “After everything I’ve done for you and your family, you’d think I’d receive a little more respect.” He kicked out with his slippered foot, and his heel connected with my hip bone, unbalancing me, sending me sprawling onto the carpet. I let myself go limp. No sense in trying to stop myself from falling. That would only make him madder, so I laid there, my face pressing into the weft of the carpet, and I didn’t move an inch. I didn’t even blink.
“No point playing fucking dead. I already know you know,” Sam spat, getting to his feet. “I already know your piece of shit father must have told you.”
