Suspended In Dusk Read Online Free

in very little time.”
    “You were six?”
    “I was probably eight by the time he started that.”
    He says it like that makes it somehow better than if he were six. “What a fucking…”
    “He ruled my mum and me, did what he liked to us. My mum should have protected me, but she was trapped too. He would beat her if she tried to intervene. Beat me if I threatened to tell. We lived in terror. When I was fourteen I told mum we had to go, we had to run away. She said we had no money, where would we go?”
    “There are shelters,” I start to say and Jake nods again.
    “Of course, but that wasn’t the point. You know what she said to me, after years of beatings and sexual assaults?”
    I sigh and shake my head. “She told you she loved him.”
    “Yep. So I ran away. I have no idea what they’re doing now. He could have killed her for all I know. I haven’t spoken a word to her since I left. I was on the street at first, then in shelters and care. A foster home took me in when I was sixteen and I was a bastard, doing all the things my mum did and worse, acting like her boyfriends, thinking I was different.”
    “You’re nothing like that,” I say. “You’re amazing.”
    He smiles, but it’s not enough to chase away the melancholy this time. “My foster mother is a lady called Glenda Armstrong and she fixed me up. Wouldn’t take my shit, made me finish school. I was lucky. She gave me direction. I got a job, turned myself around. Twenty-five now, finally feeling like I’ve got it somewhere near together. And then I met you. For the first time I feel something real, instead of just angry fucking because I thought that’s all I deserved.” His tears have stopped and there’s anger in his eyes.
    “You should be so proud of where you’ve come, given where you started,” I tell him.
    “But I’m scared and you mean a lot to me and that’s why it’s so hard for me to be intimate, emotional. It’s always been an act before, an act of defiance more than anything else, a show of power. But with you, I have no guard and it’s terrifying.”
    I stand, move around to hug him and kiss his hair. “I’m honoured,” I whisper. “I’ll never hurt you.”
    “I know.”
    The shadows of all the people who have died with me mask my vision, make Jake a distant blur. “So many wonderful people die every day, struck down by disease or age,” I say. “And yet fuckers like that Vic get to live.”
    Jake nods against my chest. “There’s no justice in the world. We have to hang on to our luck when we find it, because that’s all there is.”
     
    * * *
     
    After nearly a week of no deaths we get two in a day. The darkness wells inside me, that delicious blackness I can’t help but gather. Sometimes I think it’s going to overwhelm me, but there’s always room for more. The journey home is muffled by the circling presence of their passing.
    Jake comes around not long after I get home, bag of shopping in hand. “I’m going to make us a great dinner tonight. Special recipe! Something Glenda taught me.”
    “Great! I’m glad we’re having a good dinner. I have to go away for a couple of days.”
    “That’s sudden.” His brow is creased in concern and it breaks my heart a little.
    “There’s a two-day course Claire Moyer was supposed to go on, but she’s come down with something. Someone needs to go. It’s about a new drug administration practice, and they asked if I’d step in. I head off early in the morning to Newcastle. I’ll be away overnight, back by dinnertime the next day. Sorry.”
    He smiles. “Don’t apologise. Work is work. Let’s enjoy tonight then, eh? Maybe you can lend me your key when you leave and I can get my own cut? Then I can have something ready for when you get back on Thursday?”
    I raise my eyebrows, give him a crooked smile. “Your own key?”
    “If you think…”
    I sweep him into a hug. “Of course I think. I’d love that.”
     
    * * *
     
    It took a lot of