Suddenly, Father Bryn’s dark eyes are before mine. He has crouched down to be on my punished level.
“I have tried to save you, but you appear to be insistent on not being saved. Not a word of contrition, not a sympathetic apology, nothing but impudence.” His eyes flick up to Thor above me. “There is one reason you should let her go," he says. "She's a masochist.”
“I am not!”
I lose the warmth and strength of Thor’s big arm as he releases me. I am forced to scramble to pull my jeans back up over my aching arse. Fuck. I can’t believe Bryn managed to talk me out of that, and right before I really started to enjoy it.
“I think you’re right,” he says, looking at me judgmentally. Like I’m the freak. Like I’m not a priest who lures young women to his abbey late at night. Like I’ve done something wrong.
“Well, get fucked,” I say. This is my one chance to run, and hotness aside, I’m going to take it. I dash away, the harsh fabric of my jeans rubbing against the welts on my arse, because of course my underwear didn’t manage to come all the way up while I was yanking it around and has instead bunched under my cheeks in a useless roll.
Either one of them could probably catch me in the first thirty seconds or so of running, but they’re too busy being smug and priestly and thinking they’ve come to some great revelation to realize that letting me go still means letting the hammer go too, duh.
I scurry into the night, through the bushes, and am to all intents and purposes, gone.
6
Anita
I wake up the next morning sore and hungry. It’s not a great combination. My second-hand mattress has never felt so uncomfortable before.
Stephanie hasn’t bothered me with her eviction threats today, but I’m sure she’ll stop by later to put me out on the street.
The supermarket is my favorite place to go shopping. And by shopping, I of course mean shoplifting, or more lately, scrounging. I’ve got a guy on the inside who hooks me up with stuff that would otherwise be thrown out. He’s cool and he’s kind of the reason I eat.
But I don’t see him when I first go in. Usually I know if he’s got something for me because he stacks the avocados sideways. The more avocados stacked sideways, the better the haul will be.
Today, all the avocados are stacked perfectly upright. Weird. It’s Tuesday, and that’s his day on. Craig never misses work. Ever. The guy is like old clockwork.
I go up to one of his friends. Wendy also always on Tuesdays. Wendy turns a blind eye more than most. She’s cool, but not as cool as Craig.
“Where’s Craig?”
“We don’t know. Never showed up for work since about a month ago.”
“How could it have been a month since I was here?”
She shrugs. I guess time has gotten away on me. Paying bills and getting food have kind of become oddly unimportant lately. I’ve been getting by on just whatever. Sometimes I forget to eat. I’m maintaining mass though, so I must be doing something right, or something quite wrong.
I leave the supermarket, though not without stealing a sweetie from the racks where they put sweeties to try to make you impulse buy them. It works on me too, just without the buying part.
Guess I’ve got an old guy to call on.
Craig lives in an old flat in the better part of the village. I think he bought it years ago, before he worked in the supermarket. When prices were a lot lower, and he had a lot more money. I’ve never had what you might call a full and proper conversation with Craig, but I always knew something had gone really bloody wrong in his life somewhere along the way.
Anyway, it’s nice old stone cottage with ivy clambering up the walls and a thatched roof. It's the sort of place people dream of having to call their own when they're not thinking about the upkeep of living in a biodegradable cottage. Though I guess, strictly speaking, everything is biodegradable if you wait long enough.
I knock on the door. There’s no response, so I let myself in. There's a key up on the ledge above the door around the back. He told me that once. Stephanie thinks he was hitting on me, but I think it was worse. I think he was really fucking lonely.
MAROW!
His cat is indoors, poor thing! The cat is not happy. Craig calls him Craig Junior. Craig Junior is a big un-neutered ginger tom with a face like a pancake and a yowl like an orgasmic banshee.
I feed the cat, because, well, only a psychopath wouldn’t feed the cat. I’m now worried about Craig. Seems like nobody has even noticed he’s missing. Fuck. What if he’s not missing? What if he's lying in one of these rooms? It doesn’t smell like someone has become dearly departed in here, but maybe the conditions are correct for a kind of mummification. I’ve heard that’s possible. Things just need to be the right kind of dry and you get perfectly preserved…