and plead and squeal like a stuck pig, and this is the line you’re drawing? No Percocet?”
Lydia tried to summon the euphoria the pills would bring. She’d read somewhere that if you thought about a food long enough, you wouldn’t want it anymore. You would trick yourself into thinking you’d already eaten it. This had never worked with donuts or hamburgers or French fries or— Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner.
“I could force the pills down your throat, but what would be the fun in that?” He stretched her legs wider apart with his knees. “I could put them somewhere else. Somewhere you could more easily absorb them into your system.” He took a deep breath and sighed it out. “What would that be like, I wonder? Would it be worth fucking you if I could use my cock to shove all of these pills up your fat ass?”
Lydia’s mind started to go blank. This was how it happened. Paul would push her and she would get too scared or too broken and she would just shut down.
His hand went to her thigh. His fingers drilled toward the bone. “Don’t you want the pain to go away?”
Lydia was too exhausted to cry out. She wanted him to get it over with—the punch, the jab, the slap, the electric cattle prod, the branding iron, the machete. She had seen what the masked man had done with the tools of his trade. She had seen what Paul’s father had done to Julia. She had experienced firsthand the type of torture Paul was capable of and she was certain that his role in the movies had been far from passive.
He was enjoying this. No matter what derogatory things he’d said, Paul was aroused by Lydia’s pain. She could feel the hard shaft of his prick when he leaned in close to gorge himself on her terror.
Lydia just prayed that she would be dead by the time he finally got around to raping her.
“New strategy.” Paul snatched the pill bottle off his leg. He placed it on the rolling table where he was keeping his tools. “I think you’re going to like this.”
Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner.
He stood in front of the metal shelves beside the computer. Her anxiety ramped back up, not because he was going to do something terrible and new but because he was going to mess up the order of the items on the shelves.
Apple Macintosh, dot-matrix printer, five-inch floppy disks, duping machine, disk burner.
They had to stay that way—in that exact order. No one could touch them.
Paul dragged over a step stool.
Lydia nearly cried with relief. They were safe. He was reaching up to the top shelf, past the equipment, past the floppy disks. He pulled down a stack of notebooks. He showed them to Lydia. Her relief dissipated.
Her father’s notebooks.
Paul said, “Your parents are quite the prolific letter-writers.” He sat down across from Lydia again. The notebooks were in his lap. A stack of letters she hadn’t noticed before were on top. He held up an envelope for Lydia to see.
Helen’s handwriting—precise and neat and so sorrowfully familiar.
“Poor, lonely Lydia. Your mother wrote you tons of letters over the years. Did you know that?” He shook his head. “Of course you didn’t know that. I told Helen I tried to get them to you, but you were homeless and living on the streets or you were in rehab but you checked yourself out before I could get to you.” He tossed the letters on the floor. “I actually felt bad every time Helen asked me if I’d heard back from you, because of course I had to tell her that you were still a fat, worthless junkie sucking cock for Oxy.”
His words had the opposite effect. Helen had written to her. There were dozens of letters in the pile. Her mother still cared. She hadn’t given up.
“Helen would’ve been a great grandmother to Dee.”
Dee. Lydia couldn’t even summon her face. She had lost all images of her daughter the second time Paul had electrocuted her with the cattle prod.
“I wonder if she’ll check out when Dee goes missing the same way she did after Julia was gone.” He looked up. “You wouldn’t remember this, but Claire was all alone after Julia.”
Lydia remembered it. She had been there.
“Every night, poor little Claire was all by herself in that big house on Boulevard listening to your worthless-piece-of-shit mother cry