The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  That first kiss…oh, it goes on and on. It’s sweet, it’s sexy. It’s everything she ever dreamed it would be all those nights she waited for Cal to come home, the nights her hands crept between her legs and she imagined Tony’s hands on her while she used her own to make herself come. In fact, it’s even better because it’s real. At last, it’s all real.

  Tony’s bigger than she is, but though he tries to back off, she goes after him. She climbs him like a tree so he has to hold onto her. It’s either that or let her fall. They don’t fuck that first time, there in the parking lot, even though she feels how hard he is. She does, however, almost have an orgasm when he cups her breast and thumbs the nipple. When his thigh nudges between hers. Almost, not quite, but it’s enough to make her back off with her mouth still wet from his kiss.

  He tries to say something, but she shakes her head and puts her fingers to his lips. She gets in her car and drives away. She goes home and fucks her husband so fiercely she’s sure he’ll have to notice how guilty she feels, until she realizes she doesn’t feel guilty at all.

  * * *

  That was how it began.

  Marnie thought of all those things now as she spread out in the king-sized bed that had always seemed too small with Tony in it lying diagonally. She thought of those days when her heart had leaped at the sight of him walking through the glass front doors, and of that first kiss. She thought of the late-night conversations that came after. The afternoons spent in motel rooms, smelling Tony on her skin when she left him to go home. It had all started out as lust and somehow had become something Tony’d convinced her was love.

  Now he was dead in the backyard, and she’d done it. She hadn’t just left him out in the storm to die, which would’ve been bad enough. No, Marnie had actually finished the job. She’d killed him. As she’d done after that first kiss, she turned the memory over and over in her mind and waited to feel guilty about it. And, as with that first kiss and all the ones that had come after it…she didn’t.

  8

  There had been pain. Now there was not. There was darkness, and the smell of something bad that made him cough and cough again. Tony tried to turn his head and couldn’t. Something was holding him down.

  There was an ache in his lungs that travelled up the back of his throat and in his sinuses. It pushed against the backs of his eyes with a dull throb, but it wasn’t as bad as the headaches he got every spring and fall when his allergies to pollen and mold kicked in. Another cough forced its way out his throat. The rasp pushed at his eardrums, which popped. Again, no pain. Just a dull sense of pressure.

  He tried to move his hands and found he could curl his fingers against something hard and rough. Concrete? Bricks? Pieces of something heavy pinned him, but if he shifted his muscles in small, controlled motions, he could turn himself slowly from his back onto his side. Then a little more until he could push up on his hands and knees and shake away whatever had been holding him tight to the ground.

  Tony shoved his way out of the rubble. He shook his head. Something wet and sticky covered him; he put his hand to the back of his head and it came away red. Blood. His blood. It made sense, sort of, even if nothing else did. Something had happened to his head. Something had made him bleed. Something had covered him in chunks of brick and board and concrete from the ruined barn in front of him.

  His Mustang was destroyed.

  One foot in front of the other, that’s how he’d learned to walk as a toddler and yet couldn’t seem to manage that simple action now. One foot. The other wouldn’t move unless he focused all his attention on it, and even then it dragged. He fell forward and hit the ground with his face. He’d forgotten to hold out his hands to catch his fall.

  He crawled a little bit until his feet dug again into the ground and he could bend his legs, clutch at the earth with his fingers, press with his palms. Get to his feet, gain his balance. He lurched forward. When he fell again, his head hit the edge of the Mustang’s bumper.

  It should’ve hurt, but it didn’t. He heard the clang of his skull on the metal, and it dimmed his vision. Made him cough again. He turned his head and spat thick, dark fluid tinged with red. It smelled bad, like spoiled meat. Tony lay in the gravel for a while as the sun rose overhead and beat down on him. It heated the metal of the car, and after awhile he could feel it on his hand and the arm pressed against it, but though when he took his hand away it had gone an angry, blistered red, it still didn’t hurt.

  Slowly, the night of the storm came back to him. There’d been wind. Tornado. That explained the ruin of the barn, his beloved car flipped onto its roof. It explained the blood and broken teeth his tongue now explored.

  Marnie.

  He needed to make sure she was all right. The baby too. The thought of his woman and child got him back onto his feet. Balance was harder this time. He held out his hands to keep himself from toppling over, and still the ground threatened to come up and smack him in the face again. Still the sky tried to hammer him.

  Somehow, he made it across the yard without stumbling over the pile of debris he’d come out of. To the back porch, each of the four steps a challenge he met by stubborn perseverance. Splinters gouged his palms as he grabbed at the railing to heave himself up. The wounds they left didn’t hurt any more than anything else had.

  After everything he’d managed, the door was too much. The handle slipped through fingers that refused to curl all the way around it. He tried again. His nails left runners of white in the dark green paint he could remember buying at the hardware store. He could remember painting that door, how he’d kept his hair off his face with a red bandanna. Marnie had brought him a cold Arnold Palmer, and he’d kissed her right there until she wriggled and laughed, shooing him back to work.

  Happy.

  That’s what he’d been, painting this door that now wanted to keep him out of the house hiding the woman he loved. Happy he’d been, drinking the tea and lemonade, ice cubes clinking in the glass, the taste of Marnie on his tongue sweeter than the drink. Happy with her and this place and this house and his life.

  Tony let the weight of himself push him to his knees. Forehead against the green paint. Left a red stain, not white. Red and brown and grey. He coughed, spitting. He tasted something rotten. He pressed his head into the wood and felt no give, not even when he let the weight of his thoughts tip his head back so he could slam it forward again against the wood. It didn’t chip or break. The door didn’t open. The paint flaked a bit, and when he put his fingertips to his forehead they came away flecked with dark green as well as red.

  The sun went high. The sun dropped low. The night came with darkness, and Tony fumbled again with the doorknob until finally his fingers curled just right and tugged with just the right amount of strength.

  The door opened.

  He went inside.

  9

  When the bed dipped, Marnie woke. She knew that shift and shuffle of bedclothes, the press of a weight on the mattress. She knew that soft sigh, of a man trying hard not to wake her but not trying hard enough.

  The smell was all wrong, though. Tony came to bed smelling of soap and sometimes the aftershave she’d once adored but now could barely stand. Not this time. Now her nose caught hints of copper, of turned earth. Brick dust. Sweat. And under it all, that sweet, light fragrance that had so tantalized her the day before.

  It was delicious.

  Her sleepy eyes wouldn’t open — was this a dream? It had to be, because for the past nine months, since the day she’d looked down at that plastic stick with its two pink lines, and truthfully even before that, everything about Tony had begun to disgust her. The way he chewed his food, the hairs he left in the bathroom sink, the clickety-snip of his toenails when he clipped them. The smile that once turned her inside out now only turned her stomach.

  But this, the familiar stroke of his fingers over her thigh, the warmth of his belly and chest against her back, these sensations sent slow, curling heat all through her. When his hand moved