Never Let You Go (a modern fairytale) Read Online Free PDF Page B

With a weekend in West Virginia bearing down on her? She just didn’t have the energy for his abuse.
    “Maybe I should stay home, Jonah. I just don’t think I’m—”
    He crossed the room in a flash, standing before her with his hands on his hips. “You don’t want to spend time with me and our friends?”
    She leaned back on her hands to look up at him, crossing one finger over the other. “I do. Of course I do.”
    “Then what’s the problem?”
    She scrambled to think up a plausible explanation for not wanting to go to West Virginia. “Wouldn’t it be nice to go away together? Just you and me?”
    “Sounds boring as fuck,” he said, pulling a mashed-up pouch out of his back pocket, opening it up, and pinching a wad of brown tobacco between his fingers.
    She looked up at him, feeling her eyes flash with a rare show of hurt.
    “I don’t know why we’re together,” she mumbled, despising him. Despising herself more.
    Tucking the tobacco between his bottom lip and teeth, he grinned at her like a shit-eating baboon. “Because you’re sweet, Zelda. You take care of me. Hell, you suck cock better than any girl I ever met.”
    Much like Billy, her tormentor of old, Jonah was a bully. The only child of older and deeply devoted parents, he’d steamrollered them for most of his childhood and adolescence, from what Griselda could piece together. He’d been in trouble for petty crimes once or twice—defacing property and drunk and disorderly conduct, the stories of which he shared with pride—but his parents had always arranged for good lawyers, and Jonah had never served any time.
    Griselda had never met his mother and father—they’d passed away two years before she met Jonah—but when she met him, he’d just blown through the life savings they’d left him, and their house, on which he’d failed to pay two years’ worth of taxes, was being repossessed by the bank. He was very handsome and kept himself in good shape. His jokes were crude, which his friends from the cable company liked, and she had to admit that he could be charming, even though he was also self-centered and mean if he didn’t get his way. But when his hands weren’t slapping or grabbing her, they could be gentle and warm. And when he clasped her against his chest in the middle of the night, she could close her eyes and pretend it wasn’t him, lulled to sleep by the soothing whisper of his warm breath against her neck.
    Refusing to rise to the bait, she lowered her head and took it, accepting his ugly words and feeling just as dirty as he’d intended. She looked down at her knobby knees, barely covered by her oversize T-shirt.
    “Why do you make me say things like that to you?” he asked. “I tell you what . . . you’re contrary today, Zelda. Mrs. Hoity-Toity rubbing off on you?”
    She didn’t answer. She clenched her jaw, knowing what was coming.
    He grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her head up. “I asked you a question.”
    “I’m just tired.” She sighed, staring into his mean green eyes. He’d hit her if she didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear, and she wasn’t in the mood for extra pain tonight. Anticipating the trip to West Virginia was painful enough. “I-I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”
    “That’s better.” He nodded at her, smiling, easing his grip. “I feel better now. Don’t you feel better?”
    She nodded once, forcing her lips to tilt up.
    Jonah’s hands reached for his belt, the sound of the jangling buckle making her blood run cold as it always did. “You’re so beautiful, baby. You know what I said before? It was a compliment. You’re the best, baby. I mean it. The best. How about you—”
    Her stomach rolled just as his phone rang. Wincing with disappointment, Jonah zipped up his fly and took his phone out of his back pocket. His expression brightened immediately. “Shawn! We all set for tomorrow, cocksucker?”
    Griselda watched as Jonah pivoted and exited the room without