Flicker (Defying Death Book 1)

by Courtney Houston

  “Mari…” He rolls my name around on his tongue. “That’s interesting.”

  “It is,” I agree with a little shrug.

  His intense gaze stays fixed on me as I punch the prices in on our archaic cash register. I shift my weight from foot to foot, fighting the urge to squirm under the attention.

  I ring up his items, hand him his change and say politely, “You have a good night.”

  “Actually,” he says, taking his bag and clearing his throat, “I’m looking for a hotel here in town.”

  I raise my brows, flicking my eyes to the motel sign, directly next to the one that says Gas.

  He shakes his head and manages a small smile. “Sorry, let me rephrase that. Who do I talk to about a room? I didn’t see an office or anything when I was pulling around.”

  I roll my eyes at that. Corey, the guy who’s working graveyard tonight over on the motel side, is god-awful at his job. Luckily I don’t normally have to work with him.

  “Let me call over there,” I offer. “Sometimes Corey steps out.”

  That was a very diplomatic way of phrasing it. Sometimes he’s there and sometimes he leaves without notice to go smoke weed in the shed around back. Sometimes he just goes to sleep and doesn’t answer the phone. And that’s during the day, when there are customers. Who knows what he does at night.

  The man inclines his head to me in acknowledgment of my words and then turns to look out the glass doors toward his car and the empty street.

  The phone rings several times before Corey finally deigns to answer it.

  “What?” he grumbles.

  “What if I was a customer, is that how you always answer the phone?” I can’t wait to tell Raymond, the owner and our boss. Seeing Corey get ripped a new one has become one of my favorite pastimes.

  “It says front desk, I knew it was you,” he says, his gruff voice heavy with sleep or pot, maybe both. “What did you want?”

  “There’s a guy here that wants a room,” I tell him. “Can I send him over or do I need to handle it?”

  “Go ahead and send him over,” Corey says. “Wouldn’t want to drag you away from whatever important cleaning task you have going on.”

  I almost point out that if I didn’t clean most of it would never get done, but I don’t want to fight with Corey right now. So instead, I just hang up.

  “Sir,” I call to the man.

  He turns toward me, a small grin tilting his lips upward. “Ian.”

  “Ian,” I nod, “if you go around to the side, there’s a small office. Corey will get you set up.”

  “Thanks,” he says, but doesn’t leave, just continues to pin me with his intense gaze. It’s almost like he’s trying to figure me out or can’t quite decide what to make of me.

  “Good night,” I say, in hopes to urge him along.

  He looks nice enough, but then again, you can’t really tell that much from a person by their appearance. Ted Bundy was handsome and charming too, and you see where that got dozens of women.

  “You too, Mary,” he says, backing up and hitting the door in his inattention.

  “Mari,” I correct automatically.

  “Right.” He fumbles with the door, pushing on it in vain. Just as I’m about to tell him he needs to pull not push, he yanks it open, almost sprinting out the door and to his car.

  Apparently, I’m a glutton for punishment. A few seconds after the front door shuts, I not so subtly lean toward the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of this stranger. Ian is sitting in the driver’s seat of his car staring straight ahead, fingers clutching the steering wheel. As if he can sense my gaze on him, he turns his head my way.

  Our eyes lock for a brief second before I jerk back, hiding behind the safety and familiarity of my register. I’m grateful he can’t see me right now as a furious blush creeps across my cheeks.

  ****

  Raymond, the owner and my boss, comes in to relieve me this morning.

  “Anything interesting happen?” he asks, as he logs into the register.

  “Oh yeah,” I say with exaggerated excitement. “I cleaned the sandwich case.”

  “You cleaned it the day before yesterday.”

  “Now it’s extra clean.” I bid him goodnight—well, good morning—and wave as I head out the door.

  As always, on my way home from work, I debate whether or not to actually go home. It would be so easy to keep walking and never look back. So easy to just leave this place without a backward glance. And as usual, guilt immediately follows the thought. If I left, what would happen to my dad? He wouldn’t be able to pay all the bills or afford groceries. It’s the only thing that keeps me here—the fear that something would happen to him and it would be my fault for leaving. Who am I to complain about the hand I was dealt? A lot of people have it much worse than I do. Knowing that doesn’t change a thing though. It doesn’t change my deep-seated need to flee this place.

  Before I know it, I’m standing on the front porch of my house. Apparently I’m not leaving today.

  My stomach sinks as I ascend the stairs, telling me to turn around and go while I still can. It happens every day, and I’ve learned to stop lingering on the porch deciding whether or not to go inside. There is always tomorrow, I chant to myself as I open the front door, I can always leave tomorrow.

  I won’t though. I know it, and the universe does too.

  The blue flickering of the TV is a telltale sign my father probably fell asleep in the living room again. I shut the front door quietly as to not wake him. It never proves beneficial to my end. I’m home a little later than normal, only a few minutes, though he rarely makes the distinction between minutes and hours. Something I had to learn the hard way.

  “Mari,” my father grumbles from the floor, limply rolling from his back to side. He was probably so drunk that he missed his chair, again, then wasn’t able to get up because he was so drunk. The never-ending story of his life.

  “Here, let me help you.” I rush to his side and try to help him back into the chair, but it’s pretty useless on my end. He’s mostly dead weight and I struggle to lift him the slightest bit.

  “Daddy, you’re okay.” I try to soothe him, but he jerks suddenly and flops out of my arms.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he booms, his deep voice slurred by the whiskey, as he wriggles like a June bug flipped on its back. At first I think he’s trying to get up, but then I realize he’s just trying to get away from me. “I’ve been waiting on you to get home for hours. You out whoring around like your mother?”

  I bristle at the assumption. Someone has to pay the bills around here. Lord knows it isn’t him. I resist the urge to shake my head or roll my eyes. That would only worsen his anger. While I don’t think he’d hit me, I am never willing to test that theory. I always seem to get the short stick when I decide to take a chance.

  “No, Daddy, I was working. I work the same schedule every week.”

  “You smell like men.” He sniffs my hair distastefully and roughly shoves me away, causing me to lose my balance and stumble backward into the wall. My father is a pillar of a man. His large arms that were once full of muscle from his days as a construction worker have lost their definition, but are still quite large. At six foot five, he stands over a foot taller than me, not to mention he easily outweighs me by a hundred pounds. I’m lucky the shove only knocked me into the wall. He could have just as easily tossed me across the room, even in his drunken state. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

  He’s sick, I tell myself and try to keep my lip from trembling in anger. He doesn’t mean it. I know that. I also don’t say what I want to. That it’s better Mom isn’t here to see how far he’s fallen, to see how much of a monster he’s become. Even the thought of her twists my gut painfully. There are times that I miss her so much it hurts, and then there are times when I’m glad she’s gone. Either way, she is not here and I am because someone has to make sure dad doesn’t drink himself into an early grave.

  Or I could
just leave and let him fend for himself, a nasty voice says in my head. It’s not the first time, or the second, or even the third time I’ve thought it. It’s constantly in the back of my mind, that I could just let him do what he’s going to do and allow things to unfold however they may. I’m not proud of it and the shame of even having those thoughts is one of the very reasons I stay, to atone for being so awful.

  “I smell like gasoline,” I remind him, backing away and giving him a wide berth as he climbs to his feet. “I work at a gas station.”

  Discreetly, I try to move the half-full bottle of Woodford from his table. He lunges forward, smacking my hand away, his balance surprisingly good for someone who was on the floor just minutes ago.

  “Get the fuck out of my face. I can’t stand to look at you,” he bellows, spit and stale whiskey flying through the space between us. I know better than to stay after I’ve been dismissed, especially when he’s already this worked up.

  I want to say something, anything really, to help lessen the constant resentment he spews at me. There is nothing to say, though, nothing that I haven’t said a million times before. Nothing that hasn’t been corrupted by life and the shitty way he handles his grief.

  I take a deep breath then mumble goodnight, duck my head and slip into my bedroom as quickly as possible. This is how it is almost every day. There are occasions that are few and far between when he sobers up enough to remember that I’m his daughter and that he might have loved me once. I don’t count on those times nor do I let myself wish for them. I have enough broken dreams and don’t need to add to them, not anymore.

  After stripping off my clothes, I slip into a pair of pajamas that used to be thick flannel. They’re so worn now that the softness is gone, so thin they’re almost see-through. In my bedside table, I keep a stash of things to eat, for nights when I can’t sneak past him to the kitchen, like tonight. I pull out a honey bun and a lukewarm can of diet soda, a dinner I’ve eaten more times than I can count. I’m surprised I don’t weight three hundred pounds with the amount of junk I eat, instead of the barely one-ten that I do.

  A door slams somewhere in the house, followed by a slew of profanities. Daddy is not happy at all. He’s storming up and down the house, ranting about how no one can do anything right. Or more specifically, how I can’t do anything right. It’s not really his fault, this hate he has toward me. He sees my mother every time he looks at me and it’s too much for him to handle. I’m the spitting image of her. From our auburn hair to our blue eyes, I could honestly be her twin. We even sound the same. At least I think we do, I haven’t heard her voice in a while, not since Dad disconnected her cell phone and her voicemail stopped working. I used to call it just to hear her when nights got rough. Then that was taken from me too.

  As always, I lie in my bed and close my eyes, letting the hollow feeling of sleep replace the stark loneliness that otherwise fills me.

  Continue reading for free with KU or buy on Amazon.

  http://amzn.to/2iBvMXc