Miss You Mad: a psychological romance novel

by Atkinson, Thea

  Contents

  Title Page

  Miss You Mad

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Miss You Mad

  Copyright 2009 Thea Atkinsoon

  Published 2015 by Thea Atkinson

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form electronic or otherwise without permission from the author.

  Try without the buy. Visit http://theaatkinson.com for more info

  Mine eye hath played the painter, and hath stell'd

  Thy beauty's form in the table of my heart;

  My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,

  And perspective it is best painter's art.

  William Shakespeare

  Death does strange things to such regular laws as physics. It stretches time out like a MackIntosh toffee bar. You only have seconds before you pass out, and you know it--your whole body knows it and shoots signals to your limbs, yet your mind takes a vacation. It draws those few seconds out into eternity. There's no black tunnel with a pinprick of white light. You don't think: oh my God; I'm going to die. At least not right away. At least I didn't. At least I'm not.

  What I am thinking about is Hannah. Her ripe, apple-sized breasts, how she pressed them against me, how they felt in my hands, how they looked onscreen: so pert, so perfect. I'm thinking of how there's salvation in her eyes. I'm thinking I could bury my cock between those voluminous duckies of hers and pump till I stream a hot load onto her skin.

  See? Strange things, indeed, because I'm dying and all I can think of is how badly I want to get laid.

  A person never stops to consider what will happen when they turn on a light switch. It's taken on faith that a space will be illuminated and that all will be visible--blessedly visible--and the time spent will be all the more divine because of the light. But what if those moments were few and far between? What if they were brief and unsatisfying? What if, as in my case, there existed a strong suspicion that if you turned on the light at all, it would fizzle, then spark, then go the way of all bulbs in the end and blow out.

  In the summer, my small town saw plenty of light. Tourists and townsfolk alike flocked to any of our dozens of beaches like seagulls desperate for a gullet of fish. The beady little eye of the sun opened as wide as it could in a maritime environment and stared down at everyone until they blushed. Summer fishermen shunned the day and worked by the light of a moon as silver as the belly of a herring.

  The tourists eventually went home, though. Those blushes faded from the backs of businessmen, and the community waited for the lobstermen to set out, inevitably by moonlight as well till the winter sun came up and they could start hauling, knowing their catch would carry us through the dark winter until the summer herring fishery reopened and the tourists returned.

  For my entire existence, I'd swum in Yarmouth's current, a male herring obeying the direction of the school. Each change in direction became more pointless. Every flit, swirl, and dive of the unbreakable rhythm bored me. So, I did the unimaginable; I fished myself out. I beached my body as often as I could. But man cannot live by beach alone; he must have bread. Trouble was, my bread--the will to live--had lost its leavening.

  So, at the end of September, before the break between herring and lobster, I stood alone in my magazine-perfect kitchen, throwing a few fistfuls of Tylenol capsules down my throat and chasing them with orange juice.

  After abandoning the pill bottle with its snap-on lid to the counter top, I grabbed a blanket and headed for the well-worn path out back to the beach. I pushed past the wild Scottish roses that grew around my yard and into the eelgrass that surrounded the stretch of sand.

  Usually the weekday beach was empty of visitors at dusk. As it sat nearly in my back yard, I could easily see the sand from my kitchen window. It was small, with a flat stretch of grey that, after the tide receded, looked like wet slate. Scraps of seaweed clung to the few rocks that jutted here and there. Sea peas ambled along the edge, pausing every now and then to admire a particularly sandy spot and poke roots in where they thought the tide would stop. It was a beach that smelled of salt and, sometimes when the tide pulled back, like sulphur.

  Because my luck has always been shitty, the beach wasn't abandoned. Someone--a woman--walked along the water's edge. Great. She'd find me swooning in my death throes on the sand in a few minutes and phone an ambulance. I couldn't have that. Dying was one thing; having your stomach pumped--entirely another.

  So, like the relative hermit I'd become, I hid in the grass watching like some pervert, waiting and hoping she'd leave so I could find a comfortable hollow of sand to hunker into. I'd spread my plaid blanket. The inky sky would keep me company until my eyelids grew heavy, heavier, heaviest. Then I could close them and finish said life with as much--or as little--finesse as I'd lived it.

  But first, she had to go.

  I peeked between blades of grass hoping she wouldn't see me. My stomach gurgled. I read somewhere once that the term peeping Tom had come from a tailor who broke trust and stole a look at the naked Godiva. I felt pretty much like that Tom as I realized just how incredible looking was this creature on the beach, with the moonlight silhouetting her generous curves. My cock even got hard, and I'd thought that well-used piece of equipment had gone into hibernation out of sheer exhaustion. I wasn't sure what the original Tom's punishment was, but my stomach began delivering quick jabs as reward for my misdemeanor.

  I started to salivate--a sure sign I was about to throw up. Sweet Jesus, I had no idea death would feel so much like a hang over. I grew ever more certain the pills wanted out, and wouldn't covered in vomit be just a dandy way for my body to be found.

  The young Aphrodite threw what I supposed were breadcrumbs to the last few gulls that would roam a beach at dusk, and my mouth watered more. Not from the sight of bread, mind you, or from lust, but from my oncoming death throes. To think I'd believed medication would be a nice, simple--and more importantly--painless suicide. My stomach rolled around on itself. I started to sweat.

  It looked as if I'd either have to go back home and settle for my sofa, or I'd have to wait her out. Even as I considered the choice, one of those flying rats flew straight over my hiding place and let go a load, and I mean a load, of creamy white shit. Of course, because I wanted to die with dignity, the little blessing landed in my hair and bled down my face.

  That was that. It's odd, the overdose of medication. It has a peculiar characteristic--one I was blissfully unaware of until I crouched there gagging at the stink of bird excrement. If you take too many pills at once, your body betrays you. It thinks it's doing you a favour. That favour comes in the form of violent retching. With sea gull droppings heading toward my mouth and Tylenol doing its dance of death in my stomach, I had no choice. I gave in to the peculiarity and heaved up strings of stomach lining.

  Within moments, I heard the unmistakable rustle of someone pushing through the eelgrass and pulling a Good Samaritan.

  "Are you okay?" Godiva asked, leaning down.

  I didn't want to look up, didn't
want to be seen exercising my right to a painless and dignified death, what with bird shit and foul smelling fluids covering everything from my hair to the blanket.

  But I did look. Something pounded on the door of my heart as if it were the Holy Ghost standing there knocking. Back in the recesses of my brain I knew that if I opened the door, it would walk right in. "Saved, saved," the angels would exclaim, and heaven would rejoice.

  I wanted to stick my head in the sand.

  "Gulls just don't care where they go, do they?" She managed between chokes of laughter. Her voice sounded as gritty as the sand under my bare feet. My cock twitched.

  I swiped at my hair and crashed through the grass, onto the sand. "Yes well, they must, there's shit everywhere but on you."

  She followed me as I made my way to the water and watched as I bent at the edge of it. I made an attempt to clean my ragged self up.

  "All you did was spread it around," she murmured.

  "Did I? Oh Damn." I craned forward to try dipping my hair into the edge of the water without getting soaked. Of course, the entire top of my head ended up under the freezing ebb, which meant a hellish amount of salty water in my eyes and a good deal up my nose. I felt horrible enough as it was, what with the suffering, and worrying that I'd still die and not have time to clean up the atrocious mess. But this, this was an insult to my dignity.

  I spluttered and gagged.

  "Oh here," she said. "Let me help. You're sure you're okay?"

  I nodded. The stomach pains had abated but I still felt weak. I did my best to crouch near the edge without collapsing while she cupped her hand into the water and sprinkled it on my head. Her breast touched my shoulder as she rubbed the water through my hair.

  "There," Hannah murmured after a while. "It's all out."

  I tested my head with a tentative hand. "You sure?"

  She nodded. "Uh huh. There really wasn't that much. You actually have wonderfully black hair when it isn't covered in bird poop."

  After a quick swipe of her palm against her skirt, she stuck out her hand. "I'm Hannah."

  "I'm Daniel. I live up there." I'm not quite sure what made me, but I pointed to my bungalow that sat on the rise overlooking the beach. For the first time it looked a little forlorn amid the wild roses and goldenrod, its copper roof a tarnished blur in the evening light.

  "It's nice." She pursed her lips and shrugged.

  I frowned. Nice? Most people gushed over my house--exactly the reason I'd bought it. It had that wealthy quality that people envied--antique brick, perfect lawn. It had once been owned by a countess, so my mother said, and when I'd bought it, it had a rundown carriage house in the back. I'd restored both to a magnificence I could barely believe after I'd made my first million selling lobsters overseas. My mother loved it.

  "It's got you mesmerized," I said. "I can tell."

  Arms crossed, she contemplated the look of the building. "Well, from here, maybe it's not so bad. It could look like a painting if you squinted. The shadows going up the side are like charcoal smudges."

  "You don't live here, do you?" I said.

  Hannah shook her head so her long hair rippled like the waves in the background. For some reason, I thought of old sail boats and hemp rope and buxom women with barely contained cleavage serving me horns of ale.

  Maybe I had died and gone to heaven.

  She started walking. The dress she wore spread into a wide triangle as she strode in broad, measured steps. "I'm from the city. My travel agent said Yarmouth was as far from civilization as I could get."

  With a description like that, I assumed city meant somewhere west of Ottawa. I gave her a grudging, "Did he now?"

  "She."

  A gull screeched, irate that its dinner source had found other pleasures. A dozen or more stood on the sand only a few feet off, all gawking at Hannah. I couldn't blame them, I found myself gawking too. She had a full physique: large hips, long legs. I realized I stared at her chest trying to make out the size of it in the coming dusk.

  "I imagine gulls are the pigeons of the Atlantic," she said.

  I followed her, rubbing my stomach and swallowing and swallowing the bile that still wanted residence of my mouth. "To tell you the truth, they're more like rats."

  She laughed at that, and showed a small gap between her front teeth. I found it strangely tantalizing. I fought off images of me aiming for it like a bullseye, my semen drooling from her mouth onto her chin because of course I would hit the mark. I had to struggle for something to say.

  "I think of pigeons the same way," she said.

  We made it to the grass line. Dark creeping in faster than I wanted.

  "So how long are you staying?" Suddenly I had to get all of her information before she went up the path to the car I spotted behind the rose bushes. Just knowing I wanted that information made me want to be sick again. I'd already decided to pass quietly into non-existence; what in the Hell made me think I needed more information about anything?

  Her answer came slowly, as if she had given it some thought but hadn't come to any decision.

  "Not sure. For a while, I think."

  She paused at the start of the path. The smell of rose was as strong as that earthy scent of her. I caught another scent too, a bakery scent, cloves, I thought. They mixed well together. I had visions of a moneymaking fragrance--'Evening with Gulls' or something like that.

  "You have no plans to leave?" I asked.

  She gave a kind of frown, along with a shrug. "Don't know. Right now I love it here. Might even move here." Her frown intensified. She began to fidget.

  "Are you okay?" she asked again. "I could walk you home. Just to be sure."

  Most of the nausea had abated. The sweats had calmed.

  I rubbed my stomach anyway. "Come to think of it," I said, eyeing her from beneath shuttered lids. "I still don't feel quite right."

  She traced the outline of my shoulder blade with fingers that sent tingles straight to my ball sack. "Then it's settled."

  With me hunched over, struggling to pick my way through the bushes, and her holding my elbow, we walked the distance to my front porch. Moths fluttered around the coach lights. Before I knew it, I was asking her in. For tea of all things.

  She stared at me for a second, suspicion traveling the breadth of her fine features..

  "Not now; it makes me pee."

  She headed down the path without even looking back. For just one moment, I had felt awake. I had felt the stirring of interest. Even though she had been gentle about it, she had turned down my offer.

  Oh well, perhaps tomorrow would be a better time to die.

  Exhausted from my ordeal, I went straight to bed. The sheets were crisp, the way I liked them, and the window was open to let in peeping noises made by bog frogs. I even had my feather pillow, the one I'd had since childhood. My six-foot frame stretched nicely across the mattress. I was geared. Not that it did any good. For some reason as I lay there, I remembered images from my childhood. Some of the memories were good, some of them bad. Most were memories that didn't make sense--that seemed to matter, but had no grounding--and floated around my head is if they were vapor.

  I thought of Dad as I lay there. Well, not really Dad at first, but of Kevin, my best friend when I was six. Dad just sort of jumped in, like he often did, and I promptly pressed him straight back out. He had no business invading my thoughts. My thoughts were my own. I was a man of means now, so much cash from that ridiculously lucky lobster investment that I didn't need to work.

  Which was half the trouble. I kept working. Days I played hookie and took off, Dad's unnerving criticisms kept me from enjoying my leisure. Of course, critic was his favorite role. Much like mine had been to annoy the living Hell out of him. Strange, the little things we take pleasure in.

  At any rate, I struggled to keep Dad's image at bay as my thoughts show Kevin and me playing together in my parents' driveway. Early spring rains have left mud puddles in the dirt and we have our small plastic soldier
s forging across the water at each other. Kevin is grinning at me because he has half of his forces already into the water and I've only managed to advance a quarter. Damn him, he's going to win. I know he's going to win and in that moment I'm as mad at him as a bear with a sore butt.

  I suppose it's late afternoon, rather than the morning, because Dad comes home from fishing; he drives into the yard with his half-ton truck. Kevin and I run for the edge of the lawn. I'm still running; the crisp, salty air is moving into my lungs and I'm laughing. Laughing. I turn to Kevin because I'm no longer angry; I love to run and that has killed my brief temper. Kevin isn't behind me.

  Dad, dressed in his tartan coat and fish-stained jeans, is standing over Kevin where he lies in the driveway. Some of my friend's hair, mouse brown hair that is fine and limp, is covered in muck. His arm is stretched into the mud puddle, and the tips of his fingers have just missed the mark of grabbing a handful of soldiers, twitching with the last spark of muscle firing.

  After the funeral, Dad hires someone to strip the salmon-colored paint off our house. He pays them good money--and I know it's good money because Dad talks of it often--to paint our entire house white. He even gets them to paint the trim white. It doesn't make any sense to me, never made any sense to me, what painting our house has to do with Kevin's death.

  People do strange things, I suppose.

  Lying in my California King with 200 count Egyptian cotton sheets, I began to feel closed in, what with the memory and my nauseous belly. I quickly decided to change my mind's eye to something more pleasant. Hannah's figure stole into the glaring light of thought. I let her play with my mind and found myself imagining her in all sorts of ways. For a man who'd had no sexual contact for what seemed ages, I certainly could come up with some interesting fantasies. Poor Hannah, she had no idea how filthy she became in my thoughts.

  I rolled to my side on the mattress and strained for the table lamp. Sleep escaped me. All the night promised was fantasies. Fantasies that would only heighten the fact that I was alone, and would force me to satisfy my arousal alone. I'd be damned if my last bit of pleasure on earth would come from self-gratification.