Jeremiah Quick
Authors: SM Johnson
Tags: #drama, #tragedy, #erotic horror, #gay fiction, #dark fiction, #romantic horror, #psychological fiction
Jeremiah Quick
SM Johnson
Smashwords Edition 2014
Copyright 2014 SM Johnson
Smashwrods Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your
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or given away to other people without prior written permission from
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you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwrods and
purchase your own copy. For permissions, please contact SM Johnson
via email at
[email protected]
.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, brands and incidents are either
the product of the author's imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons,
living or dead, business establishments,
events, are symbolic, metaphorical or coincidental.
1st edition published by SM Johnson
Cover design: SM Johnson, with the gracious
help of 19
Cover image: Bloody Instant Photo 2, by
Rob
Tek
. (Bigstock.com)
Book
description:
Once she was Light to his Dark. Now he's
more than she bargained for.
Jeremiah Quick is Other, he's always been
Other, and he fascinates Pretty Loberg with his Otherness. He
doesn't give a fuck about society, or middle class values, or
following the crowd. He believes in anarchy, self-education, doing
the research, and making up one's own mind. He believes in asking
cui bono? – who benefits?
To pampered, middle class good-girl Pretty
Loberg, Jeremiah is terrifying. And she can't stay away.
She'd been trained since her earliest years
to follow the crowd, not stand out, don't embarrass the family.
Stick to the status quo and not only will everything be fine, but
everyone will like you.
Jeremiah doesn't like her. Not at all. In
fact, sometimes she thinks he hates her.
When he finds her twenty years after high
school, Pretty gets into his car, even though she knows Jeremiah
will disrupt her marriage and her life.
Behind those sharp blue eyes is a man with a
quick brain, a cynical outlook, and a penchant for the subversive.
He's kinky, mean, controlling, and more than a little bit
broken.
Pretty wants to fix him.
Jeremiah wants to break her, remake her, and
talk her into doing something terrible.
…
for Jeremy
I have never hated myself.
If I held the straight-edge to my flesh and
pressed until it drew blood, if I dragged blade-red patterns into
my skin to carve a memory, it was always, always for love.
Never punishment, never mutilation, and
certainly never self-loathing. Only this pretty-sad-bitter failure
to have ever loved hard enough.
Chapter 1
A
s she came out of
the Walmart store, Pretty Loberg wrestled with three unruly plastic
grocery bags, one of which had slipped past her hand to strangle
her wrist. It was late afternoon in September, and already almost
dark.
Thank you, Wisconsin
, she muttered,
and fuck you,
grocery bags
. She was holding her arm up, dangling the bags and
shaking her wrist, trying to get the tightest noose to spin back
around, when she heard the voice and the question.
"Sunshine. Did you buy a candy bar?"
That was all.
It was ridiculous. Her imagination getting
the better of her, because five minutes ago, in the store, she'd
been staring at the Hershey bars on display near the register,
picturing the neat little rows of rectangles exposed when
unwrapped, and smiling at the sweet memory of sharing candy with an
interesting boy a long time ago.
The boy who called her Sunshine.
She turned toward the voice, and there he
was, leaning against the pale tan brick like a question mark, his
face obscured by a fall of straight black hair.
Every part of her froze. Two of the bags
fell from her fingers and landed with soft thuds at her feet,
leaving her holding only the wrist-strangling sack. The deceptively
warm sun fled behind a cloud, and the sudden chill in her bones
came from more than the autumn air.
He was a tall, slim figure wearing black on
black, holding a cigarette and puffing smoke in her direction. Was
it him? Could it be? For a second she couldn't even think, much
less speak a single word. She'd looked for him, over the past
twenty years, time and time again, always wishing she knew what
happened to him, always hoping he was still alive.
There are memories you share with only one
other person in all the world, and Jeremiah was one of those
people.
Pretty's husband knew a million things about
her no one else did. If asked to share her secrets, he'd come up
with a few. Like how, if she was deep into a good book, he could
call her name five times and she wouldn't even hear. He might say
she struggled to speak her own mind, or he hadn't married her
because she was Betty Crocker, and she could suck a golf ball
through a garden hose, which wasn't anyone's business and wasn't
true anyway. And somewhere, buried deep in his subconscious, he
knew the candy bar story, too, but had it filed in the space of
brain we all have for 'things not very important.'
When, indeed, it had always been one of the
most important things of all.
Now, looking at Jeremiah, Pretty felt her
internal organs seize with... oh, dread and disbelief and shock and
joy. She'd been told he was dead. She made his name into a question
of her own. "Jeremiah?" But she had no voice, and all that passed
her lips was a whisper. She coughed to clear the shock from her
throat and tried again. "Jeremiah Carlson?"
His boots clumped on the blacktop as he
approached. They were black, up to the knee, and probably
steel-toed. Just like they'd always been. "It's Quick, now," he
said, as he picked up her plastic bags.
Pretty shook her head, confused, but oddly
comforted by his familiar way of leaving her in the dark. "What
is?"
And there was that old smile, the one more
grimace than grin, as if he'd had to teach himself how to do it in
front of a mirror. His eyes were the kind of light blue that almost
had no color, that could do 'emotionless' better than anything, but
managed 'cold' and 'flat' pretty fucking well, too. The smile
didn't reach them, and she couldn't remember if it ever had.
"My name. Jeremiah Quick. Not Carlson, I
have nothing to do with that fucking bastard anymore."
The charge between them was almost tangible,
like a bubble of electricity, a tremendous… presence… of something
unknown, something that would change her in unfathomable ways.
She was still processing the fact that he
was standing there, alive.
She said, "At the last reunion… Charlotte
told me you died. I could never find you, so I believed her."
His laugh was short, a sharp burst of
sarcasm, and when he spoke, his voice dripped with scorn. "You go
to
high school
reunions? God, Sunshine. Really? Did it
change so much after I left? How could you?"
"I go with Amy. It's not so bad. I hardly
recognize anyone." There. There was the sinking feeling, the little
bit of shame that she's given in and followed the crowd, doing not
what she wanted to do, but what was expected of her. No, high
school hadn't changed after he left. He knew it hadn't. She'd been
the outsider alone then, without Jeremiah, without Chill. The next
year had been worse, like the whole social structure of school was
designed to inhibit grieving.
He took a drag off his cigarette, then
flicked it into the drive lane in front of the store. "Nice poem.
My remembrance."
Such a casual statement, but a surge of heat
flashed through her, under her skin, over her skin, until her very
fingertips broke a sweat. The last plastic-handled bag slid from
her arm and hit the ground with a crinkled thump.
It was a relief to let the burden fall.
He moved right into her space to pick up the
last bag, and he was too close now to be a figment of her
imagination.
The laugh came out of her, an embarrassing
bark, but she couldn't help it. She'd always laughed easily. It was
part of the reason he hated her, and part of the reason he liked
having her around. Even the candy bar never changed the dichotomy
of
that
.
The candy bar was just bait, anyway. It had
always been bait.
She had to ask, couldn't help herself. "You
saw it somewhere? The poem?" A little part of her had to admit she
was pleased as much as mortified. Talk about dichotomy.
He spread his arms, lifting the grocery bags
into the air, out from the sides of his waist. Title the scene
Expansive Shrug Awkward with Plastic
.
His voice was flat. "I Google myself now and
then, like everyone does."
Pretty ran the words of the poem through her
head, trying to remember the first stanza, feeling faintly
embarrassed he'd seen something of her inner world, her pain when
she lost him, which for so many years she'd held close and private.
Except she’d flung the poem out to the blogosphere, finally giving
up the possibility that he was still alive.
"I wrote it after you left," she said. "All
those years ago. I know it's awful."
He shrugged with a rustle of plastic, his
mouth turned down, his words softer than the expression that
hardened his face. "Naïve," he said. "Just naïve. And that's not
your fault. It's not like you could help your life."
She didn't know what to say. Does one
apologize for a lack of childhood trauma? But she didn't have to
say anything. He said it.
"Pain. Poverty. Desperation."
He paused between each word, letting her
feel how much anger was nestled behind and between them.
She recoiled, just a fraction.
She'd been spoiled and pampered, she knew
she had been. And in a lot of ways, she preferred to be naïve.
He knew it, could see it in her, had always
seen it. "I lived everything you never knew, never experienced. And
I never forgot you, Sunshine Grrrl. In fact, I'm amazed someone so
sheltered could still be alive. I thought life would get you,
eventually."
His 'Sunshine Grrrl' was a sarcastic growl,
a mean quirk of his lips when he said it, like he was… throwing a
dart that was supposed to hurt. When they were young, he'd rarely
called her by her actual name, and had several nicknames for her.
'Sunshine' was the most affectionate of them, 'Precious' the most
caustic.
