Free The Girl in the Woods by David Jack Bell Page B

died.
    "Roger," he had said, "people don't understand the things we men do anymore. No one's going to feel sorry for you."
    And Roger thought he knew what he meant. What he was doing looked bad to everybody else, and if he let the girl go, let her go back to town and her life, she would tell and there would be hell to pay.
    So he kept the first girl, and he would keep this one too.

    * * *

    When he brought the new girl back to the house, she didn't cry at first because she was still a little out of it from the punches. He parked the van at the rear of the house and carried her upstairs to his bedroom. He couldn't bring himself to sleep in the room where his parents slept, but he had made the concession of moving their bed—their big bed—down the hall to his room so that he and his wife could share it like married couples did. And that was the bed he placed the new girl on while he waited for her to come around.
    She stirred and groaned a little bit. She still wore her biking clothes, spandex shorts and top and black shoes. Roger decided to loosen the tape around her ankles, and then he took the tape off of her mouth. It made a ripping noise and left a nasty red stripe across her soft, freckled skin. Roger felt bad because he had hurt her, and she already had a bruise forming on her cheek where his fists landed.
    He studied her face carefully. She had a small nose and dark eyebrows, and in the sunlight that came through the bedroom windows, he saw small, almost invisible hairs along her jaw line. Her hair was dark and pulled back in a tight ponytail, although some of the strands were coming loose, and he reached out to smooth them back behind her ear when she started moaning some more. Her eyes fluttered open, and Roger pulled his hand back like he'd touched a hot stove.
    Her eyes darted around the room, then settled on Roger.
    "What the...what are you doing? Fuck you, you creep."
    She thrashed like a beached fish. Her movements were awkward because her hands were still tied, but she kicked wildly with her newly freed legs, and one of her kicks caught Roger in the stomach, knocking the air out of him and making him gasp. She kept thrashing and cursing, and even though there were no neighbors within a mile, Roger didn't like the noise and the awful words she was saying, so he jumped forward, using his body weight to pin her legs and stop the movement. His right hand easily covered her mouth. It covered half of her face, and the cursing and the thrashing stopped.
    He held his hand in place, waiting.
    The girl's face was pressed against the mattress, and he could only see one side of her. Her left eye widened, the brown iris rolling to the side to get a better look at Roger, and the fear he saw there made her look like a spooked animal.
    "Stop it," Roger said. "Stop it, and I won't hurt you."
    She moaned again, like she wanted to say something, but he didn't trust her not to scream. Then he thought of something. He looked at his big hand and the little bit of her face that showed. He was covering her nose and mouth, and maybe, he thought, maybe she couldn't breathe, so he slipped his hand down a little, freeing her nose.
    He heard the air whistling through her nostrils and thought her eye showed relief.
    You almost blew it right there, you big dummy. You almost blew it again.
    But then he didn't know what to do. He'd known what to do with the other girl. They had a routine. She was his wife. But now he had a new girl, and she was different, so obviously different, and he didn't know what they were supposed to do to get used to each other.
    "If I take my hand away, will you scream?"
    She nodded her head up and down, her eye still wide.
    "Why do you want to do that?"
    She started squirming again, wriggling around on the mattress like an eel.
    "Be still," he said. He leaned against her, adding more weight. "Be still."
    She stopped moving. Roger waited, then eased up.
    "I don't want to hurt you," he said.
    The girl grunted.
    "I