Free On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1) by snyder-carroll s. Page A

into her body. They congratulated her because they had never seen anything like the strange growth they had just removed. They brought it over to show her. It was a lump of slimy flesh that looked like a fat chicken wing with two small feet, one perfectly shaped, the other so deformed it looked like a hand with two fingers.
    “Why, at first, we thought it was a baby coming out of your skull!” One doctor was smiling at her, and her inclination was to thank him, but before she could, she woke up.
    She was not on the table, but in the bed still naked from the waist down. Something was wedged up into her vagina. Dizzy and sweating, Hester threw off the thin blanket and put both hands between her legs. The bulge of cloth was soaking wet. She pressed on it and the pain was excruciating.
    The man was asleep in a threadbare chair. His head was back, his mouth open. He was snoring loudly. His puffy chins jiggled when he exhaled.
    After several minutes Hester stood up slowly, walked to where her coat hung, got the belt and sanitary napkin she’d wrapped in toilet paper out of the pocket, and went into the bathroom. She closed the door and struggled to put the pad on over the bloody wad of whatever it was that the man had shoved up her. She was in agony as she tried to pull on her panties and jeans. In the mirror the image of her pale face was fragmented by the cracks in the mirror. Her hair was oily-looking and damp. She stared at herself. Her eyes in the glaring light looked like black ticks frozen in amber. Hester went back into the bedroom, grabbed her coat, and left.
     
    The snow had stopped, but the wind was wicked cold. She stood at the bus stop hugging herself and waiting, for what seemed like forever, for the bus back to campus.
    Finally it came. It was practically empty. She took a window seat near the front. On the Walt Whitman Bridge there was a backup. The bus stopped, moved forward, stopped. Hester grew impatient. She felt horrible, and she wanted to get back before curfew to see Arty. Seeing Arty would make her feel better. It always did.
     
    Arthur Kendall was one of the first people Hester met when she arrived on campus for orientation. He saw her sitting alone in the lounge, introduced himself, and invited her to the Trailer, an old Airstream, he explained, parked behind the place he rented in town. Hester liked his long sandy-colored hair, bell bottoms, the fact that he was older. She felt flattered, and curious.
    The Trailer was pretty dirty, but it had a groovy atmosphere. Arty and the guys he lived with ran an extension cord to it from the house, screwed a black light into the ceiling, taped day glow posters over the windows, and threw an old mattress on the floor. It was a hangout, a place to smoke weed. Arty turned Hester on, and it wasn’t long before she was a regular at the Trailer. But there were always so many people around, so getting high was about all they ever did for the first few weeks. 
    On his birthday, though, they were alone. That night the black light made everything magical for Hester. The whites of her boyfriend’s eyes and his teeth shone like milk glass. As soon as they were high, Arty leaned over and kissed Hester. He pulled her hair back and licked her neck and kissed it. Hester, not being experienced, did the same to him. Their hair, the color of the top side of a deer’s tail, was so identical they looked like twins kissing.
    She felt his long fingers first. He slipped one hand down the back of her jeans and touched her between her cheeks. This made her squirm away from him so he stopped and began massaging her breasts through her blouse. He kept his mouth on her neck until he moved his hands down to her jeans and unbuttoned them. He maneuvered Hester onto her back, pulled her pants off. Before she had time to say a word, he was on top of her, then in her, and all she could feel at first was pain, unbearable, then bearable, then something that wasn’t pain but was nearly