All My Darkest Impulses (House of Crows), Lisa Unger [top 10 novels .txt] 📗

Matthew, I think about you all the time.

Honestly, Matthew knew he wasn’t that good looking. He was okay; he had a decent build, a full head of wavy, dark hair. Samantha said he had the eyelashes of a girl, which didn’t sound like a compliment, but she swore it was. He was an uneasy runner, really a bit too big for it. He wasn’t the kind of guy who had his undergraduates swooning, usually. What did she see in him? It was a bit of an ego boost.

He sat there for too long after Sylvia had gone, just staring at the card. He swept it into his wastebasket, and when no one else showed for office hours, he packed up his stuff.

But before he left, he lifted the card out of the bin and shoved it in his bag. He never intended to call her. Just—maybe he’d look at it when he wasn’t feeling great about himself.

That would have been the end of it, or should have been. But Sylvia couldn’t let it go.

Now, here she was sprawled on the couch of his grandfather’s office. Impossible.

The door slammed shut behind him, and the room seemed to fill with a kind of strange fog. He could hear only the wild beating of his heart. The door locked; he heard the click. Again, impossible.

But he had his mind on other things. Sylvia leaned back and spread her legs, moved her hand between her thighs.

Matthew, she breathed, arching her back, please.

He went to her, took her delicate, youthful body into his arms. God, it was so good, the cream of her flesh, the taste of her skin, the silk of her hair. He was nude as well, pajama bottoms fallen away at some point.

She sighed with pleasure, dug her nails into the flesh of his back. He buried himself deep into her heat, her arms tight around him, her breath hot in his ear. The release of all those months of wanting. He shuddered with the depth of his pleasure. Disappeared into it, into her.

But then she seemed to grow hard in his arms. When he pulled back to look at her, her eyes were blank, whites turned a horrible red, black bruising on her beautiful throat, her mouth open in a silent scream.

He leaped away from her. “I’m sorry. Oh my God, Sylvia, I’m so sorry.”

“Matthew.”

He wept then with all his terrible regret. Why couldn’t she just have let it go, let him go.

“Matthew.”

Awake. Naked. Sprawled on his grandfather’s couch. Fingers of moonlight playing on the carpet, outside the tall trees swaying in a stiff wind. Samantha standing at the door, one hand on the frame, another on her hip. He knew that look. That mingle of anger and pain, underscored by disgust and disappointment.

“Matthew,” she said. “You’re . . . dreaming.”

He sat up quickly, embarrassed. He reached for a throw pillow to cover himself.

“You were yelling,” she said.

“Was I?” He rubbed at his head, his eyes. He was dreaming. Sylvia. It was just a dream. Relief flooded him. He’d never touched her, not like that. I never cheated on you, Sam, not really. “Did I wake you?”

She raised her eyebrows at him.

“What’s going on with you, Matthew?”

Oh, I don’t know. I was falsely accused of sexually assaulting a student. I was fired from my job as a result of those unfounded accusations. We lost our beloved house—well, had to sell it because of that, had to move because in the current climate an accusation was a guilty verdict. Then, at the moment when we weren’t sure what we’d do next, we received this “inheritance”—my family home, which is a behemoth of need and disrepair that we may never be able to sell. So here we were at Merle House with no place else to go, money disappearing at an alarming pace. That’s what’s going on with me, Sam.

“Nothing,” he said instead, because she knew it better than anyone. “I’m good.”

“You’re good,” she said flatly. She tossed him his pajama bottoms. “I found these on the stairs.”

“Thanks.”

The moment expanded; she sighed in the darkness. Had she heard him call out Sylvia’s name?

“I’m sorry, Sam,” he said. “For all of it.”

She came to sit beside him on the couch. “I know you are.”

Hadn’t they just had this conversation? Hadn’t they had it a million times? He hoped one day, after enough penance, to hear actual forgiveness. Instead he heard her resignation, her acceptance that he was far less than the man she had once believed him to be, but that she still, for some reason, stayed by him. Still loved him? Maybe.

“We’ll get to the other side of this,” he said.

“Maybe we’re already here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Merle House,” she said. “Maybe it’s home.”

He almost laughed; Merle House had its ways of luring, seducing, enveloping.

You can’t have her, he told the house. We’re not staying here.

This time the scraping noise was so loud they both startled at the sound.

“What the hell was that?” asked Samantha, grabbing his arm.

“Old houses,” he said easily. “They just make noises.”

He’d come here thinking he would have the upper hand because he’d escaped it once. He knew better than to fall for its tricks. Merle House would give him Sylvia every night, if that was what he wanted.

What, he wondered, was it giving Samantha?

6.

Derisive laughter woke Claire from the depth of her sleep.

Ha ha! Ha ha!

Mocking, superior. The sound of someone making fun of her, cruelly taunting. The room was dark, but probably it was close to dawn.

Tap, tap, tap.

A sound at her window. She rose to pull back the curtains, and there on the branch outside sat a giant crow, mouth open, throat undulating.

Ha ha! Ha ha!

Claire regarded him a second, the big shadowy visitor, cast in relief by the milky light of sunrise. Claire knocked on the glass. “Go away,” she said.

He stared, beady eye blinking, shifting from foot to foot. He flapped his wings, looking