Darkness Bound by J. T. Geissinger

the details, savoring them, because she knew it would most likely be another few years before she’d be making new ones with anyone else.
    His mouth. His hands. The glowing dark burn of his eyes—
    You little whore.
    With that, the fun was abruptly over.
    She sat up and passed a trembling hand over her face. The accusations didn’t stop coming, rushing up from that dark part of herself she kept locked so tightly away, always managing to escape, especially at moments like this.
    The most powerful emotion Jack had experienced in her thirty years was shame. She carried it around with her like a demon on her back, a spiteful fiend that hissed into her ear, twisting even the most benign things into elaborate sculptures of ugliness. If a man passing by on the street smiled at her, it was because he could tell she was easy. If she got a promotion at work, it was because her boss expected a little something in return. If anything remotely good happened in her life at all, it was because the universe had a sick sense of humor. She went around all day every day with a thundercloud overhead, waiting for the other shoe to drop, until finally through chance or her own gift for self-destruction, it did.
    Other people had emotional baggage. Jack had cargo.
    Her stomach lurched. She ran to the bathroom and leaned over the toilet just in time for the first violent heaves to begin.
    When it was over, she sat there on the cold tile with her legs curled up beneath her, naked and shaking, bowed over the toilet bowl with her eyes streaming and her heart pounding frantically in her chest.
    “I hate you,” Jack whispered hoarsely to the empty bathroom. “I hate you and I wish you were dead.”
    Mercifully, the buzz of the overhead light didn’t require her to clarify whom she had meant.
    The flight back to New York was long, with a layover in Miami, so by the time Jack arrived at LaGuardia Airport she was physically and mentally exhausted. She hadn’t been able to work on the plane; she’d instead alternated between downing tiny bottles of vodka and staring out the window. She knew from hard experience it could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days for the malaise and self-recriminations to wear themselves out. In the meantime she’d be relatively useless, and no fun to be around.
    Which meant that stopping off at her father’s house in Queens on the way back to Manhattan was a bad idea.
    She almost didn’t go. But when she checked her voice mail as she waited in the stuffy cabin to disembark, she found her father had left her a message.
    “It’s your father. Hope your trip was good. I’ve got cake here; don’t forget.”
    Just as he always ended every call without saying goodbye, he always prefaced every message with a polite, “It’s your father,” as if she wouldn’t recognize his voice, or might have blocked the memory of him altogether. That was depressing, but visiting the house she grew up in was depressing to a multiple of one thousand.
    But she didn’t want to disappoint him, and knew there would be too many questions if she cancelled. Questions she just wasn’t up for answering, and for which he wouldn’t relent until he had answers. A trait she’d inherited from him.
    In the cab on the way from the airport, Jack chewed every one of her fingernails down to a nub.
    “Jackie,” her father said gruffly when he opened the door. He looked older than when she’d last seen him—on her last birthday—more grizzled somehow, his formerly gunmetal-gray crew cut now almost completely white. They shared the same clear blue eyes, and his stared out of a weathered face, which was angular and imposing. Though he’d retired from the military years ago, he was a Marine down to the marrow of his bones, with that ruler-straight posture, legs braced apart as if prepared for a hit. He wore his usual: a spotless white dress shirt buttoned up to his Adam’s apple, a pair of navy-blue Dockers, black leather shoes polished to a