Chapter One

Danielle was perspiring freely as the sun beat down. It was unseasonably hot for late May and she had had to walk almost a mile from the highway as the heat beat down on her jet-black hair. Now her long bangs were plastered against the side of her face. Her short gray tank was dark where sweat had soaked it, and her tight, low riding jeans were damp as they squeezed in around her hips and bottom.

She reached the porch with a sigh of relief and pushed through into the house. It was, if anything, hotter inside, but at least the sun was off her head.

Her mother was asleep, of course, and there was no sign of her mother’s useless, creepy boyfriend. She got herself a coke, then wandered out onto the back porch. The hole which was always supposed to be a swimming pool, if anyone ever finished it, was dry. The old maple provided nice shade, though, as she sat down at the picnic table underneath and looked out at the broad field of grass beyond.

Sucky small town, she thought morosely; sucky small town without proper bus service, where people lived out in the boonies, with nothing to do and no one but idiots and losers to hang around with.

A belch sounded from behind her and she made a disgusted sound which had more to do with realizing her mother’s boyfriend Roy was around than any problems with belching. She turned her head and her face wrinkled in disgust as Roy sauntered out of the open rear door of the wooden garage.

He was wearing an armless T-shirt and a speedo, and for a moment she could only stare as her mind contemplated what new lows of dignity and sophistication Roy was plumbing.

“Hot out, ain’t it?” he said, walking right up to her, his bulging speedo a foot from her face.

“You are just too gross to even live,” she said in contempt, shaking her head and sliding sideways to climb off the bench.

“What? It’s hot! Excuse me if I dress for it,” he said indignantly.

He moved around to block her as she stood up, and then, grinning, stepped forward, backing her against the side of the table, his groin pushing in against hers and grinding against her.

“You look hot, too, baby,” he said. “Maybe we should be hot together.”

“My mother is upstairs sleeping,” she said acidly, both grossed out and weirdly fascinated by his close presence and smell.

“She’s dead to the world,” he said. “We could do anything and she’d stay sleeping.”

“Get the fuck away from me,” she said, not wanting to touch his sweaty body.

His eyes moved down onto her tight gray top and he licked his eyes. “Nice top,” he said. “But it must be hot. Maybe you should take it off.”

She dodged to the side and he put his arm up to block her. “What? Here you’ve been gone all day and I don’t get a kiss? Is that any way to treat your daddy?”

“You are not my fucking daddy,” she said in disgust.

“Your step dad then,” he said, grinding himself against her tauntingly.

“You aren’t my fucking step dad either. You’re just a loser fucking my mom.”

His bulge was growing as he rubbed it against her, and Danielle wasn’t sure if she’d ever been quite so grossed out. Why, then, did she also feel a strange dark quivering in her lower belly?

“And I’m really good at it,” he said with a leer.

His hands slipped around her and squeezed her buttocks, grinding her back against him. Danielle twisted and jammed her elbow into his gut, then half stumbled half leapt away as he laughed behind her.

“Gross pig!” she shouted over her shoulder as she stormed away.

She slammed the door behind her. Who cared if her mother woke up? Then went up to her room and slammed that door for good measure. She peeled off her tank top and undid her jeans, skimming them down her legs and off. Her bra came next, flung across the bed, and she went to her mirror and shoved the hair out of her face.

Her bangs were drying, and falling back over her eyes again. Glaring at herself, she picked up a brush and brushed her hair back violently, stomach churning angrily. Roy was a disgusting, pathetic excuse for a man. He wasn’t very good looking, had a beer belly, and was constantly drunk.

What possible reason could there be, then, for her to feel the slightest sense of sexual excitement as he pressed himself against her?

She brushed angrily at her hair, and was so fixated on her task the sound of the bedroom door creaking took several seconds to dig through the anger and reach her consciousness. She turned, both hands in her hair, and gasped in shock as she saw Roy in the doorway, grinning, holding a can of coke.

“You forgot your coke, baby,” he said with a grin. “I knew you were hot and - .”

“Get the fuck out of here!” she screamed, leaping forward and slamming the door in his face.

“Sorry about that, baby,” he called through the door mockingly. “But don’t worry. You got nothing to be ashamed of. You got a helluva hot little body there. You got a real tight ass, and your tits are mighty nice, too.”

Enraged, she jammed the back of an old chair under the doorknob, face red with embarrassment that he had again managed to “accidentally” catch a glimpse of her.

He had been doing that since he’d moved in. Sometimes it was by “accidentally” opening the bathroom door she was sure she had locked. Sometimes it was her room.

The problem was that both doors only had courtesy locks. That meant you only needed to stick a little piece of metal through the tiny hole in the outside of the handle to pop the lock and open the door. And there was no way of proving she hadn’t just forgotten to lock them.

She glared at the door warily, then returned to the mirror, face red as she looked at herself. She cursed sourly. Then, eyeing the door cautiously out of the corner of her eye, she raised her arms up to her head as they had been when he’d opened the door.

Her breasts did look good, of course, with her arms raised as they’d been. She arched her back a bit, then, flushed, turned her back to the mirror and looked over her shoulder. She was wearing a tiny black thong. She eyed her bottom carefully. Yes, it had looked pretty damned good.

That didn’t make her feel much better about him catching her out, but it did do something to her self-esteem. She did have a good body, she knew. No wonder the pathetic jerk was always trying to peep at her and grope her.

She needed a shower, but was damned if she was going to do it until she was sure he was away. She went to the window, holding the curtain before her, peering out into the back yard. Sure enough, he sauntered out, a beer bottle in hand. She shook her head in disgust, then peeled off her thong and, defiantly, went to the door and stomped down the hall to the shower completely naked.

Too bad you’re not here, asshole, she thought.

* * *

Danny sat relatively still before her computer monitor. Her head, however, rolled slowly from side to side as the music raced through the tiny wires attached to her earphones and then pounded in her head. She moved in tune to the music, though others might have suggested the music itself had no tune or melody, and more closely resembled abrasive noise.

Her face looked surprisingly young as her shoulders began to move, as well. Gone were the dark eyes and black lipstick and the white powder to whiten her skin. Gone, too, was the usual mocking expression she habitually wore when dealing with the world.

She was a slender girl, her skin pale, even without the powder, her hair straight and dark as black silk, sweeping over her narrow shoulders. Her nose was tiny, her lips full, her eyes sky blue.

She was, for the most part, nude, as she sat before the monitor, save for a black thong covering her carefully shaven sex and little else. Her breasts were high, the skin pale like the rest of her, with tiny pink nipples. She was a D-cup, but, unusually, only had a 32-inch chest. Her breasts were thus very full on her chest, yet exceptionally rounded and firm, and, without a bra, wearing something heavy, she could be mistaken for being very small.

She stood up, now, swaying more with the music, her hips beginning to roll, her arms moving aggressively. Her eyes were still closed, as if to better imagine herself elsewhere than the small, overheated room with the cracked and peeling paint looking out onto a dark, hot Mississippi night.

Her shoulders began to move in counterpoint to her hips, her buttocks rolling and hips grinding in barely conscious sexual enticement.

The music ended.

Danny shook her head and pulled the earphones out, dropping them on the keyboard. She yawned and realized her hunger. She moved to the door, snatching up a thin black nightshirt and slipping it over her shoulders. She did up the buttons at the front as she left the room and padded barefoot down across the wooden floor of the upstairs hall to the back stairs.

Her eyes skimmed across the clock on the wall, noting it was almost midnight. She had school tomorrow, but cared little. School was easy, idiotic; geared to the losers who taught and the drones who attended.

Life sucked, and then you died. And that was the way of life for drones, or those who acted like drones.

She trotted down the back stairs on light feet, not wanting to attract attention. The linoleum was yellowing with age as she stepped into the kitchen. The house was old and poorly maintained.

Her mother was a stripper at the roadhouse up the highway. She made decent money, but spent most of it on alcohol, and on the loser she was currently living with. Roy Morgan was a strutting, useless creep and his myriad failed schemes to get rich without working consumed too much of her idiot mother’s money, even as he sat around on his ass collecting unemployment.

The only reason they could even afford a house was that it was dirt-cheap. Then again, not much was expensive in Jasper, Mississippi. Anyone who had money left. As she would have long ago, if she’d had two nickels to rub together. As it was she was doomed to at least get her high school diploma – hopefully in a few months. Then she could hitchhike out and take her chances on the road. Surely wherever she wound up would be better than this sweltering hick town with its overly religious, bible thumping hicks, losers, and drones.

She opened the fridge and took out a small tub of margarine, then opened the bread and took a package of sliced ham from the fridge. While it was open she took out the milk and set it on the counter.

And then that hated, slurred voice sounded from the doorway.

“Shouldn’t you be asleep, brat?”

She did not deign to answer. She was eighteen, if barely. She would go to sleep when and if she so chose, not at the behest of drunken losers like Roy Morgan.

He wore loose trousers which had seen better days and a filthy white tank top which exposed his large, if flabby arms and shoulders. He hadn’t shaved that day, and his hair was greasy and mussed. She despised him, and perhaps the thing which irritated her the most was that, despite it all, he considered himself attractive; a ladies man.

He was a toad. And even if he hadn’t been more than twice her age she’d have been grossed out by being around him. Her mother was an idiot and a whore to let this lowlife into the house, much less sleep with him. Danny had to turn her music up loud whenever the two of them got together. Her mother screeched like an alley cat and Roy bellowed like an elephant.

“You’re very pretty when you wash all that makeup off your face,” he said, shuffling forward. “Even that black hair suits you.”

Danny continued to ignore him, spreading margarine on the bread before her.

His eyes scanned her pale skin below the short, thin nightshirt.

“Nice legs too,” he said. “Bet you didn’t play at that Goth thing you’d find plenty of boys to wrap them around.”

Danny continued to ignore him. Being a Goth, dressing in black, was nothing more than her outward demonstration of her contempt for the rest of her straight, obedient, boring, unsophisticated town and all its inhabitants. At least she had a personality, which was more than she could have said for most of the others in her school.

“Of course you’d find it hard to do that with your nose stuck in the air all the time,” he said, from directly behind her. “You should try and be a little friendlier to people, Danielle.”

Still, she ignored him. He was always trying to get a reaction out of her, to get her to acknowledge his miserable existence. But she was so far above him, she couldn’t care less what he thought or said or did or wanted.

His hands slid onto the counter on either side of her, hemming her in, and he pressed himself against her from behind. Danny stiffened slightly, but continued to refuse to acknowledge him as she picked up the ham and put it on the bread.

His hands closed in on her, pressing against her belly. It was hot and humid in the small kitchen, and she didn’t need his overheated, sweaty body pressed against her, much less his arms around her, but she refused to show she was even aware he was there.

He pressed his groin in against her buttocks, but she still ignored him. She’d put up with worse, not only from him, but other males, most of whom thought her weird, most of whom she ignored as beneath her notice. He ground himself against her harder, and she could detect, now, that he was starting to become erect.

“You know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for you and me to be so bored while your mother is away,” he said, leaning in, his breath hot against the nape of her neck. “We could have a lot of fun together.”

Danny was contemptuous, and angry, but refused to show either. Even as his hands rubbed her belly and began to move higher.