Read Online The Fury by Alexander Gordon Smith - Free Book Online

identify. For the first time since he’d started hanging out here he wondered if it was safe, if maybe the candles were eating all the oxygen and spitting out carbon monoxide or something. It might not have had much of an effect on him but Lisa was about a foot shorter and half his weight.
    ‘You okay?’ he asked, grabbing her shoulder and giving her a gentle shake. ‘Lisa?’
    She seemed to stir, her eyes swimming into focus and her brow crinkling. She sat up straight, wiping the back of an arm across her face, taking a deep, uncertain breath. When she next looked at Brick it was almost as if she couldn’t quite put a name to the face, squinting, the corners of her mouth drooping like they were being pulled by wires.
    ‘Lisa? Baby?’ He’d never called her ‘baby’ before, but she was seriously starting to freak him out. ‘You want to go? Get some fresh air?’
    After what felt like a solid minute she shook her head again. She reached out and grabbed Brick by the scruff of his shirt, reeling herself towards him with a wide-open mouth. Brick recoiled, his lip throbbing, but the thought of another kiss snuffed out everything else. He pushed his mouth against hers, working his hand back underneath her T-shirt where it had spent the last half an hour hovering with nervous impatience around her lower rib, uncertain about which direction to take so taking neither. Her skin was so hot she might have had a furnace under there. Brick’s heart was like the beat-up engine on his bike, going so fast and so hard he was worried it might stall.
    Lisa’s hand was still wrapped around the collar of his shirt and she used it to push him back into the sofa, clambering onto his lap, their lips never parting. The change of position, his neck wedged at an awkward angle, made his headache worse, that pulse so loud now it was like a hand inside his skull, squeezing the flesh of his brain – thump-thump . . . thump-thump . . . thump-thump – not as fast as his own heartbeat but definitely more urgent. Talk about timing, the night he might finally get lucky with Lisa and it felt like his head was about to implode.
    Lisa’s kisses were furious now, so hard that their teeth were clashing. She banged her nose against his and he tried to tilt his head so it wouldn’t happen again, a lance of discomfort spearing his neck. She didn’t let up, bearing down on him, covering his mouth with her own so that he couldn’t get a breath in, her tongue trying to worm down his windpipe.
    He attempted to shove her away but she felt heavier than he would have believed possible. The angle his body was locked in – bent into the crook of the old sofa – made it impossible for him to find leverage. He pushed forward with his head and she moved with him, locked onto his lips like a leech. He did it again, butting her with more force. Her head swung back.
    It wasn’t Lisa.
    It looked like her but there was something wrong with her face, like it had melted. All of her muscles had gone slack, reminding him of his nan when she’d had a stroke. It made her look years older, decades older. It made her look dead.
    ‘Lisa? Lisa?’ Brick said, the words half eaten by fear as he squirmed beneath her. ‘What’s wrong? Baby, tell me what’s wrong.’
    She came for him again, that sunken face closing in, her mouth so wide that Brick almost screamed at the sight of it. He grabbed her shoulders, keeping her at arm’s length, trying to manoeuvre himself towards the edge of the sofa.
    ‘Lisa, snap out of it, what’s wrong?’
    What if something happened to her out here. What if she died ? And Brick realised with a sickening sense of shame that the first thought which flashed into his head – there and gone in a heartbeat – was that he’d have to leave her here and run, get the hell away before her parents found out. But no, of course he wouldn’t, he could call for an ambulance, they’d be here in minutes, she’d be okay. She’d be okay.
    He shook her,