Read Online Level Five by Carla Cassidy - Free Book Online

wanted to kill her yet, but as he’d walked into that room filled with paper from floor to ceiling for a brief moment the hoard had completely overwhelmed him. 
    When his gaze had fallen on her she’d looked just like his mother, sitting in the middle of a hoard with a box of newly acquired items from a dumpster.
    The rage had descended like a red curtain in front of his eyes, blinding him. When the curtain lifted the girl was dead. 
    What upset him the most was the realization that she hadn’t been the one after all. She hadn’t been the one to heal him, to fix him.
                  “He’s gotta be gay,” one of the men at the urinal said.  Anthony recognized the speaker as Bob Randolf, who worked in accounting and was something of a homophobe.  “I’ve never heard him talk about any woman he’s ever dated.”
                  “You’re right.  I’ve never heard him mention a woman and at his age that should be all he’s talking about.”  The second man was Sam Greer, also from accounting.
                  Anthony’s heart began to rap an unsteady rhythm and his stomach clenched with a painful spasm. Were they talking about him?  God, he didn’t want anyone gossiping about him, speculating on his personal life. 
    The last thing he wanted was to be seen as different or strange, not that Anthony believed gay people were particularly strange. He just didn’t want anyone wondering about his private life.
                  “You know he dyes his hair,” Sam said.
                  Bob snorted a laugh.  “Well, no shit, Sherlock.  You really think that tiger-stripe could be natural?”
                  Anthony sagged in relief as the two men finally left the bathroom. It was the new hire in development they’d been talking about, not him.
                  He left the stall and washed his hands at the sink. He stared at his reflection in the mirror.  It could have been you, a little voice whispered in the back of his head. They could have easily been talking about him.
                  He was still worried about image and perceptions as he made his way back to his tiny cubicle. He sat at his desk and stared blankly at his computer monitor. 
    What did people say about him behind his back?  Did people wonder why he never talked about women he’d dated. The men in the office spent an inordinate amount of time boasting about their sexual encounters, but Anthony never added to the conversations.
                  He’d had a brief sexual relationship when in college with a fellow student named Amanda.  As far as he was concerned sex was vastly over-rated. He’d never felt the desire to connect on a more intimate level with anyone – except the mother who had wrapped her trash and treasures around herself and had ignored her son. 
                  Punishing the projects for his childhood, for the mother who had never loved him gave him both a sexual and a spiritual release that mere sex could never achieve.
                  He’d found his passion in the growing collection in his back yard.  As a computer programmer, part of his job was to be analytical. He didn’t need therapy to know that he was working on childhood issues by taking the women and punishing them for his mother’s sins.  But he also knew that someplace out there was the woman who would transform him, the one who would make him normal. 
    In the meantime he was a self-actualized man.  He killed women who looked like the mother he hated. It made him feel good, because it released the enormous knot of rage that occasionally made breathing impossible. It gave him the same kind of euphoric release he assumed other men got from the act of sex.
                  Even now just thinking about it had him hard and even though he’d buried his latest the day before, he felt the burn of need in the pit of his