Chapter 10- Strange Bedfellows Revised

Author's Note: I'm not going to front any of you and act like I haven't updated in forever. I do hope, however, someone is still reading this, despite my own issues (senior project, family, getting ready to go to college...) and me dragging my heels.

Well, I hope this chapter is sufficient; that's all I can really hope for. Oh, also, here's where a warning for Sexual Content is gonna go. It's slight, but if you're touchy about that (Really? A homeless man gets his head split like an overripe melon, not a peep, and sexual content, then OHMIGAWD!- Really?) then you've been warned. I need to move onto another one of my other ABANDONED fanfics now to add onto, while the momentum's strong. Gah.

-- Mad Red Queen

Molly continued to cry against the book for quite awhile. Horace didn't like it- sure- but it gave him time to retract himself into a deep recess in his mind, a place where he was looking over the things that had lately been presented to him in that splintered, broken way of his. His concentration was already barely hanging on the doorway of usable by rusted hinges, but the sound of Molly sobbing away into her book broke his concentration many a time whenever her cries grew in intensity.

In truth, Horace really wanted to stop pondering things and to be able to reach forward and wrap his long, powerful arms around Molly's slight, shuddering shoulders. Sometimes, out of desperation when her cries got to him once or twice, he really did try. Each time he did, however, the same result occurred- he ended up going through her as though he were a fog that could never touch her. If not for the fact that Horace felt what little working emotions he had in him drained out in the tears that had come out of him earlier, he might have had the energy to really worry over what it was that was stopping him from the psychical contact he suddenly wanted with Molly.

But for that moment, all he thought about was trying to block out her weeping without having to resort to leaving her side. The best thing he could do was to try to think about everything that had happened to him for maybe the first time since he had left the junkyard both empty-hearted and, unbelievably, hopeful.

At some point, Molly just went quiet. For a moment, even as drained and emotionless as he had become, he was nearly thrown into a panic at the thought that she wasn't breathing. When she finally lifted her head about five minutes later, sniffling like a kid whose ice cream cone had gotten dropped on the ground, Horace could have just died- again- in relief.

The rest of the day, Molly did not show any other real sign of grief or any other real emotional disturbance. It was almost eerie; she walked to one room, turned or pushed on one device or another, did this or that, then went right onto the next task with no mannerisms that would have comforted Horace. To Horace, about everything (short of petting Behemoth when she sat stock still on the couch with commercials running by on the tv) was robotic. He did not like how drastic the change was from Molly Weeping and Molly Robotic.

When the sun set, Horace resigned himself to sitting on Molly's bed and watching as she came into the bedroom. She had gone into the bathroom earlier to take a bath, and he had assumed that she had taken clothes with her. He hadn't really been paying attention to anything she had done before leaving the bedroom earlier, truthfully, because he had been looking out the window next to her full-length mirror. The sun had begun to set, and he had found it more interesting than watching her move around the bedroom, picking up clothes off of the floor scattered around the bed before walking into the bathroom. After she came back, Horace looked up from the wood floor's many shiny, driven-in nails, and was greeted by the sight of Molly wearing nothing but a worn Disney towel wrapped over her hair.

It was shock that came first, of course, then a curiously hypnotized feeling as he stared at her when she walked into the room. He couldn't take his eyes off of the now not-so-little Molly Christoe.

She never seemed to notice him as she walked over to the mirror that sat next to her set of wooden drawers. She halted in front of the mirror, pausing to look at a side-view of her body. She frowned.

Horace realized that it wasn't that he was actually hypnotized by the sight of Molly, but it was, indeed, a sight he couldn't talk himself out of viewing. It could have been a more innocent sight (but a none the less magnificent one) with the level of indecent feelings that he was experiencing. It could have been some ancient, grand vase he was inspecting from the foot of the bed with how lustful he felt at the moment. He felt... nothing.

It was not he first time he had set about to stare at the sight he had never been willingly shown in both life and death. In fact, even on his way into the city, he had accidentally passed through more than one sight close to the one he was being treated to. Women undressing- both without any thought that anyone was actually watching them, and women who stripped in front of their lovers. He had walked through many a couple in their own particular moments of higher emotion- and one moment in which it was obvious that one of the two he caught in the moment was not in the same state of high emotion. And, yes, ability to feel sexual desire or not, he had stayed and watched as people did things that only he could have fantasied about and envied over as a teen boy, daydreaming when he took a drive in his tow and watched couples holding hands through town, then lying half-nude in his cot at night, enjoying that empty, desperate creature comfort that never substituted for anything more than that one moment of ecstasy- then loneliness. Those long, almost hopelessly empty nights were almost always ended- or began when things were at their most depressing and lonely- with those prolonged moments of almost cruel hope and completely over-powering sexual energy, then of the hurried flight to the sun, only to get sent back to earth in flames and through a cloud of smoke. In a way, being unable to feel lust in any way he could once feel was a wonder in its own.

He had never really been able to appreciate either the power he could wield over his own now non-existent sexual desire, or the pure, unclouded beauty of a naked female. Staring at Molly, he flowed his line of vision over the bony cones of her ankles, the sweet, slight curves of her legs as they swept up to her round plates of knees, the way her thighs curved up like a following a vase from its foot upwards. As he stared at her, she suddenly turned so that she was facing away from the mirror- but now facing him almost directly as she examined her backside with a blank expression.

He stared at the wheat-colored area between her legs, that area where she obviously hadn't taken the time to change her natural color of her blonde hair. As he stared at that soft yellow downward pointing arrow of hair, he began to feel less comfortable with staring at that part of her body than her legs. He eventually glanced away, feeling as though he really was the voyeur that he probably was. And not only that, but the girl he was staring at was Molly Christoe. Little Molly.

He stared off to the side for a moment, eyes shut, then, feeling more than just a little uncomfortable, he turned back to stare back at her, his eyes spanning the fullness of her wide, sticking-out hips like his hands, in his mind just barely touching the flesh, feeling awkward even imagining touching her. He came up past the indent of her belly button and ran the much-more gentle and much, much less calloused and awkward weight of his imagined hands against the pale skin covering the lower part of her chest, imagining what each bump of her rib bones through her flesh felt like under his finger tips. When he reached the curved hills of her breasts, he halted. For the second time, he felt like nothing more than some disgusting pervert, staring at a girl who, to him, would probably never really be anything more than a girl- even though he knew that she was probably older than he had been before he died.

While he hesitated for a moment longer before turning back to look at her again finally, he heard her making sounds of dismay- or disgust. When he looked back at her, he saw her staring with disliking eyes at herself in the mirror, her hands positioned over her belly. She sighed deeply, and let out a sound of dismay. "Ughh."

To his surprise, she suddenly turned away from the mirror and looked right at him on the bed. Smirking darkly, she said, "So, what do you think?"

For a moment, the shock he felt was almost too immense and heavy to lift as he thought, horrified, about what he was planning to say to Molly with his hands caught in the proverbial cookie jar. Then, Molly walked over to the bed, her movements exaggerated so that her hips jerked back and forth in a mockery of a sexy strut- and went to the other edge at the end of the bed, to where Behemoth, forgotten by Horace, laid there with that perpetual look of misery on his aging, furred face.

She cupped the dog's muzzle and ran her long fingers down the shape of the dog's skull. She sat so that she was sitting with her legs hanging off of the edge of the bed, seeming content to pet the half-asleep animal next to her, unaware that a creature that was, perhaps, worse than a beast was watching her, unseen.

A short while later, she turned away from the dog to stare out the window Horace had been looking through earlier, transfixed by the nightly light show of the sun outside. As he looked at her form sitting on the other side of the bed, he found that sexual desire or not, it was impossible to not feel a pang somewhere in him when he saw her positioned like that. As well as admiring her body further, he also stared at her, not able to fully lose the fear that she could, somehow, see him.--

At some point after Molly had shut the light off in her room and had lied down in her bed, her blankets covering her up totally where her tank top and panties that she had worn to bed had not, Horace was treated to a moment of clarity that was both a welcome relief while still in the middle of his always-present confusion as well as a conclusion that he was absolutely shocked to discover.

It began with a question that had begun when Molly had finally changed from wearing only her pale skin and went into her sleeping wear earlier that night. It had been one that had afflicted his mind in every way which was possible for a dead man while Molly, unaware of anything out of the ordinary in her own apartment, trolled her way back into her study to glower at her books until bed time. The question that got to Horace was, why do I feel the way I do around her- naked or dressed?

When he was alive, he might have found it more convenient to just push those feelings away, believing that no woman would want him anyway, but the many realities he found himself forced to face made him realize that he was going to have to deal with this.

For one, even though he could feel nothing, when he saw her crying in the study earlier, he could not make himself function in any way he had become so used to while she had been upset. Another was that although he had been tempted, he found that he hadn't bludgeoned anyone to death since he had found Molly's letter- and her trail. Last but not least was his curious reaction to her when she had walked into her bedroom earlier, that feeling in his chest that reminded him vaguely that was as though something soft was rubbing along in his chest and stomach, giving him a pleasant friction in his insides. He had no choice other than to think about the situation he was in, and about whatever he had been planning unconsciously since he had found her poem.

He danced around the issue until the digital clock that sat on top of Molly's nightstand, partially balanced on a book whose spine read, "1st Degree Murder... What It Means To You." read 3:20. He knew that it was that time in particular, because he had been staring first at the pale skin of Molly's arm, which was thrust out of her blankets to lay against her hip. The darkness in the room was so absolute that the normally dull light of the digital alarm clock was bright enough to give Molly's pearlescent skin a pink-red tint.

Feeling uncomfortable with staring at Molly in a way that he was shocked to realize as hungry in some inexplicable way, he forced his gaze up to the digital clock, watching as the minutes flicked by.

The unpleasant explanation came within minutes- or, more appropriately, clawed its way up and out of the junk pile of flimsy explanations that Horace had hidden it under back when he had found Molly's poem. Horace had tried to forget that explanation in an effort to ignore that most realistic of answers. Ignoring it, however, was much like ignoring a blow horn being turned on next to his ear on full-blast.

And so, without really getting over the shock that came along with his words, Horace said it for the first time in his entire life. And death.

"I...I... love her?"

He turned to look over at the dog (who he was lying partially through on the bed) for assurance either way. The dog made a soft snuffling, half-asleep dog noise, and turned away with a noise that was unmistakably, a fart. Horace groaned, sinking back into the bed.

As he allowed himself to feel comfort in the almost euphoric way it felt to him to have the weight of his conscious finally lifted with the words he had needed to have spoken, he was jolted to attention with the shrill noise in the room.

He felt as though the noise had hit him like a jolt to the chest, but, when he realized that the noise was really Molly's cell phone, which was on and giving out loud, birring rings, he calmed himself down. There was, after all, nothing abnormal about Molly's phone going off- even at this late an hour. She was, after all, a lawyer.

It seemed a lot less normal, however, when the rings of the phone seemed to grow louder, causing him to wince slightly. When he looked over in the direction of Molly- wondering why she wasn't awake- he was surprised to see that Molly did not seem disturbed by the sound of the phone ringing. In fact, she seemed to be in a deep, uneventful rest.

Horace stared at her in disbelief, thinking, Why can't she seem to hear that cell phone? to himself. Eventually, the shrill noise of the cell phone seemed to warp into a horrible, pulsating roar that made Horace have to choose between either clutching pillows over his head or going over to the cell phone and hope that finally confessing his feeling to himself gave him the ability to manipulate real world objects and living things once again.

He gave into the need to do the former with a loud grunt as he trudged past the foot of Molly's rumpled bed and up to the nightstand next to her side of the bed.

On the nightstand were three objects; a warm cup of soda that she hadn't pulled out of the refrigerator that day, the alarm clock that sat on top of the old book, and her loud, evil-sounding cell phone. Despite the fact that Horace could barely stand another moment of listening to the phone's noise, Horace hesitated, his huge, powerful hand halfway reaching down to the nightstand. When the cell phone rang once again, however- the loudest ring in the whole time that it had been going off- he grabbed the phone and pulled it off of the nightstand, taking a moment to nearly rip the top folded half off as he pulled the phone's brightly lit lid back, causing the phone to cease ringing in the beginning of another ring.

As he pulled the phone up to his ear, he realized that he was surprised about what was going on. He hadn't thought past the slight chance that he could actually answer the phone to make it stop ringing.

Not knowing what else to do as he raised the phone to his ear slowly, Horace looked around the room for a second nervously before he asked, "Hello?"