House of the Rising Sun Read Online Free Page A

boyfriend!”
    â€œYou were fucking him the whole time I was in prison.”
    She didn’t walk away, she didn’t even look pissed off, she just looked disappointed. “It wasn’t like that.”
    Ray’s head throbbed. He probed his scalp with his fingertips, feeling the lump from the pistol. “I’m just going by what I heard.”
    Jenny’s bottom lip quivered.
    Ray was waiting on the tears, thinking if she started crying, he might feel better.
    Then all of a sudden, Jenny didn’t look like she was going to cry. Instead, she looked defiant. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. You never did. If I were you, I wouldn’t brag about that.”
    She wanted to be a bitch. Fine, he could play that game, too. He looked at her legs, eyes lingering on her smooth thighs. He did it slowly, making sure she noticed. Then, when she started to look uncomfortable, he said, “Why don’t you go back upstairs where you belong?”
    She spun around on one spiked heel and stomped off. Over her shoulder, she said, “You’re an asshole, Raymond.”
    â€œDon’t call me Raymond,” he shouted at her back as he watched her go.

    Jenny Porter wasn’t about to let an asshole like Ray Shane see her cry. It took everything she had, but she kept her emotions bottled up until she made it to the bathroom. As she slammed the door shut behind her, it all came out. Six months’ worth of tears.
    When she finished, she looked at herself in the mirror, at her bloodshot eyes, at the twin rivers of mascara flowing down her face, and at the snot running from her nose. She filled the sink with hot water, soaked a tissue, and began to wipe.
    Ray had been home from prison for six months, and he had been working at the House for six months. But in all that time he had spoken to her only once, nothing but cruel words in the parking lot. It was like they didn’t know each other. No, it was worse than that. Men she didn’t know talked to her all the time. It was as if Ray didn’t want to know her, as if he were disgusted by her.
    Every night Ray sat next to the downstairs bar, and every night she passed him a dozen times going up and down the stairs. He always looked away. When other men looked at her, it was like they were undressing her, some like they were raping her. When Ray looked at her, it was like he had coughed something up from the back of his throat and needed to spit it out.
    She knew he wasn’t normally a cruel person, at least he hadn’t been before he went to prison. When he had first come back, she ran to him, wanting to explain what had happened. She needed to explain about Tony, but he had pushed her away.
    â€œI know you need some time to sort things out,” she had told him, saying she would wait until he got adjusted to being back in the real world, then they could talk, then she could explain. But it never happened. She waited, but they never talked. When she tried, he walked away.
    Six o’clock one morning, two months after Ray was released. The Rising Sun had just closed. She waited for him in the parking lot on Decatur, two blocks from the House, determined to have it out with him. She had only seen him once that night. Around midnight he had been standing by the counting room when she walked down from the third floor. He had looked at her, giving her nothing but a hard, hateful stare. She could tell from that stare that he knew she had been upstairs with a customer.
    In the parking lot she tried to tell him what had happened after he got sent to prison. She told him how her mother gotsick. How the cancer got so bad she had needed a nurse twenty-four hours a day and $2,000 worth of prescription medications a month. Then finally—before the end came—how her mother had spent eight weeks in the hospital. There was no insurance. Did he know how much that kind of medical care cost?
    â€œDid you get a