COVET: a short story
by Rewired,
who is trying for the
first time in a long time
to write some short fiction.
So comment, so criticize,
because I need it.
But be merciful.
-----------------------
The cool autumn evening blows in a breeze from my right, and a dead, red leaf falls on the heap of glass chards resting on the passenger seat of my car. And, hey, there it is. She's right, you can't miss the motel, not with its large neon sign. And without that cliche neon-sign flickering. The little sign below it advertises its vacancy and this seems unnatural, for especially as far as motels go, this was an unspeakably cool one. The entrance way is marked by large stones, and to either side of the entrance, beyond the stones, are tiny, well-trimmed shrubs resting on islands of small wood chips in a sea of freshly-mown grass.
This is the little shit you notice during times like this. These irrelevant details, they combine into this tiny vacation from the shit storm that has become your life in under the length of a single day.
Here I thought my life was falling together for the first time. In the end, it turns out that brief phases of optimistic perception just serve to reinforce the old, familiar, pessimistic outlook.
Its only in the face of change, the transition called death, that it seems we feel anything anyway, so might as well march headstrong right into the shit-storm. As if, in this case, there were any other option.
I swerve to dodge some road kill before pulling in, and then park in front of room 23. The number, it's painted white and outlined in black on a small sign above the overhang on the porch. Its also in black on the red-painted door, just above the peephole. There's three wood-stained stairs to step up to the porch, and my fist doesn't even meet with the door to knock until she opens it.
And I'm thinking before the door is even open the entire way, before I even give her a once-over: damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. The part of me that was going to enjoy this would only compound my self-hate for doing this, regardless of the circumstances that drove me to do it.
She grabs my tie and she pulls me into the room, closing and locking the door behind her back. She let go of my tie as soon as I was inside, and I sort of hopped, just to get a few feet away from her.
There she was, staring at me directly as I glance at her and then to the floor. And my glancing, its from my side. Its as if I'm at some stance, anticipating an attack from her or something. Glancing to her, to the floor, to her, to the floor, I'm straightening my tie now. I'm loosening the tie a bit, trying to swallow, as if the tie is really the thing choking me here. Then, clearing my throat, I finally breath in deeply. Feeling my whole body quiver as I do so.
I'm breaking out in a cold sweat here, and I wish she'd stop looking at me in such a hungry, thirsty way. Its making me nervous. Like my anxiety attacks in large crowds. In those speeches I had to make in front of the class in high school.
"Exhale," she says.
Oh, yeah. I really had forgotten to exhale that deep breath. So I do, but I do it through my nose, and I do it slowly so as to not seem like I'm so easily drawn to following her commands. I have to resist her.
I try not to look at her eyes, her face. So I look down to look away, but only slightly down, and I see her neck. She has on a spiked dog-collar and she's wearing a tight black shirt with a romantic heart on it, blooming across her large and luscious breasts, a romantic silhouette of a heart in dotted lines, like they use on packages to indicate `cut here'. Inside the dotted-heart shape there is neon-colored red lettering, made to look like a neon sign, and it says, Vacancy.
Then, realizing where I'm staring, I submit. I look up to meet her eyes.
Looking at her looking at me, I know, I just know that she knows how much I don't want to want to do this so much. The strength of my surface desire pitted against my deeper desire, the pressure I'm obviously putting on it, to conceal it, to resist it, it gives it away. There is no hiding this but in walking away, and I can't walk away. This is a hopeless situation, I've been cornered into making a bad choice in face of an even worse one.
This whole circumstance, with her and I in this locked room, this would no doubt cause major damage to my relationship with my wife. But if I leave, there's good reason to believe I'll arrive home to find my wife dead. So I go with the lesser of two evils, so-to-speak, with damage I can manage over a murderous catastrophe I don't have the capacity to reverse.
Or, at this exact moment, even explain.
The conspiracy she's waged against me, or involving me, has somehow made me loose the conspiracy against myself. Funny how things work out.
Funny how context can change what you consider `working out'.
She sits down on a chair nearby for a moment and takes out a bowl, lighting it with her Zippo, breathing in the illegal fumes with a heavy inward breath, holding it, looking at me in such a sexy way, smiling, keeping that smile as she closes her eyes and tilts her head back and breaths out the trail of smoke in such a smooth and steady stream.
Already, the battle between my penis and my brain is waging within me. Then my heart steps in, and reasons with my brain, and suddenly, beyond my control, I'm feeling something stand at attention in my pants.
I look down, and then my head shoots back up, as i again realized I was staring somewhere inappropriate. At least this time it was on my body, though. And when my head shoots up, and my eyes look at her, I see that she was looking down, too, right where I was.
Her head doesn't move, just her eyes look up to meet mine. The last of the smoke escapes her smile, and behind the thick but quickly drifting fog there is a smile so sly and sexy I don't so much as shudder as I do convulse. I close my eyes tight, trying to will this away.
Trying to will this horrible and strange and beautiful and arousing and heartbreaking nightmare-dream hybrid away.
-----------------------
It was around eight in the evening, about seven hours before she opened the motel room door, that all this started happening.
My mind's always wandering during work, and so when I thought I heard my name I pretty much ignored it, coughing it up to my imagination. So many people came through this grocery store every day, you could never really be certain it was you that someone was beckoning. I just checked the dates on the milk, then turned to the left to re-organize the cheeses. After the first few hours, there isn't much to do, working the dairy isle, and I had ten minutes more to kill before my break.
So bored. So numb, but I know I shouldn't be.
When I heard my name again, I felt someone put their hand on my shoulder this time. Now Jack, he wasn't the touchy-feely kind of guy, that's always been the case, so this kind of confused me when I turned around to see his face. That, and I hadn't seen the guy, my former best friend, for over a year and a half. It did what I think he intended it to do, though, and he'd finally got my full and undivided attention. And the look on his face was something I cannot describe.
Looking at him, happy with his unprecedented presence but confused at the mixed look he threw back at me, I told him, hey, long time no see. Since it was about time for my break, I asked him if he wanted to grab a bite to eat, maybe bullshit for half an hour. He said sure.
Eating some subs outside the grocery store on the curb, I felt there was some motive behind why he had come to see me. I didn't come out and ask, though, I asked him how he was doing, what he was doing now. He told me he was a police officer. That girl he'd met, he was planning on marrying now, marrying within the next few months if he could. He asked me how I was, and I told him I was still happily married, that I'd had a sixteen-month-old baby boy.
He broke a smile, almost, and let out what for him was the closest you got to a chuckle. "At what point, exactly, does a parent start counting their child's age in years instead of months?" Laughing, I told him I anticipated by the time he was two. It was a great feeling, being a father. I told him this after he asked what it felt like, and then I told him that he would no doubt learn in time.
Through our small talk, throughout which he seemed very guarded, he eventually mentioned the name of his wife-to-be. That answered the question I was so curious about but had been too afraid to ask, and it was a shame. This girl he was with, Sheri, it was the same girl he had been with back when I'd known him. He had to have been with the girl for half a decade now. I couldn't be sure, but I suspected she had been the one to create the rift between Jack and all his friends.
He was whipped, that is what everyone said about Jack. Never to his face, of course. But any guy who had ever seen his girlfriend, they would fall silent when presented with the question as to whether they'd do any different, being in his position. This girl, Sheri, she was a beautiful woman, and we're not talking super model beauty, we're talking insatiable, rare-gem, unconventional beauty here. Rumor had it that she was quite a sadomasochist, and anyone who had been around her for any length of time spoke of her as charismatic but controlling. An overtly-sexual, dominating woman.
Jack's mother had died about eight years ago, and she had been a very controlling woman in his life. He had outdone himself in finding a substitute.
Halfway between a long story about his job at the police department in a town a few hours away from here, I looked at my clock to see my half hour was almost up. I tried to bring it all to a close.
"I'm happy for you," I lied to him. I wasn't really happy for the poor, whipped fool. "And I hope everything works out. And you know, now that you've seen me, I expect you to keep contact. You'd damn well better invite me to the wedding, too. But I'm already gonna be late clocking in, and I've got to get back to work."
"Wait," he said, grabbing my shoulder again as I tried to stand up from where I'd been sitting on the curb. "Just wait a second."
I did, but at first, he said nothing. Like he was choking on his own words, but he really meant to spit it all out. Like he was suffocating on backed-up sentences. Whatever had been in his mind since the moment I'd turned around to face him, it seemed all too evident it was coming to a pique now.
"What?" My voice, it was almost desperate.
He closed his eyes and said it. "I need you to sleep with my girlfriend."
I've never tried acid, but perhaps one day, for some reason, I will. I wondered: could this, then, be an acid flashforward?
"I'm sorry, what?"
It's one of those occasions when you know for damned certain you've heard somebody right, but at the same time a part of you insists that no matter how convincing the auditory hallucination was, it was still an auditory hallucination.
"I need you to fuck my girlfriend."
Maybe it was slang. I was never hip to the lingo back in the day, and certainly not, you now, now-a-days.
So I just stared for a moment. Then my head jerked back and I felt one eyebrow shoot up my forehead. I looked away, and then back at him. I shook my head and shrugged.
"I don't get it."
"It's simple," he said, and he was looking dead in my eyes now, impatient, almost angry. "I need you to bang the shit out of my girlfriend. Do the horizontal hokey-pokey. Screw. Hump. You know, the old in-out. I need you to fuck her, and I need you to fuck her long and hard."
"No." I said it simply and clearly, taking him seriously for a moment. Then I began to wonder again if it was some joke, as it was always hard to tell with Jack. "Where's the punch line, man? Am I on Candid Camera?Wait, do they even do Candid Camera anymore? Or is it that Punked show?"
"He only pulls pranks on fellow celebrities, and you hardly qualify, which in a way, makes this easier," he said. "But no, this is no joke. No set up. And I don't want you to ask questions, I just want you to do it."
He threw me a piece of paper and got up from the curb, wiping himself free of dust, leaving his half-eaten sub beside me. "Call her tonight at 2 AM, and don't fuck this up."
I opened the folded piece of paper, and it was a cell phone number.
As he walked away, I looked up at him. "Jack," I said, "what the fuck is going on?"
"That," he said, looking at me briefly as he walked towards the busy parking lot, "that is definitely a question."
-----------------------
I open my eyes. She looks at me, forehead tilted towards me, eyes bearing into mine, and she hold out the bowl with one hand. "Want a hit?"
She has on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, out of which two blue-green snake eyes fixate on you, like a predator studies its prey. She has deep red, curly hair, tied in two pig tails, and her hair is wet. A few stands hang over her beautiful and pale features, and on the wrist of one arm, the one with which she holds out the bowl, there is a broken handcuff, with two loops of the chain just hanging there.
"No thanks," I tell her. She smiles wider, puts the bowl down, and stands up to approach me. Below her spiked black belt, there are dark jeans, like you might find in Hot Topic in the mall. Only on the crotch, right above the arrow pointing downward that's right above the zipper, are embroided the words, Selective Entry Only.
"Like my pants, I take it?" She says, and my eyes quickly dart up to meet hers, and I'm a little embarrassed that I'd been staring.
"Yeah," I tell her, trying to push myself out of my trance, regain my backbone, bring out my inner, bitter smartass. "It reminds me of the tattoo I have above my asshole. It says, Exit Only."
She laughs like a free and enlightened child, looks away for a moment, just a moment. She then shakes her head, and slowly, and then she lifts her head up a bit and pauses. Then, remaining still, her eyes lift up a bit more, bearing into mine. Her looks drive me insane.
"It always struck me as a double-standard," she tells me, laughing some more, brushing the loose strand from her eye, "how almost every guy I've ever come across gets a woody just thinking about two girls doing so much as swapping spit -- that's right, not even fucking."
And she says it in a sexy tone that she's undoubtedly mastered, one that ripples through me like a strong bass line when you're standing in front of the speakers turned up to the max, or like a stone thrown in a pond, reverberating throughout my entire being, turning my whole body into an erogenous zone perpetually fed by the stimulating sounds of her seductive voice.
"But two guys touching each other?" She says. "That's enough to freak them out."
As she's saying this, I suddenly think back to the grocery store, how Jack touched my shoulder, and things in my head, they begin to fall into place, into this neat and tidy little theory. How I hope I'm wrong, and how I need to falsify it.
"What's going on?" I said. "What is all this about?"
She's got that playful look about her as she says, "What do you think is going on?"
"Well," I said. "I've been really chewing on that one. Rumor has it that you're kind of weird, kind of kinky. And Jack, I don't think he's like that, but you never know. So I figure you'd have to be the central figure in all this. My only guess was that you wanted to hurt him. So somehow you black-mailed him, and also black-mailed him into black-mailing me into some threesome your planning between him, you and I here in this hotel. Granted, the theory seems a little out there, but, well, the situations a little out there, so can you blame me? I just don't think I'm up to that kind of thing, though, if its the case."
"So," she says after a pause for dramatic effect, "you're homophobic, are you?"
"No, certainly not. I've had quite a few friends who were gay," I said. "Its just nothing I'd ever want to experience. I sometimes touch my own penis out of necessity, but that's about the length of it. And, I don't know, I've always figured anal sex would just feel like pooping in reverse, and that doesn't come across to me as very appealing."
"You know what they say," she says, still in that playful, mocking tone. "Don't dis it till you try it."
"So much for practicing what you preach."
"Oh, what is that supposed to mean?"
"Well, to be honest, I've heard this `don't dis it till you try it' line before, in so many contexts, and it just pisses me off to no end." I said. "I mean, have you ever eaten your own feces?"
"What?"
"Your feces," I repeated. "You know, your dung. Your crap, your shit. Have you ever eaten it?"
"No." She says.
"Well," I said, "don't dis it till you try it."
-----------------------
After work, at about midnight, I was on the freeway on the way home. I'd called her as he said I should, and I asked her what this was all about, and she said that me and her were going to have a night of hot, wild sex. What I told her is that as arousing as I found that to be, I was a committed man, a man with a wife and a child. The beginnings of a family. That for once in my life, things were beginning to have a sense of order and normality, and no way in hell was I about to ruin it all for a one-night stand with my old friend's girlfriend, even at the request, the blessing verging on a threat, of my old friend.
She said to me, it wasn't his his request, his blessing or threat, it was hers. She wanted to fuck me, and he was to prove his love to her by allowing her to do it. I told her this was just plain fucked up, and to give me his number, because I was going to call him up and settle this once and for all. She gave me the number, and said she'd see me soon. Before I could say the hell she would, the other line was dead.
Ten minutes from home, he picks up on the other line. I don't wait for him to say so much as a hello, already I'm screaming. "Jack, I don't know what's going on, I don't know what's behind this, but I can't do this. I've got a girlfriend, and you're my best friend and this is just fucking crazy. I'm going home and that's all there is to it."
"You'll do it."
"No," I said in ruthless insistence, "I fucking won't do this."
"You've got to do it."
"No, I don't."
"If you don't do it," he said to me in confidence, "and if you don't stop raising a fuss about it by the end of this conversation, I'm going to blow the head off your girlfriend. Right now, I'm leaning my elbows atop the window sill off the attic floor of the house across the street from yours. Your neighbor, what's his name, Greg? He's on vacation. And I've got a rifle here with me, and its pointed straight at this window across the street. The blinds are pulled back. Its a nice little house with a white pickett fence. And through the window, there's the back of this slender, brown-haired woman watching television. What's the show? I think, damn man, I think she's watching one of those apocolyptic movies."
"That's just CNN," I said. "She's killing time before the pay-per-view porn."
"Fuck. Your right, it is CNN."
"Look, I don't know what kind of fucked-up game this is, but cut it the hell out."
"I'm not loosing her for one small mistake," he said, almost growling now, "and this is the only way I can keep her. Please my wife or I'll blow your girlfriend's little brain-chunks all over your fucking living room wall and ruin your lovely fucking wallpaper. In case you're wondering, this is the end of our conversation."
And he hung up.
-----------------------
She smiled an authentic smile. Every amount of resistance just amplified the look on her face that indicated she knew she was winning me over. That she knew I desired her. I changed the subject. Enough small talk.
"Tell me what this is all about," I demanded.
"Sure," she said, shrugging. "What happened is, I caught Jack red-handed. In this very hotel, in this very room, I caught him fucking the hell out of some cheap whore not two weeks ago. The dipshit could've been smarter about it, because I pass by this place every day, but Jack's a little ill-equipped when it comes to that wasted hunk of gray matter lying between the ears, if you catch my meaning."
"So you saw his car on your way passed the place," I said.
"Oh yeah," she said. "And when I listened in and heard her voice talking dirty to him, when i listened in and heard the sound of skin-against-skin and him calling her names and her moaning... When I opened the door -- the unlocked door, mind you -- I had it in my mind to kill them both. Not just as a favor to the species, not just to give natural selection a helping hand since its been so obviously slacking, but because I couldn't believe after all I'd done for the son of a dead, rotting corpse of a bitch that he would have the nerve to go cheat on me. After asking me to marry him, no less."
"So you didn't kill him, obviously," I said. "Did you kill her?"
"No, after it was all planned, it was obvious that killing her wouldn't be necessary," she said. "Killing them like that, it wouldn't convey the message I would wish it to convey. But I certainly scared the shit out of her that night, I made damn sure of that. Especially after I found out who she was, this girl I used to work with, the girl who used to be my best friend. She'd moved away, gone off to college, and we e-mailed now and again, but we lost contact. It had been years. I was so mad that she'd just stopped talking with me, and then to finally see her again, being fucked by my husband..."
"It didn't put you in the best of moods, is what you mean."
"No," she said. "Certainly not. So when I found them, they were both terrified, begging and begging. I had a knife in hand, that probably had something to do with it. But get this, he had her right up from behind, doggy style, wrists tied to the head of the bed. He got up after he saw me, hands up, backing away from the bed. I was screaming and waving the knife around, I had it in my mind at the time to kill them both. I didn't, though. I did swing the knife against the back of her neck and the bitch started crying and bleeding. And then what I did was I told him to give me one good reason not to kill her and him both, right then and there. One good fucking reason. And he said he loved me."
"How romantic."
"Yeah," she said. "So I laughed in his face and I left."
I swallowed. This woman was fucking beautiful, but just looking at her, hearing her talk, seeing her energy, I'd never want to piss her off.
"Back home," she went on, "he was beating on the locked door, crying like a baby, begging for my forgiveness. It was the most pathetic thing in the world, I wish I'd had it on videotape. He said he loved me, he'd do anything to be with me. He wanted to marry me, he said. I unlocked the door. I told him I would accept his proposal, but on one condition. He couldn't right his wrong, so in the very least we had to have a balance. He had to admit me a comparative wrong."
"What?"
"He fucked that girl, that whore I used to call my best friend," she said. "So the deal was, I get to fuck one of his friends. His best friend. And I knew it was you."
"Okay, so you knew I was his best friend," I said. "What the hell does that mean?"
"When he first met, I told him all about my sexual fantasies," she said, "and he told me all about his. My most frequent sexual fantasy, ever since high school, it was having you in bed, dominating you. Pleasing you. Fucking you and changing you through the raw experience. Burning through the mask you've constructed, and breaking down the walls around the mask you've built as your prison. Letting the real you breath and dance in the universe, unafraid. Making you into the person I know you are, deep down below all the garbage you use to hide from yourself."
"If I would've known that in high school, I would've been ecstatic," I told her. "But now I've got a wife and a kid and a great house and a fully functioning car. I mean, sure, its got an obliterated window now, but its still a damn good car."
"You know what I think?" She said to me, getting inches from my face. "I think you're scared to grow, to become independent, you're in denial of all that's truly life. I think your miserable, I think your mind is wandering all the time because you're so fucking bored and novacaned by the banality of your existence."
"And what do you suggest?"
"I suggest that when a grand turning point comes in your life," she says, "you take what's presented to you and you try and run with it. And when something fails, and you're left with a hopeless situation, you take the only path available that makes sense."
"This makes sense to you?" I said. "Because as for me, I'm fucking confused."
"I know you want me," she said, "you've always wanted me. And its strange that you're with a wife who is the polar opposite of who I am. You're just too fucking afraid to break away from your growing sense of security. Your sense of control over your tiny corner in life. Simple and traditional and conventional. You want something different, but you're trying to hide behind the mask of the ordinary, and it just clashes with your inner self."
"What the hell do you know about my inner self?"I yell to her. "Its inner, meaning not external, meaning not subject to prying eyes. Not subject to your eyes. Its for me and me alone."
"I see you. You can't hide from me. Your inner self is suffocated by the rigid, routine lifestyle you're trapped in," she said to me. "What you need is to just let go, accept that change and death are a part of life, stop trying to suit this one part of yourself to the whole world at the expense of your entire self. What you need to do is to start making your little part of the world suit to the entirety of your self."
"You think you know me, but you're just trying to manipulate me." I told her. "What, is this all to make this little fucked-up game easier for me to play?"
"I'm only trying to manipulate you into coming back into contact with who you really are," she told me, "and this is a way to win the game, a way out of the game. You're loosing, you've already lost, and you don't even see it. Just relinquish the role of the looser. Come back to yourself."
"You don't know me."
"You don't know you," she said. "As for me, I know myself, and I can smell my own. So, as a result, I do indeed know you." She held the pipe up to my mouth, lights her Zippo with her other hand, and goes, "Now, inhale deeply."
-----------------------
I'm parked at a gas station just off the freeway, not a mile from home. I'm smoking a cigarette, and I'm thinking, my mind's wandering, my twisted time machine.
Back in high school, before Jack and Sheri got together, Jack and I were best of friends. I mean, we would sit beside each other in study hall, he'd tell jokes and I'd laugh. We were both shy of women. Both of us, we belonged to no real group in school, we were both kind of loners in our own right. And we would point out the girls we liked, and the things we'd do to them if we had the chance, if we had the metaphorical balls, if we had the guts to even talk to them.
My acute fixation was on this punk rocker girl, this gothic type. Dark, sexy and mysterious. A few years back, word had it she had tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists with an exacto knife. horizontal across the wrist, we all knew that meant a cry for help. vertical, that meant business. All her cuts were at angles, though. They were criss-crossed, they were X marking the spot all around her wrist, all up-and-down her forearm.
I couldn't help but contemplate what this meant for her.
Criss-crosses. She was at the intersection of wanting help and having given up hope, then, or perhaps it was something else entirely. Me, it seemed to me as if she was flirting with death. Exploring it, getting just close enough to it to pull away at the last moment, to step away. So she could make sure death wouldn't get too close or far enough away. This flirting, this teasing extinction, this two timing with life and death, this was the way she maintained control.
Girls who teased guys, girls who flirted with them to advertise interest but turned away when he tried to go farther with it, this was to keep him close enough, but far enough away. to control him. to keep him on a leash, long, but still a leash.
This was why, after they threw her in therapy after her suicide attempt, after they locked her up for awhile and gave her pills, upon returning home she chased a dozen of those pills with a bottle of Jack Daniels. This was why she tried all those drugs in high school. This was why she'd cut herself in the first place. Why she cut herself all the way up to senior year.
With a knife pressed to your skin, to look at your own veins and the way the shimmering blade felt against it, the cold of metal and the heightened awareness, you kind of held the power over your own fate there, right in your hands. Everyone had to know as well as I did, that the closer you got to potential death, the more it was obvious you were a few inches and a few degrees of pressure away from drowning in a pool of your own red essence, the more alive you felt, the more alive you really were. You did begin to envy how those people must have felt a night before a hanging, the evening before the electric chair. This was why Grahm Greene continued to play Russian Roulette after his first time of attempting suicide through this method and it failed. You can't get a sense of structure in your life until you get a sense that it could end, that it was so fucking fragile. And to sense of life's fragility, of its finity, and at the same time hold that power in your own fucking hands, you must feel like the gods and goddesses you ceased to believe in.
That girl, I told Jack one day, that's the girl I want more than anything. Watching her, just thinking about her, my veins are on fire, every square inch of my body is teeming with that electric tingle. I want to get inside her and do the dirtiest things imaginable to her. I want to enslave her, I want to do her bidding. I want to get inside her mind and swim in the dark, rich, poisonous waters that must crash against the surface of her consciousness, day in and day out. I want to melt into her, to get as close as possible. I want to fuck the hell out of her.
And Jack, he took one look at her, made a face like he'd just stuck his nose in some dead animal carcass and breathed in deeply and said, "she's okay."
The fucker dissed it, then he tried it, then he dissed it. Make up your mind, man.
My fingers stop rapping on the steering wheel in nervousness, and I put the car in Drive and peel out of the gas station and off the off ramp.
-----------------------
"Everything's spinning," I said. "My head, its like its gone exorcist. The universe is a spinning top, a fucking cyclone in my mind. This shit, pot always fucks with my mind, it makes everything chaos."
"Learn this," she said. "Everything goes in circles, its the cycle of life."
"This isn't a circle," I told her, "because two wrongs don't make it all right again, okay? When the philosophy is that one wrong justifies another wrong, wrongs keep adding up, breeding like motherfucking rabbits. This kind of thing, it has no end. This is just revenge against a mistake and its spiraling out of control."
"You make it sound like he was just walking around naked and fell into her," she said. "For shit's sake, he made a commitment to me and then breached the contract. That's not mistake, that's pure intention."
"Fuck, you know what this is?" I tell her. "This is like our military killing members of another country because they killed members of our country, to show that killing will not be tolerated, will not go unpunished. Or killing a murderer to show that killing people is wrong. Its just hypocrisy. Doing unto others what they've done unto you isn't the way to go."
"No?"
"No," I say, and this time with insistence. "Fighting fire with fire just feeds the fire, and you become the enemy you're trying to defeat by mimicking the enemy's actions. If everyone lived by the philosophy eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, the whole fucking planet would be full of blind, toothless people wearing dentures and bumping into each other. Fuck, are you hungry?"
"Justice isn't always the illusion you've presented it to be here," she said. "Justice, in my eyes anyway, is karma. And karma's often misunderstood as being about good and evil, or cause and effect. Its not about that, really, its about finding yourself in the shoes you once put someone else in. Its about forcing you into empathy with them in some sense, about learning from both roles, from both sides of the spectrum. Its not about two wrongs, or even one wrong, its about equality. This isn't about revenge so much as its about balancing things out. Its about things going in circles, in completing a circuit, in following a process through to the end. You're just seeing a tiny part of it right now. You're just confused."
"Oh yeah, totally," I said. "Getting me stoned out of my frigging gourd, it will do that sort of thing."
"Not just that," she said, "in general. Get the message here, okay? Understand that I'm here to help you. I didn't just throw you into this so you could help me."
"I don't need a fucking savior,"I said. "And you don't need a savior, either. You need a vacation. A new boyfriend. A therapist. Maybe a couple hundred milligrams of prescribed medication."
"I'm not your savior, and I'm not trying to be," she said, "in my philosophy, my spiritual perspective, my worldview, I'm just another part of the process."
"And you somehow figure I should be a part of this process, too?" I say. "This is insane. I can't do this."
"Your wife will be dead by my idiot boyfriend's hand if we don't fuck, so I figure its more than a fair trade. You do nothing but benefit from this situation. Anyway," she tells me, "I'm kinky. It'll be the best sex you've ever had in your life."
"You're confident." I told her. "My wife is a goddess in bed, for your information."
"I'm just bloody well aware of my talents, that's all," she said.
She took off my shirt, and pushed me back against the wall behind the bed. Her sheer strength and my mind boggled by the marijuana, I can't seem to get a grip on the spinning room, let alone her in order to resist. I don't even see her take them from her back pocket, before I know it I hear the clicks and I'm hand-cuffed to the bed. Then she took off her jacket from atop the dresser and beneath it, there was the video camera.
"What is this?"
"I want him to see it," she said. "I'm going to tie the fucker to a chair, scotch tape his goddamn eyes open and let him see this at every angle possible, over and over."
"So I have to pretend like I'm going to enjoy this."
"Oh, you won't have to act at all," she said. "I told you, I'm very, very good, and I fucking meant it."
-----------------------
I pull the car out of park and I drive down my road slowly, with the light out. There's this big weeping willow on the street, and I park there. From there, I can just make out the barrel of the gun inching out the window on the attic floor of the house across the street of mine. He really wasn't joking.
My cell phone rings, and I nearly shit my pants.
I look at it, and its a vaguely familiar number. I pick up, and the voice on the other end asks me, "just what the fuck are you doing here? Do I have to kill both you and your wife? Because that's what I'll do if I have to."
"I've known you for years, Jack, and you couldn't have changed this much," I told him. "Partnership is a grand thing, but this woman you're with, if she really loved you she wouldn't put you in this position."
"You know shit about love," he said, and I heard him cocking the gun over the phone, that frightening sound. "Love is an addictive substance which may cause severe blindness and typically has horrendous withdrawl symptoms. And us fools, we are in desperate need of a twelve-step program."
"It doesn't always have to be this way," I told him. "Its all in the person you love, its not love itself that is so dangerous, its not love itself that will drive you crazy."
"As wise man once said, `all you need is love," Jack said. "You know a significant fact about that wise man that pertains specifically to this situation?"
"What's that?"
The window on my passenger-side door explodes, with tiny bits of glass flying everywhere, and I jump even higher than I did when my cell phone rang.
"That wise man," Jack said, "he's dead now, from a gunshot wound to the head."
I swallowed.
Then he said, "now go fuck my girlfriend before I kill you and your perfect fucking little family. And don't let me ask you again."
So with that, I got in the car and finally drove to the motel.
-----------------------
The dotted heart and the word vacant disappear, from bottom to top in a line of black, as she pulls the shirt over her head, revealing the two, unbound breasts unleashed from beneath. Each nipple is pierced with a tiny barbell twice, criss-crossed. She plays with them, squeezing, making circular motions.
She turns around to face the camera, teasing the camera, too. "I wish you were here in person to see this and suffer, Jack," she says to the lenz, up real close, so the screen would likely only show her beautiful, predator eyes, "but you've got your own job to do right now."
To blackmail me by holding my wife as an unknowing hostage, or to kill my wife, I wonder?
I watch her from behind, and I can see beneath her spiked black wrist bracelet a few recent scars, criss-crossed. On her back, her beautiful naked back, there is a tatoo. It is a lot like the Chinese yin-yang symbol, but there's an extra fish within the circle, three fish blending beneath each other's tails. And in each of their eyes, there's three other fish. And the whole design is made of roots, as if vines, colored black and green. Around it are swirling, snakelike rays branching off the circle containing the three fish. I recognize this as a melding of two Celtic symbols, the triscale and the Celtic sun.
I watch her arms move, movements that imply her hands are fiddling where I cannot see them. I see her belt loosening, and her pants drop. Just as there was no bra, I see there are no panties. On her lower back, there is a tattoo of an arrow pointing downward. Above the arrow, it says, Exit Only.
Holy fucking shit.
She turns to look at me, blazing sexy eyes, beautiful breasts, slender waste, nicely shaven pussy.
It had been a joke. I was just kidding. I have never gotten a tatoo in my life.
She crawls over to the bed, crawls by my feet, unties my shoes and takes off my socks. Slowly pulls off my pants and my boxers. Her hands grip my thighs and she buries her face in me. I watch her as long as I can, before my head falls back and my arms move, just to feel my wrists bound. Just to feel the cold metal grind into my skin.
This is not right. This is wrong. This is a fucking wet dream come true.
She is bloody well talented.
Her tongue trails up till it meets my neck, and then stops. She slowly eases me inside her and grabs me at my shoulders, nails digging into my skin.
She slaps my face.
"Bitch," she says, and where it goes from there, I just can't capture. The video camera captured it, and pictures, sometimes they speak louder than words. And I have to picture Jack tied to a chair, viewing this from the television, through eyes scotch-taped wide open Clockwork Orange-style, wriggling at the sight. Sheri sitting behind him on a high stool in the dark of his living room, occasionally wetting his eyes with an eye-dropper so the image would stay in focus on his wide-screen television no matter how hard he tried to blur it out of focus, because he certainly couldn't look away. And as he would try to scream through the ball gag, to beg, to plead, she'd just smile and watch the television screen, drawn in by the images, one hand taking a hit off her joint, the other hand up her red, plaid skirt, fingering herself and making those noises of ecstasy, forbidden but heavenly music to my ears.
But this is just my imagination, I will never really know. All I know for certain is he was found in the parking lot of this hotel three days later, dead in his cruiser from an apparent gun-shot wound, the entry the back of his throat, the messy exit, the back of his skull.
-----------------------
Stoned and confused and still pretty hungry, I parked the car in the driveway at home. To my right, the dead, red leaf is still there, resting peacefully atop the heap of broken glass. I had spent the last hour at an all-night restaurant, submitting to my urge for some munchies, drinking coffee and smoking until Sheri called me to say he was back home with her and I could go into my house without any fear of him blowing my head off. She said she'd had a great time. And she hung up.
All was dark outside my humble home, save for the porch lights. This was good, because I really couldn't face my wife right now. I came inside slowly and quietly, even though both my wife and my son sleep like the dead. Stepping into the bathroom, in the silence of everything, I take a look at my reflection in the mirror. My eyes huge and unblinking, branching rivers of veins breaking the whites. mis-shaven, hair messed up, tie loosened and crooked, I looked just how I'd felt. As if I'd been through hell and back. I thought I smelled something burning, something vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it, and quickly dismissed it as my imagination.
I cupped my hand under the water that shot out in a mad rush from the faucet, and leaning my face down near the sink, flushed my face a few times. Breathing deep breaths, each one just a little less uneven and shaky. Slowly and smoothly in, then a slow and smooth release outward. I brought the towel to my face, sniffed the imaginary smell again, looked in the mirror for one last time and left for the bedroom.
The door to the bedroom was partly open, and a dim, flickering light escaped out into the hallway. I was confused and curious, and so cautiously and slowly opened the door. I didn't want to think it, I didn't want to think about how my wife could be dead behind this door, shot through the window, and the house could be burning down, but Jack seemed pretty fucking insane on the phone.
Inside, the familiar scent was stronger, and now I recognized it fully and unmistakably. It was obviously incense. I saw the red candles on top of the dresser, the incense burning its long, thick, waving line of smoke out from a bottle and up towards the ceiling. I opened the door then fully, to see candles strewn all about the room. Atop the made bed, she was sprawled out her her black lingerie, her black leather boots on, her legs spread, her hand down her panties. Her body waving like the ocean, her tongue slipped out of her lips a moment before her teeth came to bite her bottom lip. She then looked at me, that sly smile on her face, those eyes that just glowed and melted you. Dominated you. In a soft voice, intoxicated by a primitive need, she said to me, "I've been waiting for you," she said, "so long, that I decided to start without you."
"I had to help out an old friend," I said to her apologetically, a smile creeping up one side of my face, wiping out all but the faintest memory of the roller coaster I was so certain I'd just stepped off of. "I'm sorry I'm late."
"Take off your cloths," she said. She didn't seem to upset that I was late, just happy I'd arrived when I did. So I began to take off my cloths, slowly unbuttoning my shirt, taking off my pants and socks. I climbed on bed, and I saw the dresser drawer beside the bed was open.
"Handcuff me to the bed," she said. And I told her to flip around. I handcuffed both her wrists to the bed, already hard and ready to go. Doggy style was her favorite position, and I think a part of me felt so guilty for what I'd done, no matter how much i hadn't wanted to do it in the first place, that i just couldn't look into her eyes as if everything was all right.
As I pushed myself in, we both sighed in synch, and I began thrusting into her deep. My hands touching her hands, down passed the metal of the cuffs, down passed her forearm and elbow and shoulder. Playing with her hair, rubbing my fingers through it, parting it away from the base of her neck, that's when I noticed the scar. The scar, deep and red and stitched.
I stopped and a second later, confused, a bit of fear bleeding through in her voice, she whimpered, "honey, honey, what's wrong?"
It was another brief moment of silence, this one initiated by my lack of answering and her terrified anticipation, until both my hands grabbed the back of her head and slammed it down into the pillow, her body flaying, her muffled screams alternating between the words, no, and I love you, and no, and no, but I love you, and no, and no, no,no. Until finally, with what sounded like, I'm sorry, she stopped moving.
by Rewired,
who is trying for the
first time in a long time
to write some short fiction.
So comment, so criticize,
because I need it.
But be merciful.
-----------------------
The cool autumn evening blows in a breeze from my right, and a dead, red leaf falls on the heap of glass chards resting on the passenger seat of my car. And, hey, there it is. She's right, you can't miss the motel, not with its large neon sign. And without that cliche neon-sign flickering. The little sign below it advertises its vacancy and this seems unnatural, for especially as far as motels go, this was an unspeakably cool one. The entrance way is marked by large stones, and to either side of the entrance, beyond the stones, are tiny, well-trimmed shrubs resting on islands of small wood chips in a sea of freshly-mown grass.
This is the little shit you notice during times like this. These irrelevant details, they combine into this tiny vacation from the shit storm that has become your life in under the length of a single day.
Here I thought my life was falling together for the first time. In the end, it turns out that brief phases of optimistic perception just serve to reinforce the old, familiar, pessimistic outlook.
Its only in the face of change, the transition called death, that it seems we feel anything anyway, so might as well march headstrong right into the shit-storm. As if, in this case, there were any other option.
I swerve to dodge some road kill before pulling in, and then park in front of room 23. The number, it's painted white and outlined in black on a small sign above the overhang on the porch. Its also in black on the red-painted door, just above the peephole. There's three wood-stained stairs to step up to the porch, and my fist doesn't even meet with the door to knock until she opens it.
And I'm thinking before the door is even open the entire way, before I even give her a once-over: damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. The part of me that was going to enjoy this would only compound my self-hate for doing this, regardless of the circumstances that drove me to do it.
She grabs my tie and she pulls me into the room, closing and locking the door behind her back. She let go of my tie as soon as I was inside, and I sort of hopped, just to get a few feet away from her.
There she was, staring at me directly as I glance at her and then to the floor. And my glancing, its from my side. Its as if I'm at some stance, anticipating an attack from her or something. Glancing to her, to the floor, to her, to the floor, I'm straightening my tie now. I'm loosening the tie a bit, trying to swallow, as if the tie is really the thing choking me here. Then, clearing my throat, I finally breath in deeply. Feeling my whole body quiver as I do so.
I'm breaking out in a cold sweat here, and I wish she'd stop looking at me in such a hungry, thirsty way. Its making me nervous. Like my anxiety attacks in large crowds. In those speeches I had to make in front of the class in high school.
"Exhale," she says.
Oh, yeah. I really had forgotten to exhale that deep breath. So I do, but I do it through my nose, and I do it slowly so as to not seem like I'm so easily drawn to following her commands. I have to resist her.
I try not to look at her eyes, her face. So I look down to look away, but only slightly down, and I see her neck. She has on a spiked dog-collar and she's wearing a tight black shirt with a romantic heart on it, blooming across her large and luscious breasts, a romantic silhouette of a heart in dotted lines, like they use on packages to indicate `cut here'. Inside the dotted-heart shape there is neon-colored red lettering, made to look like a neon sign, and it says, Vacancy.
Then, realizing where I'm staring, I submit. I look up to meet her eyes.
Looking at her looking at me, I know, I just know that she knows how much I don't want to want to do this so much. The strength of my surface desire pitted against my deeper desire, the pressure I'm obviously putting on it, to conceal it, to resist it, it gives it away. There is no hiding this but in walking away, and I can't walk away. This is a hopeless situation, I've been cornered into making a bad choice in face of an even worse one.
This whole circumstance, with her and I in this locked room, this would no doubt cause major damage to my relationship with my wife. But if I leave, there's good reason to believe I'll arrive home to find my wife dead. So I go with the lesser of two evils, so-to-speak, with damage I can manage over a murderous catastrophe I don't have the capacity to reverse.
Or, at this exact moment, even explain.
The conspiracy she's waged against me, or involving me, has somehow made me loose the conspiracy against myself. Funny how things work out.
Funny how context can change what you consider `working out'.
She sits down on a chair nearby for a moment and takes out a bowl, lighting it with her Zippo, breathing in the illegal fumes with a heavy inward breath, holding it, looking at me in such a sexy way, smiling, keeping that smile as she closes her eyes and tilts her head back and breaths out the trail of smoke in such a smooth and steady stream.
Already, the battle between my penis and my brain is waging within me. Then my heart steps in, and reasons with my brain, and suddenly, beyond my control, I'm feeling something stand at attention in my pants.
I look down, and then my head shoots back up, as i again realized I was staring somewhere inappropriate. At least this time it was on my body, though. And when my head shoots up, and my eyes look at her, I see that she was looking down, too, right where I was.
Her head doesn't move, just her eyes look up to meet mine. The last of the smoke escapes her smile, and behind the thick but quickly drifting fog there is a smile so sly and sexy I don't so much as shudder as I do convulse. I close my eyes tight, trying to will this away.
Trying to will this horrible and strange and beautiful and arousing and heartbreaking nightmare-dream hybrid away.
-----------------------
It was around eight in the evening, about seven hours before she opened the motel room door, that all this started happening.
My mind's always wandering during work, and so when I thought I heard my name I pretty much ignored it, coughing it up to my imagination. So many people came through this grocery store every day, you could never really be certain it was you that someone was beckoning. I just checked the dates on the milk, then turned to the left to re-organize the cheeses. After the first few hours, there isn't much to do, working the dairy isle, and I had ten minutes more to kill before my break.
So bored. So numb, but I know I shouldn't be.
When I heard my name again, I felt someone put their hand on my shoulder this time. Now Jack, he wasn't the touchy-feely kind of guy, that's always been the case, so this kind of confused me when I turned around to see his face. That, and I hadn't seen the guy, my former best friend, for over a year and a half. It did what I think he intended it to do, though, and he'd finally got my full and undivided attention. And the look on his face was something I cannot describe.
Looking at him, happy with his unprecedented presence but confused at the mixed look he threw back at me, I told him, hey, long time no see. Since it was about time for my break, I asked him if he wanted to grab a bite to eat, maybe bullshit for half an hour. He said sure.
Eating some subs outside the grocery store on the curb, I felt there was some motive behind why he had come to see me. I didn't come out and ask, though, I asked him how he was doing, what he was doing now. He told me he was a police officer. That girl he'd met, he was planning on marrying now, marrying within the next few months if he could. He asked me how I was, and I told him I was still happily married, that I'd had a sixteen-month-old baby boy.
He broke a smile, almost, and let out what for him was the closest you got to a chuckle. "At what point, exactly, does a parent start counting their child's age in years instead of months?" Laughing, I told him I anticipated by the time he was two. It was a great feeling, being a father. I told him this after he asked what it felt like, and then I told him that he would no doubt learn in time.
Through our small talk, throughout which he seemed very guarded, he eventually mentioned the name of his wife-to-be. That answered the question I was so curious about but had been too afraid to ask, and it was a shame. This girl he was with, Sheri, it was the same girl he had been with back when I'd known him. He had to have been with the girl for half a decade now. I couldn't be sure, but I suspected she had been the one to create the rift between Jack and all his friends.
He was whipped, that is what everyone said about Jack. Never to his face, of course. But any guy who had ever seen his girlfriend, they would fall silent when presented with the question as to whether they'd do any different, being in his position. This girl, Sheri, she was a beautiful woman, and we're not talking super model beauty, we're talking insatiable, rare-gem, unconventional beauty here. Rumor had it that she was quite a sadomasochist, and anyone who had been around her for any length of time spoke of her as charismatic but controlling. An overtly-sexual, dominating woman.
Jack's mother had died about eight years ago, and she had been a very controlling woman in his life. He had outdone himself in finding a substitute.
Halfway between a long story about his job at the police department in a town a few hours away from here, I looked at my clock to see my half hour was almost up. I tried to bring it all to a close.
"I'm happy for you," I lied to him. I wasn't really happy for the poor, whipped fool. "And I hope everything works out. And you know, now that you've seen me, I expect you to keep contact. You'd damn well better invite me to the wedding, too. But I'm already gonna be late clocking in, and I've got to get back to work."
"Wait," he said, grabbing my shoulder again as I tried to stand up from where I'd been sitting on the curb. "Just wait a second."
I did, but at first, he said nothing. Like he was choking on his own words, but he really meant to spit it all out. Like he was suffocating on backed-up sentences. Whatever had been in his mind since the moment I'd turned around to face him, it seemed all too evident it was coming to a pique now.
"What?" My voice, it was almost desperate.
He closed his eyes and said it. "I need you to sleep with my girlfriend."
I've never tried acid, but perhaps one day, for some reason, I will. I wondered: could this, then, be an acid flashforward?
"I'm sorry, what?"
It's one of those occasions when you know for damned certain you've heard somebody right, but at the same time a part of you insists that no matter how convincing the auditory hallucination was, it was still an auditory hallucination.
"I need you to fuck my girlfriend."
Maybe it was slang. I was never hip to the lingo back in the day, and certainly not, you now, now-a-days.
So I just stared for a moment. Then my head jerked back and I felt one eyebrow shoot up my forehead. I looked away, and then back at him. I shook my head and shrugged.
"I don't get it."
"It's simple," he said, and he was looking dead in my eyes now, impatient, almost angry. "I need you to bang the shit out of my girlfriend. Do the horizontal hokey-pokey. Screw. Hump. You know, the old in-out. I need you to fuck her, and I need you to fuck her long and hard."
"No." I said it simply and clearly, taking him seriously for a moment. Then I began to wonder again if it was some joke, as it was always hard to tell with Jack. "Where's the punch line, man? Am I on Candid Camera?Wait, do they even do Candid Camera anymore? Or is it that Punked show?"
"He only pulls pranks on fellow celebrities, and you hardly qualify, which in a way, makes this easier," he said. "But no, this is no joke. No set up. And I don't want you to ask questions, I just want you to do it."
He threw me a piece of paper and got up from the curb, wiping himself free of dust, leaving his half-eaten sub beside me. "Call her tonight at 2 AM, and don't fuck this up."
I opened the folded piece of paper, and it was a cell phone number.
As he walked away, I looked up at him. "Jack," I said, "what the fuck is going on?"
"That," he said, looking at me briefly as he walked towards the busy parking lot, "that is definitely a question."
-----------------------
I open my eyes. She looks at me, forehead tilted towards me, eyes bearing into mine, and she hold out the bowl with one hand. "Want a hit?"
She has on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, out of which two blue-green snake eyes fixate on you, like a predator studies its prey. She has deep red, curly hair, tied in two pig tails, and her hair is wet. A few stands hang over her beautiful and pale features, and on the wrist of one arm, the one with which she holds out the bowl, there is a broken handcuff, with two loops of the chain just hanging there.
"No thanks," I tell her. She smiles wider, puts the bowl down, and stands up to approach me. Below her spiked black belt, there are dark jeans, like you might find in Hot Topic in the mall. Only on the crotch, right above the arrow pointing downward that's right above the zipper, are embroided the words, Selective Entry Only.
"Like my pants, I take it?" She says, and my eyes quickly dart up to meet hers, and I'm a little embarrassed that I'd been staring.
"Yeah," I tell her, trying to push myself out of my trance, regain my backbone, bring out my inner, bitter smartass. "It reminds me of the tattoo I have above my asshole. It says, Exit Only."
She laughs like a free and enlightened child, looks away for a moment, just a moment. She then shakes her head, and slowly, and then she lifts her head up a bit and pauses. Then, remaining still, her eyes lift up a bit more, bearing into mine. Her looks drive me insane.
"It always struck me as a double-standard," she tells me, laughing some more, brushing the loose strand from her eye, "how almost every guy I've ever come across gets a woody just thinking about two girls doing so much as swapping spit -- that's right, not even fucking."
And she says it in a sexy tone that she's undoubtedly mastered, one that ripples through me like a strong bass line when you're standing in front of the speakers turned up to the max, or like a stone thrown in a pond, reverberating throughout my entire being, turning my whole body into an erogenous zone perpetually fed by the stimulating sounds of her seductive voice.
"But two guys touching each other?" She says. "That's enough to freak them out."
As she's saying this, I suddenly think back to the grocery store, how Jack touched my shoulder, and things in my head, they begin to fall into place, into this neat and tidy little theory. How I hope I'm wrong, and how I need to falsify it.
"What's going on?" I said. "What is all this about?"
She's got that playful look about her as she says, "What do you think is going on?"
"Well," I said. "I've been really chewing on that one. Rumor has it that you're kind of weird, kind of kinky. And Jack, I don't think he's like that, but you never know. So I figure you'd have to be the central figure in all this. My only guess was that you wanted to hurt him. So somehow you black-mailed him, and also black-mailed him into black-mailing me into some threesome your planning between him, you and I here in this hotel. Granted, the theory seems a little out there, but, well, the situations a little out there, so can you blame me? I just don't think I'm up to that kind of thing, though, if its the case."
"So," she says after a pause for dramatic effect, "you're homophobic, are you?"
"No, certainly not. I've had quite a few friends who were gay," I said. "Its just nothing I'd ever want to experience. I sometimes touch my own penis out of necessity, but that's about the length of it. And, I don't know, I've always figured anal sex would just feel like pooping in reverse, and that doesn't come across to me as very appealing."
"You know what they say," she says, still in that playful, mocking tone. "Don't dis it till you try it."
"So much for practicing what you preach."
"Oh, what is that supposed to mean?"
"Well, to be honest, I've heard this `don't dis it till you try it' line before, in so many contexts, and it just pisses me off to no end." I said. "I mean, have you ever eaten your own feces?"
"What?"
"Your feces," I repeated. "You know, your dung. Your crap, your shit. Have you ever eaten it?"
"No." She says.
"Well," I said, "don't dis it till you try it."
-----------------------
After work, at about midnight, I was on the freeway on the way home. I'd called her as he said I should, and I asked her what this was all about, and she said that me and her were going to have a night of hot, wild sex. What I told her is that as arousing as I found that to be, I was a committed man, a man with a wife and a child. The beginnings of a family. That for once in my life, things were beginning to have a sense of order and normality, and no way in hell was I about to ruin it all for a one-night stand with my old friend's girlfriend, even at the request, the blessing verging on a threat, of my old friend.
She said to me, it wasn't his his request, his blessing or threat, it was hers. She wanted to fuck me, and he was to prove his love to her by allowing her to do it. I told her this was just plain fucked up, and to give me his number, because I was going to call him up and settle this once and for all. She gave me the number, and said she'd see me soon. Before I could say the hell she would, the other line was dead.
Ten minutes from home, he picks up on the other line. I don't wait for him to say so much as a hello, already I'm screaming. "Jack, I don't know what's going on, I don't know what's behind this, but I can't do this. I've got a girlfriend, and you're my best friend and this is just fucking crazy. I'm going home and that's all there is to it."
"You'll do it."
"No," I said in ruthless insistence, "I fucking won't do this."
"You've got to do it."
"No, I don't."
"If you don't do it," he said to me in confidence, "and if you don't stop raising a fuss about it by the end of this conversation, I'm going to blow the head off your girlfriend. Right now, I'm leaning my elbows atop the window sill off the attic floor of the house across the street from yours. Your neighbor, what's his name, Greg? He's on vacation. And I've got a rifle here with me, and its pointed straight at this window across the street. The blinds are pulled back. Its a nice little house with a white pickett fence. And through the window, there's the back of this slender, brown-haired woman watching television. What's the show? I think, damn man, I think she's watching one of those apocolyptic movies."
"That's just CNN," I said. "She's killing time before the pay-per-view porn."
"Fuck. Your right, it is CNN."
"Look, I don't know what kind of fucked-up game this is, but cut it the hell out."
"I'm not loosing her for one small mistake," he said, almost growling now, "and this is the only way I can keep her. Please my wife or I'll blow your girlfriend's little brain-chunks all over your fucking living room wall and ruin your lovely fucking wallpaper. In case you're wondering, this is the end of our conversation."
And he hung up.
-----------------------
She smiled an authentic smile. Every amount of resistance just amplified the look on her face that indicated she knew she was winning me over. That she knew I desired her. I changed the subject. Enough small talk.
"Tell me what this is all about," I demanded.
"Sure," she said, shrugging. "What happened is, I caught Jack red-handed. In this very hotel, in this very room, I caught him fucking the hell out of some cheap whore not two weeks ago. The dipshit could've been smarter about it, because I pass by this place every day, but Jack's a little ill-equipped when it comes to that wasted hunk of gray matter lying between the ears, if you catch my meaning."
"So you saw his car on your way passed the place," I said.
"Oh yeah," she said. "And when I listened in and heard her voice talking dirty to him, when i listened in and heard the sound of skin-against-skin and him calling her names and her moaning... When I opened the door -- the unlocked door, mind you -- I had it in my mind to kill them both. Not just as a favor to the species, not just to give natural selection a helping hand since its been so obviously slacking, but because I couldn't believe after all I'd done for the son of a dead, rotting corpse of a bitch that he would have the nerve to go cheat on me. After asking me to marry him, no less."
"So you didn't kill him, obviously," I said. "Did you kill her?"
"No, after it was all planned, it was obvious that killing her wouldn't be necessary," she said. "Killing them like that, it wouldn't convey the message I would wish it to convey. But I certainly scared the shit out of her that night, I made damn sure of that. Especially after I found out who she was, this girl I used to work with, the girl who used to be my best friend. She'd moved away, gone off to college, and we e-mailed now and again, but we lost contact. It had been years. I was so mad that she'd just stopped talking with me, and then to finally see her again, being fucked by my husband..."
"It didn't put you in the best of moods, is what you mean."
"No," she said. "Certainly not. So when I found them, they were both terrified, begging and begging. I had a knife in hand, that probably had something to do with it. But get this, he had her right up from behind, doggy style, wrists tied to the head of the bed. He got up after he saw me, hands up, backing away from the bed. I was screaming and waving the knife around, I had it in my mind at the time to kill them both. I didn't, though. I did swing the knife against the back of her neck and the bitch started crying and bleeding. And then what I did was I told him to give me one good reason not to kill her and him both, right then and there. One good fucking reason. And he said he loved me."
"How romantic."
"Yeah," she said. "So I laughed in his face and I left."
I swallowed. This woman was fucking beautiful, but just looking at her, hearing her talk, seeing her energy, I'd never want to piss her off.
"Back home," she went on, "he was beating on the locked door, crying like a baby, begging for my forgiveness. It was the most pathetic thing in the world, I wish I'd had it on videotape. He said he loved me, he'd do anything to be with me. He wanted to marry me, he said. I unlocked the door. I told him I would accept his proposal, but on one condition. He couldn't right his wrong, so in the very least we had to have a balance. He had to admit me a comparative wrong."
"What?"
"He fucked that girl, that whore I used to call my best friend," she said. "So the deal was, I get to fuck one of his friends. His best friend. And I knew it was you."
"Okay, so you knew I was his best friend," I said. "What the hell does that mean?"
"When he first met, I told him all about my sexual fantasies," she said, "and he told me all about his. My most frequent sexual fantasy, ever since high school, it was having you in bed, dominating you. Pleasing you. Fucking you and changing you through the raw experience. Burning through the mask you've constructed, and breaking down the walls around the mask you've built as your prison. Letting the real you breath and dance in the universe, unafraid. Making you into the person I know you are, deep down below all the garbage you use to hide from yourself."
"If I would've known that in high school, I would've been ecstatic," I told her. "But now I've got a wife and a kid and a great house and a fully functioning car. I mean, sure, its got an obliterated window now, but its still a damn good car."
"You know what I think?" She said to me, getting inches from my face. "I think you're scared to grow, to become independent, you're in denial of all that's truly life. I think your miserable, I think your mind is wandering all the time because you're so fucking bored and novacaned by the banality of your existence."
"And what do you suggest?"
"I suggest that when a grand turning point comes in your life," she says, "you take what's presented to you and you try and run with it. And when something fails, and you're left with a hopeless situation, you take the only path available that makes sense."
"This makes sense to you?" I said. "Because as for me, I'm fucking confused."
"I know you want me," she said, "you've always wanted me. And its strange that you're with a wife who is the polar opposite of who I am. You're just too fucking afraid to break away from your growing sense of security. Your sense of control over your tiny corner in life. Simple and traditional and conventional. You want something different, but you're trying to hide behind the mask of the ordinary, and it just clashes with your inner self."
"What the hell do you know about my inner self?"I yell to her. "Its inner, meaning not external, meaning not subject to prying eyes. Not subject to your eyes. Its for me and me alone."
"I see you. You can't hide from me. Your inner self is suffocated by the rigid, routine lifestyle you're trapped in," she said to me. "What you need is to just let go, accept that change and death are a part of life, stop trying to suit this one part of yourself to the whole world at the expense of your entire self. What you need to do is to start making your little part of the world suit to the entirety of your self."
"You think you know me, but you're just trying to manipulate me." I told her. "What, is this all to make this little fucked-up game easier for me to play?"
"I'm only trying to manipulate you into coming back into contact with who you really are," she told me, "and this is a way to win the game, a way out of the game. You're loosing, you've already lost, and you don't even see it. Just relinquish the role of the looser. Come back to yourself."
"You don't know me."
"You don't know you," she said. "As for me, I know myself, and I can smell my own. So, as a result, I do indeed know you." She held the pipe up to my mouth, lights her Zippo with her other hand, and goes, "Now, inhale deeply."
-----------------------
I'm parked at a gas station just off the freeway, not a mile from home. I'm smoking a cigarette, and I'm thinking, my mind's wandering, my twisted time machine.
Back in high school, before Jack and Sheri got together, Jack and I were best of friends. I mean, we would sit beside each other in study hall, he'd tell jokes and I'd laugh. We were both shy of women. Both of us, we belonged to no real group in school, we were both kind of loners in our own right. And we would point out the girls we liked, and the things we'd do to them if we had the chance, if we had the metaphorical balls, if we had the guts to even talk to them.
My acute fixation was on this punk rocker girl, this gothic type. Dark, sexy and mysterious. A few years back, word had it she had tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists with an exacto knife. horizontal across the wrist, we all knew that meant a cry for help. vertical, that meant business. All her cuts were at angles, though. They were criss-crossed, they were X marking the spot all around her wrist, all up-and-down her forearm.
I couldn't help but contemplate what this meant for her.
Criss-crosses. She was at the intersection of wanting help and having given up hope, then, or perhaps it was something else entirely. Me, it seemed to me as if she was flirting with death. Exploring it, getting just close enough to it to pull away at the last moment, to step away. So she could make sure death wouldn't get too close or far enough away. This flirting, this teasing extinction, this two timing with life and death, this was the way she maintained control.
Girls who teased guys, girls who flirted with them to advertise interest but turned away when he tried to go farther with it, this was to keep him close enough, but far enough away. to control him. to keep him on a leash, long, but still a leash.
This was why, after they threw her in therapy after her suicide attempt, after they locked her up for awhile and gave her pills, upon returning home she chased a dozen of those pills with a bottle of Jack Daniels. This was why she tried all those drugs in high school. This was why she'd cut herself in the first place. Why she cut herself all the way up to senior year.
With a knife pressed to your skin, to look at your own veins and the way the shimmering blade felt against it, the cold of metal and the heightened awareness, you kind of held the power over your own fate there, right in your hands. Everyone had to know as well as I did, that the closer you got to potential death, the more it was obvious you were a few inches and a few degrees of pressure away from drowning in a pool of your own red essence, the more alive you felt, the more alive you really were. You did begin to envy how those people must have felt a night before a hanging, the evening before the electric chair. This was why Grahm Greene continued to play Russian Roulette after his first time of attempting suicide through this method and it failed. You can't get a sense of structure in your life until you get a sense that it could end, that it was so fucking fragile. And to sense of life's fragility, of its finity, and at the same time hold that power in your own fucking hands, you must feel like the gods and goddesses you ceased to believe in.
That girl, I told Jack one day, that's the girl I want more than anything. Watching her, just thinking about her, my veins are on fire, every square inch of my body is teeming with that electric tingle. I want to get inside her and do the dirtiest things imaginable to her. I want to enslave her, I want to do her bidding. I want to get inside her mind and swim in the dark, rich, poisonous waters that must crash against the surface of her consciousness, day in and day out. I want to melt into her, to get as close as possible. I want to fuck the hell out of her.
And Jack, he took one look at her, made a face like he'd just stuck his nose in some dead animal carcass and breathed in deeply and said, "she's okay."
The fucker dissed it, then he tried it, then he dissed it. Make up your mind, man.
My fingers stop rapping on the steering wheel in nervousness, and I put the car in Drive and peel out of the gas station and off the off ramp.
-----------------------
"Everything's spinning," I said. "My head, its like its gone exorcist. The universe is a spinning top, a fucking cyclone in my mind. This shit, pot always fucks with my mind, it makes everything chaos."
"Learn this," she said. "Everything goes in circles, its the cycle of life."
"This isn't a circle," I told her, "because two wrongs don't make it all right again, okay? When the philosophy is that one wrong justifies another wrong, wrongs keep adding up, breeding like motherfucking rabbits. This kind of thing, it has no end. This is just revenge against a mistake and its spiraling out of control."
"You make it sound like he was just walking around naked and fell into her," she said. "For shit's sake, he made a commitment to me and then breached the contract. That's not mistake, that's pure intention."
"Fuck, you know what this is?" I tell her. "This is like our military killing members of another country because they killed members of our country, to show that killing will not be tolerated, will not go unpunished. Or killing a murderer to show that killing people is wrong. Its just hypocrisy. Doing unto others what they've done unto you isn't the way to go."
"No?"
"No," I say, and this time with insistence. "Fighting fire with fire just feeds the fire, and you become the enemy you're trying to defeat by mimicking the enemy's actions. If everyone lived by the philosophy eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, the whole fucking planet would be full of blind, toothless people wearing dentures and bumping into each other. Fuck, are you hungry?"
"Justice isn't always the illusion you've presented it to be here," she said. "Justice, in my eyes anyway, is karma. And karma's often misunderstood as being about good and evil, or cause and effect. Its not about that, really, its about finding yourself in the shoes you once put someone else in. Its about forcing you into empathy with them in some sense, about learning from both roles, from both sides of the spectrum. Its not about two wrongs, or even one wrong, its about equality. This isn't about revenge so much as its about balancing things out. Its about things going in circles, in completing a circuit, in following a process through to the end. You're just seeing a tiny part of it right now. You're just confused."
"Oh yeah, totally," I said. "Getting me stoned out of my frigging gourd, it will do that sort of thing."
"Not just that," she said, "in general. Get the message here, okay? Understand that I'm here to help you. I didn't just throw you into this so you could help me."
"I don't need a fucking savior,"I said. "And you don't need a savior, either. You need a vacation. A new boyfriend. A therapist. Maybe a couple hundred milligrams of prescribed medication."
"I'm not your savior, and I'm not trying to be," she said, "in my philosophy, my spiritual perspective, my worldview, I'm just another part of the process."
"And you somehow figure I should be a part of this process, too?" I say. "This is insane. I can't do this."
"Your wife will be dead by my idiot boyfriend's hand if we don't fuck, so I figure its more than a fair trade. You do nothing but benefit from this situation. Anyway," she tells me, "I'm kinky. It'll be the best sex you've ever had in your life."
"You're confident." I told her. "My wife is a goddess in bed, for your information."
"I'm just bloody well aware of my talents, that's all," she said.
She took off my shirt, and pushed me back against the wall behind the bed. Her sheer strength and my mind boggled by the marijuana, I can't seem to get a grip on the spinning room, let alone her in order to resist. I don't even see her take them from her back pocket, before I know it I hear the clicks and I'm hand-cuffed to the bed. Then she took off her jacket from atop the dresser and beneath it, there was the video camera.
"What is this?"
"I want him to see it," she said. "I'm going to tie the fucker to a chair, scotch tape his goddamn eyes open and let him see this at every angle possible, over and over."
"So I have to pretend like I'm going to enjoy this."
"Oh, you won't have to act at all," she said. "I told you, I'm very, very good, and I fucking meant it."
-----------------------
I pull the car out of park and I drive down my road slowly, with the light out. There's this big weeping willow on the street, and I park there. From there, I can just make out the barrel of the gun inching out the window on the attic floor of the house across the street of mine. He really wasn't joking.
My cell phone rings, and I nearly shit my pants.
I look at it, and its a vaguely familiar number. I pick up, and the voice on the other end asks me, "just what the fuck are you doing here? Do I have to kill both you and your wife? Because that's what I'll do if I have to."
"I've known you for years, Jack, and you couldn't have changed this much," I told him. "Partnership is a grand thing, but this woman you're with, if she really loved you she wouldn't put you in this position."
"You know shit about love," he said, and I heard him cocking the gun over the phone, that frightening sound. "Love is an addictive substance which may cause severe blindness and typically has horrendous withdrawl symptoms. And us fools, we are in desperate need of a twelve-step program."
"It doesn't always have to be this way," I told him. "Its all in the person you love, its not love itself that is so dangerous, its not love itself that will drive you crazy."
"As wise man once said, `all you need is love," Jack said. "You know a significant fact about that wise man that pertains specifically to this situation?"
"What's that?"
The window on my passenger-side door explodes, with tiny bits of glass flying everywhere, and I jump even higher than I did when my cell phone rang.
"That wise man," Jack said, "he's dead now, from a gunshot wound to the head."
I swallowed.
Then he said, "now go fuck my girlfriend before I kill you and your perfect fucking little family. And don't let me ask you again."
So with that, I got in the car and finally drove to the motel.
-----------------------
The dotted heart and the word vacant disappear, from bottom to top in a line of black, as she pulls the shirt over her head, revealing the two, unbound breasts unleashed from beneath. Each nipple is pierced with a tiny barbell twice, criss-crossed. She plays with them, squeezing, making circular motions.
She turns around to face the camera, teasing the camera, too. "I wish you were here in person to see this and suffer, Jack," she says to the lenz, up real close, so the screen would likely only show her beautiful, predator eyes, "but you've got your own job to do right now."
To blackmail me by holding my wife as an unknowing hostage, or to kill my wife, I wonder?
I watch her from behind, and I can see beneath her spiked black wrist bracelet a few recent scars, criss-crossed. On her back, her beautiful naked back, there is a tatoo. It is a lot like the Chinese yin-yang symbol, but there's an extra fish within the circle, three fish blending beneath each other's tails. And in each of their eyes, there's three other fish. And the whole design is made of roots, as if vines, colored black and green. Around it are swirling, snakelike rays branching off the circle containing the three fish. I recognize this as a melding of two Celtic symbols, the triscale and the Celtic sun.
I watch her arms move, movements that imply her hands are fiddling where I cannot see them. I see her belt loosening, and her pants drop. Just as there was no bra, I see there are no panties. On her lower back, there is a tattoo of an arrow pointing downward. Above the arrow, it says, Exit Only.
Holy fucking shit.
She turns to look at me, blazing sexy eyes, beautiful breasts, slender waste, nicely shaven pussy.
It had been a joke. I was just kidding. I have never gotten a tatoo in my life.
She crawls over to the bed, crawls by my feet, unties my shoes and takes off my socks. Slowly pulls off my pants and my boxers. Her hands grip my thighs and she buries her face in me. I watch her as long as I can, before my head falls back and my arms move, just to feel my wrists bound. Just to feel the cold metal grind into my skin.
This is not right. This is wrong. This is a fucking wet dream come true.
She is bloody well talented.
Her tongue trails up till it meets my neck, and then stops. She slowly eases me inside her and grabs me at my shoulders, nails digging into my skin.
She slaps my face.
"Bitch," she says, and where it goes from there, I just can't capture. The video camera captured it, and pictures, sometimes they speak louder than words. And I have to picture Jack tied to a chair, viewing this from the television, through eyes scotch-taped wide open Clockwork Orange-style, wriggling at the sight. Sheri sitting behind him on a high stool in the dark of his living room, occasionally wetting his eyes with an eye-dropper so the image would stay in focus on his wide-screen television no matter how hard he tried to blur it out of focus, because he certainly couldn't look away. And as he would try to scream through the ball gag, to beg, to plead, she'd just smile and watch the television screen, drawn in by the images, one hand taking a hit off her joint, the other hand up her red, plaid skirt, fingering herself and making those noises of ecstasy, forbidden but heavenly music to my ears.
But this is just my imagination, I will never really know. All I know for certain is he was found in the parking lot of this hotel three days later, dead in his cruiser from an apparent gun-shot wound, the entry the back of his throat, the messy exit, the back of his skull.
-----------------------
Stoned and confused and still pretty hungry, I parked the car in the driveway at home. To my right, the dead, red leaf is still there, resting peacefully atop the heap of broken glass. I had spent the last hour at an all-night restaurant, submitting to my urge for some munchies, drinking coffee and smoking until Sheri called me to say he was back home with her and I could go into my house without any fear of him blowing my head off. She said she'd had a great time. And she hung up.
All was dark outside my humble home, save for the porch lights. This was good, because I really couldn't face my wife right now. I came inside slowly and quietly, even though both my wife and my son sleep like the dead. Stepping into the bathroom, in the silence of everything, I take a look at my reflection in the mirror. My eyes huge and unblinking, branching rivers of veins breaking the whites. mis-shaven, hair messed up, tie loosened and crooked, I looked just how I'd felt. As if I'd been through hell and back. I thought I smelled something burning, something vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it, and quickly dismissed it as my imagination.
I cupped my hand under the water that shot out in a mad rush from the faucet, and leaning my face down near the sink, flushed my face a few times. Breathing deep breaths, each one just a little less uneven and shaky. Slowly and smoothly in, then a slow and smooth release outward. I brought the towel to my face, sniffed the imaginary smell again, looked in the mirror for one last time and left for the bedroom.
The door to the bedroom was partly open, and a dim, flickering light escaped out into the hallway. I was confused and curious, and so cautiously and slowly opened the door. I didn't want to think it, I didn't want to think about how my wife could be dead behind this door, shot through the window, and the house could be burning down, but Jack seemed pretty fucking insane on the phone.
Inside, the familiar scent was stronger, and now I recognized it fully and unmistakably. It was obviously incense. I saw the red candles on top of the dresser, the incense burning its long, thick, waving line of smoke out from a bottle and up towards the ceiling. I opened the door then fully, to see candles strewn all about the room. Atop the made bed, she was sprawled out her her black lingerie, her black leather boots on, her legs spread, her hand down her panties. Her body waving like the ocean, her tongue slipped out of her lips a moment before her teeth came to bite her bottom lip. She then looked at me, that sly smile on her face, those eyes that just glowed and melted you. Dominated you. In a soft voice, intoxicated by a primitive need, she said to me, "I've been waiting for you," she said, "so long, that I decided to start without you."
"I had to help out an old friend," I said to her apologetically, a smile creeping up one side of my face, wiping out all but the faintest memory of the roller coaster I was so certain I'd just stepped off of. "I'm sorry I'm late."
"Take off your cloths," she said. She didn't seem to upset that I was late, just happy I'd arrived when I did. So I began to take off my cloths, slowly unbuttoning my shirt, taking off my pants and socks. I climbed on bed, and I saw the dresser drawer beside the bed was open.
"Handcuff me to the bed," she said. And I told her to flip around. I handcuffed both her wrists to the bed, already hard and ready to go. Doggy style was her favorite position, and I think a part of me felt so guilty for what I'd done, no matter how much i hadn't wanted to do it in the first place, that i just couldn't look into her eyes as if everything was all right.
As I pushed myself in, we both sighed in synch, and I began thrusting into her deep. My hands touching her hands, down passed the metal of the cuffs, down passed her forearm and elbow and shoulder. Playing with her hair, rubbing my fingers through it, parting it away from the base of her neck, that's when I noticed the scar. The scar, deep and red and stitched.
I stopped and a second later, confused, a bit of fear bleeding through in her voice, she whimpered, "honey, honey, what's wrong?"
It was another brief moment of silence, this one initiated by my lack of answering and her terrified anticipation, until both my hands grabbed the back of her head and slammed it down into the pillow, her body flaying, her muffled screams alternating between the words, no, and I love you, and no, and no, but I love you, and no, and no, no,no. Until finally, with what sounded like, I'm sorry, she stopped moving.
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