by Gabi Moore
His eyebrows kinked and furrowed as he looked at me, and watched another tear roll down my face. I was no stranger to the darker side of humanity. I wasn’t afraid of death or violence. But what I saw in his face was truly the most frightening thing I had ever witnessed.
“You came here with him, didn’t you? With that guy?” he said. I just wanted it all to end. “But what’s wrong with me, Evelyn? Why not me?” his voice was so low I wasn’t sure I hadn’t just imagined the words. I squirmed to try and look away, but he leant in closer.
“What did I do wrong? What did I have to do? You were always so cold, always so cruel.”
He had finally found me, he was standing a few inches from my face and could have killed me there and then, and this is what he wanted to say to me?
“There’s nothing wrong with you Joey. But you’re sick,” I said. I could tell he was listening intently to every word.
“I’m sick,” he said, as though trying the words on for size.
“I’m pregnant, Joey. Please don’t kill me.”
He gave me a bizarre look.
“You think I’m the bad guy, don’t you?” he said.
I said nothing.
“Am I really that bad?”
For a moment, I felt overwhelmed with pity for him. I suddenly saw him as he was when he was a kid – intense, fearful, a little strange. I felt so bad for him. I couldn’t help more tears from falling.
“I’m sorry, Joey. I don’t know how we got here. I just know I don’t want to do this again. No more killing…”
Slowly, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a pistol, then looked down at it like he had never seen it before in his life. He was mad. Anybody could see that, psychic mind-reading powers or not. He lifted the barrel of the gun and carefully pressed it to my sternum. I couldn’t slow my breathing as I looked down at it, pressing straight between my breasts.
“Do you love him?” he asked, voice husky, like he was drunk.
Jack. My sweet, beautiful Jack. The man who had loved me enough to blast through my walls of self-defense.
“More than anything,” I whispered. The words seemed to sting him. He leant even closer still, and reached out his hand to grab my chin. He began examining me, like an alien trying to find out where exactly this “love” was stored and how. He turned my face over this way and that, a look of violent perplexity in his eyes as he inspected my every feature.
“I can see you,” he said quietly.
He was high. So high. He appeared as a man in the middle of a violent religious experience. He seemed utterly overcome with what he could “see” in me.
“I know what you think of me,” he said plainly.
I thought of Jack. Of how even though he was technically a hitman, he had taught me more about mercy than anyone else. Without thinking, I leaned forward and pressed my chest wall against the barrel of the gun. I opened to him, shoulders back.
“I know you’ve been hurt, Joey, we all have, you’re not the bad guy, and things between us never worked for a reason, you need to believe me, all of this can be saved, you don’t have to do any of this.” But before I could say more he pulled the pistol back, turned it towards himself and popped it cleanly into his mouth.
When the shot rang out, the disturbed forest outside rustled and released a flock of birds. He flopped backwards. I could only see a gooey spray of his red blood strewn on the petals of the daisies I had hung over the bed.
I sat frozen for a moment, trying to wake up to the events that were unfolding around me.
Of course he killed himself.
Of course he did.
Who hated Little Joey Valenti more than he himself did? Pink Kisses unlocked deep, raw chambers of empathy and emotion inside people. What else would such a drug do to a man who was fundamentally incapable of empathy?
When I was sure that I was only imagining the sound of Jack’s footsteps running up the path towards me, I dug deep and found the energy to lift myself up. As I did, a sharp, angry pain stabbed right through my stomach, winding me instantly. I doubled over in pain. The baby. Something was wrong. I heaved myself upright again and tried to breathe. The worst was over now. From here on out, there was only life. If I could just hold onto it.
Tightening my jaw, I found my footing and leaned to grab him underneath each of his armpits, then lowered down onto my haunches to drag him out of the cabin. He was heavy. As I stepped, dragged, stepped again, I left a jagged trail of blood behind him. His face looked empty now. Almost sad.
With waves of pain pulsing through me now, I pulled and pulled till his body came clunking down the front steps, then I dragged him out into the trees, his feet hanging limps and carving damp lines in the dirt beneath. An echo of the blow he’d given me just moments earlier pumped through me again. I dropped him as I involuntarily clutched at my side. I felt myself moving internally. I just knew the baby was in danger. The little one was afraid, I could tell. I had to calm down. With him still propped against my shins, I closed my eyes and tried to gather myself until the pain subsided. I would not miscarry. I would not lose the baby, not after all we’d been through together.
When I had found the right spot, I let him fall to the ground. He looked much like he did when he was alive: a shell. But something about the forgiving, mossy ground underneath him and the way the forest sounds carried on regardless made me snap to attention again. I ran to where I had found a crude shovel a few hours before, and came back to start digging. I wasn’t going to bury him because I was ashamed. It wasn’t because I needed to hide his body. It was that he was dirt in my life, and this was the way to clean him. In him went it all – the brutal past, the running, the bloodshed. I hoped he took it all with him once I pressed him deep down into the earth.
I dug for what felt like hours. The pain inside stopped and I began to feel invigorated. I was tearing up the skin on my palms with each thrust of the shovel, but I didn’t care. The hole grew in size and the soil gave way easily. When it was deep enough I knelt down to roll him inside, and he flopped down into his grave, face first. I threw the shovel down onto his back and proceeded to kick the huge pile of sand over him.
When this was done, I tamped it down firmly with my feet; not quite dancing on his grave but I forgave myself that interpretation. I threw some moss and twigs down over the bald patch and sat for a moment, directly on top of him, feeling how absolutely still everything was. How he would never be coming up from there again. Then something caught my eye. Yellow and red in the bushes. I walked over to see the cigarette tin – it must have fallen from his pocket when I dragged him over.
I stroked my fingers over its rusted surface for a second, but then opened it and scattered the fine brown powder all around me. It hung weightless in the air for a moment before the soft forest air carried it away. I put the case back in my pocket, put my hand on my belly and waddled back to the cabin.
Chapter 18 - Jack
“I’m huge!” she wailed.
“You’re gorgeous.”
She stood side on to look at herself in the mirror, arching her back to make her pregnant belly look even more pronounced. In truth, Evie was the tiniest pregnant woman I’d ever met …but she wasn’t exactly used to carrying around passengers.
I lay back on the bed, propped on my elbows, and admired her new figure. She was short, with a fierce little build and long, strong hair. It’s true, she looked like she fit in a Charlie’s Angels film and not on the cover of a baby magazine, but I admired her all the same.
“I’m going to put something else on,” she said and walked back to the closet to rummage through a few items. I was sick of the hotel rooms. Sick of the hideaways and fake names and extreme caution. But it was necessary. Until we left, there was no point in taking on any extra risk. Not with Evie due in just a month.
She came back to standing in front of the mirror and looked at her reflection again. Most of what she owned was black and form-fitting, so I couldn’t really tell the difference. But
she fretted some more, twisting around and trying to pull the fabric flat down over her middle.
“What about this?”
“Yup, still gorgeous,” I said. She frowned at me, grabbed the hem of her black dress and pulled it high over her head. I couldn’t help myself. I jumped off the bed and ran over to her, looped my arms around her waist and started kissing her soft, bare cleavage just above her bra.
She tried to swat me off but then relaxed and let me kiss her, tossing the dress through the air so it landed in our almost fully backed bags.
“This bra really has its work cut out for it, doesn’t it? I swear your boobs have grown a whole size since this morning,” I said and flashed her a naughty grin. She smiled back, her arms resting on my shoulders.
“Oh, they definitely have. But like I said, you can take your elephant of a girlfriend on a lingerie shopping spree or we can get me onto that plane before I pop, there’s no time to do both.”
I lowered my head onto her warm, sweet chest and tried to hear her heartbeat. She still had that soft, freshly-showered smell in her hair. Her skin felt like satin under my rough hands. I don’t know how she did it. How she managed to be so soft and yet so tough at the same time.
“Do you even have to wear clothes, though? I hate clothes. Let’s just forget about clothes forever,” I mumbled and let my hands play over her smooth body.
“What a great idea! You can go first though. Let’s see what she thinks when she comes to pick us up,” she said and kissed my head. I buried my head in her pillowy breasts again and groaned. It had only been two weeks since I had found her alone in the cabin, scrubbing blood from the sleeve of her shirt and smiling strangely. Yet it felt like we had spent forever like this, in temporary rooms, flitting from one motel to the next, living out of bags...
I was scared, I admit it.
The weird truth was that Evie and I barely knew one another at all. We had never been on a single date. I didn’t know her family and she didn’t know mine. She was five years my senior and so far our shared activities leaned strongly towards the murderous and illegal. We had been brought together by strange, traumatic experiences and part of me was afraid that the moment we stopped to rest in a quiet, normal life, we’d both realize we’d made a mistake.
And yet, here we were. Our final motel stint and in a few months, another little being that I barely knew was going to push itself into my life, and everything would change again. I had tried to talk to her the night before. Tried to ask her about that day in the cabin, about what happened between her and Joey …but she wasn’t ready to talk yet. Part of me agreed – hadn’t he taken up too much space in our lives already?
“Seriously, though, are you all packed up?” I asked, and held her at arm’s length so I could look at her face again. Hugging her meant hugging the baby at the same time. If fatherhood came to me as easy as loving her came to me, then there’d be no problem, I guess.
“I’m ready. Got the most important thing with me,” she said and tapped her belly.
There was nothing to do now except wait for our lift to arrive. Nothing except…
I pulled her back in towards me and embraced her again, but this time differently. This time with a suggestion in my hands, with an invitation. Her hands slowly went to my body and stroked my flanks. We hadn’t made love since that night in the forest. There had been so much going on. She had felt faint. Fatigued all the time. I didn’t want to push anything. But here she was, and her hands seemed to flitter over my skin and respond to my caresses.
We looked at each other, eyes expectant.
“I don’t want to hurt you though,” I said.
“I can take it,” she responded immediately. My cock instantly sprang to attention.
“I’m …this time will be without the…”
She knew what I was saying. Without that stuff coursing through us. Now, it felt like being at square one again. The woman in front of me, the woman carrying my child, seemed virginal somehow, and like I was seeing her, touching her, for the first time.
Her little hands continued tracing lines over my body. Her fingers slipped to my belt, stroked along the length and lifted up at the buckle to travel secretly under my shirt.
“She’ll be here any minute,” I said. I wanted her to initiate, to tell me clearly exactly what she wanted. It was easy enough to have wild sex on Pink Kisses. I wanted to make sure she needed me anyway, as I was, sober and about to go out into the “real world”…
“We have time,” she said simply, and started to work the buckle on my belt.
The silence in the room felt enormous. I watched her with rapt attention as she unclinked the belt, pulled it from its loops and let it fall to the ground. She struggled a little to pull my jeans over my erection, but when my cock bounced free, she stroked fairy-light touches over it before moving to peel my shirt off. I realized how much I was shaking when I helped her pull it up and over my head. Her bra and panties easily came off. We stood with one another for a moment, naked.
The tension between us was stretched tight, ready to snap. No matter what had happened these last few months, there was always one constant: my raw hunger for her body. I never went very long without thinking about her skin, or the curve of her upper thigh as it gave way to that hidden cleft between her legs. Fucking her hard and without mercy had become a religion for me, and I was a hopeless zealot at the altar of her breasts, or her tight, swollen belly. But right now, I wanted to be gentle. The fight was over. I wanted to learn to handle her softly, to soothe her tired body, to love her.
She took my hand and led me to the bed, where we both lay ourselves down. I lay behind her, my body tracing the contours of hers – knees to knees, spine along spine. My hands fit naturally over her full, heavy breasts and I nestled my nose in the curtain of her hair. Her toes reached out for mine and I wiggled back in response. It was a quiet, peaceful conversation. Everything was soft. Except my cock, which nuzzled secretly at the base of her spine, aching like it could tell she was near.
“I used to think that this was weakness,” she said.
I traced a hand down over her rounded belly, grazed my fingertips against the soft fuzz between her legs and then traced back up again, landing again at her breasts, which hung down towards the bed beneath us.
“I never thought I’d be a mother, Jack. It actually felt easier to me to take life than to make it, isn’t that crazy? The day I found out that I was pregnant I…” she trailed off.
I knew everything that she was going to say before she said it. I could feel it somehow, in her body. In the smooth shapes it made under my hands as I caressed slow, careful lines over every part of her.
“I had always told myself it was temporary. That I wasn’t meant for that life. So how did I wake up, ten years later, one of Angelo Valenti’s right hand woman?”
As she spoke, her hips started moving independently, grinding gently back into my hips, against my stiff cock.
“I must have been mad. We all thought Little Joey was mad, but was he really so different from me? From us?”
I stroked and listened in silence.
“He said something to me, Jack, that day in the cabin. He said, you think I’m the bad guy, don’t you? And Jack, you know, he meant it. He really couldn’t see himself that way. Jack I’ve …I’ve done so much damage,” she said and this time a choked back sob cut her short. I kept stroking.
“I was willing to do anything. And I mean it; I don’t know when I lost my way or when I became so …hard. I was even willing to hurt you! But the day I found out I was pregnant I knew I had to change. I knew I had already changed…”
Her hips kept moving against me. After a moment I dragged my fingertips down the length of her spine, then gently pulled apart her ass cheeks and pressed the head of my cock into that fiery hot crevice. She was silent, and responded only by leaning forward a little and tilting her hips up to receive me.
I gently probed forward a little to hunt out that tight hole o
f hers, and pushed, and all at once her whole body opened to mine and I sunk inside her, one delicious inch at a time. I loved how every fold of her hot, drenched pussy enveloped me so perfectly, how her perfect, slippery cunt embraced me right to the hilt. I couldn’t help but groan as I found my way into her, guiding her hips back towards me to press in even deeper still. Other than a faint flutter of her breath picking up pace, she made no sound. Her pregnant body was a thing of wonder. The round orbs of her already-perfect ass felt so full. And between them her pussy was so wet and soft and juicy. Everything about her was so extravagantly ripe.
I drew back my hips and, very, very slowly, crammed the length of my cock all the way back into her, drawing out the delicious stretch of fitting every last inch of me deep inside her. I didn’t have to move much to find precisely the rhythm that made her breath skip and grow jagged. I pulled out quickly, and took my time pulling all the way out again. We fucked this way in silence, my body folded tightly against her, linked in every way. Hands over her navel, and knowing that she had my child in her suddenly seemed unbelievably erotic. We had done this, she and I, together. We had fucked and created new life. I had cum inside her and now she was full and fertile, and the thought alone woke some lusty animal part in me that wanted to do it again and again…
Her top leg bent at the knee and folded towards her waist, giving me deeper access. I planted rows of kisses all along her bare neck, kissing aside the tumble of hair there, wishing this moment never had to end. We were sober. We were fucking, sweet gentle pregnant fucking, and we were sober, and it was perfect. And why not? It never had anything to do with that stupid drug. It was her. Nothing but her. Even laying here in a shifty motel room having noiseless, slow sex at two in the afternoon was perfect. It wasn’t a fluke. It wasn’t some magic illegal fairy dust.
I just loved her. Plain and simple.
When she came, it was sweet and soft and slow, and I held her body close as she convulsed through it, tightening and clenching over me as I jammed deeper inside and kissed her neck till she calmed down. Then in a moment, smooth as water, she carried on gyrating against me again, her hips more insistent this time, milking me expertly. The pleasured pooled at my groin, a white-hot pulse that seemed to terminate at the tip of my cock, right where I reached the deepest part inside her. I couldn’t resist any longer. I growled softly, unleashing a thick string of cum into her, one spurt after another, and then held even closer still, still buried inside, kissing her neck.
