The phantom girl vanished under its harsh white glow. The music stopped and the dash lights dimmed like the picture in an old TV set.
Shaken, Gavin staggered out, bare feet on cool concrete, wondering what the hell he'd just seen.
Was it a dream? Never had a lucid one before. Never sleepwalked before, either...
Crickets chirped in the night. Otherwise, Dayton Street was silent. As loud as the music had been, it hadn't woken the neighbors. Gavin let out a small sigh. He crept into the house through the kitchen, aware of every creak.
Katie rustled in her sleep when he returned to bed, but she didn't wake. Gavin was glad for it, despite the persistence of his erection. He wouldn't have been able to explain where he'd been if she was awake. He couldn't explain to himself what had happened, let alone his wife of seven years. The image of the abused girl--whatever that had been--had disturbed him terribly.
Despite his worries, Gavin eventually drifted back to sleep. When he awoke in the morning, he found it easy enough to convince himself what had happened in the night was just a very bad dream.
❚❚
THE WOMAN BANGED on the glass while Katie was at the grocery store. Gavin looked up from spritzing aphids off the primroses to see her dark figure standing at the door.
He let her in. "Welcome to Deanie's Flowers. You must be Madison."
"Yes." Dressed in black from her cloche hat to her shoes, she sniffled as she slipped inside. "Thank you."
Madison Davis had called in an order for her husband's funeral two days prior. Katie had taken the order and later told him, "If you died, I wouldn't have the strength to make that call." Gavin directed Madison toward long-stemmed flowers, bunched tightly among white carnations into several slim glass vases and wicker baskets.
"They're lovely," the woman said, wiping her nose with a tissue.
"You can thank my wife for that."
"I will."
"You know, callas aren't true lilies. They're from the genus zantedeschia. They're mildly toxic."
"Why do they call them lilies?"
Gavin shrugged. "A rose by any other name..."
"Well, my husband always loved them," the grieving widow said, almost apologetically, shifting so their elbows met for a brief moment. Gavin stole a sideways glance at her round face. Her green eyes shimmered with tears, plump lips pouty, her thick, lined neck with the visible blue slash of her jugular. Her heavy breasts rose and fell under a cinched black trench coat ending at a knee-length wool skirt and black pantyhose. Beneath a light woody perfume Gavin smelled the mingled aroma of sweat and baby powder, and he involuntarily stiffened in his work jeans. He stepped away from her, blushing.
She turned her dewy eyes to him, so sad and broken--and suddenly Gavin wanted to swat everything off the work table and throw her down on the space he'd made, slamming the breath out of her in a terrified gasp, her fat tits popping the top buttons of her jacket. He wanted to jerk up her skirt and tear down her panties, thrust his face between her smooth white cheeks and savor the fragrant bouquet of her cunt.
Madison seemed to sense something wrong. She took a step away.
Gavin flustered. Not now, he told himself. Please, not now. "I'm sorry for your loss," he said, hoping to cover whatever his face had revealed.
She thanked him again with a wary look at his dirty hands.
"Let's ring these up, shall we?" He crossed the workshop. Madison hesitated only a moment before following. The cash register stood beside the doorway to the hall, the master bedroom mere feet away. Gavin knew he could snatch her by the throat and the belt of her jacket and push her inside easily. He could throw her down on his marital bed and dry fuck the bitch while her tears dampened the comforter and she cried out for her dead husband--
STOP IT!
His hand shook. His head swam with her sweat and perfume and his balls felt heavy. He caught her eye. Again, she looked down at his hand. "Sorry," he said, and forced a cough. "I think I'm coming down with something."
"It's been going around," she murmured.
"If you'd like, I could send you the bill?"
Madison nodded a little too emphatically, her red-rimmed eyes on the door now, longing for escape. "That would be nice."
"I'll just bring them to your car then."
Gavin juggled two tribute arrangements through the door. Madison carried the third herself, eager to get away. Under the carport the air was in motion, her scent not as potent, and the sudden terrible urge to violate her disappeared. She wasn't his type to begin with, and worse: her tears reminded him of the phantom girl from the van.
He threw a look toward the van now, its fresh white paint job shimmering in the cool autumn air.
I'll go for a drive, he thought. Play some tunes. Calm the nerves.
He stood the tributes up on the floor in the back of her Audi. Madison held the third out to him with an uneasy look. She wants me to do it, he thought. So she won't have to turn her back on me.
Gavin took the vase, eager to get her going and get behind the wheel himself. In his haste, his still-quivering fingers brushed hers. The widow snatched her hand away with such a look of fright he might have thought she'd caught a glimpse of his twisted fantasies.
"I'll get the last of them." He placed vase with the others and hurried back to the workshop.
Madison Davis was already in the driver's seat when Gavin returned. She'd started the car while he crouched for the last of the bouquets, a flower basket and the casket spray. He found the widow staring through the windshield at the back of the van, a troubled look in her eyes. Gavin loaded the last arrangements. She didn't acknowledge his presence until he said, "All done."
Only then did she shoot a brief, thin smile over her shoulder, flinching when he shut the door.
"Drive safe," he told her. The back tires squealed as she pulled out of the driveway.
The tape player blasted INXS when Gavin started the engine.
❚❚
THE FIRST TIME he came to Almond Street, Gavin met the van's previous owner.
He'd taken a circuitous route through town, clearing away the stress of the day, listening to the tunes he loved in high school. When he emerged from under the dirty graffitied overpass, he found himself in a seedy neighborhood of potholes and brick-faced warehouses.
The street sign out front of a run-down convenience store said ALMOND in white letters on green. Gavin made the realization as if in a dream. He knew the area by reputation only: it was said a man could get almost any kind of woman he wanted here, even underage ones. He hadn't meant to drive here, had only been going by the feel of the road, subtle vibrations in the steering wheel causing him to twist the wheel this way and that. He wouldn't have driven to Almond Street if he'd been aware of his destination--if he'd entered it into the GPS on the dash. It had been entirely unconscious, almost as if the van had driven him.
Women in impossibly short skirts and heels of equally improbable length trolled the grimy sidewalk. Gavin pulled up to the curb, meaning to make a U-turn and go back home, but pair of hands with black lacquered nails grasped the window sill before he could pull away, and a young woman peered in, chopped black bangs framing a pale, eager face and junkie's eyes.
"Hey, hot stuff," the girl said, before squinting at him uncertainly. "You're not Tony."
Another woman sauntered over, dark nipples like saucers protruding from a white tube top, cut-off blue jeans so short the frayed edges hugged her crotch and a waistband swallowed by her stomach. "How 'bout a threesome?" this woman suggested.
"Fuck off, Indica," the first girl said over her shoulder, ushering her competition away with a flick of her wrist. Indica stayed put, while the junkie hooker looked over the interior of the van. "Tone let you borrow his baby?" She gave him a dubious look, absently flicking the piercing under her lower lip against her teeth.
Gavin's entire being screamed for him to leave. He jerked the wheel and stepped on the gas, peeling the girl's fingernails off the passenger
window with a clack as the van squealed away from the curb. He drove home with his thoughts thudding in his ears as loud as his heartbeat. What was I doing there? What the fuck is happening to me? I love Kate. I don't want anyone else. I love my wife. It wasn't my fault. I love her. I didn't mean to do it!
But you didn't do anything, a stranger's voice assured him--a strangely familiar voice. All you did was satisfy a little innocent male curiosity.
The man's voice had a pleasant, gravely timber that felt like cinnamon candy melting in Gavin's head. As the van went over another pothole, the fuzzy dice Katie had begged him to throw out rustled from the rearview mirror.
Nothin wrong exercising your rights, the voice told him. Nothin wrong with bein a man.
"Nothing wrong at all," Gavin agreed. The voice seemed to come from everywhere, from the porous vinyl seats to the cold hard plastic of the dash. From the fuzzy dice. From the musty air. It was the van speaking to him, Gavin realized--and all this time he'd been calling it a "she."
"Who the fuck is Tony?" he wondered, recalling the look of recognition and confusion from the dark-haired prostitute.
At this, the van remained silent.
The owner of the storage facility, an old man by the name of Grosvenor, hadn't mentioned a Tony, a Tone, an Anthony or Antonio. The Ram had been gathering dust in a storage shed for six or seven years. When Grosvenor's brother Barrett died, the old man liquidated his assets, but the owner of that particular shed couldn't be found. "Old number, I guess," Grosvenor said. When Gavin asked if the owner would be upset, the old man answered, "Fuck 'im. I'm getting outta Dodge, no pun intended. Gonna buy me one of them mobile homes. Get while the gettin's good."
Get while the gettin's good, the voice agreed. That's some excellent advice. There's a reason they call marriage an institution--it's a correctional institution. Marriage is a prison, and that brainy little wifey of yours is the warden.
"You're wrong," Gavin said. "She saved me."
Saved you? The van chuckled derisively. From what? Gettin too much pussy?
Gavin flicked on the radio, trying to tune the voice out. He sang along with Tom Petty until the dial changed on its own.
Can't get rid of me that easy, compadre, the van said, speaking from the static between stations. We're takin the long way home, and you an me are gonna pow-wow.
Gavin flicked off the radio. Relief washed over him in the silence that followed. Is this what it's like to lose your mind? he wondered.
Laughter as sharp as razor blades answered the unspoken query.
You really are pathetic, you know that? Sorry excuse for a human being, let alone a man.
Gavin tried to turn at right at the next intersection, back toward home, and the wheel jerked out of his hands with a peel of tires. He tried to unbuckle, but the latch was stuck. "Why don't you leave me alone?" he cried. The man in the car beside them threw Gavin a queer look.
You an me are gonna get somethin straight. I'm runnin the show now, got it? So just shut up, sit back, and let the smooth grooves of WTNY All Tony All the Time wash over you.
The van drove straight. Gavin did as he was told--Gonna hurt me more than it hurts you, he thought inexplicably--but he didn't have to listen. So while Tony talked, driving him past ugly warehouses and rundown tenements, Gavin listed all the flower genera he could recall in his head: Astragalus, Bulbophylium, Begonia, Centaurea...
❚❚
"...GAV?"
KATIE STOOD at the top of the stairs, a towel around her midsection, the smaller one from the set perched atop her head. She called down the stairs again. "Gavin?"
No answer.
"Where is he?"
She'd popped in for a quick shower before bed, and had been in there a little longer than expected: having realized her legs were bristly, she'd taken the extra time to shave. She emerged, toweled and moisturized, hoping to find Gavin primed and ready on the duvet cover, but instead it seemed as though he wasn't in the house at all.
With her deadline quickly approaching, Katie played catchup, moonlighting in the flower shop while writing her novel by day--barely any time to breathe, let alone play. Tonight during dinner, eaten at the workshop counter, Gavin casually mentioned it had been two weeks since they'd spent any time together. Katie promised to rectify the injustice tonight, deadline be damned, but Gavin was nowhere to be found.
"That son of a bitch," she muttered, suddenly sure where to find him. Holding the towel to her breasts, she hurried downstairs. "Son of a bitch," she said again, bare feet stomping down the hall. She heard the engine rumbling even before she got to the kitchen door.
"Gavin!" Katie stepped out, moving toward the van while Mr. Big rattled its windows. She pounded on the back window before approaching the driver door.
Gavin sat in the driver's seat, staring off into the dark backyard. Several weeks back, he'd started going for long drives at night to God knows where while she worked on her novel. Secretly, Katie feared he was going through a midlife crisis, that the van's nostalgia had regressed him. Secretly, she worried he was having an affair.
He turned at the sound of her knuckles on the window, fixed on a proper loving smile, and rolled it down. The twangy ballad spilled out into the carport, four overgrown boys longing to date the cool chick in school.
"Hi, honey," Gavin shouted over the music, oblivious. He looked her over, eyes lingering on the valley between her breasts where the towel pushed them up.
"Could you turn that off, please?"
Gavin gave the tape deck a queer look, as if he'd been unaware it was on. "Sure thing, hon." He flicked off the music. "We were supposed to be doing something, weren't we?"
"You were supposed to be doing me. Instead, you're doing... whatever this is."
"Just letting off some steam. You know--unwinding."
"Well, I'm going to bed. Are you gonna come, or not?"
His grin was half snarl. "Oh, I'll come," he growled, stepping out. He shut the door gently behind himself and turned, standing so close the hot breath from his nostrils warmed her forehead. "I'm sorry, babe," he said, smiling down at her. "I know you're stressed about your deadline. How 'bout I make you a drink? Give you a nice back rub?"
He was already hard. It throbbed against her stomach as he drew her into his arms and kissed the crook of her neck. His tongue slid into the divot below her trachea, flicking up, down. Katie leaned in to him, getting wet. She wanted to be full of him--needed it.
The moment the door closed behind them, Gavin snatched off her towel. She yelped in surprise, rushing naked into the darkened hall, and he laughed as he chased her to the stairs. She laughed with him, couldn't help herself, bounding up two by two.
In the bedroom, Gavin whipped her around and pushed her down on the bed. Katie spread her legs, felt his fingers wedge into her, out and in, felt them pull out entirely and heard him suck them before the velvet head of his cock spread her wider. Delicious pain in a thousand nerve endings of her scalp made her cry out as he grabbed a handful of her hair, pushing deeper inside her. His hip bones smacked her ass, warm vibrations spreading up her spine.
His thrusts grew frantic. Suddenly he jerked her up from the bed, wheeling her around by her hair and hip to stand her against the wall, pressing her face and tits against its cool surface. She cried out, unsure if she meant it in pleasure or fear.
Gavin grasped her shoulder, mashing her further into the wall with each thrust until her tits throbbed and cheekbone ached. Then his fingers slipped around her throat--
"No," she breathed.
But his fingers closed around her throat, dirty nails squeezing the thin veneer of flesh. Katie felt the airway close to a pinhole. Gasping now, she reached behind herself, throwing a blind fist at him, striking his thigh, his hip, feeling weak and very small. Gavin humped and humped until his body grew rigid, every muscle flexing but his fingers, which relaxed, a tender mercy. Before she had a chance to catch her breath he fell against her with a mighty groan, pinning her to the wall
, cock spasming as it spewed his hot seed inside her.
Gavin drew away from her then, staggering back. She heard the springs creak as he flopped onto the bed, and stood there panting, feeling the dull ache of at least one skin tear in her vagina, maybe more, as his cold sperm trickled down the inside of her thigh. Gavin had never been like that before. Never. Katie couldn't begin to comprehend such a vast shift in behavior, so she didn't try. She merely held herself and wept against the wall until the pain and fear and confusion subsided and all she had left was anger.
When she finally turned, Gavin lay draped across the bed, staring up at the ceiling, still hard after several minutes untouched. "Never do that again," she told him. He turned to her with a look of wide-eyed innocence. "Do you hear me?" she said more forcefully.
Gavin nodded stupidly, looking like a hurt little boy.
This is going to hurt me more than it'll hurt you, Katie thought. Isn't that what Deanie used to tell him?
"I'm going to wash of." She gave him a measured look. "Sleep in the guest room, sleep on the couch, you can sleep in that fucking van of yours, if you want. But I don't want to see you in bed when I get out. You crossed a line. I don't want to look at you again tonight."
Again he nodded, lower lip pooched like a petulant child, impossible to tell if the words had sunk in. Katie held his gaze for a moment, then strode out of the room, to hell with the pain between her legs.
"I'm sorry!" he called after her, but she didn't return.
❚❚
IN THE WEEKS since his first visit to Almond Street, Gavin and Tony's "pow-wows," which mainly consisted of Tony speaking and Gavin listening, became more frequent. Picturing the man behind the voice, Gavin saw Tony as the type of guy who sits at the bar swallowing two fingers of Jack Daniels, dressed well but all in black, spouting off about all the shit straight white males are forced to endure at the hands of the demon Political Correctness--and despite Gavin's innate loathing of conservative pundits, it troubled him how much truth he began to see under all of Tony's bullshit.
Gavin sang "Urgent" along with Foreigner on the way to Almond Street, beating his palms against the steering wheel, glad for Tony's conspicuous absence on this particular drive. The cassette collection old man Grosvenor discovered in the cabinet had sold him on the van. Gavin owned some albums on vinyl and many more on CD, but his first love had been Memorex. As a kid, he would stay up late with a flashlight waiting for his latest favorite to play on the radio, RECORD and PLAY and PAUSE already pressed, just sitting on the floor with his legs crossed and a finger hovering over PAUSE, waiting for the DJ to announce his song coming up in the next row of hits, or to hear those first few telltale notes. Gavin had gotten so good at instant recognition he'd won a radio contest, although he hadn't been allowed to collect the prize because he'd been twelve.
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