Know Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book One)

by Rachel Dunning

  And dad’s cock inside her.

  “Oh, yes, Raymond. Motherfuck dat is good.” Thick Hispanic accent. Seductive. Alluring.

  Her groans bounce off the walls like they’re coming out of speakers.

  Who wouldn’t wanna fuck her? Of course dad would be fucking her. Right?

  Pops holds a PBR in his hand while he does her. He looks back at me while his pelvis pumps the Madame below—slap slap slap. Her torn stockings seem oddly out-of-place in this otherwise Victorian setting.

  A tea room of all places. Go figure.

  Pops’s ass sags. He’s still got his shirt on. His pants are in a puddle by his feet.

  There are red marks on his white legs. Sores, maybe.

  “Mmmmmm!! GOD! RAYMOND BABY! OOOH YEAH!”

  “Hey, son.” He looks back at me and raises his beer—slap slap slap. Takes a sip. Then puts it back down. He looks away, puts both his hands on her generous ass. “Say hi to Catalina, son.”

  Slap slap slap.

  Catalina turns her head to me, sweaty hair matted to her forehead. But instead of hi, she says “Umpf!” and squeezes her eyes just as pops rams another one into her. Her head bobs with each of pop’s slap slap thrusts.

  As if it had always been there, but only now am I aware of it, she takes out her nine mil Beretta, puts the smoking barrel in her mouth. And sucks it, licks it, while smoke wriggles out of it. White, thick smoke. “Mmmmmmm,” she says. Her tongue reaches out over it, caressing it.

  And then it’s not a Beretta anymore. It’s something else. Something more fleshy. And pulsing.

  I look away. Because it grosses me out.

  Situation normal, I think.

  I turn my head to the stairs.

  And there’s an entirely different sound coming from above them...

  “Oh, god.” It’s a different voice, also female, from above the stairs. It’s a wail of pain. “Oh, god.” Then sobs. “God, help me!”

  And, from the tea room, the sexy version: “Oh, GOD! Oh, yeah! God, help me, baby!” Slap. Slap. Slap.

  And at my feet: Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.

  And, from above, weak and faint, in between sobs. “Oh, god. Help me, please. Help me.”

  “M—mom?” I look behind me at dad. He looks at me, raises the PBR, smiles, takes a sip. Slap slap slap. Puts it back down. Fucks the babe with his hands on her charitable ass. “D—dad. I think mom needs—”

  Dad’s eyes turn to glowing red embers when he looks at me now.

  I look away. From behind me, Catalina howls orgasmically: “Oh, yeah! Oh, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck! MMMMMMMMMM.”

  The wail above disappears.

  I’m on the stairs now. How did I get here?

  Gulp-gulp-gulp at my feet.

  I take a step and the wood creak-creak-creaks. The sex sounds below start fading. The death sounds above get louder. “Mmmmmmmmm.” A death sound.

  At the top of the stairs now, I look left and right, and see only blackness. Mom’s room is to the right. Somehow I know this. Even though this isn’t really my house, although it also is. I don’t want to go to the right. The sound is coming from the right.

  Convincing myself that everything’s OK, too afraid to face the truth, I go left.

  There’s a statue of the Virgin in the corner, bright and shiny. The only thing glowing in this dark spot of this hallway.

  And then she’s a real woman. Nude. With knocking breasts. Massaging them, sticking her tongue out and calling me.

  And holding a Beretta...

  I feel myself harden.

  And dad’s behind her now as well, the Virgin.

  Or is it?

  He holds a beer up to me, smiles, tilts his head back, takes a sip—gulp-gulp-gulp. Then puts his hand on the Virgin’s pure ass, her tits dangling wildly while she says—

  The moan from behind me becomes more desperate: “Declan. Declan, baby!” It’s hoarse, barely audible, but it cuts into my heart like a spear. “Declan, I’m dying. Get your father. Declan.”

  In my hand there’s a joint. Where did this come from?

  I smoke it, because it’s already lit. And it makes me feel better. Oh, yes, I feel so much better when I smoke this shit. Oh yeah, baby. Yeah!

  I puff it. I puff it so much that the room sways. Pictures of beautiful women swing around my head, a harem of them, wielding milk and honey and large brown breasts. Sounds fill my ears. “Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, baby.” And, “I’m dying. Help me. Declan—”

  It’s a cacophony. All around me. Gulp-gulp-gulp. Slap-slap-slap. Creak-creak-creak

  Naked women, blood, a flower. A bee on the flower.

  A cockroach.

  “Declan!”

  Dad smiles, eyes hot as fire. And the Virgin’s tongue is a snake now, licking her nose while her hands caress her bountiful breasts and she says, in a deafeningly manly voice that echoes as if it were spoken from an interplanetary loudspeaker currently manned by James Earl Jones: “Fuck me you irreverent BASTARD!”

  From behind me, screaming now: “Declan, help! I’m dying!”

  “Mom?”

  In front of me: “FUCK ME!”

  The Virgin’s eyes go wild with passion, delirious with desire. I wonder if she’s smoked some of what I’m holding. The thought makes me smile. And I smoke it some more...

  Ahhh, that’s better. That’s a little better...just a little bit...

  What was I saying?

  “Declan, please, don’t leave me alone. Don’t let me die alone...”

  Shouldn’t I be with my—

  Did someone say something?

  I feel hard. Very hard. Below.

  Irresistibly, the Virgin’s tongue licks my check. Her hand gets to my crotch. Inside. Mmmmmm. That’s good. She holds me, juggles my balls. I feel my breath quicken, feel her hand tighten around my shaft as she squeezes and caresses it—

  Wait. Something’s wrong.

  —moves her hand up and down it. She takes the weed from my fingers and we smoke it together. Pops is behind her as well. Slap-slap-slap. Like father like son. How nice. But I feel like she’s all mine somehow. I start doing her, wild and passionate and crazy. I’m all over her now, just me and her. And now she’s someone else. Blonde or redhead or— It doesn’t matter. She’s everything I wanted. There could be no better women than her, whoever she is. I’m elated. I’m over the moon. I’m almost over the edge. I shut my eyes, pump, slam, go WIIIIILD, feel her tits wobble against my chest—

  It’s cold.

  My cock is cold.

  Huh?

  What?

  Wait a minute. Wh—

  I look down—

  Oh. Fuck.

  Oh, god.

  NO!!!

  -14-

  I knock the table over.

  Howls fill whatever room I’m in.

  Someone’s shouting, screaming, shrieks of abject terror.

  “OH GOD! OH MY FUCKING GOD! OH— I’m gonna be sick... I’m gonna—“

  Light. Light. I need light. Where’s the switch? Where am I? Wh—

  “That bastard was fucking his whore when she died! And then I was— OH GOD! NO! OH—“

  And then the puke comes, hard and forceful. Out!

  Into a...bucket?

  Huh?

  I feel hands, solid firm hands.

  “OH GOD! OH—“

  And a voice... Somewhere... It’s—

  “Deck, it’s cool, homes, it’s cool. Just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream, homes.”

  “It’s my mother! It’s my mother, Trev! MOTHERFUCK!”

  “Deck, it was just that dream. Skate, put on the lights!”

  Trev’s holding me. Somehow, I come to understand this fact. While the world spins. It won’t stop moving. The TV is evil and the walls are ghostly—

  A ram-rod finds its way into my stomach, driven in like a train. When I land back on the couch, I realize it was Trev’s fist. He punched me.

  But at least the world has stopped spinning. And the walls are not
menacing any more. And that’s when I settle. When I realize I’m in my apartment, sleeping on my couch. “Fuck.” I run a hand through my drenched hair, taste the acid vile in my mouth, feel its corrosion over my teeth.

  After five minutes of fighting for breath, I say, “Thanks, bro. I needed that.” I look at the bucket he brought for me, spit in it. “Just like old times.”

  Trev slaps me on the shoulder a few times. “We all have our demons, homes.” I feel Skate’s hand squeeze my other shoulder.

  For a moment I’m moved deeply by it, then severely embarrassed. So I say, “You guys are so fucking emo.”

  I don’t add, And I’m so glad you’re both here.

  I grab the bucket and go clean it out.

  -15-

  The next morning, Thursday, we chill out at Tom’s while Clarissa eyes me evilly from the corner. When she pours me coffee, it spills out the cup, but doesn’t quite land on my pants.

  She doesn’t apologize.

  Usually I’d expect that shit when she and Skate were dating. But I know this is all about Gina. I still haven’t gone to see her. And don’t know if I will...

  “What’s up with her?” asks Trev. “If anything, I’d expect Skate to get coffee spilled on him, not you.”

  “Maybe it’s just hormones.” I know it’s a lie. Clarissa knows I haven’t made efforts to go and see Gina. And guilt shows.

  I keep checking out my phone, but Blaze hasn’t texted me yet.

  “She’s fine, homes. She probably just went to bed late, mixing.”

  I want to believe him. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about that elephant-sized monster with the black hair last night—Tolek the Twat.

  And Gavin the Grande. Xavier the Sex Loving Dealer.

  Who else wants a piece of her?

  And I also can’t stop thinking about my own tumbling state of mind.

  For four blissfully ignorant days, all was right with the world. I confess that I even had thoughts—brief, but there—of moving into one of those two million dollar condos with Blaze one day. The two tatted lovebirds whose romance transcended all barriers of the world. “Fucking load of bullshit,” I say out loud. When Trev and Skate stop drinking and stare at me, I say: “What?”

  And then they laugh. Like it’s all a big fucking joke.

  But it isn’t. I’m pissed about it. I’m pissed about my life. And most of all, I’m pissed about what that cesspool of a father did to my mother.

  And I’m true as fuck gonna tell him! Again.

  Preferably without the fists this time.

  When I tell Trevor I’m “ready to visit pops again,” he’s not as excited as he was when he first asked me to do it.

  Funny how things change with time.

  TWELVE

  ANGIE, BERNICE, AND CHARLIE

  -1-

  Blaze Ryleigh

  It’s ten-thirty when I get up.

  A body-thunking sense of loss hits me in the stomach, the kind that slams you when you think someone’s alive, only to realize, seconds later, that they’ve actually died. But that “someone” is different today. And it’s not a death, but it feels a little like one. Because I sent Declan home yesterday. And gone is gone, alive or dead. So what’s the difference, really?

  And when I did it, I told him that “this is new” and so it isn’t important. But the feeling I have in me this morning says something entirely else to me. It says he’s come to mean so much more to me than I allowed myself to believe. Sinatra, I think. Under my Skin. Not great to mix into a dark tune. But a classic...

  It scares me. Not the song, that Declan’s actually done it—gotten under my skin. My thick skin, I’ve always thought. But how thick can it be if I let a boy underneath it with only the force of a single breath?

  Not any boy...

  It feels like I’ve lost him today. It feels like I’ve made a deadly mistake. I sent him home.

  Because I was afraid?

  Because I was scared that, if he knew my past, completely, he’d leave?

  And why did that scare me? Is it because I’ve led myself to believe that he’s more than just a boy? More than just a guy I’ve known for little more than four days?

  This is what I tell myself. What I tell my brain. It’s what I told it while I mixed Rage Against the Machine into Tuneboy’s Screamin Bitch Mix of Housenation last night until four A.M. Or Alice in Chains’s We Die Young into Luca Antolini’s Hard House (hard as a mofo) song, Heat 2011.

  It brings out the dark in a person, Błażej...

  I tell my brain lots of things. But the fucking bastard never listens.

  And I hate to freaking admit it, but my heart’s the one talking to me now. It’s downright bleeding for him.

  I don’t know why.

  I don’t wanna know why.

  All I know is I need him. Because I’ve only felt this way once before for someone. Not a boy. A sister. And she was gone by the time I realized it.

  And Deck’s not gone. Not like she is.

  I get up and grab my phone. When I see his message—the one asking if I’d like to go for breakfast—it’s like a needle to the heart.

  The lost breakfast. The missed hug. The never again attainable time of the past.

  Gone. Forever.

  I text him back:

  Blaze: I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time. Just...getting used to this whole “letting someone in” stuff.

  I don’t care if it’s blunt. In fact, I don’t think it’s blunt enough.

  Deck: Bet you my closet’s fuller than yours. Meet tonight again? We’re all counting on you to recommend a place with some decent music.

  It’s a watershed of relief. I only realize I’m shaking when my legs give way and drop me to my bed.

  -2-

  Because I just can’t help it, I go online and check out the forums to see what’s being said about me. I don’t know if I prefer that nothing’s being said, or that crap was once being said.

  My MySpace plays are still higher than usual, but they’re also dying.

  Dying with the buzz.

  And what do I have, really? I have one great gig that I did. Although that gig did give me a pretty decent—he used the word first—boyfriend. I smile at that thought.

  But it’s also woken up sleeping dogs: Tolek. Xavier.

  And put some fresh dogs on my tail. Wild dogs.

  Wild dogs that I, apparently, have to follow in order to make it at all. And hell knows I’m desperate to make it.

  Maybe they smelled that, like all dogs smell fear. And maybe they capitalized on it. Maybe, as we sat at that round table surrounded by red lights and whips and cages in Sacrament’s underground temple to all that’s decadent, maybe they saw that in me.

  And exploited it.

  Assholes.

  I pull up my calendar and check out the gigs I have planned. Two more this month—two hundred bucks each, and as artistically stimulating as a Q-Tip. The first one is on Saturday, two days from now. The other, the week after, on a Friday. That’ll be a double-whammy weekend. My own Friday gig, and then the make-or-break gig on Saturday at Sacrament. I have four more for the middle of February. All Double-Whammies. Three hundred each except for the last one, which is a whopping hundred and fifty.

  Yeah, desperate times.

  They’re right, I realize. “I need them to get into the biz,” I say out loud. And then, arguing his point of view in my head, I hear Deck’s words again: We just gotta keep getting you out there, keep getting you heard.

  “But how?”

  I call him. “Hey.”

  “Blaze...it’s...so...good to hear your voice. Hold up. I’m stopping the car.”

  I hear Trev’s voice. “Say hi to Trev for me.”

  “Uh, yeah, uhm, Blaze says hi.”

  In the background: “Waddup, Blaze.”

  “Hey.” I laugh. “Uhm, ‘waddup.’”

  Deck mumbles, “She says waddup back to you.” I hear a door close, then a strong wind. Deck whispers, “B
laze, uhm, damn, you have no idea how good it is to hear your voice.”

  “Oh. OK.”

  “I know. I know. It sounds all forward and everything but, fuck, I had a rough night last night—”

  “You went out again?”

  “No, no. Just...didn’t sleep very well. Anyway, look, I know this is insane but, fuckit, I feel good around you, you know. I better shut up otherwise I’m gonna freak you out—”

  “Don’t shut up.” I clench the phone tightly. “Tell me, please. I need to hear it. Because last night, with Tolek—I guess you figured out he’s my ex—”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  “—and I panicked and...just...old memories came back... Anyway, I can tell you all about it later.”

  “Please, yes. I’d like that. And, look, I don’t wanna come around all weak and soppy and emo and shit but, man, sometimes life’s rough, you know. And, well, then you find a smooth stone—I’m sorry, I’m not so good with words—”

  “It sounds perfect.”

  “—so maybe this is sounding really corny. But, you find a smooth stone after walking barefoot on shells and glass and cutting your feet up and... Well, Blaze, at the moment you’re the only smooth stone in my life. Business is good, my friends are like my brothers, but only now do I see how much my damn feet have been hurting from walking on all that broken glass. Know what I mean? Like I said, I know it’s forward. But that’s another thing I’m noticing. I don’t think with my brain when I‘m with you. And I don’t think with that other organ either!” He laughs. “So, that’s all I wanted to say. Crazy huh? Blaze? You there?”

  I clear my throat. “Uhm, yes.”

  “Did I freak you out?”

  “No. No. Not at all. Let’s make it an early night tonight, OK? I wanna be with you.”

  “Deal.”

  “Look, there’s another reason I called. Uhm, you’re good with business, right?”

  “I’m OK.”

  “Modest as well. Fine. Look...I was thinking about what you said, you know, about promoting myself and stuff. Uhm... What I’m trying to say is—”