The girl giggled. "What?"
"Your shoes," I said. "I'll give you a hundred dollars for them."
She smirked. "Uh . . . they cost more than that?"
"Fine, three hundred."
This time her eyes lit up. "Are you serious?"
"Yes."
She turned to the guy next to her, who shrugged and then resumed staring at my boobs with a big I'm-rock-hard-right-now grin on his face.
In her effort to remove the first shoe, the girl fell into the guy, laughing and hugging him for support. Then another boy stormed over from their car and grabbed her by the arm, jerking her away from him. An argument began to swell, fueled by drunken jealousy.
I made the trade off when the guys took over the conversation, sticking their chests out and deepening their voices as boys do when they fight over vagina. Then I approached another girl in the group and made the same offer. She quickly came out of her shoes, too. I slipped these on and rushed back to the lobby just in time to escape the physical altercation erupting between the boys.
When I came through the door, I froze in panic. Flora Girl stood facing the clerk with her dress pulled down to the small of her back. The old woman and the dog were gone. Luckily no one else was around.
I stormed over to Flora, hiked her dress back up over her chest, and shot the drooling clerk an angry look. He didn't notice, and that pissed me off even more.
"What the hell did you do?" I shouted at him.
"Hey, I didn't do anything," he said, throwing up his hands. "Ask her. She just whipped them out."
"What did he do, Flora?"
She cast her eyes to the floor. "He was staring," she said, "so I thought he wanted to see them."
"Flora, you can't go around taking your clothes off."
"I can't?"
"No. It's illegal."
"What's that mean?"
"It means the police will come and take you to jail."
"What's jail?"
A million dollars per day rental fee and they couldn't even educate the poor girl?
"I'll explain later," I said, turning to the clerk. "Can I have my room key, please?"
"You guys are crazy," the clerk said. "Here."
He handed my credit card back along with the card key to the room. "Take the elevator to the third floor, go left to the end of the hall, then right. Room 3109 is on the left." I offered him a mocking smile and he said, "First sign of trouble from you and that's it. You're outta here."
"Whatever," I said.
We rode the elevator alone and finally I began to feel a little relieved. No one around to attack Flora, no one to be suspicious of us.
Unburdened by tension and anxiety, I now felt exhausted, physically and emotionally. I hadn't even had time to process the fact that my husband was dead. Choked out and pitched aside like an empty tube of toothpaste. The snap of his neck began to replay in my mind and it made me sick.
I started to cry as I keyed into the room. Once inside, I fell on the bed sobbing. Nothing had ever hurt so much. And it wasn't the fact that I'd never see him again. I planned on that anyway. It was the fact that I caused it. The moment I decided to snoop through Ted's belongings, I set off a chain reaction, resulting in a murder to which I was now an accessory. No amount of cheating earns anyone a death sentence. Bankruptcy? I was all about that this morning, but even the thought of leaving Ted destitute now made me question my own humanity. How did I get to be this way? Conniving, malicious? For Christ's sake, I was voted friendliest for my high school's superlatives.
It was Ted. Despite the guilt stabbing at my chest, I couldn't deny that whatever bitchiness had rooted inside me, Ted had planted the seed.
Nice or not, he didn't deserve to be choked to death, and his mother didn't deserve to go through the pain of losing a son. Around her, Ted and I had always pretended to be the happiest couple on the planet. To this day she knew no different. At holiday gatherings and other visits, Ted's mother would gawk at us with sadness in her eyes, probably recalling fond memories of her own husband, who died at the age of fifty from prostate cancer.
The mattress shifted. I turned over on my back and found Flora crawling to me. She paused, like a cat stalking its prey, awaiting my instruction.
"Lie down," I said, just to keep her away from me. Then, for some reason, I added, "On your back."
She did so quickly.
This obedience was something I could get used to. It excited me. The possibilities were endless. I could truly do whatever I wanted with her.
In a way, though, it was making things worse. Maybe if Flora were capable of making decisions, taking control of her own fate, I wouldn't feel so responsible for her. I wouldn't feel so alone.
Who was I kidding, anyway? We didn't have anywhere to go, and the police were probably looking for us already, especially with a crazed naked man running the streets and my husband stiffening on the shag carpet. If no one had found him yet, they would soon enough. Then what would happen? Fleeing the scene certainly made me look guilty.
Your life is over. You have no friends, you killed your husband, and you're going to prison.
When the word "friends" crossed my mind, I thought about Kate back at the company and realized I missed her. If I did have a friend in the world, it was her, and we'd only just met this morning. How pathetic was that?
"Melissa?" Flora said, lying flat on her back and staring up at the ceiling. Did I tell her my name? I didn't remember doing so.
"Yeah, what's up?"
In the cutest, most pitiful voice I'd ever heard, she said, "Can I masturbate?"
I looked at her, lying there in that white dress with one hand resting on her flat stomach, waiting like a child for permission. Beads of sweat on her neck and forehead, despite the chilly hotel air. God, she was beautiful. The sight of her made me cringe with both lust and jealousy. Something else, too. Fear, maybe, that I would miss my chance to be with her. To kiss her soft lips, to feel her electric tongue slipping inside me.
I sat up on the bed, facing her.
"Take off the dress," I said.
Flora grasped the sides of her dress and pulled down until her breasts plopped out, then wadded the top half up, scooted her butt off the bed, and slid the dress off, raising her legs vertically while she slipped it from her ankles. Her legs split in the air and lowered to the bed, spread wide, her tiny pussy slightly agape and glistening, beckoning me to put my mouth there.
She let her head roll to the side on the pillow, chin tucked down to her shoulder, and she gazed at me with her sparkling hazel eyes.
Fuck it.
I crawled over to lie next to her. She adjusted her head on the pillow so she could see me better.
The first thing I touched was her hair, but before I even made contact, her mouth opened and she drew in a sharp, deep breath, chest inflating, body trembling. My eyes were instantly drawn to her breasts, two flush pink nipples hardened like fondant atop her butterscotch skin. Her sweet smell intensified to the point that I wanted to bite into her, chew her up like candy.
"Don't move."
She didn't even nod.
Reaching across her chest, I slowly rested my hand on her side, stiffening with a jolt of desire each time a fingertip landed. I drew my hand up over her right breast, squeezed. She moaned.
Rubbing the tiny bumps of the areole summoned the bud of her nipple to rise, like Braille forming a secret language of enchantment and delight, spoken in moans and giggles.
Then I leaned over and kissed it, the nipple poking through my closed lips. A tingling sensation washed over me. I sat up on my shins and knees and pulled my dress up over my head. Flora looked up to me with the eyes of someone in love.
"You're pretty," she whispered.
"Thank you."
I let her observe me for a moment. When her eyes came upon my vagina, she couldn't look away. Her face filled with animalistic fervor.
There was no going back now. It was as if we were magnetized. From this po
int forward, my body seemed to control my mind, instead of the other way around.
"Scoot down," I said, directing her away from the headboard. This allowed me room to get above her and do something I used to do to Ted, starting with an upside-down kiss, like Spiderman and Mary Jane in the movie.
Then I began to move slowly down her sinuous body, running my tongue to the peak of one breast, then down her abdomen.
I kissed each hip bone softly, then the smooth hump of her pubis, the slight indentation where the crevice formed. I stared at it like a ridge in the distance, overlooking some place I had been searching for all my life. I could feel the warmth of Flora's breath on my inner thigh now, the tickle of her hair.
Slowly I began to lower myself onto her, wrapping my hands around her thighs, my breasts pressed firmly into her stomach. I kissed her pubis one more time, and here I could feel the Libido Drug leaking from her pores and absorbing into my lips. I giggled. Then I pressed my tongue into her clitoris.
We both lost control instantly, our tongues lapping each other with such intense and sloppy passion that there was no beauty to it, no grace, no romance—just pure and primal pleasure. It might have lasted minutes or it might have lasted hours. To this day I can't be a hundred percent certain. All I know is at some point I stopped reciprocating and just lay there atop her, completely paralyzed, coming so hard I was screaming at the top of my lungs.
I didn't hear the knock on the door, nor the click of the lock as the desk clerk keyed into the room.
All I heard was his voice. "Is everything o-"
I opened my eyes and saw him standing there, a small erection showing through his khakis, his face flushed, his mouth hanging open.
"Ladies, you'll have to keep it down. Other guests are complaining."
We didn't stop. We couldn't. I couldn't even tell him to go fuck himself.
When two police officers arrived, we still couldn't stop. They began to yell at us. After a while, the tall one tried to pull me off the bed, but Flora wouldn't let go, so the short, fat cop put one knee on the bed and wrapped his arms around her.
They bent us over the beds on opposite sides, and we licked each other's tongues as the tall one entered me and the fat one entered Flora.
I remember the explosion of gunfire, and I remember the discomfort of the tall officer's dick suddenly jerking out of me as he collapsed to the floor.
The last thing I remember is Flora grabbing me by the head and giving me a long, passionate, closed-mouth kiss while a man wearing a black suit and sunglasses approached her from behind, grabbed a handful of her hair, and yanked her backwards. It was one of the four security guards in the lobby at Your Favorite Girl, Incorporated. The one who'd stared at Kate's ass with the same shit-eating grin plastered on his face right now.
I fainted.
─No Way Out─
I DON'T remember hitting the floor. I blinked out in mid-fall and awoke instantly in a white room, completely naked, on my back, unable to move. I was strapped at the wrists and ankles, my limbs spread out to form an X on what felt like a prep table. Smooth, icy cold metal, slippery with my sweat, despite the fact that my teeth were chattering.
He used to tie me up. I'd forgotten about that. Sometimes he did so against my will. Now look at me: kidnapped and strapped to a table all because I pulled a business card out of my dear husband's pocket, a card he should have thrown in the trash the moment someone handed it to him. A good person wouldn't carry a card like that.
Then again, nor would a good person make an appointment, purchase a genetically programmed sex slave, and create the circumstances in which someone dies violently.
I yearned for the comfort in at least knowing this wasn't my fault, but it was. Humiliation and shame were swelling up inside me like spray foam insulation, and it wasn't because I was buck naked or that I'd had sex with three guys and one girl all in a single day.
I felt stupid. Incapable of making a good decision. Skip college, marry a man I don't even know because he's good in bed and has money, devolve from a wife to an unwanted pet, and now this.
I could only lift my head a few inches, but it was enough that I could see most of the way around the room. White cinderblock walls and a wall of cabinets with a sink and counter top, a computer monitor in hibernate mode, a rolling stool, two cushioned chairs. Above me, a multi-jointed robot arm extended from the wall. At the end was a large rotor that housed several different lights and pointy tools. It looked like a demented hand, multiple methods of slicing me into pieces.
From behind me came a soft beeping and the occasional whoosh of air, maybe the breath of other bizarre mechanisms.
When I noticed the hand sanitizer dispenser by the door, for some reason I felt a wave of relief. A beautiful moment of delusion. This is a hospital. I'm in the hospital, not Your Favorite Girl, Incorporated. It was a dream.
The feeling came and went like a camera flash, a gasp of air.
Why am I naked?
I lowered my head carefully and lay staring at the ceiling, my muscles so tense they ached. I was probably still sore from my encounter with Flora, too.
Where is Flora? Where am I?
This was the first time in my life I'd ever experienced such a loss of control, the first time I genuinely thought I might die.
Perhaps it was fitting that, in my panic, I experienced a strange sort of nostalgia, triggered by the feel of the prep table on my skin. It took me back to high school, when I used to waitress at the steakhouse a few blocks down from the end of my street. On nights when the manager left early and business was slow, two of the bartenders would sneak some of the waitresses drinks. We were all friends who hung out at each other's houses, and sometimes something more sprung out of the group. I dated one of the bartenders, but at some point both of them had my butt on one of the kitchen prep tables.
That was back when I looked at Ted as no more than a very hot grownup, a regular customer who happened to live at the end of my street. A very hot neighbor who ran past my house every morning in nothing but track shorts, always timed perfectly so he would pass by while I waited for the bus. It never occurred to me that I wasn't the only girl on the block waiting at the curb, that he probably gave that same quick nod, smile, and eye-fuck to every teenager along his route. We were his catalog. The new crop. And I wanted him to pick me.
I didn't know how to flirt with anyone outside my circle of friends, but I couldn't keep myself away from him. I found excuses to come to his table, I made certain to stand in his path on the sidewalk, making him swerve around me but hoping he would stop. My boyfriend, the bartender, knew I was in love with Ted before I did. He broke up with me because I apparently twirled my hair and pivoted back and forth when I talked to him, or, as Steven put it, "acted like an eight-year-old."
Ted invited me to his house three days after my eighteenth birthday, while I was refilling his drink.
He started talking about a movie he loved, and I pretended that I hadn't seen it.
"You should come over tonight and watch it with me," he said. "I have a home theater."
The sound of the doorknob yanked me out of my thoughts in time to notice someone rushing at me. My heart started pounding and I clenched my eyes shut.
"Melissa." It took me a moment to recognize the voice.
Kate!
I opened my eyes and there she was, hovering over me, her hair falling all around her face, casting it in shadow, a pleasant perfume wafting from her neck. She brushed her hair behind her ears, revealing a purple and black bruise around her left eye.
I tried to rise. "Are you okay?"
She nodded quickly, biting her lip, shooting glances at the door.
"Where am I?" I asked.
"You're back at the company," she said. "Melissa, listen." She lowered her voice to a whisper and leaned in so close I could smell the peppermint on her breath. "You have to do exactly as I tell you, okay? Everyone's pissed and I'm trying to keep them from doing anything rash."
&
nbsp; "Like what?" I asked. I tried to sit up again, forgetting in my growing panic that I was tied down, the thought of which only make things worse. My lungs felt like empty tubes of toothpaste. I could tell the level of danger I was in by the look on Kate's face. This was a butcher's table, and I was a slab of meat.
"What are they going to do to me?"
She broke eye contact. "One of two things," she said. "Keep you or kill you."
I started to cry. Kate touched my face.
"Look," she said, sniffling. "When they come in here, you can't act afraid. They're killers, you understand? They enjoy it."
"Can you call the police?"
She shook her head. "The only outside phone lines are in the conference room and the executives' private offices. I can only use the phone for consultations, and they monitor every one." After a brief pause, she added, "There's no way out, either."
The gravity of the information sucked out whatever energy I had left. My head rolled to the side, away from Kate, and for the first time I noticed the small rolling cart standing flush against a row of cabinets. Upon it lay a blue mat with dozens of surgical instruments. Above the cart, on the counter, was a small glass-front refrigerator. I couldn't make out the labels on the small glass bottles inside, but everything on the lowest rack was filled with blood.
I pulled and jerked at my straps, murmuring, begging for help. My muscles ached. I couldn't breathe. Images of scalpels slicing through skin flashed through my mind like a twisted medical slideshow.
"Hold still," Kate whispered.
I obeyed. I lay perfectly still, so anxious that my legs began to cramp, which led to me biting my lip and clenching my eyes shut.
A teardrop streamed down to the corner of my mouth and broke, wetting the seam formed by my lips.
Not a teardrop. I'm on my back.
It couldn't be a tear drop. I didn't feel sad at all.
"My lips are tingly," I said drunkenly, opening my eyes to find Kate hovering so close to me that her hair walled me off from the rest of the room, leaving only her face for me to see.
Your Favorite Girl (YFG Series) Page 5
