by M. O'Keefe
It was dangerous with those cops circling him but easier for me.
“He doesn’t want to talk to me,” Dylan said.
“I’m sorry.”
Dylan laughed and then sighed, like he was picking up a heavy burden he’d thought he was done with.
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure why I expected anything different.”
“Rabbit’s dead?”
“Yeah. Look, tell him,” he said, his voice soft and strangled. “Tell him not to go back to Jacksonville. Tell him he’s got a choice and he should come home.”
“Home?” Foreign word. Foreign fucking concept. Max wouldn’t understand it any better than I did. “Sure. I’ll tell him.”
“Hold on a second,” he said.
“I don’t have much change—”
“Joan?”
Oh Jesus. It was Annie. Sweet, soft, stupid Annie. I closed my eyes.
Growing up the way we did, in the trailer in the back lot of a salvage yard, we didn’t have many friends. Or I didn’t. Jennifer was worlds better than me. She was the kind of person people wanted to be around. A little bit like Annie. A little too kind. A little too soft.
But I never picked up the skill. Which made me a shit friend.
But Annie didn’t seem to care.
She kept trying. I’d give her that.
And she must have just worn me down with her boxes of wine and her bruised neck, because for some reason I stopped trying to bite her head off every time she was nice to me.
And then—somehow—we were friends.
“Hey,” I said.
“You okay?”
“Just great.”
“Joan. Don’t…make jokes.”
Oh honey, I thought. Don’t take away my jokes. I got nothing but tears without them.
“I’m fine. Max is fine.”
“We’re moving up to Dylan’s house in the mountains. Once Ben gets out of the hospital.”
I put my head down on the side of the phone booth. “Sounds nice,” I whispered.
It sounded like a commercial on TV for mops or something. A vision so perfect it had to be fake. But it wasn’t. It was Annie’s reality.
And I was glad for her. Glad that for some people, there were happy endings.
Annie deserved it.
“It is. And there’s room. I know Dylan wants Max to come. You should bring him.”
“And what? Move into your commune?” I joked. I’d already done that and I have the scars to prove it.
“I’m just saying you have a place to go. If you want it.”
“I don’t, but thanks,” I was being mean. I couldn’t help it. There was something about her kindness that made me want to rip the world to shreds. “My coins are running out.”
“Joan—”
“Goodbye, Annie. Have…have a good life.”
I hung up so hard the shitty plastic phone booth rattled. So I did it again. I hammered the phone against the number pad until I heard something crack.
Great. I just destroyed the last pay phone in the world.
I stepped back, breathing hard, feeling wild. Feeling like there weren’t enough drugs or drinks or women in the world to make me right.
I looked across the road at the condo where I had Max.
Max could make me right. He could sort me out.
I couldn’t go in there. Not now. Not yet. I’d lose my mind. I’d do something stupid with Max just to get shit right in my head. Just to balance the scales.
Show me something. Give me something.
He wanted my soul. My pain—because I’d seen his. I’d seen his guts ripped out while I read that text from his brother. And he wanted the same from me.
Fuck him. I wasn’t giving him anything.
Even if I wanted to. He already had enough.
The guy was chained to a bed and still, he somehow had all the control.
The Conch Republic was a bar/restaurant down the road. It was nine o’clock on a Sunday night, and the patio would be full of people. Tourists mostly. A few locals. The families would be gone and it would just be the drinkers left. People getting loose. Sorority girls staying at their grandmothers’ condos.
I could pick someone up. I wanted to pick someone up. I wanted to be pushed face-first against a wall and pounded by some man. I wanted this cellphone in my hand to ring and have it be Lagan. I wanted to put my mouth on another woman and bite. And I wanted her to like it and ask for more.
Max would.
I could bite and claw and hurt Max and he would do the same to me because we both wanted it. We both needed it.
My pain would balance his pain.
But as sexy as that sounded, as romantic as that might seem in our screwed up world—it wasn’t the truth.
The truth was his pain would only add to my pain. I could already feel it happening. His face, while I read that text from his brother, had been so carefully still, so falsely nonchalant, but that did nothing to hide his agony. And even as I was inflicting that pain on him, poking at him with the sticks I’d sharpened with my own two hands, I wanted his pain to be less. I wanted to shut myself up even though I knew it was the fastest and easiest way for me to get what I wanted.
I felt compassion for him. Sympathy. Empathy, maybe.
Who the fuck knows? I wasn’t even sure what those words meant for me—but I felt something for Max.
And I very much needed to feel nothing for Max.
Not one damn thing. Not desire. Not care. Not this lust that made me anxious and restless.
Nothing.
I put Max’s cellphone back in my pocket and swept the leftover change into my hand. Half of it missed my hand and fell to the gravel at my feet, and I was so broke, I reached down to pick the coins back up.
My pockets full of dirty money and a biker’s burner cellphone, I skipped the Conch Republic, with its siren call of sorority girls and bored locals, and instead walked across the street, right past the door to the condo and the temptation of Max chained to a bed, seething and frustrated, and hopped the small gate to the beach.
The waves were loud and the wind off the ocean was cold. Out on the dark horizon where the black sea met the blacker ocean, there were lights, a tanker I imagined. Maybe a cruise ship. Or a fallen star bobbing in the waves.
I dropped down in the sand, like my knees had been taken out. In the cool sand, I buried my feet to the ankles.
There was nothing to do but close my eyes and tilt my face into the wind and hope the elements would erode me. Blow off this shit I did not want to feel.
Not for Max.
Not for Annie and Dylan.
No one.
A few minutes later, I heard the snick of a lighter and then the smell of cigarette smoke blew by me on the wind. I jumped, startled, not realizing anyone was near me.
“Oh, hey,” a woman said. “I didn’t see you there. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” We were way out here past the lights from the condos behind us.
She was sitting a few feet away from me and I could barely see her until she took a drag from her smoke and the bright-cherry tip flared and illuminated her face.
“Is this bothering you?” she asked, holding up the smoke.
“No.” I said it with all the fondness I felt for my years smoking. Man, I missed cigarettes. I’d quit for a long time, but while living in that trailer park last year and planning this end of the world plot, I’d taken it back up, figuring there was a good chance I would die so what was a little lung cancer.
But here I was alive and needing a new plan. I didn’t have time for lung cancer. Or money to start the damn habit up again.
“You want one?” I could hear the smile in her voice.
“Yes. But I’m trying to quit.”
She laughed. “Me too. It’s just been one of those fucking years, you know.”
“It’s been one of those fucking lives.”
The waves crashed, muffling our laughter, and the wind blew my hair across my face. I left
it there. I couldn’t see her very well, but she wore a yellow dress that fluttered in the wind.
She must be cold. She must want to be cold, sitting out here smoking.
“I’ve got a joint,” she said. “The last of my husband’s medical marijuana. You want that?”
“Sure,” I said. A little alteration to my state of mind sounded like a good idea. Something to take the hard edge off this desperation and regret.
She fumbled with something in the dark and then in the flick of her lighter I saw her face in the yellow flame. She was pretty, with pale skin and very dark hair, cut in a sharp bob. Older than me by a few years and grief hung from her like kudzu, covering her with sadness.
The smell of weed drifted toward me as she handed me the joint. Our fingers brushed and the contact went through me like electricity through water. That’s how starved I was. How close I was to every possible edge of myself.
I glanced up and met her eyes in the darkness. Our fingers touched again. Not by accident.
You had to work really hard to clear the kudzu. It was a tough job—nearly impossible. But that look in her eye, the expression on her face as she looked at me—she was giving it a shot.
And wanted me to help.
Show me something, he’d said.
I could show him something.
If she was into it—I could really show him something.
And maybe for just a few minutes—we could all feel good.
Chapter 14
Max
I heard her come back in, and she wasn’t alone. Someone was with her. Another woman and the two of them were talking low.
One of them laughed, a silky purr of a laugh.
The fuck?
I was chained to this goddamn bed, going out of my mind, peeing in a bottle, and she was off picking up girls? I was going to kill her. With my bare hands I would kill her and I would enjoy it.
The door to the bedroom opened and I could see the dark imprint of her body in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
“I’m showing you something. Turn on the lamp by the bed.”
“Fuck you.”
“Not exactly, but good guess. Turn on the light.”
I reached over and pulled the chain. The light was muted by the pink shade and the fringe and the feathers. Honest to God, it was the stupidest lamp I’d ever seen.
“Remember,” she whispered toward me, still just out of reach. “We’re married.”
She looked windblown and flushed in the rosy light. Pretty. Her eyes were bright like she was cooking up some great Christmas surprise.
“Married,” I repeated. Because I was a little bit speechless.
She nodded and vanished from the doorway and then came back seconds later leading another woman by the hand into the bedroom.
The other woman took one look at me and stopped. Dead in her tracks. Joan maneuvered her back a little, away from the bed—and basically out of my reach.
This was a dangerous game Joan was playing and I should not have been surprised.
But Joan’s hand against that woman’s stomach, the fabric of the dress gathered up in Joan’s fingers told me a really surprising story.
“You weren’t joking,” the other woman said, laughter and respect in her voice. “You really are into some kinky shit.”
“Sarah, this is my husband, Dave. Dave, meet Sarah.”
“What are you doing?” I asked. I ignored Sarah, my eyes, my attention, every ounce of my being was focused on Joan.
“What you asked me to, dummy.” She was pretending to tease me but at the same time she wasn’t. There were two shows going on, one for me and one for Sarah.
Joan’s hand dropped the dress and slid up the bare skin of the woman’s arm. I saw goosebumps rise in the wake of Joan’s touch and I felt goosebumps rise up on my own skin in reaction.
Sarah put her own hand on Joan’s bare thigh, her fingers curling under the edge of her cutoffs as if she needed something to hold on to. She tilted her head toward Joan’s, resting against her.
“You said, show me something, remember?” Joan’s voice was coy for Sarah, but her eyes were hard for me. Joan ran her hand over the top of Sarah’s breasts, revealed by the scoop neck of her dress and Sarah sucked in a breath. Surprise, maybe, but she was in. Whatever was going to happen in this bedroom, there was no mistake that Sarah was into it.
My dick got hard. My dick got so hard.
Joan was devious and twisted and my dick loved that shit.
Sarah shifted, coming closer to the bed and her hand reached out for me and I sharpened, ready to grab her. Because while I could seriously get into the girl-on-girl action Joan had planned, what I really wanted was out of these damn handcuffs.
Joan wasn’t an idiot. If I grabbed Sarah, she’d let me go so no one got freaked out. So no one found out who we really were and called the cops.
But wily Joan knew what I was thinking and she pulled Sarah away from me toward the square of carpet between the foot of the bed and the dresser.
I relaxed back against the headboard. Biding my time.
The light was dim where the women stood, shadowy and secretive. It fit the mood. Joan stepped behind Sarah, shaking her head at me over the woman’s shoulder. A warning.
“You don’t touch,” she said. “Not tonight.”
She was not going to let Sarah get close enough to grab.
“I think Sarah wants me to touch her,” I said.
“I’ve told Sarah everything.” Joan ran her hands over Sarah’s pale shoulders. I couldn’t tell how old she was. Thirty something. Maybe forty. She had dark hair that fell in a straight line to her chin. She was pale, which was weird in Florida. And she wore a sundress, a bright-yellow thing that was loose around her body.
She was pretty in an elegant way. Fragile.
Joan’s hands were bright white against that dress as she pressed it flat against Sarah’s stomach, her tits. Showing me the woman’s body through her clothes.
“Yeah?” I asked. “What did you tell her?”
“That we’re married. That it’s our honeymoon and every night we do one thing that we’ve never done before.”
Ah…we were a kinky married couple. I could get right into that shit.
“And tonight you said you wanted to watch me go down on another woman.”
Collectively, we all pulled in air. Like Joan saying it out loud made it a very real and tangible thing. My blood pounded through my veins.
This woman was a bag of surprises. Kinky, fucking surprises.
“What did you say about this?” I asked, lifting the handcuff.
That I am a dangerous criminal and no one should get too close? That I bite? That sweet Sarah might end up collateral in this crazy game you and I are playing?
“You wanted to watch her with another woman,” Sarah answered, her voice sounding a little New York City, “but she wanted you not to be able to touch us. You just watch. My husband and I used to do this kind of thing all the time.”
I just watch. Kinky Joan thought of everything.
Joan’s hands were on Sarah’s breasts now. Cupping them in her hands, her fingers spread wide. Sarah put her head back against Joan’s shoulder, her eyelids lowered, her lips parted.
I could see the wet pink of Sarah’s mouth and I got turned on even more.
Joan, behind her was watching me. Her eyes hard and sharp. Unmoved.
She was measuring me. Gauging me. It was going to be a fucking production again. She wasn’t showing me shit. Well, she’d show me plenty, but none of it would be real.
I could not have counted how many strippers I’d watched bare themselves for my eyes. For the guys in the club. The number of whores who’d go down on other women in the clubhouse while they faked their way through with moans and “yeah, babies.”
It was so frequent and commonplace that I barely noticed it anymore. I certainly didn’t care.
But right now, after all this, I cared.
With Joan—I wanted her to peel back her armor. Her skin. I wanted to see her beating heart. Her ragged soul.
Anything less than that was bullshit.
But she stood there, armed with her control, standing behind the willing and trembling body of some woman she had picked up. With both hands, I wanted to rip away that control.
I wanted to shrink the distance between us down to nothing.
“What about you, Sarah?” I asked. Joan stiffened behind her. She didn’t like me talking to Sarah. I was supposed to sit here and watch. Do nothing, blinded by appreciation.
Fuck her. She cheapened all of us.
“Why are you here?” I ignored Joan and her displeasure.
“It’s a sad story,” Sarah answered, cupping her hands over Joan’s and squeezing harder. Like she was giving Joan permission to be rough. And my girl could do it. She gripped Sarah’s breasts and Sarah cried out, a shaky moan that was part laugh, like the joy she felt in being touched was a relief. “Let’s not ruin the mood.”
“What do you want?” I asked.
Sarah opened her eyes, dark and wide and full of age and grief. It was hard to meet them. It was hard to stare back at her, but I did it.
“I want to feel good.”
“Yeah,” I said, the words speaking to some internal knot in my belly. “Me too.”
It was the tie that brought us to this room. All of us were looking for something good.
I glanced back at Joan, searching out her eyes in the murk, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was focused on Sarah and that was so much hotter than her staring at me.
“I’ll make you feel good,” she whispered to Sarah.
She lifted the short hem of Sarah’s skirt, revealing long, pale legs and then finally pink panties, damp and translucent over her pussy.
“What did you do without me?” I asked, intrigued and turned on.
“We kissed on the beach,” Joan said, running a finger over that damp spot on Sarah’s panties. Down over the slit and back up. Sarah jumped when Joan hit her clit and Joan left her finger there, pressing down just a little.
“Yes,” Sarah breathed. “Oh fuck, yes.”
“How did you kiss?” I said. Joan was taller than Sarah and so Sarah tilted her head back and Joan bent slightly and they kissed. They kissed like lovers, not like porn stars in some lesbian scene.
