Getting Off: A Novel of Sex & Violence (Hard Case Crime)

by Lawrence Block

  He sat in the chair, and unconsciously he touched himself, more for reassurance than anything else. Could something have gone wrong? Had Angelica come home alone? That was always a possibility. Sometimes one of them changed her mind. A woman’s prerogative, after all. To change one’s mind.

  No. He heard voices, the two of them in conversation. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it was enough to know they were both there together.

  So the girl had not changed her mind. And now it was no longer her prerogative. She was theirs.

  When they turned on Ordway Avenue, she said she didn’t know they had apartments here. Angelica told her she lived not in an apartment but in a free-standing house. “A townhouse,” she said. “That’s what they call it. It’s part of a development, and the association takes care of all the exterior maintenance, the lawn-mowing and landscaping and all that. But in every other respect it’s a private home.”

  “And you live there all by yourself?”

  “I’m married, Missy.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s the perfect husband,” she said, “in that he makes a lot of money and doesn’t care how I spend it. And best of all, he travels a good deal of the time.”

  “Is he away now?”

  “He’s out of town,” Angelica said, “and I’m out on the town. That’s how it works.”

  “Does he know—”

  “How the mouse plays when the cat’s away? It’s hard to say what he knows and what he chooses not to know. One time he said, very pointedly, that he wouldn’t like it if I was with another man. And he put the emphasis on man, which left me feeling that he had his suspicions, and that he didn’t mind if I found a playmate now and then.”

  “And when he’s home—”

  “I keep him very happy.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you, Missy? And when he’s away, I keep myself very happy. I drove him to the airport this morning, and he called this afternoon to let me know he was safe and sound in Kansas City. From there he goes to Omaha, and then I forget where in South Dakota. And so on, and he won’t be back for ten days.”

  After a moment she said, “And when he comes home you’ll sleep with him.”

  “Indeed I will. You disapprove?”

  “No, I just wondered. I mean, do you enjoy it?”

  “I like girls more, Missy. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like boys.”

  “Oh.”

  “And you?”

  She paused, as if considering the question. “Just girls,” she said at length.

  “You’re so sweet,” Angelica said, and put a hand on her thigh. “You wouldn’t believe the fun we’re going to have.”

  Angelica’s hand stayed on her thigh until she braked the car in front of a well-proportioned two-story house, a center-hall Spanish Colonial with a tiled roof and an attached garage. The hand moved to the visor, and Angelica worked the remote and raised the garage door, then parked alongside a smaller Honda.

  She said, “His car?”

  “Mine, actually. But when he’s out of town I get to drive his Lexus.”

  “You get to do just about everything, huh?”

  “Everything good,” Angelica said.

  They both got out of the Lexus, and the garage door descended as they approached the door leading to the kitchen. She was a few steps behind, resting her hand on the Honda’s hood while Angelica turned the key in the lock.

  Click!

  What the hell was Angelica doing? Giving the little darling a guided tour of the downstairs? And, while she was at it, nailing her on the couch?

  Waiting like this was sweet torture. But at length Brady heard their feet on the carpeted stairs, heard them walk down the hall and turn at the bedroom. And now he could make out their voices:

  The girl: What a big bed.

  Angelica: In case you want to hide from me.

  The girl: And then you’d have to search for me.

  Angelica: I found you at the bar, didn’t I? I think I’ll be able to find you in the bed, Missy.

  Ah, so her name was Missy. And she had a little-girl voice, to go with her little-girl name.

  Missy: This is nice. Is it Japanese?

  The screen. They always noticed the screen. And more often than not looked behind it, perhaps unconsciously needing to reassure themselves that there was no one lurking there. Because there could be a man there, a savage creature with a shark’s grin and a massive erection, an unwelcome intruder in a girl–girl scene, but no, the screen was purely decorative, and there was no one for it to conceal.

  Angelica: My husband saw it in a shop in San Francisco. He bought it and had them ship it here, and the first I knew about it was when the UPS truck turned up.

  Missy: It’s beautiful.

  Angelica: He has an eye for beautiful things.

  Missy: Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it?

  Angelica: And so do I. Come here, you beautiful thing.

  If you were going to try going to bed with a woman, she thought, it might as well be a beautiful one. Angelica was that and more, and it wasn’t surprising that she proved to be a gifted lover. She had been certain of that from the first touch, the hand on her shoulder, and had been certain of her own response from the first kiss in the parking lot.

  And in certain respects it was easier to be with a woman. She always felt the slightest bit shy the first time she undressed in the presence of a man. It was a sort of reflexive timidity, and it never lasted long, but it was always there. Tonight though, when she was about to do something she had never done before, and thus had every reason to be apprehensive, the act of disrobing had no attendant shyness.

  Because she’d been comfortable undressing in front of women ever since she’d been a little girl, changing in and out of gym clothes at school, getting into a bathing suit at the beach. Angelica looked her over while she undressed, but other women checked you out all the time; if they weren’t interested in you sexually, then they were sizing you up as potential competition.

  Whatever it was, she was entirely at ease. And if she had any anxiety about joining Angelica in bed, any concern that she wouldn’t know what to do, that was gone in no time at all.

  Angelica made it easy for her by taking the lead, which was no real surprise. Their roles in this performance were a given, with herself as the bottom and Angelica as the top. “Just close your eyes,” Angelica said, in case there was any doubt, “and lie back, and let me love you.”

  Easy enough to comply. Easy enough to give herself up to Angelica’s hands and Angelica’s mouth, and, really, what could there possibly be to object to in any of that? There wasn’t a thing Angelica did to her that hadn’t been done by men, and if some of those men had been awkward or clumsy or in a hurry, not a few had known what they were doing and done it with skill.

  Angelica, a woman herself and the experienced lover of women, knew what to do and how to do it, and picked up cues from her responses. And Angelica was in no hurry for her to arrive at her destination. Instead she kept taking her to the brink, keeping her right on the edge, then easing back and letting her cool down just a little before she started in all over again.

  There was an element of torture to it, because she reached a point where she really wanted to come, and yet it was all so exquisite that she didn’t want it to end. It was a little unsettling to have a lover who was so utterly in control of her responses, and at the same time it was quite wonderful.

  Oh, and there was something she hadn’t been expecting. Angelica’s spit-lubed finger, finding its way unerringly into her bottom. And moving in an insistent rhythm, but not the same rhythm Angelica was employing elsewhere. Jesus, the woman was playing her like an African drum. With a tap tap here and a rat-tat-a-tat there, and, omigod, oh, yes...

  Don’t stop, she thought. Please don’t stop.

  Jesus, did she speak the words aloud?

  It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to stop this time, she was going to come, yes, and she
kicked her feet and thrust with her hips and cried out, because why not, men liked it when you made a little noise, so why shouldn’t a woman like it, and what difference did it make who liked what, because she could no more hold back her cries than she could hold back her orgasm.

  Yes!

  *

  Was there anything more beautiful than two women making love?

  If so, he couldn’t imagine what it might be. He was not, in ordinary circumstances, a voyeur. He could neither imagine himself as a Peeping Tom, lurking at bedroom windows in the hope of a glimpse of the forbidden, or as a spectator at orgies, watching others having sex. Watching a man with a woman, or a man with a man, held no appeal for him.

  But two women, that was somehow different. And when one of the women was his woman, his Angelica, the appeal was irresistible.

  And this one, this Missy, this doe-eyed ingénue, complemented her perfectly. He couldn’t imagine a more ideal partner for his magnificent wife.

  He’d given them a few minutes in bed before leaving his den and taking up his position behind the Japanese screen. He was barefoot and the floor carpeted, so no one could hear his footsteps, and the screen was so situated that his brief passage from the doorway was invisible to anyone in the bed. Even so, he’d walked lightly and quickly, and held his breath until he was where he wanted to be. Then he put his eyes to the tiny viewing slits, and saw the two of them, and he’d been watching them ever since.

  He never tired of watching Angelica bring a partner to climax. She loved to tease, and he sometimes suspected that he was no less the object of her teasing than the woman upon whom she was performing. He fancied that he could feel what Missy was feeling, that her excitement was his excitement, and when she came he felt a tremor of the spirit, a sort of psychic equivalent of orgasm.

  And now it was Missy’s turn.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  And now it was her turn.

  As she lay quietly beside Angelica, giving herself over to the afterglow, she was struck by the sudden undeniable awareness that she was being observed. She could feel him there, behind the Japanese screen, could feel his eyes on her. She had the urge to look over there, even to wink at him, but she suppressed it. She was, after all, sweet young Missy, who could not possibly suspect Angelica’s well-heeled traveling man was even in the house, let alone in the room with them.

  So she couldn’t acknowledge his presence. But she could damn well give him something to watch.

  She rolled over on her side, kissed Angelica’s mouth, put a hand on Angelica’s breast, caressed it, then ran her hand over the flat stomach and down. Angelica was smooth as silk, she must have had it waxed, and was that a lesbian thing? Did they all do that, and was she herself less desirable for having hair there? If so, she thought, the woman had done an Oscar-worthy job of concealing her distaste.

  Still, it was something to think about. Touching it—and she couldn’t seem to stop touching it, not that Angelica gave any sign of wanting her to stop—touching it was quite irresistible.

  She’d wondered if she would know what to do when her turn came, but could see now that she knew everything she needed to know. She knew what she liked done to herself, for starters, and she had just learned what Angelica liked to do, and could thus be presumed to like done in return.

  And her fingers were eliciting the desired response. She found things to do with them, and got the woman off that way, because teasing was Angelica’s trick, and she sensed that she would not want to be teased in return. And then, while Angelica was still in the throes of orgasm, she put her mouth to work.

  She’d thought that she might not like doing it, but she did. And, from what she could tell, it turned out she was pretty good at it.

  Angelica certainly seemed to be having a good time. She could only hope it was fun for the guy behind the screen.

  Brady, perversely, was thinking of something else.

  His eyes were glued to the action before him, and he was paying close attention to what they saw. But his mind had slipped almost a year into the past; while he watched one thing, he remembered something quite different.

  The boy.

  His name was Darwin, and he was their first—and thus far only—male playmate. It had been Angelica’s idea, and she’d made the suggestion several times before he agreed to it.

  “For variety,” she’d said. “To test your limits, stretch yourself a little. And so that you can experience what I have every time, utterly dominating someone like yourself.”

  He protested that he wasn’t gay, wasn’t bisexual, didn’t find himself attracted to men. “Curiosity,” she’d said. “You’ve had your cock sucked; what’s it like to suck one? You’ve fucked women; what’s it like to fuck a man? Or get fucked by one?”

  “I wouldn’t let a man inside me.”

  “Why not? You like it when I do you with a strap-on. Don’t tell me you haven’t got the urge to try the real thing.”

  In the end he agreed to it. “To keep you happy,” he’d told her, but that’s not all it was. He’d dismissed the questions she’d raised, shrugged them off and waved them away, but they came back. They were, truth to tell, things he’d wondered himself.

  But not in St. Louis, not anywhere in Missouri. Instead they flew halfway across the country where they checked into a good hotel under false names. They had dinner in their room, and he barely touched his.

  If he was this nervous, he told himself, then he really did need to go through with this.

  There was a gay bar just blocks from the hotel. He walked to it and sat in a corner nursing a gin and tonic. Men approached him, and his manner was amiable but distant.

  “Pick a cute one,” she’d said, but none of them struck him as cute. They were men, they didn’t appeal to him. But in the end he chose a sort of male ingénue, a willowy young man whose big brown eyes were his most remarkable feature. Their lashes were long, and enhanced by mascara.

  Brady bought him a drink, a Stinger, and the youth said he could really use it, because his rent was past due and he didn’t know how he’d be able to pay it. Brady said he might be able to help, and Darwin said that would be just wonderful.

  Back at the hotel, Darwin was not happy to discover that he had two people to play with, and that one of them was a woman. It took a few drinks to loosen him up, and Brady learned the answers to a couple of the questions Angelica had raised. The acts were interesting, though not ones he’d feel a need to repeat, and the satisfaction of imposing his will on the boy was similar to what he felt with the women Angelica picked up.

  But Darwin cringed at Angelica’s embrace, and was unable to maintain an erection with her. And when they tried to get him to go down on her he burst into tears. It was not the ending they might have hoped for, and they stuck him in the shower to sober up, then gave him several hundred dollars and sent him off into the night. He left, whimpering, and that was the end of that.

  Now, though, Brady realized the evening should have ended differently. With Darwin’s face forced between Angelica’s legs, while Brady was lodged deep inside him. And then, at just the right moment, one hand on the boy’s chin and the other gripping that long hair. And a quick yank, and the neck snapping.

  It would have been so simple, and so satisfying. By the time anyone found the body, they’d have been halfway home, and no one would have a clue who’d snuffed out the young man with the slim hips and huge eyes.

  And that young man wouldn’t get to tell his friends about the disgusting couple he’d been with, and how Mr. Macho Man had sucked him off.

  Brady, watching the two women now, thought of what might have been. He wished he could turn back the clock and the calendar and make that singular evening come out right.

  He looked at Missy, who was every bit as doe-eyed as Darwin. And he felt an unaccustomed tingling in his hands.

  Angelica lay on her back with her eyes closed and felt Missy’s hand settle on her belly and make its way to her loins. How tentative that hand had
been earlier, and how sure of itself it had become!

  “It’s so perfect,” Missy said.

  “You do seem fond of it.”

  “So smooth and bare. Like a little girl’s, but not like a little girl’s at all, you know? I can’t keep my hands off it.”

  “The first time I had it done, I couldn’t keep my own hands off it. And as for my husband—”

  “He likes it?”

  “I knew he would. It was a surprise. And it made him very happy.”

  “Well, it came as a surprise to me. And I have to say it made me very happy, too.” A pause. “Maybe I should have mine done.”

  “If you decide to,” she said, “there’s really only one place in town to go. I’ll write it down for you later. And if you tell her I sent you, you may get a little extra.” Missy seemed baffled. “Catherine’s an artist,” she explained, “and a great fan of her own work. If she likes you, you’ll get a muffing along with the waxing. I always do, and that’s the part Brady never hears about.”

  But of course he did, and was always after her to recruit Catherine for a party. But then where would she go for a waxing? One had to be practical.

  “But that’s for later,” she told Missy. “Get over here and kiss me.”

  Should she have the girl one more time? She loved to keep Brady waiting, but not forever. And she really didn’t want to wait any longer herself. She wanted to see the look on Missy’s face when Brady appeared, and when she realized what was coming, and that there was nothing at all she could do about it.

  Deftly she slipped free of Missy’s embrace. She opened a drawer in the nightstand, took out a handful of silk scarves. Missy caught sight of them, puzzled, and Angelica moved her hand and let the silk trail over the girl’s body.

  She said, “Missy, darling, can we try something?”

  “What?”

  “It’s my favorite little game. I want to tie you up.”

  “Oh.”

  “I know you’ll love it.” As she talked, she reached for Missy’s wrist, and was taken aback when the girl pulled her hand away. “Just let me show you,” she began again, and reached out, only to have Missy once again draw away.