I started to say all of this to Avery because that was the kind of shit I told him because he would listen to it and parse it and come back around with something that made sense to put me back on the road I traveled for The Gate. Partly because it was his job but more so because he loved me like family, like blood, and that was what you did for your blood. You cared for them and in their time of need, you showed up and handled shit.
I started to say all of this and then I stopped. Because the door to Ralph’s opened and in walked that woman.
The One.
Her.
The lingerer from the subway station with the watchful eyes. The woman I’d glimpsed from far away and wanted to know more. Now, seeing her close, almost close enough to touch, I knew one thing was fact: she was the most beautiful woman I had seen in my life. Ever. No lie. And I’d seen a lot of women. Laughing, crying, coming, sucking, eating, walking, dancing, pissing, writhing, drinking, screaming, vomiting, shopping, arguing, painting, writing, building, destroying, fucking, fucking, fucking.
I’d seen them and trust me, they did not compare to the being who walked into Ralph’s, sat down at the bar, and ordered a Johnny Walker Black. Neat.
When they spoke of breathtaking beauty they meant her—stormy grey eyes to toss you about and prominent cheekbones sharp enough to hurt someone, warm brown skin and lips meant to mark every inch of a lover’s body. Suddenly all I could hear was Anthony Kiedis in my ear, spitting truth over Flea’s mean bass: My eyes popped out, my dick got hard, and I dropped my jaw.
Because that’s pretty much what happened. One second I was ready to confess all to Avery, and the next my dick was determined to break free of the confines of my jeans and I was fighting every urge in my body to approach the bar, whisper something in her ear, take her home, and fuck her blind.
Everything about her spoke to me, from the way her Levi’s hugged her hips to her small wrists adorned in delicate silver bangles to the ink I could see snaking up and around the back of her neck. I wanted to know where that ink began; I wanted to know every fucking inch of her body. I wanted to be inside her and around her and under her and next to her and suddenly I understood how people could get swept up in each another with just one glance, because I was 100 percent swept up in her. And if you asked me to explain it, to give you a reason why, some theory as to how I knew she was meant for me, I wouldn’t be able to, nor would I fucking bother to try because it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but her, and just like that, everything I knew to be true seemed slightly askew. And I didn’t fucking care. All I knew was that if there really was someone out there for me, it was her.
No one else.
Just her.
No doubt about it.
She twisted on her bar stool as she chatted with the bartender. Based on their body language I could tell they shared a past, were important to each other, intimate, and I was instantly jealous. I wanted to fuck him up but I also wanted to be like him, able to laugh with her and lean close to whisper something outrageous to make her grin or her eyes go wide. I wanted whatever he owned that made her love him. Then I caught myself and remembered who I was, realized the absurdity of my desires and shut them down.
Avery picked up on my changed demeanor, my altered state, and immediately scanned the bar, wary and ready to kill anything moving. His eyes fell upon her and he smiled.
“She’s way out of your league, man.” He turned back to me and took a swig of his drink. “Forget it.”
“What the fuck are you going on about?” I asked, as if I had not just spent the last thirty seconds of my life memorizing every inch of the beautiful brown woman at the bar.
“Her.” He tossed his head in her direction. “The stunner with the short hair and nice ass at the bar. Miss Perfect Fuck. Because I know that’s exactly what you’re thinking—that she’s the perfect fuck for tonight. But that’s not happening because a girl like her is not stupid enough to fuck an ignorant piece of shit like yourself.”
I laughed. How could I not—he was right. Avery was always right. “Thanks, man. Nice to hit a guy when he’s down.”
“Well, I offered some love and tenderness back there and you wanted none of it, so now it’s time for the real shit. Beautiful brown woman over there, chatting it up with the guy I will be fucking later tonight, she’s not doing anything with you and I mean anything. Nothing. Nada. So don’t even contemplate her. Stick to the whores you ram your dick into every day and night who don’t need to be touched or kissed and won’t bat an eyelash when you tie them up, because that girl right there isn’t going for any of your fucked-up shit that you don’t want to talk about but expect everyone to accept. That’s not her. Look at her.”
And we both turned slightly and studied her because you couldn’t help studying her, she demanded study, long, drawn-out, detailed study. I wanted to spend the rest of my living days studying her and fucking her and listening to her come again and again and again.
“That girl requires long, deep, wet kisses all over her delicious body and she wants to talk about everything under the sun, and after she’s finished talking to you, she’s going to touch your face and lips and chest because she likes to know the feel of her lover’s body, and when she fucks you she’s going to be on top, grinding those gorgeous hips on your dick, staring at you while you both come. You aren’t man enough to deal with a girl like that, Mathew.”
“Said the gay killer in the bar,” I shot back.
“I might be gay, but I’m not stupid.” Avery turned back to me, his face a grim mask of secretive shit. “Oh, and while I’m at it, I have your next assignment.”
I caught his eye and my jaw dropped.
Literally.
All thoughts of the beautiful brown woman with the hips made for fucking and the mouth made for sucking went out the window. She ceased to exist.
“Close your mouth, Mathew, you’re making me think dirty thoughts,” Avery deadpanned, trying to lighten the black mood that had settled between us as soon as he’d uttered those words.
“I just fucking killed that bastard,” I growled.
“I know that.”
“Don’t give me that shit, Avery,” I continued, “there is no fucking way you people already have me assigned.”
“I told you, man.” Avery cocked his finger and aimed at my head. “There’s a target on your ass, pardon the pun. I tried to speak in your defense, but the few of us in your corner are the minority, we have no power to stop much of anything when it comes to you.”
I fumed and tossed back glasses of Scout—one, two, three—incapable of settling myself, focusing, becoming grounded. The brown liquid seared my throat but did little for my mood, and I found myself floating on a cloud of black, evil, foul shit.
“FUCK!” I banged the table in anger, drawing some looks but nothing more.
“Keep it down,” Avery growled as he slid an envelope across the table, pushing it under my fingertips. I flicked it back in his direction and lit a smoke, pretending that if I didn’t accept ownership of the envelope then I could also deny ownership of the Poocha. Avery slid it back my way, letting it rest in the center of the table, and stood to leave. He studied me for a moment as I glared at him, still so unsettled with what had just transpired, and tousled my hair like I was his kid brother.
He knew not to touch me and yet he did.
I flinched and pressed myself into the booth in an effort to both make myself small and get as far away from Avery as possible, hardly succeeding at either. He watched me in silence, no longer shocked by my behavior, but still, all these years later, saddened.
“Dutch,” he said quietly, his voice laced with compassion and love, two things I could not tolerate receiving in any quantity from anyone, “I’m sorry. For so much, brother.”
He held my angry stare for
one
two
three
four
five
six beats and then turned to leave. I watched him stop a
t the bar, shoot the bartender a pointed look, and slide him a note, his number or an address, no doubt. He then glanced back at me, tipped his hat in my direction, and disappeared into the night. The bartender and the beautiful brown woman turned and checked me out for a second then returned to their conversation. They were hardly interested in anything to do with me and the feeling was mutual.
I wanted nothing to do with anyone as I sat and stared at that envelope, so small and outwardly harmless, just the usual stock white envelope any motherfucker used to send any old piece of mail, but appearances were deceiving. I learned that long ago.
I moved to pour myself another drink and missed the bottle altogether, my vision suddenly doubled, the insane amount of alcohol coursing through my system finally taking its toll and making its presence known. I put my head down and squinted my eyes, trying to make halves come together into a whole so I could make contact with the actual bottle and keep right on going drinking myself to oblivion.
“Easy there, gorgeous.”
Her voice curved around every sharp edge, like being licked from shaft to head and then sucked nice and slow until nothing else mattered. It was perfect, low and sexy with a hint of a rasp, and it moved through me and settled in the spaces of my being that nothing and no one touched. She might have been beautiful, but nothing compared to what her voice did to me, how it made me want to be someone I wasn’t, hadn’t been in years, would never be again.
But that mattered little because I was a fucking black hole of shit with an envelope containing my next walk through hell and she was beautiful and magic and stunning and not a black hole of shit at all. And like Avery said, she was probably an amalgam of all the things I decided years ago I could no longer tolerate, would no longer tolerate.
“Fuck off, bitch.”
She laughed, and for the second time that night my dick fought to escape its confines and slam so deep inside her neither of us would be able to think straight, walk straight, talk straight.
“I love a dirty mouth as much as the next girl, but we hardly know each other for you to be getting all familiar and shit with me,” she purred as she looked down at me with a smile curving her big, wide, full mouth. The mouth I wanted all over my dick.
I leaned back in the booth and glared at her, wanting her badly but also wanting her to move very far away from me, pretend she never saw me, never walked over here to annihilate me with that perfect voice and that perfect face and that perfect everything.
“Are you still standing here because you want to fuck or are you just stupid?”
She smiled and those stormy grey eyes of hers danced with amusement as she contemplated me in my sorry state, verbally abusing her with a stream of noxious diarrhea. And finally she decided something because she leaned down and I glanced up and she moved closer still and licked her lips and I could smell the peppermint of her breath and I worried that she was going to touch me and I was going to have to fuck her up but she stopped a hairsbreadth away from my mouth as if she knew she was already too close. She stilled and smiled.
“I just want to know what’s in the envelope.”
And like that, reality slammed into me. I sat back suddenly, extricating myself from her wondrous orbit. Sensing the change in my person, she pulled back and stood straight but she didn’t leave. She just smiled that smile so full of mystery and mirth and dirty jokes and sex and she remained ignorant of the fact she was engaging a cold-blooded, black-hearted, diabolical killer. An individual so depraved and demented he could no longer stand himself so he drowned that self in bottle after bottle after bottle of bourbon and smoked hundreds of cigarettes and fucked and choked and cursed and sucked and came, and did it all again and again and again to blot out the black.
She knew none of this, the beautiful brown woman at the bar who became the beautiful brown woman who leaned so close to me she could have licked me, only to evolve into the beautiful brown woman looking down at me with a bemused expression on her face and a twinkle in her eye.
“Hey Juma,” the bartender called out. The beautiful brown woman finally stopped studying me and turned slightly. “I’m out. Can you close up here?”
She glanced around the room as if worried about something, realized I was the only fuck still in the place, and nodded. “Sure thing, babe. Just leave me the keys.” She then tapped my envelope, turned on her heel, and headed back to the bar. The bartender watched me the entire time, as if not so sure he should leave his friend alone with me. He kept checking his watch, eager to be somewhere else with his dick shoved up Avery’s ass, no doubt. I smiled at him and he turned away, forgetting all he had offered me earlier in the evening, refusing to return my gesture but passing along the keys to the beautiful brown woman whose name I now knew to be Juma, thus making some sort of positive decision about me and whether he could trust me.
What a stupid fuck, I snickered to myself. His stupidity left open the opportunity for me to stick my dick in the beautiful brown woman named Juma and fuck her hard and fierce and senseless and then pat her ass and walk away, never to think of her and her perfect voice and perfect face and perfect everything ever again.
I toyed with the envelope as she moved around the room, wiping down the tables and putting up a few chairs and stools. She said nothing as she worked and I said nothing as she worked and the silence was fine. Instead I studied her, the way she moved, how her shirt slid up a little each time she bent over, the lower left lip she constantly worried as she worked her way around the room, the glances she kept tossing over her shoulder until she finally gave up the internal battle she waged and locked the door.
She lingered at the doorknob, holding it a few seconds longer than normal, a sure sign she was worried; whether it was because of being stuck inside and alone with me or because of something or someone out there, it was hard to tell. And I shouldn’t have cared. I didn’t care, I just wanted to watch her every move.
“You should take a picture, drunk boy.” She broke the silence, a laugh in her voice. “It lasts longer.”
“I’m not fucking drunk and who said I was watching you?” I growled and poured myself another bourbon, the foul effects of the last few hours fading quickly, my Keeper body doing everything necessary to always be in perfect condition, no matter how badly I abused it.
She simply laughed and continued making her rounds.
Juma.
I rolled her name around my head over my tongue listened to its cadence and decided in the name game, her people hit a home run. There wasn’t a more fitting sound to describe her perfection and sexiness to capture the beauty of her warm brown skin or the miracle of her freckles. As I watched her from the corner of my eye, I found myself burning to uncover every brown mark on her body and press my lips to all of them.
I blinked and spit.
“Hey asshole,” she was at my feet, wiping up the mess I just made, “cut that out.”
I mumbled some sort of half-assed apology, wanting her to move away from me. Far away before I grabbed her and slammed her into the bar and did something we would both regret.
“Don’t apologize.” She stood and returned to the bar. “Just don’t do that shit, it’s disgusting.”
Pause.
“Plus, I’m sure there are much better things you could be doing with your mouth.”
Without looking at her, I knew she was smiling and I made a decision right then and there about the remainder of my night. I pushed out of the booth, finished off the bottle of Scout, grabbed my envelope, and headed for the door. I didn’t look at her as I tossed the bottle into the trash and reached for the doorknob.
“I know you’re not leaving without telling me what’s in that envelope.”
I paused and closed my eyes, pressing my hands to my lids and releasing a long, slow hiss.
“You should just let me go.” I turned back to her and leaned against the door.
“But that’s no fun.” She came from behind the bar, drying her hands on her jeans.
“Nothing about me is fun.”
“Oh, I doubt that, drunk boy,” she stated without a smile, a certainty in her tone as if she knew me.
“Don’t,” I warned as she neared.
“Don’t what?” She stopped about a foot away, leaving enough space between us for me to almost breathe easy.
“Engage me.”
She laughed, low and sexy and deep.
“Who said anything about engaging you? I just want to fuck you.”
She waited for my shock to register, and when it didn’t, she grinned as if she’d stumbled upon the perfect prey for one of her perverse games. Any other night I would have happily played along, fucking her senselessly, leaving her a useless puddle of come and sweat, but tonight, after killing Arjun and meeting with Avery and receiving the envelope, I was too tightly wound for any of her antics. Or any of my own.
I turned to leave and she touched my back.
“Stay.”
I flinched as if she’d burned me.
“Don’t touch me. Ever.”
“Sorry.”
“And don’t apologize, just don’t fucking do it.” I threw her words back at her.
“Fair enough,” she whispered, “no touching.”
I faced her, my eyes running up and down her body as I had done with countless other women, seeing them but not really because they didn’t matter. They were merely an orifice within which to stick my dick, plain and simple. I was either going to shove it down their throats or jam it in their pussy, any other details were irrelevant.
But her, Juma, I saw her. And it mattered. Only it couldn’t because I was sick and twisted and she was not.
I ran my thumb across her lower lip, my eyes never leaving hers, and her lips parted and she leaned into my touch and I immediately withdrew my hand.
“You’re a goddamned liar,” I hissed.
She closed her mouth and appeared nonplussed by my outburst. “You touched me.”
Dutch Page 8
