by Gabi Moore
I glanced down to see her still fingering herself, a greedy little hand working furiously over her swollen clit while she serviced me. When I came, she opened her mouth wide and thrust my cock right to the back of her eager throat, swallowing me whole and gulping down every last shuddering spurt that burst from me. I clutched down on her hair and cried out. I roared out and felt myself pulse and empty out into her greedy mouth, her lips pressed right to the tight brown curls right at the base of my cock.
It was a surrender. A complete submission to her tongue.
When I eventually calmed down, she had scooted closer to me, feet still tucked under her, and then placed her head in my lap as I lay there. I stroked her hair idly as I tried to come back to earth. Her head rest sweetly on my hipbone, my softening cock close enough next to her to receive the little kisses she gave the tip, her eyes still closed.
I had known Sophia for years. But in many ways, that was the first time we ever truly met.
“…and then it slowly dawned on me what had happened. It was all a huge setup, right from the start. Do you think I’m an idiot? Do you think I’m just the biggest chump to have fallen for it?”
She looked at me with deep concern in her eyes. I mean, I certainly felt like an idiot. “What? No, of course not. Oh my god, Leo, you should be glad that you’re not like those men.”
I smiled as I thought that, in many ways, I was showing her a side of myself that she probably hadn’t seen before. She was capable of dancing naked in front of strangers – and relishing it – and I was capable of killing a man. And the weirdest secret of all was one that we had invisibly had as a couple all along: that not only were we OK with the dark, but it had been the missing piece of the puzzle all along. The thing that had been magnetizing us to one another all along, even though we mostly had pretended it wasn’t there.
I had fucked her twice again before morning. She had still felt slick against my skin, still open and still hungry from the time before, and I had fucked her again, and then again once more when just the memory of her body gliding hot and desperate around me was enough to make me want her all over again. We smelled of one another. The house was turned upside down and various pieces of clothing, sheets and towels were strung all over the place in honor of the sex bomb that had just exploded inside it.
As we had taken off one another’s clothes, as we had stripped away at all the masks we had worn for the other, and even the masks underneath those, we were slowly piecing together something else, something darker. I had killed him. The cold, hard fact was there in front of us, and now we had some hard choices to make.
“But you say you didn’t actually see any cameras when you were inside? There’s still a chance he’s just bluffing,” she said.
I shook my head. No, this much was clear: they wanted to frame me, and I had played right along, literally stepping into their trap and doing their dirty work for them.
“And you have no alibi for that night,” she mumbled, thinking aloud.
“Well, that might have been you, but you were at the strip club, and I’m sure quite a few people could confirm it,” I said and laughed cynically.
“Oh my god, nobody can ever know,” she blurted.
I smiled and hugged her.
“Relax, baby, they’re not really after you. In fact, I don’t think they were quite banking on you being so …unpredictable.”
“You’ll be a wanted man soon,” she said. And it was true. If it hadn’t already happened, a case was likely being built up against me as we spoke. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the police were already on my tail. But here my mind went blank. What could I do? Run? I had already vowed to myself that I wasn’t ever going to do that again. No, I couldn’t explain it, but I wasn’t going to run anymore. In fact, I was going to turn and fly straight into the hurricane.
We lay together for a moment, trying on the feeling of being naked, cuddling fugitives, when she shot up and gave me a wide-eyed look.
“We have to go back to that house,” she said.
“And then?”
I looked down at her pretty face and could see her thinking. Then quick as a fox she sprang up and went to rummage in her coat pockets. All at once she held up something triumphantly and then rushed over to the bed to show it to me.
A notebook. A small one, so worn at the edges the paper had gone soft, and filled with so many scribblings and scratchings you could almost smell the ink in it. I flipped through it quickly to see lists, records of numbers. A lot of numbers.
“What’s this?”
She shrugged.
“I found it at the strip club. It was in a back room, hidden away. I saw other things there too. Folders of …women. He’s obviously trafficking girls in…”
My brain struggled to latch onto the strings of numbers before me but I couldn’t make sense of anything.
“What does it all mean?” I asked, then closed it.
She shrugged again.
“I don’t know. But we have to go back there. We have to find that camera footage and destroy it.”
I laughed out loud.
“I’m serious Leo. If they have no footage, they don’t have anything else. They picked you because you didn’t appear to be connected to him in any way, right?”
I tried to think. I had no idea where Vito was or what his next move would be. I had no idea what I was doing. I was playing a dangerous game, with an opponent I didn’t trust, and I wasn’t even sure of the rules.
“But going back to the scene of the crime? What if Vito’s there?”
She raised herself up onto her haunches and stared deeply into my eyes, taking my hands.
“Yeah? So what if he is?”
The wicked glint in her eyes nearly blew me away. She was right. So what? Vito had stolen my childhood from me. He had barged in, used me as a pawn and now, years later, I was letting him do it all over again. I kissed her forehead and hugged her tightly. So what if he was there? Well, perhaps it was time I took a page out of Sophia’s book. She was right. Vito might be going to jail, but that didn’t mean that justice had been served.
“Get your coat,” I said, “…and bring that book. We’ll leave right now.”
Chapter 18 - Sophia
If there’s anyone in this world I wanted to be bad with, it was him.
I had tried being someone I wasn’t. I had tried to stuff all the memories down, tried to forget, tried to ‘process’ and come to terms with and rehabilitate and move on. But what had that really done for me, in the end? What if what I really needed was not to avoid everything that made me different and damaged and wicked …but embrace it?
I hadn’t had a green smoothie in days. In the last week I hadn’t thought once about wedding flower arrangements. My hair was kind of greasy, I ached all over, my boyfriend had turned into some bloodthirsty fucking machine and I had discovered that just under the surface I was certainly no angel either …and I felt amazing.
As we bundled ourselves into the car and sped off into the night I was overwhelmed with the thought that now I was really living, now I had finally come alive after a long, dormant sleep in some kind of shell, some kind of good girl costume that had never really fitted me.
I was scared shitless. I was sure I had gone crazy. And I looked over at Leo in the driver’s seat and felt a little intimidated. But I loved that, too. I had fucked him with the blood still on his hands. It was so easy to give myself to him. My mind could find no logical explanation for it but my body knew what it wanted, and it wanted him, in all his strong, forceful glory.
I loved the way he stared at the road in front of us. I loved how solidly his hands folded around the steering wheel. I loved the way his strong thighs relaxed open and I loved the bulge in his worn jeans and I loved what that bulge meant, and most of all I loved how good it felt to let him take me, to let his strong body lead mine.
The trees and shrubs in the night sped past outside our windows like hungry ghosts trying to flag us down. But we
drove on, in heavy silence. As we neared the spot he slowed down a little and leaned forward to scan the landscape ahead. There was nothing but road and trees and gravel. But eventually he steered the car gently into an almost invisible clearing and looked at me.
“This is it,” he said, and then swerved the car into some bushes, turned off the engine and exhaled loudly.
“We should walk up to the house. It’s a long walk.”
Old Sophia would have balked at the suggestion. But after what I had done that night at the club, nothing had quite the same sting of fear in it anymore. Breaking and entering, being turned on by what I was supposed to be repulsed by, even fear itself – all these things just seemed like flimsy veils – veils that I could fling off at any time like I was on a great cosmic stage, and I got off on all who watched me strip down to nothing. I was the god Shiva, dancing the end of the world in a strip club, and it felt fucking fantastic.
I nodded and we got out the car, then stole away into the night, nothing to guide us but the vague path shadowing the main driveway straight up to the main house. Leo moved swiftly, his body crushing a path for me that I followed easily. I could still feel him, inside me. He had done things to me. Dirty things. Again and again. But I never wanted to recover from those things. I never wanted the dull ache he had left between my legs to fade. Even in the icy night air, in the silence, my body was roaring for him.
As though reading my thoughts, he quickly spun around and caught me by the waist, planting a hot, insistent kiss on my lips. I hungrily kissed back, relishing how warm his lips were on mine, how good it felt to be here with him, on the edge, flirting with death.
“You don’t have to come all the way, Sophia,” he said. “It’s dangerous. I don’t want you to get hurt. This is my past, and I’m the one who has to put it to bed…” he whispered in the chill of the night.
I shook my head and held him tightly. No. I would come with him. He leaned in for another kiss, but this time, the gun tucked in at his waist pressed hard into me. I gasped. Without thinking, I leant in more deeply to wrap my tongue around his and curl my hips up closer to grind against him. He moaned and stroked down my hair, and then we dashed off again.
The woman in the strip club, Lily with the ankh tattoo, well, she had been right all along. There was nothing wrong with being an addict. It’s just that when you’re addicted to the right thing, it gets called a different name. It gets to be a calling. Intuition. People don’t say it’s obsession, they say it’s ‘passion’.
After what felt like a lifetime I slowly saw the edges of the house emerge from the darkness. It was clearly enormous, but so poorly lit it looked almost abandoned. I crouched behind Leo at the rim of some shrubs as he surveyed for an entry point. He spied what looked like an open window and we scrambled over, crouching low and flanking the house till we reached the window.
The room was dark, but it was easy enough to squeeze inside the window. He went first, and I followed, silently. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the new level of darkness in the room.
A bedroom?
It was hard to tell.
My heart skipped a beat as I thought I heard something.
“Shit! What’s that?” I whispered. The sound grew more distinct and then louder. Footsteps and voices, rapidly approaching us.
Leo quickly grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the room, and, feeling his way along the contour of a wall, found something like a closet door. He yanked it open and we tumbled into a recess in the wall. He slid it closed quickly and only two seconds later the light in the room flickered on. It came streaming through the wooden slats in the closet door. I had stopped breathing; I felt like I could almost feel my blood rushing around my body, pumping with adrenaline.
It was a walk-in closet, angled away from what I now understood was the main bedroom, and soon the voices were loud and clear behind us. An ice-cold wave of delicious fear washed over me from head to toe. I peered over at Leo, and could only see the wet shine on his beautiful eyes as he looked back at me and mimed zipping his lips closed.
Two voices.
A man and a woman’s.
I heard things being clanked and opened, drawers being slammed shut, bodies moving.
“Where the fuck is he?” said the woman. “Is this what it’s come to? I have to bury the fucking thing myself?”
I heard her mutter more complaints under her breath but the man’s voice was relatively quiet. I could feel the warm skin of Leo’s hand brushing against mine. It was the most maddeningly erotic thing in the world.
“Yeah, sure, obviously nobody expects you to do a damn thing, huh? You just sit around and bitch, right?” said a man’s tired voice. His accent was straight from a gangster movie. I could hardly believe my ears.
I turned to look at Leo but he was watching intently, the slats of light mirrored in his wide eyes as he peeked inside. We were two naughty kids spying on the grown-ups. But could this really be him? The infamous Vito Roselli? He sounded like nothing more than an exhausted, hen-packed dad to me.
“Yeah, yeah, poor you, sorry I forgot,” came the woman’s voice again. “Must be hard getting all these people to do what you want all the time.”
“Can you lay off? You think I brought you out here just to chew me out?”
The woman laughed angrily.
“Bunny, please, I’m having a hard time, can a man not come somewhere nice with his wife and just enjoy things for a second? Is that so much to ask, huh?”
“Cry me a river,” she spat, but her voice was softer now. I felt like all the blood in my body was slowly pooling somewhere at my feet.
Through the slits I could make out a little of the woman moving around in the room. She was undressing.
I was transfixed.
I had only ever seen Vito Roselli on the news before. He was an enigma. Not a real person. Not someone who had to coax a belligerent woman into bedding him. And yet here he was, and this was his life, playing out in thin, bright bands right before my eyes. Leo grabbed my hand and squeezed it. If we were discovered, we would be killed for sure. A little knot of fear seemed to tighten between my legs.
We watched as the woman blinked in and out of view, removing her clothes and revealing a mature but shapely figure. She kept her garter belt and stockings on. Who even wore that kind of thing anymore?
“Bunny, look how fucking beautiful you are. Why you gotta give me such a hard time, huh…?” he cooed. One of my feet was cramping from being held so still.
Leo and I strained our ears to hear them kissing and groping one another. Fabric rustling. The sound of more clothing dropping to the floor. Vito himself was still out of sight.
“People steal from me, Bunny, the dancers are all jumping ship, I got shit with the licensure for the bar, I got a million things going on …but fuck when I see those …I can forget about all of that, you know?”
Oh god, they were going to fuck. Right here, with us just a few feet away in their closet. Oh god. What if they needed to get some clothing and came looking in here?
I peered out the slatted doors as far as I could to either side and made out a long passage to our left. Leo caught my eyes and saw what I was thinking. We could make a run for it, provided they were distracted enough and we didn’t make a sound.
“I know baby, I know. But we have Joe as an alibi, we have the video of Leo doing the deed, and we have eye witnesses to put the girlfriend at the club,” she said between noisy kisses. “So let’s just focus on getting rid of the goddam body now, OK?”
Vito mumbled his agreement. Shawn T. His body was still here? Leo flashed me a shocked look, which I returned.
“You know, you were right about that girl, Bunny. They told me she was a bit of an ex-junkie, but man, the stories I heard…” Vito said, chuckling. I heard the bedsprings groan a little as both of them settled onto the bed, still kissing and breathing heavily.
I felt Leo’s hand squeeze mine as quiet, guttural sounds started coming from the bed.
The springs creaked. We couldn’t see much but the bobbing feet. Now was our chance. Leo looked to me, placed a cat-like hand on the slatted doors and eased them open one atom at a time. The door cooperated and glided open smoothly. The light in the room felt like an assault on our eyes.
We dove out, hugged the wall and dashed into the relative darkness of the corridor to our left, not daring to look behind us at the grunting couple on the bed. My hand still in Leo’s, we fled, his other hand feeling out a path for us in the semi-darkness. This place was huge. I followed, high on the balls of my feet, and soon we had raced down an arching staircase and landed in what looked like an enormous office. His hand yanked the chain of a small green table lamp and the layout of the room appeared softly illuminated before us: there were several desks, chairs and bookcases, all stinking of smoke and leather, and to the far end of the room was a giant safe door with a rotating lock shaped almost exactly like a dumbbell.
We exchanged glances. I immediately fumbled for the book as Leo went over to examine the giant swivel on the door.
It required two sets of codes.
I flipped through the book looking for something that would match, but my fingers trembled and the numbers swam before my eyes. By sheer luck, I turned to a page with a triple underlined pair of codes and saw a little dumbbell sketch – yes, a dumbbell just like the handle! – was doodled next to it.
Leo’s fingers flew to enter in the digits I whispered loudly to him, and a steel bolt popped out and allowed entry for the second code. He entered this in too. I knew Leo was easily two hundred pounds of mostly muscle, and yet he when he threw his full heft against the door it took its time hinging open. It was a tiny room, completely dark, and in a heartbeat something made a great whoomp sound.
I screamed as a dead man down slumped at me feet.
“Shhh!” hissed Leo, and he raced to grab the dead weight off of me and shove the body upright and back into the vault. But it was too late. My body had screamed without my permission, and everyone in a ten-mile radius must have heard me, nevermind the lovebirds upstairs. I clapped my hands over my mouth and stared down at the ashen face and dead, rubbery mouth. I had never seen a dead man before. I couldn’t tell if I was going to pass out or scream again.
