by Gabi Moore
“Sophia, Sophia baby – listen to me carefully. They know we’re here now. Get inside and hide, and don’t make a sound, OK?”
“Leo he’s …he’s …is this the guy you…?” I stammered.
“Just get inside Sophia!” he said and pushed me towards the body. I resisted with every fiber in my being.
“But--”
“Sophia, I love you. Please. You’ll be safe inside, just do as I say. He’s dead. He can’t hurt you.”
I could hear hurried footsteps coming down the stairs. I swallowed hard and forced myself to step over the body and into the darkness of the vault. Leo closed it behind me but didn’t lock it, so that a thing crack of light still sliced through.
The next few moments unfolded on only one sensory channel: sound. And smell. In the pitch dark, I realized with a lurch to my stomach that the body smelt so bad I had to actively stop myself from retching. My hands fumbled for a light switch, a table, anything, and that’s when I heard them.
“Ha! Will you look at this! You’re a little trip down memory lane, aren’t you?”
I froze.
Vito.
I pricked my ears so keenly it felt like the air itself had a sound. Silence. I wondered what they were doing out there.
“What you gonna do with that, buddy? You gonna kill me, too?” said Vito, arrogantly.
I felt sick with fear for Leo.
“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” Leo said calmly. I clung to his voice, savoring every piece of proof that he was still alive, still well. He was standing close to the safe, only a few feet from me but separated by a thick steel door. I felt more protected by the prospect of his body shielding me than I did by the thick steel door.
“In fact, looking at you now, I can see why you never picked on anyone your own size,” Leo continued. He spoke slowly, like he didn’t want a single syllable of his insult to go unheard. I could feel the tension in the air.
“Just put the gun down, Leo. That won’t help you now,” he chuckled. “You’re guilty for murdering Shawn T, end of story.”
I heard the trigger pull back and click. I whipped my attention to the space around me and furiously, my hands flew around the dark to find a switch. I had the revolting fear of accidentally touching him, but just when I had almost giving up, my hand caught a string on the roof and I tugged down hard, illuminating the inside of the vault. I scanned quickly. I saw a little ledge, several dead CCTV monitors. It wasn’t a safe. It was a safe room. I noticed woven bags on the floor and peeled back the lid to reveal tightly packed blocks of fresh $100 bills. I gulped and covered them back up again.
All of a sudden I heard a tussle outside and then the woman’s voice, high and shrill even from inside my metal cage.
“No!” she cried. “Leo, don’t!”
I heard Leo yell something back at her and she shut up instantly.
“I was just a kid, Vito! You knew that. I trusted you. I looked up to you! Do you know the guilt I’ve carried around for all these years?”
I had never heard so much emotion in his voice before. Suddenly, I spied a recording case on the ledge. On it was written: Shawn T. I snatched it and glared at the real Shawn T. Yep, he certainly was crossed out. I stashed it into my jacket pocket.
I heard the two men clash, and the woman screamed. I couldn’t stand it any longer; I poked my head out and tried to see what was happening.
The two men were rolling one over the other, stumbling across the floor, first one on top, then the other. Vito had pinned Leo down and was straddling him, arms outstretched and trying to pry the gun from him. Leo’s arm was stiff and outstretched to clamp him at his neck, and both men were red and wrestling, the gun held just out of Vito’s reach.
Vito managed to swing up his left leg and in a split second had kicked the gun from Leo’s hand and sent it skidding along the floor. Like my life depended on it I flung open the door, flew from the vault and grabbed the gun so tightly it hurt my hands. The woman screamed again when she realized I had been hiding there all along, then in the next beat lunged her hands towards my throat. As though possessed, my fingers moved swiftly to cock the trigger and I squeezed, exploding the room in a loud bang as a bright, red spot appeared square in the center of her chest.
Everyone in the room froze and stared at me, horrified, their faces nearly as ashen as the late Shawn T’s, who had been watching mute from the door of the vault.
Vito’s wife crumpled gracelessly to the floor, her mouth twisting. She gargled, her head fell limp and she collapsed in on herself. I cocked the trigger again and swung outstretched arms over to the other two.
“Get away from him!” I barked.
Vito jerked back and held his hands up in defense.
“Sweetie, you don’t want to do this. Just drop the gun, OK?” Vito stuttered, casting alarmed glances at his wife. My face hardened and I gestured for him to back off. Leo looked at me with a mix of wonder and …something else I couldn’t decipher.
“Sophia, baby, give the gun to me. This isn’t your battle to fight, you don’t have to do any of this,” Leo was saying, holding desperate hands out to me. But I held tight. The weapon felt good in my hands. Solid. Real. In fact, it seemed like a revelation, to have it here in my hands, to be directing the course of events in front of me with such ease, with such fearsome power… No, I wasn’t ready to drop the gun just yet.
“You remind me of someone, you know that?” I sneered at Vito, who seemed to be wilting right in front of me. And he did remind me of someone. The balding, shiny head. The grizzled mouth and quick, greedy eyes. The sunken cheeks and the way the skin got red and gnarled round the V at the collar of his shirt. Oh, the things I could have used this gun for in the past.
“Is it true, the allegations about the girls? About what you do?” I said, the memories of the photographs I’d seen in the club came rushing into my mind. He stammered but didn’t answer.
“It is true, isn’t it? You sick bastard. I know men like you. You’re empty. You have nothing, so you have to take from everyone else.” I took a menacing step forward and relished how he cowered back away from me.
“Men like you only care about one thing. Power. Your whole lives revolve around it. You’re only happy when you can bully someone else, make someone else unhappy. Well, how does it feel to be the powerless one, huh? How does it feel to be on the other side?”
It was as though I spit the words out, like they were poison just to speak. But they were old, old words. Words from a younger, more broken version of myself. Words that I had never said and which had sat inside me and festered. To get them out felt like finally wrenching loose a rotten tooth. Vito cringed and cowered in front of me. He made me sick. It didn’t matter that this was the first time I had met him. In some mysterious realms, I already knew him very, very well.
He held out his hands, cringing in front of me.
Sure, now he would beg for mercy. Beg for me to be the ‘bigger person’. How nice the concept of forgiveness was, how sweet the idea of compassion, when it wasn’t you who had to give it. What a lovely, final insult to someone you’ve hurt: to rob them of their desire to kick back. No, this wasn’t some cheesy action movie where I redeemed myself and showed mercy to the bad guy. I had tried in vain for years to forgive. No, some ghosts from the past need to be forcefully removed.
“I’m just an old man, sweetie. Please, think about what you’re doing, you don’t want to hurt anyone; you don’t want to be bad…” he started.
“Don’t I?” I said, and pulled the trigger.
The house reverberated with another echoing boom. Leo sprang up to grab the gun from me, but Vito was already slumping down, squeezing at his bleeding chest and throwing disbelieving glances at me, at his wife, at his punctured chest.
I felt clean, and light. The tension melted instantly from my body. Out the edge of my consciousness I knew Leo was fumbling inside the safe. Yelling. But I could only stand, my ears still ringing, and look down at the demon I h
ad slain.
He took the gun and wiped it down, threw it on the floor and began stashing money from the safe into a small bag. He took the recording from me and put it into the player. He watched himself for a moment, on screen, standing in a room full of half-naked woman.
He watched as a grainy, pixelated Shawn T fell to the ground, in silence. He stopped the playback, whipped the recording out and stuffed that into the bag too, before scanning the rest of the vault thoroughly. I watched him do all of this as though through a dream, or through a white gauze.
“Sophia? What are you doing? Let’s get out of here.”
I stared up into his eyes. For a moment, the world grew even more still, and I got lost in that perfect blue/brown snare of his, that trap that had caught me so long ago and still had me now. The corner of his mouth came up a little. I flung myself into his arms and he breathed soothing words into my neck as he held me.
He gripped my hand and held it tight, and we ran out the house and back into the night, back to the car and back onto that long, dark ribbon of road that had brought us out here. With the buzz of death all around us, I had never felt more alive in my life. My hands were shaking but my head was clear, open. Free.
Leo and I drove off, silent.
There was no need to speak.
I had no doubt that the thoughts running through his head were the same flavor as mine anyway. Tonight, the past had not been escaped. It had been defeated. And as we sped away, together, my hand still in his, it felt like so many days put to rest. And as we watched the first glowing yellow tip of the sun come over the horizon, it felt like a new day.
The first day of a different life.
Chapter 19 - Leo
Twelve Years Later
Sophia was the only other person I had ever met with completely heterochromic eyes. And while I was blue in the right, brown in the left, she was brown in the right, blue in the left. We were similarly passionate, resilient people. We both loved salsa. We shared the same goals and had the same roots in life. We had known each other for more than a decade. And in those years, we had helped each other delve into the darkest parts of ourselves, and mined the gold in those caves, and we had continued, always together, always building, not despite the ruins of the past, but right on top of them, turning them into foundations instead.
The sun streamed into our bedroom window; completely indifferent to the curtains we had hung there. The birds were already up, and I could hear the very distant hum of morning traffic and the sound of some children playing in the courtyard a few houses down.
Midnight sex had always been Sophia’s specialty, but I was all about the early mornings. There was just something so delicious about her when she was half-awake, soft, still smelling like sleep and her body still warm.
I reached over and laced my arms around her shoulders, curling my body round hers and pressing my cock into the small of her back. The bed was our nest, our haven. I nuzzled into her neck, nibbled her ear. She moaned and absentmindedly reached back to stroke me. I fucking loved that. Even when not fully conscious, that was her first instinct. Her body knew mine so well it could find its way to me without her even being awake.
“Open your legs for me,” I whispered into her ear. She stirred a little, twisting round to see me.
“Shhh… don’t wake up, baby. This is just a dream…” I purred into her ear, and she giggled at this.
“Keep your eyes closed. Just feel me,” I mumbled, and started to run my hands down over the curve of her back. And so, she kept her eyes closed.
Of course, this was all a dream. Every morning I woke up with her like this I could scarcely believe how far we’d come together. From the day we had raced down that deserted road in the morning darkness, life had been something of a dream. Neither of us could have known just how far that road would eventually take us.
She tilted her hips back to open to me, and pressed slow circles against my lap, stroking my dick with her perfect ass. The rest of her stayed still, her face still half buried in the pillow. I clutched her hips and widened the circles, nestling my cock into that sweet cleft. In it sunk down between her ass cheeks, nearly reaching the hot, juicy core that I just knew was there. I ground my hips into hers, our warm bodies pressed smooth against one another, still under the blankets.
By the time I had burrowed my way deeper in, her body welcomed me and her little pussy swallowed me up with ease. I sunk the tip in, splitting apart the tight folds and finding my way inside. Her only response was to take a deep, sharp breath in and release it with a near-groan. While the rest of her slept, her most secret part was dripping wet, pulling me in and closing tight around my rock-hard cock.
Her beautiful musk filled the inside of the little duvet-tent, driving me wild. I buried my neck in the pillow of her hair, drew my hips back and slid straight in again. The gasp she made turned me on so much I did it again, and again, losing myself for a moment in how mind-numbingly good it felt to be pressed up inside her as far as I could go.
She twisted around and blinked sleepy eyes at me.
“Good morning,” she said, as though I didn’t have my cock jammed into her at that very moment.
“What’s up?” I said with a naughty smile. “Sleep well?”
She took a deep breath and gave a little stretch, like a cat, then looked at me again. I was still slowly thrusting in and out of her drenched body. We were having one conversation above the blankets, and another, very different, conversation below them.
“You know, I had the strangest dream, actually,” she said, playing coy.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I dreamt that this really hot guy snuck into my bedroom…” She snuggled her cheek against my bicep. Without skipping a stroke, she swiveled herself round on my cock so that her hips were rotated and she was now facing me, our thighs interlocked into one another’s.
“Oh? And then what happened?” I asked, still sliding my stiff dick into her, hands still perched on her hips and pulling her deeper with each thrust.
“Oh… I’d be too embarrassed to say,” she smiled.
I kissed her. Above the duvet line, she was beautiful, sweet Sophia in her printed pajama top and silky hair. But below …our swollen bodies were locked together, fucking slowly and smoothly in that old rhythm we had taught one another so well by now.
“Aw, don’t be embarrassed. Tell me!”
“Well, he put it …he put it in there,” she said, like a schoolgirl who knew she shouldn’t swear.
“In where?” I said, and slid my engorged cock from her hot body.
“You know …in there,” she giggled, and as she did so she thrust her ass towards me under the blankets and shimmied her bent knees up my thighs, then up my chest, higher and higher up. I smiled at her flexibility. At how unruffled she was on this side of the blankets.
“Ah, you mean in there,” I said and gave her a naughty smile, then grabbed her ass cheeks, stroking my thumbs against the little pucker hidden between them.
“That sounds kind of naughty though. Did you like it?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
She sighed and shimmied her legs up further still, so that her feet were now positioned right at my neck, behind my ears, forcing the most delicious, naked parts of her flat against me.
“I don’t know,” she purred, locking eyes with me. “It kind of hurt at first, but then…”
And then we kissed.
It was crazy that even though I was about to plunge deep into her ass down below, the prospect of the daintiest, fairy-light kiss on her lips above was so thrilling it made me even harder.
My lips closed on hers, I wedged the head of my cock into there and gave one firm, solid push to open her up. She twitched in response but maintained her cool. She was so thoroughly soaked the rest of me glided into her, although with each inch I felt her body react in the way her toes tightened around my neck, and her little tongue froze for a moment in her mouth.
“Then what? Then you started to like it?”
I said, stroking the hair from her temples.
She nodded mutely. I felt her entire body tense and tighten around my cock.
I knew that Sophia liked a bit of pain. I knew where her boundary was, and just how far to take her past that boundary. I knew how much she could take, and where, and how. She had taught me over the years exactly how to dole out the perfect balance of brutality and gentleness, how to lead her down into that flawless sweet spot right in the middle…
But I had taught her, too. My body had shown her who was boss. Sometimes, the lesson was that I was always stronger, and could always overpower her easily, leaving her a whimpering mess of pleasure whenever I wanted to. Sometimes, though, it was enough just to let her know that I could do that to her, but instead I chose to just hold her, just have her close to me, and cradle her as we fucked tenderly.
Pinned together like that, her knees slung high over my shoulders, I scarcely needed to move at all to penetrate her deeply. We rocked back and forward slowly, me rolling her with my hips and stroking somewhere deep and deliciously taboo inside her, and she flopping down heavy in my arms, eyes half closed as she focused closely on the waves of pleasure we rode together.
I loved fucking her ass. I loved that even now, it still felt like a forbidden pleasure. And no matter how many times I did it to her, it always felt like the first time. I loved how hard she came when we did this. Normally, she’d scream and buck and thrash a little when she came, but when I was in there, it was thought the whole symphony dropped an octave and her body cried out from some very much deeper, heavier part of herself. Sometimes, she’d bite me. Sometimes, she’d cry a little, and the sight of her struggling to take me all in was usually enough to make me come.
Our lips locked and we kissed lazily, sweetly, all the while our bodies knotted in a dirty clinch below. I grew bigger and harder inside her, the subtle fluttering of her body inside enough to push me right to the edge. Her dripping wet cunt pressed hard against the flat of my belly, and with each subtle thrust I squeezed against her clit.
