I pulled in behind her and took a deep breath before opening the door of my van. Stepping out, the arctic wind bit at me and I turned my back to keep it from chilling my face. I put up the hood of my sweater and zipped my jacket. We were going to have to air out the house. For once I would be happy for the HAZMAT suit’s searing heat.
The driver’s side door of the BMW opened, and a pair of long legs come out, dressed only in black stockings and matching pumps. Sage rose from the car, wearing a very short leather skirt and a lacy bra. No blouse or coat. Her makeup was loud and whorish, but in a way that really worked for her, highlighting her high cheekbones and accentuating the pout of her lips. Her hair was a sea of long curls that beckoned me to bury my face in them and breathe the fruit-scented aroma of her shampoo.
She closed the door and beeped her fob, heels clacking on the pavement. I worried she would break her ankle in the cracks of the concrete, but she moved as gracefully as a swan on a tepid lake. My breath was imprisoned in my chest. Already my dick was swelling.
Stepping up to me, Sage opened her mouth, sending out her tongue to lick my lips. Her fingernails went into my hair and she whispered in my ear, making the hairs on my ass stand up.
“Let’s see what the pussycats left for us,” she said.
She took my hand and I followed.
***
The house was pungent with death.
In the living room a large, red and yellow stain stood out loudly on the once white carpet. It was mostly dry, but there were blotches of burgundy sludge from the final feline feedings. Plus, the house was filthy, though that had nothing to do with the man’s demise. It seemed that while he was alive he hadn’t made use of modern technologies such as vacuum cleaners or dusters. Cat hair was on everything. Thick layers of dust sat on the blinds and ceiling fans like brown sugar. Creeping out from behind a velvet painting of the King of Rock N’ Roll was a black tendril of mold. Mice holes pockmarked the kitchen, tiny turds scattered like burnt rice. When I turned on the lights, roaches darted through the cracks in the walls.
“Charming,” Sage said. “I know not everyone can afford a maid service, but Jesus, who can live like this?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I wasn’t much of a housekeeper myself—that was even more apparent now that I lived on my own—but I couldn’t imagine festering in my own filth the way this old coot had. To distract myself from the leather-bound apple of Sage’s impeccable ass, I went into work mode and toured the rest of the house. There were two bedrooms, both jam-packed with boxes, totes and crates of random garbage.
Great. A hoarder.
Machine parts, VHS tapes, wooden crutches, mildewed wine holders, rusted gardening tools, nudie magazines dating back to the ‘70s—a treasure trove of useless garbage. A large wardrobe box was filled with Red Sox baseball caps. There must have been a hundred in there. Stacks of framed posters for old sci-fi movies were propped against the walls. The old guy must have slept on the couch in the living room, because there were no beds or furniture in the rooms, just piles and piles of junk.
Sage came up behind me and gazed into the trash heap. “This just gets better and better.”
She slid her hands around my waist, smelling of tangerines and vanilla. Once again, she took my hand and guided me back to the living room, stopping at the crimson circle. Bits of flesh were in the carpet, some of the blood still sticky. A bug bomb had been set off to take care of the flies and their little black carcasses peppered the floor. A combination of piss, cat dander, and human decay cancelled out Sage’s perfume.
“We should put on our suits,” I said.
“Not yet. I mean, we’re just going to take them right off again, right?”
“Sage, listen . . . ”
I trailed off as she put her hands on my belt buckle and started undoing my pants.
“I want to make this fun for you,” she said. “It’s already a blast for me, but I know how uncomfortable you’re still feeling.”
I smirked. “Oh, you think so?”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m going to help you relax.”
Sage pulled down the rim of my underwear, exposing the erection I could not subdue. She got on her knees on the crusting stain. She opened her mouth, the tongue darting out again.
***
The same spot where an old man had dropped dead. The same spot where cats had chewed away at the skin and sinew of a dead body. The same spot where geriatric flesh had rotted, fizzed, and oozed.
That’s where I fucked her.
We went at it in missionary position, Sage writhing in the geezer’s stains with her legs wrapped around me, thrusting her pubic bone into me, engulfing my dick with her flushed vulva, breasts bouncing fluidly as I rocked her up and down in the sludge. She was a wild animal—the very antithesis of the limp lay Rachel had been the past six years. This young cavewoman grit her teeth and dug her nails into the carpet, awakening the viscid red goo before it could dry and harden like the layers beneath it. Flakes of blood rose in the air like tiny, floating scabs and hurtled into space, smelling of pennies that had gone green with age. She turned her head from side to side, leaving russet smears on her cheeks while catching shreds of grayed skin in the curls of her headshot hair.
Though my body craved her, my mind was still torn in two opposing directions. I wanted to run away screaming almost as much as I wanted to come all over her. Below me in the spasms of passion was a woman who was part super model and part graveyard pilferer, and the hellish fusion of blood and lingerie was dizzying, surreal, the amalgamation of sexual rhapsody and deviant ghoulishness making me feel like I was watching myself from outside my body. But as Sage’s hips rocked in the wettest spot on the carpet, the blood below her butt splattered up onto my balls, driving home the reality of fucking in a living nightmare. And I couldn’t even close my eyes against it. Despite the gore that repulsed me, Sage was beyond beautiful, particularly in the thrall of sex. There was a magnetic pull to her that made it impossible to look away. My desire wouldn’t allow it.
That’s when I realized I had lost this test of my morality. Sage had a hold on me as tight as her snatch. I would get down on my knees in a sewer of gore and pus just to be inside her, to clutch her soft curves and blow my load in her mouth. She had beaten me and, despite all my reservations, I found I was happy to have been beaten, at least in the euphoria of this moment.
We came together. I climaxed so hard my knees buckled. I fell on top of her and we rolled in the stain as the semen running out of her moistened it anew. Our lips locked, tongues entwined, hands grasping each other’s skulls.
I moaned when we broke apart for air. “Oh, my fucking god. That was incredible.”
“You’re pretty good for an older guy,” Sage said, turning one of my nipples.
She winked and her playfulness made me smile. I felt like a teenager who’d snuck into his girlfriend’s house in the middle of the night. I was giddy, a sensation I’d gone without for so long it seemed totally new, like it was an emotion Sage had just invented and passed through to me like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
“I need a cigarette,” she said. “I’d better get my clothes out of the car.”
“I think you look great in what your wearing now.”
She giggled. “I know. You should have seen your face when you first saw me tonight. I expected your jaw to hit the ground and your tongue to roll out like in a cartoon.”
I took her left breast in my hand and squeezed it gently, pecking her with kisses up her neck and into the back of her head, getting lost in her now filthy hair. I wasn’t aroused by the human remains that soiled her blonde locks, but, as Ryker had said, the dead stuff just didn’t bother me the way it did most people. I doubted I would ever be sexually excited by blood and guts the way Sage was, but if I could live with it for the sake of steady income, I sure as hell could live with it for the sake of the greatest sex I’d ever had. It surprised me how one more good screw turned me around on the whole thing,
but it had. Maybe the fact that this blood belonged to an old man who’d died of natural causes rather than two little boys who were brutally slain by their father helped me deal with it. It made the vile act seem less inhuman. That’s one of the many ways Sage got me. She started us at the pinnacle of wrong so that every atrocity that came after it didn’t seem so bad by comparison.
“You’re so sexy,” I told her.
She raised her eyebrows, which told me she already knew that, and gave my cock a friendly squeeze. It had been satisfied and now it was rapidly disappearing into my pubic hair, and the frigid temperature of the room wasn’t helping.
“Come on,” she said. “We have work to do.”
CHAPTER SIX
I used to be a director of human resources.
Even without a college degree, I managed to rise up the ranks working for the Shop-N-Hop grocery store chain, starting out as a shelf stocker at one of their stores and moving up to grocery department manager by the time I was in my late twenties. Eventually I became the store’s HR leader. I was in charge of logging hours, handling payroll, processing sick time and time-off requests, and all general employee relations with the company. I orchestrated job fairs and assisted management in hiring and firing staff, making sure our asses were covered with long paper trails, documenting our reasons for terminating an employee so they couldn’t sue or become an unemployment parasite.
I’d been a human resources director for almost fifteen years and was primed to take the place of one of the regional directors who was up for retirement. Once she was gone, I would move from my crummy office in a grocery store’s receiving bay to a sheik office building with its own private yoga studio and a cafeteria with an organic salad bar. Plus, there was the extra ten grand a year pay bump. Old Blanche Silverpoint was planning to leave her job of thirty years right after the holidays, and she was already primping me to take her place. I was set.
And then it all went to shit. All thanks to my wife and Tony DeVuche, a sleazy, loudmouth dairy clerk we’d hired despite his criminal record. If I hadn’t been so stressed over the slow disintegration of my marriage, I probably would have handled what happened with that asshole much differently. But for months Rachel and I hadn’t been sleeping together. And I don’t just mean we weren’t fucking—we hadn’t made love in almost a year, and in the three years previous sex had basically become a birthday and Christmas gift for me—I mean we weren’t even sleeping in the same bed. I’d been riding the couch for a solid hundred days, and it was screwing with my head as well as my lower back. My work had been suffering as a result, and the store manager Bob Bahl (a stoic drone who’d long ago sold his soul to the company at the expense of having no personal life whatsoever) had already sat me down for one of his soulless efforts at a heart to heart, asking me if anything was wrong. Of course I told him I was fine, that I’d just been under the weather. Don’t worry, Boss. I won’t let you down.
But I did let him down. I let everyone down.
I wasn’t sleeping well and was afraid of what was going to happen to my family if Rachel and I couldn’t patch things up. What would her folks, who already found me barely acceptable, think of all this? And what would my puritanical catholic mother—rest her soul—have said if she’d heard her son was committing the magnum, if not cardinal, sin of divorce? Which side would our friends take? Which side would our children take? I could tolerate being single after forty, but I couldn’t live without my girls, and lately, every day when they went off to school, I had this sinking feeling in my chest like some kind of omen. A sinister voice was telling me I wouldn’t be watching them skip down those front steps every morning much longer. My days with them were numbered. I could feel it. It scared the hell out of me.
The day of the “incident”, as we call them in HR, Rachel was supposed to drop by the store. It’d been another sleepless night for me, and in my groggy state I’d forgotten to grab my phone on the way out. I had taken off early the previous Thursday so I could make it to Fay’s soccer game, so I was doing a half-day on Saturday to make up the missed work. My wife was taking our daughters to the movies to see a PG-13 chick flick and was swinging by to drop off the phone.
But Rachel didn’t bother coming in. There was still a barrier of silent anger between us after the fight we’d had the previous night, once the girls were asleep. We’d chucked a lot of verbal spears that night, delivering low blows to each other’s egos, assigning blame for problems that had manifested. For the first time in our marriage she called me a fucking asshole, adding that if I were any bigger of a fucking asshole I’d be running the country. I didn’t want to see her any more than she wanted to see me. So she stayed in the car with Fay, sending Carmen in to deliver the phone.
Carmen couldn’t reach my office because it was in the back of the store near the loading dock, so she went to the customer service desk and had the clerk page me. I walked out to the sales floor and headed toward the front, making my way down the cookies and crackers aisle. I decided I was going to give Carmen some money for her and her sister to spend on whatever, just in case they hadn’t been asleep last night and had heard some of the terrible things their parents had said. I was feeling guilty on top of depressed.
When I reached the end of the aisle, Tony DeVuche was at the end cap, setting up a display of seltzer water. A newbie was helping him build the sale display, and by that I mean he was doing all the work while Tony stood there telling him what to do, even though he wasn’t a supervisor. Tony was a good thirty years older than the teenager and had worked at the store longer, so the kid wasn’t arguing. I made a mental note of this. It wasn’t the first time DeVuche had lightened his load on the back of an unsuspecting new hire. There was a reason Tony DeVuche was called Tony the Douche by coworkers. He was a lazy, lanky scumbag with an attitude as ugly as his nicotine-stained teeth. He’d been written up twice already, and Bahl and I had been looking for any reason to can his sorry ass.
I spotted Carmen standing by the water fountain. Her long, dark hair was down, whereas she usually wore it in a ponytail, and she had on those tight jeans I’d told her she needed to throw away. They were that tight. She seemed to be doing her best to look not just fashionable, but older. I wondered if she was planning on seeing any of her friends at the movie theater, maybe even a male friend Rachel hadn’t told me about. There were all kinds of girls-only secrets in the house now, things that, as a father, I felt I should know about, things Rachel would have filled me in on if we were still able to have civil conversations.
I noticed my daughter was wearing a bra darker than her shirt. It showed through in the bright lights of the store. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Tony was staring at my Carmen when I walked up behind him. He nudged the young man stockpiling the seltzer.
“Check out this lil’ piece of trim,” he said.
My blood turned to ice, freezing solid in my veins. I stopped in place and made fists in my pockets.
The young man looked up at Carmen. “She’s a little young, don’t you think?”
Tony snorted. “Hey, if there’s grass on the field, play ball. Lookit dem tight jeans. Ya think she’s still a virgin?”
The young man shifted uncomfortably. He was maybe four years older than my daughter—whereas Tony was old enough to be her dad—but the kid didn’t see her as a sexual being. He was a better class of human than Tony the Douche.
“Maybe she’s one-a-those Christian girls, uh?” Tony said. “Ya know, the ones who wanna stay pure and won’t let ya fuck ‘em, so they use God’s loophole. Ya know what that is?” He didn’t wait for the kid to answer. “That’s when they let ya fuck ‘em in the ass, ‘cause it don’t say nothin’ about that in the bible. God’s loophole is the poophole.”
His laughter sent my blood from frozen to curdled. I realized I was growling.
They noticed me. The kid nodded but kept on working. Tony, who didn’t like me to begin with given all his disciplinary actions I’d been a part of, gave me a smirk, an
d I wanted to make his crooked smile even more crooked. Maybe give him a permanent limp for good measure. Now, to be fair, the prick didn’t know Carmen was my daughter. But in the rage of that moment it didn’t make much difference. Tony’s criminal past involved indecent exposure and the sexual harassment of his neighbor, according to his pre-hire background check. So his lewd comments about my little girl were intensified by the potential of real danger.
Tony sighed in annoyance. “I’m workin’, I’m workin’.”
He’d taken my glowering as disapproval of his slacking off.
I stepped closer. “I oughta kick your colon into your fucking throat.”
Tony’s smirk turned upside down. I never talked this way at work. He’d probably thought I was incapable of cursing.
“You know that girl is fifteen years old?” I snarled.
Tony put up his hands, palms forward. “Hey pal, I was just—”
“Don’t call me, pal. I’m not your pal and wouldn’t want to be, you pedophile.”
Tony’s face reddened, surprise sledding toward outrage. “Now look, you ain’t got no business callin’ me no ped—”
I came closer, my finger pointing at his nose from half an inch away. “It was bad enough for you to pull out your dick on a train and wave it at some college girls. Now you want to fuck a fifteen-year-old in the ass?”
“Hey, shut up, Mike!”
Customers turned their heads our way. The staff at the checkout line glanced over at us, the bag boys’ faces white with shock or snickering at the potential for a show. The boy who’d been stocking the seltzer moved away, his hands fiddling with the bottom of his apron as he tried to avoid looking at us. Having heard my voice, Carmen turned around, spotting me as I went toe to toe with the larger man.
Toxic Love Page 4
