“Tempting,” Sage said, biting her lip. “But I want the window. That guy’s blood is everywhere, and I want to stare up at the moon while you fuck me good.”
She pulled her sweater over her head and draped it over a cardboard cutout of some NFL player advertising Mountain Dew. Snapping off her bra, she stretched it out and shot it at me like a giant rubber band. Her tits swayed and the bra fell into the gore with a splat. Sage moved her arms inward, pushing her breasts together, making them look even bigger. She had large, flesh-toned areolae and her nipples were stiff raisins. My mouth watered as I moved forward, wanting to eliminate all distance between us, and when Sage left the safety of the aisle I glanced out the windows, seeing only the empty driveways of the gas pumps. There weren’t even bugs beneath their lights. Beyond the pumps was the faint glare of the light on our cars, then only the still deadness of the street. It was like a ghost town out there.
The police tape should keep people away, I told myself as Sage leaned against the counter, peeling off those snug jeans like a snake shedding skin.
Crotchless panties. I knew it!
I found the switch and flicked off the harsh overhead lights, the glow of the pumps giving us just enough visibility. I twirled the bulk of her hair in my hand, tugging the way she liked, and pulled her head back, exposing the soft neck and unchaining the dark side of my sexuality, the side my wife had suppressed over the years. Pushing Sage down onto the counter, I unzipped my fly and took out my miracle of modern medicine. Sage was rubbing her arms in the blood that covered the cash register, lathering herself as if it were body wash. There was no need for foreplay. I was solid and she was sopping. My cock entered her—drove into her—and I fucked her with a fury, slamming her hips into the counter with each thrust, wanting to core this lovely creature. I squeezed her buttocks with both hands, fingers digging hard enough to burst capillaries, and she screeched in feral estrus, hair whipping in and out of the blood puddles, painting the walls like an experimental artist. I pulled out, took her by the neck, and flung her against one of the Plexiglas doors of the store. She moaned, playing with her clit while I took slow, predatory steps toward her. She was soused in the red stuff from the belly up, one side of her head drenched in blood and dripping inkblots onto the floor.
I spun her around and pressed her against the IN door. Gone were my fears of being caught. Gone was apprehension of germs and disease. I was in a sexual manic state. My only concern was making my lover come like an earthquake. I wanted her to come so hard she would collapse and piss herself. From the shudders of her body, I knew my technique was working. Her breasts squeaked as they moved against the glass, smearing blood across the no shirt, no shoes, no service sticker. Her wetness poured down my cock and balls and, as she came, I pushed her face against the glass, her hair balled into my fist. When her orgasm was over, I slid into her ass and spurted off my own.
At first I thought she was screaming my name in ecstasy, but then she batted my hands, squirming away from me.
“Shit!” she cried. “Oh shit!”
I opened my eyes.
Headlights swept the parking lot.
***
“Shitshitshitshitshit.”
The headlights’ beams hit us. Sage rattled off a blue streak of profanity as she ducked for cover. I tried to run around the counter but my pants were still around my ankles so I could only do that post-sex robot shuffle. I stopped and pulled them up. Still covered in blood, Sage was looking for her clothes but they were scattered all over the store and lost in the shadows.
“The bathroom!” I said, tucking my shirt in. “Get to the bathroom!”
Her face was pained. “Mike!”
She had nothing else to add. She was just saying my name in a panic, wordlessly begging me to find a way to undo the trouble we were in. All I could do was give panicked advice as I clumsily tried to take charge of the bad situation, knowing it was only going to get worse.
There’s no way they didn’t see us.
The headlights had swept past the windows. A car was idling out front, the lights facing a brick wall. I hoped they would just drive away, that it was just some midnight rider hoping to fill up the tank but had instead come across a surprise peepshow. Some people could be prudes, but in the twenty-first century surely most folks would just giggle if they caught people having sex in public and turn the other way, wouldn’t they? I mean, who hasn’t had sex in a car or the woods? Not exactly the same thing but they didn’t know it was a crime scene . . .
Sage moved about the store, knocking things over in the dark. “I can’t find the bathroom!”
“It’s got to be here some—”
My mind offered a quick snapshot, a memory of Sage talking to Hallahan out front of the gas station earlier that night. To the far right of them, on the other side of the building, was a door with a sign on it.
“Fuck, Sage. I think you have to go outside to get to it.”
“I’m not going outside!”
“Well, no shit, Einstein. Come on, let’s try and find your clothes.”
I remembered the cardboard NFL star and searched out his silhouette, finding the sweater. I heard an engine turn off.
“Here,” I said. “Come on, hurry.”
Sage grabbed the sweater. Outside, a car door closed.
“Is the front door locked?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t fucking know?”
“I can’t remember!”
“It didn’t move when we were pushing on it.”
“Yeah, but it was the IN door. It only swings in, not out. Now where are your jeans?”
“Help me look!”
I moved around the store but my eyes kept going back to the parking lot. A shadowy figure was making its way toward the blood-smeared door. If it wasn’t locked, there was no time to do it. From the corner of my eye, a denim lump appeared.
“There they are!”
I went for the jeans, forgetting what aisle I was in—the messiest one of all. My foot hit a runny turd and I went flying like a clown on a banana peel, landing hard on my back, igniting a russet squall. I glided in a Slip ‘N Slide of blood and shit, spitting as a damp chunk of flesh landed in my screaming mouth. When I tried to get up, the hand that supported me slipped, and I just barely caught myself before my face hit the floor.
A bell sounded as the front door opened. I crouched, poking half my head out from behind the corner. The tall shape flicked on a flashlight but kept the beam pointed at the floor.
“Might as well come on out,” Ryker said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Funny thing was, I’d always thought Ryker was kind of disgusting. He talked with his mouth full, farted without excusing himself, picked his nose right in front of you, and always ate messy food, or at least made it messy by eating it. Here I’d thought he was gross, and now he’d caught me sodomizing a woman half my age in a convenience store full of blood, pus, piss, and feces, all of which I was now covered in.
Ryker found the light switch and turned them on. Looking around, I could see how much worse we’d made things. Sage’s whipping hair had left red peacock feathers on the walls. The doors were smeared and Sage’s asshole had left a trail of browned semen. Bloody footprints were everywhere.
Sage stood before the counter. She’d almost made it to her jeans. Nude but for her sweater, she held the bottom of it down, stretching it as far down as it would go to hide her shame. She looked like she’d just stepped off the set of Carrie. And I was even worse. The fall had left me slathered in waste. Pink globs of sinew were in my hair and bits of bone scratched me beneath my shirt. Hair that was neither my own nor Sage’s clung to my skin. Liquid shit ran from my shoulder to my knee. All but my face was a dark shade of red, but embarrassment was making it match.
Instead of showing shock and revulsion, Ryker’s face was slack, corpse-like, and this dead pan was somehow worse.
“This is bad,” Ryker said.
“Harry, just hear me out, man.”
“Really, really bad.”
Sage sniffled and reach for her jeans, then went behind the counter to put them on privately.
“It just sort of happened,” I told my boss. “We didn’t mean for it to get like this.”
Sage took a pack of cigarettes from the display, ripped it open with her teeth, and popped a smoke into her mouth and lit up. She crossed her arms across her braless chest. A drop of leftover semen dribbled out of my silenced cock, moistening my underpants. Ryker looked at the floor as he spoke.
“Mr. Galanos called me about an hour ago. Said he was concerned you two might not be able to get the place cleaned up in time—”
“Harry—”
“—of course I told him we have to be very thorough with this work and that you two were both excellent crime scene techs. That you were hard workers. Very professional.” He stressed that word. “But he wanted to be doubly sure that his customers wouldn’t see this shit. So I told him I would swing by and—”
“Harry, listen—”
“No, you listen, Mike.” His words were even more threatening because he hadn’t raised his voice. He had the same neutral tone. “Whatever you two were doing here, I don’t even want to know. But it’s depraved at best, if not totally illegal.”
I glanced at Sage but her eyes were lost in space. Smoke poured from her nostrils. My pulse was so loud I could hear it.
At last Ryker looked me in the eyes. “All I’ve got to say is this—as of this moment, you’re fired. Sage, you too.”
I wrung my hands and they left a sprinkle of blood on the boxes of Milk Duds beside me. “Harry, this place is a mess. If we don’t get it cleaned up, you’ll lose the contract. I know I let you down, let us at least take care of this for you.”
Ryker looked away again. He was wan and drained, like an exasperated parent in a theme park line. “I can call in a favor from Kirby down in New York. His branch handles the city, so he’s got a big team. Some of his boys will come out if I pay time and a half. It’ll take a chunk outta the budget, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do in situations like this.”
I still couldn’t accept this. I’d suddenly become very attached to my job. “Yeah, okay, but what about next time? Who’re you gonna send when the next contract comes in? We’re your team. You know how hard it is to find people to do this work.”
Ryker pursed his lips and looked up at the ceiling. For a moment he seemed like he was mulling this over, that he was considering going home and pretending none of this had ever happened.
“If you leave right now, we can keep the police out of it,” he said. “I don’t want what’s happened here to get out. It’ll ruin me, and it sure as hell will ruin the two of you. Way I see it, it benefits all three of us to keep this under our hats.”
The smell of Sage’s cigarette hit me, the earthy stink of it sending me back to afternoons on The Long Island Sound where, as a teenage boy, my friends and I would waste away the summer chasing girls and tossing Frisbees, smoking cigarettes as the sun glazed our transformative bodies. I hadn’t had a cigarette in twenty-five years but right now I craved one. They seemed to suggest some kind of release. Sage stubbed hers out on the counter and left the butt there. The place was a disaster anyway. She put on her coat with an air of defiance, a you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit sort of attitude to her body language. Apparently, the crushing shame of what we’d done was a weight I had to carry on my own.
I wanted more time to talk to Harry. Not in a pathetic attempt to save my job—that ship had sailed, crashed into a glacier and sank—but in an effort to explain, if not excuse, my shocking deviancy. Being caught had brought the filth of my deeds back into perspective, and now I was a repulsive mutant who desperately wanted to be human again. I wanted to rationalize this somehow, to convince Ryker as well as myself that I wasn’t a psychotic pervert. But Sage was about to storm through the door, and I didn’t want her to peel out of the parking lot without talking to me first. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say to her exactly, but I felt the need to say something.
“Sage, wait a second.”
“No,” Ryker said. “You go on and leave, Sage. She’s got the right idea, Mike. Get outta here before I change my mind and call the cops.”
Sage walked past Ryker without a word. She didn’t even look at him. She had the snobbish, nose-to-the-wind look some women get when they know they’re wrong but will never admit it. I grabbed my coat and headed for the door but felt like I couldn’t pass by Harry without some sort of last words. But when I opened my mouth none came out.
Ryker cleared his throat. “I may send someone to pick up the suits and materials. You’ll get your last check in the mail and it’ll include payment for your work tonight.”
“But I didn’t do any work yet.”
He shook his head. “Just get the hell away from me, okay?”
I hesitated, wanting to tell him I was sorry even though I knew he didn’t want to hear it, that it would only make matters worse. Red lights came on outside and, for a moment, I was sure Hallahan was there to arrest me, but they were just Sage’s taillights. She was backing out. She was leaving. I took one last look at Harry, who wouldn’t return my gaze, and went out into the cold, chasing after the only thing I had left.
***
I’d always sensed disaster.
I wasn’t perceptive enough to know exactly when it was going to strike, but I always felt it looming, even when things were at their best. Even in the honeymoon stage of my marriage there was a black static in my mind that made what Rachel and I had seem only temporary, even though I wanted it to last forever. It was hardwired into me that anything good must come to an end. No matter how hard we try to keep something alive, all things break down and decay. Every joy life has to offer is subject to entropy. Even with the human resources job I’d held for over a decade there had been a nagging paranoia, assuring me that I would be fired one day. Some might say this sort of pessimism creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, and while there may be some merit to that, it doesn’t change the fact that ruination comes to us even when we make no actions to initiate it. We have things only so we can lose them. We enjoy moments only because we know they’re passing and we’ll never get them back. So while my many failures may have come at unexpected times, they were still rather predictable. But I sure as hell couldn’t have predicted I’d one day be running out of a crime scene to catch my fuck-buddy after we’d been fired for having sex on the job, someone else’s blood and shit freezing to my clothes in the cold November night.
“Sage! Hold up!”
Her car just narrowly missed hitting me as she pulled forward. She hit the brakes and rolled down her window.
“What?” she asked, a fresh cigarette in her mouth.
“I don’t know. We should talk about this or something, right?”
“What’s there to talk about? We got caught. Fun’s over.”
My larynx tightened. “Over? What do you mean?”
“Sorry you lost your job, but it was great while it lasted, baby.” She blew me a kiss. “Take care of yourself.”
The BMW idled forward. I grabbed the windowsill and the car squeaked as it came to a halt again.
“Whoa, whoa. Come on, Sage.” I smiled, more nervous tic than anything else. “I mean, I know this is a setback but we don’t need to—”
“Mike, please. Don’t do this. You knew what this was. And it was great, baby, really. The best I’ve ever had. But now it’s over. Let’s let it go gracefully.”
“But why? Come on, we can still have sex. We can still get kinky in other ways.”
Her eyes expressed genuine pity. “Sorry, babe. No guts, no glory hole. Without the blood, fucking you just wouldn’t do anything for me. No offense. Now let go of the car. I want to get home.”
I held on, searching my mind for some point to make.
Sage rolled her eyes. “Mike. Let. Go.”
I moved my hands away, deflated.
> “Cheers,” Sage said, and then she was gone.
CHAPTER NINE
There was something so refreshing about drinking a beer in the shower. I was on my fourth one, having switched to the Sam Adams winter variety pack after the whiskey ran out. I sat in the bathtub, letting the water run over me, lost in my own misery. I’d been there long enough for the hot water to go cold, but the alcohol had constricted my blood vessels enough that I didn’t notice the temperature drop. It seemed no amount of washing could get me clean. The stains ran beneath the skin. I felt victimized but had only myself to blame, as if I’d been both the victim and perpetrator of my own rape.
Once again, I was unemployed. My wife wanted nothing to do with me and my girls were growing up without a father. And I was drunk again. I should have been thinking about how I was going to fix these things, or at least repair them to the point of tolerability. I should have been planning to pull myself together and pursue a new job in human resources, something I had excelled at and could easily land another position in, even though I loathed the idea of going back to it. I should have been doing some deep soul-searching to see myself through my wife and daughters’ eyes, trying to better understand all they needed from me and had not received.
But that’s the sort of thing a good man would have been doing. And I wasn’t a good man anymore. I was a dirty warthog. I was a blood-fucking goblin. All I could think about was how I was going to get that tight, twenty-six-year-old snatch on my dick again.
I wasn’t delusional. Without the blood, pus, and gastric juices, I was about as sexy to Sage as an algebra test. But I’d felt that we’d developed a relationship of sorts, however twisted. I was surprised it hadn’t counted for something when disaster struck in all its inevitability. Our sex wasn’t just a mechanical thing. There’d been a rapport between us that went beyond a shared interest in having orgasms. We joked around, made small talk while we worked, and shared in the excitement of a clandestine affair like teenagers sneaking out at night to meet for a moonlit skinny dip. I wasn’t so naive as to think we were a couple, but I did come to think we were friends with benefits. That she would sever all ties the moment we lost access to her slick, crimson aphrodisiac was a shock. I felt as if I’d had my heart broken even though I wasn’t in love with her.
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