Toxic Love

by Kristopher Triana

  ***

  “It’s perfect,” Sage said. “Good money for you, great orgasms for me.”

  She lied down on her stomach between my legs, her own legs bent at the knees and slowly swaying back and forth like a schoolgirl reading a teen magazine. She put my cock in her mouth and hummed along to the stereo. The goombah had a large collection of Tom Jones CDs and currently we were listening to his cover of Prince’s “Kiss”. She was covered in blood from head to toe, having rolled in the mess like she was on fire and trying to put out the flames. Her hair was as soaked as the goombah’s favorite carpet. I was still nervous about this whole arrangement, and, while I didn’t say anything, Sage knew me well enough by now to sense my apprehension, so she fellated me to lower my stress. No matter how anxious I was, a man can’t argue with a good blowjob. It was almost enough to keep me from imagining Lester and the goombah coming through the front doors, discovering our debauchery and drawing large automatic weapons from behind their backs. Despite Sage’s expert tongue, this thought was keeping me from fully rising to the occasion.

  Sage popped my cock out of her mouth. “Don’t worry. We told them this would take hours and made it clear that inhaling the chemicals would kill them. We’ve got the house to ourselves.” She dipped her hand in a blood puddle and grasped my semi-hard penis, stroking it, using the gore as lube. “Isn’t it nice that you won’t have to cut yourself up anymore? Or at least, not as much. You know how much I appreciated that, but there’s only so much one body can take. You would’ve ended up looking like Frankenstein.”

  “Sage, this is really goddamned dangerous. We’re working for murderers here. Aren’t you the least bit worried this could turn out bad?”

  She slapped my dick against her face with a red splat. “You’re just being paranoid. Lester won’t let anything happen to me. We’ve done all kinds of crazy shit together over the years. I’ve just been better at not getting caught than he has.”

  I squinted, curious. “What were you two involved in?”

  “Oh, nothing too serious.” She smiled and looked away, remembering something that amused her but she chose not to share. “Just believe me when I tell you he wouldn’t get me involved in something if he didn’t think it was safe.”

  “Safe? How in the hell is this safe? Someone was just killed here, Sage, and we’re covering it up. This could mean prison. Worse yet, we could get whacked for knowing too much.”

  Sage snorted a laugh. “Did you just say whacked? Like some old-timey gangster?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’ll show you whacked,” she said, giving my dick a few fast tugs, the blood making squishy suction sounds. “Whack, whack, whack!”

  “You’re not funny.”

  She got onto her knees and her tits glistened, blood dripping from her nipples like red milk. She had such glorious curves, just the right amount of jiggle. Slathered in gore, I thought of her as a baby who’d just been pumped out of the womb but had freakishly arrived into this world full grown. She noticed me admiring her body and started lathering herself with more blood like it was baby oil. It had the same sexy effect and my cock finally grew stiff. She jumped at this opportunity and put me back into her mouth despite my dick being covered in drying blood. I rolled my head back and closed my eyes, blissing out on her performance, and when I opened my eyes again Sage was using some kind of dildo on herself while sucking me off. She’d used a vibrator many times before, to stimulate her clit while I was fucking her, but that was a small, blue bud of plastic whereas this was a white, curved thing stained pink by blood. She pumped it in and out of her, twirling it against the walls of her vagina. As she took me all the way in I came hard, flooding her throat with jizz as she moaned through an orgasm of her own. She took my cock out and shot the last drops across her nose and chin. When I regained my senses and looked down, Sage was removing the jawbone from her flushed, pink cunt.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  This began my career as a no-questions-asked cleaning service for organized crime.

  Like my old job, the work wasn’t weekly, but the pay was much better and Sage always let me keep her cut, saying she had no need for it, that the blood-spattered sex was all the payment she wanted. In a weird way this made me feel like a gigolo, which was a nice ego stroke. So, for me, each gig meant fifteen hundred to two grand, minus Lester’s twenty percent. Sometimes more. Whoever these people were, they had cash and understood the importance of a thorough cleaning after a hit or some Marathon Man style torture had left their place as one giant piece of DNA evidence. All it took for a conviction was one speck of blood to have slipped through the cracks in the hardwood, or to leave a stain where only the prying eyes of a seasoned homicide detective like Hallahan would notice. If the gangsters used their own guys, the cleanups would mean little more than mops and Windex, the kind of janitorial work that that Greek asshole Galanos thought I did for a living. Even if they cleaned up the surface blood and hired a maid service afterward, incriminating traces would remain. But our work was a guarantee—not a pinprick of human waste would be left behind. Every tile blood had touched would come up, every fold of furniture cleansed, every wall that bone fragments entered would be sawed, swabbed, purified, and patched. We were professionals, and professionals were worth the extra pay.

  And on our next job, we really earned it.

  Even Sage was a little disgusted by what we walked into that night.

  ***

  “This one’s a wicked pissa,” Lester said, tugging at the neck of another one of his Ed Hardy shirts.

  We were in the VIP room of a strip club near the airport, which was actually a bordello if you knew the right people. Lester was one of the pimps. A prostitute had been ripped apart and her body hadn’t even been removed from the scene. Her tits had been torn off and were nowhere in sight, eyes yanked out of her skull. Her vagina was shredded, as if she’d been raped with a knife, and one of her eyes stared out from the ruin of her vulva, the other from her anus. Her body was contorted in such a way that I could only guess someone had broken her bones with a sledgehammer. Blood was clotting beneath the skin, bruises turning her the color of a stingray.

  Had she been holding out on her pimps and been made an example of? Had a maniac paid her employer a hefty sum to live out his darkest fantasy? Whatever had happened here was not for us to know. And, while I was morbidly curious, I still didn’t want the details. No need to humanize the dead meat in front of me.

  “Sweet mother of Christ,” Sage said, once we were alone with the corpse.

  The owners of the club had left us a body bag to put the hooker into. Everything else was to be scrubbed down, clearing up the blood and viscera and wiping the cum stains off the vinyl seats. I’d brought in several buckets, making sure we had an extra one in case we needed to vomit, more from nerves than nausea. This scene was absolutely brutal. It spooked me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure The Virgin Mary wants nothing to do with this.”

  “I don’t know if this is too much or an extra bonus.”

  I didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about. I turned to her. “What?”

  She smiled and pointed at the carcass. “They left us with the body, Mike—the fucking body. That’s a whole new level.”

  I shook my head. “Holy shit, Sage. Are you serious? This turns you on?”

  She bit her lip and shrugged. “I’m not sure. I mean, when we first walked in—yeesh. The intensity of the violence made my skin crawl. But now that we’re all alone in here with her, it just feels like, I don’t know—like we’re amping things up. It’s super kinky.”

  “It’s necrophilia!”

  She put up her palms. “Whoa, whoa! Slow down there, big boy. I’m not saying we should fuck her. I’m just saying it’s kind of nice to have this much flesh here, and mostly intact no less. We could fuck on the floor right beside her, at the scene of her own murder.” Her eyes were like saucers, alive with sick possibilities. “I mean, come on,
don’t you think that’s kind of hot?”

  Despite my catholic upbringing, I’d never been a religious man; but this was sin, pure and simple. This was some Jeffery Dahmer shit right here. Maybe it was time to end this thing with Sage. Hell, I was still trying to get past the fact that she’d masturbated with a human jawbone while sucking my dick. The power of her exceptional hotness only went so far, right? What was the limit with this girl? How deep into depravity would she take me before my mind snapped like a breadstick?

  She had filled a hole in my life and gave me so much that I desperately needed. I felt wanted again, desirable for the first time in years. Her touch was electric, her soft skin my topical painkiller. But she came at such a terrible cost. I was capable of committing these foul deeds, but had begun to fear for my mental wellbeing. If I fucked her now, would I ever be able to have sex again without the image of this obliterated hooker flashing across my guilty conscience? And what if it was worse than that? What if I grew to love all this gory sex and ended up like Sage, unable to have an orgasm unless I was tempered in raw human waste? Could I live with that? Could I continue to look my daughters in the eyes and hold them with the very hands that had just hours ago clutched intestines while in the throes of carnal ecstasy? And what if the police caught us? Bad enough to have a father in the slammer; imagine having one who was a corpse defiler to boot. Rachel would never let the girls see me again, not even through the bulletproof glass of a prison’s visiting booth.

  “I think this is too far for me,” I said.

  Sage stepped in and tried to take my hand, but I moved out of reach.

  “Mike, come on. Don’t lock up now. I know it’s intimidating. It’s twisted, sure, but it could also be incredible. We won’t know until we give it a try.”

  “This isn’t just gross. Gross I can handle, you know that.” I pointed at the mutilated corpse. “This is evil, Sage.”

  She scoffed. “Oh, please. The first day you met me you fucked me in a room where two kids were killed by their own dad. And who knows what took place in that fat gangster’s house. That murder may have been even more sadistic than this one.”

  “Look, bits and pieces I can handle. The parts seem less human when they’re that small.”

  “So it’s just the size of this piece that bothers you?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “Fine. Let’s chop her up.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Let’s rip her into smaller pieces.”

  Challenging me, she moved toward my toolbox and I blocked her path.

  “Don’t, Sage.”

  “Why not? It’s not like our customer is going to care. Obviously they took the parts they wanted.” She nodded toward the gaping holes in the dead woman’s chest. “Maybe if she still had her tits you’d be more into this.”

  “Oh, come on, that’s low.”

  “Is it? You’re telling me if this whore had dropped dead of a brain aneurism or something and wasn’t all mutilated and purple you wouldn’t be a little more open to the idea of fucking me while we touched her all over?”

  “Okay, maybe that wouldn’t be as intense as this, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to do it.”

  Sage stepped into me and this time I didn’t back off. “Think about it, baby. Dead girls let you touch them anywhere you want. I’ll bet she was beautiful before all this happened. Hot as a firecracker.” She was close enough now that I could smell the foul mint of her most recent cigarette. Her hands went to my chest. “Just try it . . . for me.”

  I let out a long breath. “Sage, I—”

  Her finger went to my lips, hushing me. “I’m going to get naked and lie down next to her. I’ll be perfectly still, like I’m a dead body too. You can do whatever you want to me—to both of us. Absolutely anything.”

  Warmth spread through my lower belly. Unlimited access to Sage did sound appealing, and if she were perfectly still, I’d be in control of just how close we got to the dead girl. I wouldn’t even have to look at the corpse if I didn’t want to. I still wasn’t sure I should continue down this dark path, but if I was going to give Sage up, I figured I should at least have one more good screw before I dumped her.

  Sage started to undress. I rubbed my chin, still debating, but once she was on the floor, she managed to roll the hooker onto her stomach. Aside from the eyeball up her butthole, the cadaver had a perfect heart of an ass. She’d been attacked from the front, so most of her bruises and wounds were hidden when she lay on her belly. She looked like she was merely asleep. Sage draped herself over the corpse with her ass in the air, forming a cross of their bodies, and then went totally limp, waiting for me, my ragdoll of flesh, my lifeless slave.

  I undid my belt.

  PART TWO

  A TOXIC RELATIONSHIP

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I was a moron.

  I always waited until the last minute to do my Christmas shopping. Some of it I did online, but it’s hard to browse products on the web. Much easier when you’re in a store and you can see everything in person and have impulse-buy displays tell you what to do. As the father of two young girls, I needed the advice of big business.

  Of course I’d been given a list of desired presents too. Rachel had sent it along with Fay when I picked her up for our sleepover on the fifteenth. Carmen had refused to come, and I wasn’t about to force her, even though that meant I wouldn’t see her until New Year’s, the one holiday I got the girls for. On top of Thanksgiving and Christmas, Rachel had even taken Halloween, and even though the girls said they were too old for trick ‘r treating it still stung a little. We could have at least carved jack-o-lanterns and watched horror movies all night.

  Fay had been in a jovial mood. She loved Christmastime—everything from the pretty lights to the trees to those head-splitting carols. It was her favorite holiday. I took her bowling and was impressed by how much better she was now that she’d grown some, giving her strong enough shoulders and long enough arms to roll the ball without doing it granny style.

  “Sorry Carmen wouldn’t come, Dad.”

  I put down the soggy pizza and sodas I’d brought over from the concession stand. “That’s not your fault. I’m upset she feels this way, but I guess I can understand. Carmen’s just emotional.”

  “She’s a butthead!”

  I chuckled but caught myself, knowing I shouldn’t encourage that kind of talk. “What kind of thing is that to say about your sister?”

  “It’s the truth. She’s being a brat. She’s, like, mean to everyone now, even me! What did I do?” She huffed and took a sip of her Dr. Pepper.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, pumpkin,” I said. “She’s just having a hard time adjusting to all these changes.”

  “So am I, but I don’t slam doors and yell and scream.”

  I put my arm around her. “Well, that’s because you’re so mature. Pretty soon you’ll be buying stocks and using Preparation-H.”

  She giggled. “Gross!”

  Last Easter she’d seen a tube of Preparation-H in her grandmother’s bathroom and asked me what it was for. I wasn’t too pleased with Barbara that day, so I’d told Fay flat out.

  “You can use Preparation-H,” she teased. “Cause you’re so old.”

  Playful insult comedy was new to Fay and I found it rather endearing. I rustled her hair and led her on. “How old I am?”

  “You’re so old, when you walk out of a museum the alarm goes off.”

  I laughed like hell, feeling better than I’d felt in a long time. One of my girls was coming back.

  “I love you, kiddo,” I said, still snickering.

  “I love you too, you big mummy.”

  Now it was Christmas Eve and I was in a mall, kind of surprised they even existed anymore. I wondered if teenagers still went to them to hang out. It seemed to me they communicated via social media instead of face to face. Carmen’s face was always pointed at her phone’s screen and lit up in its sickly blue glow. I used to na
g her that she was going to strain her neck from looking down so long. Now I was trying to get on her good side and was buying more gifts than usual. It was the first Christmas since Rachel and I had split. I hoped this wouldn’t turn into some kind of competition, each of us trying to trump the other with the quality and quantity of the gifts. But I itched to load up on the presents. Not in an attempt to spite Rachel, but to pathetically try to buy my daughters’ affection. Fay was getting a lot of gifts because we’d had a breakthrough and I didn’t want our progress to stall out, whereas Carmen was getting a lot of gifts because she was treating me like a sidewalk turd with maggot potpourri. Funny how that works.

  As I moved through the swarms of dead-eyed consumers, I perused the glass display boxes outside the shops, wondering which scarves, sweaters and boots the girls might like. Fay had only recently outgrown toys, and I figured getting clothing as a gift would make her feel more respected as a young adult. Carmen, having her own fashion sense, was more difficult to shop for and, now that she was giving me the cold shoulder, she would throw whatever I’d picked out on the floor of her closet, never to be seen again. Maybe a gift card would be best, I thought. I certainly had enough money. Lester’s connections to the criminal underworld had brought in more business than I’d expected. Sage and I had cleaned up seven murder sites in less than a month, much more than when I’d worked with Ryker. He’d alluded to the fact that this was due to some sort of crime syndicate rivalry heating up, but he didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask. Most of the scenes were more like the first job at the goombah’s house—blood everywhere but no corpse. Only the strip club gig had required us to pack up the body, and what a body it had been.

  I still couldn’t believe what I’d done. I’d been so opposed to it at first, and then . . .

  I swallowed hard, remembering how I’d grabbed the dead woman’s ass and Sage’s at the same time, one in each hand, lost in the sick erotica of it all. I fucked Sage while she lied across the corpse, turning them into a heap of legs, buttocks, and long hair. I hadn’t had sex with the dead body, but I’d felt it up, and when I came I sprayed down both women. As soon as the sex was over, I was so freaked out by my actions that I’d made use of the barf bucket, my first time puking on the job.