Toxic Love

by Kristopher Triana

  “See anything you like?” the woman in the department store asked, snapping me back to the present.

  I’d been browsing the winter hats but had somehow wandered into women’s lingerie while reflecting upon my cumshot on the dead woman’s ass cheeks.

  “Just browsing for my wife,” I said.

  Her smile was stickered on. “Let me know if you need help with anything.”

  The woman turned and was immediately pulled away by a fat woman in a motor scooter looking for long underwear. The store was fairly busy, but nothing like the toy stores. I was glad to never have to battle my way through those soccer-mom-filled mosh pits again. Turning back to the undergarments, I considered getting something for Sage. We hadn’t talked about gifts. Something about exchanging them seemed to fall dangerously close to the boyfriend/girlfriend category, and that always turned Sage off. But just one gift wouldn’t be too lovey-dovey, would it? Friends got each other Christmas gifts sometimes. We were at least friends if nothing more. As long as I didn’t get her jewelry—especially a ring—she wouldn’t have any cause to give me the eye roll, and if the gift was lingerie it only confirmed what our relationship was really all about—dirty sex and lots of it.

  Despite my guilt over what we’d done with the corpse, and all my inner debates over breaking up with her, I’d decided to stay with Sage a little longer. The sex was a big part of it, but now there was the money too. I got all my work through her cousin. If I dumped Sage that connection would be severed and I wouldn’t be able to buy all these pretty things for my girls. I told myself that the dead hooker had been the line, that I would never do something like that again. We would stick to splashing in blood. No more pseudo-necrophilia, no matter how juicy of an ass the carcass had.

  I could stick to that.

  Probably.

  ***

  Sage came out of the bedroom wearing the outfit I’d bought her. It was Christmas night and I was still amazed she’d invited me over. I’d figured she would be spending the holiday with family. She’d told me they lived out of state, but with all the money they had she could have flown to see them. They all could’ve rented a beach house in Maui or gone skiing in the Alps. It made me wonder what her relationship with her folks was really like. They hadn’t cut her off financially, but had they cut her off emotionally? Were they estranged? I decided that now was not the time to ask, seeing as Sage was wearing a red teddy, stockings with tiny bells on them, high heels and a Santa hat. She even completed the look with an oversized candy cane. She sucked on it suggestively.

  “Merry Christmas to me,” I said.

  “I love my present. Thank you, Mike. You know, I wasn’t sure if we were going to do presents or not and I felt too weird about asking.”

  “I know. Me too. It’s fine if you didn’t get me anything.”

  She beamed. “Oh, I did. I totally did. That’s one of the reasons I was so happy you didn’t have other plans tonight. I mean, I’m sorry you can’t see your girls, but I’m glad I get to have you all to myself.”

  I was a little surprised she acknowledged my children. Sage didn’t like it when we talked about our personal lives. She knew I was separated from my wife and had two daughters, but that was the extent of it. She didn’t even know their names.

  “Thanks for thinking of me,” I said.

  “So, you want your present?”

  “It can wait. Right now, I just want you.” I took the straight razor out of my pocket. “It’s been awhile since I’ve had to cut myself. Lester’s really been pulling through for us.”

  Sage flashed a sly smile. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She walked over to me, the tops of her breasts bouncing in the tight, cherry cups. She’d been letting her hair grow even longer, knowing I liked that. It was almost down to her navel now. Her body was smooth and pale, a human dessert of a woman. She was intoxicating and I was drunk on her sweet poison, a raccoon slurping up anti-freeze, enjoying the flavor while the danger increased with every lick.

  “Come with me to the garage,” she said, “let me show you your gift.”

  ***

  I ran.

  I flung open the door leading into the kitchen, fleeing from the garage and banging into the wood trashcan, knocking it over in my haste. My knee throbbed with fireworks of pain, but I didn’t break my stride. Sage was calling for me, her words echoing off the concrete of the garage.

  “Mike, come back! It’s alright!”

  No. It wasn’t. Not even close. This ends now.

  I reached the living room but didn’t see my coat. Sage had taken it from me when I’d arrived and I hadn’t paid attention to where she’d put it. Had my keys not been in the coat pocket, I would have just left it behind. I wanted to get out—now—but the house was a palace. No shortage of mystery doors. I kept opening them, hoping for a closet, finding more and more unnecessary space. By the time I found the right one, Sage was beside me. I refused to look her in the eye as I slid into my coat sleeves.

  “Mike, will you just listen to me a minute?”

  I moved toward the front door but she blocked my path.

  “Stop!” she said. “Please, just listen to me, baby.”

  Throwing in baby was a nice touch, but not nearly enough to placate me. “Step aside. I want to go home.”

  “Not like this. Come on, let’s talk about this.”

  “No more, Sage. I can’t take it. This is too much.”

  “I’m sorry, okay? I should’ve eased you into it instead of bringing you into the garage blind. It’s too much to take in all at once.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Gee, you think?”

  “I just wanted to surprise you.”

  “Oh, you surprised me alright!”

  “You know what I mean.” She sighed and put her hand to her forehead, closing her eyes for a second. “It was supposed to be your gift.”

  A nervous snort of laughter came out of me. “You should’ve stuck with a fruitcake. Maybe some eggnog from Evan Williams.” I pointed toward the garage. “That shit in there is no Christmas gift. It’s an abomination.”

  Sage pursed her lips. “Okay, maybe it is more of a gift for me than you, but trust me, I planned to do some amazing things for you in there. I was planning on giving you that rimjob you’ve been hinting at, even though I think it’s icky.”

  “Funny how that’s what you consider gross.”

  I tried to move past her, but she planted herself against the door. When I stepped into her, her breasts squished between us like a Nerf barricade. She put her hands on my shoulders and her perfume wafted up from between her cleavage, smelling of lilacs and fresh linen and pink flesh.

  “Baby, please, I didn’t mean to freak you out. Don’t leave me all alone on Christmas.”

  I fidgeted with my gloves, too flustered to align the fingers. “You’ve got plenty of friends to keep you company.” I jerked my thumb, pointing at the garage. “Where did they even come from? Are they—no, wait. I don’t want to know.”

  “Lester did me a favor.”

  “A favor?” I asked, crossing my arms.

  “I’ve wanted to do something like this since our ménage à trios with the hooker.”

  “That was not a goddamned ménage à trios!”

  Sage shook her head. “Whatever. I’ve wanted to do this ever since we did . . . whatever you want to call what we did with the whore. Those people in there, they didn’t die just for this, Mike. They were on a hit list already. I just asked Lester to arrange it so we could have a little time with them before they were disposed of.”

  I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Sweat made a bog of my armpits and crotch. My hands trembled. My mouth was tacky and cold. Inside the garage were four dead bodies, three women and one man. They all looked to be in their twenties and they were all naked. Three of them had their throats slashed, chests slicked red, while one of the women had a black ring around her nec
k that told a story of strangulation. When I’d first walked in on this pile of cadavers, I’d thought Sage had killed them, that she’d evolved from marauding ghoul to nymphomaniac serial killer.

  “Lester dragged all these bodies here?” I asked.

  “No, silly. He brought the people here to kill them.”

  Suddenly I was weightless. I had to make a conscious effort to keep my urine in. “Lester is a hit man?”

  She blinked. “Of course he is. What the hell do you think?”

  “I thought he was just taking us to the scenes. Fuck, did he slaughter that poor prostitute?”

  “Oh no, no. Not at all. He only killed two or three of the people we’ve cleaned up after. He does hits when he’s asked to, but the Endrizzi syndicate gets up to a lot of shady business. Shit goes bad during deals sometimes. People fuck up or fuck the Endrizzis over, and they get killed for it.”

  So that’s whom we’ve been cleaning up for. I thought of the goombah who’d given us our first job. Endrizzi seemed like the perfect surname for a guy like him.

  “Lester didn’t butcher that poor girl,” Sage said. “He’s not a total psychopath. Some meth head cracked out on bath salts did that and, from what I’ve heard, four trucks quartered him as punishment. With Lester, killing is just business.”

  “So why’d he kill those kids in there?”

  I realized I’d called the victims kids when they were probably Sage’s age.

  “Same reason most people die in this town, Mike—drugs. They’d been dealing for the syndicate, selling at clubs in the city, able to reach younger customers. But the stupid little bitches were diluting the product and pinching their supply. Stole some money and had big mouths. They signed their own death warrant.

  “I was hesitant to tell my cousin about my . . . fetish. But the sex you and I had with the body in the room—with it right beneath me while I was getting rammed—that was just the motherfucking best. You probably didn’t notice because I was playing dead, but I had multiple orgasms. So I figured, fuck, if one body was fun, two would be a blast. The more the merrier, right? So why not have an orgy of the dead? Once I started thinking about this, I became obsessed and couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I thought I was going to lose my mind if I didn’t make this fantasy a reality. So I told Lester what we’ve been doing.”

  I gaped. “You told him?”

  “Everything, Mike. I told him everything.”

  I just barely caught myself on the edge of the sofa. Someone else knew. He was a criminal, a killer for hire, but he knew. It wasn’t a nasty little secret anymore. Sage had let the monster out of the box.

  “Jesus, Sage. There goes the old ball gag.”

  “It’s fine. Don’t worry. Obviously Lester’s cool with it. I mean, he left me all those bodies to play with, didn’t he? Yeah, he thought it was fucked up—”

  “It is fucked up.”

  “—and at first he thought I was joking, but then I said ‘Oh, yeah? Why the Christ would I take a job as a crime-scene cleaner unless it got me off somehow?’ He didn’t have an answer for that, and he already knew about my old boyfriend Ken and the cutting and all of that shit. So I told him why Ryker fired us. Once I started talking it all just came pouring out, you know? I felt like a naughty sixteen-year-old in a confession booth, telling a priest about my first fingering. Anyway, Lester and I have always been tight. We’re the ones the family doesn’t like to talk about—he the criminal and me the sex fiend. We’ve always bonded over being ostracized.”

  I put my elbows on my knees and hung my head. My whole body slouched forward and I briefly imagined myself melting into a pool of beige liquid and then vaporizing, every microscopic particle that had once been Mike Ashbrook separating into tiny, invisible gnats that could fly away from all of this.

  “It’s too much,” I said. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  Sage got down on one knee, scooting closer. “Yes, you can. There’s nothing holding us back now. We have unlimited access to blood and flesh.” Her breath was hot, lips sparkling with saliva. “Stay on this journey with me. I need you, baby. I’ll make it all worthwhile. Your every sexual desire, whatever money you need—anything you want, I can give you.”

  I steadied myself. “I just want to be with my family.”

  She got down on both knees now and moved between my legs, pulling down the cups of her lingerie so her ample tits came free. Her hands ran up and down my legs, fingernails pawing me, trying to lure me back into her erotic web.

  “Take me,” she said. “Fuck me hard. Fuck my mouth. Fuck my ass. Smack me in the face with your cock and your hands. Hold me down. Hurt me. Do whatever you want, baby. I’m yours to devour and destroy.” She pressed her face into my chest and nibbled me through my shirt. “Don’t act like you didn’t enjoy it with that hooker. I know you did. I saw the look on your face when you smacked her ass and shot your hot cum all over us. Three of the four bodies in that garage are female, Mike. They’re fresh and the garage is heated. Those bitches aren’t even cold yet.”

  I stood. When she tried to undo my jeans, I pushed her aside and started toward the front door.

  “Two thousand dollars!” she said.

  I unlocked the door without turning around.

  “Five!” she said. “Five grand just for one night.”

  The door came open and the crisp night awoke my skin.

  “Ten thousand fucking dollars, Mike! Take it or leave it!”

  I stopped and stared out into the night. The gated community was aglow with rainbow-colored lights, illuminating the three inches of snow that had fallen that morning. An inflatable Santa Claus waved at me from across the street, his electric reindeer burning yellow-white. I took in this serene yuletide landscape, clinging to the childhood memories the lights and snow filled me with, desperate to hold on to an innocence that had long ago slipped through my fingers.

  I turned around. Sage still had her tits out, the Santa hat atop her blonde head like a dunce cap.

  “Ten grand?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  When I’d been a human resources director, I’d made fifty-three thousand dollars a year at my highest point. I’d made considerably less as a legitimate crime scene technician. Ten grand wasn’t something I could walk away from without serious consideration. It meant almost a year’s worth of rent. It meant enough money to get by on while I looked for a real job, one that had nothing to do with blood and bodies and Sage Jaworzyn. It meant I could take care of my kids without having to live off of government cheese.

  Sage touched my shoulder. “Close the door, baby. You’re letting the heat out.”

  ***

  I was naked. We all were.

  The garage was warm and the corpses were stacked in a pyramid formation, their limbs hanging limp, jutting out of the pile. There were smooth legs, shaved vaginas, tattooed arms and a man’s hairy ass. Dead eyes stared out from within the mound of slippery flesh, lifelessly watching as I performed cunnilingus on Sage. She was lying back against the human heap and rubbing a dead woman’s hands over her breasts, the lifeless man’s impressive cock in her mouth. The bodies were lukewarm and their limbs were still compliant, the calcium having not contracted the muscles yet. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but they kept coming open every time Sage thrust her pelvis. She pulled my hair harder than ever, her whole body shivering.

  “Don’t stop,” she breathed. “Don’t you fucking stop.”

  I wasn’t going to. I was working hard down there to get this over with as fast as possible, even though I knew eating her out wouldn’t be the end of it. For ten thousand dollars, Sage would want to get fucked every which way.

  After one more climax, she pushed me back and turned over so she was face down on the cadaver stack, her ass in the air, legs swaying at the knees. The bells of her Christmas stockings jangled—the bells of hell. Grunting, I climbed on top of her, grateful that she chose to lie on top of two of the girls instead of the man. The ladies were attracti
ve (or at least they had been)—a slender redhead that actually looked younger than twenty once I saw her close up, and a curvy brunette with thunderous tits and full, pouty lips. I rubbed the head of my penis up and down Sage’s moist opening, trying to get hard despite the morbidity of the environment. I’d taken my pill, but they only provided the blood flow, not the mental stimuli. I needed inspiration. My eyes wandered to the bloody, voluptuous girl and the strangled ginger. Sage must have sensed my struggling penis. She spit in her palm and reached back to jerk me off.

  Slowly I extended my arm and touched one of the curvy girl’s fat tits, the one that wasn’t covered in blood. It yielded in my grip. No silicon there. My penis awakened like a spring daisy. The blackish purple ring around the redhead’s throat looked almost like a choker collar if I imagined hard enough, and because she wasn’t slick with blood she appeared the most alive, making her the most attractive to me. Her petite figure reminded me of the first girl I’d ever seen naked, back when I was fourteen, and a tingle of sexual nostalgia caused a drop of precum to drip from my dickhole.

  I slid my finger into the redhead’s mouth. It was room temperature and still wet. I pushed the finger in and out, touching the tongue. I grew hard and Sage guided me inside her, clenching her vagina, milking me in this great mound of bodies. The ginger’s carcass shifted, rocked loose by our fucking, exposing her tiny pussy. I licked my finger and stuck it inside of her. She was a tad colder than normal, but not yet as arctic as corpses eventually get. It helped maintain the illusion of life, making it easier for me. I was still filled with quiet dread, but I needed these new women to get hard enough to screw. They were my 3D pornography, my propellant just as the money was my incentive, providing the visual stimulation necessary for me to succeed. And it was working. God help me, it was working.

  Sage brayed in estrus as I vigorously pumped. She shook her buttocks, twerking as I slid in and out of her, and when I was fully hard, I spit on her rectum and shoved my way into her ass. Wanting to punish her a little, I buttfucked her with the same relentlessness, making her cry out in pleasurable pain. I realized I was fingering the ginger just as forcefully while my other hand squeezed the big girl’s breast until it felt ready to burst. A powerful orgasm was churning in my scrotum, and when I was ready to pop I slid out of Sage and she turned over—mouth open, tongue out—and placed her head between the heads of the two dead girls I’d been molesting. Right above Sage’s head was the ass of the third girl. I came over all three faces and squirted extra ropes of jism on those exposed buttocks, even hitting some of the man’s bloody fingers that poked out from beneath the ladies. The multiple facial left me quaking, my cock extremely sensitive as Sage lapped at it with her tongue, collecting the dangling semen, unperturbed by the ass-to-mouth. She sucked on my testicles before pushing her tongue into my rectum. I sat on her face and when I looked down I saw she had the dead man’s fingers in her pussy and was working them back and forth.