Toxic Love
Page 11
Amazingly, her analingus got my dick hard again. Sage was growling into my ass now, her breath fluttering my butt cheeks like a fart. My legs were now crimson, and Sage’s lingerie was dripping with blood and cum, her Santa hat askew, the white ball now spotted red. Her tongue left my anus and she scooted back and pulled at the girl half-buried under the others, sliding her out for play. This carcass was even more beautiful than the other two, a pink-haired punk darling with sleeves of flower tattoos. She looked a little like my first girlfriend, the one I’d sixty-nined but had never gone all the way with—green eyes, shy breasts, long legs and a shaved vulva. All but the face was splattered in the blood that ran out of the deep slice in her neck. She was still wearing fishnet stockings, the only one of the bodies with any clothes on. Sage slid under her and held her against her chest, pushing both their hips forward, two pussies stacked on top of each other, waiting for me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
How was she able to do it?
How was Sage always able to turn me completely around on my moral stance? She was like a brainwashing witch. With every new atrocity I would make new objections, but still she always got her way and, worst of all, I always ended up enjoying it. I didn’t like what that said about me, especially after what we’d done on Christmas, the holiest night of the year. If my poor mother really was watching from up above . . .
First, I’d had the pink-haired girl, alternating between her snatch and Sage’s. Before I could come, I switched to the curvy one for a little bit, fucking the corpse’s generous ass, Sage cheering me on with soft, dirty words. The ginger was the tightest of the three. I wondered if she was still a virgin, if she was even out of high school. I came inside her and Sage sucked the semen out of the redhead’s dead little pussy.
This was the closet I had ever come to an orgy, a fantasy I’d always had. I told myself that was why I’d gotten so carried away, but I could no longer deny the truth. I liked fucking the dead. They were real-life sex dolls, the ultimate submissive, never saying no. Splashing around in deluges of blood had never done anything for me, but having a harem, even a lifeless one, was exhilarating. Having a busty woman, a pretty punk and a young girl, on top of having your usual sex partner, is an inspiring experience I suggest every straight man and lesbian to pursue.
Never before had I enjoyed more than one woman at a time. I’d had a few naughty girls in my day—even Rachel had her mildly kinky desires for handcuffs, hot wax, and blindfolds—but none of them had ever been open to bringing another girl into the mix. Most of them I’d never dared to even ask, especially not my wife. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted her to bring another man into our bed with us. How would it be fair to expect my spouse to share me with another woman?
How many guys can say they’ve come on four girls at once? That’s some Ron Jeremy shit right there. Maybe it’s not as studly, seeing as how I didn’t have to seduce or coerce these women, but I wasn’t looking for bragging rights, just skull-shattering orgasms. I’d had a sordid sexual tryst with multiple lovers and had come home with a ten-thousand-dollar check in my wallet. It gave me a natural high and sure made up for the nightmares that had begun to plague me.
There was still some residual self-disgust. Horror liked to creep up on me when I was totally alone, which was more often than not. In my apartment, the walls sometimes seemed to close in on me like a jail cell and I found it hard to breathe. When I closed my eyes during these panic attacks, bloody bodies flashed across the backs of my eyelids like a rapid-edit scary movie—graying vaginal meat and slack mouths and cum-spattered torsos writhing across the lobes of my brain. My debauchery was a gremlin gnawing at my sanity, torturing me with Dostoyevsky-like guilt. So I pushed back at it, creating excuses, convincing myself what I’d done was acceptable.
They were already dead. It’s not rape if it’s a dead body. And it’s not like I killed them. I really needed this money. I had to do it, so I might as well have enjoyed it. They were so pretty. I couldn’t help myself. Maybe if Rachel had been fucking me these last few years I wouldn’t have grown sexually frustrated enough to do all these things. It’s not my fault.
Sometimes these explanations sounded pretty good to me. Other times they made me sick to my stomach. Sometimes the memories made me cry and drink heavily. Other times they made me masturbate and hope I’d get another chance to do it all over again. My personality had been ripped in two. I had money now. I could break off my relationship with Sage and the partnership with Lester, get a steady job at a desk somewhere, pushing pencils as I got back to my old, normal, boring life, a life better suited to a can of paint than a human being. But was there really any turning back now that I’d rounded this corner? Once you’ve had sex with the dead, nothing can ever be the same.
***
“Hello, Ashbrook.”
I stopped, the buckets of degreaser and solvent cleaner swaying slightly in each hand. The voice came from behind me. I recognized it. He was the last person I would have expected to bump into in the hardware store.
I turned around slowly. “Hello, Lieutenant.”
This is it, I thought. You’re through. He knows everything and there’s a squad car waiting outside. I expected him to flash his badge with one hand and take out a pair of cuffs with the other. But Detective George Hallahan was dressed down from his usual suit and trench coat, wearing khaki pants and a Cosby sweater. His smile was a warm, welcoming thing instead of a grimace forced into the polite grin he wore while on a case. He looked like somebody’s grandfather, which I’m sure he was.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Hallahan said. “Haven’t seen you at any crime scenes lately. Take some time off for the holidays?”
“No,” I said and immediately wished I hadn’t. It would have been easier to agree. Too late now, shit for brains. “I, um, just decided to leave the business.”
“Oh.” Hallahan glanced at the buckets in my hands and then to the cart next to me. It was filled with lye, kerosene, bleach and an assortment of tarps and duct tape. “Doesn’t look like it.”
My mouth grew dry. “Oh, I mean I left the company I was working for. I’m still in crime scene cleaning. I’ve just started my own business.”
I cursed myself again. Why the hell would I admit to cleaning up crime scenes now that I was doing it illegally? My annoyance with my own stupid slip-ups merged with my paranoia, making talking to the lieutenant totally brutal.
“Well,” Hallahan said, his smile returning. “Good for you, then. I always like to see a man form his own business.”
“Got to support bacteria. It’s the only culture some people have.” My joke didn’t land with him, so I changed the subject. “How about you? What’re you here for?”
“Just need some roofing nails. Well, I guess I didn’t really need them, but it gave me an excuse to get out of the house while my mother-in-law is still visiting.”
He chuckled and I did the same, a parrot. Then there was an awkward silence during which I wondered how old his mother-in-law must be. The rancid song “Last Christmas” played softly from speakers above us, even though the holiday had passed.
“Well, I best get going,” Hallahan said.
“Me too.”
“Yes, I wouldn’t want to hold up a man while he’s working. Hopefully I’ll see you at a crime scene soon.”
I’m sure he meant it pleasantly, but this struck me as an odd thing to say. It sounded like he was hoping for someone to get murdered so we could cross paths.
“That’d be nice,” I told him, and then pushed my cart down one of the isles, getting as far away from him as possible as quickly as I could.
***
On New Year’s Eve both my daughters came over to watch the ball drop. I ordered pizza, Carmen insisting on an Italian salad, telling me she’d gone vegan. Fay wanted extra cheese. Her days of idolizing her big sister had passed.
“Do we have to watch the Times Square coverage?” Carmen said.
“You don’t want to watch the
ball drop?” I asked. “It’s tradition.”
“Don’t you have Netflix or HBO Go?”
“Nope.”
She rolled her eyes. “Great. So I won’t be able to binge watch anything while I’m here.”
“You shouldn’t binge watch anything anytime,” I said. “Back in my day people were ashamed to watch hours and hours of television on end.”
“Well, like, me and Mom both binge watch all the time.”
I shook my head. The binge watching, the too-tight clothes—Rachel was letting Carmen get away with things I would never allow, and I was powerless to stop it. Surely for Rachel it stemmed from a deep need to be the fun parent, to get Carmen to warm up to her after the initial deep freeze. I looked to Fay, as if she could back me up. She didn’t, but she did change the subject, which was almost as good.
“I love my blue sweater,” she said, touching the fabric. “It’s so cozy.”
“When I saw it, it just seemed to scream your name.”
“It’s the best. Way better than the clothes Mom bought me.” She rolled her eyes. “She still wants to dress me like I’m a baby.”
Carmen chimed in. “You are a baby.”
“And you’re a buttface!”
I put up my hands in a calming manner. “Come on, stop fighting. This is my make-up Christmas, remember? Let’s have a little of that peace on earth.”
“She started it,” Fay said.
“And I’m stopping it.” I looked to my eldest. “Carmen, please.”
Carmen looked up at me briefly and then went back to moving around her salad without eating any of it, her dark hair hiding half her face. Fay, the more reasonable of the two, changed the subject again.
“When I’m older, I’m going to go to New York City to see the ball drop. That’ll be so cool. You ever done that, Daddy?”
I shook my head. “No. Maybe next year I can take you.”
Her eyes and mouth went wide. “For real?”
“Sure. You, me, and Carmen too.”
I waited for a sarcastic oh, great from Carmen but she said nothing, which was almost just as bad.
“Whoa,” Fay said. “That’ll be way, way cool.”
“I’ll have to book a parking spot well in advance. It gets pretty crowded and I don’t want us to be stuffed into a train like a herd of cattle.”
I pointed at the television set. It was still early in the night but the streets of Manhattan were a sea of partygoers with paper top hats and kazoos. That guy who’d replaced Dick Clark was smiling a Colgate grin while some bimbo talked about another upcoming musical based on a ‘90s comedy film.
Fay sang. “Let all acquaint-less be forgot, and never old man rhyme . . . ”
I knew she had it wrong but I didn’t know the right words either, so I didn’t correct her. Neither did Carmen. She wasn’t being pleasant, but she was being civil, and that was as good of a Christmas gift as I was going to get.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, Fay?”
“Mom says you do stuff with dead people.”
I spit up the beer I’d been drinking and a lump formed in my chest, fear and shame hitting me like donkey kicks to the back of the head.
I stammered. “Wha-what?”
Fay gave me a strange, curious look.
“Your job,” she said. “Mom says you don’t work at the Shop–N-Hop anymore, that you do stuff with dead people instead. Is that true?”
My heartbeat slowed and I sighed with relief. She just meant the job, the legit one with Ryker my ex thought I still had.
“Oh, yes, honey. Yes, that’s true.”
Her nose crinkled. “You’re gross, Dad.”
***
After Sage’s check cleared, I wrote one for three grand, put it in an envelope with Rachel’s name on it, and sent it home with the girls. It made me proud to do so, despite how I’d gotten the money. It was bound to impress my ex whether she admitted it or not, and it was empowering to feel like a good provider for my children again. And it was a brand new year. There were so many possibilities now that I was financially secure, at least for a while. I’d even made a few resolutions. One was to stop drinking hard liquor and just stick to beer. The other was to put an end to all of this business with Sage and Lester.
I’d been incredibly lucky so far, but that luck was bound to run out sometime. I imagined Lieutenant George Hallahan waltzing in with gun drawn only to find me tempered in gore from Lester’s recent hit, my dick buried down Sage’s throat. Not an ideal situation. I told myself I’d been an accessory to these murders for the sake of my kids, and now I had to do what was right for them again, this time by quitting my dealings with organized crime for good and ending a sick, twisted relationship that had given me a tour through the fragile halls of my own sanity. I’d seen the darkest side of my own sexual urges, a side few people can admit even to themselves, and learned just how depraved I could get when there were no consequences. I didn’t expect it to be easy to live with what I’d done, but putting a stop to it was the first step in putting distance between my actions and myself. One day I would be able to say that I wasn’t that person anymore, the way ex-cons do when they’re trying to make a normal life for themselves. But like those ex-cons, my crimes would forever haunt me, perhaps more so because I hadn’t been caught or punished. Instead I’d been rewarded and, worst of all, I knew I would do it again if the opportunity arose. Sage wouldn’t even have to pay me. If the bodies were warm and attractive, she would coax me into fucking them, no matter how wrong it was, no matter how risky, no matter how much it made me hate myself and dream only of death and gore and misery. I’d developed a terrible fetish for the compliance of the recently deceased. I had to completely cut myself off from access to them, avoiding my temptation at all costs. Suddenly I knew how a conscientious pedophile must feel.
I considered what might be the best way for me to bow out of the deal. Briefly, I thought of writing Lester and Sage letters, but quickly realized the idiocy of that. I could call Sage and tell her to pass on the news to her cousin (I didn’t have Lester’s number—it all went through Sage), ending my work for the syndicate and my fucked up affair with her at the same time, or I could wait for one of them to call me about the next job from the Endrizzis or the latest “gift” from my lunatic lover. I would keep it simple and wouldn’t insult them or what they did. I would just explain that I was getting a desk job and couldn’t afford to take these risks anymore. They would have to understand. If they didn’t, too bad for them. I was leaving anyway. Game over.
***
It was snowing hard the day I met with Lester and Sage. I’d decided that telling them face-to-face would be the decent thing to do. Lester had gotten me a lot of work and I was grateful. I didn’t exactly like the murderous scumbag, but I appreciated what he’d done for me. And while I was positive my relationship with Sage had to end, there had been a tenderness to it neither of us had intended in the early stages, or at least I felt there’d been. Sure, we’d nosedived into the blackest degeneracy, but we’d also nurtured each other by understanding what others never could, accepting one another despite our horrific, raging flaws and kinks. And while Sage had gotten me fired by Ryker and brought out the worst in my sexuality, she’d also pulled me out of a stale life of hopelessness and apathy, awakening the man I’d been when was I was young, making me feel fun, desirable and exciting—things my ex had made me feel the opposite of. Sage had snapped me out of the deepest depression I’d ever been a prisoner of; for that she would always hold a special place in my heart, even if I would make it a point not to think about her if I could help it. I felt that, at the very least, she deserved a goodbye.
I’d waited for them to call on me. It had been a longer than usual silence between Sage and me—over a week. We’d texted a little after Christmas but hadn’t seen one another or talked on the phone. Untrusting of the privacy of smart phones, we didn’t mention what had happened on Christmas, but instead exchanged bland nothings and wished
one another a happy new year, texting for the sake of acknowledging the other’s existence. When Sage finally did call, I knew it meant a cleanup, and by the high tone of her voice it had her moistening. It’d been eight days since the corpse orgy. She must’ve been starving for dick and a nice blood shower. I told her I’d meet her and Lester at her house in one hour, giving me extra time in case my van struggled in the wintry weather, but the plows had been out and roads were well salted, so I got there in half that time.
The house was dark but for the faint, pink glow of the living room windows. I waited longer than usual after ringing the bell and something about the dark silence sent a twinge of unease through me like scattering ants. The deadbolt tumbled and the door came open. Sage stood there smiling in the dimly lit hall. Her hair was tussled and she wore only a man’s t-shirt.
“Mike, you’re here early.”
I looked her up and down. She looked bed-tossed and I became jealous and suspicious even though I was about to break up with her. “Am I interrupting something?”