Toxic Love

by Kristopher Triana

  “Listen,” I said. “What we had was—” A soft groan escaped her at the word had. I realized the finality of that word and felt guilty for using it. “It was wonderful. Truly. You pulled me out of a bad place and I’ll always appreciate that. When I remember you, I’ll think of that instead of all the . . . well, you know.”

  Instead of soothing her, my words seemed to have the opposite effect. She spun around, no longer trying to hide her wet eyes.

  “Fuck you, Mike! One minute you’re screwing me on top of a dead hooker and loving every second of it, and the next minute you’re making me pay you for sex. It messes with my mind. I pulled you out of a bad place and you put me into one. Dating you is toxic, literally and figuratively.”

  “What the shit? You’re saying I’m gas lighting you or something?”

  “Yes, I am! All you care about is yourself. You’ve gotten what you want from me so now you’re leaving me high and dry.” Her nose crinkled with menace. “Just like you left your precious little daughters.”

  Despite the cold, my body temperature rose. “How dare you say that to me. You don’t know what—”

  “Like hell, I don’t. You’re just another distant dad replacing love with money. Compensating for a lack of affection with presents and the occasional weekend sleepover. You think I don’t know all about that? You think I haven’t been where those girls are all my fucking life?”

  “Look, I’m real sorry if your relationship with your dad isn’t what you need it to be, but that doesn’t make me a bad father.”

  “God you’re a dumb shit. I mean, I’m no genius, but I’m blonde, what’s your excuse?”

  “What the hell are we even talking about here? I just want to get out of all this. You couldn’t have thought this would last forever. You’re not that blonde.”

  Her jaw tightened. “You know what? Fuck it. Whatever. I don’t need you. If I can get a candy ass like you to do me in blood and guts, then I can get some other guy to do it too. Somebody younger and better looking, who doesn’t need a pill to get it up. So fine, I don’t care anymore if you leave. But that doesn’t help you, Mike. Not when it comes to Lester.”

  She started walking away but I didn’t know where she thought she was going to go. We were trapped in the warehouse until her cousin returned with the key. As she stepped through the blood, I glanced over at the cleaning supplies and mops, wincing as I realized I’d left the HAZMAT suits in the van.

  “We should get started on this mess,” I said.

  Sage kept walking. “I think you mean you should get started.”

  ***

  The concrete was pale gray and the blood had clearly been sitting there for a while. I was dousing the stains in bleach but the floor was likely going to stay pink.

  “You should use some ammonia,” Sage said from the corner.

  I looked up. It was the first time she’d spoken since I’d started cleaning without her help. “You can’t mix bleach and ammonia. It creates chloramine vapor. That shit can kill you.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why I said you should use it.”

  I shook my head. “You know, if you helped me instead of insulting me we would get out of here a lot sooner.”

  “I’ve got nowhere to be.” She supported that claim by taking a nail file out of her billfold. She held out a hand and got to work. “Besides, I like to watch you on your hands and knees. That’s where you belong.”

  “Said the silver spoon to the commoner.”

  “Suck my dick,” Sage said. “It’s not my fault your parents never made anything of themselves.”

  “Watch your mouth.” My parents were dead, so I was sensitive about the topic, though I wouldn’t tell Sage any of that. “In fact, why don’t you just shut your mouth all together?”

  She put the file in her pocket and slid off the old barrel she’d been sitting on. “You gonna make me?”

  I groaned. “Sage, just sit back down, will you?”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, stubby.”

  Stubby?

  Sage walked through a blood puddle I hadn’t gotten to yet, trekking bloody footprints across the area I’d just cleaned.

  “For fuck’s sake!” I yelled, my voice echoing off the walls.

  I grabbed her by her upper arms to stop her from getting any more blood on the pavement. She twisted against my grip and I just barely managed to turn my hip in time to block her knee from slamming into my nuts. We wrestled, Sage writhing against me like a snake in a net, and she managed to turn around so that I had to wrap my arms around her chest. I could feel her breasts beneath her coat and tried to ignore their springiness. It had been over a week since I’d fondled them, smelled them, tasted them. Sage pushed back against me, trying to buck me off, and her buttocks ground into my crotch. The friction made my penis slither. Pulling her closer, my face went into her hair and the smell of her expensive perfume curled up my nostrils like the steam of a pie cooling on a windowsill. It inebriated me. My knees weakened and when Sage pushed again, I had to take a few steps back so I wouldn’t fall, but I slipped in a piss puddle and fell anyway, taking Sage with me to the floor.

  I landed on my back with Sage on top of me, my breath leaving me in a big hurry, leaving me gasping. Sage sat up in the pool of red and took hold of my semi-hard cock through my jeans. Before she could say anything, I sat up and batted her hand away. She rewarded me with a slap to the face. My eyes went wide and before I could react, she slapped me again, harder this time. When she wound her arm back for the third strike, I dove into her, knocking her onto the floor and moving on top of her. She ground against me and my cock grew stiff, even though I told it not to. Her coat had come open and her sweater had ridden up, exposing the cream-colored silk of her belly. Her jeans were low on her hips and the flesh just above her sex teased me, reminding me of the nights I’d spent sucking on it before making my way to what Lester had so eloquently dubbed the pink fortress.

  “Come on,” was all she said, almost like a dare.

  She reached for my cock again and this time I let her open my belt and unzip my fly. I hadn’t taken my pill but I was rock hard anyway, the head of my dick poking out from the elastic band of my shamrock-covered boxers. Sage licked her palm and started jerking me off, but after a few seconds I pushed her away and got up on my knees, telling myself to stand my ground and not give in, but Sage turned over, hiked up her coat and pushed down her jeans, exposing the vanilla scoops of her perfect ass. Her pussy winked and flirted, glistened even though neither of us had touched it.

  She was face down in the blood now. When she turned back, gazing at me with an open mouth, she looked like she’d been stabbed in the face, like she’d just been aborted from the womb. Streaks of blood ran across her cheeks like splattered paint. I pushed on her arched back, making her lay flat, then knelt over her thighs and shoved myself into her hot opening. When she lifted her head in a grunt, I grabbed hold of her hair and shoved it back down, covering every inch of her face and neck in the bodily grime, baptizing her in blood and urine. I went in hard and deep, my thrusts fast, ferocious, feral. I rage-fucked her on the warehouse floor and whenever she tried to move, I forced her down again, trapping her just as she had trapped me in this job I no longer wanted. But she didn’t seem to mind being trapped. I tried to make things rougher on her, grinding her down into the cold, hard floor and sticking my hands into her mouth to pull back her cheeks. I pounded her pussy so hard that our pelvic girdles collided, the bones cushioned only by her buttocks, bruising them. She pushed back harder, as if she were trying to crack my ischium and shatter my pubis.

  Again she barked: “Come on!”

  I licked two fingers and shoved them up her ass at once. She farted softly, and I added a third finger and started pumping, ass-fucking her with the fin I’d made of my hand. I used my other hand to pull on her hair so her head snapped all the way back, and my erection demolished her pussy—a jackhammer, a powerhouse, my dick a nuclear missile bursting inside her as she
screamed. We came together, blood and piss and pus and cum splashing over us, and I popped my fingers out of her ass and reached over her head, grabbed her face, and curled my hand to put my index and ring finger up each of her nostrils while popping my middle finger in her mouth so she could taste and smell her own shit. Her lips puckered around my finger and she breathed deep. When I rolled off of her, she hurried to get my limp dong in her mouth so she could slurp up the semen and vaginal juices before they dried.

  A slow slapping sound came from behind us. We turned to look. There was a smaller side door on the far end of the building, and Lester had come through it and was standing there in the jam, watching us. The slapping sound was him clapping. I wondered how long he’d been there.

  “Bravo,” he said. “You two almost make fuckin’ in blood look good. Still a little too nasty for my tastes, though.”

  “Hey, Les,” Sage said, causal.

  “Looks like there’s still a lotta work to do in here,” he said, gesturing to the unfinished floor. “That’s okay though. It was just gonna get dirty again anyway.”

  I pulled up my jeans. “What do you mean?”

  His smile was mean, devilish, the smirk of a young boy who’s drilled a hole in the wall of the girl’s locker room. “You’ll see. You two just get your asses dressed. I gotta fetch somethin’ from the car.”

  He stepped out and I zipped up my fly. My lower legs and shoes were bloody but otherwise I was relatively clean. Sage, however, was the bride of Dracula. Every inch of her was slathered in dripping crimson, her face so red and wet I could barely make out her features. She kept blinking to keep the blood out of her eyes, licking her lips clean of it each time more dribbled toward her mouth. I helped her up and she squeezed back into her jeans.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “You can never know with him.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Sage reached into her coat pocket and took out a pack of Newports. She lit one up and took a drag, sighing with pleasure as the smoke left her lungs. “Nothing like a smoke after some nice rape fantasy role play.”

  “Jesus, Sage, do you have to—”

  The side door came open. A man stumbled through the doorway, moaning against a ball gag. His face was bruised and bloody and his hands were tied behind his back. Lester came in behind him and shoved him forward with a kick to the ass. He was carrying a pistol.

  “Oh fuck,” I whispered.

  Beside me, Sage snickered.

  “Everybody,” Lester said, “say hello to Dom.”

  The dark-haired man looked at us through the one eye he could get open. The other was swollen shut. Dried blood ran from his nostrils to the collar of his purpled shirt and down over his pronounced belly.

  “Hi, Dom,” Sage said, all cheery.

  I stared, my heart convulsing. No. Please, no. Don’t let him kill this guy right in front of me. I looked to the side door. It hung partway open and gentle flurries spun in the blackness beyond. My van was just around the other side. Could I make it inside and hit the gas before Lester was able to pop off a round? Absolutely not, genius. Besides, Lester was between the door and me.

  “Get on your knees,” he told Dom.

  When the man didn’t comply, Lester pistol-whipped the back of his skull, dropping him to the floor. With his hands tied behind him, Dom couldn’t right himself, so Lester pulled him up off the floor and propped him on his knees.

  Somehow, I managed to speak. “What is this?”

  Lester gave me his satanic smile again. “This here is your official initiation.”

  There was a silence that seemed to last forever.

  “Wha-what?” I asked.

  “Now you’re stuttering on top of being fuckin’ deaf. I said this here is your official initiation! See, like I was saying to you back at Sage’s, you know too much. You’re in too deep with us, see? So now that you’re talkin’ ‘bout leavin’ the outfit, well, it makes me worry.”

  I looked at Sage, hoping for help. All she did was stare at Dom, the corner of her bottom lip sucked between her teeth.

  “Didn’t make sense to just kill ya,” Lester said, making the hairs on my ass stand up. “You do good work and we wanna keep usin’ ya. But we need to make sure you ain’t gonna open your big fuckin’ mouth to the cops in order to get outta this here arrangement.”

  I couldn’t blink or breathe. All I could do was shake.

  Lester pointed at Dom with his pistol. “Now, Dom here, he opened his big fuckin’ mouth, so there’s only one thing we can do with him, and I think ya know what that is.”

  “Kill him,” Sage said, so softly that I only I heard her.

  “And you,” Lester said, pointing at me, “you’re gonna be the one to waste him.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When I was a six, I shit my pants during recess.

  It was right there on the school playground. All the other kids in first grade were out there too, running and playing in the warm sunshine of late spring. Of course, I’d known I had to shit. But it was recess. I didn’t want to waste time asking Mrs. Cummings for a bathroom pass, go back into the building, walk all the way down the hall, shit, and then have to come all the way back outside. Fuck that. That would burn up half of recess! So instead of asking to go, I decided to hold it in until class started, letting out tiny farts to release some of the pressure.

  But then I just had to go on the spinner, one of those big steel wheels with the chrome spider in the center for the kids to hold on to the legs of while we all spun round and round. I think by the late ‘90s these things had gone the way of lawn darts, parents deciding they were too dangerous and getting them banned from playgrounds to be replaced with lame, gentle equipment for their lame, fragile children. But back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, this ride was king, and even though I had poop cramps I had to go for at least one spin.

  It probably would have been fine if Maurice Whittaker hadn’t climbed aboard. The fat bastard was bigger than the rest of us, having been held back a year (who the hell was too stupid to pass first grade?), and his weight threw everything off balance. The old spinner teetered as the world whirled around me in a dizzying, green blur, and then Maurice jumped up and down while holding the rail and I was suddenly catapulted into the air.

  The landing was hard, but not painful. I didn’t even scuff my knees or lose my breath.

  What I did do was shit my pants.

  Falling on my butt had popped the seal, like squeezing too hard on a fresh tube of toothpaste. My drawers filled with brown macaroni, sliming across my ass cheeks, and the smell rose around me like fumes.

  That was the first time I’d felt true horror. I’d been afraid before, of course. Every child goes through a stage of being scared of the dark and believing in the boogeyman. I’d also felt fear the times my parents raised their voices during an argument, and the few times I’d been out in a crowded place with my mother and turned around only to find her gone. But Mom always turned out to be closer than I’d thought, and while my parents often quarreled, they never got the divorce their fights made me worry about. Fear is only part of horror. Horror comes with fear, but is thickened by revulsion and dread. Horror is a sick, hollow feeling that writhes in your guts, making your limbs shiver and your mind go hot and scrambled. You lose your ability to speak or even scream, and your heart feels on the verge of implosion while everything else seems to go too fast to process.

  I sat there in my own turds, not knowing what to do, panic seizing me as the smell of my own excrement wafted up around me like a brown cloud. What if the other kids smelled it? Then they would know! That would be devastating, even more embarrassing than the time I’d picked my nose so hard it bled all over my desk. I had to do something, but horror had left me paralyzed.

  If this had happened to me as a grown man, I would have gotten to the bathroom as fast as I could without running, walking upright in an effort to keep my poo from leaving my underpants.
I would get in a stall, dump my dump into the bowl, flush the evidence, clean myself as best I could and toss the dirty undies into the trash. Then I would head home to shower and hope to Christ I didn’t bump into anyone I knew on the way.

  But I was six years old. I couldn’t plan things out like that. So I did the only thing I knew how to do, the one reaction that always got me out of a jam. I started bawling. My hope was that Mrs. Cummings would come, scoop my soggy bottom up, and carry me to the safety of the bathroom while somehow not letting on to the other kids that I’d dropped a load.

  Again, I was six. Six-year-olds are morons.

  My plan backfired. Instead of my cries attracting Mrs. Cummings, they first attracted the attention of all the other students because of course it fucking did. Some of the boys snickered at my tears, just beginning to learn the joy of hurting others’ feelings, while a few of the girls just stared at me with their judging little eyes. I wailed harder and Mrs. Cummings came jogging over as quickly as her big ass could, her flabby tits bobbing over her paunch as she came to my rescue. But before she could reach me, sweet Joanie Grabowsky, the one girl I had developed a little crush on—my first crush to be exact—came to my side to help me up. In that moment, I realized she liked me too, but that was about to change. Her nose crinkled as she took my hand, her frown deepening and taking her freckles with it.

  “P-U,” she said.

  She looked back and forth, trying to find the source of the odor. I was terrified of getting up, not knowing what my poop would do if I moved but felt if I rejected her help it would somehow reveal what I’d done. So I let Joanie help me get to my feet, and the moment I was standing I felt little, sticky balls roll out of my shorts, the turds slicking the backs of my legs as they rolled into the playground sand. Some of the kids started laughing. Others screamed and ran a few feet away only to turn back to watch from a safe, upwind distance. Joanie just stood there frozen, too shocked to move or speak, still holding the hand of the boy who would from that day forward be known as the kid who shit himself.