Dangerous Women

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Tasha towed him out to the dance floor. She wrapped her arms around him and sucked his tongue into her mouth. Just when his tongue felt like it was going to be ripped from his mouth she bit down on it, hard. Within moments he tasted blood. Perhaps this was what she wanted, for she continued to kiss him as she thrust her pelvis into his. She sucked hard on his tongue. He imagined himself sucked whole into her mouth. He liked the idea. And without for a moment losing his focus on Tasha, he suddenly thought of Lydia and the girl before Lydia, and the girl after Lydia, the one he had betrayed her with. How was it, he wondered, that desire for one woman always reawakened his desire for all the other women in his life?

  “Let’s get out of here,” he shouted, mad with lust. She nodded and pulled away, going into a little solipsistic dance a few feet away. Alex watched, trying to pick and follow her rhythm until he gave up and captured her in his arms. He forced his tongue between her teeth, surprised by the pain of his recent wound. Fortunately she didn’t bite him this time; in fact she pulled away. Suddenly she was weaving her way back to the VIP area, where Frederic seemed to be having an argument with the bartender. When he saw Tasha he seized a bottle on the bar and threw it at the floor near her feet, where it shattered.

  Frederic shouted something unintelligible before bolting up the stairs. Tasha started to follow.

  “Don’t go,” Alex shouted, holding her arm.

  “I’m sorry,” she shouted, removing his hand from her arm. She kissed him gently on the lips.

  “Say good-bye,” Alex said.

  “Good-bye.”

  “Say my name.”

  She looked at him quizzically, and then, as if she suddenly got the joke, she smiled and laughed mirthlessly, pointing at him as if to say-you almost got me.

  He watched her disappear up the steps, her long legs seeming to become even longer as they receded.

  Alex had another glass of the clear liquor but the scene now struck him as tawdry and flat. It was a little past three. As he was leaving the Japanese woman pressed several nightclub invitations into his hand.

  Out on the sidewalk he tried to get his bearings. He started to walk toward St. Germain. His mood lifted with the thought that it was only ten o’clock in New York. He would call Lydia. Suddenly he believed he knew what to say to her. As he picked up his pace he noticed a beam of light moving slowly along the wall beside and above him; he turned to Frederic’s bashed-in Renault cruising the street behind him.

  “Get in,” said Tasha.

  He shrugged. Whatever happened, it was better than walking.

  “Frederic wants to check out this after-hours place.”

  “Maybe you could just drop me off at my hotel.”

  “Don’t be a drag.”

  The look she gave him awoke in him the mad lust of the dance floor; he was tired of being jerked around and yet his desire overwhelmed his pride. After all this he felt he deserved his reward, and he realized he was willing to do almost anything to get it. He climbed in the backseat. Frederic gunned the engine and popped the clutch. Tasha looked back at Alex, shaping her lips into a kiss, then turned to Frederic. Her tongue emerged from her lips and slowly disappeared in Frederic’s ear. When Frederic stopped for a light she moved around to kiss him full on the mouth. He realized that he was involved-that he was part of the transaction between them. And suddenly he thought of Lydia, how he had told her his betrayal had nothing to do with her, which was what you said. How could he explain to her that as he bucked atop another woman it was she, Lydia, who filled his heart.

  Tasha suddenly climbed over the backseat and started kissing him. Thrusting her busy tongue into his mouth, she ran her hand down to his crotch. “Oh, yes, where did that come from?” She took his earlobe between her teeth as she unzipped his fly.

  Alex moaned as she reached into his shorts. He looked at Frederic, who looked right back at him… who seemed to be driving faster as he adjusted the rearview mirror. Tasha slid down his chest, feathering the hair of his belly with her tongue. A vague intuition of danger faded away in the wash of vivid sensation. She was squeezing his cock in her hand and then it was in her mouth and he felt powerless to intervene. He didn’t care what happened, so long as she didn’t stop. At first he could barely feel the touch of her lips, the pleasure residing more in the anticipation of what was to follow. At last she raked him gently with her teeth. Alex moaned and squirmed lower in the seat as the car picked up speed.

  The pressure of her lips became more authoritative.

  “Who am I?” he whispered. And a minute later: “Tell me who you think I am.”

  Her response, though unintelligible, forced a moan of pleasure from his own lips. Glancing at the rearview mirror, he saw that Frederic was watching, looking down into the backseat, even as the car picked up speed. When Frederic shifted abruptly into fourth, Alex inadvertently bit down on his own tongue as his head snapped forward, his teeth scissoring the fresh wound there.

  On a sudden impulse he pulled out of Tasha’s mouth just as Frederic jammed on the brakes and sent them into a spin.

  He had no idea how much time passed before he struggled out of the car. The crash had seemed almost leisurely, the car turning like a falling leaf until the illusion of weightlessness was shattered by the collision with the guardrail. He tried to remember it all as he sat, folded like a contortionist in the backseat, taking inventory of his extremities. A peaceful, Sunday silence prevailed. No one seemed to be moving. His cheek was sore and bleeding on the inside where he’d slammed it against the passenger seat headrest. Just when he was beginning to suspect his hearing was gone he heard Tasha moaning beside him. The serenity of survival was replaced by anger when he saw Frederic’s head moving on the dashboard and remembered what might have happened.

  Hobbling around to the other side of the car, he yanked the door open and hauled Frederic roughly out to the pavement, where he lay blinking, a gash on his forehead.

  “What was that about?” Alex said.

  The Frenchman blinked and winced, inserting a finger in his mouth to check his teeth.

  In a fury, he kicked Frederic in the ribs. “Who the hell do you think I am?”

  Frederic smiled and looked up at him. “You’re just a guy,” he said. “You’re nobody.”

  Walking back to his hotel, he found himself thinking of Lydia. His cheek was sore and bruised; when Frederic finally hit the guardrail he’d slammed it against the window. And the smoke from his cigarette made him all the more aware of the cuts on his tongue. But he was grateful to have escaped with these superficial wounds. The car had spun 180 degrees and popped a tire on the curb before coming to rest on the sidewalk. Alex had left them there, walking away without a word as Tasha called after him.

  When he’d been caught, when his tryst with Tracey had become impossible to deny, he’d told Lydia it had nothing to do with her-what one always said-but that wasn’t true. It was all about her. Although he’d lied and tried to hide his transgression, in the end, he realized now, he needed her to know. It was all about betrayal, that most intimate of transactions between two people. She was part of the equation. How could he explain to her that as he bucked atop another woman it was she, Lydia, who filled his heart. That it was like racing one’s car at a tree. How the moment before impact would be vivid with love of the very thing you were about to lose.

  Dangerous Women - Penzler, Otto Ed v1.rtf

  THE LAST KISS

  S. J. Rozan

  W

  ashing her blood off his hands (sticky and clinging, then hot and slippery, red trails swirling, pink clouds rushing away), he thought of their first kiss. Not until then, and strange, that was: He’d burned for her so, and that kiss had ignited him. Different from all the others after, because unfamiliar; electrifying not just with her heat and the spicy salt taste of her but with newness, the nearly uncontainable excitement of the threshold.

  The softness and sting of that kiss had returned at odd times in the past months, when he was not wit
h her but also when he was, sometimes even as he was kissing her, that kiss overlaid on others; he could summon the memory, and often did, but the thrill was far greater when it ambushed him, as now. Sometimes its impact was so great that he stumbled, had to reach out and hold something to keep from falling.

  “Not tonight,” she’d said that first night, butterfly fingertips inflaming his skin, lips grazing his, then flitting away; then melting into him with a rush so urgent he thought she’d changed her mind and it would be tonight. But she released him and smiled and didn’t say, “No,” only, “Not tonight.”

  She thought she was denying him, that she had control. No. He’d waited not because she wanted it, but because waiting tightened the wire, drove the fever up.

  And it must have been waiting that made this happen: that kiss-for a few days, all he had-flowed through his memory and flesh, saturated him. And then, at moments he couldn’t predict, it concentrated, rose and crashed over him like a wave.

  Moments like this.

  With it now, for the first time, came an ache. Not entirely unpleasant, it added sweetness, softened the edges. The ache was regret: Memory, all he’d had at first, was all he was left with, now that she was gone.

  As she had to be.

  As she’d wanted to be.

  That was what he’d seen, though none of the others had. She’d declared it clearly, and if to him, then surely to each. But he’d thought it wild exaggeration, and no doubt they thought the same. Only later, when she’d pulled the single string that dropped the web over him and stood back smiling, did he realize who the true quarry was intended to be.

  Not him, but she herself.

  He wished he’d seen it earlier, but he couldn’t claim that. He was smarter than the others, and certainly smarter than she was, but he was only a man. When she’d come to him, he’d wanted her. When she’d leaned into him for that first kiss he’d felt only promise and pride.

  She’d come to him as a client. The way, he’d understood later, she’d come to them all, but at the time he hadn’t known that.

  “Jeffrey Bettinger’s been my attorney until now.” She’d spoken crisply, settling in his office chair. She wore a soft wool suit the mahogany color of her hair, a blouse a shade darker than her ivory skin. Her cheeks glowed from the cold. As she crossed her legs, a gem of melting ice slid from her boot to his carpet. He molded his features into a mask of polite interest, his true attention riveted by the wool and silk, the mounds and hollows and the darkness beneath.

  He’d noticed her with Bettinger, of course, been as amazed as anyone to see the oil-painting richness of her sharing a drink with the faded snapshot that was Bettinger. He hadn’t known she was a client and he hadn’t known about Cramer or Robbins or Sutton, then, either. He hadn’t known what she wanted, or what she’d done. Though when he discovered the truth of that, he couldn’t honestly say he’d have done anything in any different way.

  With her to that first meeting she’d brought a kidskin portfolio with a tiny silver lock. Valuable papers, she told him. As her new attorney, he need not execute any of the papers, except in the event of her death, in which case she was hereby instructing him to break the lock and follow the wishes expressed inside. Right now he need merely lock the portfolio in his office safe. He did have a safe, of course?

  Of course. He’d taken the portfolio, allowing his fingers to linger on hers, breathing slowly her rich summery scent.

  From the first he’d been a completely professional lawyer. What happened between them-first in his imaginings, then, soon, in nights and days-never distracted him from his duties, as it would a weaker man. Probably, he told himself, that was why she’d left Bettinger: The man was a wimp. He’d likely never advised her, just let her lead him around with a ring through his nose. Himself, he wasn’t like that: He’d objected, argued, offered alternatives each time she’d instructed him to sell a property at a hopelessly low price, to draft a codicil to her will leaving a bequest to some suspect cause. She was a rich woman, he told her, but there was an end to wealth if unhusbanded.

  The phrase unexpectedly drew from her a bitter laugh: the word “husband,” she explained. Hers had been a lawyer, a cold, vile man who’d forbidden her children or friends, beaten and bound her, made living an unending hell. More than once he’d threatened to kill her if provoked, and she despised herself for the cowardice that stopped her from forcing his hand, or from performing the act herself. She’d plotted against him in dark, secret fantasy; she thought, she admitted without blinking, that she might have actually been insane for a time, driven mad by isolation, pain and fear.

  “Did you try?” he asked, feeling desire grow as she spoke, seeing behind his eyes visions of her shivering and bruised, cowering below a looming shadow.

  “To kill him? He died.” She spoke contemptuously. “Before I worked up the courage to kill either of us.”

  Her husband’s sudden death, she said, had been a surprise, and the wealth she was left with was her only source of pleasure. (When he heard that his face blazed, his mind racing to the night before, the heat of their kisses, the crescendo of their rocking, together, together.) She paused a deliberate moment. With a smile, and with no amendment or exception to her statement, she went on to say that she would spend his money how and where she liked.

  He didn’t answer. He crossed the room and closed the door, and took her right there on his office carpet.

  When their flesh intertwined she did whatever he asked, however odd, painful or humiliating. In the light of the business day, on the other hand, he was entirely unsuccessful in persuading, cajoling, insisting. But he tried each time, because there was no ring through his nose.

  Now, as he worked, the memory of that first kiss flooding through him, he found himself awash in other memories also, unlooked-for but welcome. Swaddling her body in blankets for the trip to the hillside where he’d leave her, a place she’d shown him and told him she loved, he heard her voice, the breathy whisper that slithered like ice along his spine. The coppery smell of blood metamorphosed to the jungle blossoms of her perfume as he cleaned the room. No one would look here for her, or come here for any other reason, to this gloriously isolated, derelict house across the river. But he was by nature careful. He washed away the bloodstains, turned the mattress over.

  They’d had no need to slip away to this secret spot, except for the shiver it gave them both. They were single, they were adults, they could have carried on their affair at high noon on Main Street. But she’d found the house, and when she told him about it over a roadhouse table, her stockinged toes trailing along his calf, they’d agreed to agree that it was best to be seen together only as attorney and client.

  The heat in his palms as, his work finished, he toweled dry, made him think of her skin, pale velvet always warmer than his, as though she lived in a feverish cloud, a torrid private tropics out of which she reached for him.

  At the time he’d thought, to him, she was reaching out to him. But he was mistaken.

  Last week she’d come to his office unannounced, and, sitting in that same chair (glowing this time with sweat: the day was damp and hot), declared she was not satisfied. Not satisfied? Then what were the moans, the crashing heartbeat, the soft sighs?

  “I’m firing you,” she said. “Your services are no longer required.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he hissed fiercely, striding across the room to close the door.

  She rose immediately and opened it again. “I’ll take my papers, please.” She remained standing and nodded pointedly at the safe.

  “Are you-?”

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Dreyer. Of Dreyer and Holt.” Ice dripped from her words; he thought of her boots, that first morning. She looked at her watch. “If you choose not to return my papers I’ll have no choice but to add that to my complaint to the police and the Ethics Commission.”

  He tried to grasp hold. “Complaint?”

  “Yes, and retaining my papers will compo
und it. I imagine there’s a distinction, even among lawyers, between taking sexual and professional advantage of a client, and outright theft.”

  Astonished, he stood mute.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Making love to a widow to distract her from bad advice bordering on malfeasance? That’s grounds for complaint, wouldn’t you say? Some of the transactions you handled for me lost thousands. I’m firing you. I’ll be filing professional and criminal complaints a week from today.”

  In their nights she’d cooed obscenities. The filthy words her hot breath tipped into his ear had exhilarated but never shocked him. But the abstract phrases she coolly spoke now stunned him with their indecency.

  “Those deals. They were your idea, all of them. I objected every time. I have memos, letters in the file-”

  “Postdated, no doubt.”

  “No! You know-”

  “What I know is, regardless of whether you’re convicted of anything, no wealthy widow will ever come to you again, after I’m through with you.”

  The intercom buzzed; his secretary told him his ten o’clock appointment had arrived. Bewildered, disoriented, he opened the safe and gave her the kidskin portfolio.

  She turned and left.

  He slept badly that night and the one that followed. Longing for her, confusion about her, and this new fear of her roiled his attempts at oblivion. Two days later he was still in shock.

  And lucky, that had turned out to be.

  He’d done something rare, left the office in the early afternoon-on what could he possibly concentrate?-to head to the oak-paneled tavern where lawyers met to bargain, to dispute and to forget.

  “You don’t look good,” Sammy, the bartender, had said, as though he needed to be told. He’d shaken his head, given no explanation. Sammy knew his job: he poured a drink and proffered consolation. “At least you’re not Bettinger.” Sammy lifted his chin toward a crumpled form in the corner. “He’s being investigated, did you know that? The Ethics Commission, and the police.”