“Listen, Diana, I enjoyed talking to you this morning—”
“Can I come over there?”
Tim squeezed his eyes shut. How come this couldn’t have happened to him before he met Jenny, or sometime in the future? Six months—hell, one month—from now, maybe his mind would have been in a different place.
“I’m sorry, I just . . .”
You can put it anywhere you want.
Holy God, how was he supposed to handle this? His heart slammed in his chest. His face felt flushed, and once again this woman had given him a painful erection, this time with nothing but a whisper. He felt like a fool for having so little control of his body.
“Tim, hush,” she said. “Think about this. You’re trying to forget, right? I can give you that. We can help each other. I can make you forget, and you can help me get to sleep.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
“But it is.” She laughed that sweet, soft laugh again. “Honey, trust me, I’ll make you forget your own name.”
There in the dark, he felt himself grin. “I have no doubt you would. And you have no idea how tempting it is—or, actually, you probably do. But this isn’t about forgetting Jenny . . . I never want to forget her. It’s about making peace with the fact that she’s gone, and . . .”
He trailed off. The rest was too personal. He didn’t know Diana.
“And?” she whispered.
Tim took a breath and turned onto his side, phone pressed between his cheek and the pillow.
“I betrayed her once. This would feel too much like doing that again.”
“She’s been dead over a year, you said.”
“Not to me. I need to finish saying good-bye. Whatever life has in store for me after, I’ll embrace it, but not here. This place was part of us.”
“Please?” she said in a little-girl sort of voice. “I can’t sleep.”
His words dried up in his throat as the reality of the conversation struck him hard. Please, she’d said, and now that he reminded himself what she was pleading for, what she wanted from him, he could barely think. It could be the night of his life.
But he would never be able to enjoy the memory of it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Good night, Diana.”
As he reached out to return the phone to its cradle, his hand hesitated involuntarily for just a moment. But if she said anything more, he did not hear it. He hung up and laid his head back down with a mixture of relief and regret.
His arousal subsided and a peaceful sort of contentment filled him. Though he half expected the phone to ring, it did not. He closed his eyes and burrowed down into the bed. Sleep had fled, but only for a while, and soon enough it began to envelop him again.
“Tim.”
He came half awake, lost somewhere in a dream.
“Tim.”
Now he blinked and opened his eyes. In the darkness he reached out to search the rest of the huge hotel bed to make absolutely certain he was alone there. She sounded so close.
“Are you awake?”
She wasn’t in the room; her voice came through the thin wall, a lover’s whisper, though she must have been speaking up in order for him to hear her.
He considered replying but then thought better of it.
“Think of something you’ve always wanted to do but never dared to ask of a woman,” she said. “You don’t have to ask me. You could do whatever you want, and I won’t stop you. I won’t say no. Better than that, I’ll ask for more.”
Scenarios played out in his mind instantly, and once again she had him captivated.
“Please,” she said. “I need you.”
She began to tell him in great detail every little thing she would be willing to do, and have done to her, and how much she would enjoy it. How she would moan, even scream.
Then, at last, when he did not reply, she sighed.
“All right. I’ll just have to call room service. But you’re to blame for what happens.”
You’re to blame? What the hell was that supposed to mean?
Tim pulled a pillow over his head to block out her voice, but it seemed she had surrendered at last. Yet still her promises echoed inside his head. He lay curled on his side, unable to make his erection go away, unable to deny his arousal, and yet filled with more sorrow and missing Jenny more than he had since the day he had lost her.
At some point he drifted off, temptation still burning in him.
A sharp rap at the door snapped him awake. His eyes burned and his head felt full of cotton. What little sleep he’d had tonight had been shallow and restless. In the blackness of the room he threw back the covers and started to climb out of bed.
Gotta be her. Crazy woman, Tim thought. I’ve got myself a stalker.
“Who is it?” Diana called.
Tim froze, brow furrowed. Had the knock been at his door or at hers? With the walls so thin, it was difficult to know.
A muffled voice replied. He heard Diana unlocking her door and, out of curiosity, pressed his ear to the wall again. The rattle of a room service cart was followed by a murmur of voices. Tim fancied he could smell food—a burger, maybe?
He glanced at the nightstand. In the pitch dark of his room he could barely make out the glow of the alarm clock, which he’d turned away from him. Now he felt his way onto the bed and crawled over to it, turning the clock around to read the time.
Room service at two thirteen A.M.? Did this hotel even have twenty-four-hour room service? Or had Diana persuaded someone to break the rules for her? Tim had a feeling Diana had spent her entire life tempting and cajoling and getting exactly the result she desired.
A spark of irritation ignited within him. Though he felt a now- familiar stirring at the thought of her, his frustration at this long night of broken sleep trumped any lingering arousal.
From next door he heard the sound of a door closing, and he assumed the room service guy had left. But a moment later the murmur of voices began again, both hers and a man’s, and then they moved nearer and he heard the creak of weight upon the bed.
“Trust me,” he heard Diana say, “this is going to be the best tip you’ve ever gotten.”
Tim couldn’t help himself. He laughed softly, falling back onto the bed. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
But he should not have been surprised. Diana had told him that if he wouldn’t come over and have sex with her, she would call room service. He supposed things like this must happen fairly often in the real world, but to him it seemed like something out of the Penthouse letters page or some porn film.
Already the noises had begun. How fast had she stripped the guy? Tim lay there staring at the ceiling in the dark and listened to the grunts and moans quickening. Diana urged the room service delivery guy in words almost identical to those she had used with her lover of the previous night. Tim began to get an erection, and he felt a ripple of anger at himself. Tired and frayed and amused, he should not find any of this arousing, but he could not help himself. Men were pitifully predictable creatures.
Not so predictable, he thought. You didn’t go over there.
But he knew that meant little. Under other circumstances, he would have jumped at the chance to be with a woman like Diana and been just as grateful as, no doubt, the room service guy felt at that very moment.
The noises in the next room reached an initial crescendo, with Diana crying out in a throaty, shuddery orgasm followed almost immediately by the groan of a man stunned by his own good fortune. If last night was any indication, though, Diana would not let it go at that. As soon as the guy had a few minutes’ rest . . .
The groan had not stopped. The man’s voice began to rise and fall, perhaps with each spasm of his own orgasm. It sounded like he was still coming, like she had brought him to the height of ecstasy and somehow managed to keep him there. The guy cried out to God, but even those words were barely more than grunts.
The headboard slammed the wall in quick rhythm, punctuating each spasm.
Diana talked to him, urged him on, and Tim wondered what kind of woman this was, what tantric magic she had that could keep a man locked in ecstasy, and suddenly he knew that although he would always know he had done the right thing, he would also forever regret not having felt what the lucky son of a bitch next door was feeling in that moment.
And then the room service guy began to cry.
In the midst of his climactic groaning, he sobbed and began to say “please” every few seconds. The tone alone told Tim that the man wanted it to end. That he had had enough.
Diana laughed.
“Come on, baby,” she said. “Fuck me harder.”
Then it was her turn to moan, sounding the way some lovers did when they were locked in a deep kiss, or during oral sex. Tim’s erection had returned full force even as he listened with growing unease. The room service guy’s cries sounded full of pain now, even fear.
Tim reached out and turned on the light. Sitting up in bed, he stared at the wall, trying to decide what exactly he was hearing.
You’re to blame for what happens, Diana had said.
But what, exactly, was happening? This did not sound like sex anymore, not like ecstasy. And now that he thought about it, some of the groans the previous night had sounded full of pain to him as well. What the hell was the woman doing to this guy?
He picked up the phone and reached out to punch the button for the front desk, but hesitated. What the hell would he say? Instead, he put the phone back in its cradle and climbed from the bed. Tugging on the pants he had worn that day, he ran the whole thing over in his mind. He could bang on the wall or go out into the hall and knock on the door, but if he was wrong . . . if this was just extraordinary sex or some S&M thing he was too naïve to understand, he would feel foolish. And to Diana he would appear jealous and full of regret, and he did not want to give her that satisfaction.
Diana’s muffled moaning grew louder. The headboard kept banging, although if he was correct the rhythm seemed to have slowed. But in the midst of the man’s groaning, Tim felt certain now that he heard sobs and weeping.
That’s not pleasure.
Fully awake now, he went to the slider, unlocked it, and drew it open as quietly as possible. Hesitating only a moment, he went to the railing that separated his balcony from Diana’s and carefully threw his leg over, settling his weight on the railing a moment in order to shift his weight from one balcony to the next.
You’ll be arrested, he thought. Peeping Tom. Pervert. She’ll think you just wanted to see.
But such reservations did not stop him. Something was wrong. He could feel it in the rising of the small hairs on the back of his neck and the icy dread that raced through him as he crept across Diana’s balcony.
Her slider was open halfway. The crash of the surf on Santa Monica Beach, just behind him, covered any noise his bare feet might have made. He paused just outside the slider, hidden from within by the curtain hanging on the other side of the glass. But where the slider was open, the curtain had been drawn back to let moonlight into the room. Tim took a deep breath and held it, then carefully leaned in so that he could get a glimpse into the room.
Diana knelt astride an olive-skinned man, rocking herself back and forth on him, riding him hard enough to keep the headboard slamming the wall. The sensual curves of her body in the interplay between moonlight and shadows made Tim catch his breath. But then he noticed the way the man’s body bucked beneath her, the way his hips seemed to come up off the bed with her, not as if he were thrusting into her but as though with each motion she dragged him up with her, as though her sex had clamped onto him and tugged again and again, milking him, attached in some unfathomable way.
So entranced was he by the strangeness of that, and by the swaying of breasts, that at first he did not notice the strange wrongness of the shadows around her face. The man continued to cry out, his eyes rolled back to the whites, his cheeks looking sunken—Jesus, he looked sickly, how old was this guy? Diana had her mouth against his chest and at first Tim thought she must be licking his nipples or his skin, but then Diana shifted in the moonlight, drew her head back a bit, and Tim’s heart seized in his chest.
His mind tried to make sense of what he saw. He stared, breathless, as denial tried to fight back the horror and disgust and fear that filled him. Chills rippled across his body and his stomach churned. Bile roared up the back of his throat, and he had to force himself not to vomit.
Diana’s mouth was distended, stretched into a pale, blue-veined funnel attached to the man’s chest, right above his heart. Her lips trembled with a quiet suction, the skin around them glistening wetly, but he could hardly tear his eyes away from the disgusting proboscis that her face had become.
The man’s cheeks were streaked with tears.
As Tim watched in mounting horror, the other man’s face seemed to become thinner. His entire body had begun to wrinkle, even to wither, and Tim wondered what he had looked like before he had crawled into that bed. Kirk’s no longer with me, Diana had said of her previous night’s lover. So where the hell was Kirk now?
The room service guy’s head tossed to one side, and for just a second, his eyes were on Tim. That was enough.
He swept the screen open and burst into the room. Diana glanced up but did not slow the thrust of her hips, the slam of the headboard, the suction of her hideous mouth.
“Get off him!” Tim shouted.
He grabbed her with both hands, gripped her upper arms from behind, and used his momentum to drag her off the bed, straining with the effort. Too heavy. What the . . .
As Diana flopped to the carpet, Tim watched the room service guy dragged along with her, her pussy and that grotesque, distended mouth suctioned to his flesh. Her hips continued to piston onto him and he kept groaning, but his voice had become weaker now and his skin had begun to turn a hideous coal gray. Smoke rose from his open mouth, as if he were on fire inside.
“Jesus!” Tim cried. He wanted to bolt from the room, to pretend he’d never seen this thing, but he knew he would never erase it from his mind.
He reached down and tried to separate them, but Diana flailed at him, fingernails dragging furrows in his neck. She and her prey were on their sides on the carpet. The stretched funnel of her mouth still adhered to his chest, but now Tim saw the lips crawling caterpillar- like, trying to keep hold of the flesh.
“No. No way,” he said.
Clutching at his bleeding neck, he stomped a bare foot onto that thin, pale flesh. Her mouth came free with a pop and he saw a black tongue, needle-thin and long—so long—slip from the man’s chest before she sucked it back between her lips and spun on Tim.
“What the hell are you?” Tim rasped.
Diana hissed, tore herself from the man, and leaped up at Tim. She attacked with her fingers hooked into claws, and now panic raced like poison through his veins. What the hell had he done? Why had he intervened? He grabbed her by the wrists, but she was strong. She spun him around and slammed him into the wall, and that long mouth thrust at him, long black tongue darting out, and now Tim saw that it had a glistening stinger on the tip. He shoved her backward, clenched his fist, and struck her in the temple. He punched her again and again, drove her against the mirrored closet door, which shattered into hundreds of shards that cut their feet as they grappled.
Tim caught only a glimpse of the room service guy out of the corner of his eye before the guy smashed him in the head with the telephone. He spun backward and crashed into the wall, sliding to the carpet even as blood trickled down into his right eye and pain clutched viselike at his skull. Darkness danced around the edges of his vision, and for several seconds he blacked out.
He opened his eyes again to the room service guy’s voice. Full of desperation, pitiful and withered, half the life already leeched from him, the poor bastard’s cock was still hard.
“Please. Finish,” he pleaded.
The hideously disfigured mouth on the creature Tim knew as Diana twitched, then smiled. Sh
e reached out and took the lost soul’s hand and led him back to bed, mounting him again, reattaching her lamprey mouth to his heart and her sex to his.
Amid the tortured music of the headboard and their moans, Tim managed to stagger to his bloodied feet. He nearly tripped over the guy’s uniform as he shoved the room service cart out of the way. Through the wreckage of the closet door he saw a body laid out on the floor inside. The shriveled thing between its legs had once been a penis. The skin was like shrunken leather, split in several places to reveal dry pink meat inside, and the cheeks had torn badly enough to show bone. It looked as though all of the moisture had been sucked out of him, along with all of his youth and vigor, and his life.
Kirk. And now this guy.
Tim had tried. Whatever Diana had done to Kirk, and who knew how many guys before him, she was now doing to the room service guy, and like some kind of junkie, he needed it now, needed her to finish the job. The hook was in deep. The things that made him him had already been taken away.
Kirk’s no longer with me.
I guess I was a little too much for him.
Tim opened the door and staggered out of the room and down the corridor on bloodied feet. He banged the elevator call button and then ran on to the stairwell door and slammed it open. Ever since Jenny’s death, the people who loved him had told him that she would be watching over him. He had never quite believed it—she had gone from this world, a wall thrown up between them—but after this night he was not so sure. It seemed that even those walls could be thin at times.
As he raced down the steps to the lobby, he wondered again if Jenny had ever forgiven him for what he had done. Yet for the first time, it was an idle curiosity. He had loved her as well as he was able and knew she had loved him in return, but she was gone now and would never be able to give him the forgiveness he sought. He would have to claim it for himself. And he would. Tim had done his penance.
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