by Jillian Boyd
She arched her back and came hard, legs shaking around me. For that moment, it was like we were in our thirties again and I wished like anything that it had stayed like this. But then there was something to be said for age and experience. I gave my fingers a wiggle and leaned over to take her nipple in my mouth. She turned, shifting me so that the water would catch me where it would do the most good.
The jets hit me just right and I came on top of her, my own orgasm slower and quieter than hers. But she gave me the most gorgeous smile I’d ever seen on her face. She wrapped her scarred legs around me a little tighter and pulled me in close. “I love you, Nash. I always have,” she whispered against my ear, then stopped my mouth with a kiss before I could answer.
Part of me wondered what other surprises were floating around the room, besides little missiles filled with rose petals. And I wondered what it would be like to trust a lover, any lover, let alone one who’d nearly killed me a half dozen times.
The rest of me wondered if she could make me come a second time, something I almost never managed. Gia’s hand found my clit, deft fingers coaxing me to come again while she ran her mouth down my neck. I ran my hands over the faint scars on her back, letting the rough edges turn me on even more. I always did like a woman who’s been around the block a few times. Her tongue found an old bullet wound in my shoulder and somehow she managed to make it a new erogenous zone. I came, hard, unable to resist giving Gia anything she wanted.
Then I put her up on the edge of the tub and I buried my face in her pussy and licked like I could lick away every wound, every betrayal. I lost track of how many times she bucked and writhed, her legs stiffening and shaking around me. She was calling my name amid strings of Italian, endearments as well as the occasional curse, when it finally got to be too much and she pushed me away so she could slide back into the water.
She stroked my cheek and I could tell that she was waiting for a response. Did I love her? I wanted to think so but I wasn’t sure. This time, instead of saying what needed to be said, I looked at her and murmured the first thing that popped into my head, “Kid, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Or more. A lot more.” She threw her head back and laughed while I kissed her neck. At least I was sure that I loved to watch her laugh.
“I’ll just have to convince you,” she whispered against my ear and we slid down into the water together, letting the rose petals and the water swirl around us. I didn’t argue; old habits die hard. Or at least, wet.
Mid-Life Career Changes
Jessica Taylor
The blue sapphire is the size of an apple and its facets nip the sweaty creases of my palm like glass shards. It’s not smooth, like I expected, the way that small glowing fruit must have been the first time Eve held one in the Garden of Eden. The diagrams and photos that my father and I studied of the gem failed to capture its luminescence. Now that I have it in my hand, I recognize the life inside of it - the beating heart. I wouldn’t have taken this job if I had known the stone would mesmerize and paralyze me the way Roman’s eyes did. As if I don’t still think of him every day.
There are three minutes left for me to exit this subterranean vault before the billion-dollar booby traps end me. My heart pounds as hormones spill into my bloodstream like the waterfall of drugs they are. The taste of mouldy, grainy cider rises in the back of my throat. Solitude cracks against the back of my skull and I begin to worry for the manicured poodle I left snoring in a stream of sunshine. If I don’t make it, at least my brothers will take care of her. In my last career, when I was a hit-woman, I had no nerves, hesitations, or terrors like this. I did not have a dog back then either, or a family to take care of her. So that I can feel its weight slam into my bones, I pitch the stone up like my ridiculous poodle’s pink tennis ball and my mouth waters with fear. I stand just past the gates of Eden, with a groomed dog at my feet. When I look back, I still see Roman standing there next to the tree.
***
I went to New York at the apex of my career as an assassin to hunt Roman. Fall was just beginning. The trees blistered red and orange as their leaves disintegrated to the sidewalks. I’d avoided these mafia jobs in the past because I considered the work unchallenging and rather cliché, the men so lazy and easy to kill. My success as an assassin was spreading through the criminal world, and I was able to be very selective with my cases. With increasing frequency, I had heard terrific tales of the new Russian mob, a reinvented amalgam of merciless former KGB agents and harrowing criminals released from the old Soviet gulags. I took the job out of curiosity, to see for myself if the stories of their fresh ruthlessness and authentic terror were true. I wanted to watch a horror movie and see if my skin would really crawl.
I had known Roman was attractive from my preliminary research. He looked more like a Scandinavian model than a stereotypical Russian with his sapphire eyes and messily stylized dirty-blond hair. Lounging across the street against the black skeleton of a shedding tree, I leaned forward when I saw him in the flesh that first time. Mousy and small, my inconspicuousness was always an asset in my line of work. Petite and subtle, like a ballerina buried in the corps, I blended benign and innocuous into the background. The ruby and topaz leaves spun around my feet like a tiny hurricane. The sun warmed my nose and cheeks, the coffee cup my hands.
When Roman walked to the glass door of his building in a slim cut charcoal suit and with the cleverest smile, my belly warmed too. His suit was almost radiant, and his tie satisfyingly knotted. He slipped on a pair of mirrored aviator shades when he opened the door to the bright day. Then he held it for the man exiting behind him who carried a fussing baby. I’d never seen another target hold a door before. Even in those first few moments, I was struck by the failure of the surveillance I had studied to capture his vibrant smoothness, the way he pulsed with life and a luminescence I hadn’t experienced. He was conspicuous and deeply engaged in the world around him. I calmly watched him stroll away and he looked like he was whistling. Even from across the road his three-day beard looked soft. I suppressed a smile as I watched him go.
I quickly grew a sense of respect for him in those first few weeks, which had never happened to me during a job. In all things physical or business, I learned that Roman worked harder than any other man I had hunted. He worked as hard as me, and alone like me. A Bratva captain, he was the head of his entire territory in Manhattan, only answering to the authority of Brighton Beach - Little Odessa they called it. Yet he did all his own administration and enforcement, not relying on his underlings or henchmen to do the bloody, terrible, and dangerous work.
He showed dedication by training and shooting daily. Should he ever try to use it against me, I studied his techniques, the way he held his gun. He exhaled slowly as he massaged the trigger. Simultaneously his throat would soften and his eyes would go heavy and dewy, like the vibration of the shot was a caress on his body. I had never seen anyone shoot a gun with such reverence, not even my father, who had been a sniper, and had taught my brothers and I to shoot. I saw Roman kiss his gun once. As he set his pink lips on the warm barrel, all of my muscles relaxed. He must have pushed his tongue to the Glock, because my throat suddenly glowed with a metallic taste. I imagined him shooting with my father and brothers, gaining approval with jokes and stories as they all breathed in synchrony with the discharge of their weapons.
I had cultivated that same reverence throughout my life with fighting, and in those days I prided myself on having no other weapon than my body. It was a rebellion too, for my older brothers had carried on the sniper tradition in the family. During my jobs, I always took up residence near a fighting gym. So when I wasn’t following Roman or studying surveillance of him from the miniscule cameras I had implanted in his penthouse, I was in that gym. When I fought, my mind became lucid and I was bright with embodiment. My movements became worshipful and meaningful as the sweat oozed from me like inspiration. Small but hard with musc
le, I trained daily for the final moments of the job when I would cleanly end a man. It somehow made my end game more honourable, more honest. Guns, bows and arrows, swords, poison, I considered these unreliable and gauche.
Roman fought daily too, in addition to his target practice. The first time I watched him spar, I smelled the humid familiarity of his gym blocks before he entered. I grew excited when I realized where he was going and it felt like someone had dumped gunpowder into my blood. I was excited for the fight, and I felt excited for this man about to fight. As I analyzed his style for weeks, I was impressed with his intensity, the way he creatively strung combinations of elbows, knees, and fists. When he fought, he looked so lucid; like he was engaged in a tango as his body followed his partners. When he threw body kicks, I could see his inner thigh muscles. They split into a gulley that looked like it was made for my tongue to slide up.
One day, I hid like a snail above him as he boxed for hours, dodging and attacking the grid of swinging body bags. His reach was graceful and wide, like the span of a condor’s wings. Grunts and groans evocatively escaped his lips as he looked the punching bags straight on, bending to rest only when the sweat had soaked his red and gold shorts. After hours of persistence and unusual stamina, he slowly stripped off his red hand wraps but continued to bounce like a kangaroo on amphetamines. Passionately, he sang along to Drunk in Love with a throaty accent that stirred all of me. I dropped my head to the wall and exhaled his name, Roman. After that, I stopped objectifying him with the usual terms my man or the target. Though I’d never called another job by their proper name, I didn’t yet understand the depth of my compromise. I knew I was not acting my usual strict, professional self, but I allowed myself the pleasure anyway. It seemed so harmless.
Roman’s security detail was usually at its highest when he was personally rounding through his businesses in Manhattan. He would descend into subterranean clubs with a bounce to his step. His henchmen would stroke their waists, intermittently flustered as long legged girls sauntered down the cobbled steps in patent leather stiletto heels despite the frozen ground, the scent of their coconut slicked thighs billowing at the men like a steaming subway grate. He would have beaten the henchmen, had he seen their lapsing attention.
These were the seconds I wandered past, unnoticed in practical flats and dull jeans. Sometimes I would allow myself the luxury of a Dark and Stormy cocktail as I spied, with my chin in my hands and my eyes dopey. It was like watching a vintage gangster film, and my skin crawled as Roman threatened and terrorized men into submission. I once watched him gouge a man’s eye out with his finger and then lick off its gelatinous fluid while the remaining eye watched. The taste of olive oil percolated on my tongue. I knew that I was wrong to act like this on a job, to feel as if we could be private comrades, but I couldn’t stop myself.
Roman’s practices were Luddite in the midst of progressively technologized crime. I giggled with shock over the hand-offs of hard cash in the false bottoms of vodka crates. I sighed when he broke arms and snapped necks. Most of the other men I tracked had never even stolen physical cash or could not shoot without a laser for accuracy. They were spoiled cyber criminals, difficult to locate and dissociated from the world with no knowledge of pressure points or the location of major arteries.
Roman’s personal application of malicious coercion impressed me, being a hands-on type of lady. When he threatened other men in dark back offices, it was like a poem to me: “If you are inclined to choose liquor from another distributor I will rip your humerus from between your shoulder and elbow. I will then disembowel you with a fork I carve from your bone.” His accent was so cute, whenever he said bone it sounded like vone. The time he threatened to shove a man’s cock into a pencil sharpener - the old hand crank kind, not the electric kind - was one of my favourites. He never repeated the same morbid description twice. For a few weeks, I caught myself collecting descriptive threats to supply to him, should he ever run out. “Sweetie,” I would whisper into his ear, “tell him ‘If we have to come around to visit you again, my lady will tear your testicles from your sack with her teeth and then stuff them into your nose as she rips a hole between your rib and pulls out your lung’.” My tongue would brush his ear lobe and I would nuzzle his neck, gazing up into his eyes.
Roman started his days with vigorous runs through Central Park, which his glass-walled penthouse overlooked. Sometimes he would go during the purple dawn, sometimes languorously in the late colourless morning. From behind, I witnessed his hip and gluteal muscles ridging and relaxing under his black spandex pants making my stomach flutter with moths as I imagined tearing through them. On a late grey morning after fall had passed and the snow had just started, the trees along the running path stood like crooked centurions. Icicles hung like daggers from the branches, opalescent prisms decorating the sky.
When we passed the statue of the two great ten-taloned eagles slaughtering a horned goat, a giant poodle emerged to follow at Roman’s heels. She was lost, looking for help. My mouth went dry when I saw her and the air froze around my body. She was the reincarnation of the beloved poodle my mother had before she died and my brothers sided with my father, before I left them all. Her hair was coifed like cotton candy and she pranced after him with a bobbing pink tongue for a mile. Finally Roman stopped, his red down vest like oxblood against the slate of the sky behind him. He kneeled to the dog and found a collar within the ridiculously puffy hair. I slowed, in the distance, gorgeous icicles stiffening my cheeks.
The dog lapped Roman’s face, huddled into him. He must have been looking for the dog’s identification, because fifteen minutes later he delivered the lost dog to a fretting woman wrapped in fur at the copper effigy of Alice in Wonderland near East 74th Street. The dog watched him go, her teased tail dropping. I considered the past several months: my mobster saved dogs, fought with passion, and held doors for men with babies. I couldn’t follow him the rest of that day, and it was the first time I considered calling my father in ten years.
For days after that, I followed Roman as if I were weightless, drifting behind his distant scent like a hummingbird discovering a gargantuan red flower. I began to hum softly to myself and eat bitter chocolate as I watched his surveillance footage. Forgotten love songs from my youth even released from the muscle memory of my vocal chords once as I watched him unpacking a brown bag of groceries. Killing me softly, I sang to myself. The paper bag had blotches of wet where the snow had melted on his way up in the elevator. His kitchen was warm and beautiful; a mixture of raw wood laced with wide eyes, wrought iron, and recessed blue lighting.
It made me think of a happy spaceship returning to a beloved home world. I imagined standing in front of his glass wall looking out on Central Park as he put away bunches of purple beets and sprigs of fresh dill. I imagined him quietly lurking towards me as I drank steaming chamomile tea, cupping my breasts from behind and running his nose up my neck, slipping a restless hand down the front of my black trousers. Then I knew that it was time for me to finish the job. If I let it go on any longer, it might not even be possible. I was still attached then to my identity as an assassin. It wasn’t conceivable that I could show up on his doorstep a different day and in a different way.
On my last night with Roman, I dropped from a contorted perch in the airshaft of his kitchen. I knew he kept no security in his house overnight, perhaps the only honest mistake I ever saw him make. My bare feet made no sound as I landed like a small grasshopper next to his purring refrigerator in the warm, inky dark. The lights of the city pulsed like stars through the glass walls of his home. I remember almost deviating, almost going to stand next to his round, thick dining table in front of those transparent walls overlooking the up lit trees of the park below. Roman had eaten there last, sipping magenta borscht and reading the paper Nash Gorod - Our City. Then he had gone to his freezer and pulled a translucent bottle of anise liqueur from the drawer. Dressed in silk black pyjama bottom
s, his nipples hardened when he slowly kissed the bottle, leaning back peacefully onto the cold metal. His Adam’s apple bobbed finely as he pulled on the cloudy fluid.
I stole across his open home until I came to the ornately carved door of his master suite. In the centre of the room, my man was sleeping soundlessly, innocently tucked into the folds of his red silk bed. Talismans and the charms of the superstitious decorated the high ceiling above the entrance and I knew from months of watching that he crossed himself each night before he finally entered. I had smelled sage and peppercorn as I envisioned him walking down the hall, shirtless and stretching his arms above his head, scratching his shoulder blade lazily.
My hands, I remember, had shaken. It was a miniscule vibration but still it was there. It took moments longer to pick the lock than it normally would have. I suspect I even made noise, as if I was subconsciously warning him. But when I slithered in, he remained asleep and undisturbed. Then my steps were choppy, without confidence or grace, as I moved across the room to my sleeping, waiting man. He had slept so noiselessly, I thought to myself he would not keep even me, such a light sleeper, awake the way other men had with their lip smacking and snoring. I would have been at peace beside him.
When he opened his eyes, there was no fear or surprise. He looked at me as if he was awaiting me and I had finally emerged from between the trees. His eyes travelled my tightly shrouded body, taking in my small frame, my bare feet. In those days, I carried no weapons. Perhaps when he noticed this, he thought he might have a chance. Or maybe he thought escape from the situation possible when he saw the confusion in my own eyes, the hesitance in my stance. He pushed himself up slowly, as if to not ignite a wild animal, as we continued our mutual gaze. He spoke first, with a voice I knew well; scratchy and deep, caressing my ears like a symphony.