The Goodbye Man (Red Market #1)

by A. Giannoccaro

  I have spent the last twenty-years killing people to save others. I always thought I was redeemed by the lives that were saved. I never felt guilty for the killing - I still don’t. I have fucked countless whores and done unthinkable things for years without shame. In fact, I held my head high and owned what I was. But now, I lie in a puddle of myself and I see her little eyes as Marta held her hand and told her to go hide away; she would just nod and go. No words, she never spoke to me then. Those big brown eyes that watched around the corner as I fucked her mother to try and cure the lunacy of my mind. Back then I couldn’t make it stop so easily. She was small and pure, she was trusting and had the innocence of a child in this world of wolves.

  When Pavel killed Marta to spite me, I should have saved her. I should have fucking said goodbye then. I could have. Choices will always come back to punish us, and I chose so very wrong. I chose my business, my work and my sanity and quiet over her life. Ignorance can be bliss. I chose to ignore her, not to see her or be near her, for the temptation she posed to my life was far too much for me to suffer. Chaos and calm are all taking over at the same time. I am shivering under the cold water, but I can still hear them. I’m not sure it’s real or if it’s my fucking broken mind still torturing me. I cover my ears and rock back and forth so that the movements distract me from the pain that flows through my veins like razor blades cutting me apart from the inside. Why couldn’t you just say goodbye then? Or now, Caesar? Why? Because the truth is there and you know it.

  My internal dialogue is making things even worse as I pull my hair and scream at the top of my lungs to silence my monsters. I just want to fucking die right now. I have hurt her more than Pavel or anyone else ever did. I need to let Mateo fix her, but I don’t want to let her go. I love her. He loves her too. It’s a little less wrong for him to love her the way she needs. I cannot love her. I can never touch her again. Regrets consume me, I am so fucking sorry I even touched her. Why did she have to have a voice? Why did she whisper those words to me? Is this the punishment for my life, because it is the worst thing I have ever felt. Love is the devil. Love will not shut up as it rages war on my head and heart. Love. Love. Love. I hate it. I hate myself for loving her. I hate her for letting me. I hate the truth that is seeping in, a truth I cannot deny forever. I feel it becoming real as I allow myself to finally accept it. Tremors wrack my naked body as the misophonia makes me crazy. I shake and thrash around in the water that should be saving me but just drowns me deeper in the torment of it all.

  I don’t know how long I am there, I don’t care, but the water stops and I open my eyes. There is silence, thank God. Juan stands there wet and his eyes are sad and broken. He holds up his hand and a fucking towel. Not going to happen. I have been thinking too much, help me stop. I want to say this to the boy who just irritates me by breathing, yet here he stands trying to help me.

  “Caesar, you are going to get sick.” He hands me the towel. I don’t contain the snarky laugh that escapes.

  “I am already sick, Juan. Very sick.” I answer with the truth.

  “What is wrong, Caesar? This isn’t the man who came and dragged me to my salvation.” He thinks I saved him. I just delivered him to another evil. Silly boy.

  “I have done something that no man should do, Juan,” I answer, dropping the towel on the ground. “Please go get my clothes from her room.” I cannot look him in the eye. He scurries off without a word. When he returns, the sadness in his eyes is much deeper, he has been wounded.

  “Mateo is with her,” he says, and as he hands me my clothes, his voice cannot affect me because I am in full body and mental breakdown.

  “I know. I made him do it.” I answer his unspoken question.

  “But you love her?” His words are the end of my rational thought as I grab his throat and start to strangle the life of his annoying body.

  “I shouldn’t love her, Juan. I do. But it’s wrong.” I can feel the life leaving his body as the blood vessels in his eyes begin to pop and the red seeps into the whites. “She is mine, but loving her like I do is wrong.” I squeeze harder still.

  “She is my baby, my little girl, my daughter, and I have made a terrible mistake.” My truth falls on deaf ears as I admit it for the first time to myself and the dead boy dangling from my hands. I let him fall to the floor. He is gone. “Goodbye, Juan,” I say to him, as I turn to dress myself. The admission of what I have denied to myself for years opens up a new wound in me. This one will not heal, it is gaping open and the pain is excruciating as I let the truth tear into me. Agonizing noise fills my head as I walk past the room where they are making love. Her body is in love with his and she is so real to him. I turn my gaze away as I descend the stairs slowly, wishing for silence. You fucked your daughter, you sick old man. She loved you and you used her body. You deserve to die, Caesar. You should have said goodbye when she was a baby and her mother begged you to kill her. You should have let him kill her. Your touch has ruined her. Your love will kill her. You are the worst thing that ever happened to her. You put your dick in your baby. You not only fucked her body, you have fucked her mind. You are no one’s daddy, Caesar. You are just a disease.

  The noise continues as I leave the building; the fresh air outside isn’t cleansing, it’s suffocating. I want to go home but I cannot, so I turn and go back inside and wrestle myself as I dissolve into chaos. The metal box of the elevator takes me below the world to the furnaces that burn with a ferocious heat. I stand there and feel it as it warms my damp skin and causes me to sweat. My blood turns colder in me as it does. She was my baby and I love her, and the love I feel is so wrong because my mind is so broken. I will never be able to love her like a father should.

  I open the furnace door and switch on the conveyor. I light a cigarette and watch the moving motions to help clear my thoughts, but the whispers will never stop their torment on my sanity. The red hot hate and the loud noise drown out my thoughts at last and my mind is emptied of my sins. I throw my half-finished smoke to the ground and climb onto the conveyer. It moves slowly with my weight as it carries me quietly to the end I crave. I scream as the heat licks at me but I know this is nothing compared to the hell I’m going to. I yell out the words I said too many times, the words I should have said to her.

  “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Mateo

  Warm hearts can’t love. They hurt. They run.

  He’s pushing me towards her. My goddamn plan is working, but my heart can’t fucking take it. The anger that I don’t understand is threatening to be released and wash ugly over the beautiful girl I beg to understand. Her big, brown eyes bat nervously as her look is stuck on mine. Her full lips are pink. Pink with life. My eyes can’t help but notice how they tremble while I clench my jaw. Is it such a crime for me to want something I know I can’t tolerate?

  Caesar’s words pull me deeper into insanity. I have an itch I didn’t know I wanted to scratch as he pushes me, telling me that dead girl’s pussies can’t squeeze my cock. Thoughts of feeling her, just once, invade my fucked up skull as I prepare to be torn open. She is going to destroy me before I end myself.

  “Kiss me,” she begs.

  Fuck it.

  The control that was clinging onto me is gone. I am bared. Stripped away to nothing as her lips meet mine. I want to bury myself deep inside of her, but thoughts of her abandoning me continue to lurk in my heart. I have the urge to make her go away before my heart can break, but my chest meets hers and I feel it.

  Life. Her pulse quickens beneath my touch. With every stroke of my tongue, she moans just a little more into my mouth. Just a little more, I keep telling myself. Just a little bit more of this delicious fucking heaven before my true colors reign over me. I’d be lying to myself if I said I didn’t think what her lovely locks would look like trapped tightly in glass on a shelf. Trapped by me and unable to leave. Trapped by a goodbye I said before she could. Because control is something that I have alw
ays had. Pain is something I hate.

  They both hang in a tight fucking balance as my soul is laid naked before a girl who I have dreamt about finding my entire life. She begs me with her body, begs for love. Something I have never felt before.

  Just a little more, I tell myself again.

  I find her wet pussy. She’s wet. She’s fucking wet. For me. But if I love her like this, then I will feel. If I feel, then she will leave me. If she leaves, I will go fucking crazy. I will die.

  My fingers plunge deeper inside of her cunt, finding her wet as fuck. She tightens around me as her pussy begs my fingers for more. I finger-fuck her harder as her arousal coats my fingers. All I can think about doing is taking them out to taste her. To lick my goddamn fingers clean to know that this is real. Then she comes, shaking out in the most glorious way under me. Her pink nipples peak higher than before and the way her mouth opens while moaning is making me lose my cool. She looks at me through lust drunk eyes. She grabs my hard dick.

  I bite back, pushing her hand away. I’ve never had a woman touch me before. I’m thirty-years-old and a woman has never fucking touched me before. I love their almost dead bodies or I kill them, love them, and admire them through see-through jars.

  Before I can understand what is happening, the steel door to my heart is opening and I let go of her hand. The warmth of her is almost too much. Nothing in the world exists at this moment except me and her; the girl that has only existed in my dreams before now. But how do I convince myself that she will stay? Will she truly love me?

  She eases her legs open further while leading me inside of her. The breath leaves both of my lungs as I enter her scorching heat, certain I haven’t felt anything better before in my life. My body knows just what to do when it meets her, rocking inside of her. My hands can’t get enough, my mouth can’t taste enough, and my cock can’t feel enough of her. I will never get enough of her. She is ruining me in the best way.

  Is this the real kind of love? A love that will stay? I thought I saw it in her eyes, but eyes lie. No, no. I have to make my past go away for a while. Just a little while longer. I want to bask in heaven while I have it, because God knows I belong in hell, right next to Caesar. She looks at me through blinking eyes as her skin gets hotter beneath me, sticky and sweaty too. Dead and comatose girls don’t do this. They also don’t leave. She blinks at me again and I have an overwhelming urge to tell her to stop. Every motion of her eyes makes me understand that I am cutting myself open with a poisonous dagger, only to be left alone.

  No. I can’t. She loves me. She has no choice but to stay now, but my brain is programmed to work. My heart is conditioned to love for seconds, not something like this. Images of her glassy eyes grace my mind and I want to cry. Yes, cry. I want to cry because for the first time in my godforsaken pitiful life, I want someone to live despite what my brain is conditioned to do. I know deep down to my horrible soul that I won’t be able to help what happens. If loving her means death for the both of us, then so be it.

  Because loving life is better than feeling death a thousand times. Oh, this is too much. I feel like I am about to burst over every inch of my body. Her tiny hands are clawing at me as her voice makes merciless screams. Her pussy clenches around my cock and I know I am destined for hell. For torture. For everything I deserve because I have fallen for something that I know I do not deserve.

  Love. Real life fucking love.

  Her tight cunt continues to squeeze me for more and I let go, letting myself come inside of her as I cry out for a love I never thought I would find. But the goodness that I found is replaced with anxiety as I realize what I have done. I have put myself front and center in disorder. My straight, pretty little lines are crooked. There is no order with real love. It is chaotic. There is no rhyme, reason, or pattern. It just is. I don’t know if I can deal with that.

  I bend down to her ear.

  “I love you, Lettie. Please don’t leave me.”

  Desperation dances in my voice and threatens to snake itself around my neck and strangle me. I see fear, but part of me feels relief. I’m on an edge that I hate. One of begging. Perhaps I haven’t lost all control as I am able to leave her anxious and scared. But is that what real love is all about?

  I lean my lips down to her lifeline on her neck, beating rapidly as she sighs out and sinks down on her tiny bed. My cock is hard for her again. I’ve never understood what a real woman feels like. Oh, Lettie. What have you done?

  Her little hands make their way to my chest and I wince. I am not used to being touched. It makes me uncomfortable, but part of me wants to be normal. For her. For me. For us. But is there a normal? Look at how I ended up here.

  “I need to use the bathroom to clean myself up, Mateo.”

  Her commentary startles me. I’ve not had this for a long time and it’s confusing me. I don’t have conversations. I sit straight up on the bed as my cock continues to throb to life. I look at her through wide eyes as anxiety hugs me, leaving me unable to move air in and out of my lungs. She bats her eyes. STOP DOING THAT! STOP BEING ALIVE! The lunacy that I thought I could let go of is making its way back into my life. I shouldn’t let it. I should push it away as far as it will go, but I can’t. I will never be normal. I will never be healed from my abnormal views on love. Maybe for a little while, but my fears will always be there.

  I will watch her. Yes, that is what I will do. If I do, she can’t leave me. She looks confused. I don’t like it. I don’t like trying to understand what a woman’s look means. I haven’t had to do this before. It’s too much. All too much. I want to scream out loud and choke her to death, but then the only kind of heaven I have known will be gone and I will be dead too. I can’t do it.

  “Mateo?” she questions me.

  Dead girls can’t talk. I silence her with a searing kiss. Her moving hands graze my heaving chest, but she pulls away.

  “I have to go to the restroom. I will be right back,” she says, moving to stand.

  Uncertainty returns.

  I will strip her bare and make her mine. Humiliation and love are the same thing, right?

  Juan

  I have seen hell and come back to tell you who lives there.

  My savior strangles me, he takes my life and I can feel it fade away as his words still make their way into my ears. He is telling truths so sad, my heart is shattering. I remember the things they taught me when I first started out in this profession about breath play and how to stay alive when someone is crushing your windpipe. His daughter, I feel sick. She is in there fucking her cousin who loves her but not me. If I live, I have to run away. This place is tainted with madness and disease. They are all crazy and I will go crazy too.

  I fade away and I see the fiery pit of hell burning like the incinerators down below, it’s hot and the flames are burning me alive. I don’t want to die, I stayed here so I could live. I am sure I heard him say goodbye. Am I dead? Please let me live. I will leave. I will go home to my middle class family and the school I ran from. The bullies are nothing compared to the wolves of this place. Suburbia always seemed to be hell, but if I survive this, it will be a welcomed heaven on earth. I will go home and hug my mom, and my dad is an asshole, but he is not them. I float here in a cloud above the burning heat that threatens to take me away. I will my body to just draw a breath; just one will bring me back from the dead, I know it. I just need to fill my lungs with air. My body is weak from Mateo’s assault. I let him do it. I didn’t resist it or fight it. This place has already made me crazy, and the darkness of these men has consumed me and spit me out. Caesar fucked his daughter. Mateo fucks dead people, he is shoving his dick in his cousin right now. She is insane, I heard her screams and the pleading to die or be raped. I saw her beating herself. This place is as close to hell as you can get without dying.

  Black, pitch black silence claims me at last. No burning fires or singing angels, just black silence.

  ***

  Air. I feel it rush into me. It’s warm and it s
ticks to my lungs, but it pulls me from the darkness and I suck it in deeper. Then, I wish I hadn’t as pain sears its way down my throat, the air burning so badly as it saves me that it kills me. I want to cry but I can’t make a sound. I just manage to breathe for a while. I feel life slowly coming back to claim me and I am grateful for now that I have escaped the clutches of death. As I swim in the place just before you wake up, I am drowning in his words and the sins and disease of these two men for the first time since they came into my life. Why didn’t I take the money and go home when I had the chance? They sucked me in and kept me here. I didn’t even realize how quickly I was lost to the demented world that exists in this building. He loved her, maybe not as a father should, but I know he loved her. Is it wrong then? It’s wrong, Juan. I watched Mateo rape the girls that are comatose downstairs, every single day fucking the limp lifeless bodies. He said he loved them, so is it rape if he loves them and they don’t know?

  I’m still swimming in the murky waters of insanity when I hear voices and I can feel a hand on me. A slap to my cheek that is enough to pull me from the abyss. “Where is Caesar, boy?” Mateo is asking me and he sounds panicky. I try to talk but my throat is raw. I can’t make the words come out of me. I try to swallow and the pain is unbearable. After a few attempts, “He told me things, then left.” I look around, see it’s only Mateo, and I am scared he will kill me now. “What did he say boy, where is he?”

  “He said she is his daughter, Mateo. Your Lettie is his daughter and he fucked her.” An evil smile creeps across Mateo’s face as he looks at me, delighting in what I just said.

  “I know, boy. It’s perfect, isn’t it?” His laugh cackles and reeks of evilness as it erupts and echoes through the room. Mateo leaves me there on the floor as he walks from the room, yelling for Caesar. I just know he won’t find him. Caesar is gone. The man who looked at me and spilled his shame was not coming back from wherever he has gone. I force myself to crawl the small distance to my ‘hole’ and heave myself onto the bed to sleep.