Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  This was how fragile she had felt.

  She climbed between his knees, forcing them farther apart.

  She said, “It is God’s wish for us to be together, so it isn’t a sin.”

  “Stop.”

  She stroked his dick, gently tugging the membranous foreskin, and shivers crawled on him. Her cool hands massaged him, somehow relaxing and tightening all the muscles from his knees to his shoulders. She bent her head down and whispered, right above his belly, “Say yes.”

  His body pressed air out his mouth. “Yes.”

  Her wet lips parted and wrapped around the head of his dick. Electric charge ripped through the bed. His spine arched and he bowed onto his shoulders, which screamed when his arms twisted against the steel cuffs.

  Years, it had been years, and his blood roared under his skin.

  Ah, un pompino.

  She plunged down, and he wrapped his hands around the iron railings above his head, trying not to shout. Tattered remnants of his restraint fluttered into the dark corners of the room.

  Her head bobbed, and streaks of light rolled across her flashing black hair. He closed his eyes. “Oh, God.”

  She slowed and moved sideways. Cold air slapped his dick. She cat-crawled up his body—lace blouse over her breasts scraping his stomach and chest—and reached for the carved, bulbous nightstand.

  He gasped for air. Reason dove into his forehead and he sighed, “Leila, stop this.”

  “You want this.” She retreated between his bent knees again and he closed his eyes. His soul concentrated to his sex.

  Something cool nudged his ass.

  “No!” His entire body contracted upward, repelled away from her. “What are you doing?”

  She was not going to cram anything into his ass. That was homosexual, and he wasn’t, he would never, and he wouldn’t. “No!”

  He held onto the cold wrought iron in the headboard and pulled himself away from her, but his hands were locked behind his head.

  She grabbed his ankle and yanked. The whole bedspread with him slid toward her. “You’ll like it if you relax.”

  “No!” Panic whipped though him and he scrambled back, twisting his shoulder and wrenching his rotator cuff as the handcuffs pulled his hands farther behind his head.

  She slithered up his body and kissed his lips. He turned his head away from her. A soft, metallic click near his right ear, like a key in a lock, and he opened his eyes.

  Stripes of dark air interrupted the blued steel barrel, and trigger, and grip, in Leila’s hand. Cool steel nudged his temple.

  He jerked away from the flat handgun, but the handcuffs held. His arms and shoulders strained. “Stop!”

  He should have broken away sooner. If he tried to kick her, she might pull the trigger, and the bullet would fracture his skull and cranium shards and chips would slam through his brain. Mortality suffocated him.

  “Lie down,” she whispered near his shoulder, and her lips touched his skin.

  The gun rasped on his hair near his temple. “Leila, put down the gun. Unlock the handcuffs.”

  The slightest tic of the gun’s mechanism lifting the hammer from its rest brushed his ear like her long hair. “Lie back, Dante.”

  “Did the priest who molested you use a gun? Hold it at your head?”

  “Some guns are inside your head.”

  If he kept talking, she might talk herself out and stop this. “I do not understand.”

  “You will.”

  “Leila, you must stop.” The cold gun slid down his temple and rested on his cheekbone. The sharp sight scratched his skin down to his jaw. His heart slammed like repeating gunshots up his neck and into his head. The cardiac clatter cracked with adrenaline and each crash seemed to be the gun detonating and killing him, and he died a hundred times every minute.

  He was shocked to find himself alive a hundred instances, every minute.

  His dick strained to bursting.

  The gun pressed under his jaw, and her cool fingers wrapped around his testicles, massaging, threatening. “Lie flat.”

  He slid carefully down until his bound hands were above his head and he lay flat under her.

  She crawled backward through the light-streaked dark and parted his legs again with her knees. Her hand holding the gun drifted down near his ribs, rubbing muscle and ribs, and the muzzle still pointed inward toward his heart.

  The only thing he could do was breathe.

  He wrapped his hands around the iron headboard, and his eyes burned.

  The cold gun chilled his belly. In a beam of white light, her finger curled around the trigger. The hammer flinched. The bullet would singe up his chest, enter under his chin, and blow the top of his head off.

  Light stripes followed the curve of her cheek as she smiled in the dark. “Don’t move.”

  Her hot mouth was on him again, and he gasped. One of his feet slipped on the silk.

  Again, something cool nudged his asshole. “Do not do this. I understand.”

  Her mouth came off him and cold air clung to his wet dick. “You don’t know shit.”

  The small, cool thing pressed his skin. “He threatened you.”

  The cool thing wormed into his body. Leila’s wet mouth engulfed his cock again. She licked him while he was inside her mouth.

  Something besides the heat and shocks of the pompino was happening to him. The nerves in his dick were squeezed between her mouth and the small, cool thing, like his dick extended deeper into his body and it all rubbed.

  She stopped and whispered, “I love you,” then grabbed him again with her hot mouth.

  Sensation drained from his body into his chest and his balls clenched and he crashed out. Every spurt sucked his brain, blasted down his spinal cord, and cannoned his soul out of him.

  Dante held no illusions that she loved him.

  The pedophile priest had told her that he loved her. Telling her that was another abuse. It had ripped love out of her body.

  “Oh, Leila.”

  ~~~~~

  The next morning in the courtroom, Bev held hands with Mary, Lydia, and Laura, and they prayed before the attorneys arrived. Bev looked over the wooden benches and milling spectators at the camera crew spooling out cable, uneasy because Dante was late. He had been punctual every day of the trial.

  Mary’s hand gripping hers was cool. “We pray to You, Holy of Holies, and we ask You to soften the juror’s hearts so they will acquit Bev.”

  Telling God what He should do unnerved Bev. Asking for a direct intercession was presumptuous, especially when she had sinned so terribly that God had abandoned her.

  She broke the circle, was hugged, and took her place at the defense table with her black Rosary beads in her lap, sorting though them, praying the Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer over and over.

  Lydia and Laura went home, as it was Mary’s turn to stay for court.

  Mary patted Bev’s shoulder with her long, pale fingers.

  Dante still wasn’t there. He had never been late before. Bev should have demanded and stormed and cried and begged him not to go to Leila’s apartment last night.

  The lawyers trickled in, their shoes’ hard soles sounding like Rosary beads falling on wood, and Heath tapped her shoulder as he sat down. “You okay today?”

  Bev nodded.

  Leila sat on the hard bench behind the prosecuting attorneys, yawning and sipping a triple shot skinny latte. She had slept in her red gauze-draped bed for only two hours, from five to seven, before her alarm clock had shrilled and she had stumbled, still drunk, into the shower.

  Her head buzzed, and the wood rails of the courtroom slanted when she blinked. Her liver chewed through the scotch, processing it like a busy computer, somewhere on that slippery metabolic continuum from drunk to hung over.

  She sneaked a scientific paper out of her oversized black purse and began reading Six-Dimensional Confocal Microscopy, though the words shimmied away. Pictures in the article—green and red fluors like neon ligh
ts bent into arcane Asian ideograms—rippled like she was looking at them through a rainy window.

  Blasted booze.

  Dante had been asleep in Leila’s bed, with the handcuffs unlocked, when she had left for court.

  The judge called the courtroom to order and started the day’s business.

  At the back of the courtroom, the television lights ignited.

  Leila’s half-breed hand holding a thin pen above the tube-light pictures paled two shades from the brightness.

  Her name rang through the courtroom: “Leila Sage Faris!”

  Damn, she had thought she would have some time to read.

  She shoved the paper in her purse and hurried up to the witness box.

  As she got up to the witness stand and looked back at the blinding camera lights and silhouetted crowd, Dante pushed open the door into the courtroom and stood, staring at her.

  Leila couldn’t breathe.

  ~~~~~

  The jury fidgeted and watched Leila Sage Faris.

  Chessa Kendrall scratched her eyebrow and felt too much whisker up there. She should wax her eyebrows tonight. That golden California lawyer Heath Sheldon, the slick defense guy, had smiled at her the day before and she’d had a quick mental flash of what he would be like in bed, doing all those dirty West Coast things. Last night she had shaved her legs and groomed her pubic hair into a heart but all that was for naught if she was sporting a monobrow.

  In the back of the courtroom, Kirin Oberoi was busy tapping notes into her new super-tiny notebook computer and didn’t notice the triangle of glances ricocheting past her, from the grad student to the accused wife to the priest splayed on the doors at the back of the courtroom. If she had seen the recognition whirling among the three people who had survived the apartment that night, she might have written her article that night with less sympathy.

  Hara Carson, in the seventh juror position, craned her neck to see over that boor, Blake Kellen, who sat in front of her and seemed to instinctively angle his pompadour hair to block her view of the witness and the exhibits. Not that she particularly liked looking at the gory pictures or hearing the descriptions of the lurid details, mind you, but she needed to have an accurate opinion about whether a crime had been committed or not. Jury duty was more than a civic duty, after all. It was a sacred duty, to sit in judgment of another human being as if one were God, and the woman on trial was a Godly woman. A priest, a young priest, had sat behind this Beverly Sloan the entire trial, every day. Though Hara herself did not cotton to the Catholic faith, she liked their values, their ideas about marriage and family, even if that celibate priesthood thing smacked of cults. Hara had to be very careful how she judged this Beverly Sloan, lest she herself be judged.

  Blake Kellen leaned on the arm of his chair, trying to get comfortable. When that didn’t reduce the sciatica jolting down his thigh, he leaned on the chair’s other arm and found some relief. Behind him, that bitch Carson woman sighed extravagantly and flopped around. He had had it with her. She proselytized in the lunch room about Jesus. She prayed before morning and afternoon session to know God’s will and do the right thing. He wished her could vote her off the fucking jury.

  Gabriela Rossetti, sitting beside Hara, had forgiven her husband the many times he had beaten her until her skin sagged with bruising blood, and he had struck her many, many more times than once. The testimony from the medical examiner about the bruises on Dr. Sloan’s face and wrist bothered her. This Beverly Sloan might have hit Dr. Sloan more than once, might have abused him, and might have finally killed him if she was, as the prosecution said, enraged when he left her. Her ex-husband had battered the windows and doors of her sister’s house, enraged, before Gabby had received the restraining order. Beverly Sloan might be more like her ex-husband than Gabby cared to examine.

  ~~~~~

  Dante pushed back the heavy wooden doors and stopped, struck still.

  Leila was walking to the witness box and fussing with some papers. She looked up, beautiful there in her crisp white shirt and black skirt, and she saw Dante in the back of the courtroom with his eyes too wide and full of hope and his lips open.

  Beside the door, a camera swung and hot television lights bore down on him.

  Leila glanced at Beverly Sloan, who had turned at the defense table and stared at Dante.

  Bev’s mouth opened, and her jaw shifted forward.

  Leila looked back to Dante.

  The stares of the two women pinned him against the courtroom’s doors. He ran a hand through his sweaty hair and shook as if they held guns on him. The doors behind him rattled in their frames.

  Judge Washington rapped her gavel and said, “Ms. Faris, if you please?” She didn’t know what nonsense this was but they had a full day of testimony. She had already postponed the next trial on her calendar a week because that damned prosecutor felt the need to object to everything and because Heath Sheldon was wasting time playing to the LawTV cameras. She should not have allowed the cameras in her courtroom.

  Dante blinked and, shoving one hand in his pocket, composed his expression and tried to hide the vulnerable anxiety in his eyes. Last night, his arms and legs had coiled around Leila all night long, as if she were a ruined column rife with vines.

  This morning, when Leila had been dressed and ready to leave her apartment, well-armored in crisp clothes, she had touched Dante’s bare shoulder and he had jumped and flipped toward her, entangling himself in the red sheets, and his eyes had been large and black and hungry.

  He had said he hadn’t slept in weeks and he needed her.

  She sprinted out of the apartment, nearly tripping over her dog to escape.

  The prosecuting attorneys conferred together over their lawyerly notes at their table, their briefcases standing open around them like grammar school books corralled at the desk perimeter, hiding answers from the bully across the aisle. George Grossberg muttered under his breath until he remembered how to exactly phrase that all-important question near the end of Leila’s testimony so that she could produce the equivocal answer they desperately needed.

  Leila stepped up to the witness stand. The bailiff swore her in.

  When Heath tapped her shoulder, Bev turned to the front of the courtroom and watched Leila, with her shining hair so carefully twisted into a French knot, swear to tell the truth.

  Dante found his usual place behind Bev and her lawyer. Bev’s friend Mary removed her satchel from the seat beside her for Dante. He smiled at her, and she bobbled her blonde head to reply.

  She set the bag at her feet and removed a small embroidery project. The gold and green leafed pattern matched the church’s Easter altar cloth.

  Dante touched Heath Sheldon’s shoulder and, when Sheldon turned, made writing motions, asking for a pen. The lawyer passed back a thick black felt-tip pen and a legal pad.

  ~~~~~

  “Ms. Faris, could you tell us what happened that night?” George Grossberg asked.

  Leila recited the pithy, skeletonized answers that they had agreed on:

  Conroy had been alone in the apartment when Leila arrived around ten o’clock.

  George the avid prosecutor nodded, and his curly brown hair flopped at his hairline cresting the crown of his skull. He checked his notes on the yellow legal pad.

  Leila’s fingernails scraped the wooden witness chair. That terrible night, the first thing she had told Conroy was that he was an idiot. She had tried to fix his stupid mistakes, leaving his wife, blowing his career. She had told him what to tell his wife, and yet he couldn’t find it in himself to keep his life together, to become the department chair and to receive the grants and prizes and to have his family, as if he had been happy to throw it all away.

  He had turned his face toward Leila, that besotted, sentimental, dear avuncular face, and he had said he loved her and that he couldn’t stand being without her, the tragic idiot.

  He had written a note for Beverly, Conroy said.

  A note.

  Blither
ing idiot.

  Leila recited her lines.

  She had left the apartment, and Beverly went in.

  George glanced toward the jury box and smiled, trying to charm them. His eyes were Ashkenazi-variegated hazel, a green pond rimmed by black. He gazed at Leila and blinked, scrunching his eyes at her, an affectionate gesture and far too intimate for a prosecuting attorney and his witness.

  She pushed back into the crusty witness chair, adding inches of airspace between them.

  Leila had waited outside and had seen no one else go into the apartment. Monsignor Petrocchi-Bianchi had arrived minutes later and waited with her in the cold February night.

  She had only seen Dante a few times in the two weeks before that terrible night: twice at the church, once at the Dublin, once drunk on her doorstep.

  Behind the defense table, Dante braced one arm against the railing that separated the gallery from the court, as if he were ready to vault over it. His forehead was crumpled and his lips were open, as if he were watching her burn.

  Conroy had declared that he was ready to rip apart his entire life for Leila.

  The priest, last night, had clung to her.

  She destroyed men.

  She and Dante had entered the apartment, and Leila found Conroy unconscious on the kitchen floor with a knife in his chest.

  Conroy’s long arms and legs were tossed carelessly on the vinyl linoleum and that knife stuck in his chest, like a child’s amateurish mounting of a grasshopper with a silver pin on a white board, and Leila’s throat had exploded and she had screamed.

  Conroy’s breath rattled in his chest, pneumonic.

  She had leapt at the floor with her hands and tried to help him breathe because he was suffocating. He might have thought he was in a well or a cave or buried alive. The damned priest had tried to pull her away but Conroy couldn’t breathe.

  The priest had seen what happened to people who loved Leila. He should take that to heart. He shouldn’t have said those things this morning.

  And this damned George lawyer shouldn’t be smiling at her.