The Sopaths

by Piers Anthony

  “Letting go?”

  Then she burst into tears.

  Oh. She had warned him. She had accomplished her duties as she saw them, then collapsed. All he could do was lie there beside her, letting her do what she had to do.

  “Please, if you would,” she said. “Hold me.”

  He put his arms around her as well as he could as she turned into him and sobbed into his shoulder. He was conscious of her soft breasts beneath the pajamas, pressing against his chest. Yet again he felt guilty for noticing, despite the recent sex, when what she needed was comforting. So did he, actually, but holding her like this was comforting him too. He could almost pretend she was Zelda.

  Soon she slept, and he did too.

  In the morning he woke to find their mouths together. They were kissing!

  He drew his face back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “It’s all right, Abner. You didn’t do it. I did.”

  “You kissed me?”

  “Last night I couldn’t. This morning my subconscious seems to have accepted you. Do you want more sex?”

  He was taken aback. “I—no, thanks.”

  Her hand felt down to touch his member through the pajamas. “You lie. Give me a moment.” She got up and went to the bathroom.

  In moments she returned, nude, and surely prepared. She got down on him, found his member, brought it out from the pajamas, and slipped it into her. This time she kissed him as she brought him to climax. It had been only a few hours since the last time, but the novelty made it almost as explosive. He felt pulse after pulse of ejaculate forging into her. She wasn’t Zelda, but she was more than good enough.

  She remained with him until the last ebb was out, still kissing him. Then she got up again and he heard her running the shower. She was nothing if not efficient.

  She fixed breakfast while he showered and dressed. She had settled in amazingly quickly. He might have felt resentful, but instead was relieved. Alone, he would have been transfixed by grief. As it was, that was only one thing amidst competing interests.

  “I need to be candid,” Bunty said when breakfast was done. “Yesterday morning I was wiped out. You extended a hand, gave me a place to stay the night, made me feel almost normal between bouts of self pity. I am deeply appreciative.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “I thought I was doing you a favor, but having you here has eased my own wipe-out. I will be sorry to see you go.”

  “Must I go?”

  “No!” he said before thinking. “I mean, I have no right to hold on to you, but your company has done as much for me as anything I have done for you. As you said, neither of us would have chosen this path, but given that we were thrust into it, I am immensely grateful for your company.”

  “I had hoped you would feel that way. But I have to be honest. I knew I needed help and support, so I angled to get it whatever way I could. From the first. I was desperate.”

  “From the first?” he asked blankly. “You were weeping by the husk of your house. All I did was extend a hand.”

  “I was distraught, yes, but not unconscious. I saw you were a man. I flashed you with my legs.”

  Abner felt his jaw fall. “I thought that was accidental.”

  “Such things are seldom truly accidental. Then when you helped me up, I stepped into you and embraced you, pressing my torso against yours. Making you want me. That was an unfair ploy.”

  “You wanted me to take you home!” he said.

  “I was shameless. I used you. Once I was in your house, I did everything I could to make you want to keep me.”

  “Because you had nowhere else to go,” he said.

  “Yes. Today I am sure Pariah will have some sort of placement for me, and I am ready to go. But I would prefer to remain here with you. This is a function of my continuing desperation. I needed you to know, before making my pitch.”

  “Your pitch?”

  “So you understand just how cynical it is, at the root. Like selling a new product by amending it with bangles to evoke a desire despite its uselessness. I want to stay, and I believe I can make it worth your while, one way or another. But I can’t take it further without being sure you understand exactly how you are being manipulated. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Manipulated,” he repeated, bemused.

  “Including the sex. I played you the way a woman plays a man. But fair is fair.”

  “But I would have helped you without all that! You don’t need to vamp me.”

  She nodded. “I think that is true. I didn’t know you well enough, so I couldn’t afford to gamble on your decency. I apologize.”

  He considered her carefully. “Complete cynicism. Like that of a sopath.”

  She rocked back as if struck. “Dear God, you’re right! I hate that. I don’t deserve any more of your courtesy. Let’s go see Sylvia. She should have advice for me, where to stay while my identity gets sorted out.”

  He felt abruptly guilty. Was she still playing him? “No, wait. I haven’t heard your pitch.”

  “You want to hear it now?”

  “Yes. You strike me as a woman who knows what she wants and goes efficiently after it. What you have to say is bound to make sense.”

  “Then bear with me a moment.” She got up and went to the downstairs bathroom. He heard her sobbing. Oh—another siege of grief. He knew exactly how that was.

  Soon she emerged, her face repaired.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was an unkind analogy. I said it without thinking.”

  “It was an accurate one. That’s what got me. I was acting like a sopath. I can’t blame you for being turned off.”

  “The pitch,” he reminded her tersely.

  “It is this: I need you, because I have no resources at the moment. I am ready to do what is required to make you satisfied to have me remain here.”

  “Yes, you demonstrated that last night.”

  She made a wan smile. “That, too. You are similarly devastated, and, as you admitted, ill-equipped to handle things like housekeeping, laundry, meals, and shopping. The thousand little things that keep a family going. But you will need to handle them, and keep your health up, because in a few days you will have to return to your job, and do it well. Otherwise you’ll lose it, and you’ll have one hell of a time getting another. Because of what happened.”

  She was on target. “I guess I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  “I can provide the support you need to function. So you can go to work and pretend that things are normal at home. Because they will be, to the extent I can make them.” She gave him a straight look. “I can’t offer you the reality, just the illusion. No love, of course. But you won’t have to struggle with anything at home. That’s worth something.”

  “It is,” he agreed. “The illusion of family.”

  “And the ordinary details of running the household. It isn’t much, but it’s all I can offer. It doesn’t have to be permanent. Just until we both get better organized. Mutual convenience. A practical matter.”

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  “But I thought you--”

  “I don’t think you’re a sopath. I regret saying what I did. Stay. If the sex is a turnoff for you, no need to do it. Your deal makes sense.”

  “Sex is not a turnoff for me. It’s a tool. Part of my arsenal. I don’t have a lot of skills, but I’m good at what I do, and that is part of it. You know that it’s a service, like the housekeeping. I like doing it well. I feared my realism in this respect would repel you.”

  “It doesn’t. You have skills I lack. You are practical in ways that I am not. You are right: I need you to shore me up in my hour of crisis. You need me similarly. We surely have little in common apart from the horror of our losses, but for now we are good for each other. Until that situation changes, stay here. Please.”

  “Thank you. I confess to being strangely drawn to you, apart from the mutual convenience.”

  He smiled. “Women ten
d to be drawn to me. I don’t know why, but more than one at work has hinted that she would be available if I were interested. Of course I have not taken advantage of them.”

  She gazed at him with an indefinable expression. “May I kiss you?”

  He realized that for her such a kiss was more significant than sex, despite kissing having become part of their sexual interaction, because it signaled her true feeling. The fact that she asked was similarly significant. She was signaling its importance to her.

  He stood up. “Let’s kiss each other.”

  She stood and joined him. They kissed. She was firm and yielding, fitting herself perfectly to him, and her lips seemed to be on fire. His desire was rekindled, as perhaps she intended. Yet he felt the first spark of something that would challenge their agreement that there was no real love in their relationship.

  CHAPTER 3

  They went together to Sylvia’s house. She was busy trying to calm two children. “They’re just in,” Sylvia said. “Police brought them. Two different families. Both freaked out.”

  “Maybe we can help,” Abner said.

  Sylvia became fully aware of him. “Yesterday—you took the woman home.”

  “Me,” Bunty agreed. “We worked it out.”

  The little girl was about five, with a wild tangle of dark hair. She looked startlingly like Bunty. She took one look at Abner and ran to him.

  He picked her up and held her, and she cried into his chest. Again, what else could he do?

  Meanwhile Bunty went to the boy, who was about six. She put her arms about him and kissed the top of his tousled blond head. He too dissolved into tears.

  “You seem to have the touch, both of you,” Sylvia said. “Do you want to take them home?”

  Startled, Abner exchanged a glance with Bunty. She nodded.

  Thus suddenly and simply, they were driving home with the two children strapped into the rear car seats. The children had really chosen them, and they had accepted.

  At the house, Bunty took over. “What’s your name?” she asked the boy.

  “Clark.”

  “Yours?” she asked the girl.

  “Dreda.”

  “Clark and Dreda, what happened to you was too horrible to talk about. You are here now, and we will take care of you. We lost our families the same way: sopaths.”

  “Sopaths!” the girl cried, shrinking away.

  “So we understand. We don’t blame you. Now how about some chocolate ice cream?”

  That got both children’s attention. Soon they were eating dishes of it.

  “You’re a wonder,” Abner murmured behind Bunty.

  “This is my sphere of expertise,” she murmured back.

  But both children remained tight after eating and having their faces wiped. “They’re afraid to let go,” Abner said. “We have to reassure them.”

  Bunty tried. “It’s okay to cry,” she told the children.

  But they didn’t. They had cried before, but not now. “They think they’re being adopted out,” Abner said. “They don’t want to make a bad impression.”

  “Understandable. But how do we reassure them?”

  “I think the nuclear option.”

  “You have the nerve to try it?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll try.” He faced the children. “You are each survivors of sopaths. You don’t have to tell what happened. But I will explain about us.”

  The two gazed at him.

  He took a breath. “There was a sopath in my family. She killed her brother.” He saw the boy wince. He had seen similar. “Then she killed her mother.” Both winced. “Then she tried to kill me. I picked her up by the feet and cracked her head into a wall, and she died. I killed my daughter. I hate it, but I did. She was a sopath.”

  Dreda wailed. Then she came to Abner. He picked her up and held her close.

  “And I killed my son,” Bunty said. “By throwing him in a fire. He was a sopath too.”

  “I had to do it,” Clark whispered.

  “Because he was a sopath,” Bunty said.

  “Yes.”

  “He tried to kill you.”

  “I had a knife. I was afraid of him. He was smaller than me, but, but--”

  “Merciless,” Abner supplied.

  “When he tried to stab me, I stabbed him first.”

  “You had to,” Bunty said. “He was a sopath.”

  Now he cried. She took him in, comforting him.

  “It was the same with you?” Abner asked Dreda. “You don’t have to answer.”

  “He tried to—do a bad thing,” the girl sobbed.

  “He tried to kill you?”

  “No. He—he always wanted to see me bare. I wouldn’t let him. Mom protected me. But then he killed Mom.”

  “And you had no more protection,” Abner said, trying to control his shudder.

  “He had a knife. I was afraid, and took off my dress. He got bare too. He had a—his thing was hard, sticking out. He held me down and tried to put it in me, between my legs.”

  Her brother had gotten a random erection, and tried to rape her? “How old was he?” Abner asked.

  “Seven.”

  It was possibly normal curiosity. Boys did wonder what was supposed to be special about girls. Maybe the boy had seen a sex video, and tried to emulate it. When he had his erection, and opportunity. “How far did he get?” Abner asked carefully.

  “It wouldn’t go in. It was too big. He pushed harder. It hurt. I screamed, but he didn’t care. He dropped the knife and used his hand to push his thing in. Then it really hurt. I screamed and screamed, but he wouldn’t stop. So I grabbed the knife and jammed it into his neck. Then he stopped. There was blood all over. I got away. He died. I killed him.”

  “That is called self-defense,” Abner said.

  “But he wasn’t trying to kill me. Just to get his thing into me. If I’d let him, he would have gone away. Like when he wanted my candy. If I gave it to him, he went away. He said it was because he liked me. I should have let him put his thing in. But it hurt too bad.”

  “He tried to rape you,” Abner said. “You defended yourself. You were right to do that.”

  “But if he liked me--”

  Abner spoke very carefully. “Sopaths don’t like anybody. They only use them. He liked the idea of raping you. Most little boys don’t care about sex, but some do. It makes them feel good. Even if it makes the girls feel bad. He was wrong to try. You were right to stop him. Even if he died.”

  “I was?”

  “You were,” Bunty agreed. “He said he liked you so you wouldn’t fight him. So he could do what he wanted. Because it’s hard to do when a girl is fighting it. He was using you.”

  “He just wanted the candy,” Abner said. “Your body was like a kind of candy.”

  “Little girls are like candy!” Dreda exclaimed.

  “In some respects,” Bunty agreed, smiling. “And little boys can be like snakes.”

  Dreda smiled back. The crisis had passed, for now.

  Then they remembered Clark. He had heard the whole sequence. That could be mischief.

  “You never tried that with a girl, did you?” Abner asked him.

  “No,” Clark said, horrified. “I knew it was wrong.”

  “It is wrong for children,” Bunty said. “When they grow up, and know what they are doing, and the woman agrees, then it is all right. Then it doesn’t hurt.”

  “So you don’t hate me,” Dreda said.

  “We don’t hate you,” Abner said. “You did what we all did. You killed a sopath. That’s the end of it.”

  Both children looked relieved.

  “Now let me show you your rooms,” Bunty said.

  “But I don’t want to be alone,” Dreda protested.

  Oops. It was understandable, but could they afford to let the children spend nights with the adults?

  Bunty handled it. “Did your folks let you sleep with your parents?”

  “No,” Dreda said uncomfortably.
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  “Because they had adult things to do at night, and you needed to learn to sleep by yourself.”

  “Yes. But then my brother came.”

  There was the crux. “The sopath.”

  “Yes. Because he knew I was alone.”

  There was a potent argument. She had excellent reason not to like being alone. Bunty looked pleadingly at Abner.

  “There are no sopaths here,” he said. “It is sopaths you fear, not boys.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you share a room with Clark?”

  She looked at the boy assessingly. She knew his history was similar to hers. “Yes.”

  Half there. Abner turned to the boy. “Would you share a room with Dreda? So the two of you are not alone?”

  “Yes. I shared with my sister.” He squirmed. “I wasn’t supposed to peek when she washed. But I did.”

  Abner smiled. “So did I, when I was small. It’s a boy thing.”

  “A man thing,” Bunty said with half a smile.

  “Boys peek at girls,” Abner said. “Men peek at women. They’re interesting. But you can’t touch.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you pretend not to notice,” Bunty said. “And she’ll pretend not to peek at you.”

  Clark was surprised. “Girls peek?”

  “We do. But not as much.”

  “You told!” Dreda reproved her.

  Both Abner and Bunty had to repress smiles.

  “Not as much?” Clark asked.

  “Girls are just more interesting than boys,” Abner explained. “So boys peek more. You know that.”

  The boy nodded, satisfied.

  “Dreda is not your sister,” Abner concluded. “But for now maybe you should think of her as one.”

  “You’re not my father,” Clark said surprisingly.

  There was more than one way to interpret that statement. Abner chose the one that fit his purpose. “True. I am not. None of us are related to each other. But you may if you wish think of me as your father, and Bunty as your mother. We are thinking of you as our children. We have all lost our families, and now this is all we have.”

  “But will you take us back to Pariah tomorrow?”

  “No!” Abner said. Then he looked at Bunty.