That night, she tried on her new clothes and perused the latest edition of Glamor Face while Walt dismantled the corpse in the master bathroom.
They fucked again before going to sleep. This time it lasted a lot longer and was a lot more brutal.
Famished, Walt brought in a plate of meat and scarfed it down while Erica dozed off.
Routine
Over the following weeks they established something of a routine. Walt went out hunting during the day, bringing back his kill and butchering it in the bathroom. He had begun gluing the bones, which were numerous, to the walls of the apartment. It didn’t take long for the living room to be completely covered in them. Erica would wake up in the morning, shellac makeup on her face, dress in the most expensive clothes she could steal, and wander around downtown Dayton. One day Walt had surprised her with a silver Jaguar and, some days, she took that to the malls and restaurants in the suburbs. They reconvened in the evening to have lengthy, sometimes brutal sex before falling asleep in front of the torture or war footage on TV and waking up to do it all again the next day. They didn’t talk very much. If they did, Walt would talk about his kills and she would talk about her errands and neither one of them was much interested in what the other one had to say. Sometimes Erica would mention someplace she wanted to go, like another city or another country, and Walt would tell her that they were just fine here. If she got too insistent then he told her she could go by herself and maybe if she did then she shouldn’t bother coming back. Him saying this should have hurt her but, if the situation were reversed, she would have probably told him exactly the same thing. Nearly every night she contemplated going out to the balcony to try and see the man in the parking garage but she never did. It was like this for the next few months and she saw them doing it for a very long time. He seemed so content doing what he was doing and she seemed so content wanting to do anything else that she really didn’t see either of them doing anything different.
Some time in early October, they had their worst fight yet. Only Erica wasn’t really sure it could constitute a fight. For her, it wasn’t in response to any kind of emotion happening inside of her. It was merely the reaction she felt like she was probably supposed to have. She couldn’t speculate as to how Walt felt, his interior monologue was mostly a mystery to her, but she imagined it was more self-defense.
The thing about a routine was that when one part of that routine was altered it became obvious. While they hadn’t completely stopped having sex, the nature of it had changed. While watching bombs drop over some foreign country or a scared dark skinned man being waterboarded, Walt stopped taking off his clothes and stripping Erica out of hers before violating her in varied and mostly painful ways, inevitably depositing a copious amount of come somewhere on her. Instead he just lay there until she initiated it. Half the time she felt like she was raping him. And then they would slowly grind against each other for a few minutes before Walt would go soft or, if she were on top, completely lose interest and fall asleep. She would then either take her laptop into the bathroom and masturbate herself to orgasm while watching pornography or, if she didn’t feel like browsing for porn (she was kind of picky), she would rub it out to images of the models (sometimes male, sometimes female) she remembered from Glamor Face, imagining their heated, oily skin sliding against her. And while this was okay, she came to realize that it wasn’t a substitute for the real thing.
On the night of the fight or disagreement or tennis match of learned reactions or whatever it was, it had been two weeks since the last time they had fucked. Erica spent fifteen minutes giving Walt head, trying to get him hard. He said he just wasn’t interested. Didn’t feel like it. She took her mouth off his cock and lay beside him with a sigh.
“I notice the girls you’ve been bringing back are younger and younger. Some of them are quite attractive.”
“Yep. I told you about that.”
“Have you been fucking them?”
“No. Of course not. You asked me not to do that.”
For a while she had believed he hadn’t been doing this. But, in that second, the reality of it finally hit her. Walt did exactly what he wanted to do. He didn’t feel bad about doing anything. Of course, he knew she didn’t want him doing that, but it didn’t mean he had to stop doing it, it just meant he knew he shouldn’t admit to it.
“When did we start lying to each other?”
“What makes you say that?” He acted really interested in what was on the TV, a man reading Ulysses to a dog while a young Mexican girl tap danced next to them. Possibly torture footage. She wasn’t sure.
“You’ve always said you do whatever you want so I don’t know why you’re bothering lying to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
She stood up and went into the bathroom. He hadn’t yet gotten around to dismantling the corpse of the gorgeous black-haired girl, completely naked, ice blue eyes staring up at the ceiling. He’d gotten lazier and lazier about this. Sometimes there would be two or three corpses in the bathroom and if she questioned him about it he would describe it as a ‘weekend project.’ Sometimes this meant a lengthy and elaborate gorefest but mostly it just meant chopping them up and throwing their body parts at pedestrians. As distasteful as it was, she reached down and slid her middle and ring finger into the girl’s vagina. She knew exactly what she was feeling for, she’d certainly swallowed enough of it, wiped enough of it out of her own vagina, felt enough of it drying on her skin. She wished she had been more surprised when her fingers came away slick with Walt’s come. The thought of tasting it was even more repulsive so she held it close to her nose and smelled it. Not that she had smelled a lot of semen but Walt’s was very distinct, possibly because of his unique diet consisting mostly of human meat.
She came back into the bedroom, on Walt’s side of the bed, and held her glistening fingers under his light.
“This is what I mean,” she said.
“I’m still not understanding.”
“Your come in that girl’s cunt.”
He continued to watch TV. “You’re right. I’ve fucked quite a few of them. More and more of them lately. But don’t worry. I’ll come back to you. It’s different with them and there’s certainly a lot more variety in their appearance, but there’s something about the living that I couldn’t completely do without.”
“But why would you lie about it?”
“You told me you didn’t like for me to do that. I tried arguing my point but you wouldn’t listen.”
“Do you understand why it would upset me?”
He shrugged, continued to focus on the TV.
“What’s that mean? You do understand? You don’t understand?”
“I haven’t tried to understand. We’re different people. You can’t expect me to feel everything you’re feeling.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed and slumped her shoulders. She actually had no idea what she was feeling. It wasn’t hurt. It wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t even really anger. Maybe there was a trace of anger but it was more because she had asked him not to do something and he had done it anyway. She grabbed the remote and clicked off the TV. Because all of the lights in the apartment were almost always on, it didn’t really make a difference in anything other than sound. It made it seem incredibly quiet. Even the city sounds from outside didn’t seem to penetrate whatever wall Erica had built around them.
Walt grabbed the remote and turned the TV back on.
She grabbed his arm. “Do you not understand?” she said.
“What is there to understand? You’re mad. I understand that. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Be sorry or regretful or something, I guess.”
“Do you want me to feel that way because that’s how I’m supposed to react? This is what I don’t understand . . . Why do you want me to feel something I don’t feel for your benefit?”
“If you honestly don’t feel any of those things then . . . maybe we have a problem.”
She picked up the remote control and threw it at the TV. Nothing too dramatic happened. The battery cover came off the remote and the batteries went clattering onto the floor, rolling under the TV stand. The TV was still on. She opened the drawer to his nightstand and pulled out his gun. He didn’t seem any more alarmed than he was before.
“What? You’re going to shoot me?”
“I should shoot your fucking dick off.”
“Then I couldn’t fuck you anymore.”
“You’re not fucking me now.”
“Is that what this is about?”
For him to denigrate her argument to what she felt was the lowest common denominator upset her further. Or maybe it was just that what he said was true. She pulled the trigger, not aiming at him, and a flurry of feathers puffed up from her side of the bed. She tossed the gun beside him. The reason she hadn’t shot him was because she realized there might be a very simple solution to her problem.
“I have to get out of here,” she said.
He didn’t say anything.
She went into the bathroom off the hallway and changed into a pair of black skinny jeans and a loose black sweater and covered herself in makeup. She grabbed the key fob, took the elevator down, and went outside.
Girl’s Night Out
She remembered passing the Epoch the first time she had been out wandering around and thinking she should go there and wasn’t exactly sure why she had never gone. She remembered a conversation she’d once had with one of her high school boyfriends. He’d said that, when it came to sex, girls had it easy. He said guys really had to work because they would have sex with just about anything and girls knew this. He said a guy could not go to a bar and pick up anything but the oldest, most desperate woman if he wanted a one night stand with a stranger. Or, best case scenario, the drunkest. The guy had to put in time. A girl, he said, could walk into any bar alone and be picked up, probably within a matter of minutes. And it probably wouldn’t be by some fat loser either. Good looking guys were predatory, he’d said, whereas good looking women were usually high maintenance, unless they had some psychological disorder or were just blackout drunks.
Erica stepped into the bar, wondering if she would be picked up in minutes. Being virtually unnoticeable, it seemed unlikely. She certainly hadn’t attempted to get away with the amount of shit Walt had. And, despite trying to get him to explain this to her, she still wasn’t quite sure she got it. It seemed more like an exercise in diversion than anything supernatural. If she were not wearing nice clothes and a fuck ton of makeup, she could slide under the radar easily. She got that. But Walt was a good looking man, even though he’d begun putting on a fair amount of weight, and she wasn’t sure good looking guys made it a point to wear nice clothes and makeup. Yet she’d seen him go completely unnoticed while doing things that should have had every cop on duty swarming him. She went in thinking she wanted to be fucked. She didn’t care what the guy looked like. Yes, she wanted sex, she wanted a penis in her vagina or at least a mouth on her vagina but, more than anything, she wanted to go home to Walt and tell him she had let some strange guy fuck her and see how he reacted to that. She was assuming it would be with anger but any sort of response would have been better than the strange white hum she thought perpetually rattled around his insides.
There weren’t a lot of people in the bar. Around ten. Only two of those were women and it looked like they were there with boyfriends or as part of a group dominated by guys. Erica was pretty sure this was going to be easy. She sat at the bar. She lit a cigarette even though she didn’t see anybody else smoking. She had no idea if you were allowed to smoke in bars in Ohio or not. It seemed ridiculous to not be able to. She didn’t see any ashtray or anything but wasn’t too worried about it. She waited for the bartender to come over and take her order. He didn’t. Maybe he was just busy. A group of three frat looking guys came in and he immediately sidled over and asked what he could get them. She tucked her cigarette between her lips, went behind the bar, grabbed a glass and helped herself. She turned with her drink in hand to lean against the bar and look at its patrons. She had no idea how the art of seduction worked. She just told herself that if anyone made eye contact with her, she wouldn’t lower her gaze to the floor. No one did. She drained her beer pretty quickly and swiveled back around to put it on the bar. The bartender, spotting the empty glass, said, “Another?” without even looking at her.
“Sure,” she said. He went about filling another glass.
So he noticed the empty glass but not her.
She downed a couple more, smoking cigarette after cigarette. She hadn’t been this drunk since the night at the Boys’. She went to the bathroom to piss. On her way back out she ran into a thin guy not much taller than she was.
“Oops,” she said.
He grabbed her around the hips and, had she not been so drunk, she would have probably realized it was just to move her out of the way. Instead, she took it as a sign of sexual aggression and, falling into the man, said, “I need someone to fuck the hell out of me.”
That seemed to get his attention. He nudged her back into the bathroom, into a stall. The only thing he said was, “I’m going to keep going until you tell me to stop.”
She never told him to stop.
It didn’t last very long and, having accomplished exactly what she’d come here for, she went straight from the bathroom out the front doors and back to the apartment. Walt snored from the bedroom. She went into the bathroom to throw up. The toilet was already filled with a reddish brown substance that could have been diarrhea, vomit, or some sort of viscera from one of the corpses. She flushed the toilet and it made her think of the day she had first met Walt. She remembered thinking he was sick. Now she thought that again but it didn’t carry the weight it did before. Once the toilet was filled with clean water, she vomited and flushed it again before she had the chance to stop herself because she really just wanted to leave it. Walt would have known it wasn’t his. He would have known she had drunk until she was sick and, in his head, this would have meant she’d had a really good time.
She went into the bedroom, stripped the comforter from Walt, and took it out to the couch.
Confession
Erica woke up to the clear autumn sunlight blasting her face and Walt standing over her. He had his shirt raised and stroked his stomach with his right hand. She was momentarily confused until last night came back to her. She immediately realized why she felt like shit, physically, and why she felt like she had done something wrong. Then she remembered that Walt was the reason she had done that thing and that she was supposed to be mad at him.
“Why are you sleeping on the couch?”
“I didn’t think you’d want me in the bed with you.”
“Why?”
He had caught her off-guard. She knew there was a rationale behind doing what she did but she was having trouble latching on to any particular line of reasoning. She guessed there wasn’t really a need to draw it out. If she wanted him to be mad about it, if she was trying to get some sort of reaction from him, the best thing was to just tell him and get it over with.
“Why?” she repeated.
“Yeah. Why are sleeping on the couch? Why did you think I wouldn’t want you in bed with me? Because you almost shot me?”
“No. I went to a bar last night and hooked up with a guy.”
“Hooked up? You mean you fucked somebody else?”
She wanted to smile and gleefully shout, “Yes! I fucked somebody else! Some stupid guy I knew for all of two seconds fucked the hell out of me in a public bathroom!” but knew she wasn’t supposed to be happy about it. She lowered her head, looking away from Walt, and nodded.
“How was it?” He seemed calm, not exactly the reaction she expected and maybe even hoped for.
“It was . . . okay, I guess.”
“You could have brought him back here. I told you not to say n
o to anything. I hold the same standards for you as I do for myself.”
“Aren’t you the slightest bit mad or jealous or anything?”
He took a deep breath, rolled his eyes up in his head as though visibly searching his brain for something, and said, “No. I don’t think so. So, is this going to be a . . . thing?”
“A thing?”
“Yeah. Like with me and the meat. Is it going to be something you do all the time?”
She wanted to tell him she didn’t know. That she thought something like that was impossible to predict and she just didn’t have the capacity to know what she wanted from day to day. She wanted to tell him she didn’t really anticipate being here much longer but didn’t want to say anything like that. It seemed too final. As bad as she had convinced herself it was, in the end, they did have each other to come home to, and that was something.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Just wondering. I mean, I get why you did it.” He held a hand out, the same one he’d used to stroke his stomach, and placed it gently on her arm. “You got mad when you found out I’ve been fucking all those dead girls and you wanted to even the score. I’ve told you that I’m probably going to continue that behavior and just wanted to know if you’d keep doing things like this to get even with me.” He put his hand back under his shirt, continued stroking his stomach. “I just want you to be safe. That’s all.”
Sociopaths In Love Page 12