Too bad about Brad. More than repulsed, Janice felt sad. He was a fine man, with much to draw her love. But he was also yet another lover not ready for commitment, a bit of chaff in the wind, restless, blown by the next new breeze where his lust’s caprice dictated.
Well, she’d show him what he was about to miss. His clear unreadiness to embrace only her—his silence in the car—did nothing to diminish his ardor in bed nor did she suddenly hate or revile him. Sad case. She’d turn it on for him, be more uninhibited than ever, let the memory of her flesh burn into his brain, feeding his future regret. Happiness now, sorrow hereafter. That’s what she decided to aim for. Hers, his, theirs.
She pushed him down on his back, a sudden surge from her orgasm. She was rough; the springs jounced as he hit the mattress. Then, straddling his skull, she boneground her open pussy onto his mouth and helped herself to a big serving of hard cock. In went its head, an inch of shaft hot and pushing upward, another, another. Gag reflex, an ache of stretched lips, gotta get past it, a little click at the back of the throat, there it was, and she lipped a wide few inches more until his ballhair tickled her nose. “Oh, Jesus,” he gasped around her squished crush of cunt, men loved this shit, and she undicked her throat, shafted down again past the click, once more, once more, hurrying him, feeling the pulse and throb of his cock and carrying him all the way onward into the peak moment from which he would, she hoped, forever after tumble into regret.
His loss. She drank deep, draining him, regretting, knowing she’d too suffer; but his would last longer, poor fool, and when he woke to his folly, she’d have moved on, seeking the one-woman man she knew was waiting for her.
Perhaps it was the rich creaminess in the one he met that night, the surge of sweater-fill, perfectly embodied desire, top to toe; or perhaps it was his home trouble, a trio of wives tired of denial no matter how ruthlessly he tried (once Esme’d left) to compensate with knifeplay and the sinking of sharp stakes near the heart. Whatever the reason, he urged the wheat-blond Bekka back to her condo, where he tongue-fucked her into realms of bliss, and then drained her an albino white, supercharged beyond bloat by the beauty of her dying whimpers.
Tonight he wouldn’t summon Esme. And tonight at his arrival home, the fourway equation of his household would change. They’d know. They’d smell Bekka’s rich offering on him. And they’d know he hadn’t shared as he’d done so many times before. Time to ditch them, time to shove the stakes clean through and behead them, time to concentrate exclusively on Esme.
Esme. He geared the lowlying BMW and roared out on the road. She’d stay forever in that special state, half-alive, half-undead. Through the ages, he’d adore her and pamper her, savoring the fine lacings of her blood, being her primary fucktoy as he was hers, bringing her along to witness his engorgings and sharing-in-sex the best of the alluring ladies he found to feed his needs.
He thought of his wives, how once they’d been loving and capable of being loved. But that evanescent state of bliss had vanished under his greed, too swift the turning of them, too fast the imbibing of their lives, until they had turned into needy things of mere sex whose names he’d long forgotten. There was use in depravity, and his lust enjoyed could not be gainsaid. But there was also use in paring a strayward life to the bone and starting anew, in tossing off the detritus of mates gone sour.
He threaded through glaring lights and moving metal, eager to reach home, to clean house, to subsume his bride and sweep her into eternity with him.
The night was warm and the surfpound beckoned. Esme suffered the three to strip her where she stood, a button popping off between bloody fingers that shredded and tore her blouse asunder. Taut elastic wired against one thigh and snapped free; then more viciously upon the other. No clothing blocked the salty breeze, only hands everywhere, touching her, turning her on. Then they lifted her, need heavy about them, and carried her around the house out to the moonlit shore.
Dune flora whipped past their ankles, and their feet sank and slipped, making their movement toward the sea an amble. Then they stopped, eased her down, connected deep and triangular the moment her back touched the dark sand, soft savage mouths touching her here, here, here. Stings far deeper than he had dared thrilled her, the blood gone from her in a faster slipstream. She gasped and weakened at their taking, at the satisfaction of their need. Then they sheathed their tips and moved to tongues merely, two at her nipples, one at her yoni. Hard sizzled harder, so taut her erectile flesh that it felt bone-like, toothlike, against their ardent tongueswirls.
And then, her hands groping crumblefists of sand, an outward press of arousal turned suddenly inward, needling at tongues, drawing blood, the liquid flowing beautifully into her breasts and past the nerve ends in her clit. So wild it drove her, that she thought she might pass out or explode. These three beloveds were licking her, exciting her, feeding her, turning her, painting hot gold upon her inner heat.
“More,” she said, “more.”
But Flopsy left off suddenly below, mouth gone. The sands shifted softly as she moved. Esme reached a gritty hand to herself, cut it against labia, then more gingerly touched the blood fingers to them, drew in her own blood to feel there a new self-love discovered, wounded to feed her puffed organ’s cravings. Then Flopsy was at her head in straddle, kneeling, hunkering down. Using an inverted V of fingers, she held herself open and lowered the moist meat to Esme’s lips. Her tipped clit was covered, labial razor edges parted and splayed outward in harmlessness as aromatic exudate plashed upon Esme’s mouth. Moonlit pink waited, and the turning Esme bared her teeth, and touched the tips to blood-flesh, arcing them an inch deep upward, the suck coming natural to her, hot womanblood tracing an intimate path through mutated nerve and pulpwork.
She’d show him, came the thought. But she couldn’t, for the life of her, recall who he was. There was only a moon glimpsed past moving thigh, and the high distant cry of sea gulls, and a fourway imbibing of lifeblood—her own below, these three giving at mouth and breast to get back later, and all of it driving her into a dreamy, delicious frenzy unending.
Brad had blown something but he had no idea what. No calls came back from Janice. Or when they did, she placed them at hours she knew he wouldn’t be there, her voice all alien suddenly, not soft at all, on the tape—this or that reason, blah blah blah, we’ll talk soon.
His work became posturing, not that he’d been so fine a manager before. Focus came hard or not at all. Finally he caught her— out of her interminable string of meetings, not traveling to hell and back on business.
Her phone greeting, a real voice this time.
“Hi, it’s Brad.”
“Oh, hi,” a dull tarnish, the polish suddenly off her professional voice.
“Is this a good time to talk?”
“Well, actually no, I—”
“Look, I won’t take much time,” he said. “It’s just, well, it’s just that things were going so well, and all of a sudden they’re not.”
“Ah,” she said, decision there. Pause. Then a shift in tone: “I like you.” Acting again. “I really do. But there isn’t enough there to build anything on, anything—um—long lasting I mean.”
“But I—”
“I need something deeper than you can give me.”
“If you’d just let—”
“I’m sorry, Brad,” she said, “please… there’s no point in calling again. All right?” His head felt woozy.
“All right?” she said again.
“Yes, Janice, if that’s the way—”
“Bye, then.” And she was gone.
Janice cradled the receiver, feeling, despite how in charge she’d seemed, completely at a Joss. What if she’d misread him? What if he really were the one? Stiffness, her phone arm tight under crimped cloth. She relaxed it, withdrew her hand, wiped the palm on her left thigh.
She swore under her breath.
Air change at the entrance to her cube. Looking up, she saw Gene Ryman, chubby guy, nice, standing
there. He had been about to say something, noticed her startle, her demeanor. He waved a hand. “I’ll come back,” he said, a shift already in his body.
“Give me five, Gene,” she said. “I’ll drop by.”
“No problem,” his voice fading down the aisle.
Damn these open cubicles, some bastard’s brainchild, constant distractions and no privacy at all. The impulse to call him back struck, punch up his number, go with him somewhere for lunch, talk it through, be open, frank, not a bent truth nor a screen between them. That was the way to build a relationship. All the books said so.
Ah, but in her gut—and gut feel was all—Janice knew she’d done the right thing. Not done it right, she still needed to work on that; but Brad had rightly been dumped, of that there could be—yes, but there were, goddamn it, there were doubts. Big ugly ones around her tight prissy center of certainty. Life’s a bitch and then she whelps. So Gene had once said, and he’d been right.
She lifted the receiver, jabbed three buttons, got a glitch in her fingers and hit the wrong fourth. Again in its cradle. No. No. She felt the tension in her spine, eased back in the desk chair. Take a deep breath, forget him, get up, go talk to Gene, get her dithering mind back on track. That was the way, let Brad stay dead.
Palming the nape of her neck, Janice rose. Somebody paged someone she didn’t know over the intercom. Drained was how she felt, bloodless, heartless. But she’d get by that soon enough.
Life went on. So would she.
Long before he saw the curved chrome and burgundy of her Maserati etched across the dark doorway of his house, he sensed Esme’s presence, felt the sting of grief in his heart, a spreading outward, a plague. He passed into the house, oblivious to odd shapes and corridors, grabbing up the sex toys and going out the back way, down to the flop of figures on the shore. Silvered in moonlight, they dug and sucked in sensual frenzy, roiling like bloody seethes of fish in a ketch. Entwinement. Kickups of sand at the periphery. The four were interlocked to maximize contact of nip and clit, fangs and labia, with the blood-yield of exposed flesh.
As he approached, Mopsy raised her cranberried lips, her eyes to his. “You mad?” Her gaze fell to the tools. He covered his grief. When her eyes rose again, it found a convincing mask of lust. Mopsy leered through drips of gore, an alluring frog-blink.
“You mad?” Flopsy’s echo. “Must fuck.” She it was who found most delight in the stake and now her eyes grew wide with a sharp upratchet of anticipation.
He laid down mallet and stakes and scimitar, tore off his clothing, saw Cottontail’s dream-lidded eyes drunk at the savory inner thigh of his beloved. Her head seemed a bloated wart grown dark and cancerous, fanged onto it and sucking, her paramour’s thighskin punctured and puffed.
And Esme, dear Esme. His throat bamboo’d with tubed wood. She was arched, pressing a full-breasted nipple to Flopsy’s neck, the bloodsuck overspill idling red runnels down the white of her breastmeat. Her teeth were sunk to inch-depth in splayed cunt, and crusted clit needled into her cheek. But Esme’s eyes, as he retrieved the tools to draw near—these, with their filled canyons of depth, the articulated peaks of love leveled and made brutish, these tore at his heart. She was gone, turned, become just one more monomaniacal wife.
He let them draw him down, embroiling in their flesh feast, sucking, being sucked, hands everywhere, spreading the sting of tooth and cocktip wherever they touched, and taking the needle and knife of needy womanlove wherever a connection flared. But in his mind was mayhem. And when he brandished the toys and sank stake into breastskin, so that their lips steamed in delight at the pain the nearer he drew to their hearts, he, tormented to his depths, met the near-orgasm in Flopsy’s and Mopsy’s eyes and drove home the sharpened rosewood, swing-pound with the mallet, here and here. Cottontail backed off, unpeeling from the gore stickings of torso-to-torso, suddener and suddener in the moonlight, oh-no upon her face and then a turn and arrowshoot along the shore. The staked ones on the sand moved in thrash, arcs of red urine upshot and spattering as big gouts of black blood bubbled and burst from their anuses. Rise of scimitar, a smiting, another, and their shrieking heads dropped sharply off, washed in a gush of neckblood. For all their twitching, they were gone, silent, becoming fodder for the earth.
Esme waited, confused, looking at him, looking away, her eyes, her hands, her mouth groping the air for a love suddenly gone. He took up the last stake and went to her eager arms. Through smears of blood he could still smell her subtle aroma as he kissed her, her fresh sunlight and buttercup scent. He fed her fangs through his tongue and took lipblood and tongueblood from her, one drop, another drop, tasting wife-taint and turning there. He wanted to break right then into tears, but he steeled himself as an impoverished hand found his penis and stroked it hard and fed wristblood to its tip. The stake rose, the chocolate tip dimpled the streaked perfection of her breast, drew a hollow of flesh inward, straining, straining, breaking—a short sharp thrust deep through, twisting it, turning it, not needing the mallet for her, just the determination of his love, the deep penetration of solid rosewood invading the pulsing chambers of her heart.
Esme fell back, trying to pull it out, but he batted her hands away, found the scimitar, swung with a misaimed gouge to the shoulder, then swept clean through, her body seeming to topple like children’s blocks out from under a head that went straight down. Then, stroking himself, he broke down, falling to his knees. He held her head close to her yoni, kissing her lifeless lips, cutting his mouth on her urine-stenched labia, back and forth between them, loving Esme, refusing to believe she was gone. Then back upon his knees he sat, pressing her severed head upon his cock, sucking throat-blood, brainblood, and keening at the moon until there was no blood left. He rubbed that sweet flesh raw, up and down, faster, faster. Then he shot his red seed deep into her and she wept ruddy tears from eyes and mouth, gobbing his naked thighs with the thick liquid of sadness and remorse.
For a time, he considered waiting for the sun to arc up behind him as he stared out at the sea; but finally he rose, found a spade, and buried these three—bodies here, heads there—raking sand over the dunes of burial. Later or perhaps another night, he’d hunt down Cottontail, give her eternal rest. Her scent was still strong in his nose and she would be easy to find. Or maybe he would let her go. But for now, for him, it was nearly time to sleep, a first long daytime of lying there, dreaming about Esme, a first long daytime without her.
Brad was amazed at how drained he felt, whole cities leveled and left in rubble inside him. Through rancorous meetings, and the soulless razzle of pitched ideas in his office, and the black-ballooning of turned-forty Harrison Sanford—through all the pointless scurryings to and fro, Brad filled his usual pointless role. Jabber jabber, she said to him (this one, that one, who cared). And rumblety rumblety, he shot back, knowing by force of habit what in hell to say and being astounded beyond words when whoever it was nodded and sway-hipped from his office.
He cut out at three and hit the bars, his favorites, usually in rotation day by day, now sequential all in one evening. He saved the one with the sorriest cast for the end, smoky haze, lots of solitary heads hunched over dark tables, a sudden belt-back, the reflective glint of glass moving, red circles glowing at the pull of mouths. Joker tending bar, tall walrus-eyed fucker, had seen him dozens of times, never acknowledged it, never said shit beyond a name-it and a that’ll-be-x-dollars.
Brad named it. He named it often. And Janice, more beautiful than he thought possible, hovered and hazed and hurt him. All or nothing, she’d said; and now she’d gone and chosen—or had he?— nothing. Dumped him. Sucked out his love (Jesus, he’d never realized truly how much she’d come to mean in so short a time) and left him to think on might-have-beens. It was gone. She was gone. Sprockets once yanked backward couldn’t be rereeled.
Staring at last into a dreg, sloshing it, he thought suddenly of the ocean. A sad patch of rocks and breaking waves came to mind, a skull-numbing convention he escaped from
once in Redondo Beach to find late-afternoon privacy and feel the sunset deepen that moment’s melancholy. The place called him now. He paid his tab, avoiding the eyes of the bartender, and left.
Hit the road.
His car door slammed in the empty restaurant parking lot, a shatter of the peace but then gone, and the cry of gulls washed in again. He rounded the darkened building, a scrunch of sand against the blacktop, then the softness and unsteadiness of the dunes. A curved paring of beach. At his back swept a soft swish of cars, but mostly he was isolated enough to drop his cool and let hopelessness in. Moon glimmer touched him, chilled him, brought loneliness welling up and sobs. Amid the diamond glitter of moon on sea there glinted red teasings, a sheen of hair, hers.
He paid them little heed—the call of gulls, a crush of nearby tires, the rustle of dune growth in quick puffs of breeze. So, when suddenly a bulked figure appeared to his right, close but gazing out to sea, not at all giving off danger vibes, it caught him unawares. The man wore a leather jacket, was tall and muscular, and his long black hair he’d bound up in a ponytail. His gloved hand held a cigarette.
Reaching into a pocket, the leather creaking, he pulled out a flattened pack. “Want one?” he asked.
On Brad’s left now, he noticed two more men, younger and farther off but still nearby, talking to one another, ignoring him. Same leather. On the back of the one with blond hair, a cherry red BLUDSUKKAHS was emblazoned. “No thanks, I don’t smoke.” Ordinarily he’d be alarmed. But there were times when you just didn’t give a fuck, when a touch of low-down funk made you and the world one. If you looked a lion in the eye and didn’t flinch, they said, he wouldn’t attack you.
“Your call.” Nice friendly manner. He pocketed the smokes. “Peaceful place here.”
“Kinda soothing.” Brad heard distant murmurs behind him. Didn’t fucking matter. Even young toughs could use a break from whatever mayhem they’d been about. And he’d established a rapport with their leader. Pair of rejects they were, taking comfort from the sea.
Love in Vein Page 37