by J. A. Huss
MADDIE
My angel is gone.
It’s the devil who has a hold of me now. Complete control over me in this moment. My smile is his smile. The pressure of the pitchfork tines against the sensitive skin of Tyler’s lower abdomen is his doing. The scratches I’m leaving on Tyler’s scarred body—
Tyler’s scarred body.
I glance up at him. He’s breathing hard, his eyes fixed on mine. “Don’t stop,” he says, his voice urging me to resume the punishment. “Do it again.”
I close my eyes for one long second, make a decision, then open them and keep the pressure constant, forcing myself to forget about the scars.
Tyler groans, but he fucks me harder, his cock crashing into my pussy like this is the last time he’ll ever get this chance. And he’s taking it. Embracing it, leaning down to kiss my mouth, until the tines puncture his skin and little pin-pricks of red appear on his flesh.
It’s not fair, I decide. It’s not fair that all his damage is visible and my tragic past is hidden inside.
“You hurt me,” I growl into his kiss. He’s got my knees up to my chin, spreading me open as he slams his body against mine. His cock fully inside me. His balls slapping against my ass, which feels so good. But all wrong. And it makes me sick for a second.
“Hurt me back,” he whispers, still kissing me. Like he can’t stop himself. Like the kiss makes what we’re doing—what he wants me to do—all right. “Get even,” he says. “Take whatever you need from me.”
Selfishness isn’t part of my true nature. I’m a giver. But right now I’m not myself. I’m the devil. I’m pissed off. So angry that I always have to fight for everything. So sick of the struggle. So tired of losing.
And right now all I want to do is take.
I want to take everything from him.
I want to wipe him off this fucking planet.
I want to make him sorry he ever came back to Vegas.
I want to make him leave me, and this city, and never fucking come back.
“Please,” he says. He nips at my lip, gently first, then harder. Insistent. Unyielding. Trying to keep me on task. “Harder,” he says.
I wanna hurt him the way he hurt me, only worse.
I never want to stop hurting him.
I want to lose my temper the way I did with Logan. And just… damage him. Forever. Make him stay down here in purgatory with me. Stuck in an unwinnable existence, caught in the eternal penance he owes me, trapped in the nightmare I’ve been living in since—
“Maddie,” he says. “I said do it!”
I throw the pitchfork aside, dig my fingernails into the tight flesh of his shoulders, and scrape them down his arms until the scratches bleed.
“Yeah,” he groans. “Just like that.”
But then he’s just fucking me harder. And the slap of his balls against my ass just feels better. And his tongue seeks me out, twists us together as I lift my legs a little higher, and spread my knees a little wider. Until he grits his teeth, his body stiff. Like he’s about to come.
And I think—for like half a second—Good. Let’s get this over with. Just come, get off me and—
But his fingers are between my legs. Strumming my clit the way I like it. The way I told him I liked it the last time we were fucking in this alley. And all that bullshit I was just spewing in my head just… floats there. Waiting. Like some ethereal mist that fuels my hate and rage. A cloud of poison that, if I let it, might just dissipate and let the engine die.
And then it does.
Leaving me alone with my self-loathing. And all my losses. The ones I’ve been stacking one on top of another until they became a tower so tall it reaches past heaven. And when the tower wobbles, like it’s gonna fall and crash back to Earth in a pile of rubble that never gets put back together again…I come.
Lying on the trunk of Annie’s car. With Tyler Morgan on top of me. Blood under my fingernails like evidence. Sun shining down on us, illuminating our filthy, sinful souls.
Or maybe… or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s our shared contrition. Maybe we’re both sorry. Maybe we can let the hurt and anger go and make something new. Something better to take their place. Something beautiful. Maybe we’re both looking for a way out of this fucked-up purgatory we put ourselves in since—
I close my eyes and wish it to be true, just as Tyler pulls out and comes on the front of my devil costume.
My hope dies like the manic desperation after climax.
Because nothing about what we just did was beautiful.
TYLER
As I look down to watch the vibrant red of her little devil negligee get painted with streaks of my cream-colored come, I notice the blood winding its way down my chest, along the ridges and valleys of my scarred flesh, and I feel nothing. No pain, I mean.
Unsurprising. I’ve never really had to endure physical pain. Which would probably sound weird to someone if they heard me say that, especially if they knew I’d been stabbed and set on fire and blown up and all that crap. But I just don’t really feel pain. Not like other people do, anyway. And that’s not something I’m, like, y’know, proud of, or think makes me cool or tough or anything. It’s just true.
My threshold for corporal suffering has always been incredibly high. Ever since I was a kid. Used to drive my dad crazy when he’d smack me around and I’d just smile at him. One time, after I said, “Aw, Pops, is that the best you can do?” he went ape shit and damn near took my head off. It fucked me up, definitely, but I never really hurt from it. Not sure why. Maybe my nerves are wired differently than other people’s.
I dunno.
Point is, I realize that this is a good start, but if Maddie’s going to get satisfaction in the form of punishing me for my sins, we’re gonna have to work a lot harder.
Speaking of Maddie…
“What the fuck?” she yells at me.
“What?” I ask back as the last bits of come stream from my cock onto the flowy fabric she’s wearing.
“Why did you just fucking do that to my costume?”
“Wha—? I—What do you mean?”
“You coulda come fucking anywhere, dude, why there?”
“I dunno. Just… Fuck. I dunno.”
My erection now does a double-time retreat and I shove my softening and still leaking dick back inside my pants.
She slides off the trunk of the car, pulling the come-covered material off, over her head, careful not to let it touch her hair. Suddenly, I feel like a fucking twat, so I look around for my t-shirt, grab it up and put it back on.
She zips up the crotch of her panties and is now standing in front of me in the morning sunshine wearing nothing but a red bra, red panties, red stockings with a fucking devil tail hanging off the back, and two little horns on her head.
And my dick catches a second wind.
She throws her little dress in my face, which I assume she intends as an act of further punishment, but when I smell her and me mixed up together like that, all it does is make me hotter.
“You coulda come over there”—she points—“or there”—she points somewhere else—“shit, you coulda just fucking come inside me, but—”
“Really?” I ask, a bit surprised at that sentence.
“Yeah, whatever. You know I’m on the pill. You saw that shit when you went rummaging through my bathroom. Jesus. But you had to fuck up my costume. And now I gotta go buy another one. Christ.”
She open-hand smacks me against the chest, and when she pulls her hand away, she looks taken aback. I glance down to see that my white t-shirt is weeping with blood from where she dug into me.
And for a moment, I mean like maybe the tiniest parcel of time, I see something in her eyes that looks like… forgiveness. Which makes no sense and maybe I imagined it, but I could swear it was there.
“Fuck, I’m sorry.” I say. “I’ll buy you a new one.”
“No. No goddamn way. I’m not taking your money.”
“Yeah, OK, but sp
eaking of,” I begin as she grabs up her shit from the ground, her unbelievable ass bent to the sky, begging me to shove my tongue inside it. I try to shake off the distraction, because what I want to say feels important. “Uh, yeah, so speaking of money…what’s the deal? How much do you owe those fuckholes?”
She continues scooping up her shit. “Nothing. I don’t. Whatever. Don’t worry ’bout it.”
I’m gonna worry about it. There’s no way I’m not gonna worry about it. Because if it’s just money she owes these shitlickers, then I’ll take care of it for her. Whatever it is. That’s the easiest thing in the world. Well, when you have it, I guess. But I do, so fuck it.
“Maddie, please, just… fuckin’… let me help you! Shit! Even if you still hate me or whatever, that’s no goddamn reason not to let me give you a hand.”
“I got two hands of my own, and they’re doing just fine, thanks.” She throws her shit in the car, kind of ripping the leather seats with her pitchfork as she does. “Fuck! Me!” she shouts.
“What about your parents?” I offer up.
She spins on me, hard. “What about my parents? What do you mean, ‘what about my parents?’ Fuck are you trying to say, ‘what about my parents’?”
I choose not to point out that she just asked the same question three different ways. “Like, OK, fine, don’t take my fuckin’ help, but do they know what’s going on? I mean, shit, surely they can help bail you out of whatever the hell—”
“No one is bailing me out of a goddamn thing, you get that?” She’s poking me now, right in the places I’m bleeding. “I don’t need a fucking bailout. I can only trust one person, and that’s me, and so that’s who I trust, and I’m fucking fine. Get it?”
I take a breath, trying to understand and to be patient, when suddenly it occurs to me that I don’t. Understand. And I’m out. Of fucking patience.
“Yeah. Yeah, I fuckin’ get it.” There’s a little more heat in that than I actually intended, but fuck it.
Sure, I did something wrong once, but I’m trying to make up for it now.
And she fucks me and then tells me to take a hike like I’m… I don’t even know what. And then she fucks me again, and… So, no. No. Fuck that. I’m done. I’m done sitting in the penalty box on this shit. I’ll do whatever in the world I can for this chick, but if she won’t let me, then fuck her. And you know what? If Scotty was here, that’s exactly what he’d tell me to do too.
I know he would.
Seriously.
He would.
I know it.
She stares at me like she’s surprised that I got a little terse with her.
So I do it again.
“What?” I say. “I said I get it. So… I fuckin’ get it. You’re fine. You’re dynamite. Super. You’ve got a handle on fuckin’ everything, so… Great. Good for you. Run with it. Do you, boo. I won’t ask another time. Good luck. See ya. Bye.”
She blinks a couple of times with heat behind her eyes. I keep going.
“Seriously. I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want. Shit, I mean it must really be, because Evan told me that he tried to reach out to you back in the day, back when Scotty…” I stop short because I’m trying to make a fucking point, not be a goddamn asshole. “And he says you just ghosted on him. Wouldn’t return his calls. He’d invite you out and you’d never show. Or swing by and your mom would tell him you weren’t there, when you almost certainly were. And so it hit the point that when your parents moved away, he just assumed you moved with them. That’s how much you fucking disappeared. I mean… ain’t it?”
She looks like she wants to rip my goddamn head off. And so again, I keep going.
“So, yeah, you really must wanna be all the fuck alone. Because Evan’s like the best dude on the planet, and if you were doing that shit with him to… I don’t even know what. Like, make some kinda fucking statement to me? Well, that didn’t work, but you sure as shit did wall yourself away. So brava, girlie. Bra-fucking-va.”
I give her a slow, sarcastic hand clap, and ready myself for the kick to the nuts that I anticipate happening any second.
But it doesn’t.
Instead, her face goes blank. Not sad. Not angry. Not…anything. Blank.
And then—“Fuck,” she sighs out. “Man, you’ve done so much in the world, seen, I’m assuming, so much, and still… the sheer volume of what you don’t know could fill an encyclopedia.”
“Oh, yeah? Really? Who the fuck still reads an encyclopedia?”
I dunno why I said it. Just where my brain went.
“You’re fucking impossible,” she says, and gets in the car. I can hear the squeak of leather as her bare ass makes contact with the seat and I have a hard time…
No. That’s it. A hard time.
She turns on the ignition and presses a button. The convertible top lowers. She puts on her sunglasses, looks over her shoulder at me standing there, bleeding through my clothes, and says, “Fuckin’ dumbass. Next time just come inside me.”
And then she peels off down the alley, around the corner, and out of sight.
NEXT TIME just come INSIDE ME.
Fuck, fucking yeah.
I look around to see if anyone is nearby and if we—unknown to us at the time—have been giving away a free Vegas show, and see no one. Except…
I look up and in the window above the club, looking down onto the alley, stands Pete. Coffee mug and bagel in hand.
He takes a bite of his bagel, a sip of his coffee, and then shakes his head back and forth at me, slowly, like he’s not quite sure what the fuck to do with me.
I smile at him, raise both arms out to the sides, palms up, and, bloody, sleep-deprived, and still rocking a bit of an erection, I raise my left eyebrow, and shrug.
Chapter Nine - Maddie
You know how it is when you’re one of those hard-ass bitches? And you put on that hard-ass show for everyone? Like… you can take anything. Any. Thing. Nothing phases you. You just stare adversity in the face and deal. Climb that fuckin’ mountain and get to the top no matter what. Fuck your fingertips. Fuck frostbite. Fuck everything. As long as you get to the top. That’s the only thing that matters.
And everyone thinks, Damn, that bitch is fuckin’ hard.
And you are. So goddamned hard. You handle all of it. You’re even one of those women who can have an actual casual relationship, right? You want no strings, dude? Just some straight-up sex? I’m your girl.
I don’t do feelings. I don’t get needy. I don’t expect much from people because people let you down. They don’t answer your calls, or your letters, or show up for funerals. And then they go on with their lives and pretend this is just normal, everyday bad luck. Shit happens, right? Life goes on no matter what. Those seconds tick off, and time passes, and they say that heals you, but it doesn’t. It didn’t heal me. It made everything worse and then they come back into your life acting like they never left, and you should just let them be there for you, and you’re like… “FUCK!”
I punch the steering wheel as I scream the word.
Because that’s not who I am right now. Because I’m crying. Because the tears are streaming down my cheeks. Because I don’t even know why I’m reacting this way.
It’s not the money I don’t owe Carlos, either. It’s not that stupid asshole, Logan. It’s not any of those major things that could actually end up killing me.
It’s Scotty, but it’s not Scotty. It’s Tyler, but it’s not Tyler. It’s Pete’s and it’s not Pete’s. It’s my parents being so far away, but not.
There is no answer that satisfies me right now. God herself could float down here into the passenger seat of Annie’s car and give me the fuckin’ answer and it wouldn’t be the answer. That’s how elusive my sadness is.
And the longer I drive, and the more I search for the meaning of my unhappiness, the farther away the answer gets.
The tears are so big, my eyes so filled up with them, the world so blurry with this unexpected sadness,
I pull into an abandoned strip mall parking lot and stop the car.
To cry. Over things I don’t understand. Over people. Over jobs. Over failures. Over mistakes and… still, it doesn’t seem right.
The next thing I know I’m holding Plumeria Brown’s card in my hand. And then I’m pressing her number into my phone and she says, “Hello?”
“Plu?” I say, sobbing.
“Who—”
“It’s Maddie,” I say, still crying. “Maddie Clayton. Remember? I came—”
“Of course,” she says. “Of course. Are you OK?”
I shake my head no, but she can’t see me, obviously, so she says, “Where are you?”
I look up trying to figure it out, because I have lost all sense of time, and direction, and myself. “I don’t know.”
“Are you safe?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Yes. I just… don’t understand why people are assholes, OK? Can you please tell me why people are such assholes?”
“Who’s an asshole?” she asks.
I want to say, Tyler. And Carlos. And Logan. And maybe even my parents. I want to blame all of them for this ugly breakdown moment I’m having right now.
But I can’t.
So, I say, “Everyone. Me. I don’t know. But people are assholes and I must be in that club too, otherwise why? Why would so many of them be in my life right now? Can you please just tell me that? I can take it, OK? I swear. I just need to hear the truth right now, I really just need an honest, objective opinion. And you’re the only one I can trust because you give no shits, right? It’s your job. I mean you have a license to practice, right? And I’m out here failing at everything. And I just need to know, OK? I just need you to tell me why the fuck this shit is happening to me. What did I do? Who did I do it to? Because I can’t take it anymore, I really can’t. I’ve had it. I’m about to drive my friend’s car out into the desert and—”
“Are you having suicidal thoughts?” Plu interrupts.
“What?” I say, halting my crying. “No. Why would you even say that?”
“Well, you’re leading me down a path here, Maddie.”