“How much would it cost for you to pick me up and slam me against the wall?” Wes asked. He fidgeted with the corner of the napkin his half-finished drink rested on.
“That’s not really a kink,” Nick said then he immediately cursed himself for just throwing away an extra twenty-five bucks.
“I want you to cover my mouth and tell me not to scream,” Wes said. He was talking to the black Formica top of the table. “I want you to tell me that if I do, you’ll cut my throat and fuck the hole that’s left.”
Whoa, Nick mouthed to himself. That was kinky. Mild-mannered Wes harbored some hardcore, violent rape fantasies it seemed. He was only the second Nick had ever met and it had been a very long time. The one before Wes had left Nick weirded out for weeks afterward. He couldn’t understand how anyone could get off on such a thing.
“After that, I want you to choke me, tell me you changed your mind because a dirty slut like me doesn’t deserve to live,” Wes said. He shivered visibly and let his breath out on a gasp. “How much would all of that cost?”
“One hundred plus the seventy-five,” Nick said. He jacked the price up so high because he was not wild about the idea. Then he thought about how beggars couldn’t be choosers and was about to lower his asking price when Wes nodded.
“Okay,” Wes said. “I can do that.” He shivered again and crossed his arms over his chest. “Okay,” he said again, eyes burning fever-hot. The fetishists always ran hot like there were coals filling them up and smoldering away inside of them. “You look really strong, Nick.”
“Thanks?” Nick said.
“You’re welcome.” Wes reached out and touched Nick’s forearm, fingers lightly trailing up and under the sleeve to trace the curve of Nick’s bicep. “I want you to kidnap me in the parking lot. Come up behind me and tell me you’ve got a knife—it has to be a knife—and if I don’t cooperate—”
“I’ll kill you,” Nick finished for him.
“Yes, oh, yes,” Wes whispered, eyes fluttering half-closed.
There was an ATM just inside the door of The Old Bird and Wes withdrew Nick’s payment from it. They stepped through the door together into the bruised violet nighttime. Wes passed Nick the cash then ducked his head against the chilly wind blowing over the parking lot as he headed to his car. Nick gave him a good head start; Wes was halfway across the lot before he started to walk. He took out his truck keys and for a split second he considered taking the money and running, but he’d never skipped out on a john before. Not even the really damn weird ones.
Nick’s long legs ate up the distance between him and Wes so he caught him just as he clicked the button on his key fob to unlock the doors to his sensible little Prius.
“Scream and this knife goes in your fucking kidney,” Nick growled in Wes’s ear. He pressed hard against Wes’s back with the end of his house key.
“Oh, my god,” Wes said, voice a rasping whisper. “What… What do you want?”
“I want you to shut the fuck up and open the car door. Real slowly,” Nick said.
“Please don’t hurt me,” Wes whispered.
Nick dug the key into his back harder. He squeezed his eyes closed. Told himself to just breathe, he wasn’t really a rapist, this was only pretend. He still felt dirty and evil for what he was doing though.
“What did I say about not talking?” Nick pressed close to Wes’s back, felt the way he was trembling. He pushed him lightly. “Open. The. Fucking. Door. Now.”
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee—”
Nick lightly cuffed Wes on the back of the head. He whimpered then hastened to comply and opened the door. Before Wes could do anything else, Nick snatched his keys away from him. “Get in the back seat.”
Wes nodded and made a soft sound in the back of his throat that could’ve been a small sob or a soft moan as he did what Nick told him to do.
Nick got in the car, fought to get the seat adjusted to suit his greater height and then he said, “Where are you staying?”
“The Sparrow’s Nest Inn,” Wes said in a choked voice. “Room four-eight-zero.”
Nick pressed his lips into a thin line; The Sparrow’s Nest was housed in an old Victorian estate just on the edge of town. It gave guests the convenience of being near to civilization where important things like light bulbs, tampons, soap, deodorant, toothpaste, potato chips and XXL condoms could easily and quickly be procured right alongside the illusion of truly rural living. It was a win-win for the visitor who wanted to get away from it all, but not too far away. It had nicely appointed rooms and very thin walls.
Nick put the car in drive and headed for The Sparrow’s Nest. In the back seat, Wes whimpered and occasionally moaned. Nick had always been curious what it would be like to have a kink or a fetish to call his very own. Some of the shit people were into ranged the gamut from the basic “that’s sorta weird, but all right” all the way to the complex and twisted “you need to be locked away for your own safety and the safety of others” kind. But no matter what it was, how mild or how extreme, the kinkers always got off harder than anyone else.
At The Sparrow’s Nest, Nick parked and got out then motioned for Wes to walk in front of him. He fell in step right behind Wes, key pressing against his kidney again. “Remember what I said: Make a sound and I’ll stab you. Try to alert someone and I’ll stab you. Try to signal that you need help and I’ll stab you.” Each time he said it, he poked Wes with the key. “Nod if you understand me.” Wes nodded and Nick said, “Good. We understand each other.”
They made it through the lobby and up to Wes’s room on the fourth floor—the attic floor. He had barely gotten the door open before Nick grabbed him and pushed him into the room, pulling the door closed behind them.
He did what he was paid to do. In the end, Nick had to cover Wes’s mouth he was so fucking loud about it. All through it, Nick had been falling back on favorite fantasies of his to make it through and keep his dick hard. None of those fantasies involved rape and never had. Then Wes started making throaty moans that rose in pitch, became sharp cries that slipped into the occasional scream. Nick had always loved the loud ones, it didn’t matter—johns, one night stands, the occasional fling that lasted longer than a weekend. He supposed if he had a kink then that was it—noisy fuck buddies. He loved to listen to them come undone.
In the end, Nick came with the feel of Wes’s moans and cries still tingling against the skin of his palm. Wes lay face down on the mattress, shivering and moaning with the aftershocks of being pseudo-raped and liking it. When Nick was done, he took off the condom, knotted it and tossed it in the trash. Then he put his softening cock away and zipped his jeans. It was a rape fantasy he’d been fulfilling, not a soul-searching emo sex fantasy; his pants had stayed on. Violent rapists didn’t tend to disrobe fully before slamming it home in the object they coveted.
Wes rolled over on his back, put his hands over his face and began repeating, “Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god.”
“Happy ghost hunting and enjoy the Christmas Carnival,” Nick said as he opened the door and stepped outside. He never stuck around to watch the shame set in.
Even though he felt like he was the one in need of the rape shower, there was still a bounce in his step as he walked out of The Sparrow’s Nest Inn with enough money in his pocket to buy a decent interview outfit and still have a little left over.
7
Nick was hired on to the janitorial staff at Sparrow Falls Memorial the same day he showed up for the interview. He thought maybe the interview was a formality, that Nancy had pulled more strings than she’d said, put in a good word and wrangled for Nick at least being guaranteed an interview. The head of the janitorial staff was named Carol Ann Wilson and as he left her office, she complimented him on his shirt. Nick thanked her with a smile and thought of Wes.
While the job was labor-intensive, it really wasn’t difficult. Nick was on the night shift and usually didn’t have a lot to do except on weekends. Everyone assured
him that the high volume of traffic in the ER was because of the holidays. People tended to freak out and get a little too holly-jolly that time of year, which left them more prone to trying to drive up telephone poles. The first time he had to mop up a puddle of blood was a real experience and it took Nick days to forget how his reflection looked in the pool of shimmering maroon.
At the end of Nick’s first week on the job, a pregnant woman was brought into the ER after being involved in a traffic collision. She’d fallen asleep and driven right through a red light at an intersection and an oncoming minivan full of carolers returning from disrupting everyone’s silent night t-boned her on the driver’s side. The minivan was going too fast, Nick learned later, but it still wasn’t technically the driver’s fault. Not that it would have mattered. The impact sent him through the windshield and when he came to a stop on the other side of the pregnant woman’s vehicle, what of his face that hadn’t been scraped off was caved in. He was pronounced dead on the scene.
What Nick had quickly learned was that no one noticed the janitors, so they overheard more than even some of the nurses. Which in turn made the nurses love the janitors because they always had the best gossip and they knew how to get puke out of nylon hose. Nick was actually cleaning up vomit in the exam bay next to the one the pregnant woman was rushed to. He heard the doctor barking orders, calling for a surgeon right goddamn now. He heard the nurse say her vitals were fading then she quoted them. The doctor responded with a snarled curse. No one was loud about it like they were in television shows; they kept their voices low though they were harsh. Their job was to save the pregnant woman while also avoiding upsetting other patients that might overhear.
Nick heard when her heart monitor flatlined though. The sound was unmistakable. He’d heard it the day his father died; he’d been dozing in the chair beside his bed when the beeeeeeeeep began. He’d thought it would never end and he still hated the sound more than anything in the world. His dad hadn’t been a rich man, he hadn’t been glamorous or cultured, but he’d been a good man and Nick had looked up to him. Then he was gone like he’d never taken up space in the world.
When he overheard the doctor say, “Oh my God,” then, “We need to try and save this baby, there’s still a fetal heartbeat,” Nick decided it was time for him to take his mop and bucket of puke away from there.
A little while later, he was called back to the ER and sent to an exam bay. Nancy was standing beside the gurney, on it rested a black body bag that domed in the middle, rising like a tumor about to rupture from the vaguely human-shaped mass surrounding it. The sheet beneath the bag was stained with blood that had pooled and splattered on the floor. The entire room was a mess; it looked more like a crime scene than like anyone had attempted to save a life there. Nick almost tripped over his feet he backpedaled so quickly. He did not want to see that.
“Sorry, Nicky,” Nancy said. She had a clean, pale green hospital sheet in her hand. “Ken and Bobby are tied up with a psych admit right now.”
“And?” Nick asked. Ken and Bobby were the two orderlies who worked nights at the hospital. They dealt with unruly patients, helped move infirm patients. They took the bodies to the morgue if the patients became casualties. “No,” he said when she frowned and tipped her head toward the bagged body.
“I need you to wheel her down to the morgue,” Nancy said. “There’s no one else to do it right now; we’re swamped. I’ve got a drunk teenager in exam three with a high fever and a belligerent disposition that I need to get to.”
“Nothing like those drunk, feverish teenagers,” Nick said.
“Tell me about it,” Nancy said.
Neither one of them had any idea what they were talking about, but they tried to smile anyway.
“Shit. Okay, fine,” Nick said. “Where’s the morgue?”
Nancy told him and he nodded then helped her drape the bag with the clean sheet to hide the mess on the gurney.
Nick released the brake on the gurney and pushed the dead mother-to-never-be out of the room while Nancy held the door. She followed behind him and he paused for a second to ask, “Did they save the baby?”
“No, Nicky, they didn’t,” Nancy said.
All the way down to the morgue—the freezer section the more crass employees called it—Nick wondered where the tiny body was. Had they left the dead baby with its mother? Had they put it back inside of her? No, surely not. God, the idea was disturbing and sad and weird. He still kind of wanted to know even though the idea made his stomach flip-flop.
The wheels on the gurney were quiet, whispering against the tile as he pushed the dead woman (and her child?) to the morgue where they would be held at least overnight. Nick wasn’t sure how it all worked yet; if bodies stayed in the hospital morgue until they were claimed or if they were only held there until someone from a funeral home came to pick them up or relatives claimed them. All the possible way stations of corpses, from the place where they became such to where they were buried or cremated were all dots on a morbid map.
He made a left down a corridor and pushed through a set of double doors at the end into a short hallway that was darker than the others. It was older; the clean, bright tile of the corridor beyond the double doors seemed glaring compared to the sallow light in the morgue corridor. The tile was checkered, faded teal and an unfortunate shade of pale yellow that had probably once been buttery, but had darkened to the color of pus.
The lights overhead flickered and Nick almost laughed. It was like wandering onto the set of a bad horror movie. A sign suspended from the ceiling said MORGUE, if anyone was confused about where they had found themselves. The rest of the hospital, the place where the living came and went, was modern and soothing; it was even pretty in a way if you forgot for a little while you were in a place where sick people came to die. The morgue with its short, dingy hall lined with closed doors, its bad light and unfortunate tile was a leftover from at least a decade and a half ago. No one remodeled the hallway of the morgue because so few people saw it and the dead didn’t care.
There was one more set of double doors for Nick to wheel the dead woman through. On the other side, the sick-looking tile disappeared, became smooth, polished concrete. Everything was stainless steel and industrial grey except for the white uniform of the morgue attendant. The morgue attendant who was slowly waltzing across the room in front of the refrigerated drawers, headphones on and his back to Nick. He turned on his heel as Nick stopped with the gurney and stood there, wondering what he should do. The attendant didn’t seem the least bit startled to see Nick there; he smiled at him and took off his headphones.
“Well, she looks bloated,” the man said as he drew closer.
Nick raised his eyebrows at the man as he approached. “She was in a car accident; seven months pregnant,” Nick said. “She died.”
“Did she?” the attendant asked. “I really hope so or else you’ve just wasted a trip and probably gotten the hospital sued.”
Nick grimaced and shook his head. “I mean… she died in the ER and so did the baby. It’s… I don’t know where it’s at.”
“It’s somewhere,” the attendant said. He picked up the chart lying on the slightly concave area where part of her chest wall had been crushed. “Tabetha Selkirk. Odd spelling, isn’t it?”
He spelled the name for Nick who only shrugged. The attendant mimed the gesture and smiled again, eyes big and bright. They were light grey, touched with just enough blue to keep from being platinum; the long fringe of eyelashes around them was thick and dark. Nick thought the man’s eyes were beautiful, but there was nothing warm about them. They glittered and sparkled with the frost of frozen laughter.
“Well, all right then…” The attendant leaned forward and read the laminated tag clipped to the pocket flap of Nick’s work shirt. He flashed more teeth in a grin when he cut his eyes up to look at him. “Nick.” He said it with a click of his teeth on the last letter, like he was taking a bite out of it.
“Yep,” Nick s
aid. “So, where do we put her?”
“No, no,” the attendant said. “Don’t do that, don’t be rude. We’re getting acquainted here.”
“I need to get back to work,” Nick said. It was the truth, but the morgue was also creepy and it smelled funny, harsh cleansers and the scent of cold meat like slabs of beef were swinging somewhere just out of sight. There was the faintest whiff of decay in the air, too; air that was so cold Nick’s breath fogged lightly in front of him.
“I’m Crash,” the attendant said like Nick hadn’t spoken. He held out his hand.
After a second, Nick took Crash’s hand and found it as cold as the air was. “Your name tag says Calvin Newman,” Nick said.
“Printing error,” Crash said.
“Ah.”
If the guy wanted to be called Crash then Nick would call him Crash, though he hoped not to bump into him again. Crash was hot, Nick wasn’t blind; he had those pretty eyes of his, dark, dark mink brown hair and a mouth that looked like it was made for sucking cock. He was trim, athletically built like a runner or a swimmer. He was creepy and Nick didn’t like the way he smiled at him; like he was wondering what Nick’s insides looked like.
Crash sighed. “You’re no fun, Nicholas, no fun at all,” he said. He flapped at Nick impatiently. “Off with you then; I’ll put Tabetha and her spawn away for safekeeping so you can get back to mopping floors and restocking toilet paper. Though before you do that, sign the sheet by the door there so there’s proof that someone brought her down here. Can’t have the powers that be thinking the corpses are walking around.”
“No, I guess not,” Nick said as he turned away from Crash. He signed the sheet to show he had delivered one body to the morgue at 11:47 p.m. on a Thursday.
“Thank you,” Crash said. He sounded like he was smiling again, but Nick didn’t turn around to verify the hunch.
“Welcome,” Nick said.
Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1) Page 6