Sure, he means well, Coach does, in his way. He means well, but there are limits to how much Hank can listen to about how men were being suckered and strung along. Even with sufficient beer, there are limits.
No use arguing with him, either. He’d just accuse Hank of playing ostrich, head in the sand, digging in and doubling down. The willful obtuseness of the hopelessly pussy-whipped.
As if Coach could possibly understand.
The song finishes, the DJ comes on with some blather, and Hank cuts him short. He goes up the walk, up the steps, opens the door. Careful steps, avoiding the creaky spots, finding his way by familiarity more than sight. The air’s kind of stale, kind of musty. Needs a good hard cleaning and airing out.
Maybe, next time he has a day off…
Or, maybe they could look into one of those maid services?
Not that he can afford it, even with the pay bump. Not until he’s paid down the credit cards a bit.
Reaching the kitchen, he flips the switch. The light over the sink shows him their breakfast dishes—he cooked eggs—sitting in cold soap-filmy water. Plates, the egg pan, coffee cups. Plus a spinach-flecked bowl and cutting board, from which he deduces Carla had salad for lunch.
The migraine must’ve come on later in the afternoon, then. He finds the chicken in the freezer, not thawed in the fridge; she probably put it back when she realized she wouldn’t be feeling up to cooking.
Hank runs the hot tap until the dishwater foams. He washes, dries, wipes the counters, takes out the trash. All hardly half thinking about it. A can of stew, even a sandwich, seems like too much extra work. Some crackers and sliced cheese will do him fine.
He eats, then goes down the hall with the same quiet care to avoid the creaky places. By the glow of the digital clock, he can just make out the Carla-shaped lump under the covers. She doesn’t stir. He can hear her slow, even breathing.
In the bathroom, he shuts the door before turning on the light, and as he goes about the routine bedtime tasks of undressing and brushing his teeth, he notices a box from one of the fancy downtown boutiques sitting amid her usual clutter of cosmetics.
Its lid is ajar, revealing tissue paper and the frilly edge of something delicate. He peeks. Silky pink, with milky lace. He can just imagine how she’d look in it, how it’d drape and cling and flatter.
His poor, dear Carla. She’d obviously meant to be waiting for him tonight, with a home-cooked meal and something special for dessert. But, instead, another migraine had to come along and ruin everything.
It had been a long time, too. Since…
Their anniversary? His birthday? The night of his promotion?
No, not then; he remembered how his bosses took them out for a celebratory dinner and she’d been so proud of him, so cuddly and affectionate, he’d been sure they would…until her headache got its claws in on the drive back to the house.
She’d offered anyway, he remembered that, too. Of course he couldn’t take her up on it. How shit-selfish would that have been? And she’d promised to make it up to him.
Clearly, she’d hoped to make it up to him tonight.
Maybe, he thinks as he slides gingerly into his side of the bed, trying not to jostle her, he should stop and pick her up some flowers tomorrow. She deserves them. He’s a lucky, lucky man.
***
Cynthia-Lynne Abbott, that blonde beauty with not much in the way of tits but legs like holy-Judas-whoa, is really liking what Troy’s doing.
This time, she thinks, she might actually get there.
But, before she can, she feels what else he’s trying to do. On the sly. Like she won’t notice. Like she can’t tell the difference between rubbing fingers and a probing, naked dick.
She pushes him away, smacks him on the chest. “Troy, I said no!”
At least he doesn’t give her the confused innocent act. He flops over onto his back, with a big disgruntled expulsion of breath.
“God damn it, Cyn, what’s the matter, why not?”
“I’ve told you!”
“Saving yourself, yeah, but for what?”
“Until I’m sure. Until I’m ready.”
“We’ve been going together how long?”
“Off and on,” she reminds him, a well-honed edge in her voice.
“Okay, okay, look, I’m sorry.”
It’s the same conversation they’ve had before, the same song-and-dance so well-rehearsed it could be a vaudeville routine. She’s just so hot, so sexy, he wants to be close to her, it makes him crazy, is that so wrong? While she maintains there are plenty of other things they can do, plenty of other ways to enjoy each other, why does he have to be hung up on that?
What she suspects, though, is if she lets him have that, he’ll lose interest. She’s binge-watched The Tudors. She’s seen the way her playboy uncle goes through women. She listens to cautionary musical laments by Adele and Taylor Swift and Lorde.
The eager, kindling, close-to-climax rush in her loins is lukewarm history. She swings those holy-Judas-whoa long legs out of his bed and goes looking for her panties. Which she’d intended to keep on, but she’d finally convinced him to do the slow firm circular pressure instead of jabbing at the button like someone impatient for an elevator, and it had been feeling so fantastic and she hoped he might let it be about her for a change, not about him or his hardon or his prowess and bragging rights.
No such luck. He’d had to go and try to sneak it into her—bareback, no less, when they’d also had plenty of those discussions before—and ruin everything.
Sometimes she wishes he wasn’t so annoyingly rich and handsome and perfect. Or less of an arrogant asshole. Why couldn’t there be more guys who were both nice and confident and attractive? Real-nice, not Nice-nice.
Panties, check. Wispy silk whispers up slim thighs. She starts gathering the rest of her clothes. Troy lounges there in the rumpled sheets, looking like he’s posing for a hook-up site. He hasn’t bothered to readjust the briefs he’d eased down, as if hoping the sight of his still-semi will change her mind.
It isn’t fair. She wants to, she does! This whole staying-a-virgin thing is a colossal pain. But she isn’t going to be anybody’s conquest, anybody’s fuck-and-dump, like Uncle Sebastian’s ongoing list of been-there-done-thats.
Troy says, “So, you’re leaving?” and she says she guesses she’d better, and he tells her hey not to be mad, and she contemplates telling him to f.o.a.d., but she can’t and she doesn’t, and they do the usual closing routine of who’ll text whom later, so it isn’t another of their break-ups, and she drives herself home.
On the way, she passes Vintner’s Green, the golf course, dark and quiet in the middle of the night.
It makes her think of that one guy who works there, Marty’s friend, Jake. She’s seen him out there lugging golf bags, groundskeeping, driving the little carts. He’s got a cute smile, and an even cuter butt. He looks like he’d be a good kisser.
Good at other things, too.
She’s still thinking along those lines when, after turning out the light and setting her phone on the nightstand, she slides both hands under the covers to finish herself off.
Mmmm. Jake. Oh, ooh yes. Touching her, kissing her, doing it right.
Maybe she should ask Marty about him some time.
Smiling, Cynthia-Lynne drifts into contented sleep.
Chapter Ten: Confession
“So,” said Beth, “you never did tell us why you thought that crazy demon-summoning shit might actually work.”
Jake, with an abashed grin, coughed and looked away. “I…yeah…well…it was dumb.”
“Obviously, but what was it?”
They were in the apartment, him at his computer, her kicking back on the couch, and Devon taking a turn in the gaming chair because Marty was stuck working a late shift at the Shop-N-Go. Spencer wasn’t around for a change, being off helping some relative or another with something it was best not to know about on the grounds it might be incriminating.
He’d show up eventually, Jake figured. Text them or drop by, acting like nothing had happened, or all butthurt because they couldn’t take a joke. In the meantime, none of them had seen or heard from him since that night in Vault 420, and it was just as well.
“Fuck him, anyway, the fuckin’ fuckstick,” Spence had said, a sentiment with which the rest of them were inclined to agree.
“I always said he was a douche.”—Beth.
“That totally wasn’t funny.”—Marty.
Like quotes from movie reviewers. So what if the guy had money and a car? They didn’t need him to buy their damn pizza. He was a fuckstick douche, and the stunt he’d pulled hadn’t been funny.
As far as Jake was concerned, Brendan could shove it. Made him look stupid in front of his friends, his posse, his crew…yeah, thanks a lot, Brendan, thanks a lot, go to hell.
Even if, okay, it hadn’t all been on Brendan. Jake himself had to own up to his own share in the looking-stupid thing. He sighed, seeing Beth giving him an impatient and skeptical pierced-eyebrow hoist.
“You know my granddad, the one who was big into local history?”
She nodded. “Who told you about Shelter Park and everything, yeah.”
“He also got into genealogy the last year or so before he died. Family trees and that stuff.”
“Like we had to do in third grade? I remember that. Mrs. Sharpe, what a bitch.”
“Only, further back, like, way back. He traced ours, on his side, his mom’s side, and…oh, damn it, it is dumb, let’s just forget it.”
“No way. Spill.”
He sighed again. “Okay, okay. So, he traced it back, way back, and found out that his mom’s grandmother, which would be my…great-great-great-grandma, I think…anyway, she was...”
Jeez it felt even dumber saying it aloud, but they were both looking at him, waiting expectantly for his answer. Devon had paused his game—not Hellslayer, just a cheap Call of Duty knockoff first-person shooter Marty’d picked up on sale.
“Her name was Temperance Nachtwald,” Jake said.
Devon’s expression only went more confused, but Beth gawped at Jake a second and then flung back her head to whoop a loud laugh.
“Sssst!” he hissed, jerking a thumb toward the wall.
Beth reined in the laugh, but with effort. “The crazy lady who poisoned all those kids?”
“No! That…” He glanced down again, the shame-blush once more burning hot in his face. “... that was her sister.”
“Wait. Wait.” She sat up straighter on the couch and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Are you seriously telling me that, because your granddad connected your family with the weirdo witches of Blackwell Hill...”
“Weirdo witches?” asked Devon, now beyond confused and into totally lost. “What?”
“Back in pilgrim times, two hundred years ago or whatever,” Beth said. “Hexes and curses and burning people at the stake.”
“That happened here?”
“It happened lots of places,” Jake said. “Only, the Nachtwalds, they, well, everyone believed they were the real deal.”
“And you thought...” Beth snorted another laugh into her curled fist. “You thought being related to them meant you had magic powers? Our own half-assed Harry Potter?”
“I know, I know! It was stupid, okay? The whole thing was stupid. Look, can’t we please forget about it? When I went back down for the plates and Dev’s mom’s windchime and stuff—”
“Yeah, thanks, she would have wondered,” Devon said.
“—I got rid of the candles, kicked around and stirred up the ashes and salt. It’s a mess in there, yeah, especially the dried goo from whatever silly-string crap Brendan set off, but you can’t tell what was going on.”
“That’s good,” Beth said. “Anybody hassle you?”
“No, didn’t see anyone.”
The bums hadn’t even been around, though of course it’d been the middle of the day, which probably meant they’d taken their PLEASE HELP GOD BLESS cardboard signs to whichever spots they’d staked out. Vault 420 itself had smelled like burnt toast and ass, and the signature clock must’ve been jarred when it fell from the wall to smack Spence on the head; its hands now stuck at more like 5:35.
Definitely no longer a cool place to go.
In fact, Jake would be perfectly happy to never visit Shelter Park again, let alone what was under it.
Being down there had still given him some residual creeps, but the creeps were more than overshadowed by embarrassment. Embarrassment, humiliation, anger, and shame. If he had run into Brendan, Jake might have kicked his ass.
He almost could’ve sworn, as he stuffed the ruined papers, the chewed plastic dog-dish, and other junk into a trash bag, he’d heard whispers from the darker reaches of the bunker’s halls. Whispers and snickers, mocking, laughing, making fun. Hey look, there’s one of those dink-brains who tried to summon a demon.
Yeah, real funny. Hilarious.
Of the monster-leech-bug-thing, there’d been no sign. Brendan must have taken it with. Probably cost him plenty. Probably, he’d try to spring it on them again at some point, and then Jake really would kick his ass.
There was also the matter of the damn video. Beth had sent it to the rest of them, but not posted it yet. As far as Jake knew, none of them had watched it yet either; nobody was in a hurry to see how fucking stupid they looked, screaming and freaking out.
Jake was also concerned about what it might show of him. Beth wouldn’t have zoomed in for a close-up, but he’d made it this far in his life without having his dick on the internet, and he’d really prefer to keep it that way.
That he’d done it…
In front of his friends. In front of Beth and the guys.
At the time, in the moment, it hadn’t been about sex, or lust, or pleasure. Nothing like that. What mattered right then hadn’t been any ultimate goal of naked nympho devil-chicks. What mattered was the ritual. The power. Bending the forces of magic and nature to his will.
God, what a complete and utter moron he’d been.
This was how people got swept up in and carried away by crazy cult shit.
Devon and Beth left before midnight. Jake sat at his computer a while longer, trying to decide what to do, what to watch, what to play. Nothing held his interest. When he realized he was so bored and distracted he was contemplating cleaning the apartment, he decided the best option was to say screw it, and go to bed.
Not that sleep proved within easy reach, either. For a change, the behemoth next door with the neck-tats and the temper was the one who could stand to lower the volume—something with a laugh-track, canned and phony, forced, overdone.
When he finally did start to drift off, it was into a vague, drifty half-there half-dream of floating…or flying…or swimming…not falling, he knew that…the sense was of being both supported and weightless…surrounded freedom…a moving through without a pushing against…a slipping and gliding, slip-sliding, like from a song…
And someone was there with him.
Warm and aqua-blue.
A liquid, musical rippling…harpstring murmurs.
The shimmer. The glow.
Aqua-blue yes aqua-blue the shine of her eyes and her slow, lingering touch…
Intimate. Erotic.
Desire.
Yes. Desire and craving and urgency and need.
Needing him. Wanting him. To touch and to taste.
Her?
Why her, of all people? Of all girls? It was a dream, only a dream, a conscious corner of Jake’s mind saw/knew/recognized that, but strong enough of a conscious corner to let seep in senses of guilt, of betrayal.
Oh but she wanted him needed him to be with him to kiss and caress, here, now, like this, their secret their secret let her touch him let her taste him let her take him into herself her welcoming eagerness ready and moist and receptive and how good it felt, yes, to feel her curling and closing and clasping snug-h
ot-wet around him, and what she could do, the sensations, slick and coaxing, rhythmic pressure.
A dream but what a dream, what a dream, because no way in the real world no way any real girl let alone her let alone Cynthia-Lynne Abbott of all people and Marty was his friend, had been his friend since they were kids, not that she was Marty’s girl or ever could be, Nice Guy or not, friendzone or not; maybe there were leagues and maybe there weren’t but if there were, she was way out of Marty’s, out even of Jake’s, and he barely knew her to speak to, never mind the other day at Vintner’s Green when she’d been there for brunch with her uncle and some of his big-shot rich hotel friends and she’d made eye contact with him, eye contact and a little smile and kind of a shoulder-wiggle with a finger twining in her hair and Spence was right her legs in that hug-sleek skirt holy-Judas-whoa and did that make him Judas, betraying his friend?
But she wasn’t Marty’s girl. She was Troy-fucking-Cahill’s, if she was anybody’s, wasn’t she? Wasn’t she?
But Marty loved her. Marty loved her and Marty would die if Jake so much as said hi to Cynthia-Lynne Abbott, let alone be here like this be here with her like this…
Be here with his cock in her mouth her head bobbing her throat drawing his cockhead deep her tongue curling and slip-gripping his shaft while her hair whispered damp silken tendrils over his groin and thighs while she cradled and fondled and rolled his balls in her mouth in her mouth her lips there too her tongue circling his cock and also plying his balls and slithering around them and under them worming between his buttcheeks and tickling-nudging-teasing, teasing and then easing, easing in, as her head bobbed her lips suckled her tongues lapped and coiled and squeezed and milked, sopping warm slurping mouths and throats and tongues, cupping his balls and engulfing his cock and delving squirmy-wormy up inside him…
So good, God yes, so goddamn good!
His hands reaching, reaching for her head, thinking to stop her had to stop her oh so good but so wrong wasn’t it wrong why her why him why now why like this, not wanting to stop her never wanting her to stop all the things she was doing all her mouths and her tongues working him coaxing him milking him how could he stop her when it felt so good when he was coming, coming so hard, coming again and again surge after gushing copious surge as she throated him so deep so goddamn deep gulping and swallowing taking it all gulping it down, and he couldn’t stop her wouldn’t stop her wanted her never to stop, reaching for her to hold her there to keep going keep going yes keep sucking licking drinking take it all take him all drink him down drain him dry with his cock in her throat and her tongue in his ass and his balls in his mouth and his hands on her head, her head slippery and pulsating with her hair twining alive, those damp tendrils alive and moving, medusoid, undulating, moving!
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