I take my time. He’s already cum inside me, so he lasts longer. The way he grunts and paws the sheets and tugs at my hair when I’m sucking him off makes me feel feral, sexual. I remember the first time I did this, I felt submissive, even a little dirty. Now I see with every movement how I own him. I was a fool to think he would step out on me. He wants this. After long minutes he’s sitting on, propped on his elbows, his whole magnificently muscled body gone rigid and tight, and as always he tugs at me a little. Always a gentleman, my Victor, trying to stop me before he finishes in my mouth. I don’t let him. I take it and swallow it and make him mine again, and then he’s pulling me up by the arms to kiss him and has me pinned down and I take him inside me again. A push on his chest and I’m on top, riding him.
During the night I lose count of how many times we fuck, making up for lost time. Three or four, at least. By morning I’m stiff and sore but I don’t care. The warm water in the shower relieves the ache, even with him in there with me. I stand in the hot water wrapped in his arms, feeling the heat soak into my hair, the steam warm my joints. The ice queen has melted, and she’s a puddle in his arms. I pray silently. Never take him away from me again. Never ever, please. I want to ride in his car. I want to go home.
It’s nearly eleven when Alicia starts banging on the door. Check out time.
I open it for her.
“Did you two talk?” she asks.
“A little,” I say, with a smirk.
She looks at me like I’ve sprouted another head.
“What now?”
“Go home. I’m riding with Victor.”
Alicia nods, and heads back to her van. I need to make sure I pay her back for lunch yesterday. I’m hungry.
“Vic, I need food.”
He sidles up behind me, kisses my cheek and gives my butt a light smack and a squeeze. Ordinarily I’d protest but I don’t care anymore, let him show everyone. It doesn’t matter.
“Pancakes,” I say.
“IHOP,” he says. “I know where there’s a good one down here. I think,” he says, sadly. “It’s been a while.”
The cleaning woman is on her way down the row by the time we finally leave. There’s a spring in my step there hasn’t been for years. I hop in the car eagerly, Vic starts her up and we ride to get some pancakes in his Firebird.
Whatever may come now, at least I had last night.
He yawns, and his expression darkens. There’s a stop sign coming up.
“Eve?” he says. “The brakes aren’t working.”
Chapter Nineteen
Victor
When I touch the brake pedal nothing happens.
Well. That’s not good.
“Eve,” I say, trying not to panic. “The brakes aren’t working.”
“What?”
“The brakes. Are not. Working. Seat belt.”
She pulls her seat belt on and grips the sides of the seat. I can’t focus on her now. I need to stop the car. First thing, I start slowing her down using the engine as a brake. Shift down, use the engine’s speed to slow the wheels. It’s hard on the engine but I’d rather be hard on the engine than a greasy stain on the curb. I weave from side to side to bleed off inertia as I put her into neutral. The emergency brake does nothing. I think the lines have been cut. That stop sign is coming up awfully fast, and there’s an oil truck headed the other way, ready to cross in front of me. The fucker is slowing down. If I don’t stop the car he’ll smash right into us. Eve never makes a sound.
I weave across the road. The maneuver bleeds off some energy, and when the tires hit the soft shoulder, it draws off yet more. I nose over to the other side. If I try to use the shoulder to stop while we’re going too fast, I’ll lose control, maybe flip the car over.
Oil truck. Oil truck. Imminent oil truck.
I’m going slow enough to try it. I whip left, then right, into the dirt. The front wheel bites and throws up a plume of dust. I frantically pump the brakes, hoping against hope that the might give me a little traction.
The oil truck blows his horn and the world slows, dragging to a crawl. Now Eve screams, at last. It sounds like she screams for a million years, and the tires join her. The oil truck is on his brakes, but it’s no use. He can’t push too hard, or he’ll turn, jacknife and flip over. The stop sign enters my peripheral vision and slides away, in a red flash. I’m looking through Eve’s side of the car, through her window, and seeing a lot of grill and a shocked oil truck driver. Please, God, not like this.
Then, the oil truck is past and my windshield is full of corn. The car bounces, jounces, skids to a stop amid dead brown stalks, each a couple of feet high. The Firebird lurches and groans, shifts a bit, and finally stops.
Eve sits next to me wide eyed, clutching her chest. I grab her arm.
“Eve!”
She shrieks in alarm and throws herself at me. I stumble out of the car and around to her side, grab her and pull her to my chest. It feels like her heart is going to explode through mine. She takes quick breaths and I’m afraid she’s going to start hyperventilating. Jesus. I pull Eve closer and stroke her hair, smooth it to her head. I hear shouting and here comes the oil man in his coveralls, yelling.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“My brakes failed,” I shout back.
He stumbles to a stop. “No shit. How’d that happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is she okay?”
“Yeah,” Eve manages.
“I’m going to take a look.”
“Careful now,” the oil man says.
I crouch down. I’m not going to try crawling under a car with no brakes and no way to chock the wheels, but it doesn’t take much looking. The master cylinder has been sabotaged. Somebody punched a hole clean through it. I rock back on my heels and stand up, my head throbbing.
“What is it?” says Eve.
“Hole in the master cylinder. It gave me pressure long enough to drive down here, then gave out when the last of the fluid leaked out. I have no way to tell when it was done, damn it.”
Oil truck me scratches his head. “Ya’ll need a ride?”
“No, thanks.”
“I should call the police, then,” he says.
Oh. Shit. I’m on parole, I’m not supposed to leave the fucking state, except on business. Great.
“No,” I say, quickly. “Thanks, we’ve got this. Right, Eve?”
She already has her phone out. Calling her assistant, I think.
I grin. Oil man hesitates, eyeing me. Please, just leave. Finally he turns.
“Okay then. Hell of a thing. I guess you’re just lucky, then. Freak accident.”
He turns and walks back up to his oil truck, gets inside, and drives off. It snorts diesel exhaust as it rolls away into the distance. I turn back to Eve.
“Yeah,” she says, reading the sign into the phone. “Hurry. I know, I’m sorry.”
She hangs up, and huffs.
“My assistant is coming.”
“Good. Just pray a cop doesn’t roll up. I’m not supposed to be here. A parole violation would ruin my day.”
“Oh. Great.”
I shrug.
Half an hour later, we’re sitting on the Firebird’s bumper and her assistant rolls up in a fucking Plymouth Voyager, I shit you not. At this point, I don’t care. It could be a goddamn Volkswagen Beetle, as long as I can get out of here. Eve makes arrangements for a tow.
I look back at my car. My Dad’s car.
Now it’s personal, motherfucker.
I crawl into the back of the van. Eve gets in with me, instead of riding up front, and settles against me, her arm around mine.
“Hey now,” her assistant says.
Eve snorts. “Alicia, this is Victor.”
“Hello,” she says, peering at me in the mirror. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“It’s all lies.”
She smirks. “I hope not. Guess I have to ride you all back up home, huh?”
; “Yeah,” Eve yawns.
“I want pancakes.”
They both glare at me.
“What happened?” Alicia asks.
“Somebody punctured the master cylinder on my car. They wanted to catch me off guard. Make it look like the brakes failed.”
“You’re sure somebody did that on purpose?”
I nod. “Had to be. It’s a one in a million shot to…” I trail off.
“Victor?” Eve says, rising as I sit up next to her. She waits, biting her lip.
“My father died in a car accident,” I say, calmly. “His brakes failed and a milk truck from a dairy farm up the road hit him at an intersection.”
The whole car is quiet for a while.
“Victor,” Eve says, very softly. “Did I ever tell you what happened to my mother?”
“No. I never asked. I didn’t want to… I thought it would be painful.”
Eve stares at nothing and murmurs, “A car accident.”
I lean forward, fold my hands in my lap, and stare down at the floor. Fury burns in my lungs like hot smoke. I scrub my hands through my hair.
“I need access to Amsel’s personnel files. You can do that, Eve.”
“Yes. I just need a computer.”
She chews her lip. She always does that when she’s thinking, or upset. It’s cute. I pull her close to me and she starts shaking. She was in that trough between the adrenaline release and the crash, and now it’s hitting her hard. She squeezes me back, her eyes shockingly wide. Her assistant keeps eyeing me in the rear view mirror.
“Are we going back to the house? I’d like to go home today. I haven’t seen my family in over twenty-four hours.”
“We might be in a lot of trouble,” I say, calmly. “I think we should stay away from the estate.”
“Come with me, then,” she says, without missing a beat.
I shrug. Eve doesn’t protest.
Her eyes close, and she sleeps on my shoulder. She didn’t get much sleep last night, that’s for sure. After a rush like that, it’s natural to crash out. It hits me, too. After a few minutes of violent shaking as that I almost died realization settles in, I start nodding off along with her. The next time I open my eyes, Eve is still asleep, it’s mid afternoon and we’re caught in traffic. In the suburbs. This Alicia must live a ways away from the estate, closer to the city. I’ve never been overly fond of this place. It’s got all the crowding and congestion and stale air of the city and exactly none of the personality. It feels like a ten minute drive takes about two hours, and then we’re pulling into a driveway in front of a cookie cutter house in a newly minted subdivsion that wasn’t here when I went away.
Eve stirs, holds my hand as we step out and stretch. Her assistant leads us inside.
Then the kids show up. They must be four and five, a boy and girl, tending towards chubby like their mother.
“These are my kids,” Alicia says, hesitantly. “Hunter and Ashley.”
The kids seem fascinated by Eve. They crowd around her.
“Are you mom’s boss?” the boy asks.
“Um,” Eve says, visibly nervous. Kids always rattled her nerves. “Yes.”
“Shoo, kids, mommy has work to do.” She turns to us. “I have a home office. We can access the personnel files from there.”
The home office turns out to be an unused third bedroom, half packed with school supplies and kid desks. Eve locks us in and Alicia sits down to bring up the corporate VPN, and switches seats so Eve could log in. I stand behind her as she waits for it to connect.
“What are we looking for?”
“Pull up your father’s personnel file.”
It takes her a minute to find it.
Of course, it’s blank. No commendations, no write ups, no notes, no evaluations, nothing. Fortunately that’s not what I’m looking for.
“Nothing here,” Eve notes.
“Everything is here,” I say, pointing to the screen with my finger. “Look. He came on board when I was…” I do some quick math in my head. “Nine.”
“So?”
“So, my father died in a car accident when I was twelve.”
Eve’s voice goes cold. “Vic, not everything bad in your life ties back to my father.”
“Your mom died in a car accident. What kind of car accident?”
“I don’t…” she trails off. “We never spoke about it. If I asked he’d give me a few sentences, and if I bothered him…”
My hands rest on her shoulders. I can feel her shudder all the way up my arms. I squeeze, gently. She takes a deep breath. I can’t help myself and start playing with her hair. Annoyed, she tugs at my hand, but not very hard.
“That doesn’t mean much by itself,” Alicia says.
“Does he have a private office?” I ask. I leave out in my house.
“Yes, back at our house in Philadelphia. He never sold it. He lives there most of the time, now.”
I turn to Alicia. “Do you know where he is right now?”
“I’m not his assistant, but he’s going to some kind of a function tonight. He won’t be in town.”
“Okay,” I announce. “Just a little breaking and entering.”
Eve shrugs her shoulders under my hands. “I have a key.”
“Oh. Not so much the breaking, then. Just the entering.”
Eve giggles.
“Have you two eaten today?”
Eve starts snickering to herself. I can’t help it, I laugh a little, too.
“I’m serious. Kitchen. Now.”
There’s a command in her tone that I can’t ignore, for some reason. The two of us end up in her little kitchen, eating fresh pancakes while her kids watch cartoons in the next room over. They seem a little young to be on their own. Maybe half an hour later their father rolls up, and is startled to see Eve in the kitchen when he walks in. He doesn’t seem to know what to make of me. Alicia takes him aside to talk with him privately, away from us and the kids. I step away to make a phone call about my car. I have the towing company load her on a wrecker and bring her up to a garage I know that works on old General Motors cars. I’d do the repairs myself, but I don’t think I’m going to find the time in the next few hours. Once that’s done I sit at the table and feed Eve bites of pancake from my plate while she almost sits in my lap. We’re like teenagers again.
No matter what happens, at least I have this, right now.
It gets late faster than I’d like. I really don’t want Eve’s poor assistant tied up in this, so I ask her to drive us to a rent-a-car place where I pick up a nondescript Hyundai and we drive into the city. Eve’s old place isn’t actually all that far from mine, maybe a twenty minute walk, but a much nicer part of the city, all ancient row houses, big Victorians. True to her word, Eve has a key and we walk right in the front door. She locks it behind us and I lead the way, slowly. There’s no security system, or anything like that, but we leave the lights off anyway. It’ll be dark soon, and it’s already dark in the house. As I walk around, it strikes me how sterile everything is. This looks like one of those tour houses, where they invited people to walk through and gawk at old lamps. From the way Eve navigates the house, I’d say nothing has changed since she was a kid. She takes me around the corner from the entrance to a large room that takes up a whole corner of the house.
It reminds me, vaguely, of my father’s study, except the antiques are all fake. It takes a practiced eye, or growing up in a three hundred year old house, to pick up on these things. No computer, at least none sitting out.
“I was never really allowed in here,” Eve whispers.
I don’t know why she’s whispering, but I can see the fear making her tremble.
“What are we looking for?”
I shrug and start pulling at his drawers. Everything inside is inhumanly neat, like something out of an office supply catalog. Drawer after drawer.
The bottom one is fake, sort of. There’s a safe bolted into the drawer itself. I crouch down, poke at it. I have no clue w
hat the combination might be. Damn it.
Eve taps my shoulder.
“Look.”
She’s pulled a scrapbook down from one of the shelves. She starts flipping through it.
Newspaper clippings?
I’m a little surprised to see anyone keeps stuff like this anymore. Eve whips through the pages in a flurry, skimming the articles glued to the pages. Finally she stops.
“This one is about my mother,” she says, calmly. “Here’s her picture.”
From the look on her face I can see she hasn’t seen many photographs of her mother.
“Police said it was a freak accident,” she says. Her voice tightens. “Her brakes failed and she hit a tree.”
“Her brakes,” I say.
“Jesus Christ,” Eve murmurs.
It startles me. She’s usually so proper in her speech, at least when we’re not, ah, in flagrante dilecto.
“Do you think…”
“That your father murdered your mother, then my father, and then tried to kill me, or us, the same way? Yeah, I do.”
“These articles don’t make any sense,” she says, sitting in a side chair to go over them. “I mean, the articles make sense but they’re randomly chosen. They’re from the business section, obituaries, there’s an article here about a missing person…” she trails off.
“It’s not a scrapbook,” I say, softly. “It’s a trophy case.”
She looks up. “What? Oh my God, what?”
I swallow. “Eve, I think we better get out of here. Bring that.”
She nods and tucks it under her arm.
A shadow passes by the window. I grab Eve and pull her down to her knees with me, and creep along the floor. I can feel her heart hammering against me and she presses into my side. Just someone walking outside, I think. Then I hear the front door open and freeze.
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