He shrugged and gave a lopsided smile. “It’s a good movie.”
“And so you broke in — ”
“Walked in,”
“Into my living room in the dark and waited for me to wake up.”
“I couldn’t go without...you know...testing a theory.”
“And the Bennett girl? Does she know you’re on your way or...?”
“Tragic case,” William said. “We said we’d write, but she didn’t believe it, even as she said it. I could tell.”
“How do you know?”
“There was no conviction in her voice. She might not even know it yet, but a month from now, maybe even give her two, one of the local guys will ask her out to a dance at the Legion. She’ll take a while to come around and will put off the inevitable. Then she’ll be back down in the dunes, going down on some dude. He’ll get the honor of knocking her up. Years from now I’ll see her and she’ll be married with kids to the guy who runs the gas bar and she’ll look at me and think, there goes the fella who got away.”
“Did you practice that little speech?”
“In my head, I guess I worked it out.”
“That’s a shame because I’m sure you imagined it made you sound cool.”
“Didn’t?”
“Not by half. Makes you sound like an arrogant asshole.”
“I had the idea arrogant asshole might be your type.”
That made her laugh. “How many times have you met my husband? You’re doing a worthy impression.”
“Y’know...” For the first time, he broke his leering gaze. “It’s a small town. We’ve run into each other plenty in the past.”
“And the Mrs. part — me being married — that doesn’t bother you?”
“If it don’t bother you, why should it?” Slowly, he reached out as if putting his hand through the bars of a bear cage and brought his hot palm to her bare neck.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I want to feel the weight of your breasts. I want to feel you moving under me.”
“You’re not shy.”
“There’s no time for shy. I’m out of town tonight, one way or t’other.” He caressed her cheek with his palm. “You say no, I’m down the road, nothing ventured, nothing screwed.”
“Don’t say ‘screwed.’”
“What do you want to call it? Making love?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
He brought his other palm up slowly, first to her face and then down her body, sliding languidly over her right breast and across her torso and back up to her face.
“I’m not stupid. I’m about to get laid by the hottest teacher in school.”
“It’s a small school.”
“Still.”
Celeste closed the gap and raised her chin. He bent to meet her lips with his. He pressed hard at first, but she pulled back. “Slow,” she said.
His mouth tasted like gin and she wanted more. The heat that had been pounding her night after night now invaded her body. She began to unbutton her blouse and he rushed to help her out of it. She took both his hands in hers and shook her head. “Slow, I said. You’re in a rush to get to the part where you’ve already had me. You’re still here because I want to enjoy the having. You’re my first nineteen-year-old since I was nineteen.”
He nodded his understanding, but his actions were more urgent and she had to remind him to take her, but slowly. He entered her on the couch and, the first time, left her wanting more. The first round went too fast, but under her tongue he was soon hard again and the second time he entered her, it was she who came too fast. It was disappointing, like a marathon that turns into an abandoned sprint.
Toward dawn, up in her bedroom on sweaty sheets, they had learned enough about each other’s bodies that Celeste could make William match her expectations. Her orgasm reached enough height that she clutched him in a spasm that reminded her of younger days. When she came this time, an animal sound escaped her throat and she felt as young and as athletic as her partner. William caught up to her at the finish line and did some growling of his own.
She giggled girlishly as she rolled off of him.
“What?” he said. “You laughing at me?” Red-faced, he sat up and searched for his pants in dawn’s weak light.
“No, no!” she said, sensing that despite his earlier confidence, he was still a boy whose ego could be easily bruised. “I was just thinking about a strange expression: ‘Came first’.”
She couldn’t remember when she came first, as in: being anyone’s first priority. She sacrificed her time for her students. With Chuck, the military was always first. She was giving up her health to gin so she could get up the nerve to give up her life.
William pulled on his pants. His naked torso looked strong and well-defined. The dim light from her bedroom window cut sharp shadows into the back of his upper arms. “You did, right?”
“Hm?”
“You came.”
“Of course. Women only fake it with older men when they want to get it over with and get some sleep. You? I rode you like a racehorse until it was real.”
He smiled as he pulled his t-shirt down over his head.
“Good. I’m glad you had a good time. Your husband said you would.”
She didn’t ask him to repeat himself. As soon as he said it, it was as clear as a hammer to the head.
“‘Roger her good,’ is what Chuck told me. I’d never heard that expression. You should have heard him laugh when I had to ask him to explain it. Chuck’s got a weird laugh.”
She struggled for composure, and, sensing that facade would soon fail, Celeste rose from the bed and pulled on some clothes from the dirty laundry hamper.
“What else did my husband tell you to expect?”
William pulled something from his jeans pocket and it opened with a spring-loaded snap.
She stood frozen and barefoot, her eyes on the rusty switchblade.
“He told me that if I could get you into bed, then I could kill you.”
She cleared her throat. “And if I didn’t sleep with you?”
“Then I was just supposed to take the money he left for me and go on my way. He said you were a fine piece of tail back in the day and he thought I was...how’d he put it? He said I was inexperienced enough that I’d probably think so, too. Not for nothing, Mrs. Mathers, you did not disappoint. And I’m not that inexperienced.”
“Great,” she said weakly, her eyes still on the knife, but her mind wasn’t stuck in neutral anymore. “So if I let you fuck me, you kill me. If I hadn’t fucked you, you’re supposed to just leave?”
“I get paid either way, but more if you fuck me and I kill you. Chuck has the best alibi a husband could ask for. He’s on the other side of the world fighting for democracy while you’re here getting your ass dead.”
“And you think you’ll get paid? Really? No wonder I gave you a C, William. I was generous. It should have been a D. My husband is a Military Policeman. Where do you think he’s getting money to pay you?”
William’s smile faded. “It’s only a few thousand dollars.”
“Even so...you’d kill me for a few thousand dollars?”
“I got to get out West and start over. Times are tough. A few thousand dollars for a guy like me isn’t a little bit of money, especially all at once.”
She looked at the twisted sheets in disgust, but she noted the distance between them, too. The bed was a queen — a fairly wide expanse that kept them apart in the small room. But he was young, athletic and fast, with a basketballer’s quick reflexes. She didn’t know if she could do what she had to do. Could she do it fast enough?
“My husband never saw a few thousand dollars in his life. Never all at once.”
William took one step toward her. If he came straight over the bed, she wouldn’t have enough time before he started slashing and painting the walls with her blood. If he came around the bed? Maybe she’d have
time.
Celeste had once sliced her thumb deep while cutting a bagel. She remembered the sharp intake of breath and she’d cried as she ran cold water over the little wound. It hadn’t even required a stitch, but it had stung and burned. Getting stabbed to death would be like that, she supposed, times a million.
Would the blade puncture a lung first so she’d go down trying to gasp for air with one of those sucking chest wounds her husband had told her about? She’d thought of killing herself many times, and more lately, but she didn’t want to go like that. She wanted to run away from pain, not toward it. Getting away from pain was the point.
“How are you supposed to get this money?”
“It’s out by the well. Under a white stone,” he said.
“William, you’re an idiot.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Chuck’s got the perfect alibi, but what have you got?”
“A knife and a full tank of gas. And he’ll pay me more later, from the insurance.”
“There is no insurance, you moron. Oh my god, I’ve fucked a moron!”
“Don’t call me that!”
“If he doesn’t pay up, he’ll be sorry.”
“William, you blackmail someone over something they’ve done. It doesn’t work to try to blackmail anyone for something you’ve done! Fucking moron!”
He raised the knife. “I told you not to — ”
“What’s the right word for a guy who threatens to kill me after he’s stuffed all the DNA evidence up my box? You’re a patsy and you’re going to jail.”
“Everybody thinks I left last night. Once I’m done, I’ll toss your body down the well. By the time they get to you...they won’t even come looking until September, I figure. Chuck says you have no friends. No neighbors for miles. Nobody’s coming to check on you, Mrs. Mathers.”
“Chuck will call the Sheriff on you himself. He’ll tell the cops some sob story about his cheating wife.”
William smirks. “Well...you are.”
“It’s plenty more complicated than that. I’ve been getting up the nerve to kill myself.”
“Then I’m here to help you — ”
“Die like a man,” Celeste said.
The pistol was where Celeste left it, in the night table drawer. She’d only loaded one bullet. If one in the brain didn’t work, she figured she wouldn’t be in any kind of shape to try a second shot. That’s what had stopped her from killing herself: The vision of a spray of blood and gray matter across the wall above the headboard and half her face and throat torn away, yet still somehow alive, a gasping zombie praying for death’s release.
He came at her over the bed.
The safety was on and the trigger wouldn’t pull.
When he saw the gun, she thought he’d back up. He only came at her faster.
There was no time to blow William’s brains out of the back of his head.
Celeste stepped back and found herself trapped against the wall with nowhere to run.
William was over the bed and raised the knife above his head to swing it down on her, into the top of her skull.
She tried to kick him in the groin.
He twisted sideways so the blow only slowed him for a fraction of a second.
That fraction of a second was enough time for Celeste to summon up what she didn’t know she had: A will to live that burned fierce and hot. It was also just time enough for her to swing the pistol up into his temple. The sight at the muzzle dug in and drew blood as the weapon flashed across his face.
He shrieked. His eyes wide, William clasped his free hand to his forehead and temple and gaped at the blood. “You bitch!”
If he hadn’t taken the time to think about his wound, he would have stabbed her to death. However, the time it takes to scream and call a woman a bitch is just enough time for her to figure out the safety on her pistol and say, “Bad dog!”
“Oh,” William said. He stared down the pistol’s mouth. He dropped the knife. “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Mathers.”
She’d never fired the pistol, not even at bottles and cans in the backyard. It kicked high, but she’d been wrong worrying so much. One bullet through the eye and into the brain did the job just fine.
She ended William in a quick move of her index finger. Point and pull. Win. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d won anything.
Celeste scurried to grab the box of shells from the night table drawer and loaded the gun. She considered shooting William Kendle again, but that might seem excessive to the Sheriff...if she were, at some future point, to get caught. Still, she was ready if William went zombie.
She’d kept the secret of the pistol to herself. She’d planned to punish her husband with her body, letting it rot in the hottest Maine summer on record.
“Brains don’t come out of walls, no matter how many coats of paint you use.” Chuck had told her that after serving in Germany at an Army base with a bunch of terminally unhappy Marines.
She’d planned for her corpse to suck the equity out of the house as she lay on the bed, an empty bottle of Jack and an empty bottle of gin at her decaying hips and the pistol on the bloodstained quilt his mother had given them as a wedding present.
She’d thought revenge in her own death was better than beatings. Dead on the bed was better than feeling trapped in this coffin of a town. She would become a legend and this old house would be impossible to sell. She’d become the local myth in the haunted house up the hill that kids would use to scare each other on Halloween. As fuck yous went, it wasn’t the best, her being dead and all, but it had made sense to her until William Kendle came at her, armed with a knife and dreams of his own escape.
Celeste went to the window and looked at the sun’s slow rise from the Atlantic. She watched the ocean a long time. When she felt ready, she turned back to see the beautiful young man one more time. He wasn’t beautiful anymore.
“You’re a very bad dog.”
A surprise waited in the backyard. On a whim and a hope she didn’t even believe, she dug under the white rock. Just as she had kept the pistol a secret from her husband, Chuck had kept his stash behind the well to himself, too. No wonder he never had any money. How many years, she wondered, had he been saving to pay off someone to kill her?
Celeste looked up at her bedroom window. From the outside, no one can guess the horrors that wait inside an old house. No one knows the inside of anyone else’s marriage, either.
Chuck wouldn’t be back from his tour until at least Christmas...maybe longer. She could leave a message on the answering machine at the school telling the principal she wouldn’t be back in September. Another ocean waited for her. She could go see where the sun buried itself each night. William’s pick up waited for her down the hill by the gate. And the tank was full.
THE MIGRAINE TRAIN
Sex, Drugs & Romeo (the working title) is a coming-of-age thriller about Romeo Basilon, a young man who aspires to escape poverty through movie stardom. Before he can achieve fame and riches, he must star in a high school production of Romeo and Juliet to claim some acting experience. Complications ensue when the classmate who was to play Mercutio dies of a drug overdose and Romeo gets the blame. Worse, Romeo’s mother disappears, the play’s shut down and someone is hunting Romeo with a hammer. Here’s an excerpt from the opening chapter. Enjoy.
I’ll release the book in 2013. ~ Chazz
The headaches began when I was six. I don’t remember anything before that. It’s as if memories from ages zero to five are spiderwebs that break when I reach for them. Or maybe that’s just God giving a rare free pass, helping me forget the time when I was most at everyone’s mercy.
My earliest memory is Moms giggling and rolling on the floor. I had just asked her why she always had a glass of blood in her hand. “It’s just wine, baby boy,” she said. “I drink it because red goes with roast beef. And everything else.” I can still see her looking down and saying, “Oh, shit. You
made me pee myself a little.”
We lie to ourselves so much we have no business thinking we can tell anybody the truth. For instance, when I’m a movie star, my biographers will get it all wrong. It’s not true that all my problems at Truman Hall High School started with a 400-year-old blowjob joke. That myth will become legend thanks to William Shakespeare and the girl who played Juliet. Also, just so we’re absolutely clear, Jerome was just the kid who played Mercutio. I did not murder him. I only killed what people thought he was.
Gossipers always mix it up. My hardcore fans will say that Bio-Dad abandoned me as soon as Moms admitted she was knocked up. That little is true. Then they’ll say I was named after the escapee. False. Moms told me the truth about that nine years ago last April 20. I can be so specific because it was my eighth birthday. (My birthday’s the same as Hitler’s, but aside from dressing in black we don’t share anything else astrologically.)
I wanted a black forest cake but Moms said it was too late to go out again. She had forgotten to pick up birthday candles so she lit a cigarette and stuck it in the top of a leftover cornbread muffin. I tried to blow it out. She cheered, “Harder! Blow harder!”
My cheeks hurt. The cigarette paper glowed and sank as the ash rose. Moms laughed and pushed me away. She popped the cigarette nub between her teeth, brushed gray flakes off the muffin and handed it back to me.
“Thanks, Moms. This must be what birthdays are like in prison.”
Her eyes widened and her thick lips went to a thin line. “I already said I was sorry, smart-ass,” she said. She drank wine from a water glass. “You know what time I think it is?”
Oh, no.
“Truth Time!” she announced. Her smile was back, but it wasn’t her kind smile. I held my breath. For Moms, the cost of admission to Truth Time was a five-drink minimum. For me, the cover charge was death by embarrassment.
“I didn’t name you after your father exactly. His name wasn’t really Romeo. But he was a Romeo.” After Moms explained what that meant, I saw a familiar aura around the red light on the hot plate we used for heat. Moms’s voice boomed off the apartment walls, the sound too large for the small room. My eyes were slits. The Migraine Train came for me.
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