“Do I have to?” Even the question was a sign: He’d given in.
“Take it slow,” she advised. “Flick the tip. Tease it a little, it likes that. Remember what you told me, the first time? Just like eating an ice cream cone. You love ice cream, Craig. You love it.”
She didn’t need to talk me into anything. I stood steady, kept the gun erect as Craig closed his mouth over it. Maybe I was curious, too.
Darkness swirled around us, the station hissed with ghosts, and my blood was half vodka. Not an excuse, Dex. Just setting the scene.
He was tentative, at the start, like a girl sucking it for the first time, not sure where to put his hands or his tongue, licking and flicking in sorry, frog-like spurts, then easing his mouth around the barrel and holding it there, like the mere ambiance of his warm, damp cave would get the job done.
“Friction!” Nikki shouted, clapping her hands together in a steady beat. “Friction and rhythm. Get it together. And mind the teeth.”
I started moaning. A gasp here, a pant there, partly to help him along and partly to mock him, all for show, until, somehow, it wasn’t anymore. Because it felt good, Dex, his head under the palm of my hand, bobbing with my rhythm, his lips finding their pace, his fingers doing their work, one hand wrapped around mine on the gun, the other climbing my thigh and finding its way to where it needed to be, hot against my heat, rubbing in time and pressing hard, harder the louder I moaned, and maybe it was the booze or his fingers or just the fact of the gun, but I’m telling you, Dex, I felt it. Felt him, against me, sucking hard, swirling his tongue around just so, breathing hot and fast, felt him pulling back, pulling away for the hint of a moment, playing with me like I always played with him, then taking it all in his mouth again, swallowing us whole. And it was me, metal but also somehow flesh, and as it came over me—a full-on flash-bang explosion, zero to sixty to holy shit—I thought, this is some kind of black magic at work, this is science fiction and I am a cyborg of skin and steel, this is how it is for them to look down at us on our knees, but it wasn’t just that, one great erotic leap for women everywhere, it was this particular boy on his knees and me on my feet, it was this boy’s girl in the shadows, screaming my name, needing me to see her, to forget about him and need her back, it was the game and the show and the love and the gun, it was a split second of wild, muscle-clenching, teeth-rattling, tip-your-head-back-and-howl-at-the-sky pleasure, and then it was over.
I was crying and laughing at the same time when he seized up, went rigid—and if I was thinking of him at all, I was thinking how Nikki would never let it go, that he’d gotten off on it, loved the feel of something hard swelling in his mouth as much as any of us—but then he fell away from me, and only when Nikki stopped screaming my name and started screaming his did I realize that the crack of noise had not been some overload of neural circuitry but an actual, world-shattering sound. That the world had shattered. That the wet beneath my fingers was blood.
You don’t want to know what a dead body looks like, Dex. Or the sound a person can make when she sees one.
Craig, of course, was silent.
Craig wasn’t there anymore. The thing in his place, the raw, wormy, bloody thing that had just been cupping my ass and fingering my cunt and wrapping his hand over my hand over the gun . . . that’s the thing that comes after me in my sleep, the thing that kept me out of the woods. That was the reason, later on, that I stopped at one wrist, let the knife drop by the bathtub and the water swirl pink. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I believe you see something when you die, whether the firing of synapses or some groping hand from the great beyond, and I believe that’s what I’ll see, Dex. That thing, that face, that hole. I think that’s the last thing I’ll ever see, and I can never see that again.
“You killed him.” That’s what she said when she could talk, when I’d slapped her out of her keening and back to reality so we could zip up his pants and deal with the gun. “You killed him you killed him you killed him.”
I didn’t remind her who’d made him get on his knees. I was trying to be kind.
I wanted to move the body. We both did. Away from our place, deep into the woods. I thought we both wanted to exorcise our station of his ghost so we could return. They say you sober up fast in a crisis, but that hasn’t been my experience. I must have been drunk off my ass to imagine the two of us would want to come back.