Jeremiah Quick (4 page)

She.

She has her head buried in her arms, leaning
on the table, shoulders shaking with sobs, but silent.

She's crying, and it's pointless, but still
adorable.

I stretch forward and press my fingers into
her hair, stroking, gentle.

"Are you crying for me?" I ask, lowering my
mouth to her ear.

She startles, but just a little.

"Yes," she says, voice muffled into her
sleeve. "And I'm crying because all I ever offered you was a candy
bar."

"Ahh, but it was so much more than anyone
else offered, ever. And perhaps it was all you had."

What else could she have given me, that I
would have accepted? Probably nothing, this shiny, stupid rich
girl, this bright penny.

She raises her chin then, pushing her head
harder against my fingers, and now I tangle both hands into her
hair, holding on, clinging. And I press my cheek beside hers, just
for a second, before tilting my head and licking her tears away.
But it's not enough, and so I turn her head toward me, using my
hands in her hair to steer, and lick her eyes, one at a time. "Cry
for me," I say. "Feed me your tears."

And she does, shuddering in my grasp. I
catch her tears on my tongue as she produces them, and it gives me
a happy shiver, a tingle in my scalp that works its way down,
catching in the hardness of my groin for a long minute before
tumbling all the way to my toes.

God. I could almost eat her alive.

I decide right then and there I will take
all her tears. I'd run out of my own, long before I ever met her,
but she’ll give me hers, and perhaps someday I'll learn how to cry
again. And maybe, then, my losses will hurt less. Maybe I'll
heal.

I pull her from the chair, mostly by her
hair, and she stands before me, looking at me, and she doesn’t look
scared or angry or freaked out, just… curious.

I undress her slowly, like a package wrapped
in fine paper, and she lets me, making no protest or complaint
whatsoever. I toss her clothes, one item at a time, onto a kitchen
chair. Shirt, bra, jeans, panties, and socks. She shivers a bit,
but says not one word. She doesn't stop me, or ask me to stop.

She flinches when I ease her to the floor,
position her on her back, probably because the ceramic tile is
cold. I kneel between her legs and reach to pinch her nipples, hard
enough that she gives me more tears, and I have to stretch forward
to eat them.

I'm thin enough I don't even have to unsnap
or unzip my black jeans to tug them down. I don't wear underwear,
so I'm just… there, ready, and pressing into her. She tilts her
hips, accepting me. I keep pinching and hurting her, keep drinking
her tears, though I don't know why she lets me, or why she doesn't
say a word or even make a noise.

She.

Who has never known pain, could accept mine
and give me her tears. She was perfect. Why was she so perfect?

I'm angry and confused and it feels like I'm
fighting her, although she's not fighting me. Just one stroke, two,
and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, and it feels all wrong,
yet something about the wrongness pushes me over the edge almost
immediately.

I finish inside her.

I shift down her belly so I can look, spread
her pussy lips with the fingers of both hands to isolate her clit,
swollen and poking out of the little bit of flesh that wants to
shield it. I hold her apart with the classic V of one set of
fingers so I can shove the same fingers of the other hand into her
cunt and stir them around in my spunk, getting them good and wet.
Then I pull them out and slide one (just one, because I don't
really want to hurt her) into her anus.

I don't look at her, I can't. Because I'm
too fucking mean, that's why. God, she's so tight around my finger
it makes me moan, like it might cut off my circulation. She doesn't
moan, just makes a tiny whimpering sound, short and high-pitched,
and I say to her, "I want to see you come," then purse my lips and
blow a solid, tight stream of air over her clit.

And… she comes.

She wiggles a little underneath me, and her
head thrashes from side to side, her hair whipping across her face,
obscuring her expression for seconds at a time. When I dare to
look, her eyes are rolled back into her head, and, I swear, it's no
lie, her pussy has flooded, so much that her juice has joined my
finger in her ass, and it's loosening her up, just a little
bit.

I purse my lips and blow a steady stream
over her clit again, and she hitches her breath and makes a mewling
noise, and the shiver runs through her entire form, like an
aftershock.

I want to press my fingers over her
mouth and nose, make her smell herself, but it's too mean and I
don't do it.

Chapter 3

H
e fucked her on
the kitchen floor. She didn't argue or protest or tell him to stop.
It seemed silly to resist, like a delay of the inevitable. He hurt
her. She could still feel the ghost of his finger there – plunging
and cruel, grasping, mindless of Pretty receiving his cruelty. And
yet that felt inevitable, too, and long overdue. As if she'd had it
coming all along, and he was just getting around to doing it
now.

After... he helped her to her feet, helped
her put her clothes back into place, as if she had merely fallen to
the floor for some unknown reason and required assistance to find
equilibrium.

Part of her wanted to cry, part of her knew
he'd changed her again, just this one simple thing, and it made her
want to laugh and laugh, as if changing her was the point.

No wonder society deemed his penchant for
the subversive to be dangerous. No wonder he always seemed to make
sense – he did make sense. His was the voice cutting through
society's bullshit.

He was brilliant, her Jeremiah Quick.

She remembered. She remembered it all.

He touched each of her eyelids with one
gentle finger and she felt it like a
thank you
.

"Come with me," he said. "I want to show you
something."

His come dripped from her, leaving an
uncomfortable cold patch in her underwear, wet and slippery against
her flesh. It felt somehow like the response to thank you.

She nodded and let him steer her toward the
mudroom, toward the back door that was never locked. He jingled his
car keys in his fingers while she shrugged into her well-worn
leather jacket.

Quick turned back once, seeming to scan the
kitchen, eyes probing the dark of the dining room, and beyond, to
the heart of the house, the room where big, comfortable chairs
lived, the kind designed to cradle adult limbs. A couch long enough
for a grown man to stretch out on, or sit next to small boys
playing video games.

They would be all right.

Still, Pretty bade them a silent goodbye as
she tucked her phone into her jacket pocket. She would return to
them, find her way through the labyrinth, but she would not be the
same as she was now.

Every Sarah needs her quest, right? She
followed Quick to his car and settled into the passenger seat,
willing to go wherever he wanted to take her. Would he be the
goblin king, or the cherished friend she would love madly, warts
and all?

Jeremiah drove across the bridge that
spanned the St. Louis Bay between the city where Pretty lived now
and the city they'd grown up in. It was full dark, and as the car
passed beneath the span, all the bridge lights went out at
once.

For one aching moment Pretty wished she knew
how to pray.

Was it a sign, an omen? Or was it Quick's
magick, a talent for turning Light into Dark?

Just a few miles past the bridge he pulled
off the freeway and into the rest area where a State Representative
got busted for having sexual contact with a minor. Craig's List sex
shopping, the news reported, and not the Rep's fault the boy was
only seventeen. He'd misrepresented himself. Probably.

Dude,
Pretty had thought,
your
wife's going to be pissed
. The story didn't tell her anything
she really wanted to know – they never do, do they? How much
trouble is the man in at home? Is the silence stretched and cold?
Do words rise in his throat, then shrivel and die before they pass
his lips?

Are the wife's eyes gleaming with the
suppressed glee of
I told you so
? Or bitter with the pain of
betrayal?

He wasn't even a Republican. She'd had to
look it up, sure the House Rep (D) notation had been a mistake.

She giggled, softly.

Jeremiah Quick asked what was funny. She
told him.

He cocked his head slightly to the side, as
if listening for something, then said, "The self-righteous love to
scream their outrage." His posture tensed, and his words came with
an intensity that filled the interior of the car with pressure.
"It's the screaming part they like best, because they don't want
anything to change. They are… glad to see their peers fall. It
validates their superiority. It gives them esteem somehow." He
shook his head, lowered his voice. "Our people, on the other hand,
are curious about the details, the human experience, and rather
than revel in swaggering arrogance, we're capable of empathy."

She knew what he meant. Only her own people
would try to imagine how it would feel to be that man, that real
person, in that circumstance. What came before, how do you live
with yourself after?

She imagined it, wholly.

She imagined it for Monica Lewinski and John
Wayne Bobbitt, Casey Anthony, the kids who got lost in their dark
and brought guns to school. The pain beneath the act. Humiliation
that knew no bounds. Some deserved it, perhaps, some didn't. Like…
the old dog Bill. You'd think he was the first politician to tell a
lie. Blow the President in the Oval Office? She'd have done it,
just for the sheer audacity of doing it. No doubt.

Jeremiah was getting out of the car, and
Pretty followed. She had no memories of him in this particular
place, and a thrill danced through her that they were already
making one. Right. Now.

He walked past the ever-so-charming concrete
picnic area, across a small expanse of lawn, and leaned on a
barrier erected at the crest of the hill to keep stupid people from
tumbling down onto the freeway.

The view was of the Aerial Lift Bridge and
the shipping canal that gave Duluth its claim as a tourist
attraction.

The lights that dotted the residential
hillside paled against the ink-black smudge that was Lake Superior,
a yawning black mouth of riptide and nothing.
Dare you dare you
dare you
it chanted as Pretty wandered closer to Jeremiah,
tucking her hands into the pockets of her jacket.

He pulled on her sleeve, maneuvered her so
she was between his body and the barrier, and leaned against her as
if holding her captive, her stomach pressed against the wall.

He was solid behind her, long, sinewy, lean.
He was still too thin – and yet the weight of him had her sucking
in her breath, near panicked by his proximity.

"Don't…"
she wanted to say, and…

"Leave my life alone"

…but together they made perfect sense, for
she knew now he would NOT, and all her "don'ts" weren't going to
make any difference, because he would change every single one of
them to "please."

Perhaps that was his magick. Perhaps she
would learn some of it.

"Jeremiah Quick," she said, and the cool
autumn breeze lifted his name into the wind.

"Shh," he said. "Names have power."

She nodded. "So. This is weird," she said.
"You wanna neck in the car, see if we get caught? Cause a
scandal?"

He laughed into her ear, a low chuckle, and
his hands massaged her shoulders for a second, then roamed down her
back, slid into her pockets, his fingers sliding over the backs of
her hands.

She was acutely aware of the touch of his
skin, knuckles bulging like mechanical joints, curling around hers,
not just her own fingers, but all the muscles and joints of her
fisted hands.

He worked her fingers free of their tight
clench while breathing into her ear.

She hadn't realized the fingers of her left
hand were clenched around her phone, her lifeline, until he slid it
out of her pocket and flung it over the idiot-barrier and down the
hill.

His arm settled then around her waist, firm,
almost clutching her against him, and he leaned his weight into her
more, until her breath was nearly gone.

"You did
not
just do that," Pretty
gasped, feeling dread close her throat – all her obligations,
contacts, emails – everything, tumbled down the hill.

The iPhone's
Where's my wife
feature
completely defunct.

Yes. The truth. She'd been expecting her
husband to retrieve her before this thing with Jeremiah went too
far.

Shit.

Another truth: this thing had already gone
too far.

He laughed, then pointed down the hill,
toward the lights. Her eyes followed as his fingers traced the
shoreline east, then a slight jab north, toward the old
neighborhood. "We didn't have them. Didn't need them. You don't
need it now."

She mourned her phone, down there in the
weeds, abandoned. Or perhaps mourned herself, abandoned to this
arbitrary decision she had made to follow Jeremiah Quick without
knowing, exactly, what he wanted.

"Fucker," she murmured. "I'd have given it
over to you, if you'd have asked. But I would have liked to tell my
husband everything's all right."

"Really?" he breathed into her hair. "Lie
like that? How do you know anything will be all right, ever
again?"

She shrugged against him.

"Just a feeling," she said, and pretended,
for a few seconds, that he didn't hate her.

"Still so shiny," he said. "Doesn't anything
slay you?"