Rabid (69 page)

Dante asked, “Did he do this to you? Did he tie you down?”

She murmured “Dante,” against the skin of his throat and his body jumped as if he had heard his name in a dark alley. “The first time I saw you, when you were saying Mass,” his own fingers holding the communion wafer and lifting his gold-rimmed, gem-studded chalice, the soft vestments on his skin, sunlight beaming in the church full of people looking at him, “I wanted you,” she said from the darkness. “Even reading about you on your website,” before he had seen her, when she had been somewhere out there, “seeing your picture, I wanted to know you, talk to you, touch you.”

She had been stalking him before he even knew she was there, and vulnerability darkened the world.

“Did that priest say such things to you?” but Dante knew that her abuser had stalked her just like this.

“It was your soul.” She pulled his shirt and long cassock up his arms, past his shoulders, and bunched them around his wrists, restraining him further. The sheet was hot under his back. “I could feel your soul, your pure, beautiful soul, drawing me to you.”

He knew she wasn’t talking about his damned, rent soul. She was reenacting her abuse, changing his world from innocent to dangerous, showing him how the priest was just innocent background to her, practically foliage, and then, like lightening,
un colpo di fulmine,
he struck her. “Leila, don’t do this to yourself.”

“You made me want you.”

“Leila.”

She unzipped his fly and, one-handed, pushed down his pants and pulled them off one leg with his shoes wrapped in the cloth.

“Leila, don’t.”

She stripped off his underwear. He was naked from his wrists to his knees. His skin was oversensitive as if he had burned off that first layer of callused dermis, leaving him pink and raw. His dick was still so hard it curved back at his belly.

She said, “God put this desire for you into my heart and my body.”

“That is wrong. He was wrong. That is heresy.” His skin was frantic for hers.

“God wants us to be together.”

“How can you presume to know the mind of God?”

She shoved her knee between his thighs and cupped his balls. “Don’t argue. Don’t make me angry.
Angry is worse.
”

His heart battered his lungs. While she held his testicles, he did not want to say anything to make her angry.

This was how fragile she had felt.

She climbed between his knees, forcing them farther apart.

She said, “It is God’s wish for us to be together, so it isn’t a sin.”

“Stop.”

She stroked his dick, gently tugging the membranous foreskin, and shivers crawled on him. Her cool hands massaged him, somehow relaxing and tightening all the muscles from his knees to his shoulders. She bent her head down and whispered, right above his belly, “Say yes.”

His body pressed air out his mouth. “Yes.”

Her wet lips parted and wrapped around the head of his dick. Electric charge ripped through the bed. His spine arched and he bowed onto his shoulders, which screamed when his arms twisted against the steel cuffs.

Years, it had been years, and his blood roared under his skin.

Ah,
un pompino
.

She plunged down, and he wrapped his hands around the iron railings above his head, trying not to shout. Tattered remnants of his restraint fluttered into the dark corners of the room.

Her head bobbed, and streaks of light rolled across her flashing black hair. He closed his eyes. “Oh, God.”

She slowed and moved sideways. Cold air slapped his dick. She cat-crawled up his body—lace blouse over her breasts scraping his stomach and chest—and reached for the carved, bulbous nightstand.

He gasped for air. Reason dove into his forehead and he sighed, “Leila, stop this.”

“You want this.” She retreated between his bent knees again and he closed his eyes. His soul concentrated to his sex.

Something cool nudged his ass.

“No!” His entire body contracted upward, repelled away from her. “What are you doing?”

She was not going to cram anything into his ass. That was homosexual, and he wasn’t, he would
never
, and he
wouldn’t
.
“No!”

He held onto the cold wrought iron in the headboard and pulled himself away from her, but his hands were locked behind his head.

She grabbed his ankle and yanked. The whole bedspread with him slid toward her. “You’ll like it if you relax.”

“No!” Panic whipped though him and he scrambled back, twisting his shoulder and wrenching his rotator cuff as the handcuffs pulled his hands farther behind his head.

She slithered up his body and kissed his lips. He turned his head away from her. A soft, metallic click near his right ear, like a key in a lock, and he opened his eyes.

Stripes of dark air interrupted the blued steel barrel, and trigger, and grip, in Leila’s hand. Cool steel nudged his temple.

He jerked away from the flat handgun, but the handcuffs held. His arms and shoulders strained.
“Stop!”

He should have broken away sooner. If he tried to kick her, she might pull the trigger, and the bullet would fracture his skull and cranium shards and chips would slam through his brain. Mortality suffocated him.

“Lie down,” she whispered near his shoulder, and her lips touched his skin.

The gun rasped on his hair near his temple. “Leila, put down the gun. Unlock the handcuffs.”

The slightest tic of the gun’s mechanism lifting the hammer from its rest brushed his ear like her long hair. “Lie back, Dante.”

“Did the priest who molested you use a gun? Hold it at your head?”

“Some guns are inside your head.”

If he kept talking, she might talk herself out and stop this. “I do not understand.”

“You will.”

“Leila, you must stop.” The cold gun slid down his temple and rested on his cheekbone. The sharp sight scratched his skin down to his jaw. His heart slammed like repeating gunshots up his neck and into his head. The cardiac clatter cracked with adrenaline and each crash seemed to be the gun detonating and killing him, and he died a hundred times every minute.

He was shocked to find himself alive a hundred instances, every minute.

His dick strained to bursting.

The gun pressed under his jaw, and her cool fingers wrapped around his testicles, massaging, threatening. “Lie flat.”

He slid carefully down until his bound hands were above his head and he lay flat under her.

She crawled backward through the light-streaked dark and parted his legs again with her knees. Her hand holding the gun drifted down near his ribs, rubbing muscle and ribs, and the muzzle still pointed inward toward his heart.

The only thing he could do was breathe.

He wrapped his hands around the iron headboard, and his eyes burned.

The cold gun chilled his belly. In a beam of white light, her finger curled around the trigger. The hammer flinched. The bullet would singe up his chest, enter under his chin, and blow the top of his head off.

Light stripes followed the curve of her cheek as she smiled in the dark. “Don’t move.”

Her hot mouth was on him again, and he gasped. One of his feet slipped on the silk.

Again, something cool nudged his asshole. “Do not do this. I understand.”

Her mouth came off him and cold air clung to his wet dick. “You don’t know shit.”

The small, cool thing pressed his skin. “He threatened you.”

The cool thing wormed into his body. Leila’s wet mouth engulfed his cock again. She licked him while he was inside her mouth.

Something besides the heat and shocks of the
pompino
was happening to him. The nerves in his dick were squeezed between her mouth and the small, cool thing, like his dick extended deeper into his body and it all rubbed.

She stopped and whispered, “I love you,” then grabbed him again with her hot mouth.

Sensation drained from his body into his chest and his balls clenched and he crashed out. Every spurt sucked his brain, blasted down his spinal cord, and cannoned his soul out of him.

Dante held no illusions that she loved him.

The pedophile priest had told her that he loved her. Telling her that was another abuse. It had ripped love out of her body.

“Oh, Leila.”

~~~~~

The next morning in the courtroom, Bev held hands with Mary, Lydia, and Laura, and they prayed before the attorneys arrived. Bev looked over the wooden benches and milling spectators at the camera crew spooling out cable, uneasy because Dante was late. He had been punctual every day of the trial.

Mary’s hand gripping hers was cool. “We pray to You, Holy of Holies, and we ask You to soften the juror’s hearts so they will acquit Bev.”

Telling God what He should do unnerved Bev. Asking for a direct intercession was presumptuous, especially when she had sinned so terribly that God had abandoned her.

She broke the circle, was hugged, and took her place at the defense table with her black Rosary beads in her lap, sorting though them, praying the Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer over and over.

Lydia and Laura went home, as it was Mary’s turn to stay for court.

Mary patted Bev’s shoulder with her long, pale fingers.

Dante still wasn’t there. He had never been late before. Bev should have demanded and stormed and cried and begged him not to go to Leila’s apartment last night.

The lawyers trickled in, their shoes’ hard soles sounding like Rosary beads falling on wood, and Heath tapped her shoulder as he sat down. “You okay today?”

Bev nodded.

Leila sat on the hard bench behind the prosecuting attorneys, yawning and sipping a triple shot skinny latte. She had slept in her red gauze-draped bed for only two hours, from five to seven, before her alarm clock had shrilled and she had stumbled, still drunk, into the shower.

Her head buzzed, and the wood rails of the courtroom slanted when she blinked. Her liver chewed through the scotch, processing it like a busy computer, somewhere on that slippery metabolic continuum from drunk to hung over.

She sneaked a scientific paper out of her oversized black purse and began reading
Six-Dimensional Confocal Microscopy
, though the words shimmied away. Pictures in the article—green and red fluors like neon lights bent into arcane Asian ideograms—rippled like she was looking at them through a rainy window.

Blasted booze.

Dante had been asleep in Leila’s bed, with the handcuffs unlocked, when she had left for court.

The judge called the courtroom to order and started the day’s business.

At the back of the courtroom, the television lights ignited.

Leila’s half-breed hand holding a thin pen above the tube-light pictures paled two shades from the brightness.