All of Her Men (22 page)

I
t pained me deeply to know that I just could no longer look at her the same way as before. In a way, I’d had sex with one of my best friends and there had always been a line that I had chosen not to cross. And for good reason. In one fell swoop we went from the best of friends to not being able to stand the sight of each other. I spoke for myself of course. I couldn’t even begin to speculate as to
what
that girl was thinking. That day was one to be forgotten as soon as possible and never spoken of again.

I happily
recalled the countless men I’d murdered. I shut my eyes and felt the many tiny specs of blood as they slapped onto my face. It was euphoric. I relished the smell of blood as it hit the air and turned it into a coppery odor. I loved the feeling as blood glided through my fingers and through my hair. Those acts enlivened my senses. The surge of power was too much to handle.

But allowing Olivia to do what she had done and what I had forced those innocent boys to do was not only shameful, it was horrendous.
It was the exact opposite to my happy murder memories. Even if I felt like they may have deserved a smidgen of what they got, and even if they willingly performed those acts, I was disgusted with myself. I should have known better. In fact, I did know better. I felt more remorse for my actions that day than for any of the days before it. My moral compass must have been a bit off kilter. Twisted, I know. But it was the truth.

I felt so dirty
. I couldn’t so much as look in a mirror without an overwhelming revulsion taking over. A thousand showers could not wash the filth that was that day. It would be forever emblazoned in my memory as the worst mistake I had ever made. After the whole debacle, after the dust had cleared and time had turned night to day again, there was only one thing my evil twisted existence wished to do. I wanted to kill Olivia.

The impulse to kill her delivered itself to me the moment after orgasm as I saw her rise from in between my legs with my cum dripping from
the bottom of her smiling face. She smiled with pride. Undeservedly so. I could have been wrong. She could have felt something completely different but I wasn’t about to sit and dissect her every expression. I simply didn’t care that much. I felt only brewing anger that she wasn’t expelling copious amounts of blood from her neck.

I had hoped th
e passing of time would deter me from wanting to kill her. I thought if I just waited one more day. And then another and another, that the feeling to kill her would dissipate into nothingness and all would go back to normal. I’d finally lost all hope and feared the worst.

Those sinister thoughts were setting a faster pace
within me than I had hoped for. I feared my own self. I wanted so badly not to hurt her. But my mind and my heart were in two very different places. I never understood that sentiment until now. It had always seemed so childish. I always thought that if you had something you needed to do you would just do it. When you’re a killer though, when you spend your time either killing or thinking about killing, there’s only one real remedy to any issues at hand. Kill. Sorry, there’s just no way around it.

My mind held no warmth or sympathy. It
held only selfish pleasure and pain.

On the other hand, my heart
desperately sought to fight every cell that wanted to chop her up. If only my heart had the power to alter the ferocity of my instincts. Perhaps if I had a fully-functioning heart it might have had the power to override my mind on my next course of action. Unfortunately for me, I had never received a fully working heart and was thus never capable of feeling much of anything for anyone. Yes of course I could love things just like anyone else, as long as they fit the mold and worked in my favor. Olivia was no longer in favor. Such a tragedy.

My phone rang
again. I didn’t have time for a long conversation with my mother. It would have to wait till tomorrow. I sped out the door and headed on over to Olivia’s house.

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I must have changed my mind a half a dozen times on the trip over to Olivia’s place. I played a mental ping pong of sorts on whether or not to go through with it. But I just kept driving. She had been my friend for numerous years and she was a person I would miss if she were gone for a considerable amount of time. There were few people besides family I could truly say that about.

On the other hand, we had crossed some sort of threshold that would never be
uncrossed. I knew myself, and the longer I waited and bottled it all up, the bigger the explosion would be later on. I kept driving. Olivia was a pusher. It was in her nature to push and push and just when she thought she’d pushed you to the brink, she’d push you some more. Only this time, we pushed at each other too hard and brought each other too far out. In fact, she had pushed her own self off of my list of people that I couldn’t kill.

I thought about my next moves as I
continued the drive towards her home. I didn’t take this mission lightly. She lived about half hour away in the small town of Nutley, New Jersey. It was nice and quiet and bordered the town I had grown up in as a child. Overgrown trees lined most of the streets and small children could always be spotted playing in any of the numerous dead-end streets. There were so many dead-end streets in this town. I had often wondered why.

The main street
consisted of more small town bars and liquor stores than a small town of this size really needed. Oh sure, there were plenty of restaurants mixed in with salons alongside one too many cell phone stores. Each of which were all small businesses struggling just to stay open. As the years went on though, they all managed to stay in business. Albeit, just barely.

The sun shone heavily
and the hoards of teeny boppers roamed the streets endlessly walking in no particular direction. They moved in masses across the heavily trafficked streets, slowly, making sure to halt traffic as much as possible. I had forgotten that Nutley released its students for lunch and so for one hour, all of Nutley High school and Middle school students were released into the wild to do whatever it was that teenagers did. I loathed teenagers. Even as I grew up to be one, I still abhorred the very essence that was a teenager. I guess for a while, I must have even hated myself.

I managed to maneuver
through the slow traffic and finally reached Olivia’s apartment building down at the end of one of those dreaded dead ends. It wasn’t a large apartment building as it held only 8 apartments. It was quiet though. Too quiet for Olivia to be home. I eyed the scenery and noticed I was the only car on the block. Nutley was a quiet little town. Even more so, after you removed yourself from the hustle and bustle of the main avenue. Its main inhabitants in the complex and across town were old retired folks living out the long final days of their miserable lives.

Olivia lived in one of the first floor apartments. Good for her. After all those nights partying like it was 1999 I figured it would have been difficult for her to
truck up a long flight of stairs. She probably would have killed herself, I thought. Then maybe I wouldn’t be here doing it myself. I smiled. I wanted to laugh but I smiled. A laugh would have been too disrespectful, even if I would be the only one to know about it.

I forced myself through the short walk up to the main entrance of her apartment building and attempted to once again, t
hink of a reason not to do this. I wanted a reason to keep her alive. Something, anything. But I only grew more excited at the thought of killing again. But we’d been friends for such a long time. That was supposed to mean something. It was the type of friendship that starts out strong and never loses steam. Olivia had been at my college graduation, even though she went to the same school and wouldn’t graduate herself. Too many frat houses with copious amounts of booze derailed Olivia’s academic career pretty quickly. She wasn’t upset about it and so I hadn’t been either.

I attended all three of her weddings and was the maid of h
onor in each one of them. I had given my unwanted opinion just before each and every ceremonial walk down the aisle. But as usual, she was steadfast in her decisions and I, always the dutiful friend, supported her irrational decisions. Olivia loved hard and if after every drunken stupor she wanted to get hitched, I would stand next to her and hold her hair so she wouldn’t throw up all over the cheap off-white gown she’d chosen.  It was her life, who was I to judge? I was no model citizen myself.

She knew it too. She wasn’t the brightest bulb but she wasn’t stupid either. There were countless times when she’d been high off some drug
or other, that she would point a lazy finger at me and announce, “I know.”

I’d sa
t there feigning confusion and listened on as she stumbled through the words.

“I don’t know what. But I know you’re a fucked up mother fucker,” she’d said.

“You’re more fucked than me…You don’t fuck for money but you’re fucked just like me. You never wanna tell me but I see you’re fuckin’ eyes Jo. I see ‘em. And your eyes tell me scary shit.”

Those were the bad highs. She was usually on crack when she slurred her speech like that and start
ed with her crazy talk. The drugs usually made her happy but bad trips did happen from time to time. It would be there that she would call me out with all sorts of nonsensical jibber jabber. Sometimes they even occurred when her boyfriends would be sitting there next to her taking another hit.

It never bothered me though. She was flying high and mighty above us all and never remembered what she had said when she came back down. Her friends wouldn’t remember either. Even if they did, they were junkies and low-lives. No one would take them seriously. Besides, Olivia’s accusations always sounded the same, “I know! I know! I know! I know you’re a fuckin psycho!”
I never considered it much to worry about.

It was moments such as those that she
reminded me of Darla from Fight Club. Not physically of course. But the broken character of Darla would serve as the perfect caricature of Olivia when she was no longer Olivia and just a crack whore. She would get lost in that world but managed to get out from time to time and mimic the life of a semi-normal functioning human being.

She never had a real job. And by real I meant a job that required her to be in a certain place for a certain amount of time like the re
st of us did. She was a hustler. She hustled drugs and she hustled men. She hustled drugs to pay for her own habits and the men to pay for everything else. That’s how she came to live in this cute apartment here in Nutley.

His name was Daniel.
He was the one who had finally got her a decent place to live. He was a long time sugar daddy of hers going back almost two years. Daniel was a 56 year old, very married Jew and was of course very concerned with the image of an older Jewish man frequenting too many hotels. I guess the yamaka gave him away. He’d remedied the situation by arranging to rent this 3 bedroom apartment for her so she would have a nice place to stay and take care of him whenever he called upon her. He rarely did. In fact he’d been to the apartment only a handful of times in that year that she’d been living there. He simply enjoyed the ability to call and text her numerous times throughout the day.

I thought it was a bit tiresome to have
to constantly talk and text this old guy but Olivia didn’t care. She reasoned that this particular business arrangement suited her, for now.
He takes care of the rent and gives me two grand a month. We don’t even have sex once a month. It’s sooo worth it.
And so I never mentioned it again.

Daniel may have been whatever it was that he was, but at least he didn’t beat her or yell like
some of her other johns. The sugar daddy euphemism grew tiresome fairly quickly for me. She hated it when I used words like johns or tricks. As if what she did was better because she simply decorated the situation with the words sugar daddy. Yeah, that made it all better.

I rang the doorbell and waited. I didn’t see any cars around and I wasn’t really sure what car Olivia was driving today anyway. She moved around a lot and she never had the same car for more than a few months. She’d either crashed it, towed it, or traded it in. One of her sugar daddies almost always footed the bill.
Why pay for it with my money when I could use theirs?
That was how Olivia got away with always having boat loads of money. She never had to pay for a damn thing herself. The bitch was good at what she did.

About a year ago, she’d
taken me into her bedroom and locked the door. Then she took two hands and flipped the mattress. Underneath her mattress were little zip lock bags full of money. There weren’t like 5 or 6 bags though. There were a lot. More than I could count. And that’s when I knew Olivia was a much better hooker than I ever thought possible. She was loaded. I also knew that she must have trusted me more than any other person in the world. Had she shown anyone else that room, she’d have been robbed. I just didn’t care too much for money. I had other vices. I think Olivia knew it, too.

Olivia finally opened the doo
r after I rang the doorbell three times. She shot me a mean look and moved aside to let me in. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked. I hadn’t called or texted so she hadn’t been expecting me. I didn’t want to take the chance of her telling anyone I was coming over. “We need to talk,” I said.