Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (23 page)

“They work for drying off. I don’t usually get bundled up,” he said. He took the towel she had around her neck and held her in it.

She reached up and kissed his wet lips. His hair was ruffled like a little boy’s.

“Careful,” he said. “I might get aroused again.”

“I am not afraid.” It wasn’t really the truth. As much as she wanted him, Jade didn’t know how much longer she could keep him out. And she knew she wasn’t ready for that yet. Because once he did, that would be it. She’d never be able to let him go again. “Do I look like someone who gets afraid? But first we’ve got to fortify you.”

She put on her jeans and one of his white T-shirts and went into the kitchen. It was clean but badly equipped. The refrigerator was almost empty and so was the cupboard.

“What do you eat?” she asked him.

“Snacks, mostly.”

“What, like cold cereal?” It was about all she could find.

“Yes. Cold cereal is my favorite. The more sugary the better. Without milk. And crackers and stuff. Those little cheeses with the laughing cows on them. And beer.”

“Wow. At least the cheese has laughing cows.”

But there wasn’t even cheese so they walked to the farmers’ market. There were bushels of cut ranunculus, freesia, sunflowers, and roses in buckets of water and stands selling purple cabbages and bright yellow gourds displayed like flowers themselves. Maybe it’s just me, Jade thought. Everything looked more beautiful. They walked along past the little tented stands and bought eggs and butter, and asparagus and potatoes, a cantaloupe, berries, and a baguette.

When they came to the yellow roses, Jade stopped.

“Take us home. Arrange us in water. Bury your face in us.” The voices were fragile and blowzy, as if unused to speech.

“Did you hear that?” Jade asked John Grayson.

“What?”

“The roses? Never mind.”

“I think we need some roses,” John Grayson said.

They carried everything home, and she cooked the omelets. They ate in the kitchen nook he almost never used. She dangled her legs over his lap, and he ran his fingers along her calves.

“What?” she said. He was staring.

“I’m thinking that I want to take your picture.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Only the dead ones.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. That was sick. I just haven’t wanted to use my camera for anything except work.”

“That’s nice of you,” she said. “But I look freakish in pictures. You can see my freakish nature.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“And I promised Shadow that I’d take him to a matinee, and all those magazines tell you that you should always leave the man wanting more.”

She got up and kissed his mouth. Their lips were slick with butter, and there were raspberry seeds caught between their teeth.

His hands rummaged around her hips, slipped up inside the T-shirt along the sides of her waist.

“Let me photograph you.”

“Do you want your shirt back?” she asked, starting to lift it over her belly.

His hands reached up and lightly grazed the underside of her breasts. “No. I want you to wear it until it stands up by itself and then bring it back to me.”

“Only if you keep these.” She pulled away and went to her backpack, took out the underpants from the night before, and tossed them to him. He bunched the lace in his fingers.

“Take me home now, John Grayson, before I overstay my welcome.”

* * *

When he got back to his apartment, John Grayson took his camera out like a long unused appendage. It felt different in his hands after he had touched Jade all night. The camera felt heavier, his fingers lighter. He walked over to the bed. The sheets were still rumpled with the impression of her body. The afternoon sunlight throbbed into the room, onto the sheets, the bare wood floors, through the pink bougainvillea that half-blocked the window so that the air glowed. John Grayson put on the music they’d listened to the night before and got the roses she’d bought out of their vase by the bed—she’d put them there before she left and only took one home for Shadow. He shook the water off the bottom of the stems and tossed the roses onto the mattress. Then John Grayson took pictures of the bed, imagining Jade was lying there in it, among the roses, with wet hair slicked back away from her face and her longing eyes. When he was done he put the roses back in the vase, but he never heard them thank him.

* * *

A few days later he took the actual pictures of Jade with the roses. She usually hated pictures of herself. She felt as if her face revealed all the reasons she had been treated the way she had. Her eyes were just like Caleb’s—huge, brutally green, and quite mad. Her lips, full like Clarissa’s, had unknowingly seduced him. Not to mention her long, sinewy limbs, muscled since she was a little girl from all the labor she had done.

But when John Grayson photographed her, Jade saw instead what he had seen. There was no madness in her eyes and no violence in her lips. The angles and light he used softened the line of her nose. Her body was soft and calm, not angry, not bargaining. She was a beautiful, melancholy young girl reclining on her boyfriend’s bed. Was John Grayson her boyfriend? In one picture she wore his one white dress shirt, unbuttoned over her naked body. In one picture she wore his white undershirt and her jeans. In one picture she was naked with roses, red ones this time, that they’d bought at the farmers’ market that morning. She had put them over her breasts and between her legs, and there was what looked like a wreath of them on her head.

The night before, they’d gone out for pizza and seen a movie. The pizza place was tiny, and they sat at one of the sidewalk tables watching people walk by and devouring their floppy slices. They made jokes about the arousing power of the pizza smell and laughed at nothing.

The movie was a ghost story, and she kept grabbing his biceps and trying not to scream. She pressed her head into his armpit, and he grabbed her as if he’d been waiting for her to do this all night, sitting there waiting for her to do just this.

When they finally got to the bed he asked, “How can I make you come?” She looked away from him. “What’s wrong? Where did you go?” “Nowhere,” she said. He held her face and made her look into his eyes. She could feel tears starting and she knew she couldn’t let him see her cry. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s okay. I just don’t want you to shut down. I’m here,” she said. She stared back at him. “I’m right here.” “How can I make you come? I don’t have to be inside you. Show me the way you do it when I’m not here.” Jade’s hand drifted down between her legs. She curled her fingers and rubbed herself gently. “You show me, too,” she said. He took his cock in his hand and stroked it, slow, then faster to match her rhythm. “Come on my belly,” she said. He said, “Tell me when you’re going to.” “Now,” she said, throwing her head back, and he sped up his motions and spilled over her, just as she clenched in waves beneath him.

After, he wrapped them up in the covers and they lay like that, very still, as if they could stop time that way.

“I wish you would quit that place,” he said.

“Why? You don’t want men looking at me?”

“I want you to be safe.”

“I have a good luck charm.” She got up and showed him the wooden doll that she still carried with her wherever she went.

“It hasn’t always helped me,” she said, “but at least I’m still here.”

And Jade told John Grayson about the desert where she was called Girl, about the death of her mother, about the three boys in the grotto, and about the ring her father had given to her, wanting her to be his bride. And John listened and told her about how his mother had killed herself and his baby sister, shot at him, missing by just a few inches, that since then he had been able to see only the dead things and how now that he had found Jade again he understood what he had been seeking for the last five years and what it was like to see again, see someone who was alive, and to feel that way himself.

* * *

THE THREE HEADS

When John Grayson walked under the bright yellow caution tape his skin was clammy and his limbs felt so heavy and numb he could barely move them. Like he’d transformed into a giant. Not again. How the fuck could this be happening again? Ben was standing along the wash with a couple of officers. The water was shallow, brackish and strewn with trash. Weeds grew out of the cement. The storm drains built into the cement siding looked like open coffins.

The girl who had been hauled out of the water onto the bank was not Jade; that was all John could think of at first. The girl was not Jade; she was bigger and taller. Then he was able to take in the rest of what he was seeing. Like the two other Tinderbox strippers who’d been killed before, this one’s head had been severed from her neck. It was gone. Without a head a dead body looked less human, more like a thing.

John Grayson held himself steady as he unzipped his bag and took out his camera. It struck him that this work was most likely killing him. And now he actually cared a little that it was. That was the difference.

He powered on his camera, and the shot of his bed strewn with roses appeared. The yellow roses tossed across the sheets. He snapped a shot to advance the image. He hoped no one would notice his hands were shaking.

* * *

Jade did not see the Tinderbox man. He had grabbed her from behind in the parking lot and thrown something over her head. He had put her in his car and driven her somewhere without saying a word. He threw her down the stairs into the dark. It smelled like bad eggs.

She found that she was bruised but otherwise unhurt. She stood shakily and looked around. It was some kind of a basement with no windows and only the one door. It was locked. There was nothing in the room except a large industrial refrigerator that hummed at her.

Jade took the wooden doll out of the lining of her sweatshirt where she had made a secret pocket for it when she left the desert. The doll said, in a rough voice, unused to speech, “Open the cold thing and look inside.”

Jade went over to the refrigerator and opened it. The door stuck at first so she pulled harder, and it finally gave with a soft sucking sound. Inside, Jade saw the three heads.

“Take us out. Lay us out softly. Comb our hair.”

This time, Jade did not back away. She took off her sweatshirt and laid it on the ground. She reached into the icy box, lifted the first head out tenderly, and laid it out. Then she did the same with the second. And the third. They were cold and clammy, heavy and pale. She did not turn away from them.

By dawn, although she had no idea it was dawn, she had sung every lullaby she knew ten times, combed out a hundred tangles, and wiped away a hundred tears. The little wooden doll sat beside her in the dark, watching.

John Grayson called Jade, but there was no answer, so he called again and finally, he went over to her apartment. Shadow answered the door. He was a small boy with dark hair. He gazed up at John Grayson through ridiculously long eyelashes.

“She’s not here,” Shadow said. “Will you go find her?”

John Grayson knelt down beside Shadow. “I’ll try,” he said. He laid out his palm and Shadow slid his across it, the tiny hand and the hand of a giant.

* * *

A black bird was circling above Jade’s apartment. As John Grayson got to his truck the bird, cawing and flapping in a frenzied way, landed on the hood. It stared at him with one shiny bead of an eye.

“I will lead you to her,” a voice said, raw and unused to speech. John Grayson got in his truck and followed the bird through the city as if he believed in such things. But having met Jade again, having felt her body, John Grayson was no longer so determined not to believe in them.

The bird landed in front of what appeared to be an abandoned house, five miles from the Tinderbox.

“Here she waits,” said the voice. Then the bird flew away.

No lights were on. John Grayson took a small flashlight from his pocket and pushed open a side door. Trash was piled everywhere. There was a stench of garbage.

“I hang on the wall. I will open the door,” a voice said. It was a different voice, high, thin and metallic, though it, too, sounded unused to speech.

John Grayson shone his flashlight around the room. Once. Twice. The third time it glinted on metal. A small skeleton key hung by a door.

John Grayson took the key off its hook and placed it in the lock. It turned. He took the key out of the lock and saw that there was something wet and dark on his hands. He wiped his hands on his jeans and put the key into his pocket.

There was a staircase leading down and John Grayson followed it into the darkness. At the bottom was a room and in the room was a woman. She was singing in a very soft voice and there was something on the floor beside her.

He called her name.

She got up and stumbled toward him. He engulfed her in his arms.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“The way we have always,” John Grayson answered. “But this time we won’t let go.”

John Grayson helped Jade put the three heads gently back into the icebox, and then they left that house and called Ben Washington.

After everything was finished, Jade and John Grayson went home and washed each other clean and then Jade opened her body to him so thoroughly that it was hard for either of them to tell themselves apart.

And what of the three heads?

The three heads opened their eyes, tossed their smooth hair, and sighed ever so softly.

“At last,” they whispered. “At last.”

Then they closed their eyes for the last time and sunk back beneath the surface forever.