The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (50 page)

He went over to the bureau and unzipped his shaving kit.

She looked up. “What are you doing?”

“Condom,” Nicholas said.

She came up behind him, smooshed her tits into his back. “I hate those things. C’mon, you don’t have to worry. I’m just a nice girl getting back at her cheating
boyfriend. You don’t need to wear a rubber.”

He turned around to say something sarcastic about what “nice girls” do and don’t do, and she dipped to her knees, his dick disappearing into the tight seal of her mouth, his
mental processes magically unraveling.

After that, they did all the things Nicholas enjoyed most – with a few other things thrown in for extra. He fucked her standing up, her spine pressed into the wall, while she stood up on
her toes and dug her nails into his shoulders, moaning. Then on the bed, driving himself between those ivory tits, until the bumblebee was covered in come that looked like droplets of honey.

When her eyes started to close and she grew sleepy and sated, Nicholas shook her and said, “We’re only getting started. You asked me, do I like to fuck? I’ll show you just how
much.”

He flipped her over then and fucked her from the rear, butt raised, head buried in a pillow. For the last half dozen or so thrusts, he put his hands down on her back and leaned his weight into
her. Took note that she must be used to rough stuff, because she didn’t protest, but took what had to be a painful compression of her ribcage stoically, drawing in tiny gasps of air as best
she could.

“
Like
that?” he asked when he was finished for the moment. Recovered from her near-asphyxiation, she snuggled against a pile of pillows and opened up a bourbon from the
minibar.

“Christ, you sure can fuck.” Her smile was sly and silly, a drunken smile, and yet threaded through with something else, contempt or fear, something dark and ugly that he tried to
pretend he didn’t see. The cheating boyfriend, he supposed. Her anger at the boyfriend spreading out like the hood of a cobra, directed at any man that came within her line of vision.

Reaching for something to say, he remarked, “You look like you spend a lot of time in the sun. What do you do, flag cars in a bikini and a hardhat?”

“Tanning booths.”

“Those are bad for you.”

“Yeah, they give you skin cancer.” She laughed giddily. “But look who’s talking.”

She started to unscrew another of the tiny bourbon bottles. He took it from her. “Enough, OK. I don’t want you to pass out on me. You won’t be any fun to fuck.”

“How about your
wife
, Nicholas? Is she any fun to fuck? Or is she fat and frigid or maybe fucking someone else, even as we speak?”

“Don’t talk about my wife. You don’t know anything about her.”

“What is it, she don’t satisfy you?” The honey in her voice was laced with venom. “Aww, Nicholas’s wife won’t fuck him, so he has to cheat.”

He grabbed her arm, gripping it tight enough to get her attention, but stopping just short of causing pain. He wanted her to know he was playing, but also to realize he could shortcut play and
go straight to something a lot stronger, a lot more serious, real damn fast.

“Yeah, I cheat on her with little blonde sluts who come on to strange men in bars.”

“I never do this kind of thing.”

“I know, you were a virgin till just now. I could tell the minute I saw you.”

She tried to extricate her arm from his grip. He tightened it a fraction, taking pleasure in the hint of fear that crossed her features, then let her go. She rubbed her biceps, glared.

“That
hurt
.”

“Sometimes I like to make it hurt.”

“Aw, you’re no fun.”

“I beg to differ. Why don’t you pour what’s left of the booze you didn’t drink over your tits, so I can lick it off?”

He still remembered the rich, dizzyingly sweet taste of the bourbon as it dribbled down her deep cleavage, the scent of her sweat and her floral perfume. He remembered having fleeting thoughts
about Beth at home in Detroit and asking himself, “What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this?” even as he was getting hard again, turning the girl over onto her hands and knees,
roughly prying open the cheeks of her buttocks, and ramming himself inside.

And later, although normally he liked to keep some lights on, liked to see a woman looking freshly fucked, he made the room darker as she was getting dressed, because he didn’t want to see
her eyes. Something in them, the despair and shame that was also tainted with that ugliness he’d noticed earlier – not directed just at Nicholas personally, but at men in general
– filled him with a queasy kind of fear.

He watched CNN until a little after ten, then drove away from the waterfront lined with clean, brightly lit luxury hotels to the narrow, congested little lanes where the sex
trade thrived. The sleaze end of the sex trade, anyway.

Toronto was a city where you could find anything, and Nicholas, at one time or another, in one capacity or another, had provided or partaken of all. As he drove the depressingly familiar
streets, he saw that nothing had changed significantly since his days here – the whores still strutting on stiletto-thin spikes, the prancing drag queens in glitter and fake fur and tiny,
tight leather skirts, the hustlers cold-eyed and crotch-heavy, sexy dangerous.
Fuck me
,
fuck me
,
buy me
,
buy me
– the eternal mantra of desire and despair.

The rain had tapered off, leaving a chilly moistness in the late summer air and grey, glassy puddles. Nicholas parked the car under a stoplight and walked up Yonge Street, checking in sex
parlors and bookstores and gay clubs as he went. Valdez’s name elicited little response in those he queried, other than occasionally, feigned ignorance followed by a sudden, apparently
urgent, need to be somewhere else.

“Sonny Valdez? Yeah, I know him. But didn’t that fucker croak years ago? Didn’t he have heart cancer, dick cancer – or maybe he just
was
a cancer?”

The slant-eyed woman who was speaking was a sodden wreck, breasts like huge jellyfish that swayed beneath her see-through blouse, a pendulous belly, eyes ringed with grey-yellow smudges. She sat
at the end of the bar in the
Cha Cha Lounge
and tried to pick up guys, and people moved their seats to get away from her.

“No, Sonny Valdez didn’t die,” said Nicholas. “He was supposed to die. They let him out of fucking prison so he could go home to die, but then he
didn’t
die.”

The woman eyed him with bleary, wet-brain eyes. “So you already know that, then why you asking
me
?”

“I need to find him.”

“You want sweet pussy, you don’t need Sonny for that: you found it right here.” She leered and spread her bloated thighs, thumped a hand on her crotch.

Nicholas threw down some money for his drink and headed for the door. The barmaid, a tiny girl with crooked lips and short, raggedy black hair, dashed after him. The expression on her face was
so intense he thought that, in his haste to escape, he must have miscalculated his tab.

“You after Sonny?”

“I’m not
after
him. I want to find him, though.”

“Wellll . . . maybe . . .”

He pulled out his wallet, counted off a trio of bills.

“Where is he?”

“He’s got a suite at the Mayflower Hotel.”

“A suite? Last time I saw Sonny, he was holed up in a fleabag hotel without a pot to piss in.”

“He was sick, then. Now that he’s back on his feet, he’s got business deals going again. Entrepreneurial endeavors, he calls them.”

Nicholas snorted. “Right. Anything you can snort, shoot, smoke, or fuck, Sonny’s got a hand in it. How do you know the son-of-a-bitch, anyway?”

“I do him favors. Bring him his groceries a coupl’a times a week. Hold his hand, suck his dick, listen to him babble.”

Nicholas felt a twinge of alarm. “The cancer – it didn’t come back?”

“Oh, no, he’s healthy,” she said, “but he don’t like to go outside if he don’t have to. His head’s fucked up. He’s scared of something, scared so
bad he don’t even want to talk about it.”

He’s healthy
. How those words sang in Nicholas’s head. How ironic, given how fervently he’d once wished Sonny Valdez dead.

A few years back, he’d actually gone up to Toronto just to see for himself that what he’d heard was true, that Sonny had been released from prison, where he’d done five years
of a twelve-year stretch for drug dealing so he could come home to die. Nicholas had wanted to be sure. He’d told Beth that Sonny was a buddy from his old neighborhood in Chicago, and he was
going up to Toronto to pay his respects. Which, in a weird way, he supposed was true.

He’d found Sonny much as he’d imagined he’d be, living in one room of a hotel for the indigent subsidized by the government, looked in on by a sour-faced Filipino hospice
worker who barely spoke English. By the time he got there, even to an untrained eye, it was obvious that death was on the verge of crawling into bed with Sonny. He lay staring at a tiny TV set,
eyes rheumy, vacant, skin the color and texture of old newspaper. He didn’t recognize Nicholas, but kept both hands underneath the dirty sheet, rubbing at himself as though his flaccid dick
were an Aladdin’s lamp from which a genie or orgasm might yet appear.

Nicholas took a long look, saw what he wanted to see, then muttered under his breath “Rot in hell, Sonny,” and turned to leave.

He didn’t think that Valdez could even hear him and was shaken when the man said, in a cracked, tortured voice, “Maybe so. But you’ll get there before me,
motherfucker.”

The false bravado of a dying man, Nicholas had thought. The cancer coring out his brain along with his vocal cords.

Although he bought the Toronto paper for a few weeks after that, he never saw any notice of Sonny’s death: but then, why should he? How many drug-dealing pimps rate a paragraph in the
obituary column anyway?

With Sonny presumably gone, Nicholas had exhaled a three-year long sigh of relief. The scumbag he’d once run drugs for was dead, which meant he didn’t have to fear his former
colleague’s long-term propensity for vileness. Didn’t have to worry about Sonny reappearing in his life, exposing parts of his sordid history that not even Beth knew about or trying to
blackmail him with the threat of doing so.

It wasn’t Sonny who turned up from his past, however, but an ex-con named Danny Sorenson, a guy who’d been a buddy of Nicholas’s when they were growing up in Chicago. Sorenson
hustled luxury cars, stealing them in Detroit, selling them in Miami or Fort Lauderdale. He was imprudent enough to be driving one such stolen vehicle when, looped on crack, he pulled his first and
last bank robbery. When Nicholas went to prison, Danny had just gotten transferred down to Canon City Penitentiary in Colorado, after serving two years of a ten-year stretch in Michigan. He’d
known Sonny Valdez there. Had, in fact, been Sonny’s little helper in various blackmarket scams.

His first December out of the can, Danny got hold of Nicholas’s number and gave him a call. Christmas time and Danny was lonely and looking for somebody to get shitfaced with.

“No, thanks,” said Nicholas, making a mental note to tell Beth they needed an unlisted number. Then, by way of emphasizing his new, domesticated lifestyle, he’d added,
“The wife’s from Toronto. She and I are driving up there to spend Christmas with her family.”

“Hey, that’s an idea,” said Danny drunkenly. “Maybe I’ll head up to Toronto myself, see does old Sonny Valdez know some girls can suck dick like a vacuum
cleaner.”

“Sonny’s dead,” said Nicholas. “Cancer. Got let out of prison to die.”

“Yeah, well, I guess he’s resurrected,” Danny said, “ ’cause I seen Sonny less’n a month ago. Slidin’ out of a taxi on King Street with some Asian
cookie on his arm.”

Nicholas remembered the wasted wreck of a man he’d visited three years earlier. “Don’t bullshit me, Danny. He’s dead.”

“Man, I
talked
to him. Asked him what the hell was he doin’ alive. He said he found the magic cure. His head’s fucked up, though. You know what he wanted? He asked me to
say his name. Just like that. His name. Over and over, while this Asian chick was rolling her eyes, and I’m saying Sonny Valdez, that’s your fucking name, and he’s holding onto my
arm, saying,
say it
,
say my name
,
say it again
. . . And then I mention
you
, and was that a mistake! He goes off on a rant – said you rolled on him, that
hadn’t’a been for you he’d a never gone to prison.”

“Bullshit!”

“Yeah, well, like I said, his head’s fucked up.”

They talked for a few more minutes, Danny wanting to reminisce about prison days, Nicholas wanting nothing more than to get off the phone. Later on, he tried to convince himself that Danny
Sorenson was drunk or drugged when he had his encounter with “Sonny”, but it didn’t fly. Bizarre as Danny’s tale was – because of that very off-the-wall bizarreness
– there was a ring of truth to it.

And if Sonny Valdez was still alive, there was the chance he might just show up at the door one day and introduce Beth to the Nicholas Berringer she
didn’t
know – and probably
didn’t want to.

The Mayflower Arms was one of the small, swank, boutique-hotels located in the Yorkville district, northwest of Bloor Street. As expensive as it was unsubtle, the lobby
Nicholas entered was gilded like a Russian Easter egg, appointed with heavy, dark velvet furniture and Rococo lamps whose shades were supported by languidly stretching nymphs and pirouetting
ballerinas. Whatever else was going on with Sonny, he wasn’t hurting for money any longer.

The artfully made-up woman behind the front desk spoke with a French accent so thick it was almost unintelligible, but the fact that she resembled a young Sophia Loren made asking her to repeat
herself a pleasure.

Nicholas gave her his real name and was relieved when she rang Sonny’s suite and, evidently, was told to send Nicholas on up. Apparently, Sonny had forgotten the image of Nicholas hovering
at his death bed a few years earlier, murmuring “rot in hell”.