Getting Off

“Just to fill you in,” she said, “if you’ll pardon the expression, well, that’s a butt plug you feel in your ass. Just to keep you from feeling lonesome for the hot nights in prison. No, no really, because I know you were too much of a tightass to let yourself go that way. It’s more to set the stage, but we’ll get to that.

“And the constriction at the base of your dick, well, you’re wearing a cock ring. That’s why you’ve got such a raging hard-on, even though you came like crazy less than an hour ago. The vein’s constricted, but not the artery, so the blood gets in but can’t get out, and your dick stays stiff as a board even though sex is the last thing you want right now.”

He was trying to say something. He couldn’t, of course, but a certain amount of sound came through his nose. Pathetic, really.

“Okay, cut to the chase,” she said. “I couldn’t let you die without knowing this part. Remember that woman you went to prison for?Maureen McSomething? You didn’t kill her, dumbass. I killed her.”

Wide eyes. Zero comprehension.

“You fed me a Roofie, Peter, way back when. And that wasn’t supposed to happen, because I picked you up intending to fuck you and kill you, and the next thing I knew it was morning. So we had a little party, and on the way out I spiked your vodka so that the next drink you took would be your last. But I guess you weren’t much of a vodka drinker, so Maureen got it instead, and since you told the cops about the Rohypnol, they didn’t run a good enough tox scan to find out what else might have gotten into the little darling’s system. And off you went to prison, sure you deserved whatever they gave you.”

And she explained how she hadn’t even known about it until he was a few years into his sentence, how she’d had to track him down, and how she’d been willing to do this because he was one of only three men she’d slept with who still had a pulse.

And she told him why it was important to her that he die, that she be able to cross his name off the list. She was pretty sure it wasn’t making any sense to him, if indeed it was registering at all. Hearing her own words as she spoke them, she wasn’t sure it made any sense to her, either. Why did she have to do this? What difference did it make if an ex-lover was still alive? Why should she care?

But she did care. No getting around it, she cared. Her whole life centered upon it, for better or for worse.

“So here you are,” she said. “What do you figure, is it good news or bad news? You didn’t kill that girl, so that’s a relief, right? On the other hand, you did all that time in prison and went through all that guilt for nothing, so that’s not so good, is it? But either way it doesn’t matter too much, because in a few minutes you’re going to be dead.”

She showed him the noose.

“Autoerotic asphyxiation, sweetie. To heighten your pleasure. You’ll be wearing a butt plug and a cock ring, which just might give them the idea that sex is a component here, and after you’re dead I’ll lose the restraints and the duct tape, and, well, what are they going to think? And if some CSI-type genius figures out that you had a woman around, for at least part of the proceedings, do you think they’re gonna knock themselves out looking for her? You’re a known pervert, you already drugged a girl and served time for her death, so what do they care? Poetic justice, right?”

And what would he say to that? Well, she’d never know, would she?

Two.

She sat at the white parson’s table in the windowed kitchen and drank a cup of coffee. It was a shame, she thought, that she couldn’t hang on to the apartment a little longer. But there was a dead man in the bedroom, and that meant she’d have to be moving on.

She picked up the phone, keyed in a number.

“Hello?”

“Rita?”

“Omigod, Kimmie!”

Oh, right, she was Kim, wasn’t she? And now, with Peter cooling in the other room, she never had to be Audrey again.

“I sent you a present.”

“I knew it was from you. Even if I didn’t know what it was.”

“It’s a butt plug.”

“Well, I know that now, silly. I had to Google it.”

“How? If you didn’t know—”

“I Googled ‘sex toys,’ and I found a site with everything illustrated, and I must have spent an hour just reading about one damn thing after another.”

“Just reading?”

“Kimmie!”

Funny how easy it was, talking to Rita. Funny how she’d missed this.

“…called a flange,” Rita was saying. “To keep it from, you know, getting lost in there.”

“Hard to explain to the intern in the emergency room.”

“God, wouldn’t that be embarrassing? ‘I don’t know how on earth it got all the way up there, doctor.’ ”

“They must hear a lot of stories.”

“Oh, God, you know what I read online?”

Her sudden departure was the elephant in the living room, until she had to force herself to acknowledge the beast. When the conversation hit a lull, she said, “Rita, I just had to leave. It was sudden, and I should have said goodbye, but I figured the best thing I could do was just hop on the bike and go.”

“I had this vision of you on the bike, trying to get over the Rocky Mountains.”

“I just left it at the bus station. I hated to abandon it but I couldn’t figure out a way to get it back to you.”

“I never rode it anyway. And it’d be impossible now, with a butt plug up my bottom.”

“You’re too much, Rita.”

“That’s why you left, isn’t it? Not because I’m too much, but because we were too much. That last night, when we were—”

“Jilling.”

“Yeah. It was so fucking hot, Kimmie, but then the next day it was scary.”

“I know.”

“I mean, it’s not a lesbian thing when you’re both talking about things you did with guys, right? And we never even touched each other.”

“No, but—”

“But what, Kimmie?”

“Well, if we did it again, I might have wound up sitting next to you. And I might have touched you.”

“I might have let you.”

“The phone’s safe, though, isn’t it?”

“I was just thinking that myself.”

“Rita?”

“What?”

“You’re wet, aren’t you?”

“Kimmie!”

“You have to tell me,” she said, “because I’m thousands of miles away, so I can’t reach over and find out for myself.”

“And what about you, Miss Smarty Pants? You’re a little moist yourself, aren’t you?”

“Just my cunt.”

“Oh God. When you say that word—”

“Have you been with anybody lately?”

“A guy. Two nights ago. It was okay, it was fun. But you know what I kept thinking afterward? That I wished I could tell you about it.”

“We could probably both think of things to tell each other.”