NightWhere, and then one weekend she came back to the club and said she’d been there. I remember it because she had really beautiful skin when she came to the club-perfect complexion, no tattoos or moles or zits or anything like that. Pretty, though she had a little extra on the side, you know? Anyway, after NightWhere, she showed up with whip marks all over her body. I was afraid to touch her-I remember that-I was afraid she’d start bleeding on me! But she talked about NightWhere the same way it sounds like Rae is-she was absolutely in love with it, even though it looked like they’d thrown her under a truck. She talked about one of the guys there too; I sort of wondered if she was more into him than anything else. But I never got the chance really to ask her.”
“Why not?”
“She never came back to the club again after that night.” Randy shook his head. “You know, people kind of come and go through the club over time. I’d guess there were probably some others who didn’t come back after they found NightWhere. I mean-look at you guys, for example. Haven’t seen you in weeks. Does Rae want to come back?”
Mark shrugged. “She hasn’t mentioned it since the first night at NightWhere.”
“See what I mean? We’ve had others at the club who had a thing for whips and chains…they never stick around that long. Whether that’s ’cuz they were bored since most of us don’t go there, or because they got sucked into NightWhere…who knows? All I know for sure is, they didn’t come back.”
Chapter Nine
The bruises were deep. The black was yellow on the edges, but mostly…still black. Parts of her kept bleeding. She had to move every few hours so that she didn’t scab herself too painfully to the couch. That would only hurt worse.
She tried to stand, but fell back to the couch after a red-hot something snapped in her back. She saw her guitar sitting across the room and longed to strum it…the music would help take some of the pain away. But she didn’t think she could walk that far across the room. And her fingers were swollen and thick. She probably couldn’t play it.
Amelia didn’t know how she’d managed to get herself home. But she knew that she couldn’t go to work tomorrow. Maybe not the rest of the week. She tried to move her arm and nothing happened.
Maybe not ever.
The room felt like it was spinning, but Amelia hadn’t had anything to drink.
Drunk on pain.
She needed water. Her lips were dry, and something inside her felt wrong. Broken.
Amelia pushed off the couch again, and this time managed to stagger to the kitchen where she downed two glasses of water. The pain in her lower back grew, and she realized she had to make another stop on the way back to lie down. The bathroom.
She managed to get herself to the toilet without falling, but when her water came it burned…and when she staggered to her feet she saw the water was dark. She refused to think about that. She flushed and downed another glass of water before she fell back onto the couch.
“You’re broken,” she whispered out loud.
The last time she’d come home bleeding on the outside, but this time…she was bleeding inside. That was probably a worse thing, she considered.
Her eyes fluttered closed as she focused on the pain, tasting it, enjoying it, living in it…
The voice was soft, but firm. Amelia opened her eyes and saw Kharon before her. He was just as she remembered, bare-chested and pale, but with his crotch sheltered in black leather and silver chains. He smiled at her, and his teeth looked as hungry as happy.
“You can’t let go here,” he whispered. “You must come back, and enter The Black.”
Amelia tried to raise her head, but failed. “The Black?”
“There is more to the journey than The Red,” he said. “Come back one more time. For The Crossing. Wait for NightWhere.”
“Yes,” Amelia whispered, just before passing out.
AC/DC on the stereo. “Back in Black.” Because nothing that went before or after was quite as transcendent.
Vanilla incense burned in a candleholder on the kitchen counter. Maybe it was girlie, but he liked vanilla.
He liked bourbon too, and he filled a snifter with Pappy Van Winkle 15-Year. Hard to find. Hard to afford.
He was going to drink it down, slowly. And when it all felt right…
…the knife that killed his father.
Perry Pierce didn’t have a lot to live for anymore, but he knew what he liked. Good music, good smells, good buzz. And then he’d use the same knife that he’d killed his father with and let the blood out. It had been beating within him for so long, wanting to leave…it was time to let it go.
Mike was out tonight, and that was part of the plan. He knew Mike had a thing for Tony-they were at a game and, if Mike came home, he’d come home drunk. But more likely, he wouldn’t come home at all. He’d end up at Tony’s and claim that he was too drunk to get back.
Perry knew better. He was being cheated on, and Mike was too much of a chickenshit to cop to it.
Perry didn’t know what Tony had that he didn’t have, but there you go…people just fuckin’ suck, in general. And not in a good, gay suck way. Just sucked. In a kick-’em-in-the-teeth-’cuz-it’s-every-ass-for-himself kinda way.
There wasn’t anything you could do to hold the ones you loved close. They were yours for a little while, and then they slipped away. If you didn’t kill them, or cancer or AIDS didn’t kill them, they killed themselves. Or at least the love you had. Everyone moved on, whether you were moving or not.
Perry was tired of moving.
He took a sip of the bourbon and felt the heat spike across his tongue and then trail down the back of his throat. It was hot like a good blow job, he thought with a smile.
“Fuck me,” he whispered and took another sip. He wanted the world to spin, but he didn’t want to waste the bourbon. It was powerful stuff, the kind that should be savored.
He let it lay on his tongue and thought about all the times he’d let Mike tie him to a wall and whip the shit out of him. He thought about the dungeons they’d gone to together, Mike showing him off like some trophy fuck.
He thought about the time he’d gone to that secret club. The invite had come when Mike was out of town, and Perry had checked it out. He couldn’t hide the bruises, though, when Mike had come home, and they’d almost broken up over that. Perry had ignored the following invitations.
He toyed with the knife and thought of the day his father had come after him, screaming at him like some maniac. “Faggot?” his dad had screamed. “No son of mine is going to be some kind of faggot…”
Perry relived the moment again and again. The words were in his head like a recording, but worse was the memory of his father stepping into the kitchen and holding a bottle out, threatening his son. Perry had grabbed a knife from the steak knife holder and warned his father back.
“No son of mine will…” his dad had said just before impaling himself on the knife in Perry’s hand.
He’d run after that. And run with the knife. He’d kept it close ever since, as a reminder. A reminder of what he’d done. What he could do. Tony beat him, but he was never afraid…he knew what he could do.
Perry emptied the glass and poured another thirty dollars of bourbon into a glass. Maybe it was a waste, he thought, since he’d be gone before the burn really went deep.
“Fuck it.”
He pulled the knife across his wrist and let the red bleed out into his lap. He watched, with a strange disconnection, as the blood streamed across his forearm and then down his thigh to wet the floor.
And then someone was there, in the room with him. A man he remembered from the sex club. Dark eyes and pale skin, a chest to die for.
