Headstone City

Georgie nodded and left for his office.

Dane turned to Maria and saw real fright in her eyes.

He stepped closer and saw the lust there too, the reverence.

Rispetto.

She was looking at him as if noticing him for the first time since he was a child, and she was.

It made his pulse hammer and the sweat flood down his back. He took her gently but assuredly, encircling her waist and drawing her to him. She held her ground for an instant, then flowed against his body, squirming there, then yielding.

“Do you still want to be an actress?”

“I never really cared much about that,” she said. “It was something to dream about until something else better came along.”

He thought of her on the screen, sharing her with the world, ten thousand theaters filled with squirming men, guys at home with their VCRs all freeze-framed on her. “Good,” Dane told her. “I need you here.”

“You need me.” Her face softening even more, so beautiful that he could barely control himself.

“I always have.”

“I've been waiting for you, Johnny.”

JoJo had been right. We all got one thing in the world that we love more than anything else. That makes us do what we do and makes us who we are.

He led her upstairs, kicking in doors until he found her bedroom. As he kissed her throat he saw the photo of JoJo Tormino behind her, on the night table. He eased her down on the mattress, reached over, and slapped the frame to the floor.

She unbuckled his belt and he said, “JoJo loved you. I promised him I'd tell you that.”

“I don't give a shit,” she whispered, and Dane rolled her back on the bed and was on her.

The boy with the sick brain happily bounded forward from a corner of the room, perhaps finally ready to tell Dane whatever it was he'd been trying to say. An angel with golden wings as shiny as coins sat on the edge of the mattress, supplicant but silent, a burning sword in its right hand. Dane lay with his love and let out his first real laugh in thirty years against her throat as he waited for the kid so much like himself to again mutter all the grievous, joyous, secret languages of the profane and fitful dead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TOM PICCIRILLI is the author of fourteen novels, including November Mourns, A Choir of Ill Children, The Night Class, A Lower Deep, and Coffin Blues. He's had over 150 stories published, and his short fiction spans multiple genres and demonstrates his wide-ranging narrative skills. He has been a World Fantasy Award finalist and a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner. Visit Tom's official website, Epitaphs, at www.tompiccirilli.com. Tom welcomes email at [email protected].

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