“You don’t think some stranger will find their way inside?” she’d asked him then, eyebrows raised.
“I’ll find my way inside. That’s what matters.”
Elle had smiled. Her hand had slipped past the waistband of her shorts. She was wet already with the thought of him.
“Seven o’ clock,” he said.
“Seven o’clock,” she confirmed.
~~~
She hadn’t expected the mask or the gloves. He looked like he’d been called away during a heist.
“A mask, really?”
Something gleamed in the low lamplight.
A knife.
“Jesus, tell me that thing’s fake.”
He held her against the bed frame. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted you and hated you for making me want you. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I’m still deciding which shaft to bury in you.”
His grip was firm.
“Roger?”
“Shut your whore mouth.”
He was in her then, deep. Warmth flowed from her and she dipped her finger into her wet. When it came away, it was only her cum.
“You’re so big,” she moaned. “It’s going to take so long.”
His breath caught as the blade sank into his stomach. Her hands encircled his back and she drew him down.
“Fuck, this is hot, Roger. You never told me how hot it would be.”
He coughed blood. His eyes found her. They said what his mouth no longer could—Why?
“Because I can. Because I’m tired of men having their way with me and ghosting me. Because women have power, too. Because I know what you did to poor Suzette. A poet, if memory serves. I know you’re in the role of teaching, bastard. But I hope you’ve learned a thing or two. You were going to kill me too, weren’t you, you sick fuck?”
Elle let her words sink in and smiled her first real smile in months.
The crimson wad drizzled down, ran onto her breast. And then he went still.
She rolled from underneath him, stifled a sob.
How the fuck had it come to this?
He was going to kill you.
Still gripping the knife, she thought about his dick, then considered the one eye that was still open, regarding the world critically. Brilliant and hazel and frozen in time.
He felt like a pumpkin as she applied force, cut into that soft opening in his skull, severed the nerves inexpertly. Finally, she held the eye aloft. She wasn’t sure why she did it then, but she took his eye into herself, felt the roundness of the orb settle just inside, sighed deeply, imagined him seeing her act of desecration. In and out, in and out. He surfaced and was buried again in her flesh until at long last she spasmed with him still inside. She pulled him out and lifted him, regarding him curiously. If he had brought her pleasure in life, he brought her ecstasy in death. The eye had not burst inside her and she was glad for it. Eventually, the vitreous fluid would flood her, but he still had a few more rides in him. Him? It? Did it matter?
“See now what you do to me, what you always did to me? The difference is that I was always willing to do it alive. You … I think you needed me dead. I guess I can kind of see the appeal now, but really … you break my heart, Love.”
Elle dropped the eyeball into a glass of water by her bedside, watched it sink to the bottom.
The clock on the nightstand read 1:03 a.m.
Shit.
She wouldn’t sleep tonight, she realized. Would have to destroy the evidence and devise a story to feed the few people who cared what happened to him. His wife, for instance. Elle could imagine the questions now: “Well, he was your editor. What happened, anyway?”
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Well, you see, he attempted to fuck me with a knife in hand and then I pleasured myself with his eyeball.
She began to cut. This wasn’t the knife for the job. Her stomach roiled as she exposed bits of tissue. Her eyes darted to his gloves and she saw his logic. Her fingerprints were all over him. What the fuck had she been thinking?
She pocketed the knife and took up her keycard, leaving the room as it was. She slunk quietly down to the ground floor and made her way to the lobby, checked out, and tried to keep the panic from manifesting on her face.
They would know sooner or later, but right now time was on her side. The maids wouldn’t come until morning.
She’d left the exhausted eye in its glass of water. Her car awaited her in the parking garage. The key turned in the ignition and she drove away as he never would.
What happened next was up to the fates.
One thing was certain—it would be a while before she’d show her face at a con again.