Lynne Heitman - First Class Killing

“There was a dress in stock that I wanted to wear to the freshman dance. It was a teal green with a sweetheart neckline. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and there was no way on God’s green earth I could pay for it. I was going to steal it, but then one day the store manager saw me pawing it. He was this dickhead who wore short-sleeved shirts where the sweat stains under his arms never quite came out. His oldest daughter was in school with me. He told me I could have the dress if I went to the back room and sat on his lap. I remember he had this pocket watch he used to wear. It was a gold watch and he wore it on the end of this cheap old chain. I never did understand that. The chain got caught under my thigh, that’s what made me think of it. He came in thirty seconds.” She smiled. “I came home with my dress, and I wore it to that dance, and I had a blast. After that, I could get anything I wanted if I went with him to the stockroom. Easy as pie.”

“That’s your life-altering moment? You fucked a man for a dress, and that set your life on the course it’s on?”

“Not really. I fucked a priest. That’s probably what did it.”

“You…” I looked at her more closely. She stared into the fire.

“You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

“I was raised Catholic,” I said.

“I knew it. I can always tell.” Her voice had gone all dreamy. “Dried-up old men in collars and nuns in burkas, they teach you that sex is dirty and anyone who engages in the sins of the flesh is a filthy heathen who will rot for eternity in hell. What do they know? They’ve never gotten any in their lives. The only priest that ever taught me anything worth knowing was the one who stuck his dick in my mouth.” She gave me a half smile. “He taught me everything.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged as though revealing this much had left her with a chill. “I went down on him, up on him, inside and out with him. It’s the ones who know they’re doing wrong that make me the hottest.”

“Did you ever tell anyone?”

“Tell them what?”

“That you were molested?”

“Doll, if there was any molesting going on, it was me doing it to him. I was what you’d call an early developer. He couldn’t resist me. No man ever could and I needed it, too.”

Right. “How old were you?”

She offered a gentle smile. Her face softened. She rested her hands on her thighs. She looked as tranquil as I’d ever seen her. She dropped her head and looked as though she were in some kind of meditative pose. I almost wanted to reach out to her. Then she raised her head and I saw into her eyes. Something had gone off inside, some kind of light had been extinguished. She stared right through me. When she spoke, her voice was scarily dull, completely devoid of emotion.

“So tell me, Alexandra, does any of this get you hot?”

“Molestation? Not generally.”

“Because you won’t let it.” She started to come at me again, moving slowly. She reached over and started to play with my hair, running her hands through it and pushing it behind my ear. “You know what your problem is? You’re all about control. You need to lose control, or have it taken away from you. Then you could just lie back and enjoy.”

“That would be rape, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, that would be rape. Don’t you ever fantasize about being raped? Taken against your will with all choice removed. No choice means no games, no angst, or confusion, or questions. Just giving in. Letting go…and enjoying. It makes it so easy.”

“That’s not one of my fantasies.”

“Taken by someone more powerful and more experienced than you are. Someone who would know what you wanted before you did and would do it to you even when you said no. Someone who would make you do…things…to her…that you’ve never done before.”

The smile was still there, but tighter, crueler, and deeply unsettling. She moved her hand to my face. This time when she touched me, it set off an adrenaline surge that ripped through my bloodstream with one clear message:run.

I tried to get up. She put her knee and all her weight on my thigh and locked me down. At the same time, she grabbed my wrist, wrenched my arm around, and held it up between us like half a turkey wishbone. The come-on was over. The pretense was gone. Now we were down to the pure, unvarnished conflict that had been there between us all along.

“You’ve been trying to get close to me, sugar.” Her smooth-as-maple-syrup voice was back. So was her attitude. “Is this close enough?”

“Angel, all I was doing was-”

“You bitch.” She twisted my arm half a turn in the wrong direction. It hurt like hell. “You think you’re so smart. Did you find out what you wanted to know? Do you understand your client now?”

I did understand some things. First, that there wasn’t much point in engaging in discussion. I could look into her eyes and see what I hadn’t seen before. Second was that it wasn’t the sex that turned her on. It was the manipulation. She got off on making people do what they didn’t want to do. She liked making them uncomfortable and ashamed, how she might have felt giving a blow job to a priest. Sadly, I understood too late that making her feel that again would result in this kind of reaction.

“You’re nothing but a whore like me. What’s your price? What will make you do what you don’t want to do?”

She was now stroking my forehead with her free hand. I tried to figure out if I could push her off. Probably not. If I could twist out from under her. Doubtful. If I had any advantage at all. Not really. Not physically.

“I could force you,” she said.

She looked crazed, like an animal. It reminded me of something I had read about wolves, about how the weaker wolf in a fight can save itself by offering its throat, giving the stronger animal the choice to rip it out. Or not. All I had left was to offer her my throat.

I let the wave of pain in my arm subside and tried to talk slowly, with some semblance of confidence. “I know you could force me. I know you could hurt me, and I believe you would. If that’s your plan, then do it. Otherwise, let me go.”

She stared into my face and twisted my arm again, this time approaching the limit of what my normal skeletal structure could endure. My fingers went completely numb. Tears sprang to my eyes. It was as if her shell had fallen away, leaving something truly scary to look at. It was raw physical desire and a bottomless pit of loathing, for herself and everyone else. I wasn’t sure which was fuel for the other, or even if one could be separated from the other.

“I could force you,” she whispered again, “if I wanted.”

She twisted until we were both shaking. When I finally cried out, she let go of my arm and backed off of my thigh.

I was on my feet instantly. When I dropped my hand to my side, the blood rushed back in, making my fingers hurt as if they were throbbing against a thousand needles. I grabbed my things and started backing out the front door.

“Twelve,” she said, without looking at me.

“Twelve what?”

“I was twelve years old.”

I left her sitting alone in the dark, staring into the fire.

I could barely keep my car on the road on the way back to Boston. After I had blown out of Angel’s place and buckled in, a wave of delayed adrenaline had washed through me. I had started shaking and sweating and hadn’t stopped. Felix heard it in my voice when I called him.

“What’s the matter, Miss S? You sound freaked out.”

That was the perfect description. “I just had a disturbing experience.” At least I was out of the cabin, but I was out without the contact information for Sluggo. “Did you get e-mails and attachments from a guy named Bo or Bulatovic?”