Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (2 page)

Gina listens with a magical stillness, and the men’s eyes go wide like the eyes of shy ten-year-olds. Their breathing changes, their posture. They lean close. Speak quieter, and—yes! She’s still riveted! Smitten, they open their hearts.

You think that’s a metaphor for vulnerability, and it is, but it is also a factually accurate description. A doorway they cannot see, and probably don’t know exists, is hidden in their chests. By hidden, I mean invisible to regular eyes like yours or mine. If you asked Gina what the doors look like, she’d tell you each set is different. Some are fleshy, some more like antique wooden cabinets. Occasionally she sees a pair of doors that unfold like pterodactyl wings. She has no idea what any of this means, how the shape of your particular set of doors correlates to karma or genetics. Whatever; Gina doesn’t dwell on the mysteries. She sits and listens and watches for the moment when the doors swing wide.

Now would be a good moment to tell you that Gina is not really an executive assistant. Gina is a demon.

Between Gina’s breasts is a delicate silvery chain from which hangs a pair of razor-fine invisible scissors. She can feel their shape against her skin, their weight, their warmth. These scissors are the means by which she cuts the energy strings we were discussing earlier. The moment those doors in the chest of her victim swing open, she reaches for her scissors and threads her thumb and forefinger through their invisible loops. This action freezes time. All sound stops. All movement. For that moment, Gina alone moves in a world that is a sudden candid photograph. She finds frozen time unnerving, the sensation not unlike having pillows pressed hard against both ears. So she works quickly. She reaches through the doors and hooks one sparkly string. Opens her scissors. Snip: one bright balloon, one grape off the cluster.

Tonight’s victim is in his mid-forties and wears a three-thousand-dollar suit and two days of beard. He’s drinking whiskey, neat, and picking at an appetizer of tomatoes and mozzarella. He looks miserable. Gina is thinking that it’s almost too easy.

She rises from her barstool. Slowly adjusts her skirt, pulling it straight. When she looks up, Two-Day Beard looks away. Gina leans against the bar and unnecessarily asks the bartender to point the way to the ladies’ room. He nods in the direction of the frosted-glass double doors. Gina takes her time crossing the room.

The doors are heavy. She remembers the last time she soul-cut a guy who had doors like these. He was tall, athletic. She hadn’t needed to fuck him—she almost never needs to fuck any of them to get them to open up—but she indulged because he was so damn pretty. She took him to her apartment, to the guest bedroom. He’d been telling her a story from his childhood, something about the first time he played soccer, how his folks paid attention to him when he won. She’d had the fleeting thought that this guy needed therapy far more than he needed sex, and that if he’d had some therapy he wouldn’t be in a strange woman’s apartment, about to have a piece of his soul ripped from his body. She’d taken her time undressing him, lingering over each extravagantly muscled arm, the taut skin around his navel, ignoring the trembling frosted-glass doors over his chest that would fly open with the smallest kind word from her. She’d waited, carefully avoiding eye contact until he was inside her, making him work for it, pull her by the hair to kiss him, beg to be taken. And so it was fitting, really, that taking him is exactly what she did.

The corridor to the restrooms is long, lit by mod square sconces over recessed nooks bearing single orchids. Gina suddenly realizes she loathes this bar. The pretension of it, the reek of cash and sexual negotiation. The soullessness; often, literally. How many times has she chatted up a guy, pushed his buttons, lied her way into his confidence, watched his doors shudder and give way—only to find his soul cluster already pruned bare, five or six straggler balloons bobbing up there where a fat bouquet should be? And the guy staring at her, thinking victory thoughts about the likelihood that he was about to get a blow job from the hottest chick in the bar, thinking also that she seemed classy, she seemed real, she seemed to really listen, and maybe this could go somewhere, maybe he could love her, maybe she could save him. Clueless to the fact that Gina was only the latest in a long line of demons who’d sidled up to him at the office, at the gym, on the beach. Friendly salesmen with too-good deals, boss types offering the mentorship Daddy never did, big-eyed girls. Soon he’d have nothing left, not one blue balloon. What then? Hell, Gina supposes; and before that, a swift downward spiral, a howling need for liquor, insomnia or nightmares, the desire to jerk the steering wheel into the center divider, sudden snap violence that makes the news.

It’s not pretty, what Gina does. She knows. Sometimes she has a few beers with a demon friend and gasses on about how they sustain the balance of the universe by picking off the weak—but sober, she feels that’s bullshit. Sober, she knows that she does what she does because that’s what demons do. Demons toe the line. With good reason; Gina’s boss is arctic, calculating, quiet, relentless, and above all—wildly successful. You don’t maintain that level of success without an ability to exact swift retribution. In fact, it’s the trait he’s most known for in the world at large. As for Gina’s personal relationship with her boss: she’s only met him twice. She’s happy about that. Taking assignments by text message suits her just fine.

Gina pushes open the first door on her right—but it’s not the bathroom, it’s a lounge cluttered with glasses and crumpled napkins from a private party earlier in the evening. The remains of a cake litter the table, a pile of gooey candles. Gina stares.

This might be a good moment to let you know that Gina was born just like you and me. She started out human. And today is her birthday.

Gina tries not to remember her birthday. She reasons that human birthdays are meaningless to a demon, despite the fact that she still has a human body to attend to, feed, moisturize, exfoliate, dress.

Gina exits the birthday lounge. Heads back into the bar. She didn’t need to use the bathroom anyway. Just roping Two-Day Beard with her absence.

When Gina reenters the bar, Two-Day is right where she left him, nursing his drink, fussing with his napkin. Gina is thinking about how there’s not a single bone of her that wants to soul-cut this guy. Usually, she perks up right before she goes to work on someone, because she’s so good with her scissors now that it feels less like surgery and more like art. She enjoys the feeling of being a pro, of filling her quota, keeping her boss pleased and therefore distant.

You’re probably wondering how a nice girl like Gina got to be a demon, and we’ll get to that, but first let me tell you what’s about to happen. Gina will plan to close the deal with Two-Day, but on her way back to the bar, she’ll spot the man sitting in the corner. He will be wearing jeans and a worn Henley shirt, and he will be scrawling in a quad-ruled notebook. He’ll have something amber over ice in a tumbler neglected near his elbow, and he’ll be wearing an expression that dwells halfway between melancholy and determination.

Something about this man will arrest Gina in her steps. She’ll realize she’s seen him before, in this bar, in the same corner booth, writing. She’ll notice his left-handedness, his boyish cheap haircut, the merest hint of a bruise under the left eye of his otherwise well-preserved face. She’ll wonder how old he is—a wise thirty-two? A sheltered forty? She’ll wonder what he’s writing, if he’s a writer or just one of those sad people who write a lot to try to expel a bit of their sadness. She’ll wonder why he chose this pretentious place that doesn’t deserve him, and then her thoughts will drop into the valley of her belly when she notices the biteability of his full lower lip.

When Gina catches herself thinking all these things, she’ll tell herself she’s just tired and distracted. It’s not like the guy’s that interesting, really; she’s just having an off night.

That’s when the man will look up at her, and when their eyes meet she will feel a fine tightening in her chest like a single hair-width thread squeezing the air from her lungs. And he will ever so slightly startle, because a moment of mutual recognition that intense always feels physical, like touching a bare wire. Gina will see this happen with such clarity, it will feel as though she’s slipped her fingers through the loops and frozen him there in the same second that battered, lonely, fierce part of him clocks its identical twin inside her.

Immediately, her rational mind, her superior demon mind, will begin to bellow a sharp command: Snap out of it! Whatever she imagines she’s feeling, it’s exhaustion, too many nights in a row of scissor work without a spa day, the annoying fact that it’s her birthday. It has nothing to do with Melancholy over there in the worn-out shirt with the bar-brawl eye. He’s nothing, he’s human, he’s a man.

As for Melancholy, he’ll look confused and a little scared of his response. He’ll look away. Gina will watch him debate looking up again for three ridiculously long seconds.

For the first time in Gina’s demonic life, she will consider blowing off work—well, not blowing it off, she couldn’t do that, so call it procrastinating—and instead cross the room to that booth and slide in and say … what would she say? She has no idea, she doesn’t know how to socialize without an agenda. Flirting feels dirty to her, the foreplay to thievery; she just wants to get closer to him so she can get a better look. Just look; five minutes. Surely Two-Day will linger.

Melancholy will look up again. Cautious now, braced against whatever might transpire between his eyes and hers. Gina, whom we know to be thrown way off her game, will feel almost humanly shy. To cover this, she will start to smile, then think better of it. He will watch all this with curiosity and not look away. Gina will tell herself that she could just do this guy, and then Two-Day. If she went to the man in the corner now, it would be work; she would just be doing her job. But Gina can sense a soul ripe for scissoring, and she will feel with every cell that Melancholy would not be an easy take. Therefore, she has no business looking back at him. But she won’t stop looking. He looks like he’s spent a few birthdays alone.

Gina will go to this man. She will say the first thing to come to mind—
How did you bruise your eye?
And he’ll smile, a little embarrassed, and he will answer,
Have you ever done something you knew was a bad idea, on purpose?

But before we get to that, you should know how Gina came to be a demon. It helps explain a thing or two about what happens between her and Melancholy, whom she will eventually come to know as Matt William Robinson, professional ghostwriter, bearer of soul-deep sorrow, greatest fuck of her life.

Gina was an ordinary baby. She was an ordinary child. By ordinary, I mean human, but once we’re in that general category, Gina was far from average. She was, from a very young age, a little too pretty.

Gina got boobs at twelve, and then the real trouble started. Men, and the lesser evil, boys. Their dopey gazes, their insinuating tones. None of them particularly interested Gina, in the same way no one lion would catch the fancy of a fresh young antelope. She grew bookish and quiet, and she took the long way home.

Eventually, a bad thing happened, as they do to more girls than you’d like to imagine. The bad thing happened on a weekend camping trip; Gina was sixteen by then and thought herself a black belt in fending off advances. But she’d mostly practiced on boys her age, and the camping trip was organized by men, fathers. She went into the woods with one of the dads, for tinder. She’s never told anyone what happened, so I won’t tell you either. It’s what you’re imagining, anyway.

They say the Devil has a way of knowing, and they’re right. The Devil approached Gina the very next Monday as she walked home from school, alone, poorly hiding her despair, the ache still in her body, the permanent injury to her heart. She felt like dying. He stepped out of a black car parked at the corner. He was beautiful and frightening, like a movie Nazi. Perfect silver hair, smooth brow. He looked at once interested in Gina and completely detached.

What Gina knows now: she never stood a chance. Her boss exerts a kind of quiet persuasion as unfightable as gravity. All that talk about being given a choice at the crossroads is bullshit. The Devil has nothing if not perfect timing; he comes to you at the moment you most need to say yes.

He stood to the side of her path, as if to indicate she was free to walk by. But it was clear that he was there for her; he’d been waiting. So Gina asked:
Who are you?
A week ago, Gina might have run. But now she had little else to lose.

The Devil said,
I am here to help you.

Help me what?

Take revenge.

Gina got in his car. The seats were soft white leather. He reached across her lap, never touching her, and opened the glove compartment. His hand was so pale and smooth as to appear glassy. It gave her an uneasy, insecty feeling in her stomach. He pulled out a tray lined with white satin. It was perfectly empty. Gina was puzzled. He watched her, waiting for an answer. She knew better, and she didn’t care. She nodded yes.

When she looked down at the tray again, it held a pair of silver scissors.

Gina and Matt talk and drink straight whiskey for over an hour. His melancholy is loneliness, she realizes; that and the unfortunate ability to see people clearly. That talent, he tells her, gets him in a lot of trouble. Yes, she’s drinking, she’s having a bad day, but she also likes her new dangerous experiment, letting this Matt William Robinson in for a few minutes. Just to see what that’s like. Before she gets right back to work.

When she’d slid into his booth, Gina had almost believed the line she told herself—that this man would be an extra-bonus soul-cut, that she could do him and then Two-Day, no problem. She’s done it before. Once she did three in a night, all in this bar between the hours of 9:00
P.M.
and 1:00
A.M.
, and when she got home the Devil had left roses at her door.