Know Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book One) (31 page)

Slap slap slap.

Catalina turns her head to me,
sweaty hair matted to her forehead. But instead of hi, she
says
“Umpf!”
and squeezes her eyes just as pops rams another one into her. Her
head bobs with each of pop’s
slap slap
thrusts.

As if it
had always been there, but only
now am I aware of it, she takes out her nine mil
Beretta
, puts the smoking barrel in her mouth.
And sucks it, licks it, while smoke wriggles out of it. White,
thick smoke. “Mmmmmmm,” she says. Her tongue reaches out over it,
caressing it.

And then it’s not a
Beretta
anymore. It’s something else.
Something more fleshy. And pulsing.

I look away. Because it grosses
me out.

Situation normal
, I think.

I turn my head to the stairs.

And there’s an entirely
different sound coming from above them...

“
Oh, god.” It’s a different
voice, also female, from above the stairs. It’s a wail of pain.
“Oh, god.” Then sobs. “God, help me!”

And, from the tea room, the
sexy version: “Oh, GOD! Oh, yeah! God, help me, baby!”
Slap. Slap. Slap.

And at my
feet
:
Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.

And, from above, weak and
faint, in between sobs.
“Oh, god. Help me, please. Help me.”

“
M—mom?” I look behind me at
dad. He looks at me, raises the PBR, smiles, takes a sip.
Slap slap slap.
Puts it back down.
Fucks the babe with his hands on her charitable ass. “D—dad. I
think mom needs—”

Dad’s eyes turn to glowing red
embers when he looks at me now.

I look away. From behind me,
Catalina howls orgasmically:
“Oh, yeah! Oh, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!
MMMMMMMMMM.
”

The wail above
disappears.

I’m on the stairs now. How did I get
here?

Gulp-
gulp-gulp
at my feet
.

I take a step
and the wood
creak-creak-creaks
. The sex sounds below start fading. The death
sounds above get louder. “Mmmmmmmmm.” A death sound.

At the top of the stairs now, I
look left and right, and see only blackness.
Mom’s room is to the
right
.
Somehow I know this. Even though this isn’t really my house,
although it also is.
I
don’t want to go to the right
.
The
sound is coming from the right
.

Convincing myself that
everything’s OK, too afraid to face the truth, I go
left.

There’s a statue of the Virgin
in the corner, bright and shiny. The only thing glowing in
this dark spot of
this hallway.

And then she’s a real woman.
Nude. With
knocking breasts. Massaging them, sticking her tongue out
and calling me.

And holding a
Beretta...

I feel myself harden.

And dad’s behind her
now as well, the
Virgin.

Or is it?

He holds a beer up to me,
smiles, tilts his head back, takes a sip
—gulp-gulp-gulp
. Then puts his hand on the Virgin’s pure
ass, her tits dangling wildly while she says—

The moan from behind me becomes
more desperate: “Declan. Declan, baby!” It’s hoarse, barely
audible, but it cuts into my heart like a spear. “Declan, I’m
dying. Get your father. Declan.”

In my hand there’s a
joint.
Where did this
come from?

I smoke it, because it’s
already lit. And it makes me feel better.
Oh, yes, I feel so much better when I smoke this
shit. Oh yeah, baby. Yeah!

I puff it. I
puff it so much
that the room sways. Pictures of beautiful women swing around my
head, a harem of them, wielding milk and honey and large brown
breasts. Sounds fill my ears. “Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, baby.” And, “I’m
dying. Help me. Declan—”

It’s a cacophony. All around
me.
Gulp-gulp-gulp.
Slap-slap-slap. Creak-creak-creak

Naked women, blood, a flower. A bee on the
flower.

A cockroach.

“
Declan!”

Dad smiles, eyes hot as fire.
And the Virgin’s tongue is a snake now, licking her nose while her
hands caress her bountiful breasts and she says, in a deafeningly
manly voice that echoes as if it were spoken from an interplanetary
loudspeaker currently manned by James Earl Jones: “Fuck me you
irreverent
BASTARD
!”

From behind me, screaming now:
“Declan, help! I’m dying!”

“
Mom?”

In front of me: “FUCK ME!”

The Virgin’s
eyes go wild with
passion, delirious with desire. I wonder if she’s smoked some of
what I’m holding. The thought makes me smile. And I smoke it some
more...

Ahhh, that’s better
. That’s a little better...just a little
bit...

What was I saying?

“
Declan, please, don’t leave me
alone. Don’t let me die alone...”

Shouldn’t I be with my
—

Did someone say something?

I feel hard. Very hard. Below.

Irresistibly
, the Virgin’s tongue licks my
check. Her hand gets to my crotch. Inside. Mmmmmm. That’s good. She
holds me, juggles my balls. I feel my breath quicken, feel her hand
tighten around my shaft as she squeezes and caresses it—

Wait. Something’s wrong.

—
moves her hand up and down it.
She takes the weed from my fingers and we smoke it together. Pops
is behind her as well.
Slap-slap-slap.
Like father like son. How nice.
But I feel like she’s all mine
somehow. I start doing her, wild and passionate and crazy. I’m all
over her now, just me and her. And now she’s someone else. Blonde
or redhead or— It doesn’t matter. She’s everything I wanted. There
could be no better women than her, whoever she is. I’m elated. I’m
over the moon. I’m almost over the edge. I shut my eyes, pump,
slam, go WIIIIILD, feel her tits wobble against my
chest—

It’s cold.

My cock is cold.

Huh?

What?

Wait a minute.
Wh
—

I look down—

Oh. Fuck.

Oh, god.

NO!
!!

I knock the table over.

Howls fill
whatever room I’m in.

Someone’s shouting
, screaming, shrieks of abject
terror.

“
OH GOD! OH MY FUCKING GOD!
OH
— I’m gonna be sick...
I’m gonna—“

Light. Light. I need light. Where’s the
switch? Where am I? Wh
—

“
That bastard was fucking his whore when
she died! And then I was— OH
GOD
!
NO! OH—“

And then the puke comes, hard and
forceful.
Out
!

Into a...
bucket?

Huh?

I feel hands, solid firm hands.

“
OH GOD! OH
—“

And a voice... Somewhere...
It’s—

“
Deck, it’s cool, homes, it’s cool. Just a
dream. Just a dream. Just a dream, homes.”

“
It’s my mother! It’s my
mother
, Trev!
MOTHER
FUCK
!”

“
Deck, it was just that dream. Skate, put
on the lights!”

Trev’s
holding me. Somehow, I come to understand this fact. While
the world spins. It won’t stop moving. The TV is evil and the walls
are ghostly—

A ram-rod finds its way into my stomach,
driven in like a train. When I land back on the couch, I realize it
was Trev’s fist. He punched me.

But at least the world has stopped
spinning. And the walls are not menacing any more. And that’s when
I settle. When I realize I’m in my apartment, sleeping on my couch.
“Fuck.” I run a hand through my drenched hair, taste the acid vile
in my mouth, feel its corrosion over my teeth.

After five minutes of fighting for breath,
I say, “Thanks, bro. I needed that.” I look at the bucket he
brought for me, spit in it. “Just like old times.”

Trev slaps me on the shoulder a few times.
“We all have our demons, homes.” I feel Skate’s hand
squeeze my other
shoulder.

For a moment I’m moved deeply by it,
then
severely
embarrassed. So I say, “You guys are so fucking emo.”

I don’t add,
And I’m so glad you’re both
here.

I grab t
he bucket and go clean it out.

The next morning,
Thursday, we chill out at
Tom’s
while Clarissa eyes me evilly
from the corner. When she pours me coffee, it spills out the cup,
but doesn’t quite land on my pants.

She doesn’t apologize.

Usually I’d expect that shit when she and
Skate were dating. But I know this is all about Gina. I still
haven’t gone to see her.
And don’t know if I will...

“
What’s up with her?” asks Trev. “If
anything, I’d expect Skate to get coffee spilled on him, not
you.”

“
Maybe it’s just hormones.” I know it’s a
lie. Clarissa knows I haven’t made efforts to go and see Gina. And
guilt shows.

I keep checking out my phone, but Blaze
hasn’t texted me yet.

“
She’s fine, homes. She probably just went
to bed late, mixing.”

I want to believe him. And yet, I can’t
stop thinking about that elephant-sized monster with the black hair
last night—Tolek the Twat.

And
Gavin the Grande. Xavier the Sex Loving Dealer.

Who else
wants a piece of
her?

And I also can’t stop thinking
about
my own tumbling
state of mind.

For
four blissfully ignorant days, all was right with the
world. I confess that I even had thoughts—brief, but there—of
moving into one of those two million dollar condos with Blaze one
day. The two tatted lovebirds whose romance transcended all
barriers of the world. “Fucking load of bullshit,” I say out loud.
When Trev and Skate stop drinking and stare at me, I say:
“What?”

And then they laugh. Like it’s all a big
fucking joke.

But it isn’t. I’m pissed about it. I’m
pissed about my life. And most of all, I’m pissed about what that
cesspool of a father did to my mother.

And I’m true as fuck gonna tell him!
Again.

Preferably without the fists
this time
.

When I tell Trevor I’m “ready to visit
pops again,” he’s not as excited as he was when he first asked me
to do it.

Funny how things change with time.

Blaze
Ryleigh

It’s ten-thirty when I get up.

A body-thunking sense of loss hits me in
the stomach, the kind that slams you when you think someone’s
alive, only to realize, seconds later, that they’ve actually died.
But that “someone” is different today. And it’s not a death, but it
feels a little like one. Because I sent Declan home yesterday. And
gone is gone, alive or dead. So what’s the difference,
really?

And when I did it, I told him that
“this is new” and so it isn’t
important. But the feeling I have in me this morning says something
entirely else to me. It says he’s come to mean so much more to me
than I allowed myself to believe.
Sinatra
, I think.
Under my Skin
.
Not great to mix into a dark tune. But a classic...

It scares me. Not the song, that Declan’s
actually done it—gotten under my skin.
My thick skin
, I’ve always thought. But how thick can
it be if I let a boy underneath it with only the force of a single
breath?

N
ot any boy
...

It feels like I’ve lost him today. It feels
like I’ve made a deadly mistake. I sent him home.

Because I was afraid?

Because I was scared that, if he knew my
past, completely, he’d leave?

And why did that scare me? Is it because
I’ve led myself to believe that he’s more than just a boy? More
than just a guy I’ve known
for little more than four days?

This is what I tell myself. What I tell my
brain. It’s what I told it while I mixed
Rage Against the Machine
into
Tuneboy’s Screamin Bitch Mix
of
Housenation
last night until four A.M. Or Alice in
Chains’s
We
Die Young
into
Luca
Antolini
’s Hard House
(
hard as a
mofo
) song,
Heat
2011
.