ROMANCE: THREESOME : Billionaire Brothers' Party (MFM Menage Romance) (New Adult Contemporary Threesome Short Stories) (112 page)

When they finally came together, the walls seemed to turn white, and an unmistakably dull hum seemed to echo between them. As Dez slid out from her, he turned Samantha around to face him; and with a leer on his face, smeared his fingers with the fluids dripping down the inside of her legs. He presented her with two, which she took readily into her mouth, while he sucked the other two, before finally kissing one another deeply on the lips, letting the wetness melt on the tips of their tongues.

Neither knew it was to be their last sacrament.

*****

As they pulled into the parking lot of the motel, Dez could feel the dread in the pit of his stomach before he even stepped out of the car. He felt it churning inside him, burrowing like a mole, depleting him of every sense of restraint or ease. He wanted to turn the car around and drive back to the railway station. He wanted to cry out. He wanted to feel something more than a perpetual sense of turning away. And he wanted to be anywhere but in that parking lot.

Samantha noticed his pursed lips. She wanted to say something, but something warned her not to. Instead, they sat in the parking lot, smoking in unflappable silence.

“Let’s go in,” Dez finally said, crushing his cigarette but into the ashtray until it was nothing more than a disfigured cotton stub.

He noticed the door slightly ajar, only confirming his unease. He tried to rationalize to himself that Charlie had probably just gotten drunk and forgot to close the door behind him, but the thought was far from reassuring. And the lights turned off in the room only encouraged his wariness.

“Charlie?” he asked feebly, walking through the front door. His hands shook uncontrollably as he reached for the light switch. There was no answer. Only the light from underneath the cracks of the bathroom door indicated that anyone had stepped foot in the motel room over the past five hours. Samantha followed him hesitantly.

He forced his way through the unlocked bathroom door, without motive or explanation. One look revealed all of his fears were correct.

Charlie Higgins sat there on the toilet seat in a t-shirt, his pants around his ankles with one gnarled hand clutching the sink; the other arm hung feebly by his side, a clotted-bloodstained syringe dangling precariously from a tourniquet-engorged vein. A thin layer of white foam covered his lips, while the drooping eyelids stayed half shut. His face seemed neither slack nor grimaced, but calm and at rest.

Dez knew instinctively that he was beyond saving, but slapped the face and checked his pulse anyways. The body had long given up its ghost, and there was nothing left to do but shut the eyelids.

“You… stupid motherfucker,” he cursed through trembling lips, trying to fight back the tears.

Samantha crept behind him and put her hands on his shoulder, peering at the languid corpse. It was the first time she had seen a corpse since the death of her aunt and uncle; and the first time she had witnessed one who had, intentionally or not, taken his own life. To her, it seemed like Charlie was finally at peace. His outstretched palm didn’t seem to be a mere physical reaction; rather a vain attempt to embrace the world and all of its senselessness in one final desperate moment before leaving it behind. She accepted it as blamelessly as she accepted her own mortality, as one in another series of accidents.

“What are we going to do?” she asked, her hands trying to calm down Dez’s quaking shoulders.

“What do you mean? What is it we
can
do?”

“Well, we might have to call the morgue, for one.”

“And risk questioning? We can’t.”

“Well, we can’t leave him behind. What about… you know… like a next of kin or something.”

“Charlie’s mom died while we were overseas. His old man left when he was just a kid.”

“What about his brothers and sisters?”

“Didn’t have any, far as I know,” he replied, his voice cracking. “He’s got to have some ID on him. Some kind of emergency contact,” he said while rooting through his pants. “Son of a bitch! He was robbed.”

“How do you know?”

“Wallet’s missing.”

“With his cut?”

“Wait…” he reached into one pocket and emerged with a crumpled $5 bill. “Son of a bitch! It was a hot shot.”

“A what?”

“A hot shot. It’s when you rip someone off by giving them a high dose. They leave behind a bill to make it look like it was accidental. Look around the room, will you? Maybe they left something behind…”

And as Samantha left the bathroom, Dez knelt down to rest his face on Charlie’s naked thighs with his hands outstretched. The tears came fast and bitter, and blessed the silent flesh.

*****

It was shortly past 2 a.m. when the Trans Am snaked cautiously down I-35. Only the occasional sight of a diesel truck broke the mute spell. Otherwise, the expanses of the two-lane highway were taciturn and distant, almost hostile in its sparseness and indifference. The car pulled off at an exit and rolled until it reached the hamlet of a lake. Despite RVs and campers across the shores, all seemed still and uninhabited, as if frozen in some distant prehistoric time. Not even a light seemed to glow; only the drunken stars in their orbit guided its way through the hickory trees. Not a soul saw the pale and ragged young man get out of the car. Not a soul saw him drag the leaden body out of the rolled up carpet in the back. Not a soul saw him give a tear-stained sign of the cross before kissing its blue lips, rolling it gently down a narrow cliff where it returned to the womb of the sea.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Come on baby… get real,” Samantha said for the ninth time that evening. “At least try to get some rest before you do anything so fucking risky…”

“I don’t… We don’t… have any choice,” Dez slurred, his voice belligerent by bourbon and stubbornness. “We only… How much did you say… we had left?” He took another pull from the bottle.

“$147. That’s more than enough to get us to Vegas…”

“Oh yeah? And once we get there… then what?”

“We’ll figure out something. We always do. I can get another job waitressing while you look around for work.”

“We got… We gotta think ahead.”

“I am, baby. You’re drunk. Like always. It’s too risky. Wait until morning. Come back to bed, baby. Like the old days. You can do whatever you want to me. Just wait until morning before—”

“Bullshit! Tonight’s the night… Can’t wait ‘til tomorrow. That’s when they deliver it…”

“Not every gas station follows the same schedule.”

“Even if… Even if… We only get $50… That’s enough for gas and then some, ain’t it?”

The pair was just outside of Lubbock, where they had been staying for the past three weeks. It was a blistering night in early June, and even the caricatures of cowboys in the motel room paintings seemed apprehensive. Dez had been steadily drinking away through his cut from their last big score since Charlie’s death. Daily. Nightly. Hourly. His skin had taken on the jaundiced hue of a cancer patient, and his eyes seemed like dead oysters shriveled up by the High Plains heat. The endlessly circular tone of his cryptic utterances now took on an incoherent and largely nonsensical accent, and more often than not he found himself screaming at Samantha over the slightest difference of opinion. She knew she had to let him fight his own internal war, and that she had no choice but to stand by her man, to quote the ubiquitous song that seemed to come out of every transistor radio in the High Plains that summer. She knew things would change once they arrived in Vegas. Dez could lay off the booze for a little bit, get his act together and they could both move on with their lives. At least, she hoped they could. But Dez had changed so frequently, and so drastically, over the past two months that she began to wonder if they could ever truly be side by side. Was their relationship merely the sum total of a series of last meetings?

“It’s not like these are some backwater hicks, Dez. This is the High Plains, you know? Real guns. Real cowboys. Real sheriffs.”

“How many times… I got to tell you. A simple knock-off - just a simple knock-off. You don’t wanna do it? Fine… I’ll do it alone. But if you think… I’m gonna give you any of the cut…”

“I don’t even want any of the cut. I just want you to go to bed. We can try something out in New Mexico. Or Arizona. I have a bad feeling. Let’s just get out of Texas first.”

“Look, are you on the fuckin’ bus or what, bitch?”

“Bitch. That’s just… That’s just rich coming from you. No, Dez. This time, I’m not on the fucking bus.”

*****

It was shortly after 1 am when the Trans Am swerved into the parking lot of the Gulp & Go station in East Lubbock. Samantha sat in the passenger seat, her lips pursed and fuming in a marbled sneer.

“I’m not going in. I’ll wait in the car for you, but I am
not
going in.”

“The hell you won’t,” Dez replied, grabbing her arm. “You’re the bait—”

“Is that what I am to you? Bait, you asshole?”

“I don’t mean it… Don’t mean it like that… But in this instance… Yeah…”

“And you wonder why I didn’t want to come along tonight.”

“Got… got no choice…”

“I’m not going in.”

“Get in there—”

“I said
I’m not going in.
”

Twelve minutes later, Samantha Linder was walking through the aisles of the desolate gas stop, absentmindedly picking up a carton of tampons and some trash bags. She sauntered up to the counter.

“Excuse me, but do you mind telling me which way is the quickest to—”

At that precise moment, Dez Cawley came stumbling through the glass-paneled door. He was one minute too early. A rash decision to bolt out of the car meant that there was no time for Samantha to flirt and occupy the clerk’s attention. The brown panty hose feebly stretched across his face made him look like nothing more than a drunken rooster. He was one minute too early. Even the clerk—all 280 pounds of unflinching bulk and permanently glowering pique—had no choice but to chuckle as Dez waved the .38 around unsteadily. Dez was one minute too early.

“OK motherfucker… I want everything… Everything in the register,” he growled hoarsely, his trembling body pacing back and forth.

“Everything?” replied the clerk lazily, almost disinterestedly.

“Everything, motherfucker…. Come on…. Come on!” he whipped the brown paper bag across the counter, attempting to shoot out the pane of the door for emphasis. It simply ricocheted and landed in the wall opposite him.

The clerk began stuffing the bag full of bills. “Everything, you say?”

“Are you fucking deaf? Everything…”

Samantha sprinted several inches away from Dez’s frantically pacing frame. If her nerves were normally laconic, tonight they turned enraged, razor sharp beneath the thin coat of her pensive skin. A sense of urgency grew within her, reaching a feline intensity, until she was filled with a certainty that seemed without will or bias but stemmed from the deepest, most primal region of her brain.

“I got some more underneath the counter… Don’t want no trouble,” replied the clerk.

Dez didn’t even have a chance to hear himself cry out as the rounds from the .44 entered his heart. He didn’t have a chance to see the blinding flash or hear the click of the barrel. He didn’t even have a chance to see the twenty-nine years of rage and bitterness waft from his body like mists of cold smoke. He was thrown back from the impact against racks of magazines and tabloid newspapers, landing in a crumpled heap.

In the blink of an eye, Samantha knew what she had to do. There was no mute shock, no wailing and gnashing of teeth. There was no fear, no guilt and no grief in her body. She didn’t even register the sound of the magnum reloading. She didn’t register the bullets ricocheting at her feet as she bolted from the gas stop at lightning speed, her hands tightly grasping the paper bag as she fled east. She simply ran. Past the streetlights and the intersections. Past the flickering neon lights and the wailing ambulances. She ran. She ran past the hopped up truck drivers and their lot lizards. Past the cinema and the all-night diners. Past the pickup trucks and the red brick ranch houses. She ran into the very edge of the night.

*****

It was shortly after dawn when the Greyhound bus pulled into the depot; it’s engine sputtering and wheezing crudely in the New Mexico sun. Samantha Linder stretched out, stifling a tremendous yawn. She had been asleep for the better part of ten hours and she still felt drunk on the sensation. She sauntered off the bus groggily and took in the surroundings. She could see the sun playfully hiding behind the crests of the Cristo Mountains, their shadows casting refuge across the white sands. A winding road led off in the distance to a center of town undisclosed. She had always wanted to see the desert, and had a half-hearted wish that Dez was there beside her to take in the sunrise. She glanced at the one memento she still had of him; a cheap claddagh ring he had picked up from a street stall while they were in St. Louis. She held it up to the sun, and examined it closely. Her sneakers dug a shallow hole in the dust. She kissed the ring before letting it fall, burying it underneath a loose mound of sand. She walked through the sand towards the throughway and stuck her thumb out. It was 7:30 in the morning. She wanted steak and eggs. She walked towards the center of town. It was 7:30 in the morning and she had always hated being on a bus, anyways.

THE END