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He debates leaving, maybe heading over to the Public Garden across from Boston Common and taking a ride in one of those silly swan boats, the kind you pedal yourself, when he spots an empty seat at a tiny, round table in the back, a table that will allow him a view of Paige and her mother, albeit one that’s partially obstructed. He makes a beeline for it, squeezing between several tables and deliberately stepping on the foot of a young woman whose bare legs are stretched across his path. She cries out, a combination of surprise and pain, and reaches down to grab the injured toes peeking out from the sandal of her right foot. He sees that her toenails are painted bright coral and he notes with satisfaction that he has chipped the polish on her big toe, ruining what was, no doubt, an expensive pedicure. “I’m so sorry,” he says, temporarily abandoning his smile for a look of well-practiced concern.
“That’s okay,” she tells him, small, dark eyes lingering on his.You can step on my toes anytime,those eyes say.
It would be so easy to get her to abandon her companion—another stupid girl whose smile indicates she likes what she sees.
Too easy,he thinks, glancing back toward Paige and her mother.
He’s set his sights on bigger game.
“I guess I’ll live,” the girl says.
I guess you will,he thinks, continuing to the table at the back.
He orders a double espresso and relaxes in his chair, his cock tingling with the lingering feel of the girl’s bare toes crushed beneath his heavy shoe. Psychiatrists would no doubt label him a sexual sadist, the most dangerous of psychopaths, and they’d be right. Sex and pain have always gone hand in hand for him. Although the sex act itself is incidental, merely one of the weapons in his arsenal. It’s the pain he inflicts that he gets off on more than anything else. Add a dollop of fear and you have the recipe for pure bliss.
He doesn’t know where this came from—what made him the way he is—and in truth, he doesn’t care. Was he, as Lady Gaga so eloquently put it,born this way? Or did his childhood somehow shape him into the man—some might saymonster—he has become? Nature or nurture, the eternal question. Perhaps a combination of the two. But what difference does it make, really? Especially to his victims. He doubts this will be the question on Paige’s lips when he silences them forever.
He can recall lying in bed as a child, listening to the strange and muffled noises emanating from his parents’ bedroom. He remembers tiptoeing down the hall and peering into the darkness of that small room, seeing his father on top of his mother, his mother struggling beneath him, pleading with him to stop, his father ignoring her cries as he pounded relentlessly into her. And he remembers that he enjoyed watching his mother suffer, this weak, stupid woman who thought begging would save her. He remembers being excited by her pain, eager to see and hear more.
That was the moment he knew for sure that he wasn’t normal.
He’d suspected it for some time, having always felt a curious detachment from the world around him. While the other kids at school could often be found laughing uproariously at some dumb joke, or crying because a beloved pet had died, he’d felt nothing except maybe contempt for their weakness. He took to mimicking the looks he saw on their faces and echoing the joy or sadness he heard in their voices, so as not to appear different or strange. He gave them what he understood instinctively they needed. His burgeoning good looks made fooling them easy, especially the girls. Girls believed what they wanted to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary.
And the more indifferent he appeared, the more sought-after he became. The worse he behaved toward them, the more they gravitated to him.Treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen.Nowthatwas a saying he could believe in.
It seemed that girls, like the women they would grow into, liked to suffer for love. And he was more than happy to give them what they wanted. Which is why he has yet to respond to Paige’s text.
But he will. When the time is right.
Let her twist in the wind for a while.
He leans back in his chair, remembering the first time he touched a girl’s breast, and can actually feel that small lump of flesh in his hand even now. The girl’s name was Sara—he can’t be bothered trying to remember her last name—and she was fifteen, the same age as he was. Outgoing. Pretty. Not too smart. They went to a party and before long, they were in someone’s bedroom, making out. He reached for her breast and waited for the thrill he’d heard the other boys boast of. But he felt nothing. Until he squeezed, hard, and Sara let out a startled cry, and suddenly every inch of his body was on fire.
He quickly developed a reputation for liking things rough, and as he got older, his tastes grew ever more extreme. When the local girls no longer wanted to play along, he sought out professionals, women who’d do almost anything if the price was right. They’d let him tie them up and whip them till they cried for mercy; they’d let him choke them almost to the point of unconsciousness; they’d let him bite them, violating them with whatever objects he had at hand. His fantasies grew more perverse, more violent. It soon wasn’t enough to pay women to pretend. He wanted the thrill of the real thing.
His fantasies consumed him. His favorite one involved meeting a girl and dazzling her with his wit and charm, hanging on her every word, making her feel as if she was the only woman in the world, and then, when she’d been sufficiently dazzled, when she was lost in a fantasy of her own, one that involved a diamond ring and a long, white gown, he’d awaken her from that ridiculous dream with the cold shower of reality, and the feel of cold steel around her wrists.
He orders another espresso from the waitress, a girl with rainbow stripes in her naturally brown hair, who bends over to allow him a peek down her ruffled white blouse as she places the tiny cup in front of him, probably thinking this little display will get her a bigger tip.Women are so obvious,he thinks, trying to pinpoint the exact moment murder became an integral part of his fantasies.
Probably around the time his mother died, he decides, seeing his mother’s gaunt face in the dark brown surface of his coffee. She’d gotten sick. Some form of cancer. His father had promptly deserted her—“Pretty Boy here can take care of you” being his parting words.
He was twenty-one and still living at home, having decided to forgo college to apprentice as a mechanic at a local gas station. He knew the job was beneath him, but he liked it because it allowed him plenty of time to cultivate his fantasies. He also enjoyed working alongside the handful of newly released convicts from one of the five prisons in the area, soaking up their expertise in criminal activities like online hacking, and reveling in the stories involving rape and violence. For most of these men, their only regret was having been caught.
He would have no such regrets, he’d decided, because he would never be stupid enough to get caught.
He pictures himself at his mother’s bedside, watching her suffer with a pain so intense that even a veritable pharmacy of drugs couldn’t reach it. How easy it would have been to simply reach out and cover her nose and mouth with the palm of his hand, to end that suffering once and for all.
Except the truth was that he enjoyed watching her suffer. He loved monitoring her fight for each labored breath, the unwillingness of her body to let go even as her eyes begged for release. He studied her as dispassionately as he’d once studied frogs in biology class, and when she died, he felt…nothing. Maybe a touch of regret that the show was over.
Her death left him surprisingly well-off, the result of an insurance policy naming him her sole beneficiary. He sold the house, quit his job at the gas station, and took off across the country, working when the mood struck him—a good mechanic was always appreciated—honing his fantasies, indulging them whenever he could, never staying anywhere for very long.
Three years ago, he made his ultimate fantasy a reality. Penny Grover of Bowling Green, Kentucky—his first kill, messier than he would have liked, but then, it was early days. He was still perfecting his craft.How many have there been since?he wonders, although he knows the answer full well: sixteen women so far.
The explosion of dating sites online has played right into his murderous hands, becoming his unwitting accomplices. He pulls out his phone, checking his latest list of volunteers.So many women,he muses.So little time.
The air stirs beside him and he looks up to see the smiling face of the young woman whose toes he mangled earlier. She is chewing on her lower lip as she drops a neatly folded napkin onto the table in front of him, then hurries away. He reaches over and unfolds the napkin, knowing what he’ll see even before he spots her name—“Carrie” with a heart instead of a dot over thei—along with her phone number. He pockets it with a laugh, realizing only after doing so that the table where Paige and her mother were sitting is now empty.
“Shit,” he mutters, furious at his momentary lapse of attention. Then he remembers Nadia, sprawled across the hardwood floor of his living room, patiently awaiting his return.
And as his mother used to say, you should never keep a lady waiting.
