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“I don’t always have to bite you,” I say. “We could start off soft.”
I replace my hand with my mouth and kiss him like I might have if we’d both lived different lives. If we’d both been sweet, normal people who led normal lives with the normal amount of pain.
Hercules takes me to bed and fucks me softly until he can’t stand it anymore.
He leaves deep bite marks.
I like them that way.
8
HERCULES
I didn’t expecther to let me sleep in her bed.
I’d thought she’d want some distance, despite the relentless fucking. I thought Daisy would maintain power by kicking me out of the bed when I’m not sucking her clit or spanking her ass or fitting my cock to her tight, wet pussy.
She doesn’t.
She’s like a kitten that way. Curls up on my chest and goes to sleep, every time, and what would be thepointof putting up a fuss? It’s not a job. Nobody’s paying me. I’m here of my own free will. She hasn’t kicked me out yet.
I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.
It’s been ten days when I make her come so many times in a row that she cries herself to sleep, hot tears on my chest.
The last thing I think before I drift off isit should be enough.
That’s when the dream comes.
I feel it in the room, but I’m too far gone to do a damn thing about it. Or I could already be dreaming. It’s impossible to tell.
The apartment’s a crumbling place on a corner nobody wants to visit, all the way on the edge of one of the outer boroughs, cheap and shitty with a door that doesn’t lock. My stomach turns at the sight of stained carpet and the plywood coffee table with a chunk missing along one edge and the kitchen with a busted microwave door. I fixed it with packing tape. The stove’s not connected. It’s all we have.
I’m out on the couch, bouncing my foot against the floor, waiting with a quarter in my palm. I’ve been waiting so long that the metal’s warm.
Quiet, so I don’t ruin the asshole’s fuck.
He’snot quiet about it. He grunts like a pig, and there’s not a single inch of insulation in any wall in this room, so I hear everything.
I hate everything.
I hate the nervous adrenaline and the sick, bitter fear and the overwhelming anticipation.
More than half the time, my mother’s clients don’t leave without encouragement. They have to be dragged out by the shirt collar, and they sure as hell don’t like that. Not from somebody who looks as young as me. Not somebody who can kick their ass anyway.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they never got any hits in, but an angry motherfucker almost always gets lucky. They never seem to understand that they got enough. That they got more than they deserved by being in the bedroom with her for thirty minutes, or forty-five, or an hour, depending on how much they’re willing to pay. They never understand that they’re lucky to be alive. The reason I don’t kill every single one of them is that I’ve taken enough direct hits to the skull, I’ve had my neck stomped into enough curbs, I’ve taken enough knives to the kidneys to be pretty sure I’ll live forever.
I don’t want to do that in jail.
But Jesus, they deserve it. My mother’s crying, begging the asshole to be done, be done, she’s given him all she can, and my fists clench tight.
That’s the debate. Step in too early, and they take it out on her before they go for me. Step in too late, and she’s got new bruises on her neck or a stubborn black eye. That’s a problem, because that’s how we pay the bills, and they don’t want to buy time with a prostitute who’s been beat to shit.
Five minutes. That’ll get us to one minute past the thirty he’s paid for, and I can drag his ass onto the street.
I picture the cottage.
I’ll never get to take my mother to the cottage she dreams about if we can’t pay the bills. If we can’t put away a little money. It was easier when she worked at the old place, and sometimes we fight about it. I feel like a jackass, fighting with her. It doesn’t make any sense. There was money there. That’s what she says. It was safer there.
