Her mouth moved.
“No. Don’t tell me. I know. Just to yourself.”
She looked at him. There were many things in her eyes just then. But nothing he hadn’t seen before.
“Ok, kiss my balls for a few minutes. Then down my legs and to my feet.”
A sigh escaped her. He stretched a little like a cat and concentrated on the sensation.
With her face down by his feet, he wiggled his toes. “Kiss ‘em all,” he said.
She stayed at it until finally he told her she could stop.
“Wasn’t that nice?” he asked, as she covered her face with her hands. “Say ‘yes,’” he instructed.
“Yes,” she said from behind her hands.
“Ready to start all over again?”
A sound broke through her hands, a wordless complaint, that she’d tried to stop.
“You think I’m kidding. I’m not. Start over,” he said in a meaner voice. “Even better this time. And take your hands away from your face.”
Her features seemed about to collapse in on themselves.
“On your knees. Get to work,” he said.
He felt the tears this time, as she kissed her way down his body. The cool, wet droplets merely added to his pleasure. And his arousal.
“You know what’s funny?” she asked some time later, her voice still strained but with something yet unbeaten in it. He was sitting on the rug, smoking, with his back against the couch. He had her kneeling in front of him, hands behind her back, her forehead on the floor.
“I’d like to know what you think is.”
“You don’t really get to enjoy yourself. You have to always be on guard. You can never relax and enjoy it. Like if you were fucking a woman who liked you.” He smiled as she spoke into the rug.
“Nothing’s perfect,” he said, with undisturbed equanimity. “The amount I do get to enjoy is more than enough. More than the ordinary man with his loving girlfriend.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“You don’t quit, do you?”
“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help noticing.”
“It’s not about relaxing.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You know, you’re just making things worse?”
“‘Making it worse? How could it be worse? Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah.’” Her voice emerged from the carpet a little louder and with a British accent.
“Hey, is that the sound of you cracking?” he asked, surprisingly surprised.
“Oh, God. No. It’s
The Life of Brian
. You’ve gotta know that one.”
“I suppose I do.”
“But that part didn’t strike you.”
“No. I guess not.”
“Pity.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the essence of humor. Real humor. Not laughing at someone who’s weaker or at your mercy, like you do.” He did it again, even as she spoke. “Laughing because everything is so impossibly awful, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“That’s humor.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re saying I have no sense of humor.”
“Right. You think you do. But wit isn’t humor. And your laughing at my situation isn’t, either.”
“You were laughing.”
“It’s humor when I do it, because I’m the suffering one.”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying.”
“Most people don’t understand what humor is. They think it’s something lighthearted and cheerful. Like ‘good humor.’ But it isn’t. It’s looking into the darkness and spitting at it with a joke. Humor is dark. Humor is that we’re all going to die.”
“And suffer first.”
“You’ll make sure of that.” She began to move her head to look up at him, but he pushed it back down with his hand.
“Yes. I will. That’s exactly what I’ll do.”
“But I thought I wasn’t supposed to die afterward.”
“Oh, I won’t kill you. Just your soul.”
“It’s funny you believe in that.”
“Oh, I know more about souls than most people can even imagine.” He looked down at her bowed head with his own tilted back, a smile on his face. “You know about humor? I know about souls. I’ve seen so many of them shrivel up and die. I know what they look like, smell like, feel like. I can practically see them as everything else in my victims is burned away. Everything else that people rely on, hide behind – their dignity, their intelligence, their humor, their anger. Eventually, all these things get burned away. Whatever the soul is, that’s the part I get to know best, the only part that’s left by the time I’m through.” He stubbed his cigarette out. “The part that I eat last.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I told you that you should have been a poet.”
“It’s easy when it’s true. You know,” he said, reaching out and grabbing the hair on the top of her head, pulling up her face finally so he could look into it, “I can see yours. It’s very bright. Still. It won’t give up for some time. Eventually, it will be just me and it. And then just me.”
“You’re not the devil, you know. Just a criminal.”
“I guess that’s just one of those illusions that will be my downfall. Because as far as I’m concerned, I am. As far as it matters to you.”
“So where’s yours?”
He smiled unpleasantly, ignoring her words. “You know, that’s another thing that I really like about what I do. I don’t have to waste a single second on all the bullshit everyone else does getting to know someone. I get right to the essence of a person, right to what matters. Who they really are. What they’re made of.” He paused and thought a moment. “I like that.”
“You certainly found your bliss,” she said. “How did you ever think of it?”
“Stop asking those questions. I’ll never answer them. You’ll never get to my soul.”
“Are you kidding? That’s all you are. Your soul. Not that it’s beautiful or anything. It’s the fucking Beast! But it’s your essence, and there’s no disguising it.”
“Hmm,” he said calmly. “You have a point. It’s soul against soul in here, isn’t it?”
“And may the best soul win,” she said, with a quick, bitter smile.
“No. The strongest one will win.”
“And don’t tell me,” she said, glaring at him as he kept his hand entwined in her hair. “Yours is the strongest because it’s eaten so many others, and they’re so very nutritious. And every soul you eat adds to your power, the way it works with all the forces of darkness.”
“Exactly.”
He let go of her hair and pushed her head back down to the rug. “And what happens, I wonder,” she asked, “when my soul does go, when you eat that one too?”
“You’ll have peace at last,” he said.
“Will I?”
“Of a sort.”
“I can’t help wondering what made you so hungry. That this is what you do.”
“Stop wondering. I’m a monster. It’s not a mystery.”
She shook her head slightly to herself. “You’re so proud of that,” she said softly. “You’re so sure you’re the worst thing you’ll ever know.”
“I’ve met a couple who were worse, but they can’t even pretend to be human. Like I can.”
“Hmm.”
“I’m the worst thing
you’ll
ever know,” he told her. “That’s what matters.”
She sighed and looked up at him for just a second. “What’s next, boss?”
“Oh. Am I boring you?” He pushed her head back down again and held it there.
“’Your conversation has become boring to me,’” she said in her muffled voice, but this time with a German accent.
“Another reference I’m afraid I don’t get.”
“I think it’s
Saturday Night Live
, but to tell you the truth, I’m not sure.
Sprocket
s?”
“You were crying just a little while ago.”
“I know,” she said, suddenly completely serious.
“I think this will move a lot faster if I stop fucking you, and make you start fucking me. Yes. I think that’s the way to go. I’m going to make you make me happy. Get back to work on my cock now. Make me harder. Then get on top and fuck me. I’ll just sit here and watch.”
“You’d better keep your eyes open.”
“You know I will.”
He let go of her with a little push. She raised her head and stared at him, soul burning with anger.
“Now,” he said. Still on her knees, she bowed her head, took him in her mouth, and began again.
There were only a few like them. And you had to keep the team small. It couldn’t be connected to any government. But that was ok. Governments were usually about five years behind anyway. Maybe she’d watched
The Magnificent Seven
too often as a child. Had liked
The Equalizer
too much. There had always been guns for hire, for good or for ill. Most were for ill. Theirs were for good. None of her team had been terribly happy as Company men, but spun off into a small, congenial group offering analysis and operations, they could be quite useful and the work fairly lucrative, depending, of course, on the nature of the enterprise that was employing them. Corporations, for example, could afford their price.
Pro bono
work meant that they would often keep much of their target’s assets for themselves.
What was the expression? Always outnumbered, always outgunned. But something still worth doing. As long as there were men like this one here in the world.
What was it the man had said? One of the reasons he was called upon to do what he did. Because she might be
a secret agent dedicated to eradicating whatever his employers stood for. He was closer to the truth than he knew. Being a private investigative firm, able to apply the intelligence they gathered – able to
take steps
– had some advantages, although not everything they did was, strictly speaking, legal. Through a variety of means, her group had recently managed to put one whole division of a Russian mafiya family out of business. They had been paid well for the effort by a more legitimate corporation whose territory the mafiya had been encroaching upon.
And that was just the latest set of enemies they’d made, she’d made. They all knew the risks. Her husband and she, at the top, had known better than most. It was not always possible to remain anonymous. Not in a world where everyone spied on everyone else, where no one could be completely trusted.
She had looked around her sometimes, back in the day, at the PTA or a local fundraiser, at all the other couples living their normal lives. They were harried and stressed out, but even if they didn’t know it, blissfully happy. They weren’t poor. They were lucky. In this world. Too busy to know it. But they didn’t see life as a battle, certainly not a battle between good and evil. She could act like them when she was with them. And she did. But she wasn’t like them. Life, for her, had always been a battle. There were people in the world who knew that’s what life was. You could fight in so many different ways: being a doctor in a war zone, trying to form a union in a factory, saving lost dogs and cats, planting a community garden, assassinating the odd gangster or terrorist. The battle was going on all around them, but these people weren’t really paying attention. It didn’t really affect them on a day-to-day basis. Life, they thought, was hard enough as it was. They didn’t know how lucky they were. Few did. But they really were lucky, she thought, she always thought, never more so than now.