“Light ’em up and watch them burn, teach them what they need to learn…”
She sang out as she pumped her legs at nearly a full sprint. She was breathing hard after only three blocks. Sarah checked her Garmin and realized that she had just run three blocks in less than three minutes. She had to adjust her pace. It took her another two blocks to calm herself down and steady her breathing. She hated the fact that the guy freaked her out so much. She wanted to go knock on his door and kick his scrawny little ass just to get over it.
Sarah jogged briskly past rows of for-sale signs lined up like tombstones. Nearly every third or fourth house was abandoned. It had never occurred to Sarah before how deserted the neighborhood was becoming. When she and Josh had moved in the community was still under construction. New couples and families had been moving in daily. Then construction had slowed to a halt and a mass exodus had begun as home values plummeted and people began defaulting on their loans. Now, half the homes in the neighborhood were in foreclosure. Her morning jog had grown increasingly depressing as every day she noticed a new house with a for-sale sign in front of it. Most of the signs contained the ominous sub-caption
BANK-OWNED
.
Miranda Lambert clicked off and Revolting Cocks came blaring through Sarah’s headphones screaming, “Let the bodies hit the floor!” Sarah had to resist the urge to start sprinting again. Something about that song always got her blood pumping and it struck her as oddly appropriate as she jogged through her dying neighborhood, which was turning into a ghost town little by little.
There was an elementary school a few blocks away and Sarah felt a stirring of her maternal instincts at the light, airy, high-pitched squeals of children’s laughter. She stared at the joy-filled faces climbing on the jungle gym and running in reckless circles on the rubberized playground. Every time she passed the playground she reconsidered her decision to wait to have kids. She wanted to have Josh’s babies. She just wasn’t sure that she wanted them right now. She wasn’t sure that she was ready to give up her carefree lifestyle, her freedom, and most of all, her figure. Sarah continued jogging past the school and soon the laughter faded into the background.
After another mile, Sarah passed an active-adult fifty-five-and-older age-restricted community that was also half built. Construction had been ceased once funding had run out and the real-estate market had frozen after only a quarter of the houses had been built. Finished homes stood interspersed with dirt lots. Yesterday, there had been an ambulance in front of one of the homes and Sarah had seen a gurney being carted out with a body covered in a white sheet. In this community, a for-sale sign didn’t always mean a bank foreclosure.
Sarah checked her pace on her Garmin compared to yesterday’s run. The little computer screen showed where she had been at this time the day before and she was nearly half of a block ahead of her previous run.
She picked up her pace, trying to put a full block between herself and the imaginary runner in her device, racing against herself.
An hour later, when Sarah made it back to her house, she was drenched in sweat. Josh had always told her that she sweated like a man. Her dry-fit tank top was completely soaked. She checked her Garmin and saw that she had shaved a full minute off her run and burned 620 calories. She looked across the street and the vertical blinds in the new neighbor’s front window were swaying back and forth as if someone had just closed them. Sarah hurried into the house.
The dryer had stopped. Sarah gathered the sheets and dumped them into her laundry basket; then she wrestled the big down comforter into the dryer and set it on high. She was walking up the stairs with her laundry basket when the phone began to ring. Sarah ran up the last couple of stairs, dropped the laundry basket on the bed, and snatched up her phone.
“Are you all right?”
“Well, it’s a good thing I wasn’t passed out on the floor bleeding to death.”
“Are you on your period?”
The way he asked the question infuriated her for no reason she could articulate.
“No. I just woke up in a pool of blood…my blood…I-I think. Maybe my dream was real. Maybe the neighbor really did stab us both to death.”
“Are you serious?”
“No, I’m not serious. Do I sound like I’m dead?” Sarah shot back in an irritated tone. She couldn’t explain why she was so annoyed with him today.
“Do you need me to pick you up some…um…some feminine products on the way home?”
“No, I’ve got plenty of tampons at home. Thanks. Next time answer the fucking phone.” She hung up and sat down hard on the bed. She knew that she was wrong for lashing out at Josh but she also knew that in minutes he’d be so wrapped up in his work, laughing and joking with his customers, that he would have forgotten all about it. He was good that way. It was one of the things about him that annoyed the shit out of her.
They had just come upstairs after washing the dinner dishes. Tonight, Sarah had cooked dinner. She’d made Josh’s favorite, a big, fat, juicy porterhouse from Omaha Steaks with cracked pepper pounded into it and blue cheese on top. It was her way of apologizing for acting like an asshole earlier.
Sarah sat on the edge of the bed reading a book. The light on the nightstand and the TV were on. Josh was lying beside her with a pillow over his head, trying to block out the light and noise.
“Will you please go to sleep? Are you still tripping about that dream?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. I just can’t sleep.”
Conan O’Brien was making fun of the audience for not laughing at his jokes. It was an odd sort of comedy that Sarah couldn’t get into. She switched the channel to Spike TV and began watching an old replay of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Matt Hughes was getting his ass kicked by an out-of-shape B.J. Penn. Sarah usually loved that type of blood sport but tonight she just wasn’t in the mood. She turned to Comedy Central, then lay back on the bed as the gang from South Park pranced across the screen.
She opened her book, a novel about zombies on an old battleship written by a relatively new author named
Brian Keene. Normally she loved a good horror novel, and Brian Keene was one of her favorites, but it was just too gory for her tonight. She looked at an Edward Lee novel that sat unopened on her nightstand with a picture of a winged devil on the cover.
No way,
she thought. Instead, she picked up a book about the people you meet in heaven after you die. After only a few pages, she fell asleep with the television still on, Cartman and Stan singing about Christmas poo in the background.
Sarah slept fitfully, horrible images of knives and blood dashed through her mind, of Josh screaming in pain, herself being raped, mutilated, and abused. She woke up twice, exhausted and drenched in sweat. When she woke up in the morning she was convinced that there was more to these dreams than just her subconscious overreacting to a creepy neighbor.
“Josh? Wake up, Josh.”
“Is it time for work?”
“No. I just need to talk to you…about these dreams I keep having. They’re really starting to freak me out.”
“You had another one? Like last night?”
“I think so. I can’t really remember. But I think it was bad. Really bad.”
“Do you want to see a psychiatrist or something?”
“No, Josh. I think something is really going on. I want to go to the cops.”
“You can’t call the cops because of a dream.”
There were tears in Sarah’s eyes when she looked over at Josh.
“But what if it isn’t a dream? What if he’s really doing things to me in my sleep?”
Josh turned over and faced Sarah. He rubbed the
sleep from his eyes and gave Sarah his full attention. He stared into her eyes for a long moment before he spoke, reading her expression as if he were trying to solve a complex equation.
“Then you wouldn’t need to call the cops because I’d kill him myself.”
Sarah smiled halfheartedly and hugged her husband tight.
“What time do you go to work today?”
“I work the swing shift today, four to midnight.”
“I don’t want to be here alone tonight.”
“I made some extra money in tips last night. Some dot-com millionaire younger than my little brother tipped me three hundred dollars before he started losing. Why don’t I take you to buy a gun? With the way the neighborhood is changing it’s probably not a bad idea anyway.”
“Are you serious?” Sarah lit up at the idea. “What kind?”
She swiped the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands and sat up in bed.
Josh looked at her with a bemused expression on his face. He reached out and brushed the hair from her face.
“You really aren’t like other women. You know that?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Most women would object to the idea of having a gun in the house but you can’t wait to buy one. You’re too eager, in fact. Should I be afraid here? You’re not going to use it on me, are you?”
“Not as long as you keep fucking me when I want to be fucked.”
She kissed him on his lips, then rubbed her hands over his shoulders and down his arms. His biceps were
still hard and muscular despite the layer of fat he’d put on since moving to Vegas. He’d had less time to exercise and spent too much time at the buffets. She ran her hand over his belly, which had expanded quite a bit in the last few years. It jiggled as she rubbed it. She ran her hand back up to his chest. His pecs were still big and hard like a bodybuilder’s. They were even bigger than they’d been in college. Josh had begun powerlifting the last few years because it was quicker. He’d pile as much weight onto the bar as he could, do two or three reps, do that for three or four sets and then he was done. His entire routine took him less than twenty minutes a day. It was all he had time for.
He may not have had one of those ripped-up bodies full of cuts and striations with veins popping out everywhere like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but these days neither did Arnold. Josh was still a big, strong man despite his growing paunch. Sarah ran her hands over his belly, then down between his legs where he was already hard. Josh was not a small man in any regard. She hated to admit that the size of his cock had been one of the things she’d first fallen in love with. She knew that women weren’t supposed to care about the physical, especially when it came to what a man was packing. It was supposed to be all about being treated right and cared for and Josh was good at all of that too. He was patient and supportive and attentive and treated Sarah like a queen. But being hung like a porn star certainly didn’t hurt.
“Mmmmm. Is that for me?”
She crawled beneath the covers and swirled her tongue around the head of his cock, licking up and down and flicking the head with her
tongue as he squirmed and moaned. She continued teasing his cock with her tongue until he couldn’t take it anymore and reached down and grabbed her by the hair, forcing his cock down her throat. She loved it when he did that. Josh wasn’t a rough lover. He was sweet and loving, preferring to make love even when she was in the mood for a good hard fuck. But she had her ways of awakening the beast in him.
Josh aggressively fucked her throat and Sarah tried her best to ignore it whenever he felt like he’d shoved his cock too far down her throat and paused to ask if she was okay. Sometimes he was so nice it almost killed the mood. Josh may have had a huge cock but no man had made her gag since she was a teenager. It was no secret that she hadn’t exactly been a virgin when they met, but Josh still treated her like she was made of china. It was usually pretty sweet but right now it was annoying. She grabbed his ass cheeks and forced his cock all the way down her throat past her tonsils; then she squirmed a finger up his ass to massage his prostate.
Sarah heard him gasp and felt his entire body tense. Right then she felt like the most powerful woman in the world. She was in complete control. He was completely helpless. A devilish part of her wanted to bite him a little just to let him know how helpless he really was, but Josh wasn’t the type of man who needed to be reminded of that type of thing. He was the type who saved women from those types of men. Instead, she swirled her tongue around his cock while it was still buried in her throat. Back in high school, she and her girlfriends had practiced giving head on carrots and bananas, until she could swallow an entire banana with no problem. They’d read in a book on sexual positions, which her friend Ellie had taken from her mother’s nightstand, that women were supposed to practice. It had paid off.
“Oh my God!” Josh cried out and his legs shot out straight and began to tremble.
He began fucking her throat harder and more urgently. His entire body quivered and he ejaculated down her throat. He was still coming as she slid her mouth back up to the end of his cock.
Josh came like a porn star too. He could shoot a fly off the wall across the room. Sarah’s mouth was completely filled with his warm semen when she rose from the covers. She gargled his seed, making bubbles and letting some dribble out of the corners of her mouth. Then she swallowed and licked her lips, scooping up the semen that had dribbled down her chin and licking it from her fingertips. She smiled, watching Josh’s jaw drop. She’d learned long ago that one of the keys to a successful marriage was throwing something new into the mix every now and again. Internet porn was a great source of new bedroom tricks. And Sarah had a lot of time on her hands to learn new things.
“That was incredible! Wh-where did you learn to do that?” Josh was still breathing hard and little spasms continued to wrack his body intermittently.
“My turn.”
She crawled up Josh’s body and straddled his face. He went to work immediately, flicking her swollen clitoris with his tongue and stabbing it up inside of her, then dragging his tongue down to her anus and giving the rose-colored bud of her asshole the same attention, alternating back and forth between clitoris and anus while Sarah scratched at the headboard and cried out in ecstasy.
“Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck! Oh, my fucking God! Yes! Yes! Oh, fuck, YES!”