“Big and hard,” I said. “Just the way I like it.”
“Not as big as your rack,” she said. If I’d let myself laugh, maybe it would have ended there. But I was still wearing my Nikki costume, I’d slurped a deadly puddle of tequila-spiked Jell-O, and it was Halloween—I wanted to play.
“Oh, Craig,” I simpered. “I love your big, hard cock.”
He liked that, dirty talk, always wanting us to assure him, Oh baby you’re huge oh baby you feel so good oh baby I’m so wet oh baby—it said he was strong and we were weak, he was supply and we were demand, he was power and we were need.
“Oh, yeah, baby?” she said. “You want it? You want it bad?”
“I want it so bad,” I said. “Because you’re the most popular guy in all of school and we’re going to look super sexy in our Dreamiest Couple yearbook photos together.”
“I do not sound like that, bitch.”
I let my voice go breathy phone sex operator. “Tell me we’re going to be homecoming king and queen, big boy. Tell me how all the peons will gaze at us and we’ll crush them under our big, royal feet. Tell me how you’ll use that rock-hard cock of yours to pee on their parade.”
I raised myself onto my knees and padded toward her, till the gun was in my face. Leaned forward, kissed its cool tip. Tongued the edge, tasted its tang.
She jutted her hips. “You want some of this?”
“I want all of it.” Then its mouth was in my mouth, and I was licking my way around its rim. Nikki moaned.
“Ohhhh, Nikki,” she said, in his voice.
I pulled my lips away, just long enough to gasp, “Mmm, Craig,” then swallowed it again, drew higher up the shaft, cupped her ass in my hands.
“I love you,” she said, hand on my head, forcing me down, then up, into a rhythm. “God, I love you.”
It was no different than sucking at the real thing, hard and slippery and dangerous.
“I love you,” she whispered, nails digging at my scalp. “I love you I love you I love you.”
And so it went, until the real Craig woke from his stupor and realized we were playing without him. There was a manly grunt, a skunk of a burp, and then he lumbered over to us and sealed his own fate in one puff of beery breath: “Step aside, ladies, and get ready for a real man.”
DEX
1992
YOU WANT TO STOP TALKING now,” Lacey said, less like a threat than like a hypnotist’s command.
Nikki smiled. It was a storybook grin, one that might have been called insouciant in some British story of magic and portals. “No. I don’t think I do. Hannah, would you like to hear about the last time Lacey and I came into these woods? Once upon a time, on a night very much like tonight—”
“You really want to find out what happens if you don’t stop talking?” Lacey brandished the knife.
“It’s getting old, Lace. You want to kill me, kill me. You’ll have to, because I’m tired of secrets. That’s what all this is about, right? No more secrets.”
I wonder, now, if Lacey knew that once it started, it wouldn’t stop. A body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an unbalanced force. Maybe she wanted to tell me, needed Nikki to make her. More games, more marionettes, all of us pulling one another’s strings, turtles all the way down.
Neither of them was looking at me.
“There are worse things than death,” Lacey said. “Maybe you need another bath.” She seized Nikki’s hair, rougher than before, shoved her face into the bucket, held her hard and tight as her limbs spasmed, and it went on and on and then on too long and I shouted at her to stop.
She didn’t stop.
I screamed it. “Stop!” and “You’re going to kill her!” and “Lacey, please,” and only then did she let go. For a long, terrifying second, Nikki didn’t move. Then she coughed up a bubble of water and took a shuddery breath. Lacey did look at me then, hurt painted across her face.
“You still don’t trust me, Dex?”
“I trust you.”
“Then why do you look so scared?”
“Gosh, I wonder why.” Nikki’s head was hanging limp, her voice hoarse, mouth wide and sucking air, and still she managed to sound smug.
“This is getting boring,” Lacey said. “We got what we wanted. Let’s get out of here. Untie her and go home.”
Just like that. She said it like a punishment, like I’d been too loud and whiny in the backseat and she’d been forced to turn the car around.
“We have her on tape,” Lacey reminded me. “She won’t tell anyone. Will you, Nikki?”
Nikki shook her head, dog obedient.
“See? It’s over. Let’s go.”
It could have been that easy. We could have gone home, the three of us, safe and sound and only a little bit fucked up for life by what happened in the woods. Lacey set that before me on a platter, and all I needed to do was reach for it. On the other side of yes: the empty highway, our artist’s loft in Seattle with its lava lamps and dissipated men, the future we’d promised ourselves. That easy.