“Yeah,” I answer, “you were telling me about your sister, or some shit.”
She huffs and sits up the rest of the way on the bed, her breasts bouncing, her ass jiggling—I haven’t fucked her yet, but I’m getting around to it. She had just given me a massage minutes earlier.
I reach over to the nightstand and take a cigarette from the pack, placing it between my lips.
The whore snarls at me.
What the hell is she waiting for? An apology for not giving a shit?
“What?” I argue as I drag my thumb over the lighter and a flame appears.
She shakes her head and leans her naked body over me, reaching for another cigarette from my pack and then lighting it on the end of mine.
“Nothing,” she says with offense. “You just said that you wanted to talk first, so that’s what I was doing—pouring out my heart about my rich bitch sister. And you weren’t even listening.”
I puff on the filter slowly, taking a long drag.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing,” she repeats bitterly, dropping it.
But I’ve never known a woman who said “Nothing” and really wanted to drop it. Bitches and their mind games—if it wasn’t for the * I’d stay the hell away from them all.
“Maybe I should start charging you for my time,” she says with smoke streaming from her plump lips. She scoots toward the headboard and sits slumped against it, one long naked leg bent, the other lying flat against the mattress.
I laugh lightly.
“I’ve never paid for sex in my life,” I say, flicking my ashes in the ashtray on the nightstand. “And I never will.”
“I said for my time,” she corrects me. “This talking bullshit, for example.” Her blond head falls to one side and she looks over at me with a spreading grin. “I’d never charge you for the sex, Niklas.”
I smile faintly.
After I’ve smoked the cigarette down, I crush the filter in the ashtray. The room I’ve been staying in since I left our Order is a shithole, but I’ve always preferred shitholes to luxury; old boots to shiny dress shoes; worn jeans to posh suits; rot-gut whiskey to expensive wine. Only thing I can think of clean and pure and not stained by moral perversion that I like, are women. Not necessarily this particular woman—I like her not because she’s a whore, but because she’s proud to be a whore—but women…like Claire. The only woman I ever loved more than my mother.
The woman that my brother killed.
“What’s up with you, anyway?” the whore asks. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but you’ve been all brooding and shit the past couple of weeks.”
I sit with both legs stretched out before me, crossed at the ankles, the bed sheet draped over my midsection, my arms crossed over my chest. On the other side of the small, dingy room with green wallpaper, a round table sits in front of the only window covered by thick navy curtains that have been pulled together, shutting out what’s left of the daylight. Another hour and it’ll be dark. The flatscreen television—like the telephone and the broken hair dryer and stained mini coffee pot—has been mounted to the room to deter theft; it hangs from a moveable arm bracket affixed high on the wall. Old ‘Seinfeld’ reruns play on the screen with the volume low. The muffled sound of music from the bar on the ground floor beneath me funnels through the thin walls and floor.
The bed moves as the whore—OK, her name is Jackie—shifts around next to me.
I look over just as she’s standing up with her back to me, her naked ass shaped like a cherry. I like that.
“Where are you going?” I ask, mildly interested.
She steps into her skimpy black panties and walks around to my side of the bed, crushing her cigarette out next to mine; a thin sliver of leftover smoke rises from the ashes.
“I’ve gotta be somewhere in an hour,” she says indifferently.
I reach out and clamp my hand around her wrist, stopping her. Jackie never really has to ‘be somewhere’—I’ve known her for two months—and all of a sudden I feel like an asshole. Well, I admit I am a fucking asshole twenty-four-seven, but I don’t like it when I actually feel like one.
She looks down at me irritably, waiting for me to get on with it, blinking her light brown eyes.