I had passed out after the sex, completely zonked out. I hadn’t dream, just slept. My body was aching. Not from the sex, but from a job earlier that day. It got rough, and I was forced to fight. Three men came at me, and three men reeled away, bleeding. But I didn’t need to worry about that when Cassandra and I checked into the motel. Goddamn, I’d thought before sleep took me. She was so glamorous at the start. She was so normal. What the hell happened? Because Cassandra had changed those past two months. She’d started saying odd things, like, “When we die, I want us to be buried together. I want to taste your bones for all eternity.” Or, “When we have children, do you mind if I teach them to always fear the supernatural? Ghosts, you know. They’re real. All of it is real. I can’t lie to them.”
She said all of this with complete sincerity, as though she truly believed it all. We would be married, we would have children, and she would teach them about ghosts. In her mind, all of this might as well have already happened, it was so set in stone. She wasn’t like that at the start, but now . . .
I had fallen asleep for what seemed like a few minutes, and then her giggling had woken me up.
I’d bolted upright in bed and grabbed for my jacket, which was hung over a chair next to the bed. Inside my jacket was my gun. But then I looked across the room and saw that Cassandra was sitting, naked, in the pale moonlight, which slanted through the window. Cross-legged on the floor, she tilted her head up at me. “Mad-dox,” she grinned, drawing my name out. “You’re awake.”
She giggled again, this time louder.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked her, keeping my voice calm. “Why aren’t you asleep?”
Cassandra was shapely: large ass, large breasts, hourglass. Her face was round and pale, and her eyes were wide and green. When I’d first met her, she was glamorous, held herself like a model, spoke intelligently and acted like a woman a man wanted on his arm. And then, over a few months, this façade slipped away, and the real woman was revealed. The woman beneath the façade was dangerously unhinged.
She’d sat there, naked; unaware she was naked, giggling.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
And then I’d looked down and saw it.
She’d pricked her finger with the knife from dinner and was painting the wall with her blood. She moved her finger deliberately, slowly, taking her time to make sure the blood marked the letters clearly. It was dark, and I had to squint, but I made the words out: Maddox and Cassandra fore—And then the blood trailed down the wall. Giggling, eyes rolling back in her head, she cried, “It’s the truth! All of it!”
I’d got out of bed and went to her, knelt down, and made to pry the knife from her hand. “You can’t do that,” I said.
She made like she was going to let me take the knife, opening her fingers, and then when the blade was almost free, she clasped it harder and lashed out at me. I was bare-chested and the blade sliced across my pectoral, a clean line, and blood began to pour down my skin, over my abs and onto my underwear. I’d clenched my jaw, keeping myself calm.
“Don’t,” I said, reaching forward for the knife.
She’d lashed out again, slicing along my other pectoral.
“Don’t,” I repeated. And then I’d feinted, reached forward and then darted back when she made to cut me again. Dodging, I grabbed her wrist and twisted it so that she dropped the knife.
I picked it up and held it behind my back.
Cassandra had sprung to her feet, moving quick for a woman her size, and began pummelling my chest, her fists smashing into the bleeding wounds. “You said you loved me!” she screamed. “You said you wanted to have my babies! You said you wanted to be with me until the day you died! You said you wanted it all! You said you wanted to have a life with me!”
I never said any of that, I’d thought, and it was true; Cassandra and I had barely known each other, in truth.
She’d smashed my chest, over and over, and I’d stood there and let her hit me for a few moments, struck dumb, struck still. She’d been going weird up until this point, but this was the first real explosion of it. I’d never hit a woman, but I couldn’t let her keep punching me, so I grabbed her wrists and wrapped my arms around her, holding her still. She’d kicked out with her legs, and so I wrapped my leg around hers, hooking her. I held her like that for a long time, and finally, she fell asleep in my arms.
I’d laid her down on the bed and went to the bathroom, got a towel, wetted it under the tap, and returned to the motel room. I’d scrubbed the wall clean of her blood and hid the knife in one of the drawers. Then I pulled on my shirt and jeans and pulled a chair up at the foot of the bed.
I didn’t sleep again for that entire night, just watching her, terrified, wondering what I should do. I couldn’t leave her, could I? I couldn’t abandon a woman who’d just cut her own finger.
But I knew one thing: I didn’t want to touch her ever again. I was done with her.
And so I’d waited until the gray winter light replaced the moonlight, and then gently shook her awake, and explained that to her…
***
I shake my head, bringing myself out of the memory.
Leave the past in the past, I tell myself.
I force Cassandra and that dark period of my life out of my mind and turn to the computer. And Eden is different. You learned a lot from Cassandra. You picked up the warning signs. Eden is different!
First of all, I open up the actual game. I can see what Eden meant when she said it was meant to be a game to empower women. Angels of Death is a simple concept – it’d have to be, with such a small team – but I can see how it’d be fun. It’s basically a cast of female characters tooling up and then laying siege to a city full of murderous villains. I can see the differences between other games. These women aren’t perfect white-skinned mannequins. They’re of different races, different sizes, different everything. A true mishmash of feminism. But none of that interests me. I go through the game, noting where it crashes, the problems, and then I close it.
My heart pumps as I work. It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to stretch my computer-science muscles. Top of the class, and now the leader of a motorbike gang. What would Professor Hutchinson say if he could see me now? My thoughts are on quick fire today, and so I ignore them. Sometimes, they can’t be tamed.
I focus on two things: the code, and the kiss I’ll win if I can fix it.
It takes three hours for me to scan the code and isolate the problems. The code is complex, but it’s not as complex as other projects I’ve worked on. It’s all about persistence, not looking away, contracting entirely on the details. I fix the code and run the game. It no longer crashes, and everything is in working order: no glitches. I wipe a hand across my forehead, which is damp with sweat, and then rock back in the chair. All that work for a kiss from a stranger. But I don’t begrudge it. Eden isn’t just any stranger. She’s a redheaded, petite, bouncy bombshell.
I’m about to copy the fixed code to the flash drive when a thought occurs to me. Grinning to myself, I switch on the webcam, look into it, and wink. Then I take the video file and blur out the background, set it to black text, and write, You’re Welcome, along the bottom of the animation. When that’s done, I access the source code and insert it into the game’s code.
Let her see how she likes that, I think, copying the new, improved code over to the flash drive. As I place the drive on the disk, I stop and look at my hands: large, gnarled, callused hands clutching a flash drive. It’s like my college self and my biker self are united in that one snapshot moment.
Just think about the kiss. The kiss from that beautiful woman. Goddamn, I can’t wait.