Becky
For the second time in a twenty-four-hour period, when I wake I feel like I’m in a dream. But this time it’s a dream in which Chance and I, for some bizarre reason, are married and have children and live in the suburbs. I have a clear image of Chance wearing an apron flipping burgers at a barbeque. Then, slowly, the dream fades and I realize how ridiculous the idea is. Chance is terrifying, intimidating, captivating in a strange way, but he’s not a man I can imagine standing at a barbeque flipping burgers. Then my stomach grumbles and I think perhaps the dream had more to do with burgers than with Chance.
I lean up in the broken bed, my body sore, aching even more than it did earlier today. It’s evening, the New York autumn wind whipping at the glass, causing it to whistle. I clutch my belly, which is so empty it feels like it’s eating itself. When Chance walks in through the door holding two take-out bags, I almost throw myself at him and tear them from his hands. He’s found a green bomber jacket and faded jeans, with scuffed brown workman’s boots, making him look as gruff as ever. His black hair is damp with rainfall, and his eyes flit around the room when he enters, as though it’s impossible for him to enter a room without first searching it. When he sees it’s safe, he comes to the ruined bed and drops onto the mattress.
“Thought you might be hungry,” he says, not looking at me. Maybe he feels awkward for last night. I get the sense that this man rarely hangs around for the morning after, let alone the evening after. “Didn’t know what you’d want, so I got you one of everythin’.”
I snatch the bag from him, nodding, and then rip it open. It contains a chicken sandwich, a beef burger, a chicken salad wrap, and a hot dog, with a soft-scoop ice-cream with little chunks of chocolate in it for afterwards. I’m so hungry that for the next twenty minutes I don’t even think. I just eat. I devour the chicken sandwich in four bites, the burger in five, and then munch down the rest as quickly as I can, even when I feel my belly getting full. Toward the end, spooning ice-cream into my mouth, it becomes a struggle. But the feeling of having a full belly is so welcome I don’t even care. Chance hands me a fizzy orange drink, which I gulp gladly.
When I’ve eaten myself into a semi-coma, I place the wrappers beside the bed and lie back with my hands on my belly, feeling so full I could explode. Chance eats methodically, like a man completing a task, and then drops the wrappers on the floor and sits on the edge of the bed, elbows on knees, staring at the wall. Once my food has settled, I try and figure out what he’s thinking from his pensive, serious face, but it’s impossible.
“Did you know you have a speck of blue in your eye?” I say.
Chance flinches. “Reckon it comes from my mom,” he mutters. “Dad’s eyes were blacker’n mine.”
“Where are they—your parents, I mean?”
He flinches again, turning away from me so I can’t see his eyes, like the thought of talking terrifies him more than marching into a warehouse and killing half a dozen men. “Mom was a woman I never knew and Dad died when I was seven.”
I wait for him to ask me about mine, but he doesn’t. In the end I tell him anyway: tell him how my father is an enforcer, not a hitter, and my mom lives in California. “I think she still loves my dad,” I tell him. “Last time I spoke to her, she mentioned something about it.”
“Alright,” he says in a neutral tone of voice.
After an overlong silence, I say, “You’re not much of a talker, are you?”
He shrugs. “Just don’t see what whinin’ about what our mommies and daddies did to us ever solved. I reckon gettin’ ahead and takin’ care of yourself solves a hell of a lot more. Take you, Becky, you did just that this morning.” He starts this high pitched voice that is a mockery of mine. “’Oh, if I’m not a virgin anymore, Julian won’t want me and I’ll be free.’ So you jumped at me and grabbed my cock and here we are.”
“You groped me!” I snap. “When I was in the shower, you groped me!”
“Yeah,” he says, facing me for the first time, “I did. So fuckin’ what? You’re a fine piece of ass. Anyway, you liked it plenty.”
I feel myself blushing, so turn my gaze down to the bed, away from him. “Look,” I say. “I’m sorry for using you that way, okay? I am. But you’ve got to understand that Julian is an old man who was going to rape me—”
“Don’t matter,” he interrupts. “He’s a fuckin’ Capo. Anyway, it’s done now, so I reckon if you wanna make it up to me, maybe you ought’a try and do it by showin’ me just how crazy a girl who’s just learnt about fuckin’ can get.”
Looking up, I see his eyes on my chest. I fell asleep naked, and now I’ve let the blanket fall down, so that he can see my bare breasts. I remember this morning, when he was down between my legs, making me feel like no man has ever made me feel before. He just went crazy down there, eating, biting, licking, and reaching up and pinching my nipples. All of it hurt—I’m sore as hell—and yet all of it felt incredible, too. It felt like there has been a ball of pleasure inside of me my whole life, just waiting to burst, but no man, and even my own hands, has never been able to do the right thing to really get to it. And then Chance comes along and goes ballistic on me and I feel myself bursting, really bursting, all over his face: squirting, the release so incredible it fights off the pain of the brutal fucking he gave me.
Then he grins—if a slight twist of the lips can be called a grin—and I realize he’s joking. But even so, I don’t think of it as a joke. The pleasure was too immense. I’ve never known what real passion feels like, what it’s like to have your body overriding your mind, what it’s like to be so captivated with somebody that when you look at them your pussy begins to ache and your belly starts to get warm.
“I need a shower,” I say.
“I thought I gave you a pretty damn good wash.” He offers that small, cynical smile again. Like a wild cat bearing its teeth. Again, I think of a jaguar, dark and deadly.
I gesture to my hair, which is tangled with grime and I-don’t-want-to-think-what-else. “A man has absolutely no skill when it comes to washing hair. Just because most of you have buzz cuts and can just dunk your head in a thimble of water, doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t need a thorough wash. Is there shampoo in there?”
“The fuck should I know?”
I stand up, naked, for some reason not feeling uncomfortable in front of this man I met only last night. But that’s the power of lust, I suppose, that once you’ve shared a body you can go ahead and share it again. Or maybe that’s a high-brow excuse for just wanting to tease him. I feel his eyes on me as I walk to the bathroom, on my ass especially, and then I close the door. I reach for the lock, but there isn’t one. I feel a tingle up my spine at that. He could walk in on me at any minute.
As I step into the shower, my thighs twinge, my pussy aching. I remember how he drilled into me last night, so hard he shattered the bed-legs, so hard it was like he was an animal and didn’t even care if he hurt me. And once again I reflect that I should be scared, or disgusted, or ashamed, or outraged. And once again I feel none of that. I feel horny, incredibly horny, even if that horniness is tinged with confusion.