The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [53]
She’s waiting for me on a bar stool, legs crossed and face hopeful. Plump cheeks, lips like throttled . . . I let my face smile at her and order her a drink and make chitchat. She smiles sympathetically and asks me questions, trying to find out if I have—hey! She’s worried I might have a regular girlfriend, the stupid cunt, so I explain that no, my Elouise died in a car crash two years ago and I have been mourning since. She’s so stupid she laps it up, asks me lots of questions and sounds concerned. I figure I’ll drop her off with the rich guy’s pilot at Anse Marcel tomorrow: but first we’ll have some fun together. I act coy but let her draw me out because half the bitches want to be fucked hard by a stranger, they just have to convince themselves he’s sensitive and caring at first to get over their inhibitions. After a while she looks at me slack-mouthed like she’s already dripping, and I figure it’s time. So I ask if she wants to come back to my place and she accepts.
We walk—it’s only three blocks—and she doesn’t bat an eyelid at the rubbish and the locked shutters. I show her upstairs and unlock the door, and when I turn back to pull her inside she actually gropes me! Normally they get cold at this point and start making excuses but this is going really smooth. I’m hard, of course, and when she kisses me I get an arm round her and start hiking up her skirt. The Rohypnol’s in the fridge and it’d be more sensible to slip it to her first, then add a geas on top for safety’s sake, but what the hell, she seems willing enough. This one really does seem to want a rough fuck—shame for her she doesn’t know about the customer, but those are the breaks. I pick her up and carry her inside, kick the door shut, then dump her on the bed and jump her. And the funny thing is she lets me, she doesn’t fight, and my heart is in my mouth pounding away between her legs, wet meat, warm meat, it’s like she doesn’t even know the father says it’s wrong to do this beat my meat, it’s not ever this easy and I can’t let her talk afterwards even though she’s biting my shoulder and sucking me, and oh father my chest hurts—
I open my eyes and stare at the hotel ceiling until my pulse begins to slow. I’m engorged and erect and freezing cold on the damp sheets, and I feel as if I’m about to throw up. “Ramona!” I croak, my larynx still half-paralyzed with sleep.
★★The fucker just flatlined on me!★★ I can’t feel his mind anymore, but he’s lying on top of her, still twitching spastically, and I can taste her desperation and fear. ★★He must have had a dodgy heart, done one line too many. Finish me off, Bob!★★
★★What—★★ I realize I’ve been holding my penis and yank my hands away as if they’re covered in chili oil.
★★Finish me off! Please!★★ I can sense her succubus now, coiling like a black vortex of emptiness behind her conscious thoughts. There’s nothing human about it, nothing warm—it’s like death itself, not the small oblivion of orgasm but its complete antithesis, freezing and vacant, a hunger for life. It needs filling, it’s searching for a sacrifice and she’d set her eyes on Marc but he checked out early and now—★★It needs a little death to go with the big one, and the longer you wait the hungrier it gets.★★ She sounds breathless. ★★If you don’t give it one it’ll eat me, and you may think that would be a good thing but in case it’s escaped your attention we’re entangled—★★
★★But I—★★ I want Mo, don’t I? Don’t I? Mo isn’t hiding behind a glamour. Mo doesn’t eat people like a fuckvampire. Mo isn’t a drop-dead gorgeous blonde, she’s just Mo, and we’re probably going to end up getting married sooner or later, and I feel guilty and frightened because Mo won’t understand what Ramona wants me to do.
★★But nothing!★★ I can sense