I heard the bed behind me sigh with Lia’s weight once more on it, but there was no looking away from the corpse now that I’d seen it. It seemed like there should be something profound to it: a dead thing that had once been alive, a cadaver that I’d made, proof of my capacity for… something. But all it was was there.
That was immense enough. It squeezed out anything else I could reason up. Maybe other men could look at a dead body and see some great truth about life; all I could see was that it ended.
“I’m sorry, Roy,” Lia said behind me.
“It’s not your fault,” I told her, though it probably would’ve had more power if I could take my eyes off that damn body. Its blood and stillness and just how damned dead it was.
“No, I mean I’m sorry that I yelled at you. Made you sad. I just wanted to convince you how serious things are. We can’t go off half-cocked, involve the police—but you still did good. You saved me. Look at me, Roy.”
I turned from the corpse to the naked girl. More alive than ever in that room surrounded by death. Tight and taut and young, all of her breathing and swaying, her very life an erotic act, a dance any stripper would envy. I drank in her small, curving breasts and her flat little belly and the lightly curled pubic hair like an artist’s signature on her femininity.
I wouldn’t have thought anything could drown out the deadness of that man—I didn’t even know his name—but Lia was too alive, too young, too beautiful. It was madness, her and the dead thing being in the same room. I went a little mad. I wanted something alive enough to blot out the murder I’d stained myself with.
My cock stirred through my clothes. I wanted her. Did it matter that I’d just killed someone? Did anything matter? If something did, it had to be that she was sitting on that bed, soft and pink and young and wanting. Not seeming to care about the thing that I’d done. I wanted that, that lack of caring. I wanted this woman who seemed to only care about pleasure—who counted that as the most important thing.
I remembered how her bare shoulders had felt under my hands and reached out again, touched them again. Not so much, but now that I was alive to it, the feel of her was overwhelming.
“I thought about last night, Roy. That’s how I got through it. I thought about how you had touched me and even what he did, didn’t seem so bad.”
The silence was deafening. The death had been sucked out of the room, along with everything else, and there was only me and her. And whatever we could do to fill that yawning emptiness that needed to be full of something.
Her hand moved through the air like it was gliding over silk. Up my leg, up to my groin, and with a flick of the wrist she had my fly open and her fingers inside.
“I don’t want to remember what he did. I want to think of you. The way you touch me, the way you make me feel.” Her voice was steam in a sauna. It burned through me—just the thing to make me feel like I’d come in from the cold.
Her hand found my member. She enclosed it like she was as grateful to be feeling it as I was to have her hand there.
“We’re in this together now, Roy. We should act like it.”
The nails of her small fingers made piquant marks along my length. I swelled like I only could for her.
“Like you’re my hero… and I’m your damsel in distress… you saved me… you have me… I’m yours now… no one can take me from you… not when you want me like you do… too much to let anyone else take me.”
All her devotion stung for a moment. It seemed too much, yet not enough. Then just perfect. All I had to do was give in, let it make sense. But I lingered a moment, in the world where this was insane…
“Lia, he’s right there.”
“No, he isn’t,” she muttered. “It’s just you and me. Us. We have to act as one now… we have to be one…”
I followed the pull of her hand on my cock. It took me to the bed, down onto my back with Lia beside me. She brought me out of my pants and stroked with her little hand, only barely touching my sensitive cockhead, the tips of her fingers smearing my precum down along my shaft.
“You’re a lot bigger than he was,” she said, looking down with pursed lips at how her hand moved up and down my length. “He couldn’t fuck like you can, even if I let him. You make me feel good. You make me feel so good, and it’s just your cock, it’s just having you that gets me off so good…”
I took her head in my hands. I guided her down to my lap—I couldn’t take her talking anymore, doing any more convincing now that I was convinced. It seemed sick and wrong… it was sick and wrong… but now that I was doing it, I didn’t want to think about it, hear the sound of it. I just wanted it to happen.
The knock at the door wasn’t hard, but it broke apart the mood we’d built like a wrecking ball.
“Shit,” I whispered, coming back to myself so vigorously that I barely even recognized what I’d been doing. It was like I’d stepped out of my body and someone else had been in it—someone enthralled with Lia, not someone who just barely knew her. “Shit! What do we do?”
Then I was really myself again and I recognized the ridiculousness of the question. Not that it was a bad one. Just that I’d never get a better answer from the girl than I would from myself.
The knock came again. It was like echolocation. I saw, in that one sound, the dead body sprawled on the bed four feet from the door and the man behind the door, waiting to see, waiting to call the cops.
“Hide,” I whispered to Lia, then grabbed the body and pulled it towards the bathroom. It thumped off the bed and that sounded louder than a bomb going off. “Who is it?” I called to the door, hating how my voice came out, sounding pitifully breathless with the exertion I was doing.
“It’s Bill. I’m the clerk.”
I kept pulling on the body. It was moving, but it felt heavier with each passing moment. All dead weight. And it seemed to catch on everything. The legs of the bed, the TV stand, almost knocked a floor lamp over before I caught it and righted it.
It’d been too long since I’d heard Bill’s reply. I paused and grabbed a quick gulp of air: “What can I do for you, Bill?”
“Could you open the door, sir? It’ll only take a minute.”
“Yeah, give me a second.”
With a herculean effort, I made the last leg of the journey in one outpouring of strength, getting the body—I didn’t even know its name—into the bathroom with Lia. She cringed and paled at the sight of him, stepping into the bathtub to get as far away as possible. I closed the shower curtain. The last thing I needed was for her to have a screaming fit.
I swiped a handful of wet from the sink and daubed it over my face.
“Alright,” I called, sweeping out of the bathroom and closing the door behind me, “I’m a-coming, I’m a-coming.” Tried to make my voice light, until I saw the red-brown blotch on the bed. The body had bled all the way down to where he’d been lying. I grabbed up one of the girls’ suitcases from the end of the bed and set it down on the bloodstain, blotting it from sight.
I went to the door and opened it, willing my heart to stop pounding and my blood to go a little slower in my veins.
The clerk looked one bath away from being a bum. Old clothes that had cost him money, maybe a thousand miles away. And a face that had belonged to someone, a long time ago. Now he was out here, a quiet life, a peaceful man, and all he had to worry about handing out room keys and taking them back.
I realized I envied the man. Weighing his life and mine. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, being him, just with a shave every morning and a full meal every night. But then, actually living like that, maybe it isn’t so conductive to getting yourself to shave, getting yourself to eat… getting yourself to breathe.
The citizens’ life.