“You know,” said Ronnie, “a trip to Mexico or a cruise or something.”
“Isn’t that what people do on their honeymoon?”
“Well, yeah, I guess, but a trip is a trip. I think it would be good for us, don’t you?”
Does she ever shut the fuck up?
Calvin stopped suddenly. The last question posed to him had completely fallen from his radar when Hazel and her dude found a dirt path that led down into a small canyon that flanked the south side of the park just west of the Urban Beats Center and a huge playground.
There was no way Calvin could lead Ronnie into the canyon without Hazel realizing that she was being followed. There were jogging trails down there, but most people didn’t know about the canyon. It wasn’t like there were stairs that led down there. Mostly kids went into the canyon to smoke and drink away from the crowds. The trails were little used due to the danger of muggings and prowlers. Place was a rapist’s paradise.
“What’s up?’ said Ronnie. “Do you know them?”
Calvin snapped out of his daydream. “What?”
“Earth to Calvin. Hello? Anybody home? Those people you’re staring at. Do you know them?”
“No, it’s just…” He trailed off.
“Where are they going? Do you think they’re supposed to go down there? Doesn’t look like a trail to me.”
“Naw. I don’t think it is. But there are jogging trails down there, bike trails, something like that.”
“I’m hungry,” Ronnie said.
Calvin detected annoyance. “Okay, sure.” He walked to the railing that overlooked the slope into the canyon and peered over the edge, but couldn’t see Hazel or the guy she’d led down there, for it was clear to Calvin that she’d lured him.
Later that evening after watching one of the latest superhero movies rented from their local Redbox and drinking beer (soda for Ronnie), she and Calvin sat on his couch in one another’s arms watching the eleven o’clock news.
Calvin was back in the horny body exploratory mood he’d been in when Ronnie arrived at his house earlier that day, and she was perfectly all right with that. She wasn’t so perturbed by his obsession with her neck. She thought her best asset were her lips, though she figured men probably like her breasts, considering how many times she caught someone looking at her cleavage. This neck thing, though…
“What’s this new obsession with my neck,” she said with a voice that was all smiles. She didn’t want to make him self-conscious about it. If he was into her neck, so be it. Just so long as it was her neck and only her neck he was worshipping.
“Oh nothing.”
His voice was low and whimsical like he could read secret fortunes by gently caressing Eve’s peach. Sometimes it gave Ronnie the shivers, but as strange as it was, she was kind of beginning to like it.
“Maybe we should take this into the bedroom, what do you say?”
“I say lead the way, beautiful.”
Ronnie put her arms around Calvin and then placed her lips on his. He held her tighter and reciprocated with a deeper, more fevered kiss.
The news droned on in the background: “… Shocking discovery at Balboa park today. A body was found in a canyon just west of the park near the Organ Pavilion. The body hasn’t been identified, but police say that it does appear to be a homicide.”
Calvin was following Ronnie into the bedroom when he heard the news report about the body found at Balboa Park. He went rigid for a second there, wondering if it somehow had something to do with Hazel, and then Ronnie said his name and he turned to see that she had already taken her shirt off. The puckering wounds on her stomach and chest were staring at him like empty, sunken eye sockets. He’d always loved seeing her naked body, but now, with the addition of her deathly pallor and array of lacerations, he was more turned on than ever.
As they lay together on his bed fondling and caressing one another, Calvin wished she would allow him to put on the Death’s Door II video. She wouldn’t have any of that. He didn’t even ask, but he sure would have liked to be able to peek up from time to time to see the glorious dead, the blood, the decay. He’d recently taken to masturbating to the video. It was almost as if watching the dead was more exciting than being with a live woman, crazy as that sounded.
They kissed as he entered her. He thought about the body that had been discovered in the park and wondered what it looked like, what had happened to it. His mind was ripe with possibilities. Imagining the various ways the person could have died was turning him on. If he didn’t cut it out he was going to come before she could get there, and Ronnie wouldn’t like that one bit. He could have extended foreplay by going downtown, but her body, the current incarnation with the stab wounds, hadn’t been cut down there, so it wouldn’t be nearly as fun as giving special attention to her lacerated neck.
He dropped the thoughts of the Balboa park body and directed his lust toward Ronnie’s gaping neck wound. It looked dry. The blood was black and crusty and he wanted to make it moist and then he wanted to… No, she would never let him do that to her, and he wasn’t even sure he would be able to. What he saw wasn’t necessarily what existed in the real world (Calvin had to constantly remind himself of this), but then again he had probed the gash with his finger last time they had sex.
He kissed her lips and then her chin, working his way down to her neck where he lingered, flicking his tongue in and around the horizontal cut, teasing the crusted flaps of torn flesh, nibbling the jagged bits. Ronnie moaned in response and Calvin couldn’t hold back any longer. His own body reacted as he thrust his tongue deep within her neck, tasting blood. His mouth pushed harder into her flesh and he felt those familiar tingling sensations that preceded orgasm. Ronnie screamed as he probed her neck harder as if trying to wrap his tongue around her larynx. Calvin paid no mind that she was trying to push him off of her. He pumped her harder until he came to orgasm in a series of grunts muffled by her neck that was now even more wrecked, at least in his eyes, than it had been before.
Ronnie pushed him. “Christ, Cal, what the fuck was that?”
Calvin reared back. His mouth was glistening with saliva. When he wiped his lips he saw dark blood like chocolate syrup smeared across the backs of his fingers. It didn’t taste like syrup, not like the blood in Night of the Living Dead. It tasted like rust.
“I… I don’t know,” said Calvin.
As he snapped out of the sick trance he’d undergone during this maniacal bout of sexual exploration, he saw glimpses of Ronnie as a normal human being. For a second there her neck was whole again, albeit red and slathered in his slobber.
“That hurt. I swear to God, Cal, if I have bruises on my neck I’m gonna be pissed. I have classes to get to and it’s too hot for a scarf. Jeez! A hickey’s one thing, but…” She shook her head and then slipped off the bed and reached for her clothes.
Calvin was at a loss for words. For him it was one of the best sexual experiences he’d ever had, and yet he knew he couldn’t tell her that. She was so traumatized that the filter his mind had been perceiving the world through was beginning to crumble. Calvin felt bad for what happened. It all seemed so natural to him, and now that the veneer, the death visions were fading, Calvin found his heart clenching. He could hardly remember what he’d done, and now the rusty taste of old blood had faded and he tasted sour beer.