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There are blisters on your feet. There’s blood in the soles of your new leather boots. There’s quicksand in your veins, thick in the arteries and ventricles of your fast-beating heart as you make your way through the parking lot outside. The ring on your finger feels the tightest it’s ever felt in the nightmare of a year that you’ve worn it.
Another night. Another fight with a man whose eyes shift when he tells you he loves you; a tattooed fist through the bedroom wall and a knife buried in your kitchen table. He beats you more than he fucks you, fast and violent behind the walls of the house that’s still in his name. He never hits you in the face though. Your momma says that’s rare around here.
“But do you reckon I might deserve it?”
Your voice comes out quiet and slurred, rising out from down in your throat when you ask for the opinion of the tiny critter marching across the asphalt in front of your toes. Tiny, skittering legs and a long barbed tail; venom just itching to course through your veins. You wonder how bad it would hurt if it stung you— if it pinched you. If you reached out your fingers and scooped it up into the palm of your hand, would you even be present enough to feel it try?
But the scorpion doesn’t answer. It vanishes into the shadows like it was never even there.
You don’t want to be here either.
You blame it on the drugs— meth and speed and God knows what else, and you, on enough pills to take down a horse. Your husband smokes out of a lightbulb to get high, but you? You just try to survive it. You always snatch what the doctors give you like a child reaching for candy, all smiles and “yes sirs” and swearing to god you know the difference between what’s real and what’s not. You swallow them down like you promise you will only tonight you swallowed them down between shots of tequila. If you close your eyes you can still taste the lime, and the salt, and the skin of a woman you’d never met lying down on her back over the bar.
You blame it on the drugs. They double the stars when they fill up your eyes, making everything around you slow and prettier than when you had left it. The neon light of the vacancy sign turned bright enough now to rally the sun, fluorescent and pink on the hoods of beat-up old trucks. The way your legs look so long in this skirt, the bottom of the brim of your hat. You can even smell your perfume beneath the stench of your sweat from the lone walk of shame back to a pay-by-the-hour motel.
Another step forward, over the invisible path the insect left behind. You’re sober enough to keep your balance, but drunk enough to not remember which room you’d checked in before heading out to the bar. Maybe it’s 104 or 102, and maybe it doesn’t really matter. There’s no light seeping out through the curtains of either one, not a single car parked on this end of the lot. You take your chances like the flipping of a dime, hopeless and fearless and dumb. Five fingers wrapped tight around a rusted old knob, and the door opens up like a charm.
Your thighs rub painfully together when you place one boot in front of the other, beneath the too-short denim of your skirt, and you think that’s why you don’t notice it at first when you stumble inside. Then sobriety hits, like a needle to the bend of your arm before fizzling back out.
There’s a man sitting in the hotel room.
You’re smart enough to understand; you picked the wrong hotel room.
There’s a gun pointed at the round silver buckle at the front of your belt, begging to blow its way through the flesh between your hips and splatter your womb over the empty parking lot outside. There’s a silencer on the end, like a hitman in a film. If he pulled that trigger now, not even the scorpion would hear it.
“Close the door,” says the man, faceless and scary and foreign and cruel; a voice so deep you wonder if you’ve ever heard anything like it.
Your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth like it’s sewn to it. Your nails dig into the doorway.
“I think I’m in the wrong room. I’ll just—”
The sound of the gun being suddenly cocked back steals the breath from your lungs. He steadies his aim over the swell of your left breast, and so you close the door without daring to say another word.
A soft click, and the lamp on the nightstand bursts to life. Dull amber light floods the room, illuminating clearly the enormous body resting in the chair facing the door. He’s older than you. His legs are big and spread wide in his seat; cornflower denim stretched tight over his thighs and genuine leather sitting loose around his waist. The way that he’s dressed is so much like everyone else in this place that you know it’s only just a disguise— a caricature of what he thinks you to be when he passes through this West Texas town. It’s too perfect, too much; like he’s making fun of you just by sitting down in that chair.
He points you to the bed with the barrel of his gun, and when your eyes go wide his face stays just as hard and steady as if it’d been carved that way just for you. There’s no rope on the nightstand, no handcuffs or tape or petroleum jelly in a tub at the foot of the mattress. Whatever he plans on doing with you now, it certainly doesn’t seem to be that.
You half-circle the floor on wobbling knees, sitting down stiff and proper on the edge of the bed in front of him.
“What is your business here?”
There’s a lump in your throat.
“I had a f-fight with my— my man.” Your eyes squeeze suddenly shut and you shake your head. “Husband,” you correct yourself, digging your nails deep into the flesh of your knees.
“What is your business in this room?” He reiterates.
“I done told you, sir. I’m s’posed to be in the room next door.”
The stranger's dark eyes drop down to look over you, over the fresh bruises welling up on your arms, and you know he sees them now for what they really are. It doesn’t matter though. Something tells you this man has bruised his fair share of women too.
“So you chose this,” says the stranger, and you twist up your face in confusion. “You took a chance, and you chose the wrong room.”
You don’t answer him— don’t even try to. Something tells you this is a sermon, a lecture; a thing to be listened to carefully rather than interrupted by a random whore only a half his own age. Maybe if you nod your head and listen carefully enough, though, he won’t feel inclined to drag your corpse out somewhere in the desert. Maybe if he does he’ll leave you with your head and your hands and your feet; and that butterfly tattoo on your hip that’ll let everyone know who you are.
“Everything you’ve ever done in your life has brought you here to this moment… To this room… To me.” His big dark eyes are suddenly filled with wonder and light, as if whatever the hell he’s talking about now is the most poetic thing anyone has ever said in all the days of mankind.
He smiles at you, the breadth of his nose pulling wide over his face; but he doesn’t smile with his eyes.
He’s going to kill you; shoot you, drown you in that filthy green tub over in the bathroom. There’s no doubt in that now— and it surprises you how much it really doesn’t even matter to the world outside around you. The people in the motel room next door will just keep fucking, all the crickets outside still singing their pretty songs.
“Yeah,” you whisper, more to yourself than to him. “Yeah, I reckon.”
His sable hair looks long, and soft, and odd. It rounds out the square frame of his face, the iron jaw of a man who could crush your bones with his hands— hands like the knots of a tree. You want to touch it for yourself. You want to reach out and run your fingers through it the way you run your fingers through your own alone at night, coarse and long and salted with the sweat from the blistering sun. Something tells you he’d snap the bone of your arm if you tried, and all that does is make you want it more than you would have before.
The light of the room softens, only you think it might be because you’re starting to suddenly cry. You’re peaking off from the crux of your high; dizzy and insatiable and ready to be hurt and fucked and everything in between— and the man he looks so handsome. He looks handsome in a way you can bet that other people aren’t willing to see, beautiful like the fangs of a rattlesnake when it opens its mouth up to bite. You blame it on the drugs. You blame it on how good people look when they’ve got a silenced 12 gauge pointed at your heart.
He’s such a big man, you think, and you’re touching your neck without even realizing it. He could crush your skull with the weight of his boot, scuffed at the toes and littered with dried blood and sand. He could sever your spine with just one blow, could flay open your—
“You are breathing so loud,” says the man, dark and amused. “I can see your heart beating, right there in your neck.” He raises a finger to gesture at your pulse throbbing between your collarbones. “Thinking of something that excites you?”
Something drops in the pit of your belly, landing down heavy between your hips the same way it does when a man winks at you from the end of the bar. You could lie and it wouldn’t matter. Your momma says men are like dogs; they can smell the skank in you from a mile away.
“I’m thinkin’ I wanna touch you,” you admit, too fucked-up to care.
“And what would you gain by touching me?” The strange man shifts in his seat; still amused, full lips pulled out into a line. “Hm? I am nothing but a stranger to you. A man with a gun.”
His words are like the rattling of a serpent's beaded tail, a bobcat hissing when you back it up into a corner. He looks you over again, the place where your skirt has risen up over your hips; then back dully onto your face.
“And you’re just a scorpion...” You slur out, and drop your gaze down to the filthy shag carpet. “Men are always just scorpions...”
His brows twitch curiously, but the half-moon curve of his lip doesn’t budge.
There’s a long beat of silence after that. You can hear a clock ticking loudly over on the wall, water dripping loudly from the rusted faucet over the sink. It’s so long you can feel your body growing heavier on the bed, and you wonder what he’d do to you if you passed out cold in front of him.
“We’ll flip a coin.”
The man says it like he’s only just thought of it, and it brings a light to his eyes that wasn’t there before. There’s a faint urgency in the way he digs into the front pocket of his jeans, but his eyes never once leave your own. He tightens his grip on the shotgun to keep you scared, then reveals to you a silver quarter pinched tight between his fingertips.
“Call it.”
Head tilted, smiling softly; he looks younger now— hopeful, like a calf staring up at its mother.
Your eyes fall down onto his outheld fist, the scabs on the grooves of his knuckles. There’s a translucent shadow following each one of his movements, like a lapse in time itself. It reverberates through the back of your eye sockets, buzzing like the insects outside and the crackling of electricity running through the light of the lamp. Everything feels wrong.
“Heads.” You blurt out, because in your mind it only makes sense.
You don’t ask what it’s for; what it means, what he’ll do to you when he raises his hand and decides you’ve chosen wrong. Instead you squeeze shut your eyes, and focus instead on the metallic flicking of a quarter against the flat of his thumbnail; and the soft plop down when it lands in his palm. He slaps it down onto the bend of his knee, and slowly reveals to you a result you can’t make out from that far away.
The man frowns at the coin resting down flat on his knee. You watch the tension in his shoulders dissipate into the stuffy air of the motel room like rain falling and vanishing when it’s too hot to reach the ground.
He frowns for a moment. Then he says, “Okay.”
Your heart pounds. It feels like there’s static in your nerves, running all up through your body and welling up your skin into prickled goose flesh over your back.
He places the gun back into a long black case more casually than you’ve ever seen anyone do anything in their life, and then goes back over towards the door to slide closed the lock. You think he’s going to strangle you, when he comes back to stand in front of you. You think he’s going to crush your windpipe and watch you struggle desperately for air until at last it’s all over— But then he takes off his jacket. His hands rise up to work at his collar, dwarfing the plastic buttons beneath the thick pads of his slow-working fingers. His eyes look dull now. They hadn’t before he flipped that coin.
“What about the person you were waitin’ for with that gun?”
The stranger pauses. His dun-colored shirt is halfway undressed; you can see a soft patch of black hair peppered over his bare chest.
“What business is that of yours?” He asks, antagonistic; and thankfully you know better than to say anything else.
He takes off the rest of his clothes in a way that almost feels unnatural, rehearsed; like a bad actor putting on a show— and yet, there's self-assurance there too. It’s meticulous and purposeful; chaotic and frightening. It feels like an exchange, a reward, a thinly-veiled act of violence. You can see it in his eyes, black as oil slicks.
This man is no stranger to violence.
Hunger wakes in the space between your knees, still young enough to get wet before it’s even started and experienced enough to know what to do on your own. You slide down your skirt and frilly lace thong over your ankles and toss them drunkenly over onto the carpet by the bed.
All that’s left now on the stranger’s tanned body is a pair of charcoal briefs, tight like something your husband would wear. There are scars from what look like gunshot wounds on his legs, a rosebud of flesh above the padded curve of his hip, and a burn from a lit cigar. Maybe he was hurt before, when he was a boy; or maybe it was Nam. Either way it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Nothing matters and you want to kiss every single one of them for a reason you can’t quite understand in yourself. You want to run your tongue over his powerful body, want to suck his cock in your mouth but he won’t let you when you try— doesn’t trust you enough, and in a way you guess that makes sense. He still lets you touch it though, over his underwear; rubbing him until he’s straining up hard against the waistband and weeping a dark stain onto the fabric. The swell of his cock is hard and fat in your hand, mechanical motions that draw out nothing from the man but an expressionless stare.
“Take it out for me,” he tells you.
Your eyes are wet when you look up into his own, and as you obey him you wonder if he can tell just how fucked up you really are. All the stars and galaxies in the black holes of your pupils— miles away from this place when he lines his dick up with your pussy. Your husband is a big man, fattened by cornbread and toughened by hard labor on backcountry fields; but he certainly isn’t this big there. The stranger presses into you dry as bleached bone, and at first it won’t go in. He pulls himself back and licks his tongue over his fingers before gliding it back over himself, and this time you gasp when the blunt tip of his head slips inside of you.
It’s slow at first. Short, steady movements that only fill you up about halfway each time; and then faster— urgent, isolated thrusting using only his hips while the rest of his body stays rigid and stone. You can tell he’s a careful man, only he’s not being so careful when it comes to using a rubber. He fucks you like a bred rabbit, bare and raw, without ever once asking about all the dozens of men you’ve been with before.
It don’t make no sense, you think, with your legs wrapped loose around the wide trunk of his waist, how a man like this goes from ready to kill to ready to fuck at the flip of a coin — but you’re thankful to have gotten him to climb on top of you so easily. And maybe this ain’t even real. Maybe I’m passed out at home on the couch, strung out over the cushions with a bottle of pills layin’ empty on the floor.
The man doesn’t look at you, not once. He keeps his head turned to stare at the door to the bathroom, eyes opened wide and face pulled together in a way that makes you bite down on a laugh; odd and unnatural as everything else. He doesn’t make a sound save for his down in the throat breaths, and even though he hits a spot inside you that makes flowers bloom in the pit of your stomach you do everything you can to stay just as quiet. You’re drenched between your bodies, and the man— he’s hardly broken a sweat.
The frame creaks. Someday you’ll think of this when you’re old and bored and alone, how easy it was for you to bring a man like this into your bed. You’ll think of how it felt to be taken by an assassin in the darkness of your room; the smell of cigarettes and booze stale on the pillows and sheets. You’ll think back on the desert, Texas, on the eighties. You’ll think of the poison, and the wild horses that ran through your veins, of what a beautiful and volatile thing you once were in a world that tried to quell you.
Pressure mounts in the walls of your cunt, but you know he doesn’t care if you come. He treats it like a dance, a proud display in front of an audience that isn’t here, and you suppose a part of you understands. You know how it feels to be watched when no one else is around. His eyes dart back to your face, down where your bodies are joined; and you think about how unnatural a pairing this is— like a fork jammed into a fucking light socket. It’s chaotic and random and godless and odd. He cums fast; you knew he would. His dick twitches and throbs inside of you, the rolling of his hips stilling as he keeps his eyes trained down on your pussy. The hand by your head fists into the faded cotton sheets, and he pumps himself back into you once— twice— like the coup de grâce of a knife stabbing deep into a wounded animal before at last it’s all over.
Realization hits you like a knife to the spine, but you don’t really care about it when the thought comes flooding into your inebriated mind. He didn’t pull out of you, because he knows you won’t be a problem after tonight.
Corpses can’t have babies, you think, and laugh.
The hair on his face has started to grow back, all these hours of waiting here all alone in the dark. It prickles against you when he drops the brunt of his weight, like the prickled spines of a cactus laid out over his cheek.
He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t move. You stare up at him with his softening cock still balls deep inside of you.
“You gonna kill me now, Mister?”
The stranger straightens back up on his arms; strong, effortless. His eyelids look heavy.
“That depends,” says the man.
“What on?”
He smiles down at you, showing the edges of his teeth like the bared fangs of a wolf; and you know without asking that he’d made up his mind to kill you the moment you chose the wrong door.
Fucking didn’t earn you shit. It never has with anyone else, and it certainly hasn’t with him.
A shrug passes its way through your shoulders. It doesn’t matter anymore, not when the sun outside is so close to rising and you’re so close to having to go back to everything else in your life that keeps you sated at the cold barrel of a gun.
“That’s fine. I reckoned I deserved it anyway.”
Your body shifts, and you turn your head out to stare at the neon light bleeding in through the curtains. Whatever it is that’s out there waiting for you in the stars? It has to be better than this.
Something passes over the assassin’s face, something you couldn’t read even if you wanted to. He pulls himself out from you, off from you; and over to his pants lying discarded on the chair he’d been sitting in earlier. You hadn’t even noticed how neatly he’d folded them.
“What’s the most you have ever placed on a bet?”
The man’s voice draws your head back over towards him like a puppet on a string. Clutched tight between his thick fingers is the silver coin from earlier.
If there was ever the chance that none of this was real, it feels far more possible now than before. Your limbs melt into the mattress, and the static in your head is louder than the deafening sound of his too-dry fingers scraping gently over the metal. Reality flickers on and off like a light, the coin leaves his hand after you call it; and then he smiles at you, uncharacteristically warm.
“Okay.”