Dark Passions (22 page)

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Authors: Jeff Gelb

BOOK: Dark Passions
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Because you smile at me, and you say, “How
interesting.
”
The
Last Re
sort
Lisa Morton
 
 
 
“I
can tell you how to get what you want.”
Emmie dries her eyes and listens, intrigued. “You can?”
The woman with the brittle hair and bad teeth grins and starts talking.
 
 
It was just a few minutes past ten when Emmie came home and found George eating out some other girl's pussy.
Emmie was tired when she parked the car before her tumbledown shotgun house (that looked just like about a million other Florida shacks); she'd worked a ten-hour shift down at the supermarket today, and everything below the knees ached. She was moving slowly as she headed up the walk toward the front door, and she thought later on (while nursing a beer in the bar) that her hearing must have been tired too.
Because that's the only way she could have missed the moans and squeals of pleasure coming from her own bedroom.
She stopped for a moment, forgetting her sore feet as she focused on the sound, first in disbelief, then in growing anger. She couldn't hear George, but she thought the neighbors three houses down could surely make out the woman.
She strode through the unlocked front door and stopped again to listen.
Who the fuck is that? Jesus, I think it's Tessa from the beauty parlor... .
She was walking down the hall toward the bedroom when she caught herself and stopped. What was she going to do? Scream, demand they stop immediately? Order George to move out? Tell them both how disappointed she was? Tell Tessa she'd be finding a new manicurist?
Instead she ended up gawking.
The bedroom door had been left open, and as Emmie approached she could see a couple on the bed, their figures outlined by the flickering glow from the bedroom television set. Now she could make out a second layer of sound, more moaning voices and a cheap musical accompaniment. It took her a few seconds to place it.
It was that sleazy porn flick George always tried to get her to watch. Apparently he'd found someone else to share his interest.
Except they weren't watching the movie. The woman, who Emmie could see now was definitely Tessa the manicurist (she could tell by the teased blond hair spread across her pillow), was naked and spread-legged on the bed, her eyes closed, head thrown back in ecstasy. George was sprawled near the end of the bed, his head bobbing up and down as his tongue worked on Tessa's crotch.
He never did that with me,
Emmie thought.
Then she ran, all thoughts of confrontation having vanished. She slammed the front door on the way out, hoping they'd heard it, wiping tears from her eyes as she stumbled to the car. She gunned the engine too strongly and then peeled rubber as she shot down the street, heading for the interstate and ...
. . . she didn't know.
 
 
A quarter hour later she found herself in a lowlife bar.
She'd picked it completely at random. Or maybe she'd liked the name—the Last Resort. That felt right, tonight.
Normally it wasn't the kind of place she'd ever go into, but it'd been open and there'd only been a chopper and two pickup trucks in the dirt lot (it was a Tuesday night, after all), and there'd been an empty table near the rear. She'd ordered a beer (or three), taken a chair facing the wall, and cried into the solace of a cocktail napkin.
“That bastard,” she'd muttered, uncaring of what anyone thought about the sobbing woman alone in the back muttering obscenities to herself. “That lousy, stinking sonuvabitch.”
She'd supported him for the last six months, and she thought they'd been a good six months. He was so handsome, with his easy grin and wavy brown hair, that at first she couldn't believe he cared about her. Their life together had been for the most part easy, and he seemed to like the sex, even if Emmie secretly thought it was a bit dull and found his interest in porn embarrassing. Sure, she didn't like all of his friends, and he had a tendency to drink too much, but she'd believed him when he'd sworn (with that gorgeous grin) that there'd be no other girls for him.
Jesus, what an idiot she'd been.
And now ... they hadn't even tried to hide it, hadn't even had the decency to go to a motel. And right when George had known Emmie would be coming home from work—had he wanted her to find them? Or had they just been so lost in their sexy hijinks that they'd lost track of time?
And what would she do now?
She couldn't picture herself facing him. She was still burning in shame from the customer at the store who'd called her a bitch when she'd told him they were out of his favorite cigarettes. She hadn't even been able to respond; she'd just fled to a restroom, locked herself in a stall, and cried for ten minutes.
She hated herself.
“Don't hate yourself, honey, it's that dickwad's fault.”
Emmie looked up, surprised to find a woman now sitting at the other side of the table. Emmie was already on her third beer, a little drunk, and so it took her a few seconds to wonder:
How did she know I was thinking that?
“Caught him with another chick, huh?” the woman asked.
Emmie nodded, then wiped her eyes again and looked at the woman more carefully. She wasn't attractive—in her thirties, with bad skin, worse teeth, and dirty blond hair—but there was something about her, something familiar, as if she was a movie star that Emmie had seen once in something, or ...
Then Emmie gave up on trying to place her and asked, “How'd you know?”
The woman grinned and waved a hand about the room. “Please, you're a young girl sitting by yourself in a biker bar and crying. You don't have any bruises, so I know it's not that he beat on you; so what's that leave?”
There was a strange sympathy in the woman's tone, and Emmie relaxed, even smiled herself. “Yeah, I guess so. He was ... well, he was in bed with the woman who gives me my manicures.”
The woman threw back her head and roared. “Hey, that's good—he was nailing your nail expert!”
Emmie chuckled, bitterly, then thrust out a hand. “I'm Emmie.”
The woman took it, and Emmie was shocked at the strength in her fingers. “Lori.”
Her grip was also cold, and Emmie pulled her hand away before it froze. “I don't know what to do now,” she confessed miserably.
“This hasn't happened to you before?”
“Nope,” Emmie said, shaking her head. “Although I suppose I should've seen it coming.”
“Yeah, you fuckin' should've.” Lori leaned in closer and held Emmie's gaze with her own, which jittered slightly and left Emmie less comfortable. “There's only one question to ask yourself at this point: do you want to stay with this guy?”
Emmie thought for a moment and finally answered honestly, “I don't know.”
“Well, that you gotta fuckin' decide for yourself. But if you want to keep him”—here she lowered her voice and cocked an eyebrow at Emmie—“I can tell you how to get what you want.”
Emmie dried her eyes and listened, intrigued. “You can?”
“Oh, hell yes, honey, it's easy: you gotta take control. You know—in bed.”
Emmie's jaw dropped a half-inch. Then she looked away, her face hot. “Girls don't do that—”
“Fuck they don't!” the woman exclaimed loudly, causing Emmie to look around nervously. No one else in the bar seemed to have noticed. “Your boyfriend—”
“George,” Emmie obliged.
“Right, George,” Lori continued, “he's got a dick, right? Then I guarantee you he wants you to lead him around with it. It's up to you, honey. Take the lead—or spend the rest of your life crying in bathroom stalls.”
Emmie shook her head, tilted it back for another swallow of beer—and when she looked again, Lori was gone. She turned and scanned the bar, but there was no sign of her.
And how the fuck did she know about the crying-in-bathroom-stalls thing?
 
 
For a few days, Emmie wanted nothing to do with George.
She avoided him around the house, and he acted as if nothing was wrong; apparently he and the nail-filer really
hadn't
heard the front door slam as Emmie had stalked out.
But even while she was hating George and his smiling, happy deceit, Lori's words kept rolling around in her head.
Take control ... in bed....
Emmie would look at him working out in the mornings, with his muscled body lightly covered in muskyscented sweat, or the way his white teeth glistened as he played videogames, or the endearingly silly way he bounced his head to that one Eminem song he listened to over and over, and she realized that she really didn't want to lose him. At least not right away.
Take control ... in bed....
It was twelve-thirty the night George staggered into the bedroom, pleasantly drunk ... and found Emmie waiting for him in bra and panties.
She hoped he was drunk enough that he wouldn't notice how nervous she really was.
He didn't notice. Instead, he actually stopped in the bedroom doorway and gaped, an expression which made Emmie both more anxious and happy. She tried writhing slightly against the sheets, tilting one hip up, and a slow smile started to spread across George's fine face.
“Well, girl ... what's this?”
He looked good lounging there in the doorway, and Emmie began to think maybe she really could do this. She motioned him forward, crooking one finger. “Get into this bed
now.
”
He had his shirt and pants off in record time.
He tried right away to lower himself onto her—like usual—but she put a hand against his chest and pushed him back. “Uh-uh,” she purred, “not like that.”
He stared at her for a moment, and Emmie nearly let out a scream as she saw that he was plainly waiting—waiting to be told what to do.
She suddenly realized she had no idea what to tell him. “Lick my feet” popped into her head.
To her astonishment, he obliged all too happily. His tongue on her tender soles brought delicious tickles of pleasure that drew out slowly as he began to work his way up her body, pausing behind her knees, at her belly, and along her neck.
Finally he was kissing her, just as his fingers found their way under her panties, and he groaned when he felt her wetness. “Oh, baby ... whatever this is that got into you, I like it.”
“Shut up and eat me,” she ordered. If it was good enough for Tessa, it was good enough for her.
And it was good. Very good. His tongue and fingers worked the places between her legs until she was bucking like a jackhammer and making Tessa sound quiet by comparison. The first orgasm shook like none had in years. The second came when she finally allowed him inside her, and even though he was on top of her it wasn't like it had always been in the past: it was sweaty and hard and had them both screaming. The third came later that night, when she'd demanded he stay awake and hard long enough to fuck her again, slower and quieter this time.
Sometime toward dawn, as they finally exhausted themselves and were drifting toward sleep, Emmie thought she owed her friend Lori a beer. Hell, maybe a whole keg.
“C'mon, honey, don't be a fool. They all fuck around, all the time,” she says, her strange, twitching eyes jumping from Emmie's to the house and back again. “The only question is what you're gonna do about it.”
 
 
The sex with George was equally great for the next three nights. They tried things Emmie had imagined when she was horny and by herself but that she'd never thought she'd actually have the nerve to attempt for real. She rode atop George. They nearly tore the house apart with a sixty-nine. He even let her tie him up one night, and he finally had to tell her to stop because he couldn't come again.

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