“Hi, Therese,” Carol said.
Flood turned to face a stunning, bright-eyed girl with ember-red hair cut like a flyer’s cap. Breasts even larger and more gravity-defying than Carol’s gaped back at Flood, jutting from a spritey, lissome pixie. A see-through white sarong and veil flowed off her hips and shoulders—a sun-ghost. Her skin, eyes, and smile radiated a cast of perfect health and vitality. Sure as hell doesn’t look like the prescription-dope junkie Leon was talking about, Flood surmised. She leaned over and gave Carol a peck on the cheek.
“Therese, this is my friend, Jake. He saved me from the grossest scumbag earlier—yeck! You should’ve seen this guy. But Jake whipped his ass.”
“Defender of Women!” Therese exclaimed, then it was Jake’s cheek that got pecked.
This is fucking killing me, Flood thought.
Therese was petite and short, and would’ve been shorter were it not for the heavily-soled beach sandals that elevated her. She lowered her face between the two of them, grinned impishly. “So are we doing a threeway, or what? I’m so horny I’m starting to show through my thong! Look, Jake—” and she squeezed next to him and pulled her thong down beneath the bartop. Flood’s eyes roved down the flat belly to see that what she revealed: an adorable little toy of a pussy, dusted by the lightest red fur. The meticulous cleft below glistened.
“She’s such a bad girl, Jake—and I mean sometimes she’s really bad,” Carol giggled. Then, to Therese: “Put that away!”
Both girls laughed; Therese repositioned the thong, then patted the adhesive triangle of fabric.
Flood ordered another round of drinks, testicles tingly. Yes. This is definitely fucking killing me…
“Jake and I just did some business,” Carol sort of lied. “Now we’re just talking.”
“Oh. That’s cool. Sorry I missed the fun. Maybe next time?” She gave Flood’s tortured crotch a finger-tickling squeeze.
“Sure,” Flood answered and drank more.
He was grateful that the next few minutes of banter didn’t regard any manner of sex—just enlivened chit-chat. He wasn’t necessarily grateful for Carol’s hand on one thigh and Therese’s on the other. Flood slowly grew erect again, painstakingly so, and at this point—the futility of it all now burying him as if in a hole—he felt as though an abstract bullet had been put through his head. Flood was the diabetic working in the Godiva chocolate factory; the Olympic swimmer standing in the middle of the Sahara Desert. So he drank gluttonously, pretending to listen to the girls’ chat but hoping that enough alcohol would deaden his sexual nerves.
“Well, I better get going now,” Carol said. “Thanks for everything, Jake. It was great hanging out with you.”
Flood took a last useless look at the perfect breasts suspended in the big fishnet cups. “Likewise.”
Therese gave his thigh another squeeze. “Where are you staying, Jake?”
“The Rosamilia Hotel, just up the beach.”
Her breasts jiggled flawlessly when she stood up. “Cool. That’s where I’m staying too.”
“Maybe we’ll run into you before you leave,” Carol offered.
Flood was done talking, done thinking, and very much done with seeing what he couldn’t have. “That’d be great,” he said for formality. “You girls have a great day.”
“‘Bye.”
“‘Bye!”
Two more pecks on the cheek (and a final insufferable crotch-rub from Therese), and they were off. It was relief from the humiliation that overwhelmed Flood when they left. Their shadows lengthened to sultry jet-black threads as they departed back to the sand.
His head droned with an arid silence, noise that wasn’t noise. The sound of his soul? Because that’s what his soul felt like just then. Arid, sterile. A husk.
It occurred to him that if he died at that very moment…he wouldn’t have cared in the least.
His hangover dragged through the dinner hour and on into the night. He didn’t bother checking in with Farris and Nathans to see how the day’s business went; he didn’t care. He lay naked and dried out on the hotel bed, head thumping, sparks of pain behind his eyes, throbbing along with the images of those two impeccable women: the abundant flesh of Carol’s breasts blaring through the fishnets, the sparse mist of downy red hair covering Therese’s mound. The coltish legs and flat abdomens. Each image twinged in his head with his heartbeat, and each heartbeat made him feel more hopeless. He thought of calling Dr. Untermann and telling her he felt like maybe committing suicide but didn’t for two reasons.
One: She’d think I was even more pathetic than I really am.
And, two: I don’t have the balls.
The sun had set brilliantly—a fireball that looked nuclear—and soon full dark bled into the room. Flood stared at the ceiling, not listening to the baseball game that shot scatters of wavering light on one wall. He wished he could fall asleep, erase the humiliating day, and begin a new man in the morning.
But he wouldn’t be a new man, would he?
He’d be the same impotent, royally-fucked-up-in-the-head man he was today and had been for the last three years.
As his senses began to drift, he heard voices…
“It ain’t bad really, we’re doing better than the rest. We got fifteen girls and only a handful went bad. I’m sure Jinny won’t fuck us over again. I think the skinny bitch learned her lesson.”
Flood sat up in bed, glanced to his window. It was Oscar’s voice, the big bad bald guy. I left the window open, Flood realized. The curtains billowed at a breeze. And the maids hadn’t come in because he’d left out the do-not-disturb sign.
Flood sprang out of bed, seized, but not exactly knowing why. Just as he arrived to the window’s edge, Leon’s voice was floating up.
“I know. You’re one terrifying motherfucker, Osc. Jinny’ll have nightmares about you.” A laugh.
“Bitch sucked my balls the whole time I was driving her home, then begged me to fuck her in the ass back at her joint.”
A darker resolve shifted into Leon’s next words. “But the other two are liabilities.”
The other two? Flood recited.
“I had dinner with Therese tonight. Cunt lied to my face all through her steak. Got no idea Stoolie’s ratting on Phipps’ stable.”
“You’re shitting me?”
“Nope.”
A pause drifted in with the warm breeze. Oscar said, “Lemme kill her. I’ve always hated the bitch.”
Flood’s heart stilled. He felt frozen, half his face peering out his window down into the window of Room 415. He could see the salmon-pink drapes fluttering, and in their gap, the brightly lit room. Oscar sat on the bed drinking a Heineken; Flood could see his knees and back of his large, shaven head. Leon sat in the chair along the wall, legs crossed.
“I don’t want her iced, but I want her uglied up bad for when we boot her lying ass back to Phipps.”
The back of Oscar’s bald head nodded.
“It’s that other lying cunt I want iced,” Leon added.
“Good. It’d be a pleasure.”
Now Flood’s heart surged, a lump of muscle that felt on the verge of bursting. The other one? No! he thought. Not Carol!
Who was the other one?
“I’m not sure where she is tonight,” Leon continued. “I already talked to Nick. He’s going to keep an eye out for her.”
“Nick? Oh, yeah, the new security guy downstairs.”
“I’m paying him well. He’ll give me a call on my cell if he sees her.”