An unpainted plywood box held a mattress a foot off the floor. The sheets were not visibly soiled, and the stack of towels beside the bed were neatly folded, and apparently clean.
The fuck truck.
“You don’t have to go through with this,” Peter Fuhrmann said.
“But I want to.”
“Really?”
Did she? Well, it was a pretty sordid space for a romantic encounter. And Peter, dressed in his orange jumpsuit and wearing his hangdog expression, didn’t exactly set her pulse racing. But she was here, wasn’t she? And he was one of only three names left on her list, and, well—
“Right off the bat,” she said, “I can think of one thing that’s definitely worse than having sex here.”
“And what would that be?”
“Being here,” she said, “and not having sex.”
That at least got a smile from him. “It’s no place for state dinners,” he said. “I’ll grant you that.”
“Or intimate conversations.”
“Or curling up with a good book.”
“Or even a bad one. Peter? Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“When was the last time you were—”
“With someone?” He avoided her eyes. “I haven’t been with anyone since...”
He couldn’t say the name, so she said it for him. “Since Maureen.”
“Yes.”
“You never—”
“No.” He was silent for a moment. “I couldn’t even think about it. It’s as if that part of my life ended when—”
“When she died.”
“Yes.”
“And in prison—”
“People find outlets,” he said. “Men hook up with each other. That’s of no interest to me. And there are screws who can smuggle a woman in for the right price. Screws, that’s what they call the guards. What we call the guards, I should say.”
“But that’s of no interest to you either, is it?”
“No. I don’t even—”
“Don’t what?”
“Masturbate.”
“That’s what I thought you were going to say. You don’t?”
“No.”
“And when the urge comes—”
“It doesn’t.”
“Oh.”
“Audrey, the last time I had sex with a woman, she died.”
“It wasn’t the sex that killed her.”
“No, it was the drug I gave her.”
No, sweetie, it was the poison I gave her.
“And here’s something I don’t think I’ve ever said to another human being. See, there’s no way to know exactly when she died. Was she already dead while I was—”
“Still fucking her.”
He winced at the word, then nodded. “I’ll never be able to know, and I don’t even want to know, but I can’t get the notion out of my mind. And I can’t bear to think about it.”
Actually, she thought, the whole idea was pretty hot. But that wasn’t something she was prepared to share with Peter.
Instead she asked him why he’d agreed to visit the trailer with her.
“Because I didn’t know how to say no,” he said. “Isn’t that a hell of a reason? And I thought maybe, oh—”
“Maybe you’d wind up wanting to.”
“I guess.”
“But you don’t.”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t—”
“Be able to do anything? Is that why you gave girls Roofies? A sort of Viagra by proxy? The girl takes it and you get a hardon?”
“It may have been something like that.”
“Then let’s try a little role play, Peter. I’ll take off all my clothes and just lie there. You can pretend I’m in a coma. Or, hey, this is even better — you can pretend I’m dead.”
He stared at her.
“What’s the matter, you don’t think that’s funny? All right, let’s turn it around. You be the one in the coma.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Take off your clothes,” she said, in a tone that clearly expected obedience. “Now lie down. On your back, Peter. Eyes closed. You don’t get to see me, Peter. And you can’t move. You’re paralyzed, you’re unconscious, you’ve barely got a pulse. All you can do is lie there and breathe.”
She got out of her own clothes, sat on the edge of the bed, reached out a hand and took hold of him.
“No, don’t move. And don’t open your eyes.” Her grip tightened. “I’m not kidding. All you do is lie there, or I swear I’ll rip it off.”
She didn’t know what he was doing with his mind, how he was letting it play. She didn’t care. Her own fantasy was demanding all of her attention.
And it kept changing, insistent upon reinventing itself. At first it was pretty close to the reality of the situation: He was lying there, entirely in her power, unable to move because she had forbidden him to move, unable to see because her words were as blinding as a strip of duct tape over his eyes.
And then it changed, and in her mind he was physically immobilized, spreadeagled on the bed with his hands and feet in restraints, his mouth taped shut, a blindfold in place.
And in the third phase he was drugged. Unconscious, comatose, unable even to feel what she was doing with her hands and mouth.
And then — bingo! — he was dead, and that was the best of all. Oh, she’d been with plenty of dead men, but her interest in them had always ended with the sweet delight of their dying. Once they were dead, once she’d absorbed the sense of accomplishment and completion their deaths afforded her, she was ready to move on. They were off the list, out of her life even as they were out of their own, and the last thing she wanted to do was stroke their bodies, or suck their cocks.
But this dead man was different. This corpse was warm, and sentient. And so she touched and stroked the dead flesh, and the dead penis rose up in her mouth like Lazarus, and, well, she really got into it.
There was this line from an old blues song, just a fragment of a line, something about a woman who was so hot she could make a dead man come. The words echoed in her mind, make a dead man come, make a dead man come, make a dead man come, and he was rock-hard now, and unable to lie entirely still, unable to keep from moaning, and God she felt strong, God she felt powerful, and yes! Yes!
And she did indeed make this dead man come, and his orgasm triggered one of her own, not her typical long rolling climax but something very brief but furiously intense, almost masculine in nature. There was a moment when she went away, disappeared somewhere in time and space. Just an instant, and then she was back in the Airstream fuck truck, and she realized with perfect clarity that she’d accomplished something extraordinary, something more remarkable than simply raising the dead. She’d had sex with this inert being, this man who was playing dead at her command, and by so doing she had made the fantasy a reality.
He was dead. She’d fucked him dead, she’d sucked not only the life force but the very life itself out of him, and now she could cross him off her list.
Two.
She’d have some explaining to do. But they’d searched her enough to know she’d brought nothing into the trailer but her own self and the clothes on her back, and if his heart wasn’t up to the stress of sexual activity, well, that was no fault of hers, was it? They’d let her go, they’d have to, and they’d never see her again.
“Audrey?”
Oh, fuck. The son of a bitch was alive.
Shit. Three.
Conjugal visits, it turned out, were limited in both duration and frequency. You couldn’t stay in the fuck truck for more than two hours — which struck her as reasonable, actually — and you couldn’t go there more than once a week. On reflection, she decided that was probably reasonable, too. If prisoners got to fuck their wives any time they felt like it, they wouldn’t have sufficient energy to plan future crimes, let alone organize a decent riot.