The medical emergency?
I could have a heart attack here. That’s the medical emergency.
Yeah, I still had a hard-on, and we’re talking painful here. Very painful. If I could have, I would have bent over and taken my dick into my own month just to help things out. But I’m not that flexible.
Well, it was down, but I have to tell you, I’m hard again just talking to you about this.
What’d we do? Well, we always keep a cell phone in this room, so after I managed to get my hard-on down a bit – and let me tell you, with an image like that in the room, that was damn near impossible, I shifted my chair over across the floor, bit by bit, and opened the cell phone with my mouth, and dialled info with my nose, and asked for you guys.
Yeah, that’s right, I dialled you with my nose. But let me tell you, that’s a lot less frustrating than being this damn close to a woman tied up like this and not be able to do anything.
OK, so what, medically, should we do at this point?
Yes, medically.
Well, yes, I do intend to treat my wife to a nice long relaxing hour in a real bed very soon, but what I meant was, do you have any ideas about how I can get out of these handcuffs, so I can get up from this chair, lower her a bit, and totally, completely fuck her to make up for the way she’s been torturing me for the last two hours?
What do you mean, you’ve gotta go to the bath -
Crap.
Honey, I’m sorry, but it looks like you’re going to have to hold on for just a few more minutes.
Well, if you think telling the nurse took a while, wait ‘til I try explaining this to 911…
The Blood Virgin by Anne Tourney
For Joseph Nunez
The first time you kissed me, your lips tasted of my blood. That slippery cunt-sugar kiss wasn’t what I wanted. For years I dreamed of a rough stranger who would break down the doors of my father’s castle, pushing me into the shadows while whispering obscenities into my ear. I dreamed of having him deep inside me, pounding at the bloodstone of my isolation. The last thing I wanted was a lover like you, with your dainty forked tongue, and your nipples like little red bullets.
The first time you came to my father’s house, I wondered why you wanted to talk to me at all. My father is the one who knows about murder. He’s the world-famous poet of abnormal psychology, expert on deviance, violence, and the clotted glue of desire that binds them together. My father would have gladly written an account of your story: the story of his own brutal death.
She didn’t bother to knock. Like a draft from the frozen lake that separates my father’s property from the outside world, she slid into our house, slipping through oak and steel to get to me.
“Someone’s breaking into the castle,” my father warned me. “It’s a woman. She smells of Easter lilies, with a tang of cunt.” He paused, inhaling deeply. “I’ve always loved the scent of lilies.”
My father spoke to me through a transmitter in my left ear. The device had been carved out of a shard of his skull. Years ago he had lost a piece of his cranium after being attacked by a guest in our castle. He had turned the fragment into the perfect telecommunication device, an instrument that fit snugly against my eardrum. That spectral circuitry made us closer than lovers.
I sat at my desk in the library and waited. Spike heels clicked on the stone floor. Maybe this intruder was one of my father’s obsessive female fans, I thought, or a witness to one of the slaughters he wrote about.
Before she entered the library, I could smell her – floral, feral. Then she stepped into the room. She was a black blade of a woman, slut and schoolgirl in the same glossy package. Black hair fell to her shoulders, framing her face in sharp parentheses. Her mouth was painted the colour of dried blood. The pouting lips glistened and quivered, true labia blossoming in the centre of her porcelain face. She wore a black silk jacket and pleated skirt. Against all that darkness, her pale skin hit the eyes like a slap.
I asked her what she wanted.
“I want you to interview me.”
“I don’t do interviews – my father does. Let me call him for you.”
“But I don’t want your father. I want you.” A strange tension seized her face, a flicker almost like panic.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “My father is a criminal psychologist. He’s the one who interviews criminals. I’m just his secretary.”
And his research assistant, archivist, and ghost-writer. His hothouse lily and captive slave, I might have added, but I wasn’t going to share my bitterness with a stranger.
“Your father wouldn’t understand my crimes. You would.
With those words she touched the hidden bruise in me. She set her fingertip on my core of rage, and pressed and pressed, until that ache turned into a roaring pain.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I don’t commit the kind of crimes that built this house.”
She let her eyes wander along the yards of books that lined my father’s library. She was right. Every brick, every exotic carpet fibre, every gleaming inch of marble in our mansion had been bought with the profits of someone’s crime. The murderers came to my father, longing to be heard. He recorded their confessions; I transcribed them faithfully and shaped them into the manuscripts that had made my father famous.
“What crimes have you committed?”
“You’ll find out if you interview me.”
“Are you a murderer?”
She sucked her forefinger in mock contemplation. Then she trailed the glistening fingertip down the neckline of her jacket as she stared at me with her sloe eyes. Something squirmed in the depths of that gaze, something fearful, struggling to achieve form.
“Maybe,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Really, my father -”
“No! You!”
She grabbed my wrist. “Please. I just escaped from prison. As soon as they catch me, I’ll be sent back. Then no one will hear my story.”
“How did you escape?”
“The guards couldn’t watch me 24 hours a day.”
“I don’t know why you came here. I can’t help you.”
Her lips shivered. “Don’t be angry. I need you.”
She held out her hand. I looked at that slim white wing for a few moments. Then I took it. Living in my father’s house, with him so distant in his locked chamber, I had forgotten the pleasure of touching another person’s skin. When the intruder’s cool hand clasped my fingers, a trap door banged open in my chest, and my heart plunged into a bottomless well of desire.
“Will you meet me tonight?” she asked.
“I can’t. My father doesn’t like to be left alone.”
Her grip tightened. “Please?”
Please…
Please!
I said yes.
She smiled. On the inside of a matchbook she wrote down the name of a club in the city. Neutral ground – no fathers allowed. Then she leaned over and kissed me.
I expected a light peck, but she clutched my shoulders and pressed her mouth so hard against mine that my skull ached. Our tongues danced. Hers held a secret: a stud of glass that bit into my flesh and drew blood. Sugar and rusted tin, the taste of cruel candy. Her nipples were nails boring into my chest. When I cried out, she pulled away, clamping her hand over my mouth.