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But just like anything else addictive, it’s hard to go cold turkey.

* * *

I slept, I dreamed. Warm, pulling threads of sexual abandonment, hooking deep and cracking me apart. Sticky heat on my thighs. A mouth on either breast, wet and insistent, sucking hard on nipples gone tender as rudimentary clitori. Fragrance rising like incense smoke. A mouth between my legs, lips on lips, latched into me like a leech. Digging for buried treasure.

I woke up on the blind edge of climax, riding somebody’s face, my feet already starting to cramp. My hands in their hair, on their working jaw. That big, familiar head, slick from chin to moustache with dark, sweet menstrual mess.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear his tongue out by the roots.

I wanted to come, so bad I wanted to vomit.

Aroused and revolted in the extreme, I snarled, breathless:

“Loren Gault, get the fuck away from me!”

I kicked, pushed, slapped. He wouldn’t let go. Moaning curdled nonsense syllables. I felt them vibrate up inside me. I slugged him across the face, hard—and he snapped at me, little son of a bitch, with those sharp red teeth. Panting, hands spanning my hips, bruising me. Sweating blood. Holding me down—‘til I kneed him in the nose, scrabbled back, and fell ass-first against the floor, already twisting up onto my feet.

From whence I fled to the john and slammed the door behind me, barely making the sink in time.

Jos always used to keep his second-best gun wrapped in a plastic bag, taped up under the toilet-tank lid. After he got arrested, I took it with me, and did the same; in such matters, I never saw much point in not following Jos’ example.

Out in the room, I heard the TV snap back on.

I caught my breath, spat bile. Rinsed out my mouth.

Stepped back out of the bathroom, carefully—gun trained, at a classic gangsta angle, on that sheeted blur slumped in front of The 700 Club.

“You ever do that again,” I said. “Ever. And I swear to Christ I’ll kill you in your fucking sleep.”

Rennie, lost in the redemptive power of the cathode image. Not turning. Even to ask:

“Do what?”

And him still licking his pussy moustache for the very last of my blood.

I nodded, slightly.

“Fuck you, Rennie,” I said. And shot out the screen.

* * *

Dressing on the fly, jacket and jeans, barely time for underwear—just a wadded-up pair of panties in the crotch of my jeans, to staunch the flow. I got my boots on, toed up one of the floorboards and grabbed the last dead junkie’s roll from our designated “escape stash,” with Rennie all the while keeping step, gesturing and pleading—at a safe distance, after I’d showed him the gun again.

“Ro, hold up, calm down. I mean, Jeez, Ro—seriously, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. How could I, man? I was asleep.”

“Yeah, you were asleep, you were dreamin’. You didn’t know what you were doing, right? Fuck you, Rennie, I’ve had enough of your crap.”

“Fuck me? Fuck you, man. I was asleep. I mean, I’m sorry for whatever you think I did—”

I snorted, zipping up. “Yeah, you sound it.”

“—but whatever it was, I did not do it on purpose. I’m sick. You know that.”

“You’re sick, all right.”

That stopped him right in his tracks, amazed. Staring at me with those I just can’t believe what I’m hearing eyes—all insulted and kind of hurt, like I’d accused him of cheating on the big test, or something. Mr. Teen Angst Dracula himself.

If I stayed there a minute longer, I’d end up as nutsoid as he was.