Page 6

Ray nodded. “Because I was looking for the right one.”

“And this is it?”

“In my opinion.”

She stared, snorted.

“Lyle won’t like it.”

“Fuck Lyle.”

A sigh: “Been there.”

The unsaid implication—goodbye to it, to this, the nightly grind. To Lyle’s meal-ticket. And, by extension, goodbye . . .

(to me?)

Me meaning her. As well as me meaning “me.”

Before, whenever Ray’s beaux got too pooped to preserve, the routine took over. Lyle got on the pager again, handing out more of Ray’s money; the bodies made their exit, stage wherever. Parts in a dump, an acid-soaked tub-ring, concrete at the bottom of a lake, with all trace of Ray’s touch, or Pat’s—or Lyle’s, for that matter, not that Lyle ever touches the Bone Machine’s prey—salved away in disposal.

Which should be enough, surely: Enough to wash this lingering wisp of me clean and let me rise. Sponge the fingerprints from my soul, and all that good, metaphorical stuff. But—

(but)

At first I just hovered above, horrified, longing for the angels to cover my see-through face with their equally see-through wings. So grotesquely helpless to do anything but watch, and wait, and watch some more. Wait some more. watch some more. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

But then, slowly . . . through sheer, profane will alone, one assumes, while my constant companions loomed ever closer in (literally) holier-than-thou disapproval . . .

Don’t look.

But I have to.

Move on.

But—I can’t.

(Not yet.)

. . . I found myself starting to be able to feel it once more, from the inside out. The ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a sensation. Ray’s mouth on “mine,” sucking at my cold tongue like a formaldehyde-flavored lollipop. “My” muscles on his, bunching like poisoned tapeworms.

Taking shaky repossession part by part; hacking back into my own former nervous system synapse by painful synapse, my shot neural net fizzing at cross-purposes like that eviscerated eight-track we used to have in the student lounge back at my old high school—the one you could only make change tapes by reaching inside and touching two stripped wires together, teeth gritted against the inevitable shock.

Pat sends her commands and I . . . resist, just a fraction of a micro-inch; she’s off put, suspects that her calibrations aren’t quite as exact as she’d thought. But even as she reworks them, Ray strains towards me and I . . . strain back. Rise to meet him, halfway. I know he sees what I’m doing, if only on a subconscious level. Her too.

Because: It’s like cheating, isn’t it? Always is, when love’s involved. And lovers always know.

“I want to do it,” he told her in the car, on the way home. “I want to be the one, this time.”

“The one to do what?”

“You know. Finish it.”

Pat narrowed her dark, dark eyes. “Finish it,” she repeated. “Like—get rid of it? Destroy it yourself?”

Rip it apart, tear it limb from limb, eat it (un)alive. If he couldn’t have it . . .

Dark eyes, with green sliding to meet them: Money-colored too, in a far more vivid way. Because it’s not that Ray’s unattractive, that he couldn’t possibly indulge himself any other way. In fact, if you look at it too closely—closer than he probably wants you to, or wants to himself—you’d have to conclude that the indulgence is doing things the way he’s chosen to.