Page 12

But I just couldn’t do one fucking normal thing. No, I fixated. I stalked. I took pictures of her when I thought she wasn’t looking. I wrote her stupid sappy poetry that I never delivered. I left her secret admirer roses even though she absolutely knew who her not-subtle admirer was.
I’d lost my father the summer before first grade. The first day in Mrs. Schroder’s class Maddie smiled at me and laughed and flipped that shampoo commercial blonde hair. And I was gone. It was the first time since my dad died that I hadn’t felt completely numb. It was the first ray of sunlight that re-entered my world and took everything from cold drab gray back into colors. It brought the sounds and smells of the world back.
So maybe—for a while at least—I could be excused for my fixation. Because she was the first thing that felt like salvation after hell came to visit.
Every year Maddie got more beautiful, her magnetic pull and my answering obsession frightened me, but I could do nothing but go along for the ride as some insane part of me I barely recognized as human planned relentlessly for the day that she would be mine.
And here we are… just three more months and I will possess her finally. It took everything inside me not to send her a valentine this year… another homemade one, one that she couldn’t reject. But I needed everything to be perfect. Besides, I’m trying to woo her like an adult. The last thing I need is to remind her of my first fumbling attempts back when I was just some dorky kid who couldn’t stop staring at her.
But I digress.
The Black Gardens isn’t officially a brothel. There isn’t a menu of sex acts we pay for. No one who frequents this place would be so gauche. This is where the real money moves. It’s a very exclusive and very secret gentleman’s club. We pay an annual membership fee to get in the door.
Once inside, everything is free. The women here can pick and choose who they are with for the evening or for however long the gentleman stays. Though this is just the official rule and formality to make things seem polite and honorable. The truth is if any of these women were to refuse the advances of the powerful members one too many times, she’d be asked to leave. She’d be given a nice severance package—they aren’t monsters, after all—but she’d be asked to leave all the same.
Everything is included in the membership fee. Rooms for overnight and extended stays, dining, golf, horseback riding, fishing, hunting, alcohol, cigars, sex, debauchery, live shows of various adult content. The only money you could spend in this place is on the poker games in the lounge. And plenty of the members spend ridiculous sums in that room.
Brandy is waiting for me when I enter the main house, she’s about to guide me to a private room, but I stop her. I’m not just here for her tonight, and I need to be able to keep an eye on the place.
I nod to a more open room—a more public space. In a normal house, it probably would have been a ballroom. But no balls are thrown here, only orgies.
“Naughty. And here I always thought you were shy.” She’s got a bit of a southern twang. Just enough to be charming and I’ve never questioned whether it’s all part of the character she plays here.
I grip the back of her neck and pull her in close to me so I can whisper in her ear. “I want everyone to see your pretty mouth wrapped around my cock tonight.”
When I pull back she’s flustered, her cheeks flushed a bright pink like she’s been out in the cold. I always thought the phrase “make a whore blush” was just a saying, but clearly it can be done.
I know how the women here whisper about me, how their eyes follow me as I move through their space. I’m well aware that I’m one of the most attractive men who frequents The Black Gardens. Most men with money don’t have the looks to match, especially as they get older. I know the social convention is that women become old hags while men age like wine. A few men age like wine, but most of them seem not to have any mirrors at home.
The other women are jealous of Brandy because they think she’s my favorite. They imagine that I have some sort of deeper attachment to her. They all want to be her, but they all have one fatal flaw that prevents that… they don’t look like the woman I don’t fully possess yet.
Brandy leads me through the enormous room to a leather sofa in a prominent place for the voyeurs among us to get a good view.
I nod my approval and sit and spread out, taking up as much space on the sofa as I can. I open my legs to give her space to kneel between them, and she goes to work on me. I run my fingers through her hair as she licks and sucks on my cock like it’s the best thing she’s ever put in her mouth. Now that I’ve felt the real thing—Maddie’s hair—I can no longer pretend that the blonde head bobbing up and down on my cock is her. No, the smell is wrong. The texture is wrong. No one’s hair is as soft as Madison’s.
Brandy makes a big show of moaning, and I groan as the vibration of her throat hits me just right.
I’ve never bothered to question how much of Brandy’s performance is an act—a show so her high-end paycheck keeps coming on schedule—or if she’s really this into me. Now that I’ve been so close again to Maddie, the substitute is less enticing, and I’m struck with the cold reality that tonight will be my last visit to The Black Gardens. I’d foolishly thought I’d have my bachelor party here, get Uncle Martin, a few of my associates, and try once more to do something vaguely normal, but I don’t think I can do it after touching the real thing, however briefly.
There he is. Julian Sterling. My eyes never leave him as Brandy finishes me off. She sits back on her heels and smiles up at me like a puppy who wants a pat on the head. Instead I pull out a sealed envelope from my front vest pocket, much like I did a few nights ago, only this time it’s not a wedding invitation being delivered.
“I need you to give this to that man over there. Don’t tell him who it’s from.”
She nods eagerly and takes the envelope from me. Brian would again say this is sloppy. You can’t trust people, he’d say, but Brandy is so eager for my approval and has such a crush that I know she’ll do whatever I say.
I watch as she crosses the room to him and hands him the envelope, and then I slip out the side door. I’m at the stables a few minutes before Sterling arrives. No one will be out here this late at night and definitely not while it’s still so cold out.
The Black Gardens has one of the deepest privately owned lakes in the state, a great and unassuming place for a body disposal. I hear Brian’s voice in the back of my head nagging, telling me that I can’t do this here. I should have picked a different location—a place I have no connection to. I should inject my prey with something to incapacitate him and then move him to an area where I’m in control of the entire environment. To which I reply in my mind, “Okay, Dexter.”
Great, I’m having an imaginary argument in my head. But imaginary Brian is right. This is risky. But there aren’t a lot of people at the club tonight, and they’re all pre-occupied with the ladies, which is generally what they’re all preoccupied with after ten pm, and there’s a live sex show about to start, so no one is going to be wandering out to the horse barn in the cold.
I need to kill this motherfucker, weigh down his body, get it in the lake at the deepest point… and then I have to worry about the car. But, if I can pull this off, when he inevitably is reported missing, there at least won’t be a record of him being here tonight. The Black Gardens doesn’t keep records of that sort of thing. Plausible deniability for clients who are cheating on their wives or carrying out illegal or barely legal deals. This place is a hot bed of cheating and crime. There are no cameras, no written records. Every employee here has signed an NDA so iron clad that if they were to breathe a word of anybody’s comings and goings, they would be destitute down to the seventh generation of their descendants. As long as I can dispose of all the physical evidence, it may as well be Peter Pan’s Pleasure Island. I’m not even entirely sure they’d talk to the authorities if they did find this guy’s body.
So maybe I did choose the right location for this after all.
Sterling doesn’t know it’s me he’s meeting. He thinks it’s another member of the club that owes him money from a poker game last week.
When he sees me, he visibly pales. He looks like he’s seen a ghost. I get this reaction a lot.