Page 11

11

Psycho in the Shower

Jake

I miscalculated.

I slide out from under her, shut off the water, and get to my feet, dripping. She lies there, boneless on the tiles of the shower floor, hair wild, makeup a mess, laughing. I’ve never seen her laugh. I don’t know what makes her seem more exposed—all that bare skin, or the laugh.

“Do you always carry pepper spray?” I ask, drying my glasses on one of Grant’s heavy, luxurious towels.

“Any woman who doesn’t is an idiot,” she says, coughing and grinding her eyes with the heel of her hand.

“You thought I was going to fillet you.” I have no reasonable grounds to feel defensive.

“You scared the shit out of me.”

“You told me to bring the knife.”

Dolores ignores this. She hooks her thumb at tonight’s project. “Are you going to introduce us?”

“This is Verity.”

She loses it over the name. I knew she would. She crawls over to Verity and does what any normal person would do: she pokes one giant, gravity-defying silicone breast.

She looks up at me with a feral grin. None of our conversation before was a joke. Serial killer stuff, or dismembering Barbies in your footie pajamas?

“Why the fuck is there a hyperrealistic sex doll in your shower?”

I don’t know about hyperrealistic. She doesn’t look like any real woman I ever saw. Impossibly thick blond hair, dense caterpillar eyelashes, bee-stung lips, nipples that could poke an eye out. She sits firmly in the uncanny valley. She’d pass a first and second glance, maybe. But on the third glance, she’s off enough to make you do a double take, and real enough to give you nightmares when you do.

“This is Grant’s shower. It’s Grant’s doll.”

She bites her lip. “Right.”

“It is.” I experience a jolt of panic. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d think it was my doll. “It’s Grant’s doll,” I repeat.

“Oh, I believe you. It’s definitely your absent roommate’s doll.”

“It isn’t mine.”

She cocks one eyebrow. I throw the heavy towel on her and she cackles.

“Why does he want you to get rid of it? Is his parole officer coming to visit or something?”

“He cycles through them. When he gets bored, he needs a new one.”

“When the sex gets stale?”

I wouldn’t so much as touch one of these dolls if he was having sex with them.

“It’s not like that. He thinks sex is disgusting. It’s…a romantic thing.”

Her sharp little fangs show in another smile. “Aren’t these things ridiculously expensive? I find rich people fascinating. I also find perverts fascinating. There is a ripe nexus of interests here.” She sits back on her heels and narrows her eyes at me. “You said you took the last one to the river.”

The day I met Dolores in the elevator. It was a beautiful night. I even took a selfie of the two of us with a view of the river behind us. She saw it on my desktop. “That was Una.”

“Were there others?”

“The first one—Anastasia…” I hesitate for a second. “I put her in the building’s dumpster wrapped in garbage bags.” I’ve never stopped feeling uncomfortable about Anastasia.

She’s grinning at me now like I’ve delivered the filthiest joke she’s ever heard. That look makes me continue.

“I bundle them out of here in a rug or a blanket. Then I…dispose of them.” I get quite creative these days. I’ve come a long way from dumpsters.

“Boredom’s a chronic problem,” she says. “Would you get in trouble if someone traced one of them back to you?”

“For what? Littering?”

Her lips quirk. She staggers to her feet and I reach out to steady her, but she gazes at my hand with a confused expression. I look down and my hands are white—completely white—and cold as ice again. It’s a recent development, and one I don’t want to think about right now. I fold my arms and tuck them from view. She gives me a curious look but doesn’t ask. She pulls the towel tight around her and marches through Patrick Bateman’s bedroom, stepping over her dress pooled on the floor.

“Where are you going?” I call after her. “Wait. Wait. ” I trail down the hallway after her, while she sticks her nose into Grant’s office, his home gym, his sauna, and finally—

“Here it is,” she says triumphantly. “Your lair.”

It’s smaller than the other bedroom, and it might as well be the inside of a fridge. White walls, surfaces bare and scrupulously dust-free. Not even a sock on the floor or a nickel on the dresser top. I like it like this. I don’t like having possessions. If I had possessions, I’d worry about someone rifling through them when I was gone.

She takes it all in. “Did you get your last major depressive episode to do the interior decorating for you? Can I get a business card?”

I’ve never been depressed. I lurk in the open doorway like a great awkward shadow and watch as she pulls open the drawer of the nightstand next to my bed. Inside the drawer are two earplugs and nothing else. What did she hope to find? Next, she inspects the contents of the top drawer of my dresser: a dozen identical socks, paired and folded. She swings open my closet door next: five identical white button-ups on one side and five pairs of gray slacks on the other. There’s nothing else.

Well, except the bathrobe. She drops her towel on the floor and turns to face me, and for the second time tonight ten years of Catholic schooling resurfaces from the deep. I freeze. The devil sighs in disgust, and Dolores lifts one eyebrow at me, unimpressed. She slides on my bathrobe.

I cough. “We have a job to do,” I remind her.

But she’s not listening. She’s finally sniffed out my secrets. She crouches at the foot of my bed, and I’m across the room in an instant—

“What’s in it?” she asks when her fingers touch the cardboard banker’s box.

“Let go.”

I yank the box away, but she leaps to her feet and hooks her fingers into the handle hole nearest her and pulls. We’re toe-to-toe, the box between us.

“It’s your sewing project,” she says. “Do you still need some skin for your skin suit? Is that why I’m here?”

She tugs, and the bathrobe slips down one shoulder to expose her tattoos. I tear my eyes away. “I don’t wear bright colors or bold patterns.”

She bites her lip. “It’s a stack of photos with the eyes cut out.”

I look in her eyes, so dark they could be holes cut out of her face.

“No…” she says thoughtfully. “It’s your cannibal recipe cards.”

Now I’m looking at her mouth. She worries her lower lip with her teeth again, like she’s trying not to smile. I know what those teeth feel like on my own lower lip.

“I know,” she purrs. “They’re trophies from your sex doll kills.”

We’ve been pulling the box in opposite directions, and now she suddenly shoves it toward me. I topple backward onto the bed, the box lid spilling off, the contents scattering. I close my eyes.

“Paper,” she sighs. “How disappointing.”

I reach out and swipe up the papers. Important documents, a few letters I’ve read a hundred times—dull things. Less interesting than a pickled human head, but they’re my boring secrets.

I start to scramble off the bed, but then she kneels on the coverlet next to me, one bare knee slipping through the front of the bathrobe, and I…well. I stay put. She plucks up a handwritten letter at random. Does she see Jacob signed at the bottom? A date from thirty years ago at the top? No. She glances at it without reading it and tosses it back in the box. Her eyes connect with mine, and there’s an electric pulse in my stomach.

Dolores dela Cruz is in my bed.

Her hair is still wet, her makeup wrecked, and my bathrobe swallows her up and makes her dimensions and angles mysterious. A shoulder peeks out, a knee, two hands. She leans in until I feel her breath on my cheek. I close my eyes.

“We’ve let ourselves get derailed. Where did we leave off, before the pepper spray?”

She tugs on my tie, but I don’t think that’s the reason I can’t breathe.

“I think we were about to do something awful together in the shower,” she breathes into my ear. “Do you still want to do that?”

There’s a moth tattooed on her bare shoulder. A stud earring smolders dimly in her ear. Her perfume still clings to her—I notice all of these things. I notice everything about her. And I notice she loves this—me noticing her. Me… wanting her. I do want her.

She wants to toy with me, like a cat. I have to be cleverer and more interesting than the other mice.

“Maybe,” I say. I turn my head so my lips are by her ear. “I just have one question for you.” She turns her head to look at me.

“Saw or knife?”

Her lips twist into a beastly little smile.