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She learned nothing more, and tried to forget what she knew, until the night she'd feared and hoped for finally came.
She held down the counter at half past two, head propped up on her sweaty hands, glassy eyes turned inward as she sat watch on the empty store, when he came in.
She told herself at first it was just her eyes playing tricks like before, because none of the men she'd thought were him bore any real resemblance to him, except in the way they walked like a losing boxer leaving the ring. When she saw him come in the door, she believed it was only a fantasy, a waking night terror.
But it was Wade.
He looked to be at the ragged end of the bender that had driven her away almost a month ago. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin oily and oozing alcohol dregs and less healthy stuff. His fists flexed at his sides as he stood there in the doorway. Violet opened her mouth to call for Zoe or Crayonne, but her teeth clamped on and bit through the tip of her tongue.
She leaped off her stool. One leg pulled her toward the back office while the other simply buckled. She caught herself against the frame, rattling the beaded curtain screening the office.
Wade just stood there, looking. She knew what he expected. She'd been collected before, and though her terror was never greater, neither had she ever missed him so much. She hated herself for it, but what else, who else, did she have?
“Wade,” she managed, “how did you find me?” She made herself look up and meet his gaze, recoiled as if slapped when his eyes roved over her. He didn't recognize her at all. Or if he did, the rage he burned her with where other men felt love had guttered and gone out. The walls he'd built to keep her out were smashed and smoking ruins, and deep down inside where he'd let her in, there was no hurt little boy, no bestial transfigured prince, only a howling vacuum.
Looking into him was like putting her ear to a big conch shell, the rumbling silence of a ghost-ocean where his shouts of love and hate came from echoes without a source. He knew her, but he was past hitting, past begging, far past any words or feelings. He looked like a man bound and determined to drown.
He fed the change machine, then turned and went through the saloon doors into the maze of booths.
“Wade,” she cried out, “don't.”
A hand reached through the beaded curtains and clutched her shoulder. Surprisingly strong, it tugged her off balance as she tried to rip free and go after him. “Don't, honey. He's not here for you.”
She got away and ran for the booths. She hit the saloon doors so hard one of them broke off its hinges and flapped in her wake. She hit the locked door of #9 even harder, screaming, “Wade, come out, baby, I'm sorry, it's my fault, come out of there, they're gonna kill youâ”
From inside, she heard a choked sob.
She turned to Lupe, inscrutable on her stool in the closet. “Open it,” Violet shouted in her face, taking hold of the cleaning woman's smock and shaking her like a doll. “Open it, or so help me, if he's not okay, I'll fuckingâ”
“So you forgive him then?” Zoe's reasonable voice pricked her panic and instantly flattened it. The manager stood behind her, massaging Violet's white-knuckled claws off Lupe and pulling her back down the corridor. “His life is not in your hands, honey.”
Violet trembled so hard her words wouldn't come out in a string. When she could shape them, she let them pour out. Even now, she couldn't be of one mind about it. She knew nothing about what went on in #9, but she knew what it meant.
All the men who came in here were of a type, Wade's type, the kind who hit women, and none of them came out.
How many times had she wished him dead? How many times had she seen his type defiantly roaring at a talk-show audience mob and wished for all of them to burn and hang and be blown straight to a special Hell run by battered women? This too Zoe must have known when she hired Violet. She knew everything. She must have known that, sick as it was, her love for Wade was still strong. “You set him up, you bitch!”
“I told him nothing, honey. He came here, but not for you. Sooner or later, when there's nowhere else to go, that type of man always finds his way here. It's just a sort of coincidence, or maybe the Goddess brought you here to see.”
“You kill them! What gives you the right? You're not the one to judge himâ”
“No, none of us can judge, any more than we can change them. You still think you can change him, don't you, honey? Well, come into my office, and I'll show youâ”
Numb, she let herself be led. Crayonne had locked the front door and stood outside, pointedly watching the street. They went through the curtains and into Zoe's cluttered office. Zoe crossed the room and took down a row of binders on a shelf above her desk.
There, on the stained formica-paneled wall, was a single fisheye peephole. Zoe beckoned her closer, bade her put her eye to the hole. “There's security cameras in every booth, but they don't capture what really goes on inside. You have to see it with your own eyes. Go ahead and look, honey ...”
Violet pushed back, but again Zoe's soothing hands squeezed the resistance right out of her limbs. “You want me to watch him getâ”
“It's what he wants, Vi. It's all he wants now, and it's all he ever wanted and couldn't have, so he hit you and every other woman who tried to give it to him and couldn't. Watch ...”
She put her eye to the hole. She saw only black but heard rustling and the familiar cadence of Wade's halfsnoring, drunken breathing. Clicking, and the booth leapt into sharp silver-blue light as he fed the slot. A fine blur of wire mesh before her eyes told her she was looking through the ventilation gills behind and above Wade's head.
She cursed that she couldn't see his face or the screen, but the set of his shoulders, the galvanic twitches that wracked his neck, told her all she needed to know. He had gone past the point where he broke and begged forgiveness, and she had not been there. What was going on inside him now, she couldn't begin to guess.
She wanted more than ever to go to him and pull him out, but the screen blinked and syrupy electronic music snapped on, and she was pinned to the spot.
“Go back to your bitch, then, asshole! Go beat her up and eat her fucking food!” The voice on the soundtrack was her own. She was so angry and hurt and wired that last night, she knew there probably never was a bitch; he barely had the strength to beat
her
upâ
She listened to the sounds and remembered how Wade cornered her against the sink and yanked her baggy sweatpants down around her knees, bent her over. His cock, knobby and brittle like driftwood, knifed into her to the root, though she was dry as Egypt down there. She screamed into the dirty dishes, and flies swarmed up out of the swampy scum. She screamed and whooped with no pleasure, but something deeper, the painful thrill of being needed, made it all right.
When he came, he shivered and let out a strangled growl and zipped up, disgusted with her again. He went all cold and sneered, shifting gears, changing games so fast she was speechless, frozenly pulling up her soiled pants.
“Yeah, I got another bitch.” She mouthed his words as they came out of the tinny speaker. “She's hotter than you, she's cleaner, and her insides aren't all fucked up, either. She can have babies, Vi, and she's gonna have mine.”
If she could find a knife in the mess, she'd stab him. Her arms whipped out at him, and nobody was more surprised than she was when they slapped and scratched his face. “You want to make babies, Wade? You want to make a baby with her? You can't be a fucking father, you're not even a fucking man, youâ”
And Wade said “That'll be enough of that” and threw her right out the door like garbage. Into the garbage, in fact, which had piled up outside their door for two weeks, his seed leaking out down her leg, dying inside her, circling her scarred, scraped womb like kamikaze pilots with shitty directions until the acidity of her burned the last one up.
Violet blinked away tears, watching Wade's silhouette pumping at his cock. God help him, he was hard and whacking off at the impossible replay of his cruelty, but he was sobbing too.
“Oh, Vi, baby,” he choked, “I'm so sorryâ”
His hand froze on his dick and jerked away as if it shocked him. “What the fuck ...” he grumbled as he stared at a new scene.
The music regressed, sax flatulence, junkie-funk guitar, and canned moans seeping through the wall.
“What did you see?” a woman rasped, lighting a cigarette.
“Nothing, Mama,” a boy mumbled, and Wade's broken whisper echoed him. Popcorn popped on a stove.
“He wants to watch TV, so you make yourself scarce.”
“But Mama, it's Monday Night Football nightâ”
She cuffed him across the right ear with her silver Zippo lighter clenched in her fist. He yelped and ducked away. The Jiffy Pop's pregnancy came to term, swelling foil belly splitting open to ooze steam. He rolled away from her kicking legs and ducked for the door.
“What the fuck, Ruth?” A man's bleary voice.
“You want to be his daddy? You want the duty? No? Then shut the fuck up!”
The ghostly cathode light went murky as the screen before Wade became a mirror. The music changed too, subsiding into a deep bed of whispers and moans, soft, edgeless cries as of a dozen girl-girl scenes playing at once.
Wade leaned forward to feed the slot more quarters, cursing his reflection in subsonic hisses, when Violet spooked and jumped back from the peephole.
In the screen, she thought she'd seen herself through the wall, as if the camera in the booth had X-ray vision. But when she went back to the hole, her heart pounded as she saw that Wade wasn't alone in the booth, and what was in there with him looked nothing like her at all.
Zoe grasped her shoulders, held her up to the hole. “This has to happen, sweetie,” she murmured in Violet's ear. “He wants it, he needs itâand so do you.”
She looked again, daring it to be real, but it was still there, more
there
than ever. On the screen, someone rose up behind Wade, but she knew this was a trick, because nothing blocked her view. Wade stared into the screen, transfixed.
All she could tell was that it was a woman. She stood taller than Wade so that the screen cut off her head, but her alabaster body was so enormous as to defy the physics of the booth. Absurdly voluptuous breasts dwarfed Wade's head, while her belly smashed and overflowed around his skinny, shuddering form. Her elephantine hips rutted against the walls and blocked the door. Her arms floated up and stretched out to the screen, shockingly dainty little hands reaching up to the thin film of glass that separated her from the flesh-and-blood Wade, all but claiming his stupefied TV ghost.
“Please, Mama,” he wheezed, “please take meâ”
On the screen, Wade closed his eyes and went limp as the arms closed over him.
In the booth, something rose up between Wade and the screen. It bloomed and swelled and enveloped him, the glow of the screen shimmering through its molten form as it filled out and became a liquid replica of the headless woman on the screen.
As it grew, she saw rancid white slime oozing out of the seams in the booth's walls from all sides, all the spilt seed of a million meat-beatings conjuring itself out of the cracks and congealing in #9 to form the Magna Mater.
Violet bit back a scream.
The liquid thing took Wade in its arms and cradled his head. His sobs broke into seizures he smothered between her mammoth breasts. She guided a dripping nipple to his mouth, and he locked on to it for all he was worth, sucking convulsively like a newborn.
The milk soothed him, and he subsided in her arms, anguished cries subsiding, deflated into a fetal ball. His limbs sagged bonelessly as his belly filled.
Violet groaned and tried not to vomit. The thing grew still larger and rolled over Wade, oblivious, delirious, at the teat. His clothes peeled back, shredded, melted away. The thing rolled up onto the bench and settled down around him, his rigid cock swallowed by slithering mouths of fluid flesh.
He moaned loudly around the monster teat, but the thing flowed through his fingers and rearranged itself so breasts and belly lolled backward, and he sat facing the oleaginous grotto of a sopping, cavernous vagina.
Wade uttered an infant's piercing whine and leaned back from the maw. Her cyclopean thighs clenched him and drew him closer by a hideous peristalsis, like food going down an esophagus into a bottomless stomach. Finally, Wade gave in and put his face into the gaping, flowery mouth.
Violet's revulsion spilled out over her lips, and she threw up on the box of domination supplies between her feet. Through her tears, through hot flashes of oncoming faint, she could not stop looking.
As the thing lowered itself onto him, Wade leaned face first into her, and she parted, unhinged, like the mouth of a python to kiss, then devour him. The labia closed over his whole head, then flexed and strained to gobble up his shoulders, chest, and abdomen.