Sociopaths In Love (16 page)

She came back into the bedroom, on Walt's
side of the bed, and held her glistening fingers under his
light.

"This is what I mean," she said.

"I'm still not understanding."

"Your come in that girl's cunt."

He continued to watch TV. "You're right.
I've fucked quite a few of them. More and more of them lately. But
don't worry. I'll come back to you. It's different with them and
there's certainly a lot more variety in their appearance, but
there's something about the living that I couldn't completely do
without."

"But why would you lie about it?"

"You told me you didn't like for me to do
that. I tried arguing my point but you wouldn't listen."

"Do you understand why it would upset
me?"

He shrugged, continued to focus on the
TV.

"What's that mean? You do understand? You
don't understand?"

"I haven't tried to understand. We're
different people. You can't expect me to feel everything you're
feeling."

She sat down on the edge of the bed and
slumped her shoulders. She actually had no idea what she was
feeling. It wasn't hurt. It wasn't jealousy. It wasn't even really
anger. Maybe there was a trace of anger but it was more because she
had asked him not to do something and he had done it anyway. She
grabbed the remote and clicked off the TV. Because all of the
lights in the apartment were almost always on, it didn't really
make a difference in anything other than sound. It made it seem
incredibly quiet. Even the city sounds from outside didn't seem to
penetrate whatever wall Erica had built around them.

Walt grabbed the remote and turned the TV
back on.

She grabbed his arm. "Do you not
understand?" she said.

"What is there to understand? You're mad. I
understand that. What do you want me to do about it?"

"Be sorry or regretful or something, I
guess."

"Do you want me to feel that way because
that's how I'm supposed to react? This is what I don't understand
. . . Why do you want me to feel something I don't feel
for your benefit?"

"If you honestly don't feel any of those
things then . . . maybe we have a problem."

"We only have a problem if you want us to
have a problem."

She picked up the remote control and threw
it at the TV. Nothing too dramatic happened. The battery cover came
off the remote and the batteries went clattering onto the floor,
rolling under the TV stand. The TV was still on. She opened the
drawer to his nightstand and pulled out his gun. He didn't seem any
more alarmed than he was before.

"What? You're going to shoot me?"

"I should shoot your fucking dick off."

"Then I couldn't fuck you anymore."

"You're not fucking me now."

"Is that what this is about?"

For him to denigrate her argument to what
she felt was the lowest common denominator upset her further. Or
maybe it was just that what he said was true. She pulled the
trigger, not aiming at him, and a flurry of feathers puffed up from
her side of the bed. She tossed the gun beside him. The reason she
hadn't shot him was because she realized there might be a very
simple solution to her problem.

"I have to get out of here," she said.

He didn't say anything.

She went into the bathroom off the hallway
and changed into a pair of black skinny jeans and a loose black
sweater and covered herself in makeup. She grabbed the key fob,
took the elevator down, and went outside.

Girl's Night Out

She remembered passing the Epoch the first
time she had been out wandering around and thinking she should go
there and wasn't exactly sure why she had never gone. She
remembered a conversation she'd once had with one of her high
school boyfriends. He'd said that, when it came to sex, girls had
it easy. He said guys really had to work because they would have
sex with just about anything and girls knew this. He said a guy
could not go to a bar and pick up anything but the oldest, most
desperate woman if he wanted a one night stand with a stranger. Or,
best case scenario, the drunkest. The guy had to put in time. A
girl, he said, could walk into any bar alone and be picked up,
probably within a matter of minutes. And it probably wouldn't be by
some fat loser either. Good looking guys were predatory, he'd said,
whereas good looking women were usually high maintenance, unless
they had some psychological disorder or were just blackout
drunks.

Erica stepped into the bar, wondering if she
would be picked up in minutes. Being virtually unnoticeable, it
seemed unlikely. She certainly hadn't attempted to get away with
the amount of shit Walt had. And, despite trying to get him to
explain this to her, she still wasn't quite sure she got it. It
seemed more like an exercise in diversion than anything
supernatural. If she were not wearing nice clothes and a fuck ton
of makeup, she could slide under the radar easily. She got that.
But Walt was a good looking man, even though he'd begun putting on
a fair amount of weight, and she wasn't sure good looking guys made
it a point to wear nice clothes and makeup. Yet she'd seen him go
completely unnoticed while doing things that should have had every
cop on duty swarming him. She went in thinking she wanted to be
fucked. She didn't care what the guy looked like. Yes, she wanted
sex, she wanted a penis in her vagina or at least a mouth on her
vagina but, more than anything, she wanted to go home to Walt and
tell him she had let some strange guy fuck her and see how he
reacted to that. She was assuming it would be with anger but any
sort of response would have been better than the strange white hum
she thought perpetually rattled around his insides.

There weren't a lot of people in the bar.
Around ten. Only two of those were women and it looked like they
were there with boyfriends or as part of a group dominated by guys.
Erica was pretty sure this was going to be easy. She sat at the
bar. She lit a cigarette even though she didn't see anybody else
smoking. She had no idea if you were allowed to smoke in bars in
Ohio or not. It seemed ridiculous to not be able to. She didn't see
any ashtray or anything but wasn't too worried about it. She waited
for the bartender to come over and take her order. He didn't. Maybe
he was just busy. A group of three frat looking guys came in and he
immediately sidled over and asked what he could get them. She
tucked her cigarette between her lips, went behind the bar, grabbed
a glass and helped herself. She turned with her drink in hand to
lean against the bar and look at its patrons. She had no idea how
the art of seduction worked. She just told herself that if anyone
made eye contact with her, she wouldn't lower her gaze to the
floor. No one did. She drained her beer pretty quickly and swiveled
back around to put it on the bar. The bartender, spotting the empty
glass, said, "Another?" without even looking at her.

"Sure," she said. He went about filling
another glass.

So he noticed the empty glass but not
her.

She downed a couple more, smoking cigarette
after cigarette. She hadn't been this drunk since the night at the
Boys'. She went to the bathroom to piss. On her way back out she
ran into a thin guy not much taller than she was.

"Oops," she said.

He grabbed her around the hips and, had she
not been so drunk, she would have probably realized it was just to
move her out of the way. Instead, she took it as a sign of sexual
aggression and, falling into the man, said, "I need someone to fuck
the hell out of me."

That seemed to get his attention. He nudged
her back into the bathroom, into a stall. The only thing he said
was, "I'm going to keep going until you tell me to stop."

She never told him to stop.

It didn't last very long and, having
accomplished exactly what she'd come here for, she went straight
from the bathroom out the front doors and back to the apartment.
Walt snored from the bedroom. She went into the bathroom to throw
up. The toilet was already filled with a reddish brown substance
that could have been diarrhea, vomit, or some sort of viscera from
one of the corpses. She flushed the toilet and it made her think of
the day she had first met Walt. She remembered thinking he was
sick. Now she thought that again but it didn't carry the weight it
did before. Once the toilet was filled with clean water, she
vomited and flushed it again before she had the chance to stop
herself because she really just wanted to leave it. Walt would have
known it wasn't his. He would have known she had drunk until she
was sick and, in his head, this would have meant she'd had a really
good time.

She went into the bedroom, stripped the
comforter from Walt, and took it out to the couch.

Confession

Erica woke up to the clear autumn sunlight
blasting her face and Walt standing over her. He had his shirt
raised and stroked his stomach with his right hand. She was
momentarily confused until last night came back to her. She
immediately realized why she felt like shit, physically, and why
she felt like she had done something wrong. Then she remembered
that Walt was the reason she had done that thing and that she was
supposed to be mad at him.

"Why are you sleeping on the couch?"

"I didn't think you'd want me in the bed
with you."

"Why?"

He had caught her off-guard. She knew there
was a rationale behind doing what she did but she was having
trouble latching on to any particular line of reasoning. She
guessed there wasn't really a need to draw it out. If she wanted
him to be mad about it, if she was trying to get some sort of
reaction from him, the best thing was to just tell him and get it
over with.

"Why?" she repeated.

"Yeah. Why are sleeping on the couch? Why
did you think I wouldn't want you in bed with me? Because you
almost shot me?"

"No. I went to a bar last night and hooked
up with a guy."

"Hooked up? You mean you fucked somebody
else?"

She wanted to smile and gleefully shout,
"Yes! I fucked somebody else! Some stupid guy I knew for all of two
seconds fucked the hell out of me in a public bathroom!" but knew
she wasn't supposed to be happy about it. She lowered her head,
looking away from Walt, and nodded.

"How was it?" He seemed calm, not exactly
the reaction she expected and maybe even hoped for.

"It was . . . okay, I guess."

"You could have brought him back here. I
told you not to say no to anything. I hold the same standards for
you as I do for myself."

"Aren't you the slightest bit mad or jealous
or anything?"

He took a deep breath, rolled his eyes up in
his head as though visibly searching his brain for something, and
said, "No. I don't think so. So, is this going to be a
. . . thing?"

"A thing?"

"Yeah. Like with me and the meat. Is it
going to be something you do all the time?"

She wanted to tell him she didn't know. That
she thought something like that was impossible to predict and she
just didn't have the capacity to know what she wanted from day to
day. She wanted to tell him she didn't really anticipate being here
much longer but didn't want to say anything like that. It seemed
too final. As bad as she had convinced herself it was, in the end,
they did have each other to come home to, and that was
something.

"I don't know. Why?"

"Just wondering. I mean, I get why you did
it." He held a hand out, the same one he'd used to stroke his
stomach, and placed it gently on her arm. "You got mad when you
found out I've been fucking all those dead girls and you wanted to
even the score. I've told you that I'm probably going to continue
that behavior and just wanted to know if you'd keep doing things
like this to get even with me." He put his hand back under his
shirt, continued stroking his stomach. "I just want you to be safe.
That's all."

"So . . . you wouldn't mind if I
brought guys back here?" That certainly took the fun out of it. His
intention?

"Nah. If I got tired of it I'd just get
another apartment."

"Here?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like in this building or . . .
somewhere else?"

"Well, somewhere in Dayton. I want to stay
close by."

Again, his confusing obsession with this
blighted city. She wanted to ask him about it again but knew he
wouldn't give her any straight answers. She knew it had to be
something, though. She considered shifting her goal from trying to
get him to show some emotion to getting him to leave this city.
What would it take?

"Aren't you worried someone is going to come
looking for you? Staying in one place so long?"

"Not really. I told you. I have a sort of
immunity."

"Immunity from what."

"I don't know. The world, I guess."

"But eventually you're going to kill the
wrong person. Someone is going to come looking for you."

"Would have happened by now. It's
experiential knowledge."

"Sometimes I worry about it. Seems too much
like poking a sleeping bear."

"Then leave."

She waited for a long time before finally
saying, "Maybe I will."

Something flickered across his eyes and then
that fixed, almost cheerful look was again on his face.

"I've been thinking," he said. "Before it
gets too cold, we should go for a night out on the town. Tonight.
We've never really done that. I mean, there are things to do around
here."

She thought about it. It seemed terrible but
she appreciated the sentiment behind the idea. If she agreed to it,
she thought there had to be something she could get out of it.

"Okay," she said. "But if you get tonight,
then I get today."

He looked trapped or wounded or something.
She almost expected him to shout 'No!' and run for the door.
Instead his look turned to one of suspicion.