“I’ll fucking kill you! Do you hear me, you fucking pervert! I’ll kill you!”
Up and down the block, doors and windows opened as the few remaining curious neighbors looked out to see what was going on. Sarah knew she ought to feel embarrassed but she didn’t. She felt great!
“Why did you hit me? You’re crazy! I’m calling the cops! You’re crazy!”
But for the first time in days she didn’t feel crazy. She felt strong again. She felt in control again. And even if she was imagining everything else, she had not imagined that smile. She was certain about that.
She turned and shook free of Josh, then walked into the house, stomping her feet with her hands balled into tight fists. Josh walked in right behind her.
“I can’t believe you slapped him.”
“He fucking smiled at me. That slimy, nasty little bastard was grinning at me.”
“I think we need to get you someone to talk to.”
“What?”
“Maybe…I don’t know…Maybe you need some help.”
There it was, out in the open. He thought she was crazy.
“Do you think maybe we should at least wait for the lab results?”
“That policewoman told me they found no physical signs of rape.”
“She told you?”
“I’m your husband. I was concerned.”
“Did she tell you that it could have looked that way because he used lubrication and had a small dick? Or because the drugs relaxed my damned vaginal muscles?”
“Well, drugs or lubricant would show up in the lab results.”
“That’s why maybe you should wait before you try shipping me off to the fucking loony bin! Wait to see if maybe I’m fucking right!”
Josh was keeping his distance. He appeared to be afraid that she would attack him too the way she had attacked the neighbor. He held his hands out palms up as if he were trying to negotiate with a gunman. Sarah really did want to hit him. Josh knew her well.
“But what if nothing happened? You just slapped that guy. He could press charges. You were about to beat the hell out of him. Can you seriously imagine that little guy attacking anybody?”
“Maybe that’s why he uses the drugs? So we can’t fight him.”
“We don’t know that he uses anything! We don’t know that anything happened! This could all be in your head. You could have sleepwalked and shot off that gun and changed the sheets and scrubbed the carpet and then crawled right back into bed and went back to sleep. That sounds a whole fucking lot more likely than some sheepish little guy who lives across the street has been breaking in at night and raping and killing you but you can’t remember it and, did I forget to mention, you aren’t fucking dead!”
Sarah was stunned. Now it was all out in the open. Everything she had felt before, all the power and confidence, was now gone. Now, she felt crazy again.
“Wow. I-I really didn’t know you felt that way.”
Josh deflated, collapsing on the couch.
“Look, I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to think. This is just so fucking confusing and scary as hell…either way. I mean, if this guy has been drugging both of us and then breaking in and raping you, that’s fucking terrifying. And if you’re, you know, losing it, that’s almost worst. You-you’re my rock. You’re supposed to keep
me
from losing it.”
There was a hitch in Josh’s voice. When he looked up at her there were tears in his eyes. It broke Sarah’s heart. She felt like she had let him down, as if she had failed him in some way.
Sarah hadn’t thought much about how this must have been impacting Josh. She knew that Josh was not built for stress or surprises. He was a middle-of-the-road business-as-usual type of guy and this was as far from that as could be. This was the other side of the moon.
A silence fell between them, heavy and uncomfortable. Sarah walked over and plopped down beside Josh. She leaned over and put her head in his lap.
“I’m not crazy, Josh. But I can’t expect you to believe that. I mean, crazy people don’t know they’re crazy right? If I’m sleepwalking or something, I guess I wouldn’t really know. Let’s just get away for a few days. It might make things a little clearer We could both probably use a little break from all this.”
Once again, in the midst of her own trauma, it was her taking care of Josh. Sarah didn’t mind. It felt nor
mal. She hated that she had been leaning on Josh so much lately.
“Let’s just grab a few things and go. We’ll treat it like a honeymoon.”
Josh nodded and slowly rose from the couch. He still looked shaken, scared, uncertain. Sarah cupped his face in her hands and forced him to look her in the eyes.
“I’m not crazy, Josh. Don’t worry. I’m not crazy.”
Josh smiled weakly and hugged her. She could tell that he was still not certain. Neither was she. She would have to change that.
Once she had settled into the hotel room, the first thing Sarah did was plug in her laptop and get online. She looked up The Spy Store and began scouring through their surveillance equipment. Most of it was prohibitively expensive. She settled on the nanny-cam teddy bear. Both attacks had taken place in her bedroom. If she could catch it on film, then she could prove to Josh and herself that she wasn’t crazy. Then she’d have that fucker arrested and her life would go back to normal…after a few years of therapy.
Sarah wrote down the model number and the address to the store. Then she opened her documents and began working on her dissertation. She had no desire to surf through porn sites. She’d already seen enough violent and deviant sex acts to support her theory that human sexuality on a whole was growing more nihilistic as overpopulation increased. She didn’t need to see any more pictures of women being brutally fist-fucked and gang-raped. Her sex drive had already crashed and burned. She wasn’t certain she’d ever have the desire for sex again. That alone made her want to murder Dale.
Sarah took a digital voice recorder out of her overnight bag and slipped it under her pillow. If anything happened tonight, she would at least have a recording
of it. She began to write about the increased popularity of what she called “nonreproductive sex” such as sadomasochism, anal and oral sex, the use of sex toys, and ejaculation outside the vagina, on the face, breast, buttocks, etc., following the start of the AIDS epidemic.
Human sexuality had been a major focus of her study ever since she was an undergraduate. She had grown up in a very religious household where sexuality was never discussed. Sexually explicit books, movies, or TV shows were not allowed in her home when she was young. Even music with explicit lyrics was banned. She had first learned about sex from her friends in high school. It was a wonder she hadn’t gotten pregnant at fifteen like most of them had.
In college she’d finally had the freedom to explore her sexuality and divide the facts from the fiction. She had become fascinated with both the lore and the science of sexuality and had switched her major from psychology to social anthropology. She was hoping to someday write a groundbreaking book that would shed new light on human sexuality and show the necessary social function of so-called deviancy. She believed that the evolution of sexuality followed a Darwinian trajectory where acts like sexual violence would have long been eliminated from the human gene pool if they did not serve some purpose. In this case, she theorized, that the purpose was to harness sexual energy into nonreproductive activities that would not further contribute to overpopulation or exposure to disease.
Of course, by that logic, she should have found greater sexual diversity in the more overpopulated cities and countries than her research had so far uncovered. There should, in fact, have been an exponential
increase in sexual deviancy in cities with populations over five million as compared to those of a million or less. But she could not find any significant differences.
Sarah closed the laptop in frustration and picked up the room service menu. She was beginning to doubt if she would ever finish her dissertation and was starting to lose her drive. She kept finding new holes in her theory that needed to be filled and each time she plugged one hole it created another. She was also worried that all of this research might be the cause of her violent sexual dreams. And if they were real than she didn’t want to rationalize the things that monster had done to her, which is what it felt like she was doing with her research.
Sarah scanned down the menu straight to the deserts. She needed some comfort food. She found some chocolate cake and vanilla fudge ice cream. It was just what she needed. She picked up the remote and turned on the TV. She pushed the menu button and clicked on pay-per-view movies. She needed a good romantic comedy, something silly with Ben Affleck or Hugh Grant. That, along with the ice cream and the cake, was guaranteed to take her mind off her troubles. And if that didn’t work there was always the hotel gym, though she hated running on treadmills. The wind in her face and watching the scenery rush by were part of the thrill of running. But she didn’t feel like battling crowds trying to jog up the Las Vegas strip. Even with the decrease in tourism due to the recession, the strip was still packed like a nightclub on Saturday night.
There were no movies on that Sarah either hadn’t seen or could stomach. As much as she wanted to feel girly and feminine and lose herself in something mindless, she just could not stomach another girl-
from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks-meets-perfect-rich-gentleman movie. She had her limits. Finally, she settled on a nature documentary about the migration of gray whales. Not what she had in mind but the sound of the ocean and the whale calls were strangely soothing.
She had almost fallen asleep when there was a knock at the door. Sarah’s pulse rate shot up and it suddenly became difficult to breath. She scrambled off the bed, groping for her purse and the loaded .40-caliber pistol inside it.
Sarah’s hands shook as she removed the semiautomatic pistol from her bag, jacked a round into the chamber, cocking it as she walked toward the door.
“Who is it?”
“Room service.”
“Just leave it outside the door.”
“Um…I need you to sign for it.”
Sarah let out a low moan. There was no peephole in the door. She would have to open it to see who was on the other side. She put the chain on the door and put the barrel of the gun against the door as she slid it open, prepared to pull the trigger if it was Dale. She could hear her own heart hammering in her ears.
A young Latino man stood on the other side of the door wearing a red jacket and pushing a cart with a silver tray on it that held her ice cream and cake. She flipped the chain off the door and hid the pistol behind her back.
“Sorry, come on in.”
She opened the door and stepped aside so the waiter could wheel in her dessert.
“Anything else, ma’am?” the waiter asked as he handed her the bill.
Sarah paused and placed her gun on the nightstand, then walked over and took the bill from the waiter. She signed for it and scribbled a generous tip at the bottom, then handed it back. The waiter stole a quick glance at the gun, smiled, then began backing out of the room.
“Thank you. You have a nice night, ma’am.”
Sarah smiled back and followed him to the door, closing it behind him and reengaging the chain lock. After pushing the cart up to the bed, she plopped back down on the bed to eat cake and ice cream and watch gray whales migrate.
Less than an hour went by before she’d had enough. Sarah was bored. She decided to go downstairs to the casino and gamble a bit. She loved playing slot machines but usually resisted the urge. Gambling was a bad hobby to get into when you lived in Las Vegas. She had known more than one friend who’d moved to the city and then had to move back home after a few months of losing their entire paychecks to slot machines and video poker. Maybe she’d play blackjack instead. She wondered if Josh would be surprised or embarrassed or both if she was to sit down at his table to play. She wasn’t sure whether it was legal to play at her husband’s table. It might break some sort of federal gaming laws. She decided not to risk it. She could always play at the table next to him. That might even be more fun, she thought. It would drive him crazy to see her there.
Sarah stood up and started getting dressed. She considered wearing a miniskirt with no panties but was just not in the mood to call sexual attention to herself. She had the irrational fear that even there in the casino Dale might still be watching her. She couldn’t stand
the idea of him staring at her from across the casino and getting aroused. Right now, the idea of anyone getting aroused by her felt creepy, scary.
Instead of the miniskirt she picked up a pair of sweat-pants and slid on some flip-flops. She pulled Josh’s favorite college T-shirt on over her head. She looked about as unsexy as could be. She decided to at least do her hair and makeup.
She grabbed her makeup bag and pulled out lipstick, blush, mascara, and eye shadow. She sprayed a little too much perfume on her neck, then wiped it off with her hand and rubbed it between her breasts and onto her thighs. Sarah laughed at herself. For someone with no interest in having sex she was acting like she were getting ready for a booty call.
Her lipstick was a light pink from M-A-C Cosmetics called “Barely Legal.” She rubbed it on her lips, then puckered in the mirror. She brushed out her long eyelashes until they were fluffy and thick and gave her eyes a sultry sleepy look. She added a dark shimmering plum eye shadow and outlined her eyes with a thick eyeliner that further darkened her eyes.
Sarah smiled. Even in sweatpants and a T-shirt she still looked fuckable. Her smile faltered as she once again thought about Dale. For a second she even considered wiping off all the makeup. She shook it off.
I’m not going to let that son of a bitch turn me into some homely spinster.
The gun still sat on the nightstand and Sarah looked at it for a long moment, trying to decide before she picked it up and popped it into her Coach purse. She grabbed her hotel key and walked out the door, making sure she closed it firmly behind her before she walked off toward the elevator.