me, I barely felt the warm droplets from the corners of my eyes. The tears didn’t hurt; it was the mechanisms behind them that swallowed me whole. The pain, the sorrow, the eternal darkness.
Ace stood over me, every soft touch of his hand another blow. His skin slid against mine, bare and overheated. His tongue caressed the salty flesh of my stomach. When his hands sought out my shirt, lifting it over my head, I didn’t protest. But when his eyes found mine, right before his lips, I turned my face and whispered, “Stop.”
With my cheek turned, he kissed my neck, much harder than he had been, becoming more demanding. The taking felt too much like thievery. I was done. Finished.
“Stop,” I said louder, pushing his chest. “Stop!” I turned my face the other way, narrowly escaping another attempt to consume my mouth.
He stood over me, his knees pressed against the side of the bed, his readiness for me too late of a warning. His eyes were hooded, his teeth sunk into his lip.
“I don’t want to do this. I want you to leave. Leave me here alone.”
He released his lip and gave my side a nice slap. “Too late for that, darlin’. You wanted the devil. Now you got him.”
“I said no.”
He grinned, lewdly taking in my body with his eyes. “I know why the Italian wanted you. For the same reason I do. There’s something about you that gets right under the skin.”
With force, he spread my legs with his own, going in for the finale. No hesitation, I struck him a blow on the side of his head with the ballerina ring, momentarily stunning him.
Scrambling to the table beside the bed, I grabbed the lamp just before he snatched my legs and yanked me toward him. He had been too slow; I hit him on the side of the head with it, just as I had hit the faded redhead at The Road House.
Without the glow from the lamp we were covered in darkness, only a bare hint of light from outside throwing his profile in relief. He cursed, then lunged outward, catching me on the side of the face with a dizzying slap.
It must’ve been the first time he hit someone, more specifically, a woman. The hit seemed to take him by more surprise than it did me. Therefore, I didn’t dally, despite the blow. I yanked open the table’s top drawer, found the gun right on top of the Bible, and held it out in front of me.
“Do you understand now?” I asked, no tremble in either my voice or my grip. “I said no. I don’t want to hurt you. But I will.”
He swayed a bit before righting himself. We stood that way for an unaccountable amount of time, him naked, teetering a bit in the strained glow of the streetlight, me holding the gun between us. When he started to collect his clothes, I moved the gun with him, and told him to take the money too.
Once he was decent, and all of his belongings had been collected, he stood by the door, the paper bag of cash in his hands.
“Payback, darlin’. And it won’t be on you.” His voice vibrated with all the emotions that covered a lost victory. I had been nothing but a prize to him. Something he wanted to take from Brando.
“I don’t think so, not unless you want to get arrested for robbery. I’ll go to the police.”
The paper crinkled in his hands. “You’re just trading one devil for another.”
A click resounded in my mind and I started to laugh like a loon. How absurd! I wanted to shout.
I realized how childish he was, how what Brando had said about him over the months was true. Compared to Brando, he was a kid. Just a punk kid, a guppy, who had the nerve to test shark-infested waters.
The last words Brando spoke to me on the phone reverberated, even louder than the manic laughter: He’s— He didn’t even have to finish. I knew the rest. He’s dead. He had meant it.
Ace’s eyes flared in the dimness, insulted at the cackling laughter. If it weren’t for me holding the gun, he would have come after me again. Perhaps I knew something about Ace then that no one else did. He felt slight, less than he should have. This peculiar sense of mine seemed to thrive on an extraordinary amount of empathy.
“Go,” I said when I could find my breath. “Get