Page 34 of Karma

“You said you wanted to fuck.”

“I wanna fuck you,” he corrects himself.

“No.”

He releases my wrist and I go back to stroking his cock. After a while he sighs and relaxes again and for whatever bizarre reason, I take it as a gift.

“I’m only getting a hand job?” he complains after a while, but his voice is soft and I know we’re doing just fine.

“You’re lucky you’re still here at all,” I say. “So just shut up and let it happen.”

“Man, you’re bossy.” But he relaxes into me even more.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

He grins at me with his eyes half closed and I kiss him again before he says something that’ll make me do something I regret. His breathing gets harder, raspier, needier as I start stroking him harder. I bet all those sounds would be even better if he let me fuck him, which my dick is just about ready to do. But not my mind.

Random blow jobs from pretty strangers are one thing.

Letting them into my bed feels like a betrayal. And the only reason he’s here is because I’d be doing much worse things with my hands if he wasn’t.

Letting go is a bitch. Holding on to a dead man is worse.

I’ve been trying to do both for months now. And it’s impossible.

“I’m done,” he whispers hoarsely. Then his body tenses again in that powerfully coiling way as he comes all over his stomach and my hand.

And now I won’t know what to do with my hands again. It’s a crippling thought.

I let him go and lay on my back on my side of the bed and for a while the black cracks in the grey ceiling are the most interesting thing. Until they start to resemble all the roads we rode down while scattering Reaper’s ashes. I close my eyes, but the roads are all still there.

“Do you want me to go?”

I have no idea.

“I didn’t want you here in the first place.”

But maybe that’s not entirely true. I’ve been trying to fuck my way out of all the memories of Reaper. And I never got this far. Never got to the point of kissing them. Or letting them into my bed. Into my room. Into my head. It was a nice hour of not remembering.

The bed wobbles as he sits up, wiping his come on the sheet. He’s grinning at me as I look at him, but mostly just with his eyes.

“Yeah, Reaper wouldn’t like this,” he says. “I get it. So I’m gonna take off.”

I never took him for a very perceptive guy, or one who gives a shit about anything but having a good time. But here he goes, proving me wrong. He gets up and starts disappearing back intohis clothes. I don’t want that either. But I put my cock away because the fun is very much over.

“For what it’s worth, you shouldn’t feel bad,” he says while tugging on his jeans. “You couldn’t help it. I’m real good at seducing old men. It’s how Joker and me made a lot of money back in the day.”

“You’d let them fuck you but not me?” I ask, wondering why I actually care. “And I’m forty-three. I’m not old.”

He chuckles at that as he buckles his belt. “No fucking involved. I’d pick them up, he’d rob them, no need for any fluids to get exchanged.”

I wonder why he wanted me to know this.

“You gonna rob me too?”

“Nah, those days are gone,” he says.

But they’re not. Because he already took something from me and I’m not even sure what. I just know something’s different now. And I doubt things will go back to how they were. This smells too much like a new beginning.

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