Page 10 of Caution Tape

“But if I talk,” she whispers, “maybe that will make you mad. And if you’re mad enough…” The pace of her stroking increases, her hand sliding up and down my cock, her thumb brushing the tip with each stroke. “Maybe you’ll fuck me like you did last night.”

“Maybe,” I reply.

I wonder if this was how it happens for people like me. If this was how serial killers and monsters had full, wholesome lives while they secretly maimed and murdered. Did someone just happen to come into their life that at least mildly interested them, enough to stick around for years and years. I imagine myself as a python, languid and aloof, being fed for years, longing to lash out.

I could do the routine. Be in the right spots. My life etched into a spreadsheet. Filled with six o’clock dinners and nine o’clock Sunday Little League coaching. Routine was something to lean on; I could drape my skin over the bones of a schedule and hide for years. The act of assembling a personality to fit that life daunts me.

It just sounds like such tiresome effort.

Natalie’s voice interrupts my thoughts.

“Please,” she murmurs in my ear. “I want it again. I’m just going to keep talking. I’ll talk about anything. Just talk, talk, talk.”

I’m not angry. Not really. If I couldn’t control my vague, homicidal thoughts, I would have been locked up a long time ago. But Nolan gives people what they want.

I turn my head to stare into her smiling, playful eyes. She thinks I’m still—for the most part—a nice guy. My intensity in the bedroom adds just the right amount of danger to her life. I’m a mirage to her. She’ll interact with only the shiny edges, never fully understanding that there is no depth beyond the mirrored image.

Okay.

I slip away from her grasp and grab her arm, pinning it behind her back. Pulling the blankets off her, I roughly push her face down into the pillows. I hold onto the back of her neck as I climb on top of her, trapping her smooth legs beneath my thighs. My chest presses against her as I lean in, moving to kiss down her neck and around the small butterfly tattoo on her shoulder blade. My lips trail down her spine to the small of her back.

She lifts her head slightly. “That didn’t feel very angry.”

Ignoring her, I straighten up and spread her ass apart, pressing the head of my cock against her folds before sliding in, enjoying the way she moans and arches her head back. I begin rocking my hips, pumping in and out of her with slow, measured strokes.

“Come on, harder.”

I gather her hair up into a crude ponytail and pull her head back as I slam into her as hard as I can, her ass pressing firmly against me. I fuck her in rough, violent bursts, my breath coming out in short, harsh gasps as the bed frame creaks and thuds against the wall.

“Little fucking bitch,” I growl in her ear, finding myself repeating the phrase as anger and lust have taken over my ability to form sentences. “Little fucking bitch.”

She starts to say something, but the words catch in her throat. All she manages is a strangled, hoarse cry, her hands curling the bedsheets as I continue railing her, the veins in my arms popping out as I strain to fuck her harder and harder.

“Oh my God,“ she cries out and for a brief, surreal moment I think of the knife in my car, and that’s when I climax too, groaning with pleasure, collapsing against her with my forehead buried between her shoulder blades.

As I roll off her, clarity hits. Though I’m certain there is very little future for us, for the moment, I am not bored. I suppose that will have to be enough.

Time has passed and I realize I have lost most of the day. This happens from time to time. There’s no particular cause or reason; I simply check out. The world passes in front of me, and my face moves mechanically, nodding and talking and moving throughout life, but the swirling force of consciousness that is Nolan is gone. Disengaged. A dark lightbulb. An automaton of flesh.

For whatever reason, when this particular mood strikes me, I tend to wind up at a store. Target. Best Buy. Sometimes a hardware store. Never a grocery store. I need clean, contrasting colors. Sharp red on white tile. Order. The reds and whites bring a sense of calm that I cannot explain, and gliding amongst the little people scurrying around, living their frantic, sweaty lives, brings me back.

I’m in the electronics section. TVs are glowing and flickering like digital eyes. A family is in the next aisle. Four of them: a mother, a father and two boys. The children are hanging off the cart, lolling their pale, blank faces in piggish stupor as they gaze at the shelves. The mother and father are arguing about a TV.

“Will it fit on the wall?” she says.

“Yeah. I can mount it. It comes with these brackets, see?”

“I don’t know, won’t that hurt our eyes?”

A delicious daydream erupts in my mind. Where I pull a TV off the wall and slam it on the father’s head, bashing him over and over, watching blood arch off his skull and spatter the white tile in a bright, vibrant spray. I would hit him, and the TV would fall apart in my hands, chunks of plastic and crystallized glass crunching under my feet. I would change the course of everyone’s life forever. I would be akin to a smiling car accident, ripping apart their entire universe in one fell swoop. They would howl. They would scream. They would question the very moral fabric of the world they live in. How could pure, random chance be so malignant to them?

I peer over the aisle divider at them. In nature documentaries they always show a lion peeking over tall grasses at the grazing gazelle. Without warning, the lion leaps at the dumbfounded creatures, sinking bared fangs into soft flesh.

I want to do that.

There’s a sudden pain in my hands and I look down to see that I’m gripping the rack of headphones and phone chargers very tightly, as if I’m about to vault over the divider.

I close my eyes.

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