Page 64 of Caution Tape

I nudge her. “Clowns are your fantasy. Would you like to hear another one of mine?”

“Does it involve that thing you do with your tongue?”

“It can. My first fantasy, the first dream of killing someone, I had this idea about phone books.”

“Phone books,” she echoes dryly. “Nobody uses those anymore.”

I give her a look. “They would get delivered to our door. A yellow and white paged book full of numbers and locations. I wanted to pick a random address out of the book and kill everyone in the house, leaving behind the page with their name and number circled. Tack it to the wall with the remains of their face pinned next to it, dripping like a fried egg slapped onto a plate.”

On screen, an actress talks about her upcoming movie. A couple sits down; a person with black hair sitting next to one with brown hair. Both are wearing denim, which bothers me.

The lights darken, and we’re coated in a smooth, soothing blackness. Cora crawls over and sits on my lap, leaning back against my chest, her cheek flush against mine. She takes my hands and pulls them around herself like a warm blanket. “Tell me what you want to do, baby.”

Why does she smell so good?

I squeeze her tighter. “Of all the days, of all the people to come across, they came across me, because I just so happened to lay my finger on a number in a book.”

The movie starts. The opening scene features a grotesque clown dragging a body in trash bag down a dark road.

Cora guides my hands between her legs, closing her thighs around them and making me feel how wet she is. Then she takes my left hand, daintily extends a finger, and begins aiming it around the movie theater.

“Eenie,” she says, aiming it one corner, at a group of three young men, guffawing and tossing popcorn at each other.

“Meenie,” she continues, pointing at an old couple in the front, the light of the screen reflecting off their glasses.

“Miney.” She hits a lone person with red hair, and Cora begins grinding her hips against me, and I have to bite her shoulder to keep quiet.

“Mo.”

It’s the couple in denim, but I don’t really care. I want to shove Cora on the ground and fuck her brains out.

“Catch a tiger by his toe. If he hollers let him go. Eenie, meenie, miney, mo.“ She moans the last word into my ear, biting my earlobe and pulling on it lightly with her teeth.

“Them? Tonight?”

“Mmhmm.”

“We follow them home, we get their address, then we come back in face paint and kill them in their beds.”

Cora sighs with pleasure. “I love it when you talk like that.”

There’s a clown chasing someone down with a chainsaw. Cora watches it and pulls my arms around her, nuzzling into me. The denim couple glances back at us. The woman frowns.

The man glares at me.

“Can I kill him?” I whisper to Cora.

“If you’re a good boy,” she whispers back.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Nolan

On my fourth date with Natalie, we went grocery shopping.

Yeah.

Somewhere in the barrage of text messages, she mentioned a thing she read that a good way of seeing if someone is compatible with you is to see how you like them in a mundane environment; one of those routine life tasks that you will ultimately be sharing thousands of with them over the course of a relationship.

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