3. Ezra #2
“You feel that?” My hand tight in her hair. “How hard I am inside you? I killed a man Tuesday and drove straight here. Didn’t even call the client. Drove here with his blood still on my hands because I needed to be inside you more than I needed to finish the fucking job.”
Her cunt squeezes me so hard I see stars.
“God—“ Her nails in the sheets. “Don’t stop.”
“Your pussy is choking my cock right now.” I pull back and drive in and the wet sound of it fills the room.
“Every time I say something that should scare you, you get tighter. Feel that?” I thrust harder and she cries out.
“Tighter. Wetter. You hear the word kill and your cunt grips me like a fist.”
My free hand reaches under her. Finds her clit. She bucks against me.
“Come on my cock, Dove.” I’m close. I’m so fucking close and I’m holding it back through force of will and eighteen years of professional discipline. “Come for the man who kills people. Come for the man who jerked off in your hallway. Come on.”
She comes with her face in the sheets, my fist in her hair, her cunt clamping around me so hard my rhythm breaks—and then so do I.
I slam in and hold and the orgasm tears through me, every muscle locked, my cum flooding into her, and I stay buried while my breath goes ragged against the back of her neck and she shakes through every beat of it.
I hold her after. Pull her against me so her back is against my chest. My hand in her hair, gentler now, stroking where I pulled.
She lets me. Her breathing slows and steadies against my side.
“You have to go,” she says. Not angry. Just stating.
“Yes.” The contract. The window that’s closing and doesn’t care what happened in this bed. “I’ll be back.”
“The man you’re supposed to be watching,” she says. “The real target.”
“He won’t be a problem much longer.”
Something in her face—she’s processing what that means. She processes it and she stays where she is.
“Come back before dark,” she says.
I get dressed. She watches from the bed—sheet pulled up, dark hair loose, mouth still swollen from my cock, eyes doing the careful thing they’ve been doing all morning.
I pick up my jacket. I take the two pairs of underwear from my pocket and set them on the nightstand, both of them, weeks of carrying them.
She stares at the underwear for a long moment.
The white pair and the gray one, cotton, the waistbands worn soft.
Weeks in my jacket pocket next to the phone I use for contracts.
She knows, because I told her this morning, that I touched myself while I listened to her use her vibrator and kept those in my pocket while I did it.
She knows everything now. The full scope of it.
She picks up the gray pair and sets it back down.
“I should be furious,” she says.
“You are furious.”
“Yes.” She looks at the underwear. Then at me. The thing in her face is not only fury. “Come back before dark.”
The contract target is at the north window late afternoon.
I know his habits as well as I know hers—six weeks of watching both of them. His window at the north side, the chair he drags to catch the afternoon light. Phone call on the usual day. Today is that day.
I settle behind the rifle. The weight of it is familiar—more familiar than anything in my life except, now, the weight of her body under mine. The reticle finds the target. He takes the call. The call ends early.
The shot is clean. The work takes seconds.
The sound a suppressed round makes through an open window—a flat crack, quiet enough that the city absorbs it.
The target slumps. I watch through the scope long enough to confirm, the way I always confirm.
Then I feel nothing, the way I always feel nothing.
I pack the rifle into its case. Take out the second scope. Redirect it across the alley.
She’s home early. Still in her school clothes—the blue dress, the one with the misbutton.
Standing at the kitchen counter with a glass of water, not drinking it.
Looking at the plant on the windowsill. She picks up the watering can.
Fills it. Waters the plant with the focused attention of a woman doing a small ordinary thing while thinking about something that isn’t small or ordinary at all.
She finishes. Sets the can down. Puts her palm flat against the glass of the window.
Just her hand. Flat against it. Looking across the alley.
I’m across the alley. She can’t see me—the apartment is dark, I’m at the scope, no angle from which she could catch the glint. She doesn’t know I’m here. She knows I’m here.
Her hand stays on the glass for a long time.
I watch her go about her evening. The pasta, standing at the counter.
The couch. The television on low. She changes out of the blue dress and I’m aware of every second of it through the scope—she leaves the curtains open, all the way, wider than usual, and I don’t think she’s doing it consciously yet.
She leaves the bedroom light on when she goes to brush her teeth.
When she comes back she goes to the window in her sleep shirt and stands there.
Looks across the alley.
I watch her at the window at 10:42 PM—in the sleep shirt, the first thing I ever saw her in through this scope—and I think about the wall.
About three nights of standing in her dark hallway with my cock in my hand and wanting the rest of it, all of it, the version that starts with her knowing I’m there.
I take the scope down.
Close up the case.
Put on my jacket and cross the alley.