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Dr Pepper, naps, and puppy breath.
I HAVE IMAGINED him in my mind for so long, my imagination creating a monster of grotesque features and proportions. But standing before me, his head tilted and eyes sharp, is just a man. Slightly balding, twenty pounds too heavy, whose mouth is turning into a sneer. Whose eyes are narrowing, stance strong, the combined effect sinister. This man, this balding, thick man, has whispered in my ear, poured out the disgusting thoughts in his soul, showed me the dark evil in his heart. And now he is stepping closer, the excitement radiating from his body like a foul smell.
He thinks I am weak. He thinks he can manipulate and subdue me. Kill me, like so many girls before me. He has no idea that my small frame and delicate features contain an evil that rivals his own. I finger the knife in my pocket and fight to keep a grin off my face.
This is it. This is my time.
Wait
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
–John Milton, Paradise Lost
UNDRESSING IS AN everyday occurrence. Most women do it mindlessly—automatic motions that accomplish an end result. But if done correctly, stripping can be the ultimate foreplay, a sexual seduction that can wipe clear any rational thoughts and leave a man totally and utterly at your mercy. I have mastered the art.
I kneel on the bed and trail my fingers over my skin—light, teasing caresses designed to heighten my senses and stimulate my body. I exhale slow, trembling breaths as my hands travel near sensitive areas, the dip in my neckline, the lace over my breasts. I keep my eyes down, subservient to him, and wait for the command. One always comes.
“Take off your top. Slowly.” The voice is foreign, English words dipped in culture and dialect. I comply, lifting my eyes and biting my bottom lip gently, my tongue darting out, and hear his gasp in response. I run my hands down my neck, grazing the top of my collarbone and dipping under the silk of my negligee. I slide down one strap, then two, the silk bunching over my breasts, the fabric clinging to my nipples. Then I rise to my knees, crossing my arms, sliding the fabric higher, letting it reveal inch by slow inch of skin until it unveils the curve of breasts, dip of throat, and pout of pink lips.
“Good,” he groans. “Very good. I like you, Jessica.”
Jessica. Not my real name. He thinks he knows me. They all think they know me. After all, they’ve seen my Facebook page, seen the Photoshopped photos that construct my manufactured life. They believe what they see, because they want to believe. They want to believe that I am normal. And for the brief moments I am with them, I fool myself into thinking the same thing.
I turn to the wall and stand, dragging my expensive thong down over my toned hips, bending over and exposing my most private area to his hungry eyes. The embroidered lace slides the rest of the way down my legs and drops around my ankles, snagging on the Italian stilettos that encase perfectly pedicured feet. I am naked now and slide down to lie on my side in front of him, propped up on one elbow, his eyes feasting hungrily on my body. The lights, bright and hot, illuminate my bare skin, causing it to glow. He speaks, the arousal present in his voice, in the slight thickening of his accent.
“Touch yourself. Just your fingers. I want to see you come.”
He wants my fingers, a seductive performance of gasps, moans, and slick foreplay. Eventually, fingers won’t be enough. The next visit he’ll want more, something bigger, deeper—my moans to be louder, my orgasm stronger. There will be no secrets anymore, no boundaries, no requests he won’t be comfortable giving. At this moment I am his, to do with as he pleases. And right now, he wants fingers.
I angle my body so that he can see my parted legs, my completely bare sex, wet, opened and closed with experienced movements. I dip one finger, then two, inside of me, moving them in and out with slow, seductive strokes, my eyes closed, head tilted back. I hear his gasp, the rustle of clothing, a zipper, and a moan as his hand finds his cock. Unintelligible words, a brief slip into a foreign tongue, the meaning clear despite the language. I increase the speed of my fingers, then pause, spreading my lips and exposing the sensitive bud that holds the power over my ecstasy. I moan softly, a breathy sigh that speaks of want and need, spreading wetness over my swollen clit, the change in pace causing a groan from him.
“Jessica…” He whispers my name, longing and need filling every syllable. “Please. I need to see you come.”
I open my eyes, staring forward into the bright lights, a thin sheen of moisture on my skin. I bite my bottom lip, widening my eyes when my fingers again plunge into my core, quick, fast darts of movement, skin on skin, every thrust placing the heel of my hand over my clit with a delicious friction that moves me in the general direction of an orgasm.
I won’t come. An actual orgasm is an occasional occurrence, one that my tortured body spits out in exhausted exasperation, one of those “here, take it!” gifts. But for the most part, I am severely oversexed, and my body, my pussy, has grown immune to stimulation. But he doesn’t know that. All he knows is that ten minutes after my fingers make their first dip into the wet folds of my sanctum, my back arches, my eyes close, and I have a full-body, toe-curling best-orgasm-of-my-life. I shudder, I gasp; I own the shit out of that fake orgasm. As I always do.
He groans at my climax, his hand creating slick sounds at an impossible speed, and a strangled sound meets my ears, a shuddering moan that disappears into thick gasps.
Then, pure silence. No breaths, no fabric rustling, no sated sighs.
An electronic beep sounds, a tone that I’ve heard thousands of times. I stretch, grab my lingerie and roll over, hop off the bed, and walk carefully across soft carpet in four-inch heels until I reach my computer’s keyboard. I press a key, exiting the website.
The lights go out.
CHAPTER 1
I HAVEN’T TOUCHED another person in three years. That seems like a difficult task, but it’s not. Not anymore, thanks to the Internet. The Internet, which makes my income possible and provides anything I could possibly want in exchange for my credit card number. I’ve had to go into the underground world for a few things, and once in that world, I decided to stock up on a few fun items, like a new identity. I am now, when necessary, Jessica Beth Reilly. I use my alias to prevent others from finding out my past. Pity is a bitch I’d like to avoid. The underground provides a plethora of temptations, but so far, with one notable exception, I’ve stayed away from illegal arms and unregistered guns. I know my limits.
The UPS man knows me by now—knows to leave my boxes in the hall and to scrawl my name on his signature pad. His name is Jeremy. About a year ago he was sick, and a stranger came to my door. He refused to leave the package without seeing me. I almost opened the door and went for his box cutters. They almost always carry box cutters. That’s one of the things I love about deliverymen. I stayed fast, refusing to open the door, and he stayed stubborn, arguing with me until he grew tired and left, taking the damn package with him. Jeremy hasn’t been sick since then. I don’t know what I’ll ever do if he quits. I like Jeremy, and from my warped peephole v
iew, there is a lot about him to like. Muscular build, short dark hair, and a smile that stretches quickly and easily over his face, even when there isn’t a damn thing to smile about.
The first shrink I had said I have anthropophobia, which is fear of human interaction. Anthropophobia, mixed with an unhealthy dose of dacnomania, which is obsession with murder. He told me that via Skype. In exchange for his psychological opinions, I watched him jack off. He had a little cock. I think he was right on the second half of that diagnosis. But I don’t fear human interaction. I fear what will happen when I get close enough to a human to interact. Let’s just say I don’t play well with others.
While I may go out of my way to avoid physical human interaction, virtual human interaction is what I spend all day doing. To the people I cam with, I am JessReilly19, a bubbly nineteen-year-old college student—a hospitality major—who enjoys pop music, underage drinking, and shopping. None of them really know the true me. I am who they want me to be, and they like it like that. So do I.
Knowing the real me would be a bit of a buzz kill. The real me is Deanna Madden, whose mother killed her entire family, then committed suicide. At the time it was big news, the “tragedy strikes perfect family” story of the summer. My name was attached to sympathy, notoriety. But then other tragedies occurred and my family dropped off the grid. I inherited a lot from my mother, including delicate features, long legs, and dark hair, but the biggest genetic inheritance has been her homicidal tendencies. That’s the reason I stay away from people. Because I want to kill. Constantly. It’s almost all I think about.
My inner demons have driven me here, to apartment 6E, my world for the last three years, all I need contained in nine hundred square feet. I’ve learned, from inside these walls, how to generate and optimize my income. From eight a.m. to three p.m. I work on a website called Sexnow.com, which has a clientele of mostly Asians, Europeans, and Australians. From six p.m. to eleven p.m. I’m on American turf, Cams.com. In between shifts, I eat, work out, shower, and return e-mails—always in that order. I live on a strict schedule. It helps to tell my brain when to behave a certain way and helps to keep my impulses and fantasies under control.
Whenever possible, I try to get clients to bypass the camsites and use my personal website to book an appointment and pay. If they go through my website, I make 96.5 percent of their payout, plus I can hide the income from Uncle Sam. The camsites pay me only 28 percent, which officially constitutes highway robbery. I charge $6.99 a minute. On a good month, I make around $55,000 from camming—on a bad one, about $30,000.
That income makes up about 70 percent of my total dough; the rest comes from my website’s subscription memberships, which allow men to watch a live video feed of my different cam sessions. I broadcast at least four hours a day and charge subscribers twenty bucks a month. I wouldn’t pay ten cents to watch me masturbate online, but apparently 350 subscribers feel differently.
The $6.99 a minute grants clients the ability to bare their sexual secrets and fantasize to their heart’s content, without fear of exposure or criticism. I don’t judge the men and women who chat with me and reveal their secrets and perversions. How can I? My secret, my obsession, is worse than any of theirs. To contain it, I do the only thing I can: I lock myself up. And in doing so, I keep myself, and everyone else, safe.
It is, in simple terms, a shitload of money. Money that I have no earthly idea what to do with. I can spend only so much on sex toys and lube. But thinking about the money makes me think about life outside of this apartment, so I don’t. The funds go in my account and are ignored. Maybe they will be used one day, maybe they won’t. But I’d rather have the cash than not. I feel protected having it there. I feel like at least one part of my life is going right.
I try to sleep at least eight hours a night. Nighttime is when I typically struggle the most. It is when I thirst for blood, for gore. So Simon Evans and I have an agreement. Simon lives three doors down from me in this shithole that we all call an apartment complex. Over the last three years, he has developed a strong addiction to prescription painkillers. I keep his medicine bottle filled, and he locks me up at night. Without a doubt, my door is the only one in the complex without a dead-bolt switch on the inside.
I used to have Marilyn do it. She’s a grandmotherly type who struggles by on the pittance that is her Social Security. She lives across from Simon. But Marilyn stressed out too much; she was always worried that I would have some personal emergency, or fire, or something and would need to get out. I had to find someone else. Because I knew what was coming. At night, my fingers would start to itch, and I would come close to picking up that phone, to asking her to unlock my door. And then I would wait beside it, wait for the tumblers to move and my door to be unlocked. And when I opened it, when I saw Marilyn’s lined and tired face, I would kill her. Not immediately. I would stab her a few times, leaving some life in her, and wait for her to run, to scream. I like the sound of screams—real screams, not the pathetic excuse that most movies try to pass off as the sound of terror. Then I would chase her down and finish the job, as slowly as I could. Dragging out her pain, her agony, her realization that she had caused her own death. I had gotten to the point where I had picked out a knife, started to keep it in the cardboard box that sits by the door and holds my outgoing mail and various crap. That was when I knew I was getting too close. That was when I picked Simon instead. Simon’s addiction supersedes any concern he has for my well-being.
I know what you think. That I’m being dramatic. That I saw a Stephen King movie once and got excited at the thought of blood. But you don’t know the depravity of my mind. You don’t know the thoughts I struggle with, what I fight to contain. Simon certainly doesn’t know. He thinks I’m a hermit with night terrors—that I sleepwalk. I’m sure he thinks my steadfast dedication to the lock is ridiculous, the unyielding nature of my strict demands extreme. My threats always heighten when he is late, but that doesn’t happen often. It takes only a mention of cutting his supply and he snaps to attention. The most reliable thing on earth is a druggie’s cravings. I think they are worse than mine. But the only person Simon is hurting with his addiction is himself. I have a whole world of victims outside these walls.
CHAPTER 2
HIS FANTASIES ARE getting stronger. It has been almost three years since the last girl, and his need has overtaken the rational part of his mind. The invitation didn’t help. The announcement, like a huge glowing sign, that she is turning six. It had come in the mail, pink construction paper with handwritten details in a childish script that could only be hers.
He had hoped that a scratch wouldn’t be needed, that the itch could be minimized and held at a level that was bearable, controllable. But he can feel himself weakening, feel a break in his streak coming. He hopes role-playing will be enough to satisfy his itch, his enjoyment of the sessions giving him hope.
But just in case, he needs to prepare. If he is going to stumble, if he is going to fall, things must be in place. This time he will keep the girl around longer. Create enough memories to tide him over for a longer period. His hands shake and he stuffs them in his pockets, moving through the grass to the front of the trailer, pulling out the creased envelope that holds the key. He glances around the empty yard, the wind rustling through quiet brush, isolation surrounding him. Ripping the paper, he ignores the landlord’s letter and palms the key.
Preparation. Just to be safe. Maybe he won’t need this place. But just in case, better make sure that everything is ready. Preparation has always paid off in the past.
CHAPTER 3
I HAVE EXCEPTIONAL hearing in my left ear and enjoy sitting against my sixth-floor apartment door, listening to the activities going on in the hall. It’s amazing how much people give away on their way from the elevator to their apartment. Sometimes people step out of their apartment for “privacy,” a fact I find hilarious. From my doorside seat, I hear the fights, the secret phone conversations, and the everyday normalcy tha
t gives away so much about a person.
Simon was, for a long time, “the Redheaded Smoker.” I keep a notebook next to the door, in the cardboard box. In it, I have a page dedicated to every resident on our floor, including me. There are fifteen “Sixers,” as I like to refer to us, and when Simon moved in, “the Brown-Haired Smoker” is what I wrote on the top of the page.
He moved in with a girl who, as best I could tell from my peephole, was one step above trailer trash. They were arguing, carrying black trash bags full of crap, and her voice interrupted his twice between the elevator and their door. I started a page for her and titled it “Trailer Trash Tonya.” I later found out her name was Beth, and she worked at Applebee’s. Two weeks after moving in, they got in a fight, she moved out, and I threw away her page. From the words of their parting, she would not be coming back.
Simon’s current girlfriend is Vicodin. In return for my containment, I keep his girlfriend coming. From his level of dependence, Vicodin is one demanding bitch, reducing him to a sniveling, whiny submissive in the days leading to the first of the month, when his next order arrives. Simon understands that if he ever unlocks me, ever releases me before morning, his prescriptions will stop and his addiction will go hungry. He doesn’t realize he might die at my hand.
CHAPTER 4
ANNIE
ANNIE SITS ON one of the high stools in her kitchen, kicking the baseboard of the bar top, which causes her stool to slowly spin, right and then left. Her book bag, the edges frayed from three years of use, slumps against the bar, exhausted from a day of reading, writing, and riding the bus.
“Stop that,” her mother says—not turning—the sound from Annie’s kicks grating on her nerves. She lays out two pieces of bread, then spreads peanut butter onto one side. Letting out a deep breath, she screws on the lid, then opens the jelly jar and glances at Annie with a warning look.