Bane of Blood: La Gorgona

III, Part 38

"I don't have any money for you," Fernando said.

This wasn't exactly true, but as Chico had so sagely put it: Why pay for what you could get for free? The whore shut the door behind them, plunging them both into shadow.

"I don't care," she growled back at him, driving him up against the closed door.

Her mouth was on his then, lush and musky and wild. Her hair crinkled in his hands, a bristly tangle of half-fallen curls. She scored her nails over him through his thin shirt, scratched at him like an animal. He grabbed both her clawed hands up in his, restraining her. She panted against him, surged against him. He drew back and in the scant light looked her over.

She wasn't a beautiful creature, but her bristling savagery aroused him. Her mouth was snarling, snaggle-toothed. A fading bruise discolored one side of her face. Her eyes were sloe-dark, lynxlike. Blackly aflame.

"How many men did you fuck tonight?" he asked her.

"Three," she answered.

"How many of them made you come?"

"None," she said. Her snarl furled steeper. "They never do."

"But you can, can't you?"

"Can I what?"

"Come," he said, leaning back into her.

She gave a raspy laugh, rubbing against him like a cat. "Yeah, guapo," she purred, "I can come however you like."

"Not how I like. How you like." An inch from her ear, he asked, "How do you like it?"

She stilled against him. "What do you mean?"

"How do you like to fuck yourself? When you're alone in this room, do you ever make yourself come?"

"Yes," she said gruffly, "I've done it here."

"Show me how you do it," he said, releasing her slowly. "Make yourself come. Pretend I'm not here."

In the gloom he saw her shake her curly head. "I can't do that." Before Fernando could press her on what she meant, she murmured, "Pretend you're not here."

"Then don't," he said, catching her hooded eye. "Don't pretend anything."

She looked at him, wary and wanting. A hungry vixen wondering if she dared take what he was offering her, an open invitation to do whatever she liked. She tugged her lower lip into her mouth, moistening it so that it shimmered. She reached for the side zipper of her sleazy red dress.

"I could have had more men tonight," she said lowly, unzipping. The dress peeled away from her dark body of its own accord, as though her voluptuousness had only ever been tenuously contained. "But when I saw you come in, I let the other girls take them. I only wanted you."

"Why?" he asked, letting his gaze trail leisurely over her big brown breasts, dark capped as the curling pelt between her thighs.

"I've never seen a man like you."

Fernando's eyes snapped to hers. "I told you not to pretend."

Her eyes flashed back at him. "It's not your body. It's not your face either. It's..." she trailed off, frustrated. "No," she said, peering hard at him. "It is there, in your face. Something in your eyes, in the shape of your mouth. It's like you're burning—burning up inside."

Fernando's mouth rose at one corner. "That doesn't frighten you?"

"No," she said, her gaze falling flat, "nothing frightens me anymore."

The strap of the dress slinked from her hand. She stepped back from the puddle of cheap fabric, out of her shiny heels. She took the rhinestone clips out of her tousled mane of hair and shook it. Fernando caught the scent of her hairspray like a new pheromone, and followed after.

The clips clinked to the side-table by the shaded lamp. She sat down on the mussed bed with one leg folded beneath her. Her hands rested on her thighs. Between them Fernando saw the pink sliver of her sex, faintly peeping. Glistening wet.