Untitled.FR11 by Unknown Author Page A

yanked the jeans and red-lace briefs down and away, she tried a volley of kicks. But he fended her bare legs off, feeling the power in them, her desperation going straight to her sole defense. He stepped back, out of leg range. He looked at her, saw her for what she was. There was still makeup on her face, but except for that, all her shopped deception was gone, her cover blown. Wan writhing slugflesh in the moonlight, curves and tucks and slit-fuzz to tempt cockrise and burrowing and seedshoot in those not as wary as he. The leaf cover below her feet made crackly sounds, twig and bark and overlapped interleavings rustled by her struggles. Beneath the truck tarp, he found mallet and ropes and twin stakes that had rattled like loose jack handles against iron. He sank one, barely out of range of her kicks, only tamped in a little but enough to know that it wouldn’t do. Then he got wise, pictured her legspread, added a foot more around the base of the tree, pounded the suckers in at an angle, like bigtop stakes. First he tied a length of rope to each one. Then he caught at an ankle, held it so that her left leg flailed ineffectually against the tree, so limited was her movement. He secured a tight knot about her ankle, snagged the other, did the same, her body pinned against the tree, butterfly on cardboard.
    He stepped back to admire his handiwork.
    Beautiful.
    If you ignored the girl’s head, with its unflattering 54
    spew of tears and vitriol, April was all come-on. But his dick was not duped. Securing her excited him, a dim head-glow only. He lifted a finger (One moment!) and went back to the truck. Under the tarp, lying on a gritty towel, he found the Makita cordless drill, hefted it. Green finish, a sixteenth of an inch drillbit tight in its chuck, tip to clutch just, over two inches long. Wasn’t much heft to it, other than the hidden weight of its motor, but as he moved toward the naked spread-eagled woman, the drill hung heavy in his hand. It would be meaningless if he and his victim didn’t connect, if he didn’t stop shutting her out.
    April was his conduit to the whole sex, all of ’em.
    “Come on, please? Let me go.” Her eyes flitted away from the drill. Her voice was harsh and raw.
    “Look,” he said, feeling foolish, “it’s not personal. You just wound up in the wrong body is all.” She looked a little like a nude chanteuse, with her legs parted and her arms spread wide-and-out in a starburst of climactic song. Love me, it said, a sick Judy Garland gesture. And though he saw now that she was not in the slightest interested in sex, her torso could not help but radiate a steady message of fuck-me, no matter what: Saint Sebastian, arrows, pale flesh aerated in sensuous oils.
    “You’re a nice man.” April was lying, and it was not a pretty sight. It made him sad, her pouty lips passing a lie so glibly. “We can undo this,” she continued. “It’ll just be between me and you.” He watched a glimmer of hope die in her wide eyes as he made no reply.
    “You’re pretty,” he said at last.
    She looked away. “Ah.” She thought she knew what he meant. Stupid girl. But her nature dictated filth.
    “People like the white skin, of course. Some people, anyway. This,” he touched her, “or this, these things—no don’t struggle.”
    “I don’t like that.” Her voice had a girl’s whine in it, the sound of a victim. “Please don’t.”
    “But they really drool over the hidden bits, the bits where blood darkens it or swells it up. These nip things, for one,” he said, pulling one forward, taffy-stretch, and giving it a slight nose tweak. He held the drill up, took in the tip of the bit, then dropped it to his side and let April’s nipple worm away from his fingers. “But it’s this baby-thing that’s the real biggie.”
    “No!” Sudden tension at her inner thighs.
    He fingered the dry-lipped spread-open gash, the vile place where every damned planet-fuck dropped from.
    April was