THE SKIN BENEATH THE SKIN OF MADNESS
US COPYRIGHT PROTECTED
Chapter I
From the bedroom door, he watched his mother banging a john. As they
screamed in joy or pain, Watkis’s chest, sweaty and hairless, slapped his
mother's
breasts and their grunts and groans increased his loathing and rage.
He fired six rounds from a
Remington R-25 into Ed Watkis’s back. Blood splashed
from the divots in Ed’s flesh, and the eye of a cracked rib winked. The
toothless wino’s body jerked and he died where three had been born between
Rosalie Drago's legs. The blasts dislodged the needle from
Nat King Cole’s
An
Affair to Remember and the
stylus clattered against the vinyl’s edge. His mother, shocked and blood
splattered, stared into her son’s eyes and spoke, but he heard none of the
words she spit through the quivering slit of her lips, a pair of wriggling worms.
He was mourning the anniversary of his beloved sister’s death. She had
died two days after an aide had raped her in 45th Street
Clinic in
Palm Beach, Florida.
The last time he saw her, he had held her tight as if to quiet his heart while
his tears dropped onto her
blond hair. She had anorexia, had begun cutting
herself, and a potassium deficiency had caused her heart to seize.
Watkis's blood dripped from Rosalie’s face to her breasts. She yanked
the bloody sheet to her throat.
“You’re an evil bastard.
Christ, I knew you
were a shit the minute I held you in my arms and you never stopped bawling.”
Watkis’s corpse draped Rosalie, pinning her. Her legs crawling with
spider veins had slid from under the sheet.
She said, “You don’t have the balls
to shoot your mother.”
“You don’t remember.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“Michelline, your daughter today is her first death day.”
“You still pissed off over that?”
He smiled. He fired the
semi-automatic until her head, a
jack-o-lantern, he thought, became a blob of
pulp. Skull fragments lodged in the wall and headboard. He sank to his knees
and cried, “Oh, Michelline!” He would never cry again.
He wobbled down the creaking stairs,
and paused to scan the family pictures sitting on yellowed doilies atop the warped
piano whose cracked keys signified something he could not articulate. He replaced
the rifle in the rack. He ambled into the kitchen, grabbed a cola from the
refrigerator, and guzzled it in two swigs.
He slipped into his rain slicker and walked through the front door
over the whining floorboards of the front porch. The rain fell, a wall of pins,
and a fist of roiling black clouds choked the house while skeletal lightning
bolts coupled and danced against the anthracite colored clouds. He stepped into
the burning rain. He had just turned fifteen.
Peter’s drenched clothes were chains, the eldest of Rosalie Drago’s
sons, dragged toward home. A rusted truck, driven by his brother, Eric,
pulled up, splashing Peter. Eric's
girlfriend, Tanya, threw the door open. Peter
climbed in and dropped his aching head into the sack of his hands. On a patch
of dirt ten feet from the porch, Eric
parked. They ran from the truck into the house.
Shaking off his long, wet hair like a dog, Eric
said, “Where you been?”
A soaked Marlboro stuck to Peter's lower
lip. He said, “The bitch asked me to get beer and butts.” From beneath his
raincoat, he removed a wet paper bag. The beer and Marlboros ™hit the floor. Peter
tried lighting his cigarette.
Eric said, “It’s soaked. You forgot
your medication, didn’t you?”
Peter nodded, “She's not
Michelline?”
“Michelline's dead,” Eric said,
“You met Tanya. Let’s get your pills.”
They walked through the foyer, reeking of camphor, and into the
kitchen. Eric took two vials of pills out of the cabinet and filled a glass of
water for Peter. “Swallow them!” Eric inspected Peter's mouth. Eric grabbed two
beers from the refrigerator and removed the metal caps with his teeth. Tanya
squealed, “I love that.”
Peter went upstairs; Eric
led Tanya into his room. He kissed her; she
squirmed in his embrace.
“Your mother is home.”
“You think she gives a shit.” Eric saw red confetti-sized images
fluttering through his mind. Eric stared into Tanya’s eyes. She froze; his
fingers skimmed her sweat dappled flesh, raising the fine hair, a human caterpillar.
His kiss, fluttering moth wings on her lips, tingled. She opened her mouth for
the tongue she had to wait. Pushing her onto his mattress, he ripped her jeans
off, her panties with his teeth. Hands as if leg irons spread her ankles, his
erection, a long slow stroke, penetrated Tanya, igniting a fire that rose from her
curled toes to her scalp. He pulled out, she whimpered, he snatched her butt,
teasing her, scorching her coral curtained eye to inter his torment, amid
echoed gunshots, to bury his rage so deep within Tanya her tears exchanged his
fury for whispers if not silence, while her irises, crescents, rolled under her
half shuttered lids, a slot machine. His last kiss squeezed three dollops of
blood to the surface.
From upstairs, they heard the toilet flush, a door slammed, and Peter
screaming something incomprehensible, ran down the stairs. Tanya
said, “What's that?”
“It’s Peter,” said Eric, caressing her face, slowly moving inside her
where anger murmured still.
Peter's shrieks soared until…
Easing from within Tanya, who could no
longer tell the difference between pain and pleasure, Eric
slipped into his jeans. Tanya watched sweat drops slide down his spine as he
left the room, leaving molten pearls of semen on the sheet and her salivary
wine on her lips. She placed her red fingernail in one pear atoll, imagining
their baby kicking her womb. A drop of blood fell hitting the sheet, close to
what her fancy conjured, making her recoil. She looked up and saw what appeared
to be blood squirm through the cracks were the ceiling and wall converged. She
stood on the bed. It was Blood! Her heart swelled, filling her throat, to
escape what she could neither believe nor endure. Peter screamed, “They’ve been
shot.”
Tanya became dizzy as she rose, slipping into her jeans, and ran
upstairs, buttoning her blouse in her ascent. Eric held a fistful of Peter's
shirt. A bare light bulb swung overhead, the veins in their foreheads shone as
the light swayed. On the bed, Rosalie and Watkis, a pair of overfed shattered
mannequins, lay tattooed with the blood they exchanged.
“I killed them,” Eric said. Checking for a pulse, he held their wrists
together. Their hands resembled flopped, hanged men. Panic, a rat scuttled through
Tanya’s mind, bearing her cry, “Oh, my god, are they dead?”
Eric
said, “Yes. I’d have used an axe, if I could do it again.”
Eric held Tanya’s
hand, escorted her outside, and opened the truck door. The storm had blown
passed; the rain, too. The sun was a laser. Eric’s eyes remained deadlocked on
the warped lucent snake of hot air waggling upward along the black mirror of
macadam. Tanya looked at him with an admixture of awe and dread, waiting for
him to speak, his stillness scared her more than what remained of Rosalie’s
face and Watkis’s obscene white body laying on her in the crimson sack of the
bed. Tanya placed her head on Eric’s shoulder. Her nails, quivering like
thistle in the wind, grazed his cheek, slicing the heads of his tears. At
first, Eric’s wrath dismissed what memory could not bear, missing frames in the
film, and he was deceived into believing Peter had shot them. By the time, he
had driven Tanya home his fury accessed the developing images. Tanya loved him
more than anyone could tolerate and kissed him with such tenderness her heart
all but burst. She called him one crazy bastard and she knew, but wouldn’t say
it, he had sided with the devil. Eric remained dumb. He didn’t watch Tanya
leave the truck but waited until her door closed before he drove to Sheriff
Thompson’s office.
They tried and convicted Eric as a juvenile. A panel of six
psychiatrists decided Eric was insane when he had shot Rosalie and Watkis.
Judge Eugen Bleuler sentenced him to the state asylum for the violent and
criminally insane at Loxahatchee where he would remain until he no longer represented
a danger to society. No one expected Eric Salvatore Drago to walk back out through
those rusty gates alive. They were wrong. They were dead wrong.
Chapter II
December 2012
Considered one of the preeminent architects in the country, Eric Drago
had refurbished, The Willows, an English Tudor mansion. Embraced by ancient
oaks, poplars, huge evergreens, spruces, and immense Japanese maples, it sat on
a hill surrounded by fifty acres of lush lawn, gardens, including a maze, and
with a view of the Long Island Sound. Divided by cross gables, he had renovated
the residence from its foundation, to its slate roof, its reframed chestnut
timbers, its brick walls, and marble façade. He had razed the crumbling brick
walls protecting the property’s perimeter, layered it with a patina of stucco
painted the color of wet sand, and adorned the parapet with dense ivy.
Carved marble buttresses flanked two panels of wrought iron and at the
gate, an armed guard sat in a brick kiosk, watching rows of surveillance
monitors. The egress opened onto a driveway, straddled by trees, traversed a
wooden bridge, over a brook, and encircled a fountain, near the main entrance.
The setting sun’s dying light filtered through wet leaves, a mist prism,
refracting a lucent rainbow on the windows facing the northwest, and a long
shadow on the lawn. A flock of crows had gathered on the roof preparing to take
flight.
In the dark master bedroom, Eric Drago lay within a woman’s arms. They
had made love and now slept on a four-poster built by Thomas Chippendale with a
gilded canopy, and drawn eggplant damask drapes. According to rumor, it had belonged
to a French Courtesan who had died of syphilis and sat across from an immense marble
fireplace on the far wall. The new mattress had won the Trillium award despite
its absurd name, Sleeping Beauty Footloose, a playpen for years of pain-free
comfort and debauchery.
Carved into the fireplace were Indian figures in poses from The Kama
Sutra. Two leather divans sat on one of the hand-woven Oriental rugs on the
parquet floor, and Drago had draped the windows with green velvet over
tea-dipped white lace. A Chippendale desk with baroque inlays and a pair tufted
Sheraton chairs stood beside one window. On the far side of the bed, Atwood
exuded the scent a warm loaf of bread and lilac. Serena’s hair flowed as if
black lava over the down pillows in monogrammed silk cases.
Burnished gold and mango damask chairs with Serge covers stood near
the hearth. A painting Neptune and Amphitrite, an original, by Flemish
artist, Jan Gossart, hung over the mantel. Several logs on the lattice
smoldered with an orange glow, ashes rose as if black and white butterflies and
two logs cracked in half with a soft hiss. In front of two walk-in closets were
two large oval pier glasses.
The electronic yelp of the alarm clock jarred Eric from his nap and
the brunette’s arms. Direct sunlight at any hour was unwelcome and he opened
his blue eyes, winced, from a blade of sunlight through the window curtains,
into the otherwise embryonic chamber, and glared at the clock radio: 7:27 PM. He silenced the clock and spoke to
the recumbent woman in a drowse next to him. “Why does every whore and
miscreant believe in God and the Devil? My mother spouted scripture to the men
between her legs while she spat in their faces.”
A smile tugged his lips like a pulled stitch.
Drago had been in the middle of a dream set in Loxahatchee. A young patient had
opened an elderly man’s skull with a cleaver. The victim, Drago’s friend, made Eric
beat the killer with such force he fractured the man’s skull. Pieces of broken
bone lay scattered on the floor as if someone had dropped a glass, and blood
splattered the walls twenty feet from where the two men had died. All the
blood, all the pain, all of it transfigured into a sequence of dreams that
incurred Eric’s heart to kick his ribs. Those violent reminiscences were
half-interred in Drago’s conscious, floating as if a waggling kite carried into
the black sky on Michelline’s anniversary and burrowed beneath the skin of Eric’s
mind, a disease bearing tick, waiting.
Eric’s companion, a famous model, Serena Atwood, lay as if sculpted
from stone. Seminal fluid dripped from his master’s cyclopean eye. A lover had once
called Eric a walking endocrine gland. Did his erections, which sometimes
lasted for hours, indicate a vascular or neurological abnormality? Fortunately,
he had a choice of comely repositories for his dictator’s demands.
Alarmed by Eric’s recurrent headaches, his internist, Dr. Liss,
decided to rule out a possible a pituitary tumor and he had hospitalized Drago a
week ago for test: MRIs, a glucose tolerance test, and multiple blood screens
to rule out abnormal levels of cortisol, human growth hormone, testosterone,
and thyroid function. Drago had seen Liss that afternoon.
Atwood often appeared in Victoria’s Secret, Vogue, Elle,
Cosmopolitan, and myriad television commercials, and she was Drago’s
frequent companion. Atwood had ordered the roses, lilies, and orchids that
Thelma Caldwell, his housekeeper, had arranged in ten vases, according to
Atwood’s instructions. Six vases were Ming porcelain, and the one that got
away, which Steve Wynn whose ten million dollar bid Eric decided not surpass.
Drago raised his muscular arms, yawned, arched his back, and stretched,
inhaling the floral bouquets as if sipping wine. In the hall, Duncan and
Reynard, twin one-hundred and fifty pound Rottweilers, cried at the door. Eric,
who slept nude, crossed the room and opened the double mahogany doors. The dogs
jumped up, and slobbered over his lean muscular body. When Serena slept over,
he banished them from the room where they usually slept with their master. They
dashed through the open door, jumped on the bed, and lapped Serena’s face. She
winced and groaned as she tried fending them off. Drago snapped his fingers,
and they ran to his side. He led them to the door, allowed them to kiss his
cheeks, and told them they would go for a run along the water later. Serena
thanked him, blew a kiss, and collapsed into the pile of pillows.
He had recreated the bathroom
walls using black marble, dark-green malachite pilasters, stenciled brass
molding, and ormolu carvings, with a shell-shaped whirlpool bath, the sunken
tub stood between it and his La Scala T 650 Entertainment Jacuzzi “designed for
individuals with discerning taste.” Compared to Milan’s opera house, “La Scala
is a true marvel in sight and sound.” Drago’s unit provided the discerning owner
and friends with the ultimate home Atheater
and entertainment system.” It ‘showcased’ a 52-inch high-definition TV
and a surround sound system so powerful it made the most subtle nuances
spring to life. It came with a DVD, CD
player, and a floating remote, including fingertip access to all its innovative
features.
Naked, he stretched, yawned, and ran his fingers
through a great mass of wavy hair that almost stroked the vines of his external
obliques, tapering toward his 30” waist and the woven hemp-like muscles of his
abdomen. He emptied his bladder, stretched his calves, and hamstrings by
leaning on an angle against a wall. To maintain his health, he lifted free
weights, ran for six hours a week, remained limber with yoga and he now spread
a bamboo mat on the bathroom floor, and watched a second 42-inch TV on a marble
vanity. Facing the screen, he bent at the waist and pulled back on his toes, he
did one thousand crunches, followed by five sets of two hundred pushups, a
series of slow stretching exercises into a full split.
On the television, he winced as a tank crumpled cars. Mangled bodies
oozed blood had turning the bricks into a rust shade, and the constant
skirmishes around the globe raged on in its infantile madness. Their absurd
conflagration threatened the structure of the Church of the Nativity, the
tabernacle set atop the hallowed ground where one God had been born.
The chaotic rhythm combined the
destructive elements of the Dionysian ritual of the Saturnalia regressing from
joy to the shredding a sacrificial lamb whose blood offering seeped into the
soil, regenerated the foliage, and in its new incarnation the former Bacchanal
had driven seven billion people mad. This chronic propensity toward mass murder
had revived, Drago decided, a modern incarnation of the chorea-like dancing
manias such as the purported curse of John the Baptist and other collective
hysterical disorders. He owned a sixteenth-century rendering by Pieter Brueghel
the elder’s Wedding Dance pooled with The Fall of the Rebel Angels
had predicted the lunacy in a world polluted by runaway aggression. Children
with assault rifles and acne, in the US, who had failed to find their niche in
the group, mitigated their torment by escaping reality by huffing petroleum
distillates, eating MDMA, shaved their heads and slaughtered the peers who had
not embraced with automatic rifles.
President Obama, said the anchor, had annoyed Israeli Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu over Obama’s dithering with economic sanctions when force
was needed to terminate Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.
The volatile nature of man, the random killings, and the mass murders
performed in the name of God, depressed Eric. Unable to cry after Michelline’s
death he would have found relief in the physical detoxification of those tears when
he had seen the streets awash with doctors and nurses treating the wounded and
the dying. Well… it was sheer insanity for murder without art, and tempered by
reason, and without a succinct goal became the repository of mere delusions.
Disgusted by the endless fighting,
Drago changed the channel to 1 NY. He saw Commissioner Rattan of the New York
Police Department award a medal of honor and promoted Lieutenant Jon Lang. Lang
walked to the podium, appeared to have blushed, and when Lang mentioned his
fellow officers, he choked on his tears. He told the audience how a gang of
drug dealers, the Cobras had murdered his partner, who had died in Lang’s arms,
and tears stuck to Lang’s cheeks.
The face of Lang’s wife, Nicole, seated in the front row of the
audience, filled the screen. Drago froze and his heart squirmed in his chest
her personified into a premature baby suffocating. For some reason, these
impressions commingled with the blood and chaos in the world and the vivid
impression of Nicole Lang’s face. He dropped the strap, but he held the razor
as if he were choking it to death. He walked up to the screen and traced Mrs.
Nicole Lang’s face with his forefinger.
“Michelline,” he said as if whispering so no one else in the room
could hear and again he repeated, “Michelline,” as if a prayer.
Eric raised his head and stared at himself in the mirror, watching his
lips and tongue articulated the sounds of his dead sister’s name, “Michelline,
why had you lived, you’d look like Nicole. Lieutenant Detective Jon Lang’s
wife, Nicole, and I will be together soon, very soon, darling.
He
had first seen Nicole several months earlier when he had met Serena for dinner,
he saw Nicole get into a cab with Jennifer Ferragamo, who worked for the same
agency, Wet Heat, as Serena and Nicole. Nicole had used her modeling career to
pay for her education and compose her doctoral thesis, and became a clinical
psychologist who specialized in eclectic therapeutic modalities for troubled,
often emotionally and physically abused, children and earned her doctorate from
NYU/Bellevue Hospital. Although he saw her for an instant, Nicole’s face
haunted him like the bent and cracked picture of his sister he kept in his
billfold pressed to his heart. He planned to pursue Nicole. Eric considered her
marriage to Lieutenant Detective Lang, as in marital intrigues as nothing more
than a mild impediment. Marriage he believed limited his competition to one man
rather than millions of potential suitors.
Eric turned off the TV and assumed a lotus
position, and meditated for fifteen minutes the first of his twice daily periods
of silent contemplation. He stood, rolled up the mat, ambled to the counter,
and stood in front of the full-length mirror. With the sweep of his forefinger,
he inspected his tongue, the insides of his cheeks, and his throat. He observed
the ceremony in the mirror. Naked before the mirror, he inspected his
body for moles, freckles and other indices of ill health, he manicured his
pubic hair, and this tugged him further out into the riptide of his sensual
avarice. He pruned the growth under his arms, and shaved his chest because of
the current androgynous fashion among the women he courted, and hair
occluded the sinew of a body a great sculptor, perhaps even a God, appeared to
have chiseled from granite.
Then
he took his Braun from its cradle, inserted a brush on the metal spindle,
spread a dollop of toothpaste, and massaged his gums and teeth for two minutes,
and thirty seconds brushing his tongue. He held the tip between his thumb and
forefinger so he could examine the movements of his uvula. This was part of his
ritual, but he wasn’t certain why. Drago took a wooden bowl of Yardley shaving
soap and mineral oil from the medicine cabinet, applied a layer of oil to his
face, and used a natural bristle brush and warm water to whip the soap into a
froth he applied to his face. He shaved with a straight razor he sharpened on a
leather strap before each use and enjoyed working the blade against the
leather.
He took the morning’s mail off his Carlton House desk and
sorted it: a telephone bill, LIPA, cable, five credit card statements, and the
latest catalog from Victoria’s Secret whose cover Serena Atwood graced
for the thirty-sixth time. He shredded the junk mail filed the bills in the
desk, and tossed the catalog on the pillow next to Atwood. The catalogs were
now what Lenny Bruce had called stroke books and through a magical
transfiguration, they seduced men into the belief that by purchasing the erotic
lingerie worn by the models their two hundred and twenty pound wives would
become a Serena Atwood.
The sacred and forbidden was replaced by his lust, and his attention
was focused on Serena stretched out on his bed. She lay with her bare hip
jutting out beneath the covers, a hill along the horizon that did not decrease
his poignant desire.
Aroused by seeing Detective Lang’s wife, he whispered in Atwood’s ear.
“Even in your sleep you pose.” He listened to the soft bubbling of salivary
champagne in her throat and nibbled her earlobe. Eric had already withdrawn his
lips when Serena waved her limped hand as if swatting a fly.
She had fallen asleep wearing a soft bra. He
unhinged its bow, kissed her nipples, and she lifted her breasts toward his
voluptuous lips. Once he had roused her, a spider scuttling over his knee
distracted him. He caught it; escorted it to the window, freed it, and paused
to watch the crows extend their wings and take flight in three perfect V-shaped
formations.
He returned to Serena who lay stomach down on the bed.
He clasped her ankles and spread her long legs while her glossy image lay on his
pillow staring up at him, swelling his lust into a madness loitering on the
verge of what he could not control.
Tears,
containing neither sorrow nor joy, dripped from Serena’s eyes and her voice, a
velvet voice rasp. “Don't...Eric...you...”
His tongue traversed the sole of her left foot, loitered
on the tender skin on the underside of her knee, drowning her inhibitions. What
reticence she maintained had dissolved in his powerful hands and reminiscences
of their devotion whose physical expression forced her to muffle her screams of
delight by biting a pillow. She begged, latched onto his thick hair, and tried
tugging him toward the fount of her desire, whose searing heat launched
imagined bifurcated flames.
“Kiss it, please!”
“What?”
“Kiss it!”
His coiled
tongue slithered around her clitoris, avoiding direct contact, and he permitted
a drop, a salivary crest, a caress once removed, that enhanced her delirium
until her words ran together in the syntactical ramblings of a word salad
ending in whimpers, as if a feral cat in heat cried in the distance. Facing her, Drago locked onto Serena’s eyes
but saw Nicole Lang in the emerald green tarn beneath him. Arching his back, he
rose to his knees and came with a sound unlike that of any other man she had
known.
Massaging his
eyes and temples, Serena placed his beautiful face in her lap and her tears
were more frequent than unusual. The shuddering tips of her fingers traced his
faultless features through the curtain of his thick black hair. His jaw’s subtle
upward curve and rounded cheekbones evoked images of Native American Indians.
Dimples began below his cheekbones, straddled his graceful nose and cupped his
lips, beyond which his white teeth glistened from within the frame of his lips,
perfectly formed they struck the common observer as lewd, and his skin tone
evoked red sandstone in the light of early dawn. The bluest eyes she had ever
seen seethed and smiled in the flux of as if mood stones. A white scar from a
razor, held in an enemy's sweaty hand, ran along his neck from below his right
ear just short of his throat’s midline. His nipples were tiny pink buds. At
6'5" and 230 pounds and wrapped tight as a lanyard, Eric's hairless body
resembled an anatomical rendering of all the human muscles.
“You remember I'm visiting Jennifer tonight.”
“Yes send her my best or try to describe the
ineffable.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“It is a migraine. How’s your father doing, I had
forgotten to ask earlier?”
“No change.”
Serena’s father
had slipped into a coma post a ‘perfunctory’ coronary artery bypass.
Knowing his words made little difference, he said, “I've
seen people in comas emerge without a jot of brain damage. What's the matter?”
“I don't want this baby.”
“We’ll give it up for adoption.”
Serena and
Eric played a conjugal diversion she had instigated. Pretending to be siblings,
they went to a club, and selected attractive strangers with whom they often had
sex. Humiliated by her own game, the last time, she awakened the following
morning in a dolor with ideas regarding suicide as she noticed the stranger, or
strangers, who lay beside her where Eric belonged.
“When you
picked up Terri,” Serena reached for her calendar on her night table for the
exact reference. “And I met her lawyer brother, though I suspect he’s her
husband” She paused to located his name, “Roger, I had sex with him and with
you and I'm certain I was ovulating.”
“What about your demand for safe sex?”
“He wore a condom. I watched him, well… I put it on.
It turned the idiot on.”
“Then what’s
the …” Eric knew but it was part of our cultural vernacular to ask.
“It must have
broken because I found semen in my vagina.”
“Didn't you wear your diaphragm as backup?”
“I don't
remember.”
“It's my child.”
“If this baby
isn't yours, I don't want that man’s child. It's my body!”
“Not when
you carry a fetus. It is God's will. You change one atom of his plan and we are
doomed.”
Drago laughed and his mirth, even in jest carried an ominous portent.
Their interdependency had become a fixture in the
cognitive and emotional set of their friendship like an old bedroom set. An
heirloom handed down from an aunt who had received it as wedding gift,
polishing it with obsessive diligence and had placed huge doilies,
candlesticks, and photos of her burgeoning family tree. Inside her silverware
also polished with the devotion of a true believer’s religious fervor.
Serena suffered from some inaccessible psychological torment
for her entire life, but what caused her indelible agony remained unknown and no
amount of introspection would have made them concrete or accessible. Drago
kissed her—he made the common term, soul kiss, a palpable entity, for his
penetration transcended the physical act—and her soared for the duration.
Later, Eric,
in a robe, escorted Atwood down the stairs and across the courtyard to one of
the two garages. She cried while driving to visit Jennifer Ferragamo. Convinced
that their child evolving in her womb represented a dreadful omen, she neither
wanted it or the responsibility, but she feared Drago and his reaction despite
their affection. Part of his mystique was her inability to comprehend the
complexities of his incredible mind and its psychological matrix.
Drago washed his hair in the sink before using a
cholesterol conditioner. He massaged an apricot-scented sculpting gel into his
hair, blow-dried it, combed it straight back, braided it and placed it in a
handmade silver and turquoise hair clip. His cologne, Frenzy, promised to
buckle the knees of prospective objects of desire.
Duncan and Reynard by the closed doors expressed their lament in a growl
and Eric heard Caldwell’s tentative
attempt to soothe them and her weak tapping on the heavy mahogany doors and in
Eric’s case, he slithered along the floor as if on a conveyor belt, to the door.
He was naked but enjoyed Caldwell’s
fluster. “Yes!”
“I am very sorry to disturb you.” Her eyes explored his naked body.
Her embarrassment incurred blush on her gray cheeks as one of the few signs she
was alive. Her skin had wrinkled and thinned like onion skin, her long crooked
nose, her tiny eyes, and angular facial bones evoked images of a pterodactyl. “I
hope I didn’t disturb you.”
“You know you are. I’m a hunk of addled meat to you.”
“It is not as if I’d spent my life as a nun. I was a married woman.”
“You miss the friction, don’t you? You watched us through the keyhole;
you listened by the door or your timing is precise?” Before she answered, Drago
reached out and ran his fingers over Caldwell’s face down to her throat,
pulsing beneath his fingertips.
“There. There. There.”
Caldwell grabbed his wrist
and squirmed as if he was choking her but he was gentle and he withdrew his
hand and said, “The men finished fixing the water main, sir.”
“Good. Tell them clean up their mess or I’ll make them fuck you for a
gratuity.”
He told her to give them a
hundred each from the petty cash box in his office desk drawer.
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