Chapter 8

8

Jonathan

I am not even inside her when I start to feel it again: my encroaching death. Not la petite mort . The big one.

But I am in a little bit of a situation. A woman is straddling me, on a luggage shelf, on a fast-moving train.

It is not my first time in a sticky situation. It is not the first time I have had to think fast.

She strokes my dick and I have to decide. And I do.

Go with it.

I have never been a go-with-the-flow guy, but today I am playing against type. It might be the Ecstasy. It might be the woman. It might be my heart, which will not stop stopping. I feel it sink now in my chest, sucking my rib cage down with it, like my whole chest might collapse.

Maybe the bullet moved, drawn like a magnet down toward my dick, where everything else seems to be going: my blood, my nerves, my brain.

I start to lose consciousness. My eyelids flutter.

"Are you okay?" she says.

"Slap me," I say, a little slurred. She looks unsure, then shrugs. She slaps me with impressive force. I gasp. My heart starts. "Thank you."

"No problem." She smirks. Then she bends forward. Her hair tickles my neck. "Are you sure you can handle this? You seem a little fragile."

Her words spark in my brain. You see, I am a cold-blooded killer, and there is nothing that incites me more than someone calling me chicken.

"I can fuck you as hard as you want," I say. She seems a little taken aback, but then she grins.

She expertly slips on a condom, then takes my dick and guides it inside her. She bends over me again, puts her lips against my ear, tells me, "I want you to fuck me pretty damn hard."

I can feel my consciousness receding again. My heart sinking in my chest. I cannot even feel it beating anymore. It may have stopped when I took all those pills in the bathroom. I might be a chicken with its head cut off. But I said I could fuck her as hard as she wanted.

I grab her waist, wrap my leg around her leg so she stays with me and I flip her on her back.

She seems impressed. "Neat trick."

"I have a few more." I start to move. "Tell me if it's too much."

"Oh, you'll know."

There is an art to thrusting, although it sounds straightforward. The art of thrusting, the art of sex and pleasure and anything that makes you gasp or makes you smile, is in the element of surprise. You want to beat an unusual rhythm—but even more important than that is to tailor your beat to your audience, to your sexual dance partner. You have to make sure they can keep up.

She can, and I feel this immense relief—a pleasure wave all through me—because the thing about sex is, you never know if someone will be good until you try them. And sometimes you try and find you never stop trying. And it is an arduous climb to an orgasm. You still feel the satisfaction of the achievement, but there is no joy in the journey. And is that not what life and sex are all about?

Once I have established that my partner can keep up, I have to feel out what she likes. I do this by marking all the moments when she melts like warm wax in my hands.

When I thrust forward.

When I curl left.

When I pull back, as if to leave her, and then when I come back.

You have to know when to stop. Stopping is just as important as going. Patience is the biggest secret to incredible sex.

Patience and pursuit, of every angle, every appendage, every pressure point and type of pressure. Until you know everything about them. All the important things, anyway.

The spectacular thing is, every body is different. A new experience, a different taste. But every body makes you feel the same. Godlike, the way killing sometimes does. Sex feels that way every time.

Eva likes:

When I run my thumb down the base of her skull.

When I suck her tongue.

When I pulsate her clit.

When I call her sexy. "So fucking sexy."

She comes fast, so I know she was already mostly there.

The train shudders with her. She forgets herself and grips my shoulder—the one with a bullet in it. Which is unfortunate for me, but I feel I cannot complain. I cannot stop her. It would not be fair. Her pleasure is more important than my pain.

When she comes around, she notices her hand. "Sorry," she murmurs. "No touching."

"S'okay," I say.

She struggles to find a place to put her hands, then puts them on my face. She pulls it down and kisses my lips. "What do you want me to do?" she says. "I'll do anything—believe me, I mean anything ."

I do believe her. I do not usually meet women like this—who am I kidding? I never meet women like this. She is so wholly here ; I wonder how she has survived this long. It is a dangerous world for people without boundaries. I know that better than most.

The promise alone of anything I want should be enough to send me over the edge, but it is possible I am too drugged to come. I am not too drugged to feel fucking fantastic as I move inside her, which seems a little unfair. I cannot make her work forever.

I am trying to decide just what I want her to do. I wish I had come prepared. I wish I had known this moment would one day come. It seems like an unforgivable blind spot on my part. I have a long list of fetishes, but which is the most fetish ? Which is the absolute pinnacle?

I have this dream of taking her with me, taking her all across Europe so we can find out, discover the landscape of our mutual pleasure. We could fuck in so many places. I could sneak away in the morning to commit murder, then come home with croissants. We could have breakfast in bed. It is a dream so provincial that I feel almost ordinary.

Abstractly, I am a little surprised by the sudden pivot of my dreams. The thought of seeing someone every day tends to terrify me. At first I think it might be love, but then I remember it is definitely Ecstasy.

I start to come up again. But this time I do not have to fight it. This time I can just let it ride.

I am moving inside her. She is moving with me. The train expands around us, echoing, throbbing, screeching along the tracks.

"You're perfect," I tell her. "You don't have to do anything."

The train seems to move faster, and I move faster with it, until I feel it bleed into my skin, until I am a part of it, this delicious agony machine. She curls beneath me as if she feels it, too.

Darkness snaps over us. Either we are in a tunnel or I have gone blind. I feel every screech of every wheel like a hit of pleasure through my nerves and I am on fire; I am burning up. My heart starts hiccuping in my chest. My chest is as tight as a fist and I am peaking.

Higher and higher until I am so high, there are only two options: come or die.

And I am not even sure which one I choose when I collapse over her. Until waves of pleasure rack through me like electric jolts, like the shudders of the train.

The tunnel opens. The light comes through.

She is stroking the back of my neck. "Damn," she says. "Contact high."

I lie beside her on the luggage rack. She burrows her head into my chest. It hurts, but I cannot stop her. I like her and the pain.

She sighs with a shudder. The lights grow dim.

Then they go out.