Read Online Dressed to Kill by Campbell Black - Free Book Online

highrollers with fat billfolds and an interest in Nazi souvenirs, leathers, wetsuits, riding crops. All that stuff made her sick. Sometimes she’d thought, with surprise: Hey, I’m straight, no kinks, look at me.
    She stepped inside the apartment. The guy closed the door.
    “I’m Liz,” she said. Fly me to the moon.
    “Ted,” the man said.
    “Good to know you.” She looked round the apartment quickly. Average place, lived-in, nothing fancy. The guy wasn’t rich, he wasn’t poor; just another In-Between. For a moment she looked at the far wall where some kind of religious icon hung. She went closer to it: a small plaster cast of the Virgin Mary, gaudy in color, the lips bright red and the eyes too blue to be real—like the kind of souvenir you imagined pouring out of Mexican factories in their millions.
    The man laughed in an embarrassed way. “It’s not mine,” he said.
    “No?”
    “It’s not even my apartment. I borrowed it from a friend. He’s in Maine and I’m only in town for a day or two . . .”
    It’s okay. Save the lengthy explanations, she thought. Then she sensed it in the air, his nervousness, a certain tension, the need to ramble on to no real purpose. She turned away from the little statue and smiled at him. The designer of the figure had contrived to make Christ’s mother look like a Tijuana hooker. Some kind of achievement in that, she thought.
    “You never used the service before?” she asked.
    “No, not exactly,” he said. He had his hands in the pockets of his pants.
    “They told you what I did and what I didn’t do?” she said.
    He nodded. “It’s okay,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I don’t have any . . . well, what you might call exotic needs.”
    “Where’s the bedroom?” she asked.
    “Um, that door there.”
    She went briskly towards it. She pushed it open, stepped inside, moved towards the window. The drapes were drawn; red cotton burning in the slipping-down sun. Neat: the bedspread matched the drapes and the drapes matched the rug. A blood-red room. She thought she remembered it from a nightmare. She called out, “Hey, are you coming through?”
    He shuffled into the doorway. She sat down on the bed, watching him; he was as wary as some animal whose life has been one of avoiding larger predatory beasts. The meek were supposed to inherit something, she thought. She couldn’t remember what it was exactly. She smiled at him: the full dazzle this time, the come-on.
    “Sit down. Here. Beside me.” She patted the bedspread.
    He moved cautiously towards her.
    “Did they tell you I got over my leprosy?” she said.
    He stared at her for a moment. She could hear the penny drop in his head. Then he smiled.
    “Cured. Completely cured.”
    “Yeah,” he said. He watched her as she undid the buttons of her blouse. “Let me do that,” he said. “Is it okay if I do that?”
    “Feel free,” she answered.
    She watched his fingers tremble with her buttons. He was hopeless. She had to help him, first with the buttons, then with the buckle of her belt. With any luck, she thought, this could be a severe outbreak of premature ejaculation and I could be gone before the statutory hour had faded away . . . She lay back across the bedspread in her underwear, watching him hover above her. There were times when this was the worst moment, when all the fears you’d managed to keep hidden came like bats to the surface. Maybe he’d pull pantyhose from his pocket and wrap them around your neck, or pull a switchblade and stick it between your ribs. There were those times when, at your most vulnerable, you wanted to shut your eyes and drift away and imagine there was nobody else in the room with you, you were all alone; sometimes you imagined an old lover, somebody familiar and boring and wonderfully safe. Melvin Pike, for example. Sweet old Melvin, who had taken that graceful flower called virginity one bitingly cold Chicago night beneath the bleachers at the high-school football