Page 11 of Slow Burn

“Been that kind of a day,” she said. She looked at the bottle—four inches left in it—and waggled it in Robby’s direction. “Gotta friend for this? ’S gonna get lonely.”

“You realize that if I keep giving you drinks, you’re probably going to pass out.” Schoolteacher talk; the brown eyes behind those round glasses looked so damn fucking superior. Velvet flashed a tinsel-bright smile.

“It’s a hobby.”

She drank in silence, watched inches go down her throat as she thought about Ming. Maybe if she got drunk enough, she wouldn’t care about Ming, wouldn’t be scared. Maybe.

Robby sipped like a goddamn PTA mom.

“Y’ live here?” Velvet asked. Robby shook her head. “’S nice. Mean it. Nishe.”

“What do you want?” Robby asked. Velvet faltered to a stop. She couldn’t quite remember, what with the pickup truck and the skinned patches on her knees and the—Burt—

Burt.Just for a second in the bar, Robby had looked right at her, and there hadn’t been any goddamn superior bullshit, there had been understanding. She’d known what Velvet was talking about, all right.

Robby’dseenit.

“Burning,” Velvet said. Robby’s gaze went deep-sea diving to the carpet. “C’mon, don’t. You know. Y’do.”

Her tongue was thick again, sloshing around in her mouth like a squid—now there was a disgusting thought, enough to make her barf. She’d eaten squid once. The taste came back, and she washed it down with vodka.

“Yeah,” Robby said. Velvet leaned forward and had to brace herself with a hand on the coffee table. She dropped the Stoli bottle, but it didn’t matter, there wasn’t enough left in it to spill. “I’ve seen it.”

“Sho—so you seen it, I seen it—how ’bout that? Kinda strange, huh?”

Robby sipped Scotch. She wouldn’t meet her eyes. Velvet hiccuped and covered her mouth. Her fingers felt remote and rubbery and cold.

“Unless it happens alla time,” Velvet finished. Robby looked up, eyes wide. “Doesn’t. Does it?”

Robby got her another bottle. They shared it.

Incident One

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Kevin Baird Tannery eased back into the bubbles of the Jacuzzi and accepted a fluted glass of champagne; a cheap vintage, biting, but good enough for the present company. Little Sharon Rose was not enormously sophisticated about bubbly, or anything else, but she looked appropriate in a string bikini. Ah, that reminded him—he slipped his free hand under the hot skin of the water and touched cloth. There was a catch at the back—one quick twist of his fingers, and the bright pink top floated off on a cloud of bubbles, and little Sharon Rose giggled nervously and smiled at him. He caressed the small brown nubs of her nipples and leaned in for a kiss, a long one, with tongue.

She was clumsy, open mouth trembling and tasting of salt. He circled her nipples with his thumbs, not quite hard enough to hurt, and ran his hand down her flat smooth stomach to the thin bikini briefs. The curly mass of her pubic hair felt springy through the cloth. She made a squeaky sound of protest. He pinched her nipple harder, and smiled.

“Oh—oh—don’t—I—”

“Hush, my dear,” he said gently. The gentleness was really automatic; he no more cared what Sharon Rose had to say than he did what the veal thought about being the main course at dinner. What was important about Sharon Rose was that she was seventeen, and gullible, and easily left behind when that became necessary. Young enough to be piquant, old enough to be excusable. He was forced to save his enthusiasm for younger girls for rare trips out of the country, after the embarrassing contretemps in Dallas, which had only gone to prove that there really was no civilization in the western half of the country.

Of course, there’d been that delicious little Asian girl in Los Angeles—fourteen? Wonderful. A juicy, eager mouth. A very pleasant memory.

Sharon Rose was trying to keep her knees together, remembering too late a strict upbringing. He pried them apart with strong fingers and soft meaningless words. She began to cry, which was tiresome; he stripped the bikini briefs away and probed warm moist flesh, sipped champagne, described for Sharon Rose in detail what he wanted from her. Then he wiped her tears away with characteristic blank gentleness, and aroused himself with memories of the Asian girl—exceptional, that one, really. She’d be fifteen now. Not too old to be exciting.

He stepped out of the Jacuzzi and had Sharon Rose wipe him thoroughly dry. He had to brace himself with one hand on the back of a wrought-iron chair against a new wave of dizziness. He’d been drinking most of the night, of course, but the wine had gone to his head in a very strange way, almost disorienting. The scrape of the towel along his erection distracted him back to his pleasure, and he closed his eyes and remembered the Asian’s mouth, so muscular, the teeth so fragile.

He opened his eyes and looked at Sharon Rose, whose face had blotched unbecomingly from crying, and decided that one night really would be quite enough of her. Draining the last of his champagne, he put the crystal aside.

“I’ll want my robe again,” he told her. She recovered his Neiman Marcus robe—rich fluffed cotton, embroidered with his initials—from the chair where he’d discarded it earlier. The familiar lushness of it along his skin made him instantly harder. He left the front open and motioned Sharon Rose inside, to where the bed waited. She ran ahead, holding her towel over her nude body with appealing modesty-little winks of firm buttocks, the barest glimpse of golden pubic hair—and he decided that it might turn out to be a properly amusing evening, after all.

Annoyingly hot, though. He paused at the thermostat and checked it—set at seventy-five, a perfectly acceptable temperature. He flicked a fingertip against it two or three times, and frowned. Perhaps the Jacuzzi had been hotter than usual, or perhaps it was the wine, but he was really quite overheated—

He looked down at himself—curling chest hair, lightly dusted with gray—a firm flat stomach—the bobbing club of his engorged penis, revealed by the open slit of the robe.

How odd that the memory of the Asian girl made him remember the smell of mu-shu pork. But it was more than a memory—it smelled like—

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