Are You Loathsome Tonight? by Poppy Z. Brite Read Free Book Online

dinnertime, and apparently this was a residence hotel: the sad smells of poverty cuisine seeped into the hall, frying meat and Wonder Bread, the sickly-cheese aroma of canned spaghetti.
    He pressed the barrel to the slow steady throb in the crotch of his jeans, and his skinny body shook with a rush of heat nearly nauseating in its intensity. He was a criminal stalking the night, incapable of mercy, bristling with murderous intent. He was a soldier, grimy and desperate, under attack from an enemy more insidious than any his grandfather had known.
    Billy twisted the knob. It slid through his sweaty fingers, unlocked. He pushed the door open.
    The girl was sitting at the mirror, her reflection indistinct in cloudy glass, brushing the long midnight spill of her hair. The brush slipped from her fingers, thudded on the worn carpet. The bruise-colored eyes went wide.
    â€œWho are you?” Her trembling hand clutched at the front of the filmy white nightgown she'd changed into. Beneath that, a lace bra cupped smallish tender breasts, nipples stiff with terror or arcane desire. She was playing along beautifully. “How did you get in here?"
    Billy showed her the gun and watched her cringe. Her face went pale and the irises of her eyes showed a panicky rim of white. God, she was good.
    â€œShut up, whore.” He spat the words in the cruelest tone he could muster. Tears darkened those eyes like a summer storm rolling in. Billy almost expected them to stain her cheeks inky purple as they spilled over, but no, they were clear as rain. With the Luger's barrel he gestured at the gown. “Take that off."
    â€œPlease,” she whispered.
    "Shut up!" Billy lunged at her, grabbed double handfuls of fabric and tried to rip the gown off her. The flimsy weave resisted him. Enraged, he rent it with his teeth, filled his mouth with the bland dry flavor of nylon. The gown fell away. Billy's lips brushed lace, skin. His nostrils caught the lemony tang of sweat. Maybe she really was afraid of him.
    If she wasn't, she would be.
    He pressed the barrel hard against the girl's breastbone, just above the visible flutter of her heart. When she flinched away, he saw a thin red circle already pressed into the flesh. The ghost of a bullet wound. He thought his penis would soon burst the confines of hot denim.
    â€œTake off your bra."
    â€œPlease,” she said again, barely audible.
    He jammed the gun into her face, into her soft mouth. The barrel smeared her lips across her teeth, and blood blossomed, spilled, ran in thin bright streaks down her chest. Her eyes were huge, gone from bruise to an impossible purple-black, the color of rotting flesh.
    â€œI said, shut up!"
    Her hands spidered to the frontal clasp of her bra. When he nudged her again with the gun's barrel, she undid the clasp and let the scrap of lace and elastic slide off her shoulders.
    The girl had no breasts.
    With the gun still pointed at her heart, Billy bent to retrieve the bra, stared into the gossamer cups. Flesh-colored padding, with hard little dots of pink rubber like pencil erasers where the nipples should be. Mastectomy? But there were her real nipples, small and chocolate-brown on the flat unscarred chest. They didn't sew the nipples back on after a mastectomy. Did they?
    He yanked down her panties, heard lace rip and elastic give way. There : glossy black delta of hair at the juncture of matte-pale thighs, unadorned, unencumbered. Between those thighs he would find no threat, only fleshy frills and folds opening on an absence of flesh, on a hole, on nothingness. Right? Right?
    He pushed her back on the lumpy mattress and forced her legs apart. He stared and stared; he could not stop staring.
    The soft flesh was dimpled where testicles had been pushed up into the groin. A rubbery penis stretched taut as chewed gum, wedged all the way back into the crack of the ass. No, not wedged . Billy saw the gleam of metal and bent to look closer.
    The head of the penis