I Let Him Fuck You

“I let them fuck you because I think you need to be reminded that you’re my whore,” Edward said, unprovoked by anything that had been said or done in the last hour or so. The statement hung in the air like a particularly noxious fart.

“Get out,” Edward said to the man with abated desire who lay in bed with Frederica. He put a pistol on his lap as an inducement for the naked man to leave.

Frederica did not know the man’s name, nor did she care to. The man followed Edward’s direction. He rolled to the edge of the bed, pulled off his condom and dropped it on the floor. Then he pulled on his pants, gathered the rest of his clothing in his arms and let himself out of the motel room and into the slowly breaking dawn. Gone forever, the only evidence of his passing was the soiled prophylactic and the hundred dollar bill he’d put on the dresser before the fun began. The moment the man shut the door Frederica could not even remember what he looked like. It didn’t matter.

Frederica watched Edward lean back in the cheap motel chair and look at her. No doubt he was waiting for some kind of reaction.

“You miserable bastard,” she finally said, angry at herself for rising to the bait. Where most women would have covered up, she was comfortable in her nudity when she was arguing. “You made me this way.”

“You were always this way, Frederica. You just needed help.” Edward began to undress.

“What the hell are you doing?” Frederica asked, wrinkling her face at his growing nudity.

“The room’s paid for until eleven,” he said, plopping himself in bed next to her. His scent combined with the other man’s sweat and the stink of his lust. Edward ran the back of his hand up her side from her waist to her neck, pressing his erection into her thigh.

“I don’t want to,” she said.

“I didn’t ask.”

The morning was wet and cold to Frederica, and contaminated too. Her hair was still damp from her shower. Maybe it was her imagination, or maybe it was in her nostrils, but the air was tainted and smelled of bleach and semen. She zipped her jacket up to her neck and tried not to breathe through her nose.

Edward followed her out, not bothering to shut the door behind him, as was his habit. Once he had used something up he tossed it aside without a second thought. Frederica wondered when she would be tossed away, left to rot at the side of the road like an empty beer can.

They breakfasted at a Denny’s across the street from the motel. Frederica was ravenous, but she held herself back and ordered only coffee and a muffin. If she ordered more, Edward would cancel the order and lecture her about keeping her body in fighting trim. That’s what he called it. As for himself, he had no such compunctions, and he ate a lumberjack’s breakfast right in front of her.

“Can I have a piece of your sausage?” Frederica asked.

“No.”

“Not even if I ask nicely? A little cleavage? A nip slip?”

“Breakfast and a show? Not likely,” Edward said, shoveling in a forkful of pancakes. The people in the next booth might have swiveled their heads upon overhearing their conversation, but they barely reached Frederica’s threshold of perception. Any feelings of shame had long since been pounded out of her on mattress after cheap mattress.

As soon as Edward wiped the last of his greasy breakfast off of his lips he rose to go. Frederica followed as mindlessly as a gosling. He paid for breakfast with the hundred dollar bill from last night’s trick and didn’t bother to go back to the table to tip the waitress. Like the motel room, it did not matter to him. He would never see that waitress again. Even so, Frederica felt bad for her. She knew what it was like to perform a service without compensation.

They crossed the street back to the motel and got into Frederica’s car.

“Where to?” she asked as she stirred the engine to life.

“Just drive,” Edward said. “That way.” He pointed.

She did as she was told. They drove for about an hour, silent except for Edward barking out a direction every now and then. Frederica had no idea where she was. Edward made sure of that with his confusing routes. Most of the license plates were from Pennsylvania, but other than that she could be anywhere in the state.

They drove across a featureless length of highway.

“When did I start being your whore?” Frederica asked.

“You were always my whore.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes perfect sense. Take the next exit. We need some gas.”

Moments later they were pulled up next to a pump in an otherwise empty gas station. Edward went in and talked to the guy behind the counter. Frederica watched the pantomime of Edward’s sales pitch. After a few minutes, he gave her a thumbs-up. She got out and pumped gas into the car until it was full. Afterward, she walked into the station without waiting for Edward to bark any orders. She knew what was coming next. She went straight to the women’s bathroom and didn’t lock the door behind her.

After a minute of waiting the door opened and the man who had been behind the counter walked in. He locked the door. Frederica handed him a condom, pulled up her dress, pulled down her panties and leaned over the sink. The man was awkward. She guided him into her with her hand. She held him back as much as she could to give Edward time to climb over the counter and clean out the cash register, but it was still over quickly. She could see the pain of his orgasm in the restroom mirror above her own bored features.

After he came she arranged her clothing and stepped out of the bathroom, leaving him with a confused and quizzical look on his face. As she stepped through the aisle to the door she helped herself to some Butterfingers and Slim Jims.

Edward was already in the car waiting for her. Maybe someday there’d be no Edward. Maybe someday there’d be no car, but this wasn’t the day. She handed over the snacks, started the car and pulled out onto the road toward the highway. She didn’t bother with a seat belt. She was long past such minutia.

“You whored me out for forty dollars in gas and whatever was in the register,” Frederica remarked. “Again.”

“Fair trade. I love the barter system.”

Half an hour later the highway they were on intersected with the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Edward instructed her to get on it and head east.

“Am I going to have to blow the guy in the toll booth?” she asked as she took a ticket from the automated dispenser and put it under the visor. Edward laughed.

“If you could, you would.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“If I said so, you would,” he said firmly.

The hills of Pennsylvania rolled by, grey and brown in the latter part of autumn, adding nothing good to the general mood inside the car.

Reading, Pennsylvania was a shit-hole of a town, and the dive they were in was the shit-hole of all dives, all skanks and strung out alcoholic bums and a bartender whose sleaze was a living and thriving parasite. Edward sat at the bar while Frederica sat at a sticky table in a rarely swept corner of the joint.

Edward made his way around the bar, singling out potential customers and giving them some variation of The Pitch. Over the course of an hour a lot of heads swiveled in her direction. It took about an hour for him to hook a john. The man looked nervous. Edward had to stop him from taking out his wallet right there at the bar. He took the john by the elbow and guided him to Frederica’s tiny, dusty table.

“So what do you think?” Frederica asked, lighting her first cigarette of the night. She had no enthusiasm for the potential transaction, and she made no attempt to put any into her voice. She took a hit of the cigarette and blew the smoke off to the side.

“You’re very pretty,” the john said, almost apologetically. “But I don’t know. I never, I mean, I’ve never paid for it, you know?” His voice seemed to waver and shake. Frederica noted how out-of-place he was in the bar and wondered what he was doing there.

“Me neither,” Frederica said. She laughed a brittle little laugh. Edward cut his eyes at her.

“A hundred for a throw plus the motel room,” Edward said, laying down the law. “Oral is okay, anal is not. You can fuck her and she’ll suck you off, but no rough stuff.

“Of course not,” said the john.

“You’ll follow us to the motel,” Edward continued. “And you pay up before you giddy-up.”

All parties were agreed.

They left the bar together. Frederica and Edward waited for the john to get to his car and they caravaned around Reading before finally finding a seedy motel in a seedy neighborhood. Edward had a second sense for these things. Once there, Edward touched the john for forty dollars to pay for the room. After he indicated the room number with his fingers, they converged at room six. Edward opened the door and the john followed him in.

By the time Frederica made it inside the john had Edward in a choke hold. Edward clawed at the arm around his throat ineffectually, thrashed left and right for a few moments, and then the john helped him gradually to the floor. Frederica did not scream, nor run, nor do anything but shut the door.

“Is he dead?” she whispered.

“I hope so,” the john replied.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Of course not,” he said, mimicking the innocent routine that had taken them in so completely at the bar only thirty minutes before.

“Why?” Frederica asked.

“I didn’t like him. I didn’t like the way he talked about you. His pimpishness offended me.”

“He was my husband.”

“Some husband,” the john said.

They stood looking at each other for a minute.

“Do you still want to fuck me?” Frederica asked.

“Yes,” the john said.

They had fast, strenuous sex above Edward’s corpse. Frederica came again and again as she thought about Edward lying dead on the floor. Exhausted, they slept for a few hours. When Frederica awoke, the john was putting a hundred dollars in twenties on the nightstand.

“You don’t have to pay, you know,” Frederica said.

“I know.”

“Would you like some company?”

“No, thanks,” the man laughed. He left. She listened to his car start, listened to him drive away.

Naked, she bent over Edward and rifled his body for anything of value. She took a shower, imagining she was scrubbing Edward off of herself even though she had to put the same soiled clothes back on. She folded all the money she had and stuck it in her bra. She wiped down the room and got into her car, leaving the key and a tip on the dresser and closing the door behind her.

She let herself into her car. She was free. The tricks she turned would be her own.