Page 2 of Bitter’s Sweet

“Because you’d have remembered me.”

“You are so full of yourself.”

“And yet here you are, so full of me.”

She makes a noise, something between a curse and a prayer, and presses her forehead against my chest as I continue to thrust into her softness. I feel her smile there even in the dark. That is the thing about women. They might hate what you say, but they love when you make them feel like the only woman alive dumb enough to survive you.

For a little while, at least.

I don’t promise more than that.

Never again.

The dark gets hotter. The walls around us hold the sound close. There is music outside somewhere, muffled through concrete and wood and distance. A jukebox in the main room. Somebody hollering over a game of pool. Boogie’s laugh carrying because the bastard has a laugh like a haunted house door.

The clubhouse is alive out there.

In here, it is just us and the dark.

She whispers my name once like she regrets learning it.

I take that as a compliment.

By the time we’re done, I pull out and tie up the condom so I don’t ruin the fabric. She’s breathing hard enough to fog hell’s mirror, and I’m grinning like the devil just paid me a personal visit and left satisfied.

For a second, neither of us moves.

That second is always my favorite.

Not because it means something. It doesn’t. That is why I like it.

A second can’t lie too long, can’t ask for breakfast, can’t look at you like maybe there is more underneath your cut than a bad reputation and worse decisions.

A second just sits there, warm and quiet, then dies before it gets needy.

“You alive?” I ask.

She smacks my chest again, harder this time. “Barely.”

“Need a medic?”

“You got one?”

“Crypt. But he’s ugly, mean, and has cold hands.”

“Then no.”

“Good choice.”

“You always bring women back here?”

“No.”

That is mostly true. Sometimes I bring them outside. Sometimes to the room behind the embalming display. Once to the back of the hearse during a storm, but that one was a mistake because Ghoul stole the keys to the old thing and we were stuck in there until morning with nothing but a funeral fan and a half-empty bottle of peach moonshine.

This place, though?

This is new.