That's because he didn't love you for s.h.i.t, Vic hissed. Little f.u.c.k didn't even know what love is.

No, Vic, she went on, working the knife deeper and deeper into his heart. You're the one who doesn't know what love is. If you did, you wouldn't have to chase after every piece of a.s.s that comes down the pike. . . .

At which point he went whoa, whoa, whoa. Excuse me just a G.o.ddam minute here. Do you see me chasing after anyone now? Do you see me even looking at anybody else?

And she said of course not. Of COURSE you want me now. You want me because you know you can't have me. But if I was to give in for EVEN ONE SECOND, you'd start chasing around again the minute my back was turned. And you know why? Because this isn't about us at all. It's about YOU. It's about what YOU want.

You're wrong, he started to say; but Nora would have none of it. And you know how I know? she continued, setting up the coup de grace. Because for all your big talk, you'll never give me what I want.

Oh? he said snidely. And just what the f.u.c.k do you want?

I want you the f.u.c.k out of my life, she said. I want to never have to see your face again. Because I hate you, you lousy son of a b.i.t.c.h. I hate you for stealing my life from me. I hate you for stealing Michael from me. Every decent thing I ever tried to have in this life, you stole from me, or you destroyed.

And I will never forgive you. Not now.

Not ever.

It was impossible to quantify the depth of his damage at those words. There was no bottom to the pain. He tried to speak, could not. He wished he could cry, but that too was beyond him.

You ever mention his name again, Vic had managed at last, and I swear I'll kill you.

To which Nora had answered I wish you would. . . .

She had been looking in his eyes when she said it. She was looking in his eyes now, as well. And if there was any difference at all, it was probably because now the shoe was entirely on the other foot.

He looked at her, in the dim light of the boardwalk patio, while the salty breeze rustled through the tangled ma.s.s of her hair. Nora's hair was like dancing snakes of fire in a ratty nest of their own device, framing the exquisite face gone pinched and sour with too much drink and unquenchable despair. A year and a half was a very long time to live with such vehemence burning within.

She had let herself go, to an extent far beyond what Vic would ever have dreamed her vanity would have permitted. Bitterness and gravity had done the rest, minutely resculpting her features with delicate inlaid spider lines of startling unpleasantness. She was still technically beautiful-at least in the right light and under the right influence. But she did not look good.

"What are you thinking?" she asked him now; and if she didn't know exactly what was on his mind, she at least had gotten a whiff of its tenor. Vic had never been good at muzzling his rage; a tight rein on it was about the best he could do.

"To be real honest," he said, lying only slightly, "I was thinking it would be real nice if you just stopped asking me what I was thinking. Do you think that might be okay?"

Nora nodded her head, understanding completely. "That's okay," she said, then added, "I gotta go pee." When she stood, the look in her eyes was a powerful mixture of compa.s.sion and regret. He found himself thinking of his gla.s.s and her face again-just a stray, pleasant fantasy-even as he smiled and nodded his a.s.sent.

She crossed to his side of the table and, surprisingly, leaned over to kiss him on the mouth. As she did she ran one hand across his chest, down his torso to his lap. It sent a cold rush of numbness arcing through him, made something clench in the vicinity of his heart.

"I'll be right back," she said; and when he didn't respond, she just headed for the patio door and the rest rooms within. She was weaving slightly, as was normal these days. Vic didn't even bother to watch her go.

Once he was alone, he exhaled heavily and leaned his head in his hands. Christ, but he was tired. Tired of her, tired of life, tired of the miserable endless hamster wheel his existence had become.

He had to think of something. Whatever it was, it would have to be slick. Nora's instincts were good; even drunk as a b.i.t.c.h, she was light-years beyond the precocious farmgirl c.u.n.t he'd happened upon in the Bitterroot Mountains, oh so long ago. If only her daddy could see her now . . .

Probably his best bet, Vic mused, would be to kill her when she nodded out. It wouldn't do to have her fighting back.

Besides, why the f.u.c.k should I give her the chance? he added, thinking bitterly back on last night. What a waste. What a G.o.dd.a.m.ned tragedy. Nora didn't give out second chances. Why should he?

The clock read eleven forty-six. He wondered where his waitress was, that miserable stupid cow. He needed his drink, and he needed it now.

Vic ran his tongue idly over his teeth, tasted whiskey and a little something else that was wedged way in the back, between his rear molars. It took him a second to place, another to index, yet a third for the pain to set in.

It was the pain of intimate recognition.

Her name was Tristana, or at least that's what she said. She was working as a dancer at one of those 17th Street tiny bars when he'd wandered, quite by accident, into her life.

It was his fifth night in Virginia Beach, and Nora had remained true to her now-established nightly pattern of drinking herself insensate and blacking out by twelve-fifteen. Vic, to be honest, had been pretty d.a.m.n good over the very long year since that fateful dialogue had transpired, not even scarfing so much as a bit of stray poontang, even when he thought he could get away with it.

Still, he had to admit that at this point it was more a matter of principle than of actual fidelity. And with all this excess cash and free time on his hands, he would be good and G.o.dd.a.m.ned if he was gonna sit on his hands for two weeks, watching the Playboy Channel and listening to her snore.

Fishnet's was your standard rubbernecking flesh market, designed to squeegee greenbacks off the tourists and trillions of h.o.r.n.y grab-a.s.s sailors who regularly poured out of Norfolk Naval Base. The latter were pejoratively referred to by the locals as squids, and they were absolutely everywhere you looked: roaming in packs, sniffing for action. Trying to scratch the itch.

They were tough, drunk, rowdy sons of b.i.t.c.hes, but Vic waded easily through their ranks; even the dumbest and meanest among them seemed to sense that he wasn't someone to be messing with. The masculine reek of barely bridled l.u.s.t and lonely desperation was thick enough to choke on, but Vic enjoyed adding a little fear to the mix. The old city ordinance that only allowed bikini dancing had recently been repealed, so there was plenty of what he was looking for on display.

But out of all the hydroponically grown beach bunnies, obvious t.i.t jobs and aerobicized abs of steel, there was one that stood out from the pack. She was a lithe punk b.i.t.c.h with a dangerous body and att.i.tude to burn. He liked her aggression, her panther-like strut. He liked her china-white skin, her leather G-string and close-cropped blue-black hair with the long braided forelock that she could crack like a whip. Most of all, he liked the fact that she utterly intimidated the natives, even as she got them off.

And she even came with her own nose ring.

Her first time past, he slipped her a fifty and gave her a bemused look. The rest of the night, she played to him whenever she was up. He made it worth her while. Still, the vibe was there, the unmistakable underlying message: yeah, so you're hot and you're loaded, but I'm working and this is business. . . .

Vic watched her all night, then left, ten minutes before closing time, without even learning her name. He made sure that she saw him go, though, nodded to her as he waltzed out the door.

The next night he was back, with more cash to flash and more casually smoldering glances. Vic dropped another couple of hundred or so, this time in tens and twenties, drawing it out for effect. As before, his attention was focused solely upon her, as though the other dancers were nothing but background detail, shifting shapes and colors that only served to highlight her presence, her perfection. And again, at the end of the night he left, with no more than a glance and a nod and that sly, knowing smile.

When he showed up the third night she came to him during one of her breaks, introduced herself. Vic said he'd like to talk to her, maybe take her out for a bite to eat. She gave him a look-part cynicism, part intrigue-and said she'd think about it.

When closing time came, Vic hovered at the door just long enough for her to see that yes, he was leaving now. Then he departed, winking at the sumo-sized bouncer at the door on his way out. He enjoyed watching the seismic tremor of confusion as it rumbled through all that blubber.

She emerged, some twenty minutes later. Vic was waiting. When he asked her to walk with him, she raised an eyebrow warily. Vic smiled his most disarmingly dangerous smile, pouring on the charm.

But in the end, he got the feeling that she came not because he had bamboozled her, but because she'd decided to. She had weighed the risk, decided that yes, she would take the chance. Her att.i.tude was a refreshing change of pace.

As they strolled down to the boardwalk Vic played the part of the perfect gentleman, bereft of even the tiniest whiff of sleaze. And though he never so much as laid a hand on her as they walked along the moonlit beach, he touched her nonetheless. He asked just the right amount of questions, gave the impression of being genuinely interested in her responses. Which, in fact, he was.

She said she was twenty-three, though she looked more like seventeen. She told him that dancing was a temporary fix, a fallback position to get her through this little rough patch in her life. It appeared that, up until three weeks before, she'd had a lucrative gig as a dominatrix at the only first-cla.s.s dungeon in town: whipping the flaccid b.u.t.ts of upstanding Southern businessmen, administering serious c.o.c.k-and-ball discipline to lawyers, evangelical TV hosts, local politicians, and touring music stars. These were people who wielded power in their daily lives, and then paid dearly to pretend to relinquish that power for a couple of carefully controlled hours at a stretch: being made to crawl and beg and squeal, to excrete on command or swallow disgusting things, to admit what slime they really were without having to change their methodology a whit. Mea culpa, mea culpa, my transgressions are legion. And then back to ruthlessly ruling the world.

Vic was utterly fascinated. He asked her what had gone wrong. A cloud pa.s.sed over her features as she described her fall from grace. It had basically to do with a long-standing problem of hers: an intense contempt for authority figures. Basically, if she couldn't beat them senseless, she had no use for them.

Unfortunately, the madam who ran the place didn't double as one of Tristana's clients. This was a woman who desperately needed to be tortured, then mangled, then shot; but reality, in this instance, was not willing to oblige. In the battle of wills between Tristana and the dragon lady, there was no G.o.d or G.o.ddess to turn to, nor any justice to be found. The next thing she knew, she was out on her a.s.s, hustling up s.e.xual grunt work just to keep the bills paid.

Vic was more than sympathetic. He was strangely touched. There was something about this girl that spoke to a very deep part of him. He admired her soul-fire, her innate survivor's instinct, her disarming lack of confusion and pretense. At first he thought maybe she reminded him of Nora, back in the good old days: before Nora'd gone and changed the rules on him.

And then, he realized: this woman was nothing like Nora, with her constant whining about fidelity and her nattering biological clock. Tristana was no good-girl-gone-bad bulls.h.i.t artist; Tristana was just bad. She knew who she was, apologized to no one for it, and reveled in her edgy ident.i.ty.

In short, she reminded Vic of Vic.

For the first time in decades, Vic felt the internal stirrings of something profound. They walked and talked for hours. And then, just when the vibe built to a head and he was about to make his move, she surprised him by taking his hand and leading him down to the shadows beneath the abandoned steel pier. It was there that she pulled him down onto the cool, damp sand. It was there that they did the raging bone dance ceaselessly till four A.M., their screams buried by the pounding surf. She was so fine, so wet and savage, that he never wanted to stop thrusting inside her.

But alas, reality beckoned with the first hint of sunrise. Reluctantly, he bid her adieu, then rinsed himself clean in the ocean green. He was back in his hotel room by a quarter to six, her phone number tucked in his pocket, his head still humming from the glory of his new l.u.s.t for life.

When Vic awoke, sometime after noon, he was unsurprised to find Nora rapidly losing her appeal. There was something about women who no longer gave a s.h.i.t. When she finally dragged herself out of bed at four, Vic hustled her out for a late margarita brunch.

She was out like a light by ten.

And Vic was on his way.

As fate would have it, Tristana had the night off. She met him on the boardwalk, led him to a seedy little motel on Baltic Avenue, the kind that featured kitchenettes and weekly rentals and catered to a transient clientele. And indeed, Tristana's s.p.a.ce gave no indication of rootedness; everything was geared to up and run at the drop of a hat.

The apartment itself was Spartan and spare, the sole nod to individuality evident in the photos she'd plastered across the bedroom walls: a variety of Tristana-in-bondage poses, playing both dominant and submissive roles with equal skill and fervor. As she showed him her collection of whips and d.i.l.d.os and nipple-clamps, she went on to explain that you couldn't really top until you'd bottomed, felt the experience from the pay-end of the whip.

Vic was fascinated; so much so that when she brought out a pair of handcuffs he actually let her slip one on him, click it shut. Something stirred in the silt of his soul; he took the other side of the cuffs and fastened it on her wrist. When she led him to the bed, he let her.

As she laid him down she asked about his many tattoos, who the mysterious woman was who ruled over so much of his body.

No one important, he replied. Not anymore.

She regarded him skeptically, searching for clues. He gave her none. She's in the past, he said. Now there's only you.

Only you.

They spent the rest of the night driving each other completely insane. The s.e.x was phenomenal, worlds away from his standard prey. In the s.p.a.ce of a single night Tristana taught him not so much the art of give-and-take but how to take and be taken. It was a first for him, a revelation. She taught him to trust, as she did things with ropes and whips and hands and mouth, showed him a whole new dimension to pleasure in pain.

And when they were done and spent and sated, she had actually kicked him out, saying she had to be somewhere in the morning. Vic was frankly amazed: it was the first time a female of his choosing had shared his bed and not become a brainless slave to his d.i.c.k. The look on her face as she shut the door in his was a thing of beauty. What was the old saying? A man chases a woman until she catches him.

He was hooked. As the door closed Vic realized it was very possibly the best time he'd ever had.

But, of course, it was too good to last. . . .

Vic looked up. "Bout f.u.c.king time," he snarled.

"Sorry about that," the waitress said, placed a fresh drink before him, beat a hasty retreat.

Vic sipped thoughtfully and stared at the ocean. What secrets it contained. And now it had another. He found himself replaying a bit of dialogue he and Tristana had shared on their last good night together. Out of context, it was horribly ironic and tragic . . . all the more so because of the hopeful spirit in which it had originally been played out.

On the night before it all blew up, he was already contemplating the realities of turning Tristana. It would have been another first-generally he ate his conquests. Nora was handful enough, and the last thing he needed was a bunch of p.i.s.sed-off werewolf one-night-stands chasing him around. But Tristana was different.

The more he thought of her, the less important Nora seemed. The very thought of roaming the night with Tristana at his side left him nervous, antic.i.p.atory, excited. He doubted that it would even be that hard to awaken her. She was halfway there, in spirit anyway, and she didn't even drink. And it was a fact that she had his juices flowing; already it was all he could do to keep from Changing every time she touched his c.o.c.k.

No, her animal would emerge, and beautifully; of that, he had no doubt. Tristana was a natural. In fact, she was more than just a likely protegee; everything about her told him she could actually become his equal, someone to rival and complement his appet.i.te. Once awakened, she would be magnificent. And together, they would be unstoppable.

They just needed a little more time.

And a couple of key issues cleared up.

So after spending hours drenched in each other's pa.s.sion, he pulled her close and looked her in the eye. She met his gaze fiercely, awaiting the words she seemed to sense hanging between them. Lord only knew what she was expecting to hear-I love you, I need you, I want you forever-but he was impressed by how she took it in stride when he asked: "So. . . what do you think about eating human flesh?"

Tristana did a double take, then laughed: a low, evil chuckle that never failed to make him smile. "I guess that depends on who's doing the eating," she said. "And who's being eaten."

"Seriously," he persisted, and let her know he meant it. She was about to say something else glibly transgressive; he watched the impulse flare up and fizzle, becoming suddenly thoughtful.

"Well, if it came down to a choice, I'd rather be the one who eats," she said, and with a sudden faraway look in her eye. "But if I was to be eaten, I'd want to be eaten by someone I loved. Like 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' if you know what I mean." He had no idea, but nodded anyway. "To be part of them forever," she continued. "That would be cool. . . ."

He had kissed her then, as if sealing a pact.

If he had only known . . .

Vic took another hit of whiskey, felt the sorrow bloom inside his chest and well up in his eyes. Hindsight could be so incredibly cruel. He looked at the clock. Twelve oh-seven. Briefly, he wondered what was taking Nora so long.

But even the thought of her name was too much to bear. Suddenly, he couldn't stand to think of her at all. It flashed him back to last night, flashed him back on his guilt, his own culpability in what had gone wrong. It made him wish he had killed her first.

Before it was too late. . . .

In retrospect, he realized she'd probably been sensing it coming. The clues were certainly there: his increased impatience, his mounting detachment, his sudden indifference to her aloofness. Vic cursed himself for not having worked harder to cover his tracks.

Tuesday night had gone pretty much like every other: Nora reducing herself to catatonia with the television on, snoring through some Cinemax softcore p.o.r.n with a warm bottle still in her hand. Vic had felt nothing but contempt for her as he slipped out the door, heading for the tenth-floor elevator banks and the big wide world beyond.

It was just a couple blocks to 17th Street, with its garish neon and carnal, neo-carnival atmosphere. The streets were teeming, the tacky sidewalk souvenir shops bright-lit and bustling with life.

When he got to Fishnet's, Fernango the bouncer nodded. Vic had been acknowledged; a regular now, practically part of the family. There was, as always, a good-sized crowd, but he had no problem finding a place at the bar. The bartender saw him coming as well, set him up from the second he landed.

When Tristana came out, she was easily five times as hot as when he'd first seen her take the stage: writhing with shamanic abandon, firing unadulterated l.u.s.t over the heads of the overheated throngs. Where before she'd been going through the motions, now there was a genuine burning pa.s.sion.

But she only had eyes for Vic, and vice versa. The rest of the patrons didn't seem to notice their hidden dialogue; they were too busy responding to Tristana. As s.e.xual totem, as f.u.c.k m.u.f.fin-slash-fantasy figure par excellence. They were mesmerized.

Vic scoped the crowd as he watched her work, decided to play a little impromptu fiscal d.i.c.k-measuring game called up the ante. He would target some sweaty, fervid herbivore with a fistful of dollars and a bellyful of beer, then sidle up adjacent to him and proceed to hand Tristana fives to his ones, tens to his fives, twenties to his tens and so on, making the clown pony up to match him for the illusion of her affections.

Tristana sensed the scam instinctively, played up to the sucker like crazy, giving him the extra smile and flash that told him beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was the one she really wanted, he was the one who made her all hot and sticky, ooh baby, ooh baby gimme another twenty to show me that you love me. . . .

In between sets, she would come down and sit with each mark in turn, keeping their libidos greased, before toddling off to the shadowy corner table where Vic lay waiting. Physical affection was strictly verboten on the premises-especially where boyfriends were concerned-but the look in Tristana's eyes told him that she was pleased. They made a beautiful team, and they both knew it.

So when he told her to give him her money, there was but a split second of doubt that flitted across her features before she dipped into her bag and forked it over. Vic slipped the wad of bills into his pocket and smiled. Trust.

The second set was even better; Vic and Tristana tag-teaming the crowd as he fed her back the cash in ever-increasing quant.i.ties and she pushed her own considerable s.e.xual repertoire to the limit, all with astonishing results. The bar grew even more packed: men began streaming through the door in droves, driven by an unseen impulse. Like cattle to the slaughter, like lemmings toward the cliffs of their collective desire, it was as if they could smell the charge from blocks away, knew instinctively that this was the place they needed to be. While up on the runway, Tristana whirled and gyrated, pushing psychic b.u.t.tons they never even dreamed existed.

Vic hung back, sending her the subtlest of cues, picking each successive mark with a nod and a glance. Thoroughly enjoying himself, and the show. Completely in awe of her power.

All the while seeing a new world unfurl in his mind.

By the middle of the third set, Tristana had raked in close to six hundred dollars, and she was riding high: strutting up and down the runway in complete control, crossing into other dancers' kill zones at will, exerting her utter dominion over all. The crowd hooted and roared and drank with abandon; the other girls grumbled and gave way, trading knife-edged glances even as they yielded her ground. The management counted the profits and happily turned a deaf ear to their complaints.

The hours unfolded, wending inexorably toward closing time and the fulfillment of their hearts' desires. Vic had never felt quite so happy. He decided he would ask her to come away with him tonight, felt certain of her reply. Tristana was tough, and as such, she was unused to exposing herself emotionally. But love is willing vulnerability, under any other name; and she didn't have to say a word for him to know she loved him, too. The look in her eyes said it all.