She parked her car and stared at it. Tiny red house with peeling paint sandwiched between a vacant lot and a much nicer Tudor style. It surely wouldn't be the most horrific place she's gotten fucked in, but it wasn't a landslide victory, either.
There was the apartment building with the leaky roof over the exact spot where Galloway lurched into her. Dining room over an old table. Drip. Drip. Thrust. Thrust. Real talkative, that one. As if she was unaware of the fact he was nailing his boss and it was "amazing" and wanted her to tell him she felt the same.
"Just get on with it," she had said.
He smiled and knotted a handful of her hair in his fist. "Want to play it like that? Fine." He pulled her up an inch from his face, close enough to smell the cheap vodka and canned soup he ate for dinner.
It would have been easy to push him away. A simple flick of the wrist. He needed an outlet though. One night and he would be hers forever, so she breathed through her mouth and let him have his fun. There was nowhere else for her to move that wasn't a river. That was unfortunate; having to actually look at that old man have his way with her to avoid the rusty water instead of pretending she was some place warm or only soaked because she tore him apart.
They were all like that. Unappealing and as erotic as geriatric porn.
A week after the flood she was in an RV that Sullivan had parked in a parcel of land on his sister's property. No shower or running water, but she didn't think about how unsanitary it was too much, not after the water boarding incident, not considering Randy was over three hundred pounds and moved so hard behind her the flat wheels on the one side became airborne.
Still, she got wet. The lone workout of his year had caused the sweat to pour out of parts he himself hadn't seen in years.
"Where do you use the bathroom?" she asked after he was through.
"Inside my sisters. Go ahead, go around the back," he replied, naked and covered in greasy slime.
Nice lady, and somehow even larger than her brother.
The interior of tonight's job had already been scouted. Standard poor decor. Not dirty, just depressing. No known water issues. She would have preferred the littered patch of city wilderness next door. You never know what you may find in a habitat equally suitable for ditching murder weapons and light opiate gardening. They never took as long in public, either. No one wanted to be caught out in the open with such humble equipment.
Her attire was not outdoor appropriate. Not tonight. She called her outfit "retro slutty" and it didn't mix well with damp fall, and if she could try for a single goal this evening, it would be to stay dry.
"Let's put the cherry on top," she said, clicking on the dome light to apply a shade of lipstick she bought at the drug store labeled "Apple Sunday." She puckered and her uniform was on. Time to go to work.
Samantha Turner was the supervisor of the underwriting department for the Buffalo branch of Davis Auto Insurance. Her duties included overseeing day-to-day operations and, according to her employment contract, "spear-heading team-building activities." She hated that line. Then again, it probably looked better on a piece of paper than "get employees addicted to the taste of death so she and her husband can settle down and stop moving every six months."
It wasn't that it was incorrect. She certainly had built a team. Four after tonight. The phrase screamed "perky secretary" more than a collector of slaves. That was her true job.
She still supervised the drones forty hours a week. The unknowing she had not yet turned respected her, the ones she did feared her retribution and craved her attention once more. Numbers were good, corporate downstate was happy, but Mr. Turner was tired of living from Rubbermaid containers and cardboard boxes.
The target's wife had left for her weekly night of "cards with the girls," which was code for drinking wine with friends, about twenty minutes ago. Routine. Creatures of habit, both of them. He'd be in the front room droning over the television. Car auctions of makes and models he would never afford, nodding in and out of boredom sleep until being woken up by the sound of keys scraping against the lock. The deal had to close by midnight, the average time she returned home stumbling through the hallway reeking of grapes.
Knock knock.
He opened the front door - a thin old thing with a cracked frosted window - and dropped his coffee cup.
She flicked her foot away at the hollow pop of ceramic splitting without breaking eye contact. Steam rose from the wood of the porch and traveled up the curves of her legs covered only by thick stockings. It soothed the goosebumps from the cold night.
The beginnings were nice. All but one man she had encountered were single or settled for women far less attractive than their ceiling. Her body had gotten attention since the turn of the century and although she would not have considered herself to be vain, it was refreshing to be thought of as pretty before reduced to an object of lust.
"Samantha?" Brett asked before crouching and scooping up the stained white shards. His breath replaced the brown liquid as comfort on her skin.
"Nothing gets by you." He stared at the hemline of her short skirt. "Enjoying the view?"
She studied him for weeks before going in for the strike as she had always done with great success and concluded that Brett Ellison was a simple man. In to work ten minutes early, kept socializing to a bare minimum, and never questioned her authority as his boss. He drove an economic sedan with good gas mileage, mid-thirties, decent enough looking to have a pretty wife by comparison to his co-workers but no kids.
His online presence was absent, a holdout to the old ways of communication. This was promising. Brett would change in the coming hours and the fewer people he interacted with the better. Less to notice the new him.
All but the woman, but if the conversations Samantha had eavesdropped on card night two weeks ago were any sign, any change would be welcome.
"Just leave him if you're that bored," one girl said.
"I can't. I love him but he's so boring," Mrs. Ellision replied.
"Have you tried to spice things up?"
"No. I don't think he would be okay with that."
Mrs. Ellison looked pretty enough in the pictures on his desk. A little shorter than him, nice smile, long black hair she kept behind her like some beehive with what appeared to be a crochet hook.
This woman had options. Did she not know she needed not live her life sharing a bed with someone who'd rather watch an engine being revved on screen? But she knew where to find answers.
An underwear drawer never lies.
Samantha looted it on their weekly date night, Thursday. Plain cotton briefs, nothing special. Satin nightgowns with hemlines above the knee but not by much. She appeared as a mirror of her husband. Sensible. Safe.
That was until the stack of vintage skin books were found in the bottom under some old bras.
The ink was faded but pages were crisp, filled with girls that could have been straight from the metal and early rap music videos of the time. Big hair. Lingerie that went high on the hips.
Her sexual identity was outdated by twenty years, and that's something she was familiar with. Brett was used to leather and lace being the go-to move when his old lady needed a good toss, but he'd never seen her interpretation. He hadn't laid eyes on retro slutty.
She wandered through the rest of the house after the reconnaissance was complete. Tacky, to be honest. Mismatched furniture. Wallpaper with flowers. Stuffy.
Jesus stuff everywhere, which made sense. The story around the office was they had met at a Christian bible camp for Christ's sake.
This posed the only roadblock in her plan. It had been quite some time since she had to impregnate the constitution of a highly religious man. It had been successful for her in the past, but that was a lifetime ago.
There used to be stares from neighbors, gossip, curtains drawn to the side by the handful on the block that knew when the women went grocery shopping or the men fled to the bar.
It was a task just to get them alone in a way that made sense. Then, she would have to crack the nut. She certainly couldn't be standing at the threshold of a married mans house wearing the half naked bulls eye.
The only 'amen' from her was for the new age of people not knowing or giving a shit who lived next to them, and an easy entrance for the lock standard slave by sex method of turning a normal human into an all-you-can-eat buffet.
"Is- how can I help you?"
"It's not about how you can help me, but about how I can get you out of that rut of yours."
"Rut? What rut?" Samantha made typing motions with her fingers. His eyes grew wide. "Have you been reading my emails?"
"I have."
He retreated and leaned against the edge of a recliner, dropping the garbage on the cushion. "That's between me and my therapist."
"Don't care," she said, stepping inside and sliding off her thin leather jacket.
The men are most different. Over the decades more and more immoral, open to corruption by the most basic of sins. Morality went out the window when a mini skirt and cleavage came gift wrapped. They would never change about discussing their feelings though. Heaven forbid anyone finds out that tears ever ran along a bearded chin.
He felt the same as her. "Trapped" was the word he used most in his emails to that quack. If he would have just spent the money he sent for sessions on a nice makeover for her and a vacation somewhere tropical, he might have been too happy for her to be there.
Women were never shy in that situation. They'll tell anyone who listened that their old man was crap in bed, or lost the lone romantic bone he had left, and they never had to pay for it because their sounding board was another woman working pro-bono for their turn to vent.
The only similarity was this: the last person on the planet they would ever be honest with was each other.
He looked to her legs, then stomach.
They all did that. It took years to unlearn the reflex of covering with her hands.
"They're called abs," she said. "There are muscles behind the inflatable tube most people have in that region and when your body is below a certain body fat ratio they pop out for the world to see."
"I'm aware of that."
"You sure? I seem to have to explain that to a lot of guys."
"Why are you in my house?"
She peeled off her top, careful to not get it caught on the mass of teased follicles cemented by hairspray and held it tight. A flash of skin he couldn't see. It was a white tank she found at a second hand store made of thin soft material. The original plan was to have him focus on the outline of her nipples hard from the cold but had forgotten that Brett liked to keep his thermostat just south of napalm and didn't want to sweat.
"That's not the question you're looking for."
He rubbed his face. "Why have you been spying on me?"
She let it fall out of her hands and cupped herself with her palms. "You're right there. Come on. I have faith you'll get it."
Brett launched to his feet. "Enough." The recliner toppled to its side. Samantha gripped herself tighter. "I don't know what sick game you're playing but I'm calling the police and reporting you to HR first thing in the morning. Now get out of my home before my wife finds you here like this."
He was inches away, fists clenched, the vein in his forehead just below a receding black hairline throbbing.
