Conjugal Rites (Kit Tolliver #7) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’re gonna throw you out. And there are a few I’m pretty sure are using.”
    “Drugs?”
    He nodded. “A neighborhood like this, how hard can it be to find somebody to cop from? And that’s not just against the house rules, it’s a parole violation and a quick ticket inside. You said something about a bottle of wine.”
    “Right.”
    “Well, it’s fine with me if you have some, but I think I’m going to pass. I was never in that much of a rush to get out of there, you know, but then you came along, and all of a sudden I couldn’t wait to breathe free air again. And drinking was never a problem for me, at least I never thought it was, but if not drinking gives me a better shot at staying out, well, I think I’ll give it a try. At least as long as I’m at the residence.”
    “How do they feel about Coca Cola?”
    “They’re fine with Coke,” he said, “as long as it’s not the powdered variety.”
    “Then screw the wine,” she said. “I’ve got Coke in the fridge and clean sheets on the bed. And there’s a gypsy cab. He’s not allowed to pick up fares on the street, but I bet he will. See? What did I tell you? This is our lucky day.”

    The sex was sweet. They started kissing, and things proceeded from there at a dreamy pace, and there was never an opportune time to show him the sex toys. Easier to scrap that script, just as she’d abandoned her plans for the wine. It was a nice bottle, a slightly pricier version of what she’d brought to Rita’s dinner table, but it could remain unopened. She wouldn’t need it, or the toys.
    Sweet kisses, sweet stroking and petting. He was quite obviously in love with her—or, perhaps more accurately, he was in what he thought was love with what he thought was her. He’d got it all wrong, but while it lasted she might as well go with the flow.
    And maybe, she found herself thinking, just maybe the flow she was going with was there to bring her full circle. Maybe she had done what she had to do, maybe she’d killed enough lovers to wipe the last of her father’s touches from her flesh. Maybe the relentless cycle of couple and kill and couple and kill had finally run its course.
    Maybe the love he felt for her was real, and maybe it had somehow given birth to that same emotion within her. Maybe she’d punished him enough, poisoning his playmate and sending him to jail for her murder, saddling him not only with a prison sentence but with a double burden of unwarranted guilt.
    And maybe she was even now responding to his love, and what stirred her now was not an itch being scratched, not the excitement of sex wedded to the anticipation of another killing, but, well, love. Her own love for him, and her anticipation—incredibly—of a life free from the need to bring an endless line of men to her bed, and from it to their graves.
    Maybe she could have a life, a real life, being lover and, yes, wife to this man. A good man, a man who loved her, a man whom she could love.
    Maybe—
    Her climax was surflike, waves rolling and rolling, tossing her, drowning her, hurling her onto the shore. For a long moment she was somewhere else entirely, lost in space and time.
    And then she was in her bed, in her sublet apartment in Riverdale, with the perspiration cooling on her skin and a man lying spent at her side.
    She reached out for that last thought, a thought that cried out for violins in the background, and a visual that was all pastoral fantasy out of an Irish Spring commercial.
    Maybe—
    Then again, she thought, maybe not.
    “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “Don’t go away.”

    The thing about Coca Cola was it had a good strong taste. You could add almost anything to it and it would still taste like Coca Cola.
    That was the good thing about it. The bad thing was that if you dropped a pill into a glass or can or bottle of Coke, it did its Old Faithful imitation and fizzed like crazy.
    She knew this because of a pre-teen experiment. The word at school