Part 18 - Goldie: Seeing Red

Quiet on the subway ride back home — Steve and I; he in his world and me in mine.

Something about Wolfe’s den — dusty sticky tables, spilt booze and the ashy trails of cigarettes crushed underfoot — had me thinking even harder about Red and what in the hell she would have seen in him. A cop. A dirty cop , too. We all knew what kinds of things he was known for. We’d seen him in action. That night when that one mook had tried to go up on stage and get his hands on her, and how the ambulance had taken him after Wolfe was done. The blood I’d mopped up. The tooth I’d found. I’d worried myself what he’d do to me if he knew that she and I…if I….

Hard stop there. I couldn’t even. I sat hip to hip with Steve, my hands dangling between my knees, staring at the grit on the subway floor, just trying to breathe.

And then he was there, watching me sing. His big eyes drinking me in when I opened the door to the champagne room. The way his cock met me, filled me, made me her.

I was Red in those moments, as much as I’d always wanted to be in her head, to know what went on behind those quiet eyes, to penetrate the silence that surrounded her. She was like a pixie dancing on pins, light and airy in the bright sunshine, yet something else when stars filled the sky, when the house lights fell and the music started. I could see the shadows then, dark and dangerous as she peeled layer after layer away, leaving her bare and raw and feral. Lust hung in the air between her and her marks, the mooks who shot their wads of hard-earned cash into her face, showering her in greenbacks for a whiff of her cunt.

I couldn’t blame them. I was them. Only, I lay there often enough, awake while she dozed, thinking about how she touched me, kissed me, played me like a song. What was it like to be her? So gentle and tender, as if she could sing a song and forest creatures would come out of Central Park and clean our apartment. And yet…

He fucked me like an animal, like Red fucked me, her strap glistening, a thin line of saliva like a string of diamonds in the candle light leading to my trembling lips. Legs open, begging for more. Deep, hard thrusts that rattled my teeth, made me a believe, left me worshipping at her altar.

I reached up to my neck. His mighty paw prints around my throat for everyone to see. I’d seen the bruises on Red — her neck, her ass, the insides of her creamy, tender thighs. I pressed my lips over the each one, kissing them away, hearing her shudder, mewling like an angel when my tongue found her molten core.

I stared down at her vacant eyes. Never again. But Wolfe. I shook my head. No. I couldn’t. The gun, oh the gun. I squeezed my eyes tight, trying to blot out the barrel in my face, the shut off the sound of his voice, the growl.

I opened, tonguing the barrel, our eyes together as I sucked it into my mouth. Had Red done that for him? Or was it just me? The whore in the champagne room? I shuddered, squeezed my legs together. The cool metal teasing my throat as I opened myself up to it, taking him deep, watching him watching me, his finger on the trigger, waiting for him to explode in my mouth.

The train shuddered to a stop, brakes hissing, the buzz of the late night crowd shifting with the weight of the train. Doors opened, and Steve stood, began to walk away. He turned before he’d taken three steps. “We go. Our stop here.”

I shook my head and fished out my keys. “Go on and wait. I need to ride bit, to think, to…I just need some time.”

The barrel hot now, wet, drifting between my breasts. I taste the blood from my lip as he leans in, his hot breath on my face. His tongue, long and languid, pushed into my mouth as the barrel fills me again. And I moan, sucking on his tongue, pulling him in, legs opening wider as he begins to fuck me.

“I’ll be back soon. Wait for me.”

The sway of the train, the press of bodies, the long night closed in. I shut my eyes and drifted, feeling the push-pull of their need. Wolfe’s heat, the force of his grip, Red’s piercing eyes, her wild words twist me in-turn, one after the other, my body theirs to punish, my soul theirs to command. The pistol glistens from my cum. He drives it nose first into the pillow next to me and two shots ring out as his cock plunges into me. Red presses down on my face, and I lap at her perfect cunt. Above me they meet in the middle, and I’m just a vessel for their pleasure.

I got off the train on 63rd, neon glimmering down onto the wet pavement. A homeless person pushed by with a cart full of plastic bottles. A guy dragged on a cigarette under the sign that reads “Jack’s Off-Street Parking two blocks ahead”. He passed the butt to another guy, who asked me how much for both of them.

The shelter was close. I’d only been there once with Red, during the day, but the landscape hadn’t changed. Just the people. At night, when the world was shrouded in darkness, everything changed. The mooks who poured their carnal desires into Smiley’s at night couldn’t survive the day, the sun, the light revealing who they were. Like Red. She danced in shadow, luring her prey with a promise of a weeping cunt, an eager mouth, a set of tits that made me drool. But during the day…

What was the city during the day but a steaming pile of shit dressed up like a song.

I’d fled here was I was too young to know better, found myself in a flophouse up in Harlem with three gay men, all named Steve, drug addicts and dope fiends, chicks turning tricks three doors down while their kids played I’ll Show You Mine in the hallway. The safest way in and out was the alley because you knew the crooks who lived in your building, and they knew you. I sucked cock there once for safe passage, gave up the back door once to a beautiful liar who promised a shiny rock and big score.

All mooks, and I was a mook, too. Once. Back then. But now, my heart bled out back in the alley behind Smiley’s shithole. No more. Red wasn’t a mook, and she’s all I’d ever wanted…to be.

Holmgren’s 63rd Street Shelter sat across from the coffee shop where I’d met her. Its windows were nothing but darkness and shattered dreams, like the crumbling facade of the building I’d found myself in front of a year ago and again tonight. I knew the Red of shadows, the class act of Smiley’s Cabaret, the paragon of perversion on the stage and off it. What I didn’t know was who she was when the lights were on, when she closed the door behind her and left me lying in bed with nothing but her scent and a lingering ache.

I needed to know.