Conjugal Rites (Kit Tolliver #7) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) Read Free Page A

then it changed, and in her mind he was physically immobilized, spreadeagled on the bed with his hands and feet in restraints, his mouth taped shut, a blindfold in place.
    And in the third phase he was drugged. Unconscious, comatose, unable even to feel what she was doing with her hands and mouth.
    And then—bingo!—he was dead, and that was the best of all. Oh, she’d been with plenty of dead men, but her interest in them had always ended with the sweet delight of their dying. Once they were dead, once she’d absorbed the sense of accomplishment and completion their deaths afforded her, she was ready to move on. They were off the list, out of her life even as they were out of their own, and the last thing she wanted to do was stroke their bodies, or suck their cocks.
    But this dead man was different. This corpse was warm, and sentient. And so she touched and stroked the dead flesh, and the dead penis rose up in her mouth like Lazarus, and, well, she really got into it.
    There was this line from an old blues song, just a fragment of a line, something about a woman who was so hot she could make a dead man come. The words echoed in her mind, make a dead man come, make a dead man come, make a dead man come, and he was rock-hard now, and unable to lie entirely still, unable to keep from moaning, and God she felt strong, God she felt powerful, and yes! Yes!
    And she did indeed make this dead man come, and his orgasm triggered one of her own, not her typical long rolling climax but something very brief but furiously intense, almost masculine in nature. There was a moment when she went away, disappeared somewhere in time and space. Just an instant, and then she was back in the Airstream fuck truck, and she realized with perfect clarity that she’d accomplished something extraordinary, something more remarkable than simply raising the dead. She’d had sex with this inert being, this man who was playing dead at her command, and by so doing she had made the fantasy a reality.
    He was dead. She’d fucked him dead, she’d sucked not only the life force but the very life itself out of him, and now she could cross him off her list.
    Two.
    She’d have some explaining to do. But they’d searched her enough to know she’d brought nothing into the trailer but her own self and the clothes on her back, and if his heart wasn’t up to the stress of sexual activity, well, that was no fault of hers, was it? They’d let her go, they’d have to, and they’d never see her again.
    “Audrey?”
    Oh, fuck. The son of a bitch was alive.
    Shit. Three.

    Conjugal visits, it turned out, were limited in both duration and frequency. You couldn’t stay in the fuck truck for more than two hours—which struck her as reasonable, actually—and you couldn’t go there more than once a week. On reflection, she decided that was probably reasonable, too. If prisoners got to fuck their wives any time they felt like it, they wouldn’t have sufficient energy to plan future crimes, let alone organize a decent riot.
    But it certainly didn’t make her life any easier. She could visit him once a day if she wanted, could simply show up at the prison and get ushered into the big room where they’d sit on opposite sides of a window. But if she couldn’t kill him in the fuck truck, how could she kill him in the visitors room? All she could do in there was have a conversation with him, and she’d just as soon talk to herself.
    “I’ll be back next week,” she told him in the visitors room, a day after their visit to the Airstream trailer. “That’s if you want me to.”
    Oh, he wanted her to.
    “Then I’ll come,” she said. “Is there anything you need? Anything I can bring you?”
    “If it’s not too much trouble—”
    “Just tell me.”
    Cigarettes, he said. If she could manage a carton of cigarettes, that would be great. What brand? Well, Marlboro would be ideal.
    “I’ll bring you a carton tomorrow or the next day,” she said. “Just as