So, I entered a writing contest where I am assigned a genre and a subject and have a week to write a 2500 word story. Last year I finished in the top 30. This year my assignment was Horror/Bus Stop. I wrote the following piece in two days, stressed that I might miss the deadline. It is not the best thing I have ever written, but is it strong enough to move me to the final round? We'll have to wait and see. DISCLAIMER: There is some language and a sex scene in here so reaad only if you are comfortable with that.
HEAT 5
Cherry Bomb Slushee
2383 words
SYNOPSIS:
Jeremy Fletcher encounters a beautiful woman at a bus stop late one night and discovers the thin veil between the worlds of light and dark.Jeremy Fletcher was thinking about murder when he saw her coming toward him. He was sucking down a cherry bomb slushee, courting a very serious brain freeze and concocting gruesome ways to kill his boss when the most beautiful woman in the world crossed beneath a street lamp at the bus stop half a block away. Though the sodium vapor lamp shone brightly, the shadows moved with her, hiding her features as she weaved, unsteady along the sidewalk. Only her hair shimmered, so black it glowed blue under the light, and when she looked up, strands of pure white framed her dark face and pooled at her shoulders.
Jeremy Fletcher fell in love the moment she passed through that light and carried the darkness with her like a shroud.
He walked slowly, head down and tried not to stare, but her dark beauty commanded his attention. As they drew close to each other, she glanced up with heart-wrenching eyes and smiled. The air turned intensely cold. “Hello, Jeremy,” she said as she passed.
Jeremy stopped. His heart pounded in his chest. He was suddenly aware he could see his breath, while breathing itself became more difficult. He turned to watch her glide past and started to say something, to ask how she knew his name, but the words stuck in his throat.
Beyond the spill of light on the sidewalk, the shadows grew heavy around her as if she radiated darkness. He had to focus hard on her movement just to see her. A moment later, she crossed beneath another streetlight. She seemed to shimmer in the warm glow, to become less real somehow. For an instant she was nearly transparent. Ghostly and ethereal she floated to the street corner and vanished around the far side of the convenience store.
He released the breath he’d been holding. Raising the cup, he slurped absent-minded at the icy mixture. She’d been stunning! He imagined he could see a faint ebony glow along the path she’d walked and he knew, suddenly and completely, that he’d do anything she ever asked of him. But a woman like that was beyond his reach, out of his league, and with a last glance toward the street corner, he walked slowly toward the bus stop bench and sat down. Soon his thoughts turned back to murdering his boss. The rich old bastard had stepped on a lot of people to get where he was and now it was his turn to be squashed.
“How would you do it?”
Jeremy nearly leapt off the bench. The base of his spine went cold. He spun toward the voice. Standing behind him only inches away and shrouded in a cloak of darkness and shadow, the dark beauty offered a sensual smile.
“I did it once” She leaned toward him over the bench and flicked her tongue against his ear. “He was my lover. I killed him slowly,” she whispered. “I felt like I owed him that much.” Grabbing Jeremy’s face under the chin, she pulled him to her and kissed him hard. Her hands caressed his chest through the shirt. She darted out her tongue, met resistance and then overcame it.
When she finally let him up for air, Jeremy pulled away and slid down to the end of the bench, at once terrified and aroused. He wiped the back of his hand across his lips. His tongue, where it had touched hers, was icy cold and throbbed in time to his rapid heartbeat. “Who are you?” Uncontrollable tremors raced through his extremities. “What do you want?” After all those adolescent fantasies about women, all those wet dreams about what he could do with a woman like this, Jeremy found he was scared beyond belief. And that made him want her even more.
Like a predator, she climbed over the back of the bench and crouched on the seat. Her pale skin glowed against the tight, black silk bustier she wore and the swells of her breasts rose and fell with each rapid breath. “You crave this body.” She trailed a fingertip from her pouty lips down her neck and along the line of her cleavage. “I can feel desire pulsing off you in waves.” Reaching out her hand, she stroked the inside of his thigh through his jeans.
Jeremy shuddered, nearly convulsing. His hand clenched, crushing his cup and squeezing cherry slushee all over himself. Jumping to his feet, he brushed the sticky ice from his pants, which had taken the worst of it, before it could seep through to the skin.
The woman threw her head back and screeched in horrible laughter. She pointed at the red stain spreading across his slightly bulging crotch. “It looks like you peed blood!”
Jeremy took a step backward. “That’s not funny! The fuck kinda game you playing? None of this is funny!”
She turned suddenly serious, her eyes hard and unblinking, her lips pressed into a thin line. “None of this is supposed to be funny, Jeremy.” She flipped back to bubbly again and patted the bench seat beside her. “Come sit down.” Coyly she batted her eyes like a cartoon character. “PLEEEEASE?”
She drew out the word with pleading flirtatiousness, but beneath it there was something else. Jeremy thought he detected anger behind the playful tone, her insistence more command than request. Feeling the pull of her, he took an involuntary step and it took every ounce of strength within him not to take another. For something to focus on, he looked at his watch. The crystal face was shattered and the hands stood at 11:32 but it couldn’t be that late already. When had the damage happened? He tried to think through the fog that filled his mind but nothing came. He was suddenly confused, like he didn’t belong here, like the world had moved on somehow and left him behind. Looking far down the street in first one direction and then the other only increased his confusion. Where the hell was his bus? It surely should have been here by now.
“I killed my lover on this bench.” She whispered in his ear, her body pressed against his, her eyes searching his for some measure of understanding, some unknown truth. “I come back here a lot, almost every night. I sit at the exact spot that he died, imagining I can still see the blood stains. I stared into his eyes as the life drained from them. You have no idea how sexual it is. One minute there is a spark in the eyes, there is life, and the next there is nothing, the eyes turn glassy and they stare without seeing. It was the first orgasm he ever gave me.”
“Leave me alone!” Jeremy’s fear ratcheted up a notch. He shoved her roughly and she fell back onto the bench laughing. In a blur of movement she grabbed his belt buckle and yanked him on top of her.
“I love it when we fight.” She gripped the back of the head and traced a line behind his ear with her tongue. “You never win,” she whispered and bit his earlobe playfully.
As he struggled to free himself, she flipped him effortlessly onto his back. Last time he weighed himself he came in at just under two-twenty, yet she’d tossed him like a pile of laundry. She straddled him, pinning his wrists under her knees and suddenly Jeremy knew. Laying there with the slats of the bench pressing into his back, staring up at her incredibly beautiful face, Jeremy Fletcher knew he was going to die.
“If you behave yourself,” she said, slowly grinding her hips in a circle against his crotch, “we can have a little fun before you go. We don’t have much time.”
“The bus,” he blurted as she rubbed against him faster. He fought valiantly against his body, willing it not to react. But he lost the battle. As he felt himself stiffen beneath her he stammered, “The bus will be here any minute!”
She giggled like a child. “Your bus doesn’t stop here anymore. It hasn’t stopped here for months.”
The fog in his brain thickened. In a tired, defeated voice he said, “I take this bus every night.”
“No. You wait for this bus every night, but it never comes.”
Reaching behind her back, she produced a pointed stainless steel rod, like a nail the size of a railway spike. “I can feel how much you want me.” She ground her hips harder against him. “I was never able to cum but the sex was always intense, that’s what I miss most.” She laughed and a mock expression of sadness crossed her face. “Am I bad for missing the sex more than the man?”
“You’re crazy,” he said and with all his strength, Jeremy bucked his hips up into her, trying to dislodge himself and knock her to the ground. He gritted his teeth, straining hard against the slats of the bench but she barely moved and the effort left him drained and winded.
“Oooh, Lover!” she squealed. “You can’t even wait until we get these clothes off! I like that.” She bent down and kissed him passionately. Staring into his eyes she said, “Patience, my love. Patience. We’ll have our fun. But first I need you to do something for me.” Her hand trailed down to the bulge in his jeans. “I need you to put your hands together over your head. Like you’re diving into a pool. Can you do that for me?”
“Fuck you,” he rasped with as much conviction as he could muster. His thoughts felt mired in sludge and he had an overall feeling of being less there somehow. Faded. Had she drugged him? Pain shot up suddenly from his groin.
“Do it!” She spat. “We have to hurry before you go.”
He thrust his hands above his head in a point. His breaths came in gasps. “Why me? How did you know my name and why did you choose me?”
“It’s always been you.” There was a sudden bright flash as she raised the spike above her head and drove it down into the palms of his hands, pinning them to the bench.
The pain was intense and white hot, shooting tendrils of fire up his arms. But an instant later it turned muted and distant, as if he could remove himself from it and experience it from a distance. Through the fog he felt her loosening his belt. She yanked down his pants and he marveled that he was still hard. The pain and the fear had not affected his desire for her. And when she took him in her mouth the burning cold only intensified his erection.
The night sounds quieted and the streetlights dimmed. Jeremy was lost in a cloud of ecstasy. She brought him to the brink time and again but would not let him orgasm. The torture was exquisite and the throbbing in his hands no longer mattered.
With a devilish grin, she stood, hiked up her skirt and straddled him. Within minutes her breathing became heavy and her grinding hips slowed and undulated with more precision. She leaned forward on top of him and stretching out, gripped the steel spike. As she continued to ride her, sinking him deeper into her with each thrust, she twisted the nail.
His screams seemed to increase her mounting pleasure. He felt a shiver pass through her.
“Almost time,” she said through teeth gritted against the pleasure, prolonging it. “Almost…time.” Her body tensed and she sat up, wrenching the spike from Jeremy’s flesh. As the first convulsive spasm wracked her body, she plunged the spike into her lover’s chest over and over. Killing him anew. Killing him again. Killing him always.
Her orgasm lasted several minutes and she remained atop Jeremy for all of it. Wave after crashing wave rocked her and she went with them as far as they’d take her until finally her pleasure subsided. She straddled him and waited. It was almost time for him to go.
With a jerk, she pulled the stainless steel nail from his chest, staring at the puckered hole it left behind. She missed the blood. She missed the smell of it, the taste of it. Blood was everywhere the first time she’d killed him, so much of it that it surprised her. She missed the way it pulsed from the ragged holes in his chest. Of course, he’d been alive that first time.
Climbing off of him, she smoothed her skirt and slipped the spike into a pocket. She glanced at her watch. It was almost time. Squatting next to him, she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “See you tomorrow, baby,” she whispered even as he began to fade. For an instant he was there and not there at the same time, existing in two worlds at once. At 11:32 exactly, Jeremy faded into nothingness, just as he had every night since she’d killed him three years ago.
She’d gotten away with it, had never even been a suspect. At the funeral she’d been inconsolable, and not all of it had been an act, she’d genuinely missed him. Not enough to regret killing him, but almost.
After a month, she’d returned to the bus stop – the killer returning to the scene of the crime, the poor lost girlfriend searching for answers, and she’d been shocked to find Jeremy sitting there, confused, disoriented, and with a complete lack of memory. That first encounter, she’d hidden in the bushes and watched him. And when he disappeared, she’d walked to the convenience store at the corner, bought a bottle of tequila and drank the apparition from her memory.
She came back the next night.
And the next.
On the sixth night, she screwed up her courage and walked past him on the sidewalk. Within a month, she was talking to him.
Soon she began killing him again and again.
Each night he reappeared shiny and new, with no memory of her or the things she did to him. He never wanted to sleep over, she could date other guys, and the sex had become amazing! He was the perfect boyfriend.
So what if he was dead.
END
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