Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

wouldn't wake Link and Natalie, but he was
hurting me, and I was scared. I tried to say something to him, but I
could only squeak. He hurled me into the tub and I cracked my head
against the tile. I cried out and he crossed the bathroom and put his
hand over my mouth and nose and then I couldn't breathe, and my head was
swimming.

"He was naked and hard, and he had the knife in his fist, not like for
slicing, but for stabbing, and his eyes were red from the smoke at the
club, and the bathroom filled with the booze-breath smell, and I sank
down in the tub, shrinking away from him as he grabbed for me.

"He -- *growled*. Saw that I was staring at the
knife. Smiled. Horribly. There's a piece of granite we use for a soap
dish, balanced in the corner of the tub. Without thinking, I grabbed it
and threw it as hard as I could at him. It broke his nose and he closed
his eyes and reached for his face and I wrapped him up in the shower
curtain and grabbed his arm and bit at the base of his thumb so hard I
heard a bone break and he dropped the knife. I grabbed it and ran back
to our room and threw it out the window and started to get dressed."

She'd fallen into a monotone now, but her wingtips twitched and her
knees bounced like her motor was idling on high. She jiggled.

"You don't have to tell me this," he said.

She took off the ice pack. "Yes, I do," she said. Her eyes seemed to
have sunk into her skull, vanishing into dark pits. He'd thought her
eyes were blue, or green, but they looked black now.

"All right," he said.

"All right," she said. "He came through the door and I didn't scream. I
didn't want to wake up Link and Natalie. Isn't that stupid? But I
couldn't get my sweatshirt on, and they would have seen my wings. He
looked like he was going to kill me. Really. Hands in claws. Teeth
out. Crouched down low like a chimp, ready to grab, ready to swing. And
I was back in a corner again, just wearing track pants. He didn't have
the knife this time, though.

"When he came for me, I went limp, like I was too scared to move, and
squeezed my eyes shut. Listened to his footsteps approach. Felt the
creak of the bed as he stepped up on it. Felt his breath as he reached
for me.

"I exploded. I've read books on women's self-defense, and they talk
about doing that, about exploding. You gather in all your energy and
squeeze it tight, and then blamo boom, you explode. I was aiming for his
soft parts: Balls. Eyes. Nose. Sternum. Ears. I'd misjudged where he
was, though, so I missed most of my targets.

"And then he was on me, kneeling on my tits, hands at my throat. I
bucked him but I couldn't get him off. My chest and throat were crushed,
my wings splayed out behind me. I flapped them and saw his hair move in
the breeze. He was sweating hard, off his forehead and off his nose and
lips. It was all so detailed. And silent. Neither of us made a sound
louder than a grunt. Quieter than our sex noises. *Now* I wanted to
scream, *wanted* to wake up Link and Natalie, but I couldn't get a
breath.

"I worked one hand free and I reached for the erection that I could feel
just below my tits, reached as fast as a striking snake, grabbed it,
grabbed his balls, and I yanked and I squeezed like I was trying to tear
them off.

"I was.

"Now *he* was trying to get away and I had him cornered. I kept
squeezing. That's when he kicked me in the face. I was dazed. He kicked
me twice more, and I ran downstairs and got a parka from the closet and
ran out into the front yard and out to the park and hid in the bushes
until morning.

"He was asleep when I came back in, after Natalie and Link had gone
out. I found the knife beside the house and I went up to our room and I
stood there, by the window, listening to you talk to them, holding the
knife."

She plumped herself on the cushions and flapped her wings once, softly,
another puff of that warm air wafting over him. She picked up the tin
robot he'd given her from the coffee table and turned it over in her
hands, staring up its skirts at the tuna-fish illustration and the
Japanese ideograms.

"I had the knife, and I felt like I had to use it. You know Chekhov? 'If
a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.' I
write one-act plays. Wrote. But it seemed to me that the knife had been
in act one, when Krishna dragged me into the bathroom.

"Or maybe act one was when he brought it home, after I showed him my
wings.

"And act two had been my night in the park. And act three was then,
standing over him with the knife, cold and sore and tired, looking at
the blood crusted on his face."

Her face and her voice got very, very small, her expression distant. "I
almost used it on myself. I almost opened my wrists onto his face. He
liked it when I... rode... his face. Like the hot juices. Seemed
mean-spirited to spill all that hot juice and deny him that pleasure. I
thought about using it on him, too, but only for a second.

"Only for a second.

"And then he rolled over and his hands clenched into fists in his sleep
and his expression changed, like he was dreaming about something that
made him angry. So I left.

"Do you want to know about when I first showed him these?" she said, and
flapped her wings lazily.

She took the ice pack from her face and he could see that the swelling
had gone down, the discoloration faded to a dim shadow tinged with
yellows and umbers.

He did, but he didn't. The breeze of her great wings was strangely
intimate, that smell more intimate than his touches or the moment in
which he'd glimpsed her fine, weighty breasts with their texture of
stretch marks and underwire grooves. He was awkward, foolish feeling.

"I don't think I do," he said at last. "I think that we should save some
things to tell each other for later."

She blinked, slow and lazy, and one tear rolled down and dripped off her
nose, splashing on the red T-shirt and darkening it to wineish purple.

"Will you sit with me?" she said.

He crossed the room and sat on the other end of the sofa, his hand on
the seam that joined the two halves together, crossing the border into
her territory, an invitation that could be refused without awkwardness.

She covered his hand with hers, and hers was cold and smooth but not
distant: immediate, scritching and twitching against his skin. Slowly,
slowly, she leaned toward him, curling her wing round his far shoulder
like a blanket or a lover's arm, head coming to rest on his chest,
breath hot on his nipple through the thin fabric of his T-shirt.

"Alan?" she murmured into his chest.

"Yes?"

"What are we?" she said.

"Huh?"

"Are we human? Where do we come from? How did we get here? Why do I have
wings?"

He closed his eyes and found that they'd welled up with tears. Once the
first tear slid down his cheek, the rest came, and he was crying,
weeping silently at first and then braying like a donkey in sobs that
started in his balls and emerged from his throat like vomit, gushing out
with hot tears and hot snot.

Mimi enveloped him in her wings and kissed his tears away, working down
his cheeks to his neck, his Adam's apple.

He snuffled back a mouthful of mucus and salt and wailed, "I don't
know!"

She snugged her mouth up against his collarbone. "Krishna does," she
whispered into his skin. She tugged at the skin with her teeth. "What
about your family?"

He swallowed a couple of times, painfully aware of her lips and breath
on his skin, the enveloping coolth of her wings, and the smell in every
breath he took. He wanted to blow his nose, but he couldn't move without
breaking the spell, so he hoarked his sinuses back into his throat and
drank the oozing oyster of self-pity that slid down his throat.

"My family?"

"I don't have a family, but you do," she said. "Your family must know."

"They don't," he said.

"Maybe you haven't asked them properly. When are you leaving?"

"Today."

"Driving?"

"Got a rental car," he said.

"Room for one more?"

"Yes," he said.

"Then take me," she said.

"All right," he said. She raised her head and kissed him on the lips,
and he could taste the smell now, and the blood roared in his ears as
she straddled his lap, grinding her mons -- hot through the thin cotton
of her skirt -- against him. They slid down on the sofa and they groaned
into each others' mouths, his voice box resonating with hers.

#

He parked the rental car in the driveway, finishing his cell phone
conversation with Lyman and then popping the trunk before getting
out. He glanced reflexively up at Mimi and Krishna's windows, saw the
blinds were still drawn.

When he got to the living room, Mimi was bent over a suitcase, forcing
it closed. Two more were lined up beside the door, along with three
shopping bags filled with tupperwares and ziplocs of food from his
fridge.

"I've borrowed some of your clothes," she said. "Didn't want to have to
go back for mine. Packed us a picnic, too."

He planted his hands on his hips. "You thought of everything, huh?" he
said.

She cast her eyes down. "I'm sorry," she said in a small voice. "I
couldn't go home." Her wings unfolded and folded down again nervously.

He went and stood next to her. He could still smell the sex on her, and
on him. A livid hickey stood out on her soft skin on her throat. He
twined her fingers in his and dropped his face down to her ear.

"It's okay," he said huskily. "I'm glad you did it."

She turned her head and brushed her lips over his, brushed her hand over
his groin. He groaned softly.

"We have to get driving," he said.

"Yes," she said. "Load the car, then bring it around the side. I'll lie
down on the back seat until we're out of the neighborhood."

"You've thought about this a lot, huh?"

"It's all I've thought of," she said.

#

She climbed over the back seat once they cleared Queen Street, giggling
as her wings, trapped under her jacket, brushed the roof of the big
Crown Victoria he'd rented. She prodded at the radio and found a college
station, staticky and amateurish, and nodded her head along with the
mash-up mixes and concert bootlegs the DJ was spinning.

Alan watched her in the rearview and felt impossibly old and
strange. She'd been an incredible and attentive lover, using her hands
and mouth,