A Twist Of Noir 403 - Keith Rawson

TWO CHERYLS - KEITH RAWSON

The 1st Cheryl

The family had worn him to a nub this weekend.

The boys had decided to get up at 4:30 in the morning on Saturday. Normally they were both sound sleepers, but for some reason the twins were acting like it was Christmas morning and they knew they were either getting bicycles or some elaborate video game system and couldn’t wait to get their greasy little kid hands on them. When they were toddlers, Jason hadn’t minded the early mornings—he was a natural early riser—but now that the twins were six years-old and far more independent, he’d readapted his sleep patterns to his and Cheryl’s pre-children days:

In bed by 2 AM and up whenever the hell he felt like it.

Of course, the boys didn’t give a shit what time he’d gone to bed and as usual, not even gunfire three inches from her head was going to wake Cheryl. So he headed downstairs with them to doze on the couch as they watched whatever obnoxious cartoon they were into at the moment.

No doing.

They both wanted some serious Daddy attention; which meant he was down on the carpet with them building forts with Lego blogs and fighting wars with Star Wars and Transformer action figures until Cheryl dragged her sagging ass out of bed around ten. Within an hour of getting up, they were piled into the van off to run errands. Cheryl had no sympathy for his two hours of sleep. She was home alone with the boys five days a week and had plenty of days where she didn’t have enough sleep, either.

Sunday wasn’t any better. He had a little more sleep because he’d passed out a half hour after the boys’ bedtime at eight, but they still got him up at four and wanted the same performance as the morning before. No chores on Sundays, but the boys had soccer and both of them were on separate teams and their games ran one after the other, which meant four hours out in the sun, sweating and listening to lifeless suburbanites bitch about how badly the kids other than their own were playing.

Cheryl did let him catch a brief nap after they got home, but it was interrupted after forty-five minutes when he heard Cheryl’s shrill, loud enough to break sound barrier voice yelling for the boys to stop whatever they were doing and came charging into the bedroom, shouting at him in the same octave. Yelling at him to get his lazy ass up RIGHT NOW!

Jason was a patient man, he’d put up with Cheryl’s near psychotic outbursts for fifteen years.

He’d bowed down to her every whim:

He obeyed when she told him she wanted to get married.

He obeyed when she said she wanted to get pregnant.

He obeyed when she said she wanted to stay home and raise the boys, even though they had fifty thousand dollars in student loan debt from her education they were paying off.

He was a dutiful, hard-working husband, and all that he asked was the chance to get a little rest on the weekends. A little time to himself to recover from his sixty-hour work week.

He flung himself out of bed, his eyes grainy; his throat tight and dry. He needed a couple of minutes to let himself wake up. Cheryl wasn’t giving him a minute; she needed his help. He needed to get the boys under control. Her shrill babble filled his head; the noise was like a table saw grinding against a broken carpenter’s nail buried and invisible in a 2-by-4.

“SHUT! THE! FUCK! UP!”

Hearing the VOICE well up from his chest, rumble up his throat and explode out of his mouth was perhaps the single proudest moment of his life.

And the look in Cheryl’s eyes.

The woman who had been his wife for fifteen years had never known a moment of fear in her entire life and at this perfect moment, her steely grey eyes trembled, a sheen of tears briefly coating them right before she asked:

“What the FUCK did you say?”

She shoved him, putting all 5’3”, 120 pounds of herself into it.

She barely budged him.

Her first punch made him laugh, which pissed her off just enough to put a little more intensity into it. Within seconds, it felt like she had sprouted six arms; her sharp knuckles digging into his bones, colliding with his teeth. He struck out blind, grabbing a fistful of Cheryl’s sandy blonde hair. He shook her like a pitbull, lifting Cheryl’s small frame off the floor and tossing her at the wide mirror attached to the dresser. She tumbled with rag doll elegance, a cooling hunk of meat and bone, shards of mirror dragging bloody gashes. She landed flat, staring up at him, all of the fire and life gone from her eyes.

The boys stood in the doorway of the bedroom, their cheeks wet, screams tearing from their lungs.

Jason didn’t hear them...

His boys, they were good boys. He’d always taught them to be good, honest, obey their parents, never tell a lie.

They’d say something about their mother being gone.

His boys.

His good, honest boys...

After it was all said and done, he had to get out of the house, take a walk. Nothing epic, just a couple of miles to clear his head.

Jason’s neighborhood wasn’t much, a typical Phoenix suburb, nothing but track homes broken up by the occasional mini-mall. The only thing that broke up the monotony was a Catholic church a couple of miles down the road from his development. He remembered the realtor used it as one of the selling points of the neighborhood when they were deciding to move in or not. He shrugged it off; neither he nor Cheryl was particularly religious and the last time either of them had been inside a church was when Cheryl’s baby sister married her first husband, the god nut with the lisp. But he needed some peace and quiet and he figured the church might be good for a little solitude.

Jason stepped through the heavy wooden doors of the entrance and was enveloped by the sudden murky darkness and the near arctic chill of the air conditioning. He took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly through gritted teeth; he was exhausted, needed to sit down. He headed into the chapel, hands tucked into his pockets. Walking into the flickering candlelit chapel, he expected peace and quiet, maybe some illuminating stained glass windows, and, of course, the emaciated vestige of Christ dying on the cross, staring down, judging him with his weeping gaze.

What he got instead was a young nun bent over a pew, her habit hiked up around her hips, wearing black fishnet stockings, black six-inch stripper heels with a black man noisily lapping away at her upraised ass.

It was like a scene out of a porno. The young nun was quietly whispering to the black man, telling him what a bad boy he was, that he was getting what he deserved; her tongue flicked out between her teeth, licking her full lips. He should’ve been disgusted by what he was seeing. No, he wasn’t religious, but this woman, she had made a pledge to God...but here she was, getting her pipes cleaned by some hood rat! He should’ve been rushing down the aisle, pulling the two of them apart and give them a stern lecture...

...should’ve...

Instead, he focus on her lips, on the string of obscenities and dirty talk flooding from her mouth and started rubbing himself through his pockets.

Rubbing and rubbing to the sound of her words and the wet slurping.

He let out sharp breath as he suddenly came in his underpants and the nun’s snapped to attention, seeing him for the first time, her eyes as big saucers.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God!”

He started back down the aisle, getting ready to run just as the black man stood at his full height, his stern face glistening in the candle light.

*

The 2nd Cheryl

Cheryl’s been bugging me about having a kid. She says it will help cement our love, make us a stronger couple, all that stuff women say when they want their bellies filled with eight pounds of shit machine. I wish I didn’t sound so bitter, because I’m not. I’m forty years old and some how I’ve managed not to get a single woman I’ve ever been with pregnant.

But here I am with a twenty-five year-old wife.

A blonde, tight-bodied, smoking hot twenty-five year-old white girl.

She’s pornstar caliber all the way and goddamn she’s hot in the sack. So hot that I needed to get myself on Dr. Porkenhiemer’s big blue pill in order to keep up with her urges.

We’ve been together three years.

It ain’t all been blissful. Her folks weren’t exactly down with our age difference or with my skin color. My family pretty much felt the same way. Both my mother and oldest sister nearly fainted when I brought her home. Both of them always hoped I’d end up with a nice church-bred black girl; both of them hoped I’d end up with a woman just like them; hard-headed, strong-willed and waiting for some man to come along, boss ’em around and occasionally knock out one of their front teeth or bust their nose for throwing out a little too much sass.

My Cheryl, she’s strong-willed, she’s ambitious, and she ain’t a damn thing like my mother or sister. But we dealt with the disapproval of our families and we built a good life together. Solid careers, a beautiful home, a small, tight knit group of friends.

It’s a perfect life as far as I’m concerned.

But then she started in with the baby talk. I hemmed and hawed, smiled politely whenever she brought it up, but never giving her any kind of real answer to how I felt.

Until she finally cornered me one night after we’d drank a couple of bottles of good wine with dinner.

The way her eyes sparkled when she talked about having a baby, of having a person who was made of a small piece of her and me, it melted my heart, it made me want to have a baby with her.

Kind of.

I didn’t know what kind of father I’d be. My father was mulch by the time I was two years old and the only father figures I knew were the series of bonebreakers my mother hooked up with when I was growing weren’t the type of assholes you wanted to use as templates.

I said fuck it, especially since the idea of getting knocked up was driving Cheryl wild and her normally advantageous sexuality was kick-started into overdrive and she was turning me inside out two or three times a day. I couldn’t keep up and started pushing her away when she’d try climbing on top of me. Then she started trying different things to keep me interested and as revved up as she was.

Crazy, kinky shit.

My girl’s biggest thing is roleplay.

When Cheryl was in high school, she was huge into the drama club, so was her first boyfriend. Her first sexual experiences were hot, sweaty throwdowns dressed up like Romeo and Juliet, or whatever costumes they happened to be performing in that semester. We’d played her games only a few times before our spate of baby-making—bad cop, French maid, dirty nurse—and it was some of our most explosive sex. But when Cheryl decided on wanting a baby, she stepped up her routines and, along with playing dress up, she wanted to act out her little passion plays on location.

The French maid routine now had to be in an upscale hotel room.

Bad cop had to be at the side of a three AM strip of two lane highway.

Dirty nurse had to be in a hospital emergency room.

The bigger the risk, the hotter she got and I had to admit, it got me sweating just as hard.

But I thought her dressing up like a nun and us heading down to the local Catholic Church was a bit much.

Even though neither Cheryl or I were very religious, I was raised Southern Baptist, the church was my family’s entire world and it was instilled in me that every church—no mater which faith it may be—was sacred.

Cheryl kept pushing.

She kept parading her ass around in the sack cloth black and white habit with nothing underneath except black six inch stripper heels, fishnets, and no panties.

Like all of her other demands, I finally relented and drove her down to the church a couple of miles away from our townhouse on a Thursday night.

The chapel was completely abandoned, so we started in on her nun/teacher/naughty parochial school boy fantasy. We were just getting into it, Cheryl bent over a pew, my face buried in her ass, lapping away, and I felt her tense up.

“Oh my God...oh my God!”

I stared up and saw some nondescript white dude backing down the aisle, not able to take his eyes off the two of us. “Stop him, Ty!” Cheryl practically shrieked. “You’ve got to stop him!”

I stood up, letting the man see my full six-foot-three frame, my face slick with spit and Cheryl’s juices and I charged. His eyes were huge and glazed over, still in shock over what he was seeing. I hit him hard, tackling him around the midsection. I clambered on top of him, wrapping my big hands tight across his throat. He tried fighting back; weak punches glancing off my shoulders. I heard Cheryl somewhere far away, her voice high and shrill.

I didn’t know why I was squeezing the life out of this complete stranger. Maybe it was because all the blood that normally would’ve been powering my brain had all drained away from it to power up my dick and I was in survival mode, like some kind of animal.

I finally came out of my blood stupor, the dead man under me, Cheryl standing over me, her face glowing, slack-jawed. She pushed me off of him and collapsed on top of me, maniacally grinding me, cumming over and over again, never taking her eyes off the corpse.

That was two months ago.

Six bodies ago.

Still no baby.

We’re out again tonight; she wants me to do a cop, so we’re in a stolen car, speeding around corners, side-swiping parked vehicles, trying to attract attention.

I want to tell her every day that we need to stop; that we’ve gone too far.

But I can’t.

I just can’t say no to her.

BIO: Keith Rawson is a little known pulp writer who lives in the alkaline desert wastelands of southern Arizona with his wife and very energetic three-year-old daughter. His stories have appeared in such publications as Plots with Guns, Pulp Pusher, CrimeWav.com, Bad Things, Powder Burn Flash, A Twist of Noir, Beat to a Pulp and many others. You can find him most nights dicking around on either Twitter or Facebook, or stroking his already over-inflated ego at his blog Bloody Knuckles, Callused Fingertips.