Hard Bargains Read online

  A year passed, and things didn’t get better. In fact, they got worse.

  I spent my nights plaintively crying, my days futilely looking for full-time work. Jason’s family tried to be supportive, tried hard. But they had busy lives of their own, and, with my empty life full of memories of Jason, I started to shun them, withdrawing from life. I was retreating back into myself like I had as a child when my parents were killed. I found it harder and harder to get up in the morning and face the harsh, cold, real world. I started drinking again.

  And that’s when I ran into Tony, just when I shouldn’t have run into someone like Tony. But just when a weak-willed person with slumping self-confidence would run into someone like Tony. In a seedy bar down by the river on a cool, grey November day quickly fading to night.

  I’d just gone through the ordeal of another interview, at the local box factory, and I needed a drink, bad. The nearest bar was Casey’s, on Waterfront Drive. I staggered down the sidewalk through the cutting wind and pushed my way through the heavy wooden door. The familiar beery warmth embraced me, like the devil embraces those who have strayed from God.

  The place was dimly lit to hide its dilapidation and dirt, and practically empty. Just a tattered old couple at a booth, and two men leaning against the bar. One of the men was Tony.

  I didn’t recognise him at first. I walked over to the short, greasy bar, slid onto a battered stool and ordered a vodka and orange juice.

  ‘Hey! Angela! Quiet little Angela from eighth grade!’

  I took a sip of my drink and then turned my head to look at the man who had called out my name, already ashamed to be recognised in such a place.

  ‘Tony! Remember? You had a crush on me in junior high.’ He elbowed his companion and then strolled over and jumped onto the stool next to me.

  I recognised him up close, all right. Tony. The junior high juvenile delinquent whom I’d sort of hung out with in the eighth grade. Him and his gang of troublemakers and losers. All of whom had either dropped out of school entirely or gone on to different high schools. I’d gotten poor grades in junior high, been suspended a couple of times, and Tony had been a big part of that.

  He still had the same dark, curly hair and dark eyes, sensuous mouth and crooked nose. And he was still wearing the same type of torn black leather jacket and dirty black jeans, with the same sneer on his face. But he was a lot heavier than when I’d last seen him, and his skin was the unhealthy colour of someone who didn’t go outside very much, or work very hard. There were dark half-circles under his eyes.

  As I sat there clutching my drink and staring at the lowlife, I wondered what I’d ever seen in him in the first place. ‘Oh, hi, Tony,’ I mumbled, looking back down into my glass.

  ‘Long time, no see, huh?’ He glanced around the desolate bar in an exaggerated manner. ‘So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a dump like this?’

  The bartender, a short, fat, bald man, started to protest. But Tony shot him a menacing glare, forcing the man to swallow his words.

  He was waiting for me to say something, ready to pounce. And I gave it to him, so low already I thought I was residing on rock-bottom. ‘I’m, uh, not doing so good, Tony. I’ve been looking for a job. My husband died, and …’

  He took it from there, swinging a heavy arm around my small shoulders and clasping me roughly. ‘Hey, lucky you ran into Tony then, huh? I’ll take care of you. Like I did back in junior high. Right, Hi?’

  Hi was the other man propping up the bar. A tall, skinny, sandy-haired, vacant-eyed guy who’d been Tony’s sidekick back in school. He was nicknamed ‘Hi’ because of all the marijuana he smoked back then. Judging by his emaciated physique and jerky movements, he had moved onto other, more potent drugs since I’d last seen him.

  Tony and I had sex that night, in the dark, cold, filthy alley that ran between the bar and a vacant building. Unprotected sex. I was more than a little drunk, I guess, and full of self-pity along with the alcohol. Tony was more than a little insistent, too, like he’d always been. Just like old times.

  He pushed me up against the alley wall and mashed his mouth into mine, pressing his body hard against me. I struggled a little, but not much. His heavy hands clutched my breasts and his thick, wet tongue swarmed into my mouth. I moaned, flailed back with my tongue, undulating my body against Tony’s.

  It was sordid, rank, demeaning and disgusting – and I was just in the mood for it.

  Tony and I hungrily thrashed our tongues together. And then he dipped his head down and shoved my sweater up, caught my bare tits in his swarthy hands. I moaned again, writhing against the rough wall. Tony flogged one of my nipples with his tongue, then the other one, making me shiver with both cold and heat, my pussy buzzing.

  He slammed my tits together and smeared his tongue back and forth over both of my nipples at once. I grabbed onto his greasy hair and clawed at his scalp, thrusting my burning chest into his fleshy face. I felt sick and sexy at the same time, Tony assaulting my tits with his mauling hands and lashing tongue, the stench of garbage all around us assailing my nostrils. The perfect atmosphere for the craven fuck. I could only be thankful the guy didn’t push me right down onto the filthy alley floor and mount me there. Or maybe that actually would’ve been more appropriate.

  Tony jammed my tits up and sucked a jutted nipple into his drooling mouth. He pulled on it, bit into it, bruising my nipple with his teeth like he was bruising my breasts with his hands. Then he spat out the one nipple, and gulped up and fed on the other. I tore at his hair, squirming against the wall, in heat with lust, cold for love.

  Tony straightened back up, fumbled his fly open and pulled out his hard cock. Even in the dim light, I could see it was short and stubby, bushed with curly black hairs at the base. Good enough. I popped my own jeans open and Tony yanked them down to my knees. Then he hit my slit with his bulbous cockhead, slammed his shaft into my tunnel.

  I grabbed onto his thick neck and groaned. He grunted and grabbed my tits again, started pumping his hips, stabbing his cock into my cunt, fucking me up against the grimy alley wall.

  It was quick and savage. Tony wildly thrust into me, clasping and kneading my breasts. I bounced off the wall against him, digging my dirty fingernails into the folds of flesh on his neck. He huffed rancid breath into my face. I spat back into his gasping mouth.

  Tony jerked, banging me. I felt his cock jump and shoot in my pussy, spurt a load of hot, sticky, soiling sperm. I desperately swallowed back bile and shuddered my own wretched joy, orgasm shocking up from my stuffed cunt and stinging my desolate body. We were united in depravity, Tony and I, two lowdown, down-low animals rutting around in the dirt for any pleasure we could get and take.

  I felt terrible about it afterwards, when I woke up in the bed I’d shared with my husband in our apartment, and Tony was snoring, naked, next to me. I spent ten minutes throwing up in the bathroom, then thirty minutes under the hot shower.

  But it was no good. Tony was back in my life – what little life I had – whether I liked it or not. I just didn’t have the strength, the resolve, to stand up to the guy, even if I’d wanted to.

  I could say that I was vulnerable, use the excuse that I was still ‘recovering’ from the death of my beloved husband. But the truth is, I actually, subconsciously welcomed it – my descent into Tony’s clutches. At least now I had somebody who would tell me what to do.

  Tony told me. I’d do whatever he wanted me to do. He moved right into my apartment that day, him and Hi and various other scummy acquaintances.

  Tony didn’t work. He partied all night and slept most of the day, drank and played loud music and video games, dealt drugs on the side. It didn’t take long for my neighbours in the four-storey building to start to complain.

  Henry, the superintendent, stopped me as I slunk up the stairs one day, after getting back from my part-time job at the veterinary clinic. My arms were loaded down with beer and junk food for Tony and his gang.

  ‘Angela, your “
guests” were banging on the walls and floor all afternoon, slamming doors. Mrs Latimer almost had a stroke, she was so upset by it all.’

  Mrs Latimer lived in the suite directly below mine. She used to bake cinnamon buns and muffins for Jason and me.

  Henry smiled. He’d always been so helpful, as well, watchful, like a second father almost. When I dared to glance up at him, I could see the concern etched all over his kindly face.

  ‘What’s going on, Angela? You used to be such a good tenant, such a sweet person. You and your hus—’ His voice trailed off, and now he looked down in embarrassment.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, and ran up the stairs.

  The party went on almost all night, as usual. Until the police finally arrived to break it up when one of Tony’s buddies urinated off the balcony onto Henry’s flowers.

  That cleared out most of the riff-raff, but not all. There was still me and Tony, and Tony’s ‘friend’ Ginger.

  Ginger was a thin, scraggly-haired woman who dressed and talked and acted like a refugee from the 1960s. She was constantly looking for ‘kicks’, to turn on and tune in and drop out.

  I guess I was pretty buzzed myself, wallowing in the sweet-smelling after-party, the air and my mind equally clouded, my body lethargic. So that when Ginger plopped down next to me against the wall and put her arm around my shoulders, I hardly took any notice. Tony dropped down on my other side, crossing his legs like Ginger.

  ‘Hey, baby,’ he said, rubbing my thigh with a grimy hand. ‘Ginger really digs you. Right, Ginger?’

  The woman squeezed my shoulders, staring at me. Then she kissed me on the cheek. ‘I do, man. I sure do. She’s one foxy little lady.’

  Ginger kissed me on the cheek again, and this time I felt the wet tip of her tongue caress my face.

  I sobered up, fast. I jerked my knees upright and wrapped my arms around them, trying to get small, disappear inside myself, like I used to do as a young girl when I was frightened and faced with adversity. But Tony and Ginger pressed in on me from either side. Tony’s hand travelled up to cup one of my breasts, while Ginger’s hand travelled down to cup my other breast.

  ‘What d’you say we really party – just the three of us?’ Tony breathed hotly in my ear.

  I tried to lift up off the couch and get away, but the pair held me, clutching my breasts in their filthy fingers, then shoving my T-shirt up so that they gripped my bare, heated flesh. They craned their necks down, and Ginger’s cracked lips latched onto my right nipple, Tony’s wet lips sucking up my left. I leaned back against the couch and moaned, hating it and wanting it at the same time. What else was there to do, with those people?

  Ginger and Tony worked my tits with their hands, my nipples with their tongues and lips and teeth. Until, abruptly, Tony jumped up, broke his pants open and pulled out his stubby cock. He thrust forward into Ginger’s and my face.

  ‘Suck it, you sluts!’ he growled, glaring down at us.

  Ginger eased me forward with her arm around my shoulder and I took Tony’s outstretched cock into my mouth and sucked on it. He spasmed and grunted, grabbing my hair and hers. I popped my lips off his cock and Ginger slid hers on, sucking off my ‘boyfriend’ herself.

  I didn’t mind, didn’t care. Everything was a hazy blur, the more numbed the better. Ginger and I buzzed our lips up and down either side of Tony’s veiny erection, his hands guiding us. Then he pushed our heads together, so that Ginger was kissing me at the end of Tony’s cock, tonguing my tongue, her fingers squeezing my tits and tweaking my nipples again.

  Tony liked watching the show. But he had a short attention span. He pushed us sluts back on the couch and crouched in between Ginger’s skinny legs. Her pants were down around her ankles, like mine, somehow. Tony plunged his cock into her red-furred pussy and wildly thrust back and forth, fucking the moaning woman now groping her own tits.

  Then he jerked out of her, and jammed his cock into my pussy. Tony grabbed up my thighs and pumped into my tunnel. Greasy sweat splattered down off his face onto my stomach. Ginger rubbed her clit with one hand, fed the grimy fingers of her other hand into my open mouth to suck on.

  Tony jumped back and forth, penetrating and pile-driving the pair of us. Ginger and I twisted our tongues together, rolled one another’s nipples, buffed each other’s clits. My body buzzed like my head, despite the sickness in the back of my mind.

  Tony soon shook and bellowed and blasted, filling Ginger’s pussy with his spraying semen, then jerking out and jamming his coming cock into my cunt, staining my tunnel with his heated seed yet again. Ginger’s clit vibrated under my fingers like her body on the couch. She pinched my clit, and I shuddered with a racking orgasm of my own, the three of us debauched all together now.

  Afterwards, I leaped to my feet, ran for the bathroom and locked myself inside. I sat on the toilet trembling violently, my teeth chattering non-stop. Listening to Tony and Ginger having rough sex on the bed I used to share with my husband.

  * * *

  ‘You have to throw the bum out, Angela,’ Nicole told me. ‘Or call the police and get them to remove him. You can’t let him get away with … that.’ She pointed at the Band-Aids over my left eye.

  I chewed listlessly on my cheese sandwich, but it had gone so dry in my mouth that I couldn’t even swallow it. Much like Nicole wasn’t swallowing my story about banging my head, accidentally, on a cupboard door.

  We were sitting at the round table in the small break-room in back of the veterinary clinic. Nicole was one of my few remaining friends, because I had to see her at work, if I wanted to earn any money.

  ‘OK,’ I gulped. ‘He pushed me. And I hit my head on a doorframe. But he was drunk. He didn’t mean to hurt me.’

  ‘Like heck he didn’t. And next time it won’t be just a push.’

  I stared at Nicole, wanting to yell, to scream, to cry. But I was so mentally and physically drained from my life of living hell with Tony that I couldn’t muster the strength.

  So I fled. I quit my job at the clinic the next day. When Tony split my lip with a hard slap to the face.

  The abuse had started shortly after I’d insisted that Ginger get out of my bed. Tony had kicked the bathroom door, punched the wall. Then, later on, he’d pushed me, slapped me. And with me at home all the time with him, bringing in no money, he would kick me or punch me anytime he liked, calling me useless and other, worse, names.

  I was locked in the destructive relationship, unable to escape.

  I was too bruised and battered to even go out and look for another job. The rent quickly went into arrears, the apartment and my appearance a mess. And I didn’t care. Liquor was my solace and companion, one hellish day blending into another brutal night, alcohol dulling the pain, Tony having his way with me whenever he liked, abusing me both mentally and physically.

  Things only came to a head when the eviction notice showed up in my mailbox, long overdue.

  ‘Looks like you’re finally going to have to get off your lazy ass and get back to work,’ Tony smirked, sitting across from me at the wobbly kitchen table. ‘My friends and I need a place to hang out.’

  I lifted my dizzy head out of my arms and blinked my bleary eyes. ‘Why don’t you just deal more dope?’

  Tony slapped me. His hand shot across the table and his palm cracked off my cheek. I hardly even felt it. The man sitting in the third taped-up chair at the table just grinned and nodded.

  He was a short, stocky man with a shaved head and gold earrings and gold teeth. Another one of Tony’s street associates.

  ‘I know how your woman can make you some money, bro,’ he said, his voice low and dangerous-sounding. ‘Good money.’

  Tony looked at him. ‘What d’you mean? She’s good for only one thing.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ the man said, still grinning. ‘I can get Lexie to fix her up, put on some makeup, some nice clothes.’ He licked his thick lips. ‘She’d bring in three hundred a night, easy.’

  Tony grinned at th
at, then at me, his dark eyes shining.

  I looked from one man to the other, my numbed senses gone colder than ever before. I pushed myself up from the table, sick to my stomach.

  Tony grabbed for my arm. I snatched it away. Then I stumbled through the garbage and empty bottles that were scattered all over the carpet. I hit my bed crying, burying my face in the foul-smelling pillow.

  The last thing I heard before I fell asleep in a stupor, after draining the last quarter of a bottle I’d hidden away in a drawer, was Tony’s friend saying to him, ‘Don’t worry, bro. I’ll break her in. Won’t be difficult.’ The sinister self-satisfaction in his voice was chilling.

  I woke up in the middle of the night. I didn’t know what time it was, only that it was pitch-black, and quiet. And that someone was kneeling on the bed, over the top of me.

  I was lying on my stomach with my face sideways on the pillow. I was naked, no sheet or blanket covering me. I bit into the pillow, clutching it with my chewed-down fingernails, holding my breath. The bed groaned, and a man’s damp hands grabbed onto and spread my bottom.

  I rolled over and screamed. Tony’s friend was straddling me, naked.

  He smacked me across the face. Jarring me, shaking something loose inside of me. I suddenly flashed from cold to hot – cold fear to hot anger. I didn’t think, I didn’t worry, I didn’t quail. I whipped my right leg up, slamming my right knee in between the man’s legs. Furious. Fighting back.

  He gasped and grabbed at his groin, toppled over onto his side on the bed.

  I jumped off the bed, ran to the door and yanked it open, flush with fury. Tony’s snores were fuel to my raging fire.