BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

Jessica gazed longingly out of the window at the city, Washington, DC, as she sat astride Bug Man and rubbed his narrow back with long, steady strokes.

The sun had gone down and painted the Washington monument orange. Then the rain came, and the landscape disappeared in gloom. It was depressing. Surely over there, somewhere, was a club, a night spot. Something.

It was right there, across the river. All that history. And probably shopping as well. Restaurants. Boutiques. And the White House and all that.

It was a curiously squat city, more like Brooklyn, where both Jessica and Bug Man—she knew him as Anthony—lived, than like Manhattan. It didn’t look to be such an important place.

“Can’t we go out tonight?” she asked. To ask the question she leaned down, flattening herself against him, and tickled the back of his neck with her lips.

“We can’t go out,” he muttered. “I’ve told you that about nine times.”

She pouted. He failed to notice.

“Couldn’t we at least go downstairs to one of the restaurants?” No answer.

She had known Anthony for much longer than she had loved him. At first he’d been nothing to her, just a boy two years her junior, not especially handsome, definitely not tough or rich or exciting.

But over a very short time she had come to first notice him, and then to like him, and then to want and need him almost desperately. She would do anything for him.

And yet he still wasn’t objectively attractive in any way.

It puzzled her sometimes. She puzzled herself sometimes. She still remembered what she had found attractive in other boys and men. She still found hard muscles—which Anthony lacked—and long muscular legs—which he also lacked—and a quick wit—ditto—to be the things that turned her on.

Yet Anthony—too short, too weak, too sullen—had a devastating effect on her. She worshipped him. What he asked for he got, and if he failed to ask, she gave it anyway.

Well, Jessica thought, life is a mystery, isn’t it?

“It’s boring here,” Jessica said, resuming the massage. He was always tense. But more so since yesterday. He was so tight, it was almost as if he worked out and had muscle tone.

“It’s a boring place,” he agreed.

“At least you get to go out,” she said.

“I go to work.”

“How long is this so-called temporary assignment? We had more fun in New York,” she said. She knew the answer, but he hadn’t told her to shut up, yet. When he did she would, of course, shut up. But he hadn’t said it yet, so she asked.

“Don’t know,” he said into the mattress.

“I can’t just stay in a hotel room forever,” she protested.

He reached back blindly, fumbling with one hand until he touched her thigh. “Hey, you’ve got me, right?”

“Mmm. Yes, I do.”

“Okay, then shut up.”

And she did.

But as she pressed her lips together she remembered a dream. She almost told him about it, but he had told her to shut up.

In the dream she had been somehow buried up to her neck. Just her head stuck up above the ground. She couldn’t move. She had wanted to put her hands to her head, had wanted to press her palms against the side of her head and squeeze, really hard. She didn’t know why.

Jessica had been very angry in the dream. That’s mostly what she remembered. That she was very, very angry, because she didn’t want to be buried in the ground and someone had done that to her.

Sometimes she could almost see who it was. But she couldn’t turn her head far enough to make him out. She rolled her eyes back and forth but she couldn’t see him because he kept scuttling out of sight.

Even now, recalling the dream, she was angry. It rose up in her, that anger, like boiling oil rushing through her veins.