Shadow Creek by Joy Fielding

Betty.”
    “That’s for damn sure.”
    And then soon after that, “I love the name Nikki. With two
k’
s.”
    “Then Nikki, with two k’s, it is.”
    “Call me Nikki,” she’d said to that stupid Ellen Laufer. Opening her door to a total stranger in the middle of the night. In the middle of a storm. How ridiculous was that?
    No more ridiculous than living out in the middle of nowhere, she thought, answering her own question. No more ridiculous than not having a TV.
    It was like her grandfather had once said: some people were just too stupid to live.
    “What was it like when you tried to kill your stepmother?” she’d asked Kenny one day. They were sitting on the double bed in the sparsely furnished room he was renting. “I mean, did you actually get to cut her?”
    “Nah. I was too little. She was too fast for me. I just chased her around the kitchen with a steak knife. Freaked her right out.”
    “I bet.”
    “It was fun.”
    “I bet,” she said again. Then, “I used to cut myself.”
    “I know.”
    “You do?”
    “Those scars on your legs.” He touched her thighs, his fingers tracing a series of thin lines on top of her jeans. “Do you still do it?”
    She shook her head. “I stopped.”
    “Why?”
    She shrugged.
    “Would you start again—if I asked you to?”
    “Yes,” she said without missing a beat. Didn’t he know that she would do anything for him?
    “I want you to do it now,” he said. “I want you to show me how you cut yourself.”
    She quickly wriggled out of her jeans and kicked them to the floor. “I need a razor.”
    Kenny pushed himself off the bed and walked purposefully into the bathroom, returning with a razor and a towel.
    “Watch,” she said.
    His eyes followed her hand as she lowered the razor blade to her bare skin, drawing a line along the flesh of her inner thigh, as easily as if she were taking a pen to paper. It took a second for the wound to open and the blood to appear, another second for the pain to register, then disappear into pleasure. Her lips parted; her jaw slackened; her head rolled back. She felt the familiar rush, as if someone had just stuck a needle full of heroin into her veins.
    And suddenly his head was between her legs, and he was licking the blood from her thighs, and moaning along with her. “I want you to cut me,” he whispered.
    “No. I can’t hurt you.”
    “You won’t. Here,” he said, prying the razor from her fingers and removing his jeans, flinging them to the floor beside hers. “Show me. Guide my hands.” He’d placed the palm of her hand over the back of his and waited. And when she pressed the blade into his skin, when she ran it along his flesh, he’d shuddered, then pulled her to him and kissed her, deeply, tenderly.
    She’d never felt so much love.
    A few days later, he suggested they find someone else to cut.
    “Stepmother number one has an old aunt and uncle who live in the outskirts of Plainfield,” he said, his enthusiasm increasing as his idea expanded. “Arlene and Frank Wall. They always had a soft spot for me.”
    “Their name is Wall?”
    “As in ‘brick.’ ”
    She laughed, trying to remember if she’d ever been so happy. She would do anything to hold on to this man, to this feeling. Anything and everything. Anything he wanted. Everything he asked.
    “Anyway, they have this cottage in the woods, almost as old as they are, and they’ve gotta be almost eighty by now. No kids. No neighbors. Just the two of them. Nobody’d even miss them.”
    “Are you serious?” she asked.
    “Yeah. Are you scared?”
    “No. Are you?”
    “Hell, no. I’m excited. A couple of old farts. They’ve been around long enough. We’d be doing the world a favor by getting rid of them.”
    “We’re going to kill them?”
    “Well, dummy, we can’t very well cut them up and just leave them there to tell everyone, can we?”
    She felt her heart sink. Why had she asked him such a stupid question? She’d let him down.