WANNABE

Wannabe lived in rented accommodation above a butcher’s shop. By agreeing to take Red back to his house, he was showing her how little he respected her intelligence. Here he was, an apparent millionaire rock star preparing to play to thousands, and yet he had chosen to spend the night in a dingy second-floor flat as opposed to a five-star hotel.

I couldn’t hear their conversation, but I knew what men like Wannabe were like, I knew how their minds worked, and I had a fairly good idea of what he had told her. As I followed behind, far enough not to arouse suspicion, close enough to see where they were headed, I pictured him telling her that he had borrowed the apartment from a friend.

I like to live rough when I’m on tour, I imagined him saying. It keeps me connected to my roots and means I can put in a more meaningful performance.

If I didn’t find him so repulsive and didn’t believe that Red would have believed anything anyone told her, I would have been impressed.

Wannabe reminded me of Neckbeard. He wasn’t as physically repulsive. He was cleaner, fitter, moderately more attractive, charming, albeit intermittently. There was no sadism there, either. Manipulation and deception were used for sexual advancement, not for the sheer hell of it. But he was still despicable, selfish, and narcissistic.

I found myself gaining on them with every step I took. I kept my movements slow, methodical, but their steps were staggered and interrupted by groping, kissing, and shrill laughter that echoed throughout the empty streets like banshee screams. They were clearly having a lot of fun, even though they’d only known each other for a few minutes.

They began looking over their shoulders at me, firing furtive glances. I knew they weren’t smart enough to realize I was following them. They didn’t have anything to fear or anyone to suspect, but they seemed unsettled by the fact that I was there. I retrieved my phone from my pocket and began fiddling on the screen, using the opportunity to significantly slow my steps and make it clear that I wasn’t following them.

When I looked up again, they had vanished.

Shit.

The streets were empty, devoid of life and movement, the silence broken only by the sound of distant cars and monotonous music thumping from a nearby house. The promiscuous imbeciles were nowhere to be seen.

There was a chance they were hiding and watching me, a chance they had seen me, anticipated my intentions and turned the tables. A chance, but not a likely one. Muffled laughter and hasty footsteps quelled my doubts and settled my anxiety. The sound came from an alleyway ahead and to the right. It was Red—I would recognize that shrill voice and vacuous tone anywhere. Wannabe was trying his best to silence her, but his hushed warnings were just as loud as her laughter.

They were hiding, and they hadn’t spotted me.

Wannabe had surprised me. He hadn’t lied to his provisional partner about his home. He hadn’t even intended to take her back. Either he had decided that she wasn’t worth the time and effort, or he was just so horny that he couldn’t wait.

The alleyway wrapped around the back of an abandoned pub and came to a dead-end behind a boarded-up apartment block. It was here that the young and stupid lovers decided to share their first kiss, hungrily swapping saliva and the remnants of everything they’d kissed, sucked, and swallowed over the last few days—a prelude to their first fuck, in which they would share other bodily fluids and a plethora of STDs.

From behind a dumpster, nestled in the shadow of an overhanging roof, I watched them grasp and pull their way through an awkward and hurried sexual encounter, their actions highlighted under the white glow of a nearby florescent. They kissed, long and impassioned. Wannabe pressed her against the wall, kissing her neck, groping her breasts, and then pulling down her pants.

He turned her around and thrust his face between her exposed cheeks as she squirmed and giggled. Seconds later his pants were around his ankles, his fly ripped open, his erect penis exposed to the unseasonably cool air. The sex was quick, hard, cold, and confusing. Wannabe came after a few thrusts and pulled out; she had barely gotten started, seemingly believing that this was still foreplay and the best was yet to come.

Pants up, hands around her waist, Wannabe leaned in close, whispering in her ear and kissing her neck. She seemed happy with the act, but his goal wasn’t to placate her after a hurried and disappointing encounter; he wasn’t intent on giving her the same pleasure that she had given him. He simply wanted to surreptitiously wipe his penis on the seat of her pants.

“I’m sorry,” he said when she turned around.

“It’s okay,” she said quickly. “It happens to everyone.”

The pause suggested he hadn’t expected that. “No,” he said slowly. “I was going to say that I’m sorry I just remembered that I have to meet my bandmates at the venue.”

“Oh, okay.”

Maybe he expected her to be more disappointed, maybe he expected her to put up a fight, call him a liar, and even demand that he take her with him. But she did none of those things. Red might have been stupid and gullible, but she also knew what was good for her, and a five-second fumble that made her feel uncomfortable, cold, and unsatisfied definitely wasn’t it.

Her footsteps echoed a hasty retreat on the concrete as she walked through the shadows and out of the alleyway without saying another word and without catching a glimpse of the voyeur hiding behind the dumpster.

Wannabe was in no rush to follow and was already preparing to gloat about his experience, phone in hand, a wide grin on his face. There was no shame, no embarrassment, no sense that he had just given an attractive young girl the most uncomfortable sexual encounter of her young life, not to mention an awkward encounter at the sexual health clinic a couple weeks from now.

He snapped a picture of himself to capture his stupid grin for posterity before taking another while standing in front of the scene of the crime, giving the camera a thumbs-up. If his friends had been there with him, he would be high-fiving them and telling them how amazing it had been and how he’d rocked her world.

As if confirming my suspicions, he pressed the phone to his ear and spoke excitedly to his equally dim-witted friends. “Did you see them?” he asked, “it’s not random, and it’s not a mistake. That’s where I am right now, and I just fucked a gorgeous hot girl here. My dick is still hard, man. And, better yet, she pissed off after!”

Clearly, he wasn’t the only asshole in his band. Tool had a lot of explaining to do.

I slipped out from behind the dumpster and made my move. I was bathed in darkness; he was standing under a light. The advantage was mine.

“It’s behind the old Queen’s Head—”

I removed a large blade from its sheath around my waist and edged closer, knowing his excited words would drown out my approach.

“No, seriously. And it was her idea! … No, honestly, look!”

He turned the phone toward me, pointed it directly at me, and snapped another picture.

I froze, locked in place by the Medusa-like flash.

The smile still beamed on his face as he pulled the phone back to his ear and stared absently into the darkness. “See, you get it? I told you, man, it’s an alleyway, next to—”

Shit. Shit. Shit.

His smile slowly faded, turning first to confusion and then to horror. “What do you mean?” he asked. “What person? There’s no one else here. She left.” He tried to laugh it off. “You’re tripping, man. Stop trying to scare me and ruin my buzz.”

I moved quickly, blinking away the stars from the corner of my ears, heading straight for the idiot sheathed in the glow of the streetlight.

“Mate, you’re scaring me—”

I was just five or six feet away when he saw me—too close for him to react. If his brain hadn’t been tainted by years of drug use, he might have reacted quicker, he might have heeded his friend’s warning and run, shouted, screamed, or come out fighting. But he did none of those things.

Wannabe barely lifted a finger as the knife came down, first near his shoulder, then his upper chest, then his neck. I stabbed him six times before he finally began to fight back, but by that point, it was too late: the aspiring rock star played his last note with a strangled cry that bubbled out through the viscous blood pooling in his mouth.

There was no fight. No resistance. No chance. I treated him to the same experience that he had given so many slow-minded, promiscuous women over the years—it happened so quickly and so brutally that he barely had time to react, let alone acknowledge he’d just been fucked.

He dropped to his knees, his simpleton grin now a picture of horror; his eyes imploring.

There was a glimmer of recognition when he saw me, but it was soon replaced by confusion, desperation, and then fear.

“Hello? Hello!?”

Wannabe rapidly bled out while his dimwitted friend failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation on the other end of the phone.

“Damn it! My bloody phone is playing up again.”

I ended the call and checked the image he had snapped. My outline was visible—a black silhouette, the glint of a knife—but there were no discernible features and it was all wrapped in motion blur, with the hood covering my face like the shroud of the grim reaper. I deleted the photograph from his phone. I couldn’t do anything about the image on his friend’s phone, but I didn’t need to. It didn’t show anything. I wiped the device with my sleeve and dropped it on the bleeding, gurgling body at my feet.