Racking the Slide

by Q Lindsey Barrett

There was a film I saw in psychology class where cats had electrodes implanted in the pleasure center of their brains. They learned to step on a bar to momentarily activate the electrodes. They quickly became addicted. Every one of them continued pressing the bar until they died from pleasure—literally. They lost all interested in food drink sleep. Stepping on the bar, again and again and again until they were too weak to do anything but keel over dead.

Sleepily, his impossibly tender fingers caress my back, he whispers, "I could get lost in your coppery hair," as he buries his fingers then brushes it aside to nuzzle my neck. Soon he's hard against my thigh. "Are you warm enough, baby?" He pulls the blanket around, cocooning me in the rising heat of his body.

I murmur something like, "Yes." His hand between my legs distracts. Nearly to the place where coherent speech doesn't exist. Dylan uses the tip of his tongue to explore the hollow between my collar bones, traces the outline of my breasts, spiraling in to gently flick each nipple, all the while his thumb and forefinger work a steady rhythm.

By the time he flips me onto my belly I am nearly beyond conscious thought. My arm flops off the side of the bed and makes contact with. . .what?

Something cold and hard and metallic protruding from between the mattress and box springs. Another frickin' gun, really? Dylan pays no attention to my sudden stiffening, to my fear. He pulls me back to him, continuing to stroke between my thighs.

"Dylan. . . ?" I want to ask him, I want to ask him. . . something. Something about this other gun, I think. I want. . .but he has slipped into me and all I want is more. I want harder, I want deeper, I have no other thoughts as another wave rolls over me, drowning me.

The guns sheriffs use in our county have no safety. Dylan laughed when I told him it bothered me that he kept his service revolver on the nightstand at the ready. "Grace, we don't want to get killed by a bad guy because we forget to release the safety."

"But I'm not a 'bad guy.' Can't you lock that thing up when I'm here?"

He started to laugh again, all smart-ass. "It's not like the gun's gonna go off by itself."

When I turned away, he turned me back, serious then. "Watch." He pulled the hammer back with his thumb. "It has to be cocked first, and even then nothing happens without pulling the trigger. See." His finger squeezed at the trigger, and my hands flew to cover my ears. I suppose if I'd been thinking, I'd have known he wasn't going to shoot the gun in the apartment. My fingers found the thickening in my earlobe, the scar where I used to wear an earring. A nervous gesture I can't seem to shake.

Dylan suppressed a smile—he's got this kinda crooked bad-boy smirk—and wrapped his arms around me. He still had the cocked gun in his hand and I pictured getting accidentally shot in the back as he squeezed me and the trigger in one fatal motion. "What you need," he said, "is shooting lessons. Then you won't be afraid."

Just like my brother, Beau, fascinated by guns. Only not like Beau, I hoped, fingering the scar again. "Okay, but for now, do you mind putting the gun down?" I pushed away from him, away from the gun.

He laughed for real, a beautiful sound to match his dazzling movie star smile, white teeth gleaming against tan skin. It was that smile that first caught my attention when I met him. To advance his career he's taking criminal justice classes at UNO where I'm a journalism student. He tells me about arrests he's made and I practice writing news stories. Sometimes he likes creeping me out with stories about abused women since he knows my family's history. He told me about how easy it was for a guy to put a GPS device on a girl's car 'as quick as a hide-a-key.' Much more difficult to hide-a-person from someone determined to track her. He doesn't understand why more of them don't move, change their name, disappear completely, give up everything to keep their life. Tonight as we were crawling under the covers he remembered something that happened when he was a rookie up in Montana where he's from. He was first on the scene when a fisherman found a teenage girl on the river bank, her lungs filled with water, her eyes bulging. Dylan reveled in being able to tell how she died, his certainty she'd been held under, though it was his first and only murder. The more gruesome the details, the better the story as far as Dylan's concerned. He says he's helping me toughen up, because I'll need to if I'm going to be reporting such stories.

So tonight is another fitful night at Dylan's. I open one eye and peer at the bedside clock. Damn gun, black and menacing, peers back at me with its one dark eye. Gives me the creeps it does, though I suppose not for a rational reason. It's not like it's going to rise up and shoot me in the dark of night. Although Dylan might. I lift my head higher to see the clock over the gun. 3 a.m. I am positively becoming an old lady, only able to sleep in my own little bed in the dorm.

Dylan, next to me, doesn't stir as I roll over to face him. He's gorgeous, especially with the soft blue light of the moon through the window illuminating his face, casting shadows that highlight his chiseled cheekbones. I kiss the bridge of his imperfect nose and he smiles without waking. His nose was made imperfect by impact with a fallen tree across his path that he had ducked not quite under, chasing a perp past a windbreak row in the dark. The guy was trying to escape into the corn fields.

"My partner said he could hear the crack a quarter mile away when my nose made contact with the tree." His laugh as he told me gave me the willies. Like nothing mattered. Even smashing his nose was a joke. "Knocked me on my ass and knocked me out cold, but not long enough to let the son-of-a-bitch get away. You should have seen the look on that bad boy's face as I came running up and jumped him looking like something out of a horror flick, blood all over my clothes, blood still streaming from my nose." Dylan's pecs flexed against his tight white t-shirt, his biceps bulged brutally as he reenacted the moment. "Sucker was so stunned he didn't even put up a fight when I punched him in the face—payback for thinking he could lay me in the dirt and get away with it. I punched him again for thinking that a little thing like a smashed nose could keep me from coming after him." He clenched then unclenched his fists. "Too bad he went along easy then, I'd been wanting an excuse to crack skull for a long time." He turned to me then and the harsh light in his eyes softened. "It's okay, babe." He must have read my face, since he stroked my cheek, my hair, comforting me. "I don't mind a crooked nose—adds character, don't you think?" Like the only thing about his story that might bother me was that his face was less perfect than it used to be.

I try to reconcile the stark brutality of the man who gets pleasure from punching-in the face of another man with the one I see sleeping next to me, the gentle, thoughtful, loverman who takes me dancing, showers me with attention, spends every moment we're together focused on making sure I'm happy. The sheet is draped erotically along his hip, baring his chest, exposing all six defined ab muscles down to where his happy trail points under the cloth. I shiver with. . . what? Desire? Fear? Cold? I can't say, so I snuggle in under the covers and try not to think about it. He automatically draws me nearer, cradling me in his warm arms.

As we lay there after, my head pillowed against the muscles of his chest, his arms enveloping me, we hear a noise in the hallway. He rolls and lunges so suddenly, I'm sent flying, but my hair is caught under him, trapping me, yanking me back and I yelp. He hisses, shushing me as he comes up with the gun from under the mattress and in one smooth move crunches to a sitting position while loading a round in the chamber and taking aim at the door. "Chill dude. It's just me Dylan." I guess his housemate John recognizes the sound of Dylan racking the slide. I wonder if I'll be facing down the barrel of that gun when I toddle off to the bathroom one of these nights.

"You okay Gracie?" Dylan rubs my head where my hair got pulled.

He is so gentle with me, he'd never understand, and I'm not sure I do, but I have to leave. The electrode got ripped out of my brain with my hair I guess. I can't know yet that leaving will mark the beginning, not the end; that his comments about how easy it is to track someone were more than mere observation. My own sleep-soundly bed is calling, and I don't understand why I'm afraid to tell him. I wait until he drifts off, gather my clothes on the way out, brace for the sound of him racking the slide, the sound I in fact hear, holding my breath as I run away, away fast, sprinting barefoot across the parking lot.

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