Broken Prey

quick: they were hungry for the first woman. Tired of descriptions, tired of what-we-might-do.
    They wanted meat. They wanted it now.
    He thought about Millie Lincoln. The woman did crazy things to him, and the thought of her blood drove him into a near frenzy.
    Not now; if he took Millie Lincoln, the cops would be on him for sure.
    But he would take her later. He licked his lips at the thought. Millie.
     
    MILLIE LINCOLN HAD a decent body, she thought—not Hollywood quality, but decent. Maybe she could lose a few pounds. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror that she and her roommates had pinned to the back of the front door: Okay, maybe ten pounds . . .
    “You think my ass looks fat?” she asked Mihovil, who was sitting on a couch, reading a Dilbert cartoon book.
    “I would have to see it closer . . .”
    “Hey: does it look fat, or doesn’t it?”
    “Every time I see it good, I get hard,” he said. ‘What more do you want?”
    She went over and plopped on the couch next to him and said, “Pizza.”
    “I think so. I am starved to death.”
    But he kept his nose in the book, not quite ignoring her. She crossed her legs and put them across his. He said, “Pizza,” and dropped the book on the floor, and brushed his hands up and down her legs. “ Mmm. You’re sticky.”
    “Haven’t shaved my legs in a week,” she said.
    “Don’t shave your legs until I come back,” he said. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will shave your legs for you.”
    “ Really. ” Sounded okay.
    “I am very good with a razor. You will see.”
    “ Mmm. ”
     
    THE NEXT EVENING , the roommates were gone, and they moved into the shower.
    Mihovil told her that the first great thing he’d experienced in the States was the shower in their apartment in New York. They hadn’t had running water in the refugee camp, and when his family got to New York, got the small apartment in Brooklyn, it had been like heaven.
    “Wasn’t heaven—was the fucking Yugoslavian ghetto, but it seemed like heaven, and all this hot water from the shower. I could stand in the shower for an hour—I took a shower every morning before school and every day when I came home and every night before I went to bed. You cannot understand hot water coming from the wall until you haven’t had it.”
    When he got his residency and moved into his own apartment in downtown Mankato, he’d unscrewed the showerhead and replaced it with one he bought from a local hardware store; a showerhead that produced a torrent of water.
    “My mother always said the best thing about America was a kitchen with a real stove and a real sink and everything works; I always thought the shower. And the toilet, of course.”
     
    HE GOT HER IN the shower and said, “First we soap your legs. Huh? We need some nice shaving soap.”
    He’d brought it with him. He shaved from an old-fashioned mug, with a shaving brush; but the thing that really turned her crank was the razor.
    He produced an ancient-looking leather-covered box and from it extracted a straight razor with a mother-of-pearl grip. “From my homeland,” he said. “My father gave it to me when I came old enough to shave.”
    The hot water was pouring down over her belly and legs, and Mihovil lathered her legs with the brush—the brush felt amazing, the brush was something she decided she couldn’t live without—and then began carefully shaving her legs, carving his way upward, kneeling on the dirty old tiles, his hands soft and the blade like a piece of light cutting through the prickly leg hair . . .
    Like any number of college students with good bodies, Millie liked to lie in the summer sun in a bikini; and a bikini required the removal of patches of pubic hair, left and right. The problem was that when you shaved, you often got nasty red bumps from ingrown hair. The idea of shaving off all her public hair had never appealed to her, because she suspected that she’d turn into one gigantic infected red bump.
    But Mihovil, shaving up her legs, simply didn’t stop. He just kept going. And the brush felt so good . . .
    Mihovil could feel her trembling as he played with the razor and then with the brush, with the razor and the brush, razor and brush . . .
    Millie began to whimper, and she knotted her hands in his long Jesus hair, and she began to cry out . . .

20
    WEATHER CALLED AT eight o’clock. Lucas fumbled the phone receiver and hit himself on the nose, which hurt.
    “How are you?” he