The Winner: Part Seven

An hour later, I'm sitting in the parking lot of a McDonald's a mile down the road from Friday's, drinking a strawberry milkshake and listening to a Slayer CD, blasting through the Mercedes' crystal clear sound system. Apple told me to wait for her here since she'd get in trouble if we left the club together.

Finally, a cab pulls into the parking lot and Apple emerges from it. She looks much different wearing something other than stripper clothes. Between her ripped up jeans, green hoodie and baseball cap, there's not much to distinguish her from the average girl at the grocery store. This turns me on even more.

I turn down the music, open my window and wave her over to the car. She hops in the passenger side. "Wow, this is a real nice car."

"I'm glad you like it," I say, then I lean over and kiss her on the cheek. "I only accept the best."

Apple gives the sort of smile that a girl gives when she doesn't know what to say. "So, do you really have the money?"

I'm a little hurt that she wants to get down to business so quickly, but I pull out a wad of twenty one-hundred dollar bills anyway and hand it to her. "Here you go, that's all of it." Thankfully, Apple doesn't count it in front of me.

"You mind if we do this at my place?" she asks. "I want to spend time with you, but I really do need to check on my babies."

"I guess your place is as good as mine."

"Good. Make a right out of the lot here. Mind if I smoke?"

I roll down the window even though it's twenty degrees outside so her smoke doesn't stink up the car too bad, then I start driving. We head north and a light snow begins to fall outside.

"I wanna let you know straight up here that I'm not a whore," Apple says. "I don't go home with guys from the club regularly. I'm just in a tight spot right now and really need the money." She throws her cigarette butt out the window. "You promise your gonna treat me like a lady?"

I sigh. "Of course I'll treat you like a lady. I don't think of you as a whore at all." Of course, if I'd known that, I probably wouldn't have gone all the way to two-thousand dollars.

After driving for twenty minutes, we finally get to Apple's neighborhood, which is a trailer park on the edge of the city. The place is filled with gutted old cars, riddled with bullets and sitting up on cinderblocks. We pass a rail-thin man walking around in the cold without a shirt. He has obviously been awake for days, probably on meth. His body is covered with sores. Everywhere there are shady looking white dudes, smoking cigarettes and hollering at my luxury car which probably costs more than the combined net worth of every person in this trailer park. I really don't want to park my car here, but it's too late as we are now at Apple's trailer.

The lights are on inside the trailer and I can hear a baby crying inside. Apple fumbles around with her keys and eventually is able to get the door open. The trailer is fucking fithy. It's even worse than my mother's house before I hired a maid. Trash is piled waist deep against the walls. There is rotting food all over the kitchen counter. Shit filled diapers are in a pile on the floor. One of her babies is sitting on the stained, shag carpeting of the living room, sucking on what I'm horrified to find out is a used tampon applicator. Her other baby, the newborn, lays in a cardboard box that's filled with baby shit and a thin blanket. It looks like they've been left alone all day.

Apple drops her bag and rushes up to the makeshift crib. "Oh darling, don't cry. Mommy's home," she says, picking up the baby and patting it's back. The baby makes a strangling noise, spits up small stream of gray goo which lands just inches from my shoe, and resumes crying. Apple turns to me. "This is my little boy Bubba," she says. "The other one is Kevin. I gotta feed and change them real quick. My bedroom is in the back, if you want to go back there and make yourself comfortable. I should only be like five minutes."

"Okay," I say, heading towards her bedroom. I feel extremely uncomfortable. Nothing kills the mood like meeting the stripper's children.

Apple's bedroom is just as filthy as the front. Her bed is nothing but an old stained mattress with a comforter. Dirty clothes are piled all over the place. The NASCAR calendar with the page still set on August is nearly a cliche at this point. I close the door, but the thin walls of the trailer do nothing but muffle the sound of her babies crying. I sit down on the bed and wait for Apple to come back.

The five minutes she quoted turned out to be more like ten. She steps into the bedroom and gives a demure smile. "Sorry about the wait there," she says. "But I'm all yours now. You want to hear some music?"

"Sure," I say. She goes over to the old radio on the dresser and turns it onto a fucking country music station. The reception is thin and tinny. Still I don't complain. She comes back over to where I'm sitting and puts her hand on my knee and I wonder if she washed the baby shit off her hands before touching me.

"You nervous?" she says.

"A little," I say.

Apple kisses me on the cheek. "That's so cute," she says. Apple quickly takes off all her clothes, then leans over and whispers in my ear, "You can touch me if you want."

I grab her hips as she dances in front of me, slowly working my way up to her butt, then over the loosened, stretchmarked skin of her waist, up to the her tiny, perky tits. I don't know if its because it's cold in here or because she's turned on, but her nipples are rock hard and I play with them in my palms. I can see her veins through the pale white flesh of her breasts.

Good lighting does not flatter Apple's physique, but despite this (and the fact that I'd already blown the majority of my nut over those hookers from Sergei's escort service) I started getting a boner again. Actually, I'd grown quite a large tentpole. Apple notices this.

"You can touch yourself if you want. I don't mind."

I quickly whip my schlong out and start tugging away. Apple teases my balls by rubbing her knee against my nuts (it feels better than it sounds). I'm about to nut all over the place when I suddenly come to my senses: I'm paying two-thousand dollars to do what I do three times a day for free. I quit jerking off and let myself calm down. At the very least, I should savor the moment.

"Don't stop, baby, don't stop," Apple says, quickly grabbing my johnson and picking up where I left off. She leans over and I for a second, I think maybe she's gonna put it in her mouth, but she just ends up spitting on it. I'm already so worked up that it doesn't take her long to finish me off. I don't feel elation or relief when I come--I feel loathing. For myself, for Apple, for everything. For a moment, all of existence seems vile and contemptible...

"Oh, that's so hot baby," Apple says unconvincingly. "Oh yeah, I love it."

...and I look at her and I see the truth. Apple doesn't love me. What was more shocking is that I realized I no longer love Apple either. In fact, I realize I despise Apple. I hate her, I hate her so much, I wish I could reach over and dig my thumbs in her eyesockets. I could strangle her to death I hate her so much.

Outside the bedroom, I hear Apple's babies start crying as someone entered the trailer. It's a man's voice: "Angela! Woman Where are you? You better have fed these kid folk sometime today!" His footsteps are heading towards the bedroom.

It only takes me a split second to realize that if I was lucky, this male voice outside the bedroom was Apple's (though I guess her real name is Angela) pimp, in which he'd see his bitch naked and wiping my sperm off her hand with a Taco Bell napkin, two-thousand bucks richer. Shit, he'd probably be happy. However, if it happens to be husband-slash-boyfriend or god forbid, her father, I'm gonna at least get my ass kicked.

Sure enough, the door opens up and some scraggly looking white dude in a biker jacket steps inside, his steel toed boot crushing an empty Big Gulp cup filled with cigarette butts into the filthy shag carpet. "Ang?" he says confused as he takes in the whole scene. "What the fuck is going on?"

"Honey, it's not what you think..." Apple says, but before she can answer, the biker looks up at me.

"Who the fuck are you?"

I tuck my now flaccid dick back into my fly and stand up. "Okay, guess I'm leaving now, baby. It's been fun..."

"Sit down!" the biker screams at me. The Desert Eagle he's waving at my face in a white knuckle grip convinces me to do so.

As soon as I'm down, he whips the gun towards Apple. "Woman! You best have uh good explanation for this, or I'm a put a bullet in the both of ya!"

"Easy honey," Apple says. Her voice sounds both cautious and calming. "This is just a fella I met tonight at the club. Now put that gun down, Luke. Your scarin' me."

Somehow, her explanation doesn't seem to calm Luke down much. He steps towards me and puts the Deagle's huge barrel right against my cheek. "I know Demitrious over at the club. I know he don't let you go home with no men..."

"I know, but this guy offered me a lot of money and I didn't even have to have sex with him."

"That's totally true," I say. "She wouldn't let me."

Luke pistolwhips me in the cheek. I see stars for a second, but don't pass out. "Shut the fuck up," he hisses through his rotted grill. It looks like someone has a bad case of meth-mouth...

Apple reaches down into her hoodie and pulls out the wad of hundreds I gave her. "See. Look...it's two-thousand dollars. I was gonna give it all to you, sweetheart. Ain't two-thousand what you owe Dexter for that stash you lost when you got arrested?

With the money in front of him, Luke looks like a confused animal that has suddenly been forced by reason to snap out of their rage, that perhaps there's some obvious self-interest involved her. I just hope Luke doesn't go for the next obvious step, which would be to grab the rest of my money, blow my head off, then bury me in a shallow grave a hundred yards into the woods.

"Dexter kept the payment for the run I did before, so I don't owe him. But I can't work now that I can't leave the state, and all our money's gone to my bondsman..."

"See, we can use this..." Apple says, now handing the cash over to him. He takes the gun off me, looks through the wad of hundred dollar bills, and then sticks his hand out to me. "Sorry 'bout how I hit you there, brother. But this will really help this family out."

"Okay," I say, not knowing what else I could say.

"Here, let me offer you a beer." Luke says. He looks over to Apple, "Sweetheart, could you clean up in here just a little bit."

"Yessir," she says, then starts sheepishly picking her clothes off the floor.

"Stay undressed and leave the door open," Luke says, before walking towards the tiny kitchen. He hadn't yet put his gun away, so I figured I kinda had to have a beer with him.

"Catch!" he says, lobbing an open and foaming can of Natural Light Ice at me. It bounces off my chest, covering me in beer suds, but I grab it on the rebound. Luke sets the Deagle conspicuously on the counter, then pops open his own can and chugs about half of it on his first sip. "Sorry if it ain't that cold. But hey! Warm beer is the best, ain't it?" he says slapping me on the back. Apparently, I'd made a new friend.

"Yeah. Warm beer. Nothin' better that that," I mumble, wondering how I'm gonna get out of this mess.

Luke throws me a menacing look, which breaks into a grin shortly after he has another gulp of his Natty Ice.

"So, you like my little Ang there?"

What do I say. Right, something lame..."She's really kind," I say. "She's a really good person."

"She is, she is," Luke says solemnly before suddenly slapping me against the shoulder again. "She also got that fine ass, don't she?" He looks down the hall to the bedroom, where Apple was eavesdropping on us. "You still cleanin' in there?"

"Yessir," she says, halfheartedly picking some pillows off the floor.

"You know," Luke says, crushing his beer can and opening up another one. "For two-thousand dollars, I'm okay with you seeing her."

"I..." don't know what to say..."I don't want to cause any problems."

"Won't be a problem," Luke says, running his fingers over the Deagle on the counter. "Besides, me and Angie are swingers...and for two-thousand, I'll make sure she fucks you each time."

"I...that's okay..."

"I'll drop it to a thousand if you let me join in. Don't be uptight about it. I wouldn't want to play with you. But I do like double penetration, and your dicks kinda rub together inside the girl during that. You ain't uptight, are ya?"

Luke runs his hand over my cheek. I don't move away, but I can't help but shudder. If only I were about three feet closer to the gun, I'd try and make a grab for it, hopefully get it in time to paint the walls with the back of that faggot's skull. Then I'd grab Apple and we'd hop in the car before the police arrived and take her away from all of this.

"Well, keep all that in mind," Luke says. He gestures down the hall, "You know where you can find her. Been nice meetin' you."

I take that to mean I'm dismissed. I set the beer down and move calmly but quickly out the door of the trailer and down to where my Mercedes is parked. Of course, while I was inside someone broke into it. The driver's side window was now glimmering pile of safety glass covering the bucket seat. Luckily, it looks like they were only after the stereo and the ignition still seems intact. The car starts up just fine and I drive as fast as I can out of that fucking trailer park. I forget where I even am, I just start driving west.

Part of me is screaming, "That bitch is completely not worth the hassle." On the other hand, I can't walk away either. It's not that I wanted to help Apple out. In fact, I think I hate her. I want to destroy her spirit.

I want to break her.