My ass jumps into my throat. I break the grip around my waist and spin toward the entrance, legs coiled like springs. Shoppers stop and stare.

'Happy Birthday!' It's fucken Taylor.

I spin a full circle, looking for the heavies who must be here to get me. But it's only Taylor. The clerk at the wire agent's counter smiles as she wraps an arm around my waist, and leads me shaking from the store.

'You didn't wait for the wire details, like the password, dummy,' she says.

'Uh-huh, so you hopped a fucken plane.'

'Language, killer!'

'Sorry.'

'Well I couldn't leave you stranded. Anyway, I'm bummed back home, and this is my vacation money - I hope you don't mind sharing. Here's three hundred, and we'll work the math out later …'

'I'll try to cope. How'd you know it's my birthday?'

'Hell-o? The whole world knows it's your birthday.'

The reality of what's happening starts to tingle in my brain. Taylor's here. I found a beach-house, and Taylor's here, with money. One thing to be proud of: I don't respond to the flood of joy-hormones, the one that makes you want to sniff flowers, or say I love you. I contain myself like a man.

'Wait'll you see where we're staying,' says Taylor, dragging me along the street. 'If they'll let you in - you look like an Indian.'

'You got a hotel?'

'Twin room, so you better behave - serial killer you.'

I become heavier for her to pull. 'Wait up - I found somewhere to stay you won't believe - on a beach, with jungle …'

'Eew! With, like, spiders and bugs? Eew!'

'You never saw Against All Odds?

'I already paid for the room, Vern, like, God.'

Whatever. As we walk, I remember I have to keep enough trouble around me to not give a shit how I act with her. You can only really be yourself when you have nothing left to lose, see? That's a learning I made. It may sound dumb, but it ain't easy when your dreams roll up. Take note, you can feel jerksville lurking in back. And as we know, just by thinking it, you suffer it worse. The learning: potential assholeness when a dream comes true is relative to the amount of time you spent working up the dream. A=DT2. It means I could even fucken puke.

She's wearing white shorts, I can't tell yet if there's a visible panty-line because they're kind of crinkled. Maybe one of the crinkles has formed over the topography of her panty-line. She also has a peach-colored T-shirt with a little Scorpio logo on it, and a stiff kind of jacket that she wears over the top. Her long brown limbs are perfectly attached to her body. I kind of frown at the jacket, though. She sees me and smiles.

'The plane was like a refrigerator.'

It's almost dark when we reach her hotel, one of the bigger ones. She pulls me into the lobby, where all these folk start looking at us. My shoulders hunch. Everything suddenly looks alien, like some kind of store display, with me the only one moving. Except I ain't even moving, not at all. I just become silent.

Taylor collects her key, then her voice goes into overdrive, or underdrive, more like it. 'C'mon upstairs - you'll like it - c'mon.'

I look at her perfect nose and skin and hair. She smiles a crooked little smile, a horn smile, and takes my hand. Actually, she takes my fingers first, just the ends of them, and caresses them all the way up to my palm. I get electric fucken shocks to my boy. We climb into an elevator car and ride up to her room. Nice room she has, with a view over the whole bay. Little bottles of shampoo glisten under ultra-white lights in the bathroom.

'Welcome home,' she says. She pulls some tequila miniatures out of the mini-bar, while I just stand here like a spare prick, then she curls up on the bed closest to the window. Somewhere in the composition of the air-conditioning is a licked-skin smell that brings a plague of fruity tangs to mind, damp edges of elastic crusted by sand and sea; salt lips pouting musk and vinegar. I scatter them, and move to the bed. Her sunny-smelling hair makes it seem like a regular day on vacation; fluffy, normal and free - I guess like your sixteenth birthday should feel. But my ole lady will be home, thinking it's my birthday, and trying to shut things out of her mind. She probably bought my cake while I was still there, just to start looking forward to it. I picture a lonely cake on the table, with my mom sobbing over it. 'Lord, you'll make it soggy!' Pam would say. Even the truth of things, like that she'd probably be at the Barn with Pam, even that makes me sad. Taylor must pick up some of this backwash, because she throws a tequila at me.

'Snap out of it.'

I fumble the catch. 'Tay - you're here to see I ain't committing any murders. You're a witness - right?'

'Whoa, back up. I don't want to even, like - you know? I'm just here for whatever.'

'But if a court, I mean if …'

'You ain't quitting, are ya, killer? She pats the bedclothes by her thigh. Come to Tay-Tay, you bad boy.'

Taylor raises her bottle, and we slug our tequilas down. I lie back on the bed like I'm wearing guns. She crawls half off the bed to grab some beers, and as she does it, her ass strains into the air. Panty-line. Bikinis. I'm fucken slain. In my dreams we're always alone, stuck tight together, somewhere secluded and safe, but never anywhere fancy like furnished rooms. Always just in a gap in some bushes, or in a field, where she absorbs me like an ameba, all kiss-smell, and thighs, and lips blow-drying the sweat on my skin. Part of the dream includes a kind of yearning to be in a room, all locked up with her, but I never am. Until now.

After four drinks, I'm laid back on one elbow feeling like it's my birthday. Drinks are wonderful that way. Taylor kicks off her leather sandals, one of them flies behind the TV. She runs a finger around the lip of her bottle, and studies me through vixen eyes.

'Vernon, tell me all those things you did.' Her voice is like a little girl's.

What did I say about trouble? She rolls closer until there's an inch of breath between us, alcohol haze with a far-away hint of cheese. We don't touch at all, but hang suspended, sucking chemical data like trembling dogs. Then comes a shock from the tip of her nose, wire touching wire. We melt into each other's mouths, my hand finds the round of her ass, surfs it, a finger charts an edge of panty - doesn't pick, or lift - just teases and glides, moving higher, feeling the climate change around her rudest rebellion, all for Vern.

'Violent, nasty boy,' she says. 'Tell me you killed for Tayla.'

Her whisper becomes a thread in the lace, fibrous and baking with desperate heat. She squirms out of her shorts, kicking them onto the floor by the mini-bar. Panties - The Final Frontier. I lower my face as the creases on her mound disappear, taut glory unfurling, pressing into my touch, forcing my hand flat to squeeze nectar through the silk, lagoons that trickle over the elastic and run down her thigh.

'Death-bug - God, murder - uuugh, God . . .'

She tries to close back her legs, wriggles hard, but she's lost, I'm on fire, committed even more now she's shy of her musky damp. I pull aside her weeping panty to face a delta writhing with meats, glistening with sweat carrying spicy coded silts from her ass; olives, cinnamon dust and chili blood. She gives up, beaten, without a secret left in the animal world. Her knees bend up and she takes in my tongue, my finger, and my face, she cries and bucks, horny ridges, ruffles, and grits suck me up, suck me home to the stinking wet truth behind panties, money, justice, and slime, burning trails through my brain like acid through butter. Pink Fucken Speed.

'Ugh, fuck! Tell me what you did to those people, tell me you loved it.'

I don't make a sound.

'Tell me! Tell me you killed!'

She starts to tighten her legs, draw away, and I whisper until she relaxes, and pulls me back to her vee. I've heard about these kinds of girls.

'Did you, Vern, did you do all that for me - for us … ?'

I feel a fatal oscillation on the head of my man, press him into the bedclothes, rub the stitching across his veins. 'Yeah,' I moan. 'I did it for you.' I keep whispering, but a new reality seeps into me, heavy like the beginnings of an infection. Suddenly her pout turns to rubber, her breeze to raw shrimp and metal-butter. Something ain't right. She scoots to the edge of the bed. Her cleft sneers through the silk of her panties as she bends over one last time. I know I've had the last of Taylor Figueroa. My world dissolves under my belly with a jet like stung snakes squirted out through their own eye-holes. Then quiet. Just a slow ocean moving slowly, and spit-curry after-poon drying cold on my face. Taylor pulls up her shorts, ties her sandals, flicks her hair in the mirror.

'Okay!' she says into the breast of her jacket.

The door opens and four men walk in. I shield my eyes from the glaring camera lights. 'Vernon Gregory Little?' asks one. Like - duh.

I could handle everybody in the lobby staring at me, if only one of them was Taylor. She doesn't stare, or even look. She crouches next to a smiling technician, and listens to an earpiece connected to wires in her jacket.

Then she giggles into a microphone. 'It's so exciting. You really think I can anchor the show? Like, God, Lalito …'

I'm led away from her crouching ass, an ass barely dry with my spit and my dreams. Her careless laugh follows me from the lobby. People around the hotel entrance fall silent when I com............