The man screwed the cigarette into its holder and handed it to the woman beside him on the bed. The woman was naked except for her bush, which was thick – and the man thought – red with white-blonde highlights. He figured the highlights weren't real, but he didn't know about the red of her bush. When he had been close – he liked to taste his pussy before he fucked it – he hadn't really looked.

Her thin lips sucked on the cigarette holder. They looked thinner than when he had met her, in the bar downstairs. But he guessed her lipstick had filled them out, and it was gone now. God this place is such trash, he thought, looking around his apartment. Thankfully the only light in the room came from the neon flashing outside – red and green and blue; blue and green and red. The neon tubes formed a topless woman wearing a cowboy hat; the sign was for the strip club next door.

She was a stripper there; he was sure of it, though she hadn't said and he hadn't asked. The strippers liked to stop over at the bar after their shift, fully clothed, and pretend that they were just regular girls out for a drink. They were such easy prey too. He guessed, after having those pervs leering at you, to be treated decently by a halfway good-looking guy felt kinda nice, even too nice to pass up. Most of the girls he brought upstairs were from the strip club – and none of them came back after the one night. He didn't know if he wanted to explore that fact for its cause. Probably he didn't.

She stirred inside her cloud of spent nicotine and crooked her legs so that her soles were touching and her pussy stuck straight out into the flashing light. Yeah, she was a stripper. You couldn't adopt that pose next to a guy you had just fucked for the first time if you hadn't already lost all shame, or at least any self-consciousness about your body. “Can I have a drink of water?” she said. She sounded so young, like a damn kid, like the next question for daddy would be if she could get out of bed after lights out. He'd feel guilty for taking her to bed – if only he had any feelings left. “Water in the tap,” he said.

He watched her cross in front of him on the way to the kitchen, titts so perky they almost pointed up at the ceiling. Taut, bulbous ass too, just the way he liked it. Yeah – he was one lucky middle-age fucker.

The man didn't feel the splinters falling on him; the crack of his front door being kicked in and the crash of it beside the bed took all his attention. He lunged up, but could only think about the pistol holstered beneath his box springs. An intruder in black – practically invisible until the neon flashed – roundhoused him in the face. His cheek split and blood splattered to his chest. Then he was pinned back, his right arm across his chest and his legs hampered by the sheet. It got hard to breathe.

With each gunshot the intruder jerked. The first bullet went straight through the intruder's body and seared his split cheek. The man tried to push his attacker off and at the same time shield himself by scrunching down farther beneath him. He finally managed to push him off a few seconds after the shooting stopped, when he was just dead weight. His first sight was of the stripper standing over the dead guy with a lady derringer, which smoked in the green neon. “What the fucking hell?” he shouted. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Yeah, grow up, cowboy,” she said, wiping the derringer with the bed sheet. “Who did you think you were sleeping with, Mother Teresa?” That didn't make a whole lot of sense to him – there were a lot of people short of Mother Teresa who wouldn't shoot an intruder in the back and then wipe the gun for prints like it was a day in the park. And she was a kid for Christ sake, wasn't she? With titts like that? His brief tinge of guilt about her age seemed ridiculous now. And where had the gun come from? She went into the kitchen naked as a jaybird.

Now she had thrown the gun next to the dead guy and was cramming her legs into her jeans. He didn't know what to say. Blood ran down his face, and his cheek burned like holy hell. He looked at the dead guy on the bed and at his busted apartment door. His place was open for the whole world to see. Shit. “What are we going to do?” He felt like a fool asking it, but she had just killed a guy and seemed pretty composed. She probably knew what to do next.

She laughed. “Well, you've got a dead guy in your apartment and you can't even shut the door. I don't know what the fuck you're going to do, but I'm leaving.” Yeah, leave, that was the thing. His world was starting to make a little sense again, but before it came together, she blew it to pieces. “But don't for a minute think that you're coming with me. This ain't no fucking movie, cowboy.” She was already moving for the doorway, passing an arm's length from the bed without even looking him in the face. “Whatever you do, this is the last we're going to see each other, you got it?” Oh, yeah, he got it alright. She got what she came for and now she was leaving. Used, abused, and discarded.

Fucking always.