Chapter 5: The dancer's fishnets rip as Santa tears them apart, spanking her red while Bernadette sobs beneath them. He yanks his wife's head backward by her braids, forcing her tongue into his musky crack as he throat-pounds the stripper, Christmas ornaments rattling with each thrust.
The sleigh cut through the sub-zero silence, the only sound the whisper of runners on void-black ice. Beside him, the dancer—her stage name was Noelle—shivered violently in nothing but a sheer wrap over her candy-striped pasties and G-string. The reindeer moved with a somber, knowing grace, their bells muffled by the eternal night.
Noelle stared at the spectral glow of the North Pole complex as it materialized from the darkness. “Fuck me,” she breathed, her breath crystallizing. “It’s real.”
“Shut up,” Kris muttered, his hands numb on the reigns. The hollowness from the club had solidified into a leaden purpose during the flight. The spectacle hadn’t filled him. It had only carved the cavity deeper. He needed to violate the last clean thing.
The stable elves scattered like frightened mice as the sleigh touched down. Their wide, black eyes took in Noelle, then darted away. Kris didn’t look at them. He grabbed the dancer’s bony elbow and steered her through the back corridors, away from the sterile bustle of the packing department. The scent here was different—beeswax, old wool, simmered lingonberries. The smell of Bernadette.
He kicked open the door to their private quarters.
The sitting room was a diorama of domestic winter kitsch. A fire crackled. Hand-knitted stockings hung from the mantel. Bernadette sat in a high-backed chair, darning a sock, her glasses perched on the end of her nose. She looked up.
Her eyes moved from Kris’s disheveled, stained suit, to the near-naked, shivering woman beside him, then back to his face. No shock. Just a slow, cold settling of her features, as if a final piece of a long-expected puzzle had clicked into place.
“Kris,” she said, her voice flat as the ice plains.
“Bernie. We have a guest.”
Noelle hugged herself, her teeth chattering. “C-c-can I use your bathroom?”
“She’s not here to piss,” Kris said, not breaking eye contact with his wife. “She’s here to perform. In your bedroom. On your side of the bed.”
Bernadette’s needle paused. The fire popped. She set the darning aside, folded her hands in her lap. “I see. And am I to watch?”
“You’re to participate.”
A faint, bitter smile touched her lips. “Of course.” She stood, a short, compact woman shaped like a flour sack, and walked towards their bedroom door. She moved with a terrible dignity. “Shall we, then? The fire in here is wasteful if we’re all in the other room.”
The master bedroom was a monument to chintz. A quilted bedspread, lace curtains, the cloying scent of pine potpourri. A portrait of a younger, beaming Kris and Bernadette hung over the headboard. Kris marched Noelle to the left side of the bed—Bernadette’s side. He pushed her down. The springs squeaked in protest.
“Do your routine,” he said, shrugging off his coat. He let it drop to the meticulously vacuumed carpet.
Noelle, professional to her core, began a feeble version of her pole dance, rolling on the bed, her pasties grazing the white quilt. Her skin was goosefleshed and blue.
Bernadette stood by the door, watching, her arms crossed.
Kris unbuckled, freed himself. He was still half-hard from the memory of the club, from the filthy transition of power in this clean room. He climbed onto the bed, his weight making Noelle bounce. He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t touch her breasts. He ripped the flimsy string of her bottoms aside and shoved two fingers inside her. She was dry and tight.
“Lube, Bernie,” he growled, not looking back.
He heard the small closet open, the rustle of a drawer. Bernadette returned. She stood beside the bed and handed him a small, utilitarian bottle of unscented lotion. Their fingers did not touch.
He slicked himself, then pushed into Noelle with a single, brutal thrust. She gasped, her eyes squeezing shut. He fucked her with a steady, punishing rhythm, the headboard starting a dull thud-thud-thud against the wall. The portrait rattled.
He looked over his shoulder at his wife. Her expression was one of profound, analytical distaste, as if watching a poorly maintained machine leak oil.
“Come here,” he panted.
She didn’t move.
“NOW.”
She approached the side of the bed. He reared back, pulling out of Noelle with a wet sound. He rolled onto his back, his bulk creating a canyon in the mattress.
“Your mouth isn’t for talking,” he said to Bernadette, his chest heaving. “It’s for cleaning. Start with my boots.”
Bernadette’s gaze was level. For a moment, he thought she might refuse. Then, with a sigh that seemed to deflate her very soul, she lowered herself to her knees on the carpet. She took the toe of his heavy, reindeer-shit-caked boot into her mouth. She licked the leather, her eyes closed.
“Not the boot, you stupid cunt,” he snarled, grabbing a handful of her grey hair. “Me. I’m filthy from the world. Clean your husband.”
He guided her head between his legs. She resisted for a fraction of a second, a tiny muscle twitch in her jaw, before yielding. Her tongue, thin and precise, began to lick the sweat and dried traces of other women from his inner thighs. She worked like an elf on an intricate toy, with a detached, technical proficiency.
“Lower,” he commanded.
She moved down, her nose brushing his scrotum. She flinched at the musky, fermented smell.
“Further. I want that tight little tongue on my fucking hole, Bernadette. I want you to taste where I’ve been.”
A low moan escaped her, one of utter degradation. She pressed her face deeper, her tongue probing the coarse, matted hair, finding the pucker of his anus. She licked it. A jolt went through him—not pleasure, but power, absolute and corrosive.
“Yeah,” he hissed. “Lick it clean. Swallow the dirt.”
As her tongue worked in reluctant, circles, he reached up and hauled Noelle by the hair towards his face. “Sit on it,” he grunted. “Feed me your cheap cunt.”
Noelle scrambled, straddling his face, lowering herself. He ate her with a furious, gagging intensity, his own wife’s tongue buried in his ass. The flavors were a dissonant hell: synthetic strawberry glaze from the dancer, the intimate, salty tang of his own body from his wife. Bernadette’s ministrations became more vigorous, almost angry, as if she could scrub the corruption out of him through sheer force of will.
Kris felt his orgasm building, a storm surge of venom. He gripped Noelle’s thighs, holding her down as he suffocated himself in her, while Bernadette’s relentless tongue pushed him over the edge.
He came without a sound, a series of hard, dry pulses that shot up onto his own belly and chest.
He pushed Noelle off his face. She collapsed beside him, weeping quietly. Bernadette sat back on her heels, her mouth and chin glistening. She looked ancient.
Kris lay there, staring at the carved wooden reindeer on the ceiling beam. The hollowness was still there. It had been gouged wider, but it was not filled. The violation of the last sacred space had been just another transaction.
Bernadette stood. She walked to the washbasin in the corner, poured water, and scrubbed her face with a washcloth. She did it three times.
“Get her out of my room,” she said, her back to him. Her voice was quiet, stripped of everything, even anger. “And clean yourself. You smell of poverty.”
She left, closing the door with a soft, definitive click.
Kris looked at the sobbing dancer on his wife’s rumpled quilt. The portrait smiled down at him. The fire had burned low. He felt nothing at all. Just the vast, cold, silent night pressing in from all sides, and the faint, metallic taste of blood in his mouth where he’d bitten his own cheek.