Her breathing was slow and steady as he bound her hands and feet with masking tape, the rasps of the roll the only sound in the room.

If you’d told him this morning that he’d have a girl in his bed tonight, he’d have told you to fuck yourself, but the opportunity had presented itself so perfectly that he’d have been a fool to pass it up. There was nothing to lose.


He was driving back from work when he saw her slumped against the shattered glass window at the bus stop, her long legs stretched out before her, high heels kicked off. He’d driven past initially, to make his decision as much as check if anyone was around. There was no one, of course, since it was two in the morning in Greenwood and nothing (bar the shitty security office at Bluegates Shopping Centre) was open after midnight. What he’d always hated about the town in his youth had finally become a blessing. What a revelation!

When he pulled up at the bus stop, she looked at him with blank eyes, her head wobbling on her shoulders as if her neck was already broken. Her short denim skirt had shifted up her thighs to reveal a flash of slutty red knickers and in her hand was a bright pink phone that sparkled under the streetlight. He’d seen girls like her before in Bluegates; all tits, hips and blowjob lips. ‘Little Miss Fuck Mes’ he and Al called them.

‘I’d screw that till it bled,’ Al said of them, rubbing his dry hands together. And then they’d laugh, the idea that either of them, the wrong side of 50, beer guts and balding, would have the chance to fuck young girls was unimaginable. Or at least, it always had been. Who knew what was just round the corner? Who knew where opportunity lay?

‘Dad?’ the girl asked, pulling her skirt down as if for decency and dropping her phone in the process. The battery fell out and the screen went dead, but she didn’t even seem to notice. ‘We going home?’

Her words were so slurred that they became one, and her inebriated state both aroused and repulsed him.

Nodding, he picked up the pieces of her phone and slipped them into his jacket pocket. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, gripping her wrist and dragging her towards the car.


She woke with a jolt, and when she screamed he realised how stupid he’d been not to gag her. Grabbing the masking tape again, he wrapped it around her mouth. Once, twice, thrice. But though she was silent, her wide eyes still screamed, and so he covered those, too, finishing the roll of tape and casting it aside.

As he climbed onto the bed and slipped his hand between her legs, she writhed like a faceless worm beneath him. Though she was silent, it still felt as if she was screaming. And he knew only one way to make her stop.