Paradise - Part Four (The Erotic Adventures of Sophia Durant) Read Online Free Page A

If I was ever driven to do something like this again, I would not use p-210. What a fucking mess.
    We each took a glass of Pinot Noir from the table, walked to a table under a canopy and sat down in a corner.
    “It’s awesome I met you. You’re an amazing woman,” she said, slurring her speech as she looked at me.
    “You’re just feeling the AK.”
    “I’m feeling the AK up. I want to fuck it, I think it’s so fucking hot.”
    “We can always have more.”
    “Can we? I look forward to it. I’m supposed to meet Mark. It’s dark now. I was supposed to meet him a long time ago. I wonder what happened to that. Oh well, it was in the cards to meet you instead. And I couldn’t have done better.”
    “Thank you. I like you too.”
    I said it to placate her more than for any other reason.
    “I need to visit the bathroom again. I’ll be back.”
    Finally, my chance. After all this fucking mess. Finally. She got up and I turned into the corner I was sitting in and hunched down with my glass of wine. I poured the contents from the vial, without removing it from my glove, into the glass. After I set the glass on the table, I screwed the cap back onto the vial and pocketed it. Looking around in the candlelight—there were candles mounted in seashells burning throughout the canopy—I thought I saw just a flicker of the image of Emma Green in the shadows. It shocked me to see her, and I shuddered. Even if I was imagining things, the image still terrified me. And it gave me an ominous, portentous feeling, as though her presence was a foreshadowing of terrible events to come. As if she was saying, “Revenge will be mine.” I tried to calm myself, thinking it all just the effects of the grass. It felt like I waited ages for Ava to come back. Eventually I saw her in the garden talking to some men. She saw me and waved.
    “God, that was a mess. I had to talk to twenty people just to get back over here. And look, I don’t even know what I did with my drink.”
    “Take mine.”
    “No. I might spill it.”
    “Really. I don’t want it. I’m just waiting to go smoke again.”
    “You sure you don’t want it?”
    As she said it a woman in the crowd picked up the glass off the table and took a sip before I could stop her. It was most certainly lethal, even in one small sip. I cringed. I wanted to cry.
    “I’m so sorry. Is that your wine? I thought I just put mine down, then I realized I must have done so over there somewhere.”
    The woman who just took a sip of the contaminated wine pointed.
    “I’m so sorry. I’ll get you another.”
    “No, don’t worry about it. I wasn’t going to drink it anyway.”
    “You sure?”
    “Definitely. Besides, if I was going to, I wouldn’t mind. It’s not like you’re going to make me sick.”
    I said this suppressing an evil grin. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to grin, I just knew that I did.
    She laughed and stumbled off into the crowd.
    “Stupid whore,” said Ava in a low voice as she took the glass.
    I watched her in what felt like slow motion. All background sound drowned out and I felt as though the whole world was comprised of only Ava, the glass, and what was in it. I could feel my heart beating in my throat. I felt sick. Ava pressed the rim of the glass to her lips. Tipping it up, she poured the whole contents of the glass down her throat. I watched her throat vibrate as she swallowed. I felt confused and terrified. Over the course of the evening I had started to like her and I felt for her. She would get sick and not know what happened. And that woman who took a sip from the glass would also get sick, go to the hospital and die. In all likelihood, nobody would ever know the cause. P-210 was something that was rarely tested for after a person’s death. It took a special kind of test to determine its presence, and I was confident that neither of these women would be given that test after they died.
    Ava smiled at me.
    “Would you like to go smoke again? I’m