She drove a matte black Chevy Nova with no air conditioning and a seven foot whip coiled next to the baby seat.
The car's name was Stallionette. Her name was Pidge.
She was a hard-mile twenty six, but preferred virgins in her bed(or the virgin-like); high school closet studs with just enough religion for her to break with a glance, or if those were in short supply, the community college nerds coming out of their shells and game for anything. She never bothered with the frat boys, who were boring and never as adventurous as they bragged, everything they knew gleaned from idiot older brothers and badly produced porno. It was the naive, shy ones who went the distance. You just had to lead them a little.
But even the nice guys changed quickly. A few runs through the gauntlet with Freaky Pidge and they began to think a lot of themselves, their fragile egos inflating beyond what their experience could back up. They always ruined it in the end, and she would let them go to chase the serpent on their own or whither back into the dull, embarrassed little boys they had been before.
It started the same, too. She would catch their eye, the little auburn haired girl behind the wheel of her killing machine, grinning at them like a dare. The baby seat never bothered them, not like her mother told her it would. Less and less each year. She wasn't setting traps and they felt the vibe. They were cool with it anyway. Hers was a different sort of danger. The kind they had only read about or seen in movies. Not the sort of thing you pass up.
Later she would bring them home and into her pink-lit room. The little girl was asleep with the mother down the hall, so it was okay to be loud.
She would show them her toys and her tools. She would undress them and bind them in silky knots and teach them how to please her, using terms gleaned from science fiction stories and comic books.
"The slow blade penetrates the shield" and "Do or do not, there is no try" always got results.
There would be pain and rubbery surprises and sometimes tears. Tears of pleasure, tears of revelation, tears of shame. They were never hers, and she found those moments alternately exciting or irritating, depending on the guy.
When she was done Pidge would kick them out, always before sunrise, answering their pleading and begging with vague promises of future encounters.
After a few hours of sleep she would get up for work and the stress of her life would be taken from its hiding place. The girl would already be up, eating breakfast with grandma, saying good morning through a mouthful of pancakes.
The three of them would sit, grandma sipping tea, mother with coffee, stealing bits of syrupy eggs off her daughter's plate as they discussed bears with hats, polka dotted dresses, and how Geraldine the goldfish gets sad when nobody is home.
"She needs a boyfriend!"
"No, sweetheart, Geraldine is fine. The bowl isn't big enough for two."
And grandma would get that look on her face for a second, then ask how the car was holding up.