Alfonso scowled and stomped back to his bike.
As they walked back to her motorcycle, Maxence said to Dree, “You can ride on the back. I can drive the motorcycle.”
She scoffed, “Evidently, no, you can’t. I’ll drive.”
Luckily, all the motorcycles they’d rented had extended seats that allowed for a second rider.
Dree swung her leg over the back of her motorcycle and scooted forward. She patted the seat behind her curvy bottom in what she probably meant to be a perfunctory manner but was altogether too enticing. She said, “Saddle up, partner.”
Behind Max, Father Booker cleared his throat.
Maxence was not going to survive this.
He faked a casual demeanor and strode over to the motorcycle. He planted his left foot firmly on the ground and swung his right leg over the back of the bike, settling onto the extended seat behind Dree.
His hands found the curve of her waspish waist and settled on her round, womanly hips. The warmth of her skin emanated through the puffy insulation of her ski outfit and filled his palms and fingers even through his gloves.
Max’s fingers wanted to flex his hands and dig his fingertips into her hips just the slightest bit, because the last time he’d been holding her waist and hips from behind like this, she’d been on her hands and knees and he’d been watching his hard cock ram into her. She’d thrown her head back and screamed when she’d come, strands of her short, blond hair clinging to the sweat on the back of her neck. He’d grabbed the back of her neck there, forced her face down to the soft bed, and fucked her harder.
He did not tighten his fingers on her hips.
Refraining was one of the most difficult things he’d ever had to do.
At the touch of his hands on her waist, Dree stilled.
The other guys were struggling to pull their helmets over their heads while sitting on their bikes. The helmets were properly fitted, which meant they were tight.
Dree leaned her head back closer to his, reclining against his chest, and whispered, “Don’t do anything that’s going to make me drive off the side of the road, okay?”
Maxence said, in a voice lower than he had anticipated, “I wouldn’t.”
“Then it’s a good thing you’re riding in back instead of me, because I would.” She yanked on her helmet and buckled the chinstrap.
Yeah, he was not going to survive this.
Max shoved his helmet onto his head.
Dree slowly guided the bike back onto the road.
As always, Batsa took point because he was also the navigator, but Dree and Maxence were in the second position with the other three guys surrounding them.
Father Booker, wearing brown leather motorcycle pants and jacket and a sapphire blue helmet, rode on Maxence’s left, a constant reminder of priestly behavior.
Every inch of his body oriented on Dree’s luscious form pressed against him, separated from his exquisitely sensitive skin by her ski suit’s insulation and the half-shredded leather of his motorcycle gear.
After they retrieved the few remaining items from the storage bins on Maxence’s wrecked motorcycle and pushed it over to the side of the road, they proceeded to the town Batsa had identified as their next stop.
The ride to the next town took two hours and forever and was over far too soon.
When they arrived in the small town, Maxence dismounted the motorcycle and surveyed the stone huts as if his dick wasn’t standing at half-mast. His black leather motorcycle pants might strangle his balls if he popped a full erection.
Dree gripped his arm, and it felt like his motorcycle pants had grabbed onto his nuts just a little tighter. She said, “Why didn’t you stay with the motorcycle after you crashed?”
He shrugged. “It was obviously totaled.”
“You should’ve stayed with the bike.”
“Why would I stay with a broken motorcycle? It was going to get cold when night fell, and I couldn’t wait out there for days or a week until a truck came by and I could hitchhike a ride to the next town. So I started walking. I think I had enough gear to survive a night or two. I didn’t think I’d have to walk for more than two days.”
“We turned around as soon as we noticed you were missing. It’s just that you were in the back, the last motorcycle. It was only ten minutes or so before I looked in my rearview mirror and noticed you were gone.”
“It was fine. I was getting myself out of the situation. I calculated how far the next town was and how long it would take me to get there at three and a half miles per hour, which is around my normal walking speed. I figured I would find you guys there.”
“In the next town? But that was forty miles away! Of course, we turned around and came to find you as soon as I noticed you were missing.”
Dree’s mouth dropped open just the slightest amount, and she blinked.
She said, “Maxence, I’m not sure what-all that story about the pirates really meant, but of course, I noticed you were missing within a few minutes. Of course, I came to find you. I would never leave you lost somewhere and not come and find you.”
Maxence flipped his fingers in the air. “I was fine on my own. I would’ve made it to the next town eventually.”
“Maxence.” She stared straight into his eyes, and he blinked at the intensity of her blue gaze. “I would never fail to notice that you were missing for more than a few minutes, and I will always come to find you.”
Maxence’s heart quivered, and he looked away. The blue-gray mountains in the horizon looked like towering waves that would batter a rusted-out hulk of a cargo ship to pieces. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”
She touched his hand. The pressure of her fingers on his motorcycle glove grabbed his attention. “You deserve to have people around you who love you and who will notice if you are missing.”
He said, his voice lowering, “I’m fine.”
“Did you—” She took a deep breath, and her red-and-white ski suit expanded with her breathing. “Did you—panic?”
“Oh, no.” He flipped his hand in the air again, dismissing that. “I was a little disoriented from crashing the bike and landing on my ass for a few minutes, but that’s not a kidnapping-claustrophobia thing. Kind of a dark places-thing. I don’t like boats very much. But it’s not every situation. I’m pretty reliable in a lot of emergencies, and it only hits me afterward, anyway. And, this just didn’t apply. This was a vehicle accident, outside, under a very open, sunny sky, and no one was grabbing at me. It’s a different situation.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “When I realized you weren’t with us, I freaked. I slammed on my brakes. Alfonso and Father Booker nearly ran over me as I skidded like I was motocross racing and flipped my bike around on the road. Thinking that you might be dead freaked me out. Thinking that you might be alive, hurt, and panicking really threw me.”
His eyes were full of the mountains because they did not move. “Like I said, it might have taken me a day or two, but I would have walked into the village and caught up with you guys.”
Dree went on to set up her clinic, and Maxence stared at the jagged, slate-blue horizon until the blood stopped rushing through his veins and he could breathe again. That wasn’t due to the motorcycle accident or finding himself alone, he knew. Dree’s insistence that she would always come and find him if he were lost cracked something inside him, and he didn’t know how to fix it.
After Father Booker and Batsa procured a suitable house for the day’s clinic, Maxence stole Batsa away for a few minutes during the set-up phase to find a seamstress who could repair the tears in his motorcycle gear and a cobbler for his boots. A woman assured him that she and her daughters could do a first-rate job on everything, and considering the delicate embroidery on their clothes, he believed them.
When they delivered his outfit back to him a few hours later, he had to tilt the leather in the sunlight to find the tiny black thread of the repairs. The boots were more comfortable than before, so he paid them ten times their orig
inal negotiated price. He’d planned to do something like that, anyway, but their stitching was excellent work. He was keeping these repairs as a souvenir and wouldn’t buy a new kit when he got home.
Maxence walked back to the house where Dree had her clinic so he could help.
After the woman with cancer yesterday, the way Dree had tossed and turned in her sleeping bag all night, and then his motorcycle accident, Maxence prayed to every saint he could think of to intercede and give Dree a calm and easy clinic that day.
The saints did not listen.
A middle-aged woman was led into the house they had appropriated as clinic space by her adult daughter while two small children ran around their feet. Dree inspected the woman’s eyes with an ophthalmoscope and then squeezed her own eyes shut, sighing. She told Batsa, “Please tell her that she has exudative macular degeneration, or ‘wet’ MD. I’m sorry, but her eyesight will continue to worsen until it is gone.”
After they left, Max sat beside Dree as she gathered herself.
A mother and her sisters brought in a young boy who they said was twelve years old. Two of the aunties half-carried him by slinging his arms over their shoulders. He was light enough for them to carry because his arms and legs were severely wasted. When Dree inspected him, his muscle tone was diminished. Between that and other signs, she had to tell the mother, “I’m so sorry, but I believe he has muscular dystrophy, most likely Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.”
Dree went on to explain the terrible course of the genetic disease to the mother, how her son would become weaker and weaker during the progression of the fatal disease, and that if she had any more sons, half of them would also be afflicted with it.
As the sobbing family was leaving, Dree asked Maxence, “Should I tell her that half of her daughters are also carriers, and half of their sons will also have it?”
“No,” Maxence said. “They don’t have access to genetic testing facilities up here, anyway. Half of the girls are not carriers, and the family would be ostracized.”
As darkness was falling, Dree laid her head on her arms on the table and sighed.
The waiting area had only two more people, both of whom Father Booker and Maxence had triaged.
One had a minor rash that Batsa had translated as having been on his arm and unchanged for six months. Maxence thought that it looked like a second-degree burn, and Batsa discovered that the man leaned against his family home’s heating stove at least once a week, burning himself in that spot. Max put a bandage on it and told the guy to wear sleeves around the stove or move his chair.
The other was a little girl with a slightly inflamed scratch that looked like the family cat had gotten mildly peeved at the child. He and Father Booker dressed the scratch with antibiotic ointment and sent her home.
Maxence crouched beside Dree. “Chérie, come back to the campsite. You need to rest.”
She rolled her forehead back and forth on her arms, shaking her head no. “There’s more. I can’t leave them.”
“You are all done. You saw them all and helped them. You need food and sleep now.”
When she rolled her head back and forth to signify no again, Maxence helped her into her ski suit, gathered her up in his arms, and walked out of the small house. She was nothing but blond fluff against his chest, and her arms reached around his neck.
Father Booker held the door for them and helped Maxence situate her on the back of the motorcycle.
As Father Booker removed the gray veil over her hair and pressed her helmet onto her head, Max heard him tell her, “‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ Your work is done here, Sister Andrea Catherine, and it is time for you to rest tonight. Hold on tight.”
Her arms cinched around Maxence’s waist, and she leaned against his back.
Maxence followed Batsa slowly back to the campsite, which was only a few minutes’ slow ride beyond the village.
When they arrived, supper was ready and waiting for them. Maxence led her over to the fire, and again made sure she sat in the warmest spot but where the wind would not blow smoke in her face. She perked up enough to eat a little food, and then she dejectedly murmured her good nights and staggered into the tent Isaak pointed to.
Maxence was going to stay behind to allow Dree her customary few minutes of privacy to wash up, but her flashlight clicked off moments after she had crawled inside her tent.
Father Booker exchanged a worried glance with him, and Max stood to follow her.
Just after he turned and walked away, Father Booker jogged after him and caught his arm. “Minister to her as a priest. Do not succumb to your temptations for this woman.”
Max’s longing for her must be as apparent to everyone else as it was to him. He said, “I do not have a sin against chastity on my conscience.”
Father Booker nodded gravely, but he didn’t look like he’d gotten the answer he wanted yet. “She is grieving, and she is wounded. Don’t take advantage of her.”
It was Maxence’s turn to nod solemnly. “I won’t.”
Father Booker whispered to him, “You have the soul of a priest, Deacon Father Maxence, but I do not know if you have the heart of one.”
Father Booker left him, and Maxence crawled into the tent after Dree. As he entered the tent, he whispered, “Chérie.”
“I’m awake. I feel like I won’t ever sleep again,” she said in the dark.
He zipped the tent flap behind himself and lay on his sleeping bag, facing her.
Dree had zipped herself up into her mummy bag, and just her face was visible as an oval in the crimson fabric in the lowest beam of his flashlight, hardly any more glow than a votive candle.
Her red-and-white ski suit was a crumpled lump near the rapidly dwindling boxes of vaccine at the back of the tent.
Maxence said, “On my first project for Catholic charities into South America, I felt like I didn’t sleep for weeks. Every time I was so exhausted that I passed out, the dreams of what had happened that day would wake me up again.”
She said, “All these people, and they’re all so sick. I can’t work fast enough. I can’t work hard enough. There’s always still more of them and they’re always still coming.”
“We’ll go back to Jumla city tomorrow. We’ll stay out for a few days. You can’t keep doing this.”
“But if I don’t, no one else will. There’s no one else out here. No one will help them.”
She cried tiny hiccupping sobs like the saddest little hamster weeping.
Maxence flinched forward to take her into his arms, but he knew he shouldn’t.
She asked him, “How do you do it? Do you just harden your heart to it and not care anymore? How do you survive this?”
“I don’t think I hardened my heart. It’s more like I surrendered. Even if I were the Prince of Monagasquay and had a billion dollars, although I think it’s a bit more than that now, I still couldn’t make a dent in this. I could help a few people here and there, but I couldn’t change it. The Prince’s power is mostly through influence anyway, making deals behind the scenes with meetings and conferences. No matter what we do, we can’t solve everything. We just do what we can. We can be kind when we can. But we can’t change every person’s life. We’re lucky if we can change any person’s life. You vaccinated two babies today against common childhood diseases that might have killed or injured them for life. Ninety percent of people here have had rubella. Congenital rubella infections cause most cases of deafness here. Who knows how much suffering you prevented today? It’s just harder to see that. “
“That seems so little in the face of a woman who has a few weeks to live at the most, another woman who is going blind, and a teenage boy who is going to waste away and die.”
“You’re right.”
Her voice was a quiet wail. “Why does God allow this? Why would God allow any of this? If He is all-powerful—” She trailed off.
Maxence said, “I studied theodicy during my graduate work, the study of what and why evil is. It
’s the old paradox. ‘If God can prevent such suffering and evil and does not, then He is not good. If He cannot prevent it, then He is not God.’”
“Yes,” Dree said. “If you could prevent this, wouldn’t you?”
“You did today.”
“But I didn’t do enough.”
“The only way I can reconcile it is to think that evil just is. It’s not from or of God, and prevention of it doesn’t seem to be God’s job. But some people make more of it, and they are evil to their core and deserve to be damned to Hell on Earth and in the world to come. I could go on and on about who they are and what the Church should be doing about them, too. And some people love and heal the world, who try to make the world have less evil in it. They’re good. They’re wonderful. They’re God on Earth. They’re angels.”
“Why the Hell aren’t there any of them around?” Dree hiccupped.
“You’re an angel, Dree. You made the world so much better today. That woman with cancer knew she was dying. You talked to her with kindness and grace. The woman whose son had Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy doubtlessly had a brother or two who died of it because she must be a carrier. She knew what she was seeing. You told her the truth, but you did it with love and empathy. There is evil in the world, but the world is what we make it.”
And we could be making the world so much better, if only the Church and good people dared to do it, he thought.
A tiny sound like a rip squeaked in the small tent.
When he glanced over, he saw that Dree had unzipped her sleeping bag near her neck, and her fingers extruded from the small opening.
Her eyes were closed.
Asking, but not demanding.
Surely, this wasn’t a sin. She was an angel in need of comfort because she’d seen too much of the world’s evil.
Maxence extended his hand and tangled his fingers in hers.
She gripped his hand, and her eyes creased.
He held on.
He held on for hours, until her breathing smoothed and her eyes and mouth relaxed into sleep.
And still, he held on.
Chapter Twelve
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