by Ana Good
When the driver refused to stop, Poppy was on top of her, clawing at her hands on the steering wheel.
“Damn!” cried the driver, who spun the van to a stop just short of ramming into the butt of a busload of Japanese tourists.
Poppy scrambled over Wee Gee’s lap, sprang open the door, and ran, slipping and sliding, down the street toward the Bentley.
“Where is she going?” asked Nan as her leather-gloved hand wiped away the condensation from a side window.
“To hell, I’m afraid,” sighed Wee Gee, who had also noticed the Bentley.
54. Back-Seat Tongue Bath
Storm sprawled on her back in the Bentley as Hunter gave her neck a lavish tongue bath. Storm loved having her neck kissed. It made her wild. Horny as a teenage toad. Knowing this, Hunter wasted no time applying her vastly talented tongue to the correspondent’s Achilles’ heel, sexually speaking.
“That feel good?” purred Hunter. “You like that, baby?”
“Lovely,” slurred Storm who was in a dreamlike state from the huge hit of designer opiates her agent had slipped into her hot chocolate. She felt freaking great. Hunter’s nimble fingers, now busy inside Storm’s battle fatigues, were only elevating the war correspondent’s feelings of nirvana.
Hunter expertly slipped two fingers into Storm’s softness. She pulled back a little, twirling a tongue in Storm’s ear before inserting a third finger. Storm was squirming out of her pants now.
And moaning.
Hunter followed Storm’s near-naked lead, unzipping her ski jumper, then unsnapping her garters and expertly shedding her own silk stockings. Hunter guided Storm’s hand up her creamy soft thigh to her thick bush. “Do me, baby,” Hunter was urging as Storm’s fist began a bold exploration.
The two women were completely intertwined, deep into each other, rocking the back of the Bentley, when the back door was flung open.
“What the fuck!” called Hunter, who, completely sober, was quick to react to the frigid intrusion.
Storm reacted slowly, not even noticing the blast of cold air at first. She pulled Hunter back down into her lap, biting at the strap of her bra in an effort to disrobe her completely.
Hunter was not so eager to return to lovemaking. Seeing Poppy standing in the snowy street, her mouth agape, she grabbed Storm’s bomber jacket and pulled it over her shivering nakedness as best she could.
“Fuck off!” she called to Poppy as she reached over in a failed attempt to slam shut the Bentley’s door.
“Fuck off, yourself!” cried Poppy, who climbed defiantly into the back seat, straddling both women.
Suddenly Storm was aware of Poppy’s presence, and her own nakedness.
“Hello there, love,” cooed Poppy. “Having a good time, are we?”
Storm didn’t know what to say. She tried to get one leg back into her fatigues but missed and ended up with her agent’s thong panties stuck around one ankle.
Poppy stared at Storm. “Need some help, do we?” She reached down and yanked the agent’s underwear off Storm’s foot and threw into the agent’s face. “These yours? Yes?”
Hunter caught the panties.
Storm was so drugged she couldn’t form words.
Poppy did the talking instead. “Thought you fancied me! Guess not, eh? Looks like you’re off me. You off me, then? That it? ’Cause I can see you’re on this whore. You’re definitely on this whore. Surprised you’re not on her face. Guess you would have been if I’d given you a little more time, eh?”
Storm still couldn’t talk. She felt frozen, like in a nightmare.
Poppy continued. “I thought you needed my help. Guess not. Guess I’m bloody in your way here, eh?”
Hunter replied. “Yes, you are. Get lost, okay? Storm’s going back with me. Tonight. We’re leaving for D.C. as soon as you get your underage, twiggy ass out of my car.”
That did it for Poppy. Embarrassed and dejected, she jumped out of the Bentley.
Hunter wasted no time slamming and locking the door.
Poppy stood in the street, silent, letting the snow cover her, as the Bentley roared to life and slid down the alley.
She’d thought Storm had fancied her. Really liked her. She’d obviously been deluded. Storm didn’t care about her. If she did, she’d not be stoned, finger-fucking some other tart.
She’d thought Storm was special. Strong.
Crap, I was wrong.
Taking a deep breath, Poppy turned in the snow and began scouring the streets for a taxi. She stood shivering in the snow in her mini dress for a long time before a yellow cab pulled up.
“Where to, sweetheart?” asked the driver.
Poppy considered that question for several seconds. She was free. She could go anywhere. Anywhere in the world.
“Sugarbush, the rehab center,” she sighed at last.
“You got it, girlie!” said the driver.
55. Silent Night, All Is Bright
That night, back at rehab, everyone was sullen. No one could believe Storm had cut out on them. “It makes no sense!” cried Nan, who was curled on the couch in the TV room enjoying a steaming cup of soy chai tea. “We’ve only got a week left! Six days. Why cut and run now?”
Poppy, who’d been staring at the blazing fire, turned to face Nan. “I don’t think it was her. I think that whore of an agent had everything to do with this.”
Dirk shrugged. “I dunno, Poppy, Storm’s a grown woman. She could have come back with us, and she didn’t. Guess she had her reasons.”
Candice, who was sitting across from Dirk at the card table, trying to teach the younger woman how to play bridge, threw in a comment along with two discarded cards. “Don’t take this personally, Poppy. Dirk’s right. Storm’s a big girl. She wanted to leave. It’s her life. None of us could stop her.”
Poppy chewed her lower lip. She knew the women were right: Storm was an adult and could make her own decisions. Still, sadness congealed like ice around her young heart. Of course it bothered her that Storm had left treatment; but what bothered her more was that she’d let herself believe Storm had fancied her. That something special had been brewing between them. That Storm would stay sober for her, if for nothing else.
What a fool I’ve been.
Babe entered the room, a large ax cast over her right shoulder. The blade glinted blue steel in contrast to the well-worn blackened grip. “Christmas Eve,” she announced. “Anybody notice?”
Poppy eyed the ax. “What are you going to do now, love? Decapitate us?”
Babe roared in laughter.
Nan shrugged as she wandered over to the card table to see if she might organize a real bridge game with Candice and Dirk. “I’m a Jew,” she said with a sigh. “This whole Christmas thing doesn’t really rock me.”
Poppy sighed heavily. “Doesn’t feel like bloody Christmas to me, either.”
“That,” said Babe, “is because none of you lazy-assed little dykes bothered to go out and get us a tree.”
Candice scraped back her chair. “Tree? The stores are all closed.”
Babe snorted. “Store? We don’t need a store. Hell, you look out that window lately? We got a few thousand trees out there. All you girls need is this” — she thrust out the ax — “and a little girl muscle,” she added with a grin.
Poppy came forward and took the ax. Even that made her sad. (She and Storm had first bonded over chopping wood together.) “You care which tree we chop?”
Babe nodded. “Partial to evergreens, myself. Scotch pine. Spruce. Take your pick. We’re filthy with evergreens high up on the rock ledge behind the farmhouse. Hike up. Bring back whatever strikes your fancy.”
Poppy asked Wee Gee if she’d like to tag along, but the older woman had already donned her flannel pajamas and was in no hurry to scale an icy rock ridge. “Sorry, kid. Count old Wee Gee out on this escapade.”
Thumper, who’d been sitting silent in a rocking chair in the corner, volunteered to help Poppy. “Could use some exercise,” she said as
she pulled on her snow pants.
Babe stared at the remaining women as Poppy and Thumper headed out in search of a tree. “You all look like something the moose has chewed on. Why so glum? Hell, it’s Christmas Eve. You have less than a week left!”
Candice folded her arms to her chest. “Storm. We all liked her. We thought she’d make it.”
Babe shook her head. “Maybe she will make it.”
Nan snorted. “Without rehab?”
Babe advanced into the room. “Look, none of you know what happened to Storm. Why she left. Stop making things up in your head. And yes, people can get sober without rehab.” She grabbed a sofa pillow and tossed it at Nan’s head. “Storm was here long enough to get her head filled with some good ideas. Maybe she’ll do just fine. You can’t know. None of us can. And, in case you haven’t been listening, even if you make it through rehab there’s no guarantee any of you will stay clean. One day at a time. That’s all you get. All of you. One day. You’re clean today, thank God. But tomorrow … every one of you will have to work at this sobriety thing all over again.”
The room was really quiet now.
Candice sauntered to the upright piano by the fire. She stared icily at Babe as she rolled back the cover on the keys. “Thanks for that bit of holiday cheer.” She began to move her fingers along the keyboard. It took a few seconds, but suddenly a recognizable snatch of music wafted out.
Halfway through the song, Candice looked up. All the women had gathered around the piano, including Dylan. “Any of you lezzy heathens know Christmas carols?” asked Candice, who’d once been the star pianist at her father’s church.
Recognizing “Silent Night,” Dylan jumped in. Then Dirk. Nan, too.
“Silent night, Holy night, all is calm, all is bright,” they sang.
Candice had not played a Christmas carol for three decades. Oddly enough, every word, every note, remained tightly stored in her mind. In her heart, as she sang, a fire sprang to life. “All is calm, all is bright,” she belted out; and for the first time in thirty years, she almost believed it.
56. I Got My Sister and Me
Poppy trudged the icy hillside, the ax resting over her left shoulder. Thumper had volunteered to shoulder the ax, but Poppy had insisted she carry it. The only reason Poppy had volunteered to cut down a tree was because she feared that if she remained in the farmhouse one more second, she’d burst into tears.
How humiliating.
The night was cold, black, silent. The only sound was the light crunching the women’s snowshoes made as they bit through the crusty surface of the snow. Halfway up the steep ledge, Poppy had to stop to catch her breath. She jumped onto a giant boulder that was frosted in snow. Looking out over the moon that shone through the bare limbs of a stand of larches, Poppy wished Storm were with her.
Thumper jumped up beside Poppy and stared at the moon with her. Both women waited until they had their breath back before talking. Poppy spoke first, asking Thumper about her girlfriend, Mary Lou. “She left a good bit of her lips on you, I noticed.”
Thumper grinned as she rubbed a cold, rosy cheek. “That girl loves her lipstick.”
“You don’t?”
“I love it on her.”
Poppy laughed. Thumper, like her sister Dirk, seemed to take life and love so easily. “You in love?”
“Probably,” mumbled Thumper. She grabbed a fistful of snow and played at packing it into a ball, but the snow was too cold to stick so she ended up dusting it off her gloves. “We’ve known each other, like, forever.”
“She okay with Dirk’s sex change?”
“Yeah. More than me.”
“What? It upsets you?”
“Yeah. Kinda.”
“Why?” Poppy was curious. The twins seemed so close. Inseparable. She envied their closeness since most of the time she, Poppy, felt so bloody alone in this life.
“Selfishness, I imagine,” Thumper sniffled.
“How so?”
Thumper took off her stocking cap and ruffled her blonde hair, which glistened in the moonlight. “It’s, well … it’s, like. Well … she was always the leader. I sort of followed.”
“I get it, I think. You’re afraid if she’s not around to push, you might lose your edge?”
“Yeah, I guess it’s like that.”
“Have you told her that?”
Thumper dipped the toes of her snowshoes into a drift and played at shooting snow through the air.
“Well, have you?”
“Haven’t said much of anything. She doesn’t know I’m mad at her.” Thumper stretched her stocking cap back onto her head and jumped off the rock.
Poppy snorted. “Of course she knows! You two are closer than anything. You’re like one person. Believe me, she knows!”
“You think?”
“I know!” Poppy shrieked.
“You think I should talk to her?”
“Uh, yeah. Definitely!”
“Mary Lou said the same.”
“Look,” said Poppy, as she jumped off the boulder and headed up the steep slope in an effort to catch Thumper, “what you and Dirk have is very special. Most people — like me — have no one. Absolutely no one. Understand?”
Thumper stopped and stared at Poppy in the moonlight. “Uh, you have, like, the whole world. Everyone knows who you are! You’re, like, hot chick number one with all the girls I know. They all want to be just like you. Mary Lou: You’re her idol. And girls like me, well, we just want to do you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Poppy, glad to know she still had a fan base. But as she climbed the icy hill, she knew Thumper was wrong: Everyone did not know her. They knew her image. The carefully crafted star image she cast into the world like a beacon.
Only one person had taken the time to get to know her, the real Poppy, in the last decade, and that person was thousands of miles away. She’d likely never see that person again in this lifetime.
The pain of that realization was almost unbearable.
57. Falling Star
Storm hunkered in the vibrating belly of the army helicopter, keeping her lips pressed tightly together so her teeth wouldn’t chatter. Combat soldiers were tucked against her, and her network cameraman, Josh Littleton, was curled at her feet, trying to check the battery pack on the portable handheld military recorder they’d been issued at the base in Baghdad. It was pitch black inside the chopper. Josh had a flashlight strapped to his head. The wildly bopping light was of little practical use.
“Fuck!” he kept saying. “The battery’s dead. Fuck!” He tossed the tiny camera, but the chopper was so jostled by turbulence and packed with men that the camera bounced back into his lap.
“Calm down!” Storm hissed at him over the pulsating whirl of the blades. Storm had a raging headache. Hunter had yanked her straight out of the back seat of the Bentley and stuffed her into the first military transport headed out to Baghdad. Out of her mind on opiates, the war correspondent had not felt much during the flight overseas. Now that the drugs were wearing off, she was hyperaware of everything: her own mortality, most imminently.
Her agent had tucked a load of opiate pills into the pocket of her fatigues, but Storm was determined to stay straight. No more drugs. She had to make it into the war zone and out again running on nothing more potent than her own courage.
The helicopter swooped to the right, then to the left. The pilot was trying to locate a cloistered target in the desert of Iraq. He was supposed to drop Storm, Josh, and a handful o soldiers at the target site, where they would be taken (in theory) to an ISIS strong hold. The ISIS rebels there were supposed to give Storm an exclusive interview on their impending attack on the White House.
Storm was struggling to stay clear-headed enough to form the key questions she’d need to ask the rebels: Whom did they represent? Why attack the White House? Were they really agents of ISIS or someone else?
Josh elbowed her. “Don’t like this! Don’t think they know what the hell t
hey’re doing. We’ve been flying in circles for hours. Think this is a trap. A trap, that’s what I think.”
Storm wanted to say, The U.S. military feeding us bad intelligence? No way! Instead, she gritted her teeth and repeated her request to the cameraman that he shut up.
The advice just seemed to annoy him. “You want to get your pert little lezzie ass blown off, be my guest! I’ve got a wife and kids. No way I’m parachuting into that sandy hellhole.”
“Suit yourself,” said Storm as she took the camera from Josh and strapped it around her own heavily padded chest. “Stay here. They’ll take you back to Baghdad. I’m going after this story.”
Josh caught her by the shoulder as she turned from him. “Don’t be a fool, Storm. This thing smells to high heaven. You could be killed down there!” He nodded into the darkness, sweat pouring off his face. Down below, red rockets shot through the night. Yellow clouds wafted up toward the descending helicopter. The noise was unbearable.
One of the soldiers made a circling motion with his right hand, signaling Storm that they were above the target — time to jump. Storm slid across the floor of the helicopter to the open door. As soon as the first soldier jumped, she elbowed her way to the dark mouth of the helicopter and followed suit.
All the way down, Josh’s warnings echoed in her ears.
What if Josh is right? What if this is an ambush?
Storm had no answer. She knew two things for certain. One: This was the only thing in life she’d ever been any good at. And two: If anything happened to her on this mission, no one would miss her. No wife. No kids. Not even a pet goldfish. Storm Waters was alone in this world.
For some reason a vision of Poppy Zigfield flashed before Storm’s eyes as she fell face forward toward the earth. The image came to her against the backdrop of a vast exploding desert that rushed upward like a spinning Fourth of July celebration.
“Go away!” hissed Storm at Poppy’s image. “I don’t deserve your friendship. I fucked it all up. I hurt you! Big time! Get out of here! Leave me! Get out of here!”
An imaginary Poppy raged otherwise at Storm.