by Amelia Wilde
“You will love the way we abuse your generosity,” Odin said.
I caught Zeus’s eyes in the mirror. Gaze grave, he said, “One week, and nobody does anything they don’t want to, and then you go home while you still have plausible deniability. Got it?”
Nobody said anything more.
We sped through corn country.
It had been a wet, hot August and the crops stood high and thick, like short green walls, blurring by. Judging from the angle of the sun, it was dinnertime.
The mood of sex was still thick in the van, and I thought how frustrated these guys must be. My body still thrummed with energy; I couldn’t let go of that crazy moment when Thor was lewdly fondling me, and Odin bit my toe. It was beyond hot!
Zeus said we’d stop for the night eventually. When?
And more importantly, what would happen? I had this feeling like the whole road trip was foreplay.
3
Zeus said, “I saw a sign for a filling station coming up. Area’s looking okay to me. Anyone see anything?”
“Come here.” Thor pulled me against him, pointed at the sky. “I’m looking for cameras,” he said. “Look at the tops of the poles and anything on the wires. Describe what you see.”
I nestled back into him. I could do that now. I was the girlfriend. We were the god pack. It was weird they’d kept using their god names. Did they use their god names 24/7?
I described what I saw, shocked at how little I ever noticed about the poles and webs of wires and gadgets and barrel-looking things that had been right up there for twenty-five years. Thor told me the names and functions of the stuff, and what to watch out for, and I struggled not to wriggle in delight as his hands roamed possessively over me. Apparently there would be no sex in the van, though. Was that a rule? I needed a manual.
On my first day working as a bank teller I was given a spiral-bound manual of rules and policies. I thought back on that, remembering the section on what to do in case of a robbery. I think you were supposed to put on the silent alarm and do what the robbers said, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have this masturbation scenario in mind.
“Always know where the eyes and ears are, wherever you go. Telephone poles are the worst. It’s something you’ll develop,” he said.
Zeus grumbled. A warning of some kind.
That is how the god pack works, Odin had said during his rules talk about how the woman must follow the rules.
So had some other woman come before me?
And if so, what had happened to her?
The three of them discussed the surroundings and various technological and geographical features they’d seen. Odin was reading things off some kind of alien-looking map on his phone. Was it a map of phone poles and cameras?
This whole finding-a-filling-station thing had turned the three of them from sex maniacs to five-star generals plotting a major invasion.
They started putting their businessman clothes back on, too.
Thor handed me my jacket. “It’ll be good to have another pair of eyes. Being aware will be one of your jobs.”
Again I got that sense of a ghost. A girl whose job it had been to observe things.
I recalled, just then, the stutter of attention on me when I’d taken a god name. Did the last girl have a god name?
“What are those green bell things?” I asked, pointing at a line strung between phone poles.
“Those are ceramic spacers. We’ll have to do a whole tutorial on phone poles with you,” Thor said. “That will be one of the only non-dirty tutorials you’ll receive.”
Shivers rained over my skin.
Apparently they were satisfied with this area; a few miles later, Zeus pulled into a run-down filling station whose concrete walls had vertical brown stripes near the top, showing the path of leakage from the metal roof. Junker cars crowded the edges of the lot and a lonely pump stood out in front.
A boy stood behind a counter inside, surrounded by cigarette displays. Zeus slapped down two twenties. “Forty for gas, and we’ll take both flavors of bathroom keys.”
Odin took both sets. “Let’s go.”
I followed him around the side of the station.
“You always get tons of high security with nice ones,” he explained. “Fucking-g modern gas stations like fucking-g airports. We hate them.”
I went into the bathroom with Odin’s words ringing in my head. Fucking-g airports. Gairports. I really wanted to find out where he was from. I wanted to find out everything.
The bathroom wasn’t so bad. I peed and cleaned up and finally got up the guts to look at my hair in the mirror. It was completely crooked, but when I shoved it behind my ears, it wasn’t all that crooked. But still, it needed work. I’d been thinking about getting it cut short, and maybe I could dye it pink. Isis would like pink hair.
When I came out, the van was on the other side of the station at the air pump. The side of it no longer said Romano’s Catering; it said Marcomm Technologies in fat italic letters with two blue underlines. Odin loitered at the back of the van, partly concealing Thor, who was changing license plates. My bandits, like a bad-boy pit crew.
Soon we were back on the road, with Zeus driving again, and me in the back with Thor. I felt like I was in a dream, moving further and further away from reality, from my troubles. I liked it.
Odin threw us each a small bag of Doritos.
“Ranch,” I said, my mouth watering. “Thanks.” I was ravenous.
“We can’t stop until Chicago. But we’ll stay somewhere nice,” Thor said with a little smile.
“Is that where you’re from?”
“A few ground rules,” Zeus said suddenly. “Don’t ever ask us where we’re from or how we got into this, and you can never know our names. Don’t try to get that information, understand?”
“Okay,” I said.
“We took a leap of faith to trust you,” he continued, “and as you can imagine, it’s not something we would have done normally, just pick up a stranger. But you were in a position to help us and you came through, and that means something. We’ll hold up our end of the agreement by taking down another of your boss’s banks. Right afterward, we’ll send you home with a plausible story that I don’t want to have to work on right now. And we’ll send your cut of the money to you somehow. And if you deviate from the story we develop for you, or if you don’t do your re-entry how we say, we’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
The kill you seemed a bit harsh, but that was Zeus. Not a man to make empty threats.
Not a man to have empty sex, either, maybe.
“How long until our heist?”
Odin snorted. “Heist.”
“It’ll happen when it happens,” Zeus snapped. “You have to be cool with not knowing the future. That is what this life is.”
It sounded like the voice of experience. “And then you eject me?”
Zeus watched the road, not deigning to answer.
“It’s better for everyone that way,” Thor explained. “The longer you’re with us, the less plausible it will be that you don’t know anything and didn’t see our faces.”
“Right,” I said, feeling suddenly upset at the prospect of being ejected—I’d only just become Isis! And, sure, I worried about my sisters, but I’d been dying on that farm. “It’s just that, as long as I’m away, Hank won’t take away the farm.”
“Don’t you care about people who might be worried about you?” Zeus glared at me in the rearview mirror, which somehow seemed to amplify his disapproval of me.
“Of course I care,” I said.
“Danger, subversion, and hedonistic pleasures,” Zeus growled. “It’s fun for a while, but at some point you’ll hit a low where you feel homesick. You don’t want it to be too late to go back when that happens, got it?”
“Okay,” I said.
“We’re doing you a favor by dumping you,” he added. “In the meantime, don’t even think about getting a message to your people. You have to come to us with that sort of t
hing, and we’ll decide what’s smart. You need to tell me you get that right now.”
“I get it.”
“You think you’ve given the finger to every rule you’ve ever had to follow? You think you’ve seized a week of freedom and adventure? You haven’t,” he continued sternly. “You’ve traded in one set of rules for another. You’ve given up your freedom to the good of the group. We all have. That is how we stay strong. This is our power. It is a power beyond what you can imagine. Do not fuck with that power.”
The guys all nodded, like they were all really serious about this.
“Okay.” My voice sounded tiny to my ears. The silence that followed was almost thunderous.
This was more than a gang. More than bank robbers, I thought. They were three men living all together…this group must somehow form a family… I bit my lip. Bad time for the Brady Bunch song.
Also, what was up with the danger, subversion, and hedonistic pleasures bit? Who said that? Who were these guys?
Thor’s cheekbones looked slightly pink, possibly from the sun, and he had blond scruff. He looked more like a tennis player than a soccer player, I decided. He said, “As far as you’re concerned, we started our life of crime five hours ago when we hit your bank. We don’t have a past or a future, okay?”
Odin looked back at me. “We’re the fucking hive mind of crime,” he said.
“Like the Borg?”
Thor gave me a heated look. “More like one for all and all for one.”
My breath caught in my throat. “I never thought of that as dirty before.”
He sat back. “This is a good time to start.”
4
I rested my head against the back of the seat as the scenery zoomed by, drowsily wondering what my sisters were doing. Probably entertaining police at the farm. Vanessa would bake cookies. I talked a bit with Thor about it, and he said most hostages didn’t get hurt. Hopefully the cops told them that. Or they could just Google it.
Maybe I could get a message to them. Zeus hadn’t said I couldn’t. You have to come to us with that sort of thing, he’d said.
More scenery zoomed by. I closed my eyes. The next thing I knew, I was facedown on the seat with my cheek glued to the vinyl, with a hand gently shaking my shoulder.
We’d arrived.
I pulled myself together and we walked as a group across a parking lot and into the lavishly gold-gilded and palm-tree-filled entrance of the Regal Hotel.
I’d never set foot in a place so fancy. A lot of the money they’d stolen, I presumed, would be spent at the Regal Hotel.
Thor and Odin and I lingered in a stand of marble pillars and potted tropical plants in a corner of the lobby while Zeus went to the desk.
Thor and Odin had even put their ties back on. I supposed we looked like a group of business people. Aside from my rip-hemmed mini skirt. They were the businesspeople and I was the business-pauper.
“They don’t need our IDs?”
Thor shrugged. “Nah. We’re special.”
“Gods?”
Odin settled into a posh velvet chair. “That’s right, baby.”
“So we lie low for a while?” I asked. “Is that the idea?”
Thor got a devilish look in his eyes. “That’s one way of putting it.”
My cheeks heated, and I didn’t have to look under my jacket to know my nipples were hardening like two eager bullets.
“I love when you blush,” Thor whispered. “I haven’t even told you what we’ll do up there, and you’re already blushing. This is awesome already.” He closed the distance between us, slid a finger down the side of my neck.
I shut my eyes—it was like his fingers were magic wands, but instead of fairy dust, he seemed to be sprinkling me with shivers of apprehension. Good shivers. Crazy good shivers.
“Did you have something specific in mind?” I asked.
“Well, it’s safe to say that first, you’ll take off all your clothes,” Thor said.
“Slowly,” Odin grumbled from the chair, gaze cool on me. “Slow and one thing at a time.”
“Is that so?” I said it a little bored, but really, I loved their dirty attention on me.
“Yes, Isis,” Thor said. “It is so.” He drew closer and kissed me, right there in the lobby, pressing me up against a marble pillar.
Every nerve in my body lit up, especially the extra-excited bundle of nerves between my legs where Thor’s hard cock was currently pressing.
It was total exhilaration, this sudden, intense contact.
I wound my arms around his neck, enjoying the hardness of his body against mine, glad for the potted plants. Also, I enjoyed the idea that Odin was right there watching.
Thor pulled away. “You know you want to.”
I took a deep breath. I wanted to feel more of this exhilaration. I wanted to feel more of his hard athletic body. As he kissed and nibbled at my neck I made a mental note to ask him if he played soccer or tennis, but then the mental note ripped itself to shreds and drifted away and I just closed my eyes, wonderfully lost.
He whispered in his rough and silky voice, “Say you want to.”
“I want to,” I said. “What was the question again?”
He snickered softly. “Does it matter?”
“No.” I gripped his necktie and looked into his eyes, face heating, pulse racing.
“But to recap,” Thor said, “we’ll tell you when you can take off all your clothes, and you’ll do it. Slowly, or Odin will be extremely wrathful.”
Odin glowered from his chair.
Wrathful!
“You’ll bare yourself to us completely, Isis, and you must not try to cover yourself, even if you want to. When we’re ready, you’ll come to us. You will let us touch you everywhere we please. And don’t think we weren’t paying attention to your shameless display in the van. We’ll spread your legs open wide just like that. Wider, maybe, and touch you like you touched yourself, but more. Far more. Because we have extra hands to use on you, don’t we?”
He paused, seeming to want an answer. “Right,” I said, wondering how many hands. I had the feeling it was just the three of us under discussion here, or would Zeus join in? I seriously wanted him to. Or would he watch, a silent mountain of a man with blazing eyes?
“Can you think of how extra hands could be an advantage?”
“Yes,” I breathed.
“And what else do we have?”
Cocks, I thought. Did he really want me to say it?
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You have such a degenerate imagination,” Thor whispered. “What will we impart? What did we discuss in the van? I know that your mind was completely in the gutter, even then.”
I smiled. “Skills.”
“Skills you can’t imagine. You would be shocked. And I have to warn you, we are relentless with our skills. Gods have no shame.”
“Thor has no shame,” Odin grumbled from his chair.
It was true. Thor had zero shame. I sort of loved him, right then. Him and his dirty talk.
Again, I wondered where these guys were from. Why were they robbing banks? They seemed highly educated and technically savvy. They didn’t at all have that hardened criminal vibe going.
“And this necktie you’re clutching so hard?” Thor continued. “Can you think of what we might do with that? We each have one, you know. Ties are very strong material. Have you ever been in a position to find out exactly how strong a tie is?”
My mouth went dry. “No.”
“Well, let’s hope that you won’t have to find out,” Thor said.
Odin simply smiled his evil smile. Thor could get a certain mischievous grin, but Odin had an evil, glittering-eyed smile that made you feel like he was gazing right into your deepest, darkest secrets—and lewdly violating each and every one of them.
I realized here that I was still gripping Thor’s tie, knuckles white.
I let go.
Thor smoothed it against his chest without taking his blue eyes fr
om mine. Even the way he smoothed the tie was suggestive. Then he brushed a chunk of hair from my forehead and placed a hand on the pillar next to my head.
His gaze made me feel naked, and I had the impulse to look away, like that would make me less exposed. Yet…I enjoyed it, too.
So I kept my eyes on Thor. I let myself be pinned by his gaze.
I let him know he had me.
And he knew he did, and he knew I knew. It was a total rush.
“A tie has several uses for a squirmy goddess, you know,” he continued huskily.
My breath sped. I locked gazes with Odin, who was sprawled on the lobby chair like a surly prince.
Thor continued, “A tie is very useful on a squirmy goddess whose body we are using for our complete and utter satisfaction.”
Naturally he managed to infuse the phrase complete and utter satisfaction with tons of dirty significance. I stood there, pinned like a helpless butterfly to a cool marble pillar. Pinned by his deep blue eyes and his dirty talk.
“Do not forget about the hot tub,” Odin said. “Hot tubbing has its many aspects.”
“Oh, yes,” Thor continued. “Many aspects. Have you spent much time in hot tubs?”
I shook my head.
“Well, you will now. You’ll get to know all about hot tubs. But we’ll see what the layout is like. Things sometimes have to flow organically from the layout. We let the layout speak to us. I’m sorry, but there’s not always a lot we can do about it.”
Flow organically from the layout? Let the layout speak? I stifled a grin. “Are we going to have sex or do feng shui up there?”
“Oh, dear,” Odin said. “Sounds like Isis is getting a bit out of line already.”
My blood raced. I swallowed and glanced toward the front desk just in time to catch Zeus striding across the lobby, briefcase in hand.
Zeus moved his brutish bulk casually. To the people in the lobby, he probably just looked like a well-off traveler and not a really powerful bank robber, but I could see him now. I could feel him.
He held my gaze—because he could, I thought.
The press of his silent dominance got heavier as he neared. But there was something else as well—a cold light in his eyes that felt like accusation.