by Gabi Moore
“You don’t have to tell me. I know.”
And I did. It felt strange, but right then, trusting her felt as natural as breathing, as unthreatening as her bare, soft breasts against my forearms.
“I’ve never seen you like that before,” she whispered.
I held her closer.
“I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“Are you sure?” she laughed quietly.
I nuzzled her neck and buried myself in the scent of her hair. I wanted to do that again and again with her. I wanted to fuck her so hard she screamed. I wanted to see her pretty eyebrows twisted in pain as she struggled to accommodate every single thrust of my cock, and I wanted to fuck every part of her so completely that she wouldn’t walk right for days after.
But I also wanted to kiss her neck like this forever, probably till I died. I wanted to tenderly stroke the skin on her pretty smooth hips and love her and hold her and protect her from everything bad in this world.
“Nora, I love you.”
I felt the fluttering in her chest halt as she stopped breathing. She turned around in my arms to face me, then rested her forehead against mine, our noses slightly touching. Her gentle fingers stroked my chin and cheek.
“Dean, I love you too,” she said after a long pause.
Whatever it had felt like a moment before, whatever deep pools of bliss we had so recently plunged into, it was nothing compared to how it felt to hear her say those words. I closed my eyes and we lay together, her and I, tucked in our little world.
It was then that I realized: Nora was the one who was protecting me. She was the savior, the strong one. With Nora, there was no domination, no submission. Only utter surrender to pleasure. Only bliss.
I didn’t care what color hair she had, or what job she did, or what her name was, or what she did or didn’t do in the past. I didn’t care about how selfish and scared and mean she could be, or that she had known my father or that we were camping out here in the middle of nowhere on the most bizarre trip of my life. I didn’t care about any of the ‘games’ we had played together, how dark, how twisted. As long as I was playing with her, I was happy.
Chapter 7
Myth: The rich don’t live in the real world with everyone else. They don’t know what it is to really suffer, to want something, to do without
Reality: Money buys you everything, including the most exclusive and luxurious forms of misery
“It’s like we’re on a weird kind of honeymoon,” she said.
I turned to her and laughed.
“Oh? So what was the wedding then?”
She gave me a sexy look as her response.
“Me doing your hair for you? That night at my mother’s?” I said. I liked the idea. Nora and I, on the run, a fugitive’s elopement, her wedding dress the torn pajamas she wore on the porch that night, her peroxided hair the veil, our wedding feast the stringy rabbit my mother served that tasted of rosemary and metallic buckshot.
“I don’t know,” she said dreamily, and gazed out the window, up at the sky. The clouds were the most interesting part of this landscape, and had been for the last three hours of driving. “Maybe our wedding happened all in bits and pieces. I don’t know. But this part definitely feels like the honeymoon” she said, and wiggled her bare toes on the dashboard.
“Our wedding…” I said, playing with the word in my mouth.
She turned her head to look at me now, and even though I had my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, I could feel her eyes on me.
“Don’t get cocky. I’d never marry you,” she teased.
“You wouldn’t?”
“No way. You’re a total weirdo. A sexual deviant.”
I pretended to pout.
“Oh is that right? Well, shit. I know how much you hate sexual deviants,” I said, and quickly glanced over at her. But her gaze was out the window again, and she watched listlessly as the red-orange road whipped by her at 75 miles per hour – the fastest this rust bucket could takes us.
“How do you think she’s doing?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
I didn’t want to talk about any of that. I wanted to be on our illicit honeymoon again, with nothing ahead of us but the open road, the cash in my pocket and her sweet, yielding body every night.
“I think she’s just fine. I told you, Charlie knows what he’s doing.”
“What if your father gets to him though?”
“He won’t. Not everyone can be bought, you know.”
“That’s the opposite of your dad’s philosophy.”
“Damn straight it is.”
We drove in silence for a while, and when I could, I reached over and placed a hand on her sun-warmed thigh. She was right, though. All of this did feel like a vacation. A big holiday from ourselves. She put on the radio and twiddled the dial until she hit the classical channel, and we both listened to the warbled crackle of a Madame Butterfly aria coming out to us like a mirage on that deserted road.
It’s hard to explain, the ground we covered on those few long, quiet days. Motel-hopping and hiding from the vengeance of one of the most powerful men in the country sounds like it would be super stressful… but it wasn’t. Without phones and tablets and laptops, without the weight of our old occupations, our old habits and routines, even our old personalities, life felt simple. As clean as the fresh air that was blowing gently into the pickup and lifting Nora’s hair like it wanted to play. With each mile we drove, there were two driven on the inside. Each night we spent in a new motel, we played a different game.
The pieces were always the same: her body, my body. But the moves varied endlessly, and the rules of each round changed over and over. The bigger game was to keep dreaming up new variations. She would challenge me; push me to play a role I had never played before. But I’d take her up on her challenge, and push right back. It was now a week since we had left my mother’s place, and I had fucked Nora in every way you could imagine, plus several you couldn’t. And yet every night, the stage was set again and we played another, completely novel round.
“Your beard is growing so fast,” she said.
I took a look at my reflection in the rear-view mirror. I had kept clean-shaven since High School, and had to admit, it was a very different look for me.
“You like it?” I said.
She reached over and stroked her fingers through it and smiled.
“I love it. It’s funny that you can grow your own disguise, isn’t it?”
“I guess. Maybe I’ll keep it like this. I always just cut it because that was what I did. But I like how I look with it on.”
“You look older. A little more dangerous.”
“Excellent.”
“Do you still have your suit with you?”
I looked over at her.
“Yeah, why?”
“Just asking,” she purred, and tried to hide a little sideways smile.
“You couldn’t possibly be thinking of something naughty, could you?”
She squeezed my knee and we drove on in silence.
I loved how dirty her mind was. I loved how we were never more than a few hours away from fucking. I could either still feel her body on mine, still taste and smell and even hear her from the last time we made love, or I was ramping up in anticipation, knowing that the next time wouldn’t be far off. I didn’t know how much longer we could keep any of this up, but while it lasted, I was relishing every moment. Relishing every sweet hour of sunshine with her, every dirty romp in every strange motel room, every time we pulled over on the dust road and kissed so hard we both needed to remind ourselves to breathe.
When the sunshine started to dull and the day looked like it was winding down, we found yet another roadside motel and pulled up yet again into an old carpark filled with old beat up cars without plates, and camper vans with bumper stickers that the rain had long ago washed out so you couldn’t even tell wheat they said anymore. This country has an unlimite
d number of places like this, all completely unique and yet all exactly like one another.
In silence we left the car and went inside, overnight bags crumpled over our shoulders. An old woman at the reception desk eyed us up and down with a face that looked like she had just been told a really lame joke.
“Just one night please, ma’am. For two,” I said. It was the same thing I had said for the past four motel rooms. But she looked at us both and said nothing.
“You wouldn’t happen to be in any sort of trouble there, would you folks?’ she said.
My heart stopped beating.
“Trouble?”
She shifted her jaw over to the other side and appeared to be chewing thoughtfully on something invisible.
“Well, it’s just that you both have the look about you, you see. I know it when I see it.”
I laughed quietly.
“Ma’am, we’re just a couple looking for a place to crash for the night, no trouble at all…”
She passed rheumy eyes over us once more and shifted her jaw back to the other side again.
“Recently dyed your hair, darling?” she said.
“I’m sorry, are you full or… nevermind, we’ll just go someplace else,” I said quickly, not liking the looks she was giving to Nora one bit. But her and Nora were now staring at one another and my skin went cold. We had only had the occasional TV news report to follow what was happening back in the city, and the rare call from Charlie to let us know what he was up to and how the murder case was unfolding. But by now both Nora’s face and my own had been flashed so frequently on those reports it wouldn’t be surprising if somebody recognized us.
But here Nora did something I didn’t expect. Without skipping a beat, she reached over to me, stuck her hand in my pocket and pulled out the roll of hundreds we had been living off for the past few days. She peeled off five of them and slammed them onto the table, forcing the old woman’s eyes to follow her gestures. Then she reached over the counter, grabbed the sign-in book and the pen, turned it around and began writing. She spoke calmly as she did this, and flicked a few ghostly white strands away from her face.
“Now, ma’am, I understand you’re running a respectable establishment out here and you wouldn’t dream of giving board to people who you didn’t trust, but see my friend and I need a room and you’re going to give us one. I’m sure you don’t want any trouble. For that reason, you should keep quiet and give us a key this instant.”
The woman’s eyebrows hiked up her forehead and she looked down at the notes on the table.
“You’re that hooker that killed what’s-his-name’s wife,” she said, with all the relish of someone who had solved a riddle.
I nearly fell over in shock but Nora simply smiled.
“Oh, you’re talking about Jeff Cane? About that nasty stabbing?” she said, and reached over to peel off two more notes. The woman gave a small nod and began chewing again, like making deals with wanted women were all in day’s work for her.
“If you want my opinion, it was him that did it. Any smart woman can see that. Men like him are sick, of course. They don’t think they should ever have to face the consequences of their actions, do they? So typical.”
I watched with the fascination of an anthropologist hiding in the bushes.
“They weren’t raised right,” the old woman said.
“Amen to that,” said Nora, and tucked the roll of bills back into my pocket.
“I’ve seen the pictures. Of him all dressed up and such, like a creep. It’s just not right for a man.”
“That’s the truth right there.”
“They’re all homosexuals, too, rich folks like him. I bet you anything. It’s disrespectful to God,” she said.
“Couldn’t agree more, ma’am. I don’t know much about it, of course, but if I was calling it, I’d say he’s capable of one, he’s capable of the other, don’t you think?”
The old woman either bought Nora’s little tale completely, or else didn’t care at all, given the cash now spread out on the register. But in any case she took her time reaching into a cupboard to pull out a key and handed it to us, still ogling Nora up and down.
“You uh, you’d best be gone by tomorrow morning,” she said quietly, and closed the register.
Nora smiled.
“Ma’am, you’ll have thought we were just a dream.”
We walked out of the little reception room and into the sun, and I almost burst out laughing.
“You have a talent, you know that?” I said to her, as we made our way to a room on the second floor, one that would overlook the gravel of the car park.
“Dominatrix skills plus a psychology background. Now, if you only knew Kung Fu, you’d be a real force to reckon with,” I added. She smiled and we unlocked the room door, and peered into the small, humbly furnished setup, with a little TV, side tables and a mini bathroom at the back. We threw the bags down, locked the door and smiled at one another.
“But seriously Dean, she recognized us. I’m getting nervous.”
I grabbed her shoulders and kissed her forehead.
“I know. Me too. But we’re not breaking any laws out here. Not yet at least. We just have to lay low until the last possible moment.”
“But when does it stop? We can’t just keep running forever. What are we going to do?”
“You don’t worry about that. You just keep doing what I tell you.”
She looked down at my hand, now resting dangerously low down on her hip, in the same place I had held her countless times before. It was the place I pinned her down when she started to come and began bucking and convulsing. It was the place I grabbed to get deeper inside her, the place I could grasp to let her know exactly what I wanted, to teach her how to move against me, how to open deeper to me…
Every part of her body was a delicious reminder of all the things we were learning to do to one another. I couldn’t look at any part of her, clothed or naked, without also thinking of the things it made me want to do to her. Her lips. The fine bones in her shoulder. The crease at the back of her knee. All of them told some hidden erotic story that only I could read, only I knew how to translate.
I kissed her, deep and full. She smiled up at me.
“Dean. Will you put on your suit?”
I thought for a moment and then nodded. I didn’t know exactly what she had in mind. But I didn’t need to.
“I’ll put it on right now,” I said, and gave her one last peck.
Dear reader, it’s difficult to explain exactly why what happened next was so important. But it was. I have a theory about life. I think most of daily life is insignificant, uneventful. Just something you keep doing because of the momentum of the things you did the days before. But every once in a while, on a rare moment, something happens. That something is so intensely significant that it counts as hundreds of years of normal days, crammed into one moment of insight. That moment can last only a second or two, but it feels so bright and momentous it’s like catching a direct flash of a lighthouse beam. For a brief moment, the entire world is illuminated, things are bright and the way ahead is obvious and clear, no matter how dark and rough the sea. And then just as quickly the beam passes over you and you’re in black again, back in the ordinary, back in the slog of life, hungry for that moment of truth again, for that wonderful sensation...
I didn’t know it at the time, but the lighthouse beam was wheeling round and preparing to flash its brilliant white light on me. The motel room was dull and dingy and unassuming, but soon, everything would become bathed in crystal clear light. And the path ahead would become clear.
Chapter 8
Myth: Anyone can strike it lucky and make a name for themselves, make a lot of money, build their own empire, if they work hard enough
Reality: All of us are stuck in the roles we play, and only a select few ever break out of those roles
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said, hands held in her lap.
“
That’s OK. I’ll show you what to do.”
Her eyes glimmered but she kept a straight face. Nora was a master at never breaking character. I would have told her right there and then how much I loved her, if it didn’t mean breaking character myself.
I sat on the bed next to her, dressed in my suit, gleaming black shoes, tie and white shirt with the collar so sharp you could cut yourself on it. Well, that’s how it was meant to look, at any rate. I rest my hands on my knees, puffed my chest up and set my jaw.
“Your father owes me a lot of money,” I said slowly. I could tell I had her full attention. “So we’ve come to …a little arrangement,” I said, trying to sound as sinister as possible. She was no longer Nora, and I was no longer Dean. I reached out my hand and touched her knee, and she jolted.
“You’re afraid?” I said.
She was silent, her stony gaze on the beige carpet in front of her. I smiled.
“That’s OK, pumpkin. I’m not here to listen to you talk,” I said, and stood so I was facing her. “But I’m a busy man, so let’s get this started, shall we?”
She lifted her eyes to me, face dripping with contempt.
“You’re an asshole,” she said with a sneer.
I laughed.
“You’re only a teenager, I bet everyone’s an asshole as far as you’re concerned, huh?” Legs spread wide, towering above her, the role I was playing felt unnervingly comfortable for me. I crossed my arms and looked down at her.
“No, just you,” she said with a sulk.
I shifted my weight.
“Well, that’s just fine as well, because as it happens, you don’t have to like any of this one bit, do you?”
“After tonight,” she said, “the debt is paid off, and then it’s over. You get to have sex with me, once, and that’s all. It doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want with me.”
I knelt down, roughly grabbed her chin in my hands and forced her to look at me.