by Emma Rose
“She’s a BRICK…House,” the phone jolted her away from her ennui and she answered thankful for the relief from her thoughts while simultaneously praying it wasn’t Tyler on the line.
“Someone was in my house!” Maralee blurted as soon as the phone clicked.
“Of course someone was in your house! You told me to go in your house!”
“Not you, Cam. I know you were here with Tyler. But, someone else was here. I feel it.”
“I locked the door when I left, which was better than you did, by the way.”
“What are you talking about? I always lock my door!”
“Well, you didn’t today. You always put your eggs away, too. But you were late today, remember?” Cami could sense Maralee’s level of agitation was higher than she thought the situation deserved.
“I swear I locked the door! I’m telling you someone was in my house! I feel an energy, a spirit, here and it’s not yours.”
“Anything stolen? Missing? New?”
“The goddess is telling me someone was here.”
“Well, maybe she wasn’t too happy with whoever you had in your bed last night. He seems like a slob.”
“What are you talking about?” Now Maralee was as confused as Cami. She used a guest room or the backyard for the casual lovers she shared time and body with, never her own bed.
“Well, I can understand a guy not putting down the toilet seat, but he could at least learn to flush!”
“What are you talking about? He who?”
“Well, that’s the question with you, isn’t it? He who?” Cami didn’t mean for her tone to sound so bitter. While she admired Maralee’s decision to run her own life without commitment or a mate, she sometimes looked at her sex, singleness, and spirit-world as a well intentioned train wreck.
“I haven’t had any he’s or who’s in my bedroom lately,” Maralee shot back angrily. “The last time I had sex was the moon greeting.”
“Whatever,” Cami sighed dismissively. It wasn’t like Maralee to hide anything from her, but she didn’t have the energy to deal with this and Eddie’s upcoming visit to the office at the same time. “I just know when I put up the eggs, your door was unlocked, your bedroom and bathroom lights were on, the toilet seat was up, and it hadn’t been flushed.”
“I’m telling you,” Maralee blurted, more anxious than ever. “Someone was in my house!”
“Is anything missing?”
“Not that I can tell.”
“Okay, so a burglar came in, used the bathroom, turned on the lights and left the door unlocked. No harm, no foul.”
“I find it very foul,” Maralee grumbled. She could see Cami wasn’t going to help her figure out this riddle. “Anyway, I have an invitation to an opening. Want to go with me?”
“Sure. What opening?”
“The Wine Loft. Remember that really nice man at Eddie’s that night? The one who works for him. Howard?”
“Harold.”
“Yeah, well his lover is opening a new wine bar in Upper Grafton called The Wine Loft. Sounds like a great event. They are having a contest and are asking everyone to bring a special or unique bottle of wine. A wine specialist will be the judge and the winner receives a gift certificate and gets to name one of their signature drinks. How cool is that? You could be drinking a Maralee Malibu someday or maybe a Snow Slammer. That would be fun.”
“I better pass,” Cami said hesitantly. She knew it was a bad idea the minute her mind flashed pictures of Eddie holding a wine bottle and staring at her breasts at the same time. It wasn’t the instant flash that worried her. It was the way she tingled and ached when she saw him in her mind, that was the clue. “If it’s Harold’s event, Eddie will be there. I’m trying to lay low from him for a while.”
“So, it’s definitely Tyler, then?”
“I don’t know,” Cami sighed. Maralee talked about the opening—what she should wear, who she could take, and who might be there she’d know. Cami drifted between Maralee’s gabbing and visions of bending over Eddie’s desk through most of the conversation.
“I want to take an interesting wine. Howard said he and his lover aren’t from here, so maybe I should take something local. Something that says “Grafton!” but also something that is part of me. You know, maybe a wine that represents what it was like growing up in Grafton,” Maralee mused. Cami laughed at her friend’s ability to romanticize anything, even her crappy childhood growing up in a small town that was the armpit of the technology corridor.
“If you want to symbolize your coming of age in Grafton, better take them a bottle of MD 20/20,” Cami chuckled. “That was our drink of choice.”
Maralee laughed with her friend. Lying back on the bed, she chatted with Cami a bit more and clicked off the phone feeling better than she had since she got home. She looked down to see her old diary had a corner sticking out past the nightstand. Pushing it back into place, she paused for a moment, her finger resting on the cover. How did that book get turned around?
“I guess it’s silly,” she said to herself. “Mooning over my adolescence like I had anything worth remembering.”
Maralee stretched her legs out and let her mind go back to the past. She didn’t do it very often, but MD 20/20 wasn’t just the crappiest, cheapest wine at Super Save; it was the key to the night she made the only real commitment of her life. The night she gave herself to the goddess in front of half the high school, and no one knew.
Running her hands through her blonde waves, she willed herself to remember the night with the bonfire, and the boy in the back of his truck. Poor Dustin, she’d been grooming him for the role for almost a year, but knew she needed to wait until she turned sixteen and placed both feet across the line of legal consent. Cami laughed and asked if she thought her dad might sue Dustin. Maralee told her quite factually that she was more worried her dad might kill him. Or her.
Looking back at the night, the fire roaring and the music blaring from every speaker, vehicle, and angle—she couldn’t have asked for a better scenario. She flirted with Dustin, got him to ask her to homecoming, arranged to spend the night at Cami’s house so she didn’t have to answer any questions, got Dawn to buy her a bottle of MD 20/20, and met her destiny. Years later she could still feel the heat of the fire in the night air.
The memory enlivened Maralee’s senses and she began to feel the nagging pull of her clit tightening against its sheath, begging her for relief.
It’s weird Cami thought I had a man in here, her mind began, but she leaned over and turned the clock radio to an oldies channel, grimacing when she realized it would be playing the songs from her youth. The music, the memory would silence the worry as her hands dropped to her breasts, remembering Dustin’s shaking fingers reaching the cup of her bra, pulling it down. The priestess pinched her nipple rhythmically, reflecting on the sweet kisses and sucking on her breasts.
Her mind lost in time, Maralee’s body began to relax and react to the pleasant sensation her fingers created. She reached between her legs, starting with small, slow circles, hips rising to meet her hand. She continued to cup and pull at her erect nipple with one hand, servicing her needing, wet sex with the other. Once again, as it had that night, her body seemed to elevate from its position into the hands of the goddess she imagined.
Diana, goddess of the hunt, virginal and strong, served by women who gave their sex to her so she could remain pure and they could channel the life force of mating into her realm. Maralee pushed harder against her clit, the small circles becoming rough, jerking motions as her hips snapped back and forth. A thin veil of sweat covered her body as she ground herself against the bed, both hands now diving between her legs—one entering her channel, filling her, the other continuing its pressure on her pleasure center.
The fire, the music, the cheap wine, the rocking of the truck, the sounds of sex all around her, his hot breath on her neck, her body stretching in ways it had never stretched all merged into a pinnacle she began to climb once more. The
sound of her bed springs, contracting with the motion of her self-love, was the mantra she offered as she climbed—her body clinching, the wetness flowing over her hand. She saw Diana in her mind. Reaching out to her, holding her, leaning down with her sweet, luscious, full lips cloaked in the color of the stars and kissing Maralee deeply, pulling her body into the goddess’s own…Maralee rammed her hips against her hands, and in her mind’s eye returned the goddess’s warm embrace, letting herself go, letting her orgasm roll over her as waves of pleasures emanated from her spasms, letting herself fly.
She gasped out loud as the explosion of pleasure filled her starry thoughts with pure bliss. She knew the goddess accepted her passion, just as she knew it that night when Dustin was ready to break through her innocence. She had felt the goddess then, too. Diana encouraged her not to be scared and not to have fear. She guided him to continue, crying out to the moon under the fire-lit sky, when the deed was done.
Dustin would later tell his friends he had been the first with lots of girls (“lots” being a forgivable exaggeration for a young man), but he had never had an experience like entering Maralee Snow. She was vibrant and otherworldly, even then, and she held him close to her breasts when it was done, telling him she would always cherish what they did. He walked her back to Cami’s car, careful to go slow enough to accommodate her sore awakening.
“Can I see you this weekend?” Dustin asked, enamored by the firelight reflecting radiantly on her face.
“You can see me in school,” she answered, sweetly and clearly.
“But, you know, um…for a date?”
“I don’t date,” she responded, sorry to see the shocked and saddened look on his face. “I love you for what we just did, and I’ll probably always love you for it, but it’s done and so are we.”
“But…but…what?” He called as she got in the car Cami had already started.
“Thank you.” She waved through the rolled down window and began babbling to Cami about gods and fire and someone named Diana. Dustin didn’t tell anyone about the strange night for a very long time. By the time he confessed his broken heart to a college girlfriend, he decided Maralee wasn’t a lesbian, asexual, or a slut—all of which he had considered over time. Older and wiser, Dustin knew she was exactly what she claimed to be—a witch, for she had certainly bewitched him that night.
Breathing the sweet sigh of orgasmic relief, Maralee turned off the radio and pulled the covers snugly around her. No, she didn’t need a bottle of Mad Dog to share a taste of Grafton with the guys opening The Wine Loft. She’d give them something far more magical—a hand-sealed bottle of Alchemist’s Punch.
“With a dad like that, I don’t think anyone would hold killing him against her, do you?” Steve shouted. They didn’t fight often, but when they did it was always Steve who got loud first.
“Well, the law might have something to say about it,” Harold grumbled. “And, of course someone is going to hold it against her. Why do you think Eddie wants this information? Precisely SO he can hold it against her.”
Harold stared at the printed pictures on his kitchen table and the written report of all he had discovered from his trip to Maralee’s. He explained the story the pictures showed to his partner. An elder of a church who spent his less holy time with sex workers and beating on his wife and daughters was killed by the youngest with an arrow to the heart. Harold agonized over every detail and Steve sympathized to a point, but he was always more practical.
“Eddie sent you find something and you found the mother lode. That’s the job, right?”
“I don’t think my terms of employment involved spying on harmless women trying to get by in the world and giving their private details over to a blackmailer. I work for a pharmaceutical firm, not the CIA.”
“You work for Eddie Dunning and now, so do I. Give him the damn pictures.” Steve hadn’t accepted Eddie’s offer to invest in a wine bar easily, but with his clubs making such thin margins, he needed a cash cow and the high flying people of Upper Grafton seemed ready for milking.
“I knew bringing him in was a bad idea. First we got the big check, then we had to put the club on the lake near his house; then we had to agree to put a fetish club in the basement; then we had to have a wine contest just so he can rub Tyler Bach’s nose in how much money Eddie is willing to spend, and now we are engaging in illegal activities and ruining an innocent person’s life. How much is that check going to cost us, Steve? How much of our soul are we really going to pay?”
“First, bringing Eddie in wasn’t a bad idea, it was the only idea.” Steve sat down across from Harold and adjusted his tone to the numbered, analytic volume that served him well all these years. “Second, that property is beautiful and we couldn’t have it without him. Third, a bar underneath the loft for the dungeon and collar crowd? It’s perfect and we are going to double the income for the same space. Fourth, that wine contest is genius! People bring valuable bottles of wine we could never buy and they make a centerpiece for our club, for free. Fifth, if she killed her father, she isn’t innocent, and finally, I don’t know about you but I sold my soul long ago—to get out of the streets, out of the hustle, and into the suit I’m wearing today.”
“You don’t think this is the hustle?” Harold said quietly, holding up the camera and pics. “And that wine contest? Eddie knows Tyler recently bought a Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1945, one of the finest wines in the world, for his collection. Eddie’s spending almost $150,000 for some rare bottle just to beat him in front of Cami and the rest of the blue bloods. Everything we do for him is a hustle.”
“I remember our first crappy apartment on 6th and Delancy in DC. I remember our tires getting slashed and you working overtime to replace them. I remember the word faggot painted on our parking space and the “no mo ho mo” sign on our door. I think if this is what it takes to never go back there, then so be it.”
“You think we can buy tolerance?” Harold mused, realizing Steve was right. They had gone this far with Eddie to ensure their success and there was no backing out now.
“I think we can buy a house in a place other than the intersection of hate avenue and ignorance alley,” he said, placing his arm around his partner. “Give Eddie the pictures, and let’s get on with our lives.”
Cami jumped onto the elevator praying all would be go well and that the industrial strength deodorant she used really did live up to its promises because she was sweating bullets. She arrived in her office just in time to print up the agendas and sit down.
“Camellia Hill,” Eddie’s voice boomed out across the office, jolting Cami from her seat, causing her to upend a desk tray, spilling highlighters and pens all over the floor. “It is always such a pleasure to see you, my dear. It’s been so long.”
Eddie took Cami’s hand in his meaty palm, and then closed the other hand around it as Tyler was stepping out to see what all the commotion was about. Cami looked at his shoes for a moment, head down, eye contact avoided, but when he wouldn’t let go of her hand she was forced to meet his stare. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see in his eyes, but he just smiled at her as if the time he had to hold her hand was a precious gift and he was grateful for it.
“It has been,” Cami stammered, trying to slip into her charming office persona, only to have it turn slippery when she needed it most. “Too long. Mr. Dunning. It is nice to see you.”
“Ty the guy,” Eddie blurted, clapping Tyler on the back and nearly sending him into a wall. “I think between us we could get that conference here in record time.”
Ever the gentleman, Harold stood in the hall waiting for Cami to pick up the mess on her desk and walk ahead of him. He watched as she scurried to push things back in the drawer, even though she would have to redo the whole thing later. She was more nervous than he’d seen her before, and he was sure he knew why. Of course, he knew nothing she felt could hold a candle to the grip of fear he endured crouching in her best friend’s closet. Somehow it brought them closer.
“Thank you, Mr. Jennings.” She nodded. “I…um…I appreciate your discretion.”
“I feel nothing for you but the greatest respect,” Harold replied as they turned the corner to see Tyler and Eddie bent over the agenda fighting over whose name was going first on the invitation. Harold spoke quietly, but distinctly. “Either man is lucky to have you, dear.”
“Thank you, so much,” she breathed a sigh of relief and took the pharmaceutical titans in hand, guiding them to a settlement and keeping them from killing one another in the process. On the way out, Harold handed Cami a sealed invitation to the opening.
“I hope you can join us. I invited your friend, Miss Snow, as well. Steve and I are hoping it’s an evening to remember,” Harold said.
“I’m sure it will be,” Cami replied. “I believe I am busy that night, unfortunately.”
“Keep the invitation anyway,” Harold held his hand up, refusing to take the sealed envelope back. “Just in case you change your mind.”
“I’m afraid I can’t have two dates,” she confessed, watching as Eddie handed an invitation to Tyler when they emerged from the conference room.
“Why not?” Harold asked, then put his hand on Cami’s arm and winked. “I don’t judge.”
She giggled, tucking the invitation in her notebook. She ran into her office and began fussing with paperwork, uncharacteristically allowing her boss to walk Eddie out of the office. He did manage to stick his head in her door on their way down the corridor.
“It is always lovely to see you, Camellia,” Eddie drawled with all his southern charm. “I hope we encounter one another again soon.”
Cami shivered and managed to nod. As soon as the elevator door closed, Tyler was in her office.
“Call Dr. Sovich at the lab and ask him to call my private cell right away.”