“You son-of-a-bitch!”
Lana still had no working knowledge or even concerns that Mel or any of the others were even there as she started after Tink, her fists already tightened white in rage, her lips turned back in a primordial snarl that showed her clenched teeth. Undoubtedly, those looking on would have preferred to be in the path of the mother bear rather than the incensed Lana that was approaching them now.
“Lana, take it easy,” Mel said hopefully as he reached out in an attempt to slow her down if not stop her completely. All he did was divert her path, his hands closing on empty air behind her as she sped past him, but it was just enough to allow Tink enough time to slip into the passenger side of the sedan and close the door behind him. As one of her fists collided violently against the thick glass, Mel caught up and wrapped her in a restrictive hold, pulling her away from the car, her legs kicking wildly in the air toward the now protected Tink.
Hours later, back in Sergio’s apartment, Lana remembered the even in vivid detail, recounting the conversation with Mel as the nurse applied the wrap to her hand, the hand that now had two broken carpal bones as a result of the collision with the car window. He had told her she should consider herself lucky Tink wasn’t pressing charges against her for attempting to assault a police officer. That was a felony, he had assured her. Her response had been that he was lucky she hadn’t killed him, sending Mel over the edge with a flood of more warnings and declarations about police officers, but Lana could see the weakness in his warnings, as even he knew the hypocrisy it would take for Tink to actually try to have her arrested at this point.
“He really fucking knew,” she had finally said to Mel, causing him to blink rapidly several times before turning and walking out of the room without saying anything else.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
She had been raging somewhere beyond furious when she got back to the apartment the night before, and calming her down had been too much to ask of Sergio, leaving him no choice but to flat out demand it. While she had eventually been able to at least act as though it was no longer on her mind, it had remained there and kept her up well after Sergio had sent her to bed. It remained on her mind still as she went about the task of preparing his breakfast, but there would be no hint of it on the outside, not in front of Sergio.
“Breakfast is ready Ser,” she said as she approached him, “are you ready to eat?”
“Yes, that would be nice,” he said.
He got up and followed Lana to the table, taking his seat as she pulled the chair out for him before taking her own place just behind his left shoulder. She watched attentively as he ate, vigilantly refilling his coffee the moment the cup reached the halfway point, and then returning to her place behind him. Sergio made short work of the meal, a gesture she took as complimentary on more than one level and as soon as he was done, indicating that he required no more than the one serving she had provided for him, he returned to the living room while she ate her own breakfast and then cleaned the dishes.
“I think I’ll go to the library today,” he said as she was drying her hands, “would you like to come with me or did you have something else in mind to keep you busy?”
“I do have a few things I need to catch up on here,” she said, “but I’d love it if you would pick a book up for me.”
“Was there anything in particular you wanted?”
“No, just something new, anything you think I would like.”
A few minutes later he was gone and Lana was again left alone with her thoughts of Tink and the betrayal they represented. She made her way out the patio door to the small balcony that accompanied the apartment. Since they had reunited, Sergio had made no qualms about her smoking, only asking that she did it outside, and she really wanted one now. She sat the coffee warmer on the small table beside her after filling her cup with the Louisiana blend that Sergio had introduced her to. She had grown fond of the chickaree flavor of the Community Coffee he had to order online since the stores didn’t sell it locally.
The cars buzzed by lazily below her on Antoine Avenue, their owners unaware that somewhere on a balcony above them a woman, naked from the waist down, was slowly sipping a dark roasted blend of imported coffee. They might have cared no more than that same woman did about their various destinations or from wherever they might have so recently come. They were nothing but a footnote in Lana’s world, mere sights and sounds easily lost in the background of her morning and just as easily forgotten long before they had even passed out of view, had she been watching in the first place.
Two stories above her, on a similar balcony near the western most end of the building, another woman was also drinking coffee, only no one was on the way to pick out a good book for her to read, and there was no one to complain if she had been smoking as well. Only she wasn’t smoking, and she wasn’t as oblivious to the lives passing by below her as Lana was. The woman whose name Lana would never know, was lonely and she watched each and every one of those passing cars, wondering if perhaps the driver of one of them might someday be a friend to her.
Lana was unaware the woman even existed, just as she was unaware of the events taking place across town. If she had known, she may very well have jumped off the balcony and rudely disrupted the life of one of those passing motorists. But they went by unheeded and she sipped her coffee slowly, and quietly, finding it easier to let any lingering feelings for Tink casually slip away from her heart.
She had no way on knowing it, but in a small room at the courthouse, her name was being used regularly and with little respect. Earlier, while she was standing dutifully behind Sergio, one of the unseen cars passing by on Antoine Avenue below them was on its way to the same courthouse. It was driven by a portly man in a blue suit who had been summoned to hear an argument raised by a lawyer of some recent prominence. The argument the lawyer by now had already vehemently raised was in regards to a case that same judge had ruled over months earlier, his decision sending a man to prison for abducting a young female clerk and keeping her locked in his home for an extended time.
On the balcony that extended from apartment 217, on the north side of the paradise Place Apartments, Lana Martin was still sipping coffee, unaware her name had been used regularly during that lawyer’s argument. Had she known of the meeting, of the dishonorable way that same lawyer was portraying her character, she would have undoubtedly been angrier than she had the moment she had seen the guilt in Tink’s eyes. But she hadn’t been aware of the meeting at all, any more than she been aware of the woman on the balcony of apartment 449.
As Lana poured another cup of coffee, her only thoughts at the moment being about whether she wanted another cigarette, newspaper reporters were scrambling for the cell phones. In an earlier time, long before those reporters were employed as reporters, their fathers would have been screaming into payphones the overdramatized words of their own day. Stop the presses, they would have been screaming. But these newer generation reporters, doubtfully never having an opportunity to see a payphone themselves, were instead using cell phones to inform their editors that they needed to update the papers’ websites with a breaking story.
Sergio Marsilis was standing at the counter, waiting for the librarian to stamp his two selections, Stephen King’s Under the Dome for himself and The Poetry of Robert Frost for Lana. At that same moment, the woman who resided in apartment 449 was crawling back into her bed alone, wiping allowing the soft pillow covered in a maroon slipcase to wipe the tears from her eyes. At the police department’s main building downtown, Mel Massey was walking out the front doors, talking with Tom Tinkerton. Tom, known by Mel, as well as just about everyone else as Tink, had just turned in his badge and department issued pistol. They had thanked him for his service by allowing him the opportunity to resign as opposed to being fired. His tenure would keep him out of jail, but he would never wear a badge again.
Across the street from the police headquarters, on the third floor of the county courthouse, the honorable Judge T
errence Macklin was sitting quietly in his office, the multiple phone calls that were now coming in with only short pauses between them getting no further than his receptionist’s desk. Her name was Laura Mableton, and two days after the honorable judge would announce his retirement, some three months into the future, she would do the same.
Just outside of the city limits, though still uncomfortably well within the physical makeup of the town according to many of the residents, Daniel Morrow was standing in front of a caged window as one of the trustees was handing him the personal items he hadn’t seen since his incarceration. Standing beside him was a lawyer Daniel now viewed as nothing short of a genius. As Sergio headed to his car outside the library and Tink to his outside the police department, Daniel Morrow was stepping into the cab that had been waiting for him in the prison’s parking lot. Moments later, the cab pulled away from the prison. Its lone passenger was a free man, his conviction having just been overturned.
Lana Martin knew none of this.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
1
Lana lay motionless on the living room’s plush carpet as Sergio slowly trailed the business end of the riding crop along one of her inner thighs. The soft tender skin there still sported a pink hue left from the leather’s most previous kisses. Lana was reading from the book he had checked out of the library for her, and she couldn’t help but look at up at Sergio and smile as she read the last six lines from Frost’s poem, Paul’s Wife.
“She wasn’t anybody else’s business, either to praise her or much as name her, and he’d thank people not to think of her. Murphy’s idea was that a man like Paul wouldn’t be spoken to about a wife in any way the world knew to speak.”
Lana smiled as the last line hung in the air between them. The words were absolutely beautiful. It was no accident that he had chosen this book, handing it to her as she undressed before him, just as it was no accident that the complimentary book mark the librarian had given him had been placed to mark this particular poem. Asking him about it never made it past the stage of contemplation however, as Sergio answered her before she could ask.
“That’s how I feel about you Lana,” he said, his eyes holding her in their deepest depths, “No one else has a right to so much as even think about you, much less let your name grace their lips. Their minds can’t comprehend someone as perfect as you, so they should never be allowed to speak of you. To do so would be nothing short of blasphemous.”
Lana couldn’t speak. All that time, when she had been ashamed of herself, frightened she was sinking into a world of unforgivable darkness, he had been there with her, but she hadn’t realized it. She had been convinced that the only way she could truly be herself was to leave him behind, but he had never been behind her at all. All along he had been waiting for her to reach him, a lone believer waiting patiently for his goddess to descend and free him to worship her as no one else could.
“I love you, Ser.”
“Completely?”
“Until the end of time,” she said.
Again Lana felt that connection between them, the one that required no words, and would only be cheapened by the very attempt of description. She reached beside her for the black mask and pulled it slowly over her head, feeling her desire come alive in the embrace of the total darkness. Her hands clinched at her sides, the nails digging deeply into her skin as she felt the leather crop touch between her legs softly, teasingly. Without prompting, Lana became unable to remain still on the floor in front of him, anxiously anticipating his merciful touch, longing for his stinging offering of blissful pain.
The room detonated with a sharp crack as the flat piece of leather connected to the soft skin just below Lana’s abdomen, sending delightful impulses of liveliness racing through her body. The swelling skin, the burning sting that would cause most to go scrambling for safety was nothing but a tease to her. To Lana, it was as though she had merely caught a fleeting glimpse of the throne created for her and her alone as she waited to be exalted to her rightful place.
The second touch from the leather struck her inside her left thigh, no more than two inches from the warming essence of her seething vitality. Her hands shot instinctively between her legs, grinding against the wetness her welcoming slit offered. Lana pulled against her own weight with both hands, lifting herself slightly before her hands released their hold, only longing for another.
As her hands found their way up the front of her body, each cupping one of her breast, squeezing it roughly, she felt the leather strike her skin again, this time resounding with a muffled report as it arrived directly at the center of Lana’s lust, causing a surprised cry of a euphoric whimper out of her mouth as she writhed on the floor begging for more. Her hands found their way to her sides again, then underneath her. She lifted against her legs, presenting an open altar to the worshipping hands of her priest. Another smack, harder than any of its predecessors, struck her, its epicenter just below the swollen lips of her begging pussy, sending electrical aftershocks coursing through her again. Lana moaned uncontrollably.
She felt his hands as they grasped her legs just under her knees, tightening against her calves as they pushed her legs toward her head. Sergio entered her quivering slit easily, finding the depth of her passion instantly as his hips rocked against the underside of her thighs. As he held himself deep inside her, he released his grip of her legs, allowing them to fall against his shoulders as his hungry hands found the sides of her neck.
He pulled back from her slightly and then slammed inside again, his hands tightening around her neck as his balls crashed heavily against her flesh. Lana’s body contorted in an almost circular manner as the muscles in her thighs and stomach began to tighten. She pushed her crotch against his passionately, while lifting her neck amiably against his hands. He in turn leaned his weight forward, forcing himself unbelievably deeper inside of her tightening pussy whole pinning her to the floor by her neck.
As Sergio’s hips reached a fever pitch, jack-hammering his hard, merciless dick inside her at a maddening pace, fought against her restricting throat, forcing the air out of her lungs past his still tightening hands. The blackness swirled around her inside the hood as her thoughts stopped streaming by in their previous rush and slowed to a pace akin to a complete stop, floating in front of her in perfect clarity. She watched in wonder as the thoughts fell apart, all former pretense and delusion gone, leaving only their simplest core structure behind, and allowing her to know what they really meant for the first time.
God existed inside of her, just as she existed inside of him. Right and wrong were revealed as mere delusions as Lana witnessed the creation of time itself folding over an infinite sea of blissful colors, all representatives of her dreams and emotions. Even Sergio’s presence was barely discernable in the swirl of orgasmic growth within her awakening soul. The darkness around her began to fade away leaving an array of shockingly bright colors, and as she felt all the muscles in her body contract at the same instant, the colors blended into one that she had never seen. The last thing she thought before the darkness returned in a decisive flash of a perfect black was that the new color she had seen was a combination of everything inside her mind and body. That color was her as seen through the eyes of God.
2
Daniel Morrow walked through his father’s house unable to hide his amusement at the reminders that Lana had so recently been there. Tink had gone to his bedroom – apparently to take a long nap – as soon as he had gotten home and he hadn’t come out of there since, so Daniel had been left to his own devices as far as entertaining himself, but that had never really been a problem. Today would prove to be no exception.
The television had barked loudly when he turned it on, and while it had been a long time since he had actually been able to so much as hold a remote control, he immediately turned it back off, not wanting to disturb Tink. After a few minutes looking over the book selections on Tink’s shelves – it was a decisively small selection to choose from, so nothi
ng really jumped out at him – Daniel made his way into the kitchen.
Frozen Jimmy Dean breakfast biscuits, complete with sausage and egg would serve nicely as a passable breakfast, and given his meals had been served in small quantities for some time, Daniel put the entire package on a cookie sheet in the oven, flipping the knob to 375 degrees before heading back into the living room to wait. He opened the curtain, letting in the last of the morning sun, and stood there soaking it in. He decided that after breakfast, he would take a long walk, just because he could.
The time passed quickly as he stared out the window the window that wasn’t Plexiglass and wasn’t covered with mire mesh and thick bars. That fucking bitch was out there in the city somewhere.
“Don’t worry, little one,” he mumbled under his breath, “I’ll find you eventually.”
The small biscuits weren’t exactly what he would call “piping hot,” but they were warm enough and Daniel had no trouble putting them all away quickly. Afterward, he went to the garage and dragged the boxes out from under Tink’s old work bench, the one marked junk. Apparently Lana hadn’t made it to the garage much or surely she would have taken a look inside the boxes and seen that they belonged to him.
Then garage served double duty, also storing the washer and dryer as well. Daniel loaded several sets of his old clothes into the washer and while it began its work he went through the boxes to see which ones he wanted to keep. Aside from a few small things, there was nothing in the boxes but clothes, but he did run across his old pocket knife and a few his old steno books. He was surprised they weren’t locked in an evidence room somewhere downtown, given the dark nature of some of the writing inside them, but Tink must have managed to take them out of his house before the place got swarmed by the police. For the next couple of hours, he went back and forth between the laundry and the books, so by the time he had finished reading all of his old writing, most of his clothes were washed and dried. He left them in the garage for the time being, neatly folded and back in the boxes.
Freeing Lana Page 16