Hell and Back

by Patricia Blackmoor

  Parker slid one hand up the inside of my leg and slipped a finger inside of me. My knees nearly buckled as he stroked me from the inside with his finger and along my clit with his tongue. He lapped at me like an expert, his tongue swirling along my clit, gently stroking, coaxing me to orgasm. As my nails dug into his back, he pulled his finger out of me, and I let out a whimper of disappointment. I was quickly satiated and nearly overcome when his tongue took its place instead, penetrating the deepest parts of me, his thumb still attending to my clit.

  The orgasm started in my toes, a tingling filling my body, overcoming me with more pleasure than I’d ever felt in my life. I screamed as my body was racked with bliss, knowing that no one could hear me and I could be as loud as I wanted.

  When the pleasure had subsided, Parker stood up and kissed me under the water. My body felt weak but somehow invigorated.

  “Let’s get out of here and go to the bed,” I murmured to him. Pleasure still surging through my body, I reached over and turned off the water without a second thought.

  Together, Parker and I fell together onto the bed, a tangle of limbs as we explored each other. He’d had the chance to make me feel good, and now it was my turn to give him pleasure.

  Parker lay flat on his back and I straddled him, his cock pressing against my clit as I leaned down and met his lips in a deep kiss. My hands roamed down his chest, my lips following closely behind. My tongue followed the thin strip of hair from his belly button down to his pelvis. I had taken him in my hands before I realized how big he truly was. Mitchell was nothing compared to him. All my life I’d heard jokes about black men and the size of their cocks, and in this case, the stereotype was true.

  “Holy shit,” I said, my eyes wide as I stroked him.

  “Is that a good thing?” Parker asked.

  “I simultaneously can’t wait to have you inside of me, and I’m terrified that you’ll split me apart.”

  “I haven’t split anyone apart yet.”

  “That’s promising,” I said.

  I took him in my mouth, my jaw stretching to accommodate his girth. I tasted the salt of his precum on my tongue, the first thing I had tasted in ages. I couldn’t fit all of him in my mouth, even with his tip hitting the back of my throat, so I used my hand to take care of what I couldn’t handle with my tongue.

  Parker reached over, threading his hands into my wet hair, pulling me down so I was nearly gagging on his length. I savored every minute of his pleasure, thrilled to see him in the throes of ecstasy.

  “Fuck, Meg,” he moaned. “Please, I need to be inside you.”

  “I can accommodate that,” I said as I pulled him out of my mouth with a pop.

  I scooted up the bed to meet his lips. He tried to flip me over, but I shook my head. “I like to be on top,” I whispered.

  “Fine by me,” he said.

  I straddled him once more, this time sliding him into me. My fears of him splitting me apart weren’t completely unfounded; I felt a pain radiate through me that was similar to the pain of my first time. Once my body had relaxed and stretched to fit him, though, I felt only pleasure.

  With my legs spread far apart, I rocked myself on him, his cock hitting my g-spot no matter which way I turned. With my hands planted firmly on his chest, nails digging into his skin, he began thrusting up, waves of pleasure washing over me as he hit my g-spot over and over. Parker’s large hands teased my breasts, fingers pinching and pulling at my nipples.

  Parker pulled his hands away momentarily, pushing himself up into a seated position, thrusting his cock further inside of me. I moaned as I felt the tingling in my toes, not ready for another orgasm so soon. I wanted this to last forever, his lips on my neck, hands all over my back, holding me close to him so that as my orgasm washed over me, he was still hitting the deepest parts of me, over and over until he groaned, his whole body tensing under my hands.

  His arms around me, we both fell together onto the bed, exhausted, though we knew we couldn’t sleep.

  “You know what the best part of being incorporeal is?” I asked him as we lay twisted together.

  “What’s that?” he murmured.

  “No need for protection.”

  Parker laughed.

  We stayed naked the rest of the night.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I could have stayed naked on that bed until the demons came to drag us back to hell, but instead, Parker had a different idea.

  “I’d like to visit my family, if you don’t mind,” he said, rubbing his thumb across the back of my hand.

  I turned to him, brushing his lips with mine. “That sounds like a fantastic idea.”

  I disconnected myself from Parker’s arms and climbed off of the bed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a night this amazing, this thrilling. Despite my untimely death, it felt like every atom in my body was buzzing and alive.

  I stepped across the room into the bathroom and picked up my clothes from off the tile floor. It almost pained me to pull on the dirty, soot-stained clothes over my showered body, but I did it anyway. If I had been thinking, I would have washed my clothes in the shower and let them dry overnight, but I had been distracted.

  I still had nothing to tie my hair back with; I should have grabbed something from my old house. Instead, I braided my hair back. It wasn’t perfect, and it wouldn’t stay for too long, but it would do for now. Maybe Parker’s sister would have one.

  Parker pulled on his clothes. We were a sorry pair, the two of us, dirty and torn, but no one would see us, so it didn’t matter. We linked arms, ready to leave the hotel.

  The sun was bright, no wind to chill us or give us goosebumps as we walked along the sidewalk.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked him.

  “Transit station first,” he said, pointing down a ways.

  “You know what I miss?” I asked with a sigh. “Ice cream. My favorite dessert.”

  “Wait a second,” he said, stopping short. I looked at him in confusion. “It’s your birthday, isn’t it?”

  I paused. “It is. In all the frantic confusion, I’d forgotten.”

  He wrapped me in his arms, murmuring into my hair. “Happy birthday.”

  “Thanks,” I said, resting my head on his shoulder. “Am I another year older if I’m dead?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think you’re forever twenty-six.”

  “Could be worse,” I said with a shrug. “Twenty-six isn’t the worst age to be forever.” I was sounding more optimistic, more positive than I felt, but that was all right. There was nothing that could be done about it now.

  The two of us passed into the transit station. Parker took a moment to glance at the map, searching for the next train to take us to his family. After a few moments, Parker pulled me over and we boarded the train.

  “You know,” I said as we sat down in an empty spot, “I don’t think I’ve ever ridden public transportation so much in my entire life.”

  “This was practically a regular day for me,” he said. “I wasn’t able to afford a car until I made that deal. Maybe I should have saved the money, but I wanted to make sure my sister had something before I passed away. The bus and train can take so long, and I didn’t want her to have to be away from my brothers.”

  I didn’t say anything. It was hard to imagine such a world so different from the one I had grown up in, one where poverty was an everyday occurrence. We’d gone through stints when I was a child where money had been tight, and there had been plenty of weeks in college where I’d subsisted on ramen and cold coffee from the university lobby, but nothing compared to what Parker and his family had gone through. I would never and had never had to fear that I’d be sleeping on the streets, that I wouldn’t eat for weeks on end, that my siblings would be relying on me. Sometimes, when I allowed myself to think of what Parker went through, my heart broke and I wanted to cry. It was too much responsibility for any person, especially one as young as he had been at the time.

&
nbsp; “What did your family usually do for the Fourth of July?” I asked him, head still resting on his shoulder.

  “We’d go for a picnic,” he said. “There was a park not too far from my house. It wasn’t a great park; the city didn’t keep it up, and if you weren’t careful you might find drug needles and paraphernalia at the playground, but my mom would clear the grass and put down a blanket and we’d have a picnic for dinner. After we ate we’d go watch the fireworks by the river. Sometimes, if we had extra money, we’d buy sparklers and play with them in the backyard.”

  “That sounds nice,” I said. “What about after your parents passed?”

  “I tried to keep up our tradition as much as possible, but we moved, and we weren’t very close to the park anymore. It was a lot of work trying to wrangle three kids on the bus. So we’d have a little picnic in the backyard of our apartment building. The yard is really small, and mostly dirt, but it was the best I could do for them. They didn’t seem to mind. Once I made that deal, I’d spend a little bit of money on sparklers each year. We didn’t splurge much; I wanted to save as much money as possible, but the sparklers made them happy, so I kept doing that.”

  “That’s really sweet,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “I did what I could.”

  “Are you excited to see them? I know you were nervous before.”

  “I still am, a little bit,” he admitted. “But I guess I just want to see them happy, and I want to know that all the work, all the effort I put in, was worth it.”

  “That’s fair.” All I wanted was for him to be happy. I was hoping he’d agree to see his family. I couldn’t imagine caring so much about them and then being dragged back to hell not knowing what they were up to.

  The bus pulled to a stop and Parker motioned for me to follow him off. We stepped off the bus and onto the sidewalk in a neighborhood that I had to admit made me uncomfortable. I knew Minneapolis had its bad neighborhoods, but this was almost like something out of a movie scene. Music blasted from a broken apartment window, and laundry was strung out to dry across back courtyards. The sidewalks here were cracked, weeds forcing their way through the ancient cement. This was a part of town that was avoided by construction crews, forgotten by the government, avoided by police.

  Parker led me over to a faded brick building. The door was a heavy metal, the windows yellowed, some of them cracked or broken—several with air-conditioning units hanging out of them, dripping water onto the dead grass. Even though I knew we were invisible to the people loitering on the sidewalks or leaning against the buildings, I still pulled my arms in tighter, uncomfortable in this strange part of town.

  I followed Parker inside the building. The lighting was hard to see through after coming from the sunny outside, and I found my eyes struggling to adjust. Cigarette smoke mixed with the smell of marijuana and something chemical filled the air. It was better than the ash and sulfur of hell, but not much better. I couldn’t imagine breathing this air in all day every day.

  Parker didn’t meet my eyes as we climbed the stairs, weaving our way around cigarette butts on the steps and a man slumped in the corner, tourniquet still on his lap. The railing of the stairs was coated in a sort of grease and dust, and I kept my hands to myself, even though I couldn’t touch it unless I really wanted to.

  “You lived here?” I asked as I followed Parker up the stairs.

  “Yeah,” he said quietly.

  “With children?”

  “Housing in the city is really expensive,” he said. “We didn’t have anything when my parents died, and we couldn’t afford to stay in our house. I found the least expensive place that could fit us. I never let my brothers walk out of the apartment alone.”

  “It still seems really dangerous.”

  “We didn’t spend much time outside. We kept to ourselves.”

  It wasn’t an attempt to argue with him; rather, I was trying still to wrap my head around the whole situation. I couldn’t imagine bringing up children in this sort of atmosphere, where gunshots put them to sleep and addicts overdosed on the steps.

  I followed Parker off of the steps and to the third floor of the building. The lights were still dim here, no windows in this hallway to provide light. We crossed about halfway down the corridor and stopped in front of an innocuous-looking door. Parker took a deep breath, hesitating, and I found his hand with mine.

  The apartment was small, even for me, who had been stuck in a cell hardly bigger than a bathtub. To my right was a tiny galley kitchen, the cabinets a faded fake wood that I could probably put my fist through if I tried. The flooring was a yellowish linoleum, turning to a gray carpet in the small corner living room furnished only by a couch, armchair, and coffee table. To our left was a narrow hallway with two bedrooms and a bathroom with the same fake wooden cabinets and yellow linoleum.

  “There’s no one here,” Parker said, returning from down the hallway.

  “Maybe Hope took the boys out for a walk or something,” I suggested.

  Parker shook his head. “No, she shouldn’t have done that. It was too dangerous.”

  “I mean, it is hot in here,” I said, fanning myself with my hands.

  “Yeah, I almost didn’t notice. It’s like the arctic compared to hell.”

  Parker sat down on the couch while I meandered around the apartment. We’d wait here for his siblings to get back, and I had no problem with that. I had nowhere I needed to be and I wanted to make sure that Parker got the chance to see his family.

  “Sorry it’s messy in here,” Parker said.

  I scoffed. “What are you talking about? You don’t even live here anymore.” Sure, there were a few children’s toys scattered on the living room floor, and some dishes piled in the sink, but nothing out of the ordinary. “It just looks like people live here.”

  “I wasn’t the best at keeping things clean anyway,” he admitted.

  “You were busy. Which room was yours?”

  “Last door down the hallway,” he said. “I shared it with my brothers. Hope has her own bedroom.”

  I crossed down the hallway with the thin, gray carpet into the room that had been Parker’s while he was alive. There was one bed, only a queen size, with an air mattress on the floor. The air mattress had no blankets on it; instead it was bare. The bed had a few pillows and blankets on it, and was unmade. This must have been where the boys were sleeping now that Parker was gone.

  The closet was open behind me, wide but not deep with sliding doors. A few adult-sized shirts were hanging up, some polos that I assumed were for Parker’s job. Most of the closet was taken up by children’s clothing.

  Parker came into the room as I was looking around. “Looks like they’ve still got your stuff here,” I said.

  “Probably haven’t had time to box everything up,” Parker said, reaching out to touch the navy blue polos hanging on the rack.

  “It’s almost like you’re still here,” I said, glancing around the room. The corner was full of kids’ toys, but the top of the dresser still had a cheap bottle of cologne and a framed family photo. The bathroom next to the bedroom still had four toothbrushes by the sink and men’s dollar store shampoo on the edge of the bathtub.

  Parker gave a wry smile. “Yeah, it kind of does.”

  I crossed over to the kitchen, narrowly avoiding a mouse trap tucked underneath the lower cabinets. Dishes were stacked in the sink, but the countertops were mostly bare. I saw a few dry pieces of ramen near the stove as well as an empty seasoning packet.

  Parker went and sat back down in the living room while I walked through the galley kitchen. With a little bit of focus I could open and close the cabinets and refrigerator, but my heart sank. They were nearly empty. The fridge had some milk and eggs, but there was almost nothing else perishable in the apartment. The cabinets had a little bit more food, some ramen and store-brand macaroni and cheese, white bread, and some canned soup and canned corn.

  I glanced over at Parker, still sitting on the couch. His eye
s were closed. He wasn’t sleeping, but he was resting, and I didn’t want to interrupt him. My eyes flickered to the barren cabinets. I was so torn I wanted to cry. Parker had come here for one last send off, one last visit before he was pulled back into hell forever, but things weren’t as picture-perfect here as he had imagined. He had left his sister money, but clearly, she hadn’t gotten any of it. The lack of food was proof enough of that, but so were the stack of envelopes on the counter reading “Final Warning” and “Past Due.” Parker’s family was in dire straits, and he had no idea.

  I leaned against the refrigerator, tilting my head back as I thought. He should know, I should tell him, but at the same time, did I want to be responsible for him returning to hell and having him know for all eternity that his family was starving and destitute? There was nothing we could do to help them now that we were dead.

  I looked over at Parker one more time. I couldn’t lie to him, even if the lie was meant to protect him. Swallowing the lump in my throat, I stepped out into his living room.

  “Parker?”

  He opened his eyes and looked at me. I took a deep breath. “I think your family is in trouble. Come here.”

  Worry filled his eyes as he joined me in the kitchen and I showed him the empty refrigerator and cabinets and the stack of unpaid bills.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “My life insurance policy was $150,000 and I had another twenty thousand in the bank. They should have been set for years. Hope shouldn’t even have to work. They were supposed to use that money to find a new place to live and to help pay for Hope’s college. Where did it all go?”

  I noticed a stack of papers sitting on the microwave, and stepped over to take a look. My heart sank even further. It was Parker’s face, accompanied by a phone number.

  “I don’t think they ever got the money,” I said, picking up one of the fliers. “Parker, they think you’re missing.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Parker took the flier from me. His mouth had dropped open, and his hands were shaking. “I don’t understand,” he said.