by Tanya Chris
The kids weaseled themselves into the middle of our embrace, Abigail very proud of her job of officiating and Tom wanting to re-hash his musical performance. Daffy nickered from her stall, which might have been her way of saying congratulations but might also have meant “get me out of this hat.”
Ezekiel thanked the children for being our witnesses and making our day so special, then he shooed them out of the barn and turned to me. “It might be as I have a surprise for you as well. We shall stay at the far barn tonight, that we might have a proper wedding night.”
“Alone?” A night with Ezekiel, completely away from listening ears, wasn’t something I’d been sure I’d ever get, certainly not so soon.
“I spun a tale about some work as needed doing out that way and our being out too late to bother Daffy with having her on the road. Mother packed us a cold supper and we’re to meet them at church on the morrow.”
I wasted no time saddling Daffy up. I even left her hat on so she could feel like a proper part of our wedding processional. We left the wagon for the family and rode off into the sunset on horseback together like Prince Charming and his Even-More-Charming Also-Prince.
Over at the far barn, I discovered what Ezekiel had been up to while I’d been weaving straw and decorating a barn. He’d undraped his grandfather’s massive sleigh bed and made it up with snowy white linen. He’d uncovered and dusted a dining table too, on which he unpacked our picnic supper.
We ate in the deepening twilight with my phone between us, just like a twenty-first century couple. I’d taken a video of the kids singing our hymn, which Ezekiel had to watch three times over, and then I played him back the recording of him saying “Hi, Luther” the day I told him the truth about me and “I love you” the day he’d said that for the first time. Then of course I had to record myself saying it back to him, which he also played several times. He was getting better at running the controls. He could at least hold the phone without dropping it.
I eventually shut the thing down. I only had about ten percent battery left. I loved the video of the kids singing and the audio of him telling me he loved me, but we were going to have to save replaying them for our anniversaries. Besides, we had better things to do.
Ezekiel lit the candles he’d ringed the bed with and we stripped each other with a long-overdue slowness. I could undress him, eyes taking in every inch of flesh I uncovered, and he could undress me, doing the same. Our hands could roam slowly across each other’s bodies and stay there. We could push back the covers and lounge with our skin open to the air, no bunched up nightdresses, no furtive hands beneath layers of obstruction.
From the moment he’d told me about our honeymoon, I’d had an idea of what I wanted to do with it, and I’d snagged a tin of oil from the barn in hopes he’d be on board. I wanted to join our bodies the way we’d joined our hearts. It was OK if we didn’t. I knew it might be too much for him. I hadn’t even raised the topic before. In his parents’ house, under cover of darkness and secrecy, and given how new Ezekiel was to everything we did, penetration had seemed inadvisable. But tonight, perhaps …
“But how could we?” Ezekiel asked when I told him I’d like to consummate our marriage through intercourse.
“You’ve heard the word sodomy?”
He hissed in a breath. “Sodomites. That’s what we are.”
OK, the word sodomy was obviously way too judgey for where I wanted to end up. “We’re gay,” I reminded him. “And it’s fine. So never mind about the sodomites. I was just trying to figure out if you were familiar with the actual sex act being described there.”
His fearful nod told me he had some idea.
“Right, so it’s not for everyone, and we don’t have to do it. I’m fine if we don’t. But it’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds. Men have a special gland up there that feels really good when it’s rubbed.”
“So we were made to have intercourse in that fashion?”
Well, shit. I’d never exactly thought of it that way, but sure. Maybe God had a plan. “I guess we are,” I said. “We could try it, see what you think.”
“You’ve done this with men before?” The way he said it, flat and a little sad, told me that my sexual experience wasn’t exactly a positive in his eyes. Ezekiel would only ever be mine. I wished I could give that back to him.
“I’ve kissed some men, maybe some other things you don’t want details about, but I’ve never done this.” I was stretching a little. I’d had anal sex, but I’d never been fucked by the man I loved on my wedding night. “I think you’ll like being inside me, Ezekiel. It’ll feel like nothing you’ve ever imagined.”
“I’ll go inside you?”
“We can try it both ways. That’s one of the great things about being gay. Everything goes both ways. Anything I can make you feel, you can make me feel back. But for tonight, for our first time, I’d like it if you’d make love to me, make me yours.”
I had less experience bottoming than topping, so it would be more new for me that way, and I didn’t want him to experience even minor discomfort. I wanted him to experience nothing but mind-blowing ecstasy, the kind of pleasure that would be a revelation, an experience that would be worth all the difficulties we’d have to face for the rest of our lives.
And all of that expectation was maybe putting too much pressure on me because suddenly it was like I’d forgotten how to do this sex thing. We faced each other from opposite sides of the overlarge bed, the only point of contact between us my hand on his hip and his on my shoulder, strangely awkward, like we were naked together for the first time, which we kind of were.
I wiggled closer until our chests touched. There was no awkwardness that couldn’t be fixed with touch and, sure enough, the moment our lips met, the strangeness was gone and we were plastered against each other, legs threaded through legs in a shifting tangle, hands drifting and stroking, lips running everywhere.
I itched to suck the flesh of his neck between my lips, to leave marks no one could mistake, but I contented myself with nibbling at his ears and returning, time after time, to the mouth that said it loved me.
When we’d first started messing around, Ezekiel had been a mostly passive partner, uncertain and shy, but he’d lost the hesitancy over our months together and his hands now strayed as far as mine, farther even when he slipped his fingers between my ass cheeks and ran them down my crack to brush against my hole.
“Tell me how,” he demanded, already waking sensation in me with just the brush of his fingertips and the warmth of his voice.
I called a timeout to dig out the bottle of oil I’d smuggled over. “Women get kind of slimy on their own,” I told him and he shuddered like he’d rather not think about that. I maybe hadn’t made it sound as erotic as porn did. “So we need lubrication when we do this.” I coated his fingers in the oil and directed them back to my hole.
“Slow and easy,” I told him, but I needn’t have worried. Ezekiel never treated me with anything other than loving care. He worked a single finger into me and gave a gasp.
“Hot?” I asked.
“Smooth,” he said. “I did not expect it so.”
“Come this way.” I directed his finger towards my prostate and then, when he found it, I was the one to gasp.
“Cannot I try as well?” he asked, and I laughed. Sure, what the hell. We’d feel each other up. I coated my fingers in oil and worked him as gently as he worked me, until we were writhing on each other’s fingers, both our prostates awakened to sensitivity. We each had a hand on the other’s cock and the oil was helping there too so that we were slipping and sliding against each other as we stroked in and out and over each other. The barn was full of sighs and moans, of slick squelching noises and love.
“We could just finish like this,” I suggested, because I wasn’t more than a few strokes away from doing exactly that, but Ezekiel disentangled himself from me.
“I want to do what you said. I want to be inside you.”
OK, ye
ah. I wanted that too. I added some oil to his cock, making him squirm and giggle.
“You’ll have me off,” he complained. He was so adorable, maybe the most adorable thing ever. I couldn’t believe he was mine. I rolled onto my back and pulled him on top of me. The logistics might be easier doggy style, but we were going to do this face-to-face tonight. We had the rest of our lives to get down and dirty.
I guided him into me, pushing out so that his entrance was smooth and unobstructed.
“Luther?”
“How does it feel?”
“Like your hand, but hotter and more.” He shifted back towards his heels so that his cock pulled nearly free and then pressed back into me again. “Like heaven, mayhaps, though it be sacrilege to say so.”
“Not sacrilege. Sanctified. Our union has been blessed.”
“Blessed,” he agreed, but I could tell he wasn’t following me anymore. His expression said enough. It was concentrated, rough, a disjointed conglomeration of features he could no longer control. His mouth hung open and his eyes screwed shut and his brows were high in a kind of surprise below a forehead wrinkled with intensity. If I didn’t know how he was feeling, I might have feared he was in pain, except I was right there with him, as enraptured, as focused, as ecstatic.
“Zeke.” His name was all I could manage. The way his cock stroked over my prostate—his thrusts longer and harder as his confidence grew—sucked all the breath from my lungs. He leveraged my legs up to get deeper, an instinctual move as old as time. His back was arched, his head thrown back. He was wild and real, a feral man in the throes of pleasure, claiming his own. I couldn’t look away from him.
“That’s it,” I told him. “Give me everything.” And his thrusts grew even faster and deeper, the angle hitting me exactly right. I brought my hand, still slippery with oil, to my own cock. I didn’t need much stimulation, just the slide of flesh against flesh, and I was coming. Semen spurted across my abdomen in hot jets that went as high as my chin.
Ezekiel laughed a laugh that rang of freedom and joy and leaned down to swipe his tongue across my chin, then, as if the taste of my come was all he’d needed to reach his own climax, he came himself—loud and long.
I’d never had bareback sex before, and I’d briefly worried earlier about being the unexpectedly early introduction of some STD into America, but I’d been tested recently enough and I knew Ezekiel was as clean as the Virgin Mary and twice as cute, so his was the first dick that ever unloaded directly into my ass. I could feel it—the extra warmth, the lubrication.
I let my legs droop. They’d gotten cranked up rather high there, higher than I’d known they went, and they were happy to settle down against the mattress. Ezekiel dropped onto my straightened body with a grunt, still buried inside me and still breathing like he’d been running sprints. I traced patterns against his back as I felt his heartbeat settle against my chest.
“What did you think?” I asked him. “Would you want to do that again?”
“Until we try the other way, how shall I know which I like best?”
“You looking to switch places right this minute?”
“Soon.” He wiggled his hips until his dick popped free. “We are all of a mess.”
“Yeah, give me a second and I’ll throw some clothes on and go out to the pump for some water.”
“It’s our mess,” he argued. He squelched tighter against me as if determined to spread the mess as wide as he could.
I knew I should get up, but what was the hurry? The damage had been done.
~~~
Morning came too soon. We’d managed to clean ourselves up the night before, only to do it all over again with positions reversed. Ezekiel had refused to declare a preference for topping or bottoming, but he’d been enraptured by the terminology. I’d filled his head with a lot of words that weren’t suitable for polite company, but they were all innocence to him. The wedding had tipped the scales. Whatever vestiges of shame he’d held on to over being gay had been swept away by a few words and a promise.
We dressed reluctantly, almost as slowly as we’d undressed the night before, because I hated each layer that separated him from me. I couldn’t help but be an obstruction to his efforts, though I knew we had church to get to.
“Best you go over there to dress,” he said with a shove when I’d abandoned buttoning up my own doublet to unbutton his once again. I let him move me a few feet away and even turned my back to him, determined to be good. I finished my buttons and prowled the barn as he finished his. The crunch of glass beneath my feet reminded me of how I’d arrived in this place and time. Now, by daylight, I could better see the mirror I’d busted through. It leaned against Ezekiel’s grandmother’s armoire, still largely intact except for that section missing in the lower right corner.
As I examined the not-Luther-sized hole, I caught a flicker of movement in the opposite corner. I turned to acknowledge Ezekiel, but he wasn’t behind me. No one was behind me. I turned back to the mirror and there she was: a woman, not one I knew, dressed in jeans and a bright blue shirt beneath an unzipped parka. She had her hands up in the classic mirror-maze pose and dark hair topped by one of those pink pussy hats. She looked alien, like something I could remember seeing once upon a dream.
“Hey.” I waved but she didn’t notice me. She bumbled her way through an opening and out of view.
I gestured Ezekiel over, not taking my eyes from the mirror, afraid it would blink out if I looked away from it. “It’s my home. It’s right through there. That’s where I came from.”
“I see only the reflection of the barn, Luther.”
“Wait.” I clasped his hand tighter as the seconds built and then there— “See him?” It was a guy in track pants and a t-shirt, no coat. He had a goatee and a smirk and was obviously too cool to be cold. I did the math in my head. Two and a half months had gone by since I’d stepped through the mirror. If time tracked the same on both sides, it was now mid-January back in the future. I wondered where the maze was, to what town fair or event it had been towed.
The man walked out of frame and I turned to Ezekiel. “You saw him, right?”
Ezekiel shook his head.
“Come on, you must have. Look, there’s another one.”
“Do you think as you could go back?” he asked me.
“That’s what it seems like. If I push through there, I’ll end up …” End up either smashing into the armoire or back where I belonged.
Two and a half months ago, I’d have jumped through there without a second thought. But now? Now, I had Ezekiel. Did the fact that he couldn’t see the other side of the mirror mean he couldn’t go through it? Would he even want to? I knew which side of the time divide I’d rather live on, but his home was here.
“Shall you go?” Ezekiel asked, his hand gripping mine harder like he’d hold me back if I tried, but before I could frame an answer I didn’t have, Daffy whinnied. We’d left her in a stall near the barn door where she’d been contentedly munching her morning oats a moment ago, but she was riled now.
“Someone’s here,” Ezekiel said.
We surveyed each other and the room. We were both fully dressed, but there was an unmade bed and a table set for two. Ezekiel moved towards the front of the barn as I pulled the drop cloth over our wedding bed. When he threw back the door, morning sun flooded in so bright it took a moment to see the figures standing on the other side.
Corwin was there. Corwin, four deputies, two shotguns.
“Luther.” Ezekiel backed away from the door.
“Luther Johnson,” Corwin intoned in his best official asshole voice, “you’ve been charged with witchcraft.”
Of course.
As he read off the formal complaint against me—and it shouldn’t have mattered which of his puppets he’d gotten to call me out, but I was relieved it wasn’t Tituba—Ezekiel came to my side.
“The mirror, Luther. Go through the mirror.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t do it. For b
etter or worse, we’d said. This was pretty fucking worse, but I didn’t know if Ezekiel could come with me and I wouldn’t leave him behind.
“Please, Luther,” he begged as Corwin’s goons advanced on us. “Please go.” He tried to drag me towards the mirror, but without my cooperation, he couldn’t get me there fast enough to evade the approaching men. I used my last moments of freedom to slip the phone from my pocket into his and then my husband’s hands were pulled from me and replaced by the hands of my would-be executioners.
I’d been arrested for witchcraft.
Chapter 20
Being arrested in Salem in 1692 was nothing like how they showed it going down on TV. There were no fingerprints or mug shots, no cavity search. They didn’t even give me a pat down. I could have kept the phone.
After being hauled into Salem in the back of an open wagon—and there were no handcuffs either, leaving me to consider, as we drove, how doubtful it was that any of these wannabe tough guys could have caught me if I’d run—I was manhandled into a jail cell with three other men. Salem was low on jail cells—they hadn’t built their jail with a witch hunt in mind—but the men weren’t packed in as tight as the women because men got accused a lot less often. No surprise there. This witch hunt was all about who had power and who didn’t.
The door had barely clanged shut before one of my cellmates started bitching about sharing a cell with a negro, although the word he used was a lot less polite than that. There was some consultation between Corwin and the jailer and then some rearranging and I was eventually shown to my own cell right next to Tituba’s. I didn’t know if she got her own cell because of her skin color or because she was Corwin’s favorite stooge, but either way, there we were next to each other in the colored section of the jail, each with our own cell. Racism for the win.