by Gabi Moore
I took it, provided that he promised that nobody would ever be able to find me. He laughed, and we shook on it. I’m pretty sure he gave me the opportunity that he was trying to build for himself. In retrospect, I owe him more than I paid for the place.
So far, his word had been solid. Nobody had ever come out to see me. To my knowledge, the government didn’t give enough of a shit to bother me. They had better things to do than come out here and hassle whoever the deed presumably belonged to now. It made me glad to know that there was still an older way of doing things. I was content to fall into administrative cracks. Never saw much of a reason to need endless amounts of paperwork just to set your claim to a place and be left alone.
Of course, the problems with the cabin weren’t negligible. The man I got it from had been a real DIY person, but he wasn’t exactly what you’d call a skilled craftsman. The joints in the cabin never fit correctly, and the insulation was a work in progress. A few key modifications in the beginning of the whole affair might have made all of the difference. Unfortunately, but those modifications never happened. Now that the cabin was built, and covered in snow, it was too late. There could be no fundamental structural changes without destroying, and rebuilding the whole thing.
I loved the place, but I could never get around to tearing it down. It would be nice to build it back up in my own image of functionality, but it felt wrong. There was an anachronistic feel to the cabin. The flaws in the structure seemed to echo the personality flaws of the builder. To remove that at this point would have been an insult to the designer's intent. At least that’s what I told myself whenever I got the feeling that I might like to finally dig out the root cellar. To this day, I still don’t know what that guy was thinking.
Who builds a cabin this far into the woods without a proper root cellar?
The other reason for pushing off the renovation was structural. The house had been built around a central stone hearth. The man had collected stones from the area, and built brick fireplace. Each stone's place had been reinforced with cob mortar. The bricks were unique in their shape. The idea of tearing that thing down seemed like an ethical violation I wasn’t prepared to claim. I guess that’s the problem you run into when you can’t quite distinguish craftsmanship from art.
When I got back into the cabin, I could smell the meat in the air. I smiled, like you do when you’re hungry and you’ve just hiked twelve miles through the snow like a pack animal.
I suppose without any pretenses at all, I was just thrilled to have fresh meat.
The woman hadn’t moved since I dropped her down. After checking, it was clear that she was still alive. The obvious conclusion was that she would make it through the night.
I settled down, letting myself finally relax after a period of hard exercise.
Living with yourself required a heightened level of personal maintenance. The main reason was because there wasn’t anyone else around to share the load. I had acclimated well enough to the amount of effort necessary to take care of myself. When another factor was thrown into the mix, it pushed my boundaries in an uncomfortable way.
I felt self-conscious and anxious for no reason. There was another human in my room, and they had nearly escaped death. Through my efforts, she was still alive. If I hadn't stopped, the animals would have had her for breakfast tomorrow morning.
I wouldn't have minded death by wolves. Being eaten by the wild seems like more of a compliment than anything else. The problem was that she didn't have a fair chance. There were obviously elements stacked up against her. At that point, I had to make a call. If you can help someone out, then you should. Death is not one to be cheated. There will always be another appointment with destiny. No reason to rush.
I rested my body on the ground and pulled some of the meat from the fire. My teeth sunk into the steak, exploding both flavor and vitality in my mouth.
The pleasure of taking a life, and integrating that body into my own had never been more satisfying. I nodded to myself, and indulged completely in each bite. After swallowing, I spoke to the deer, while staring into the fire.
“You would have been proud to know how your body was used.”
Life was always better when you were able to live by an internal set of values. Integrity wasn’t something to be taken lightly. The problem with living around other folks is primarily ethical. When people deviate from their internal sense of integrity, the consequences fan outward. Fucked up behavior ends up affecting people who were minding their own goddamn business.
“Like this,” I said to the fire.
I nodded over toward the woman sleeping on the floor, and tore another hunk of meat off from the steak.
Meticulously, and valuing each bite, I finished the remainder of the meal. When I was done, I poured myself a cup of tea and leaned back on the floor.
Her hair was beautiful, and the fire brought a glow of health to her skin that wasn’t there before.
I sat up and threw another log on the fire, then walked over to my cot and pulled my sleeping bag out from its stuff-sack.
“Better to be too hot than too cold…”
I wasn’t sure if that was actually true. Regardless, giving her something warm to sleep underneath felt like the right action. I didn’t exactly have a huge supply of blankets, but for a night or so, I could handle using the fire to keep me warm at night.
When she was set up, I stretched out my body out on the floor, and closed my eyes for a spell. The door to the cabin was barred shut, and I always slept with a knife at my side. If trouble came our way, I”d be ready for it, but I saw no reason to deny myself an honest night’s sleep.
Nothing to be gained by staying up and thinking through things too hard. Plenty of time for all kinds of uncomfortable conversations in the morning.
Chapter 3 - Aden
The night that followed wasn’t nearly as restful as I might have liked it to be.
The dreams I had weren’t coherent, as much as they were impactful. Strong feelings, and heavily symbolic images, as opposed to a straight narrative. It was hard to pull meaning from something like that, but I got the sense I was being hunted.
By what, I wasn’t sure.
All I knew was that the forest around me was running of of spaces to hide, and I was getting low on resources to fight back. Whatever nameless dread was pursuing me didn’t have a face, as much as it had a physical presence. The impressions were that they were tentacles that moved through the air like wraiths. The wolves were all leaving ahead of me, and there was nowhere else to run.
The way that the mind changes after a traumatic experience is interesting. There is this blip of confusion, which is followed by a fundamental need to get beyond the confusion. The confusion was still in place, which left me in a strange twilight world. Things weren’t quite right, and I didn't have the resources necessary to correct course.
That’s what it was like waking up from that dream in front of the embers from the fire.
The woman had rolled over in her sleep. I paused, allowing her arm to rest over my shoulder. She moaned slightly in her sleep. The sound pulled at my body and I forced myself to relax and breathe.
I paused for a moment and stared at her.
Her face was bruised, though I could easily tell that she was beautiful. I imagined that this was likely the lowest time in her life. A woman as beautiful as that couldn’t have dealt with something as terrifying as this before. The marks on her body were unique. She might otherwise have put a great deal more effort into her appearance. She might otherwise have been flawless.
I was left to process the contrast between picaresque beauty, and a body abandoned to die in the woods.
What did you do to deserve this? I thought.
Long ago, I might have thought her a helpless victim in this whole affair, but I was no longer naive. Conflict in this world always has two sides. Things are always deeper and more complex than we initially imagine them to be. Some of the biggest problems that I’ve come acro
ss in life have been based on assuming one thing to be true, and finding out too late that there was more to the story.
I frowned, and then set her hand down on the floor.
There was no reason for me to trust her. The only thing I owed her was the same thing that anyone in my position would have wanted to share. As a human, I owed her warmth, food, and the chance to continue forward with her life. Everything else would pass with time. If I kept my head, I would look back on this as no more than a brief interruption.
“Don’t get involved,” I warned myself, while putting another log on the fire.
Sparks flew into the air, and light flashed into the room as the fire grew back to its full capacity. The chill from the early morning had already crept through the walls of the cabin, and up from the floor. Once more, I thought about the structure of the house.
Fantasizing about things that I couldn't change was a way to distract myself. There wasn't anything else that I would have rather given my attention to. I always found it easier to focus on things that I had already concluded could not change. Remaining present was a taxing way to live. I was present as a matter of necessity for much of my life. This woman being here complicated things. Her presence was a terrifying vector of the unknown. She was an interloper, lying next to me on the floor of the cabin.
I busied my mind imagining theoretical building efficiencies.
Suppose the cabin been built into the side of a hill, as opposed to on the surface of the soil in a clearing. There might have been a more efficient distribution of cold air. The cold might have moved around the house in sunken berm landforms. Using thermal energy, I would have been able to heat the house using a fraction of the wood. The fraction of wood meant less labor, which meant more time to hunt.
I made a note to myself in the back of my mind. Install the root cellar, and then focus on thermal insulation.
These sorts of thoughts bounced around in my head for a while. Then, the fire had hypnotized me once more into a relaxed state. My body settled into the floor and my mind calmed itself once more.
As I fell asleep again, I felt her pull her body closer to mine, and lay her hand around my body. Tomorrow, there would be an opportunity to set right the course she was on. I could push her out onto the highway and be done with the whole encounter.
Looking at her, it was hard for me to believe how embittered I had gotten throughout the years. A man like myself was almost a lost cause. I had been alone for such a long time that I hoped this might bring about some new hope for my heart. It was possible that some new love might come about from this problem. You never could tell what would happen when you met a new person.
Of course, the opposite could be true as well.
I had been burned before, and I wasn’t excited to participate within a toxic relationship like that again. The whole reason I had left society behind was because I felt like my interactions with humans were nothing more than a constant barrage of attacks against my peace of mind.
It didn’t matter if you were close with another person or not. Relationships… all relationships were taxing. Every interaction with people had an immense cost of emotional labor. You couldn’t go anywhere, or talk with anyone without having them need something from you. Unfortunately, the worst part of that entire equation was that intimacy often increased the cost of that emotional labor.
Some of the most traumatic times in my life had been caused by some of the people whom I had been closest to. Being in the armed services pushed that threshold even higher. Not only had I been burned by people who had claimed to love me, but I had lost friends who had given their lives for a country that claimed to have their best interests at heart.
At night, when I was alone, there were times when I was consumed by terrible memories. I had been betrayed so many times, I had lost count. I lost track of which betrayals had been most cruel, and which one had been most damaging. I lost track of the good things that people had done in between — the things that had made everything else not hurt quite as much.
Now, in the face of another possibility of being hurt, all of those old fears were coming back full force. But there was no reason to speculate on the future. Even the brief entertainment into the future modification of the house wasn't relieving. There was no way to move forward that didn't involve dealing with her first.
I decided I would need to focus on how to immediately resolve her presence in my life.
A great war general once said that all conflict has a cost, and the best way to win a war is to find the method of achieving your objective that has the lowest cost. In my mind, it was a foregone conclusion that every relationship in my life would be a source of conflict. Sad to say, but the beauty of the rose colored glasses was not accessible to me any longer. The best way of moving forward that I could manage these days was a mode of efficiency, risk management, and presence of attention.
Live in the moment, that’s all we really have, is right now. The mantra was repeated for a time, and when my body actually started to believe it, I found rest once more.
Chapter 4 - Lorin
Dreams are so wonderfully private. Whether they are terrifying, or hopeful, they are entirely mine.
The most spectacular dreams I’ve ever had have been when I was closest to death. Incidentally, those dreams have also been the most erotic.
I can't account for why, but I suspect the latent eroticism is just me being hopeful. I see the hope as a defense mechanism operating at a sub-conscious level. My soul wants me not to give up in spite of the cruelty of the world around me.
Whatever expression of sexual cruelty I had gone through wasn't really important. There had been enough to where it wasn't a unique experience. There was the one-year sado-masochistic, submissive experiment with Ryan, and when the BDSM stint was over, I moved on to repeated sexual abuse by the hands of my captors.
My dreams offered a compassionate alternative to the hardcore fucking life had provided.
Every relationship which surrounded that time period pushed me to the edge of my comfort zone. I wasn't even sure that what I was experiencing wasn't normal. My mind had been warped to believe that sex and violence were natural partners.
It is good to know that there is still some part inside of me that values, and longs for a more sensitive connection.
I felt as though my dreams were taking a moment to remind me of a lighter perspective. Even though cruelty, and violence permeated the sexuality of this world, hope wasn't lost. There was still a degree of vulnerability, love and sensuality to be discovered in this life.
The challenge was allowing myself to find that love. To find love, without getting swallowed up by my own fear. Self-defense and scar tissue now guarded my most private places. The way my body had been responding recently, I wondered if I would ever get off on a soft touch again.
The following is an excerpt from a journal — written long after the incident. I hope that the journal entry will provide insight into the more untouched part of my psyche. Somewhere along the way, my sexuality changed into something else. I was curious as hell to know how I was going to move back into love again. It seemed like my experiences had changed me into a monster.
I was told that writing these sorts of reflections were more useful if they were written in the present. The idea is that reading through them once more would reinvigorate the memories associated.
I sure hope it works.
.:.
He’s kissing me now.
One finger slips between my legs. I feel him rubbing along the underside of my clit, while his tongue slips out to bring its heat and moisture to my skin.
He is so delicate. I wonder how such a thing could be possible.
Even in my dream state, I am aware of the brutality my body has endured. I bear the psychological scars of the men who have claimed me in recent memory.
In this dream, my hands are no longer bound behind my back. I am free to stick a finger into my mouth, and feel the wetness on my fingertips.
I can rub my breasts, and reveal them from beneath leopard print clothing.
In my dream, I’m not a whore to be used by men — bound, gagged, and broken on the floor of some private warehouse.
When I take out his cock, and feel the smoothness in my hands, and the heat between my lips, it is because I want to do so. I don’t have to worry about anything except going at my own pace.
I bring his head into my mouth, and work his shaft with steady movements of my hands. I can smile, and indulge in the heat, taste, and texture of his body.
When I stand up to kiss his lips once more, he returns my caress, and isn’t afraid to share a moment of love with me.
He peels my clothes back, until we are both naked.
When I turn around, I hold onto the wall with both hands. I feel his hands grabbing a hold of my hips, as he presses himself into me. His hand is on my clit, and his lips are on my shoulder. I feel him resting himself while I work my body into him. We take turns thrusting into one another.
There is an edge to the way he handles me, but the edge only works toward the passion of the sex. The violence doesn’t dominate the way we come together.
Our bodies go back and forth like this for some time.
My mouth opens wider, and I start to notice some the surreality of the dream. The way the wall feels uncomfortably real beneath my fingertips. The way his mouth bites down on my shoulder leaves a mark. I get the sudden sense that not everything will be as smooth and sensual as I initially thought.
Fighting between fear, and pleasure, my body increases its pace as I slam my hips into him.
Suddenly, I feel nails digging into the skin of my hips. Teeth move up from my shoulder to my neck, and fingers reach around to stroke my nipples.
I back off slowly, and turn around to face the man who has been fucking me.
He looks the same.
The compassionate eyes that I saw in the beginning are still there after our first contact. I know there is something deeper, and more feral to his sex drive.