Mistress of the Runes

by Andrews

  “How I’m treated. I’m not a one-night stand. I’m a full-time partner: at work, at play, on the ranch, in your head, in your bed. That kind of partner. And when you’re ready for that, I’m ready for the ranch.”

  She stood up, put ten dollars on the table, kissed me on the cheek, and left me to contemplate partnerships. Liz’s style of negotiating seemed to consist of a list of demands delivered upon exit.

  *

  I left for the office, put in a long day to keep from thinking about what Liz had said, then drove back out to the construction site to check their progress, as I did every night. Liz surprised me, pulling up a few minutes after I arrived bearing sandwiches.

  I walked toward her vehicle, grateful she was here. But how long would she stay with me?

  As she got out of the car I began in the middle of the conversation I was having with myself. “Am I driving you crazy?” I blurted out.

  “Yes.”

  “So it would be better for you—”

  “If you would just come over to my house and get in my bed, damn it!”

  She pushed me back against my car, and I glanced around to make sure all the workers were safely out of sight.

  “Don’t look around for cover. I know you want me. You’re the biggest damned chicken I’ve ever met in my life, Brice Chandler. You’re an emotional coward. And I have really had about enough!”

  Why the hell did I think I needed to bring up the subject in order to let her beat me to death with it? Because what you’re doing to her isn’t fair, I thought.

  Liz pushed her pelvis up against mine as if welding herself to me and kissed me with a mouth hotter than a branding iron.

  “If you took me by force in our last lifetime, then it seems to me that you owe me. And it’s time you paid up.”

  “All kidding aside, if we both truly believe I took you by force, then why do you want me now? Why aren’t you tracking me down with a butcher knife for a little quick karma…cutting my balls off, figuratively speaking?”

  “That’s one kind of lesson. Maybe I’m here to help you with a less painful one—how to have a mutual relationship with a woman in which power is shared.” She smiled, watching the look on my face. “I think that scares you more than a woman with a hatchet.”

  “Do you have to attack me in the middle of a field?” I pulled away. “So what if we do this thing…”

  “Make love,” she corrected me.

  “…and I’m insane about you and then you find out that the reason my relationships last four years is me…I’m the problem. And then you leave me.”

  “You’re already insane about me, and we already know you’re the problem.” She kissed me teasingly. “And I’m a stayer. It’s hard for me to even take the trash out because I don’t want to part with it. Lighten up, you’re a woman in love, and soon you’re going to realize that, and won’t that be fun.”

  She slapped one of the sandwiches into my hand. “Chicken,” she said in a tone that sounded more accusatory than descriptive and sashayed over to her car, got in, started the engine, and left.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I was beginning to appreciate men on the ranch construction site more than I did men in the office. The men on the construction site were crude, rough, and crazy, but whatever they were, they were without pretense. At the office all that crudeness, roughness, and craziness was concealed, until just occasionally it would pop up like a beach ball held too long underwater. When someone on the work site did something crazy, he acknowledged it. When someone at the office did something crazy, he denied it. In fact, even the sane among us now seemed to accept acts of craziness.

  “We just bought a guitar factory,” Hugh said, plopping down on my couch.

  “We who?”

  “We the A-Media conglomerate led by Carlton Daniels.”

  “Why?” I faced him, letting the word string out into a long and disgusted question mark.

  “He wants to be in the guitar-manufacturing business. Guitars are his passion. In fact, this particular plant made a very expensive guitar he’s been trying to get his hands on, and they keep it in their offices housed in a glass case like a museum piece. So in order to get it, he bought the company. Thought I’d let you know because now, in addition to promoting talent, rumor has it you’ll be marketing guitars.”

  “How did the board let this happen?” I asked, exasperated.

  “He convinced them it positioned the company as cutting edge—and he got them each a pair of Super Bowl tickets and an invitation to the players’ party. He’s not as dumb as I originally thought.”

  *

  How could I support Carlton Daniels? I didn’t share any of Carlton’s beliefs; in fact, I wasn’t sure he had any beliefs, other than if he could hang on for two years, he’d be rich. If left unchecked he would, I predicted, run the entire corporation into a wall, and the board of directors would be left with no choice but to sell off the parts at salvage. But right now the board had taken leave of its senses. They were having a collective midlife crisis—breathing the virile exhaust from their young CEO.

  Carlton’s corporate arrival had put a new set of rules into play: results were not as important as shared ideology, the litmus test a leader falls back on when he doesn’t understand his business well enough to defend his own views. Once understanding the business falls by the wayside and shared ideology becomes the sole criterion, completely incompetent executives readily rise to the top and stay afloat, simply by assuring their leader that he’s as infallible as the pope. In common vernacular, it’s called sucking up.

  “Right now we want to market them as the hottest guitars on record,” Mahiserat, a dark-haired, dark-skinned man, ordered. He seemed to be Carlton’s corporate swami, risen to power via the roommate resume, having shared a dorm room with Carlton—or so it was rumored by jealous executives whose college roommates had proved far less useful. Beyond that, none of us knew Mahiserat’s title or role in the company, a fact that seemed irrelevant to Carlton who, I assumed wickedly, traveled with Mahiserat only because his name sounded like an Italian sports car.

  “And we’re footing the bill to retool the factory to make guitars, but only for left-handed musicians. Is that what you’re saying?” I ventured.

  Mahiserat made eye contact with Carlton. “Correct. To cut costs. No more right-handed ones,” he said, doodling on a pad with his left hand and making no fiscal sense.

  “How many left-handed guitar players are there in the world willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a guitar?” I asked.

  Then I made eye contact with Jack and Hugh across the table, signaling them to jump in and utter a thought or ask a question, but I was in this fight alone and weary. The battles were too numerous of late, the foe not even worthy of killing; there was nothing to be gained from thrust and parry with a sparrow.

  “I think we’ve got it,” Carlton said in an upbeat tone and beamed at Mahiserat, which I knew was corporate code for she doesn’t get it.

  “Good,” Mahiserat said and beamed back at Carlton, who beamed at Mahiserat. “We’ll see you all in Boston, then, at the annual meeting.”

  “So, how did you think it went?” Hugh asked after Carlton was safely out of earshot.

  “We are being jerked off by a prepubescent jerk.”

  “I agree. It went well,” he said, with upbeat sarcasm.

  *

  Tuesday, Liz had to leave town for two days on a shoot for the station—original local programming to air during sweeps week. I phoned to tell her that by the time she got back I would be on my way to Boston, but I couldn’t reach her and had to leave the message on her cell phone.

  Wednesday afternoon my plane touched down in Boston, along with a hollow gnawing in the pit of my stomach, eating away at my soul, as I tried to ignore the stupidity of this constant, senseless drill of traveling thousands of miles to hear new leaders’ visionless visions, running up hundreds of thousands of dollars in meeting expenses, then coming home to cut
more line items in the budget to make up for these unnecessary expenditures.

  The Boston event was surreal: a corporate nature film of rival animals gathering for the first time at a coveted watering hole to clap eyes on Carlton, the virulent young stallion who would lead the herd. The older stallions watched from afar, not wanting to confront him, jealous of the host of giddy fillies sidling up to him. Older mares watched him out of the corner of their eyes, while wolves patrolled the outskirts waiting for opportunities that might be afforded them without much effort. There was circling and snarling, and mating late at night, under cover of darkness, and then there was me—the Boss Mare, the one they counted on to lower her head, extend her neck, lock eyes with this young, mannerless stud, and drive him back outside the circle of influence, letting him back in only if he exhibited good behavior.

  But I had temporarily and inexplicably lost the desire to do battle with young stallions. I watched the entire event as if I were watching a film shot through a heavy gauze filter—detached, emotionless, knowing suddenly, but assuredly, only one thing: I wanted more out of life than to be part of this herd. I wanted to go home to my ranch and to Liz.

  I packed up and left the conference early, aware my leaving would not go unnoticed and not caring. Like a migrating bird that gives no real thought to its flight path but navigates solely on instinctual DNA, I drove without thinking, straight from the airport to Liz’s house, and banged on her door.

  When she opened it, she looked gorgeous in white drawstring pants and a loose shirt. I was tired, but I still knew gorgeous when I saw it. I looked into her deep blue eyes and said softly, “I’m only good for four years.”

  Liz pulled me into her hallway and began undressing me as she led me upstairs.

  Between kisses I murmured, “It’s not worth it, I’m warning you. It’s like getting a degree in something you’ll never use. It’ll ruin our friendship.”

  “I’m taking you up on your offer. Two days with you. Just two days—and if you’re still uncertain that we’re soul mates after that, then we’ll call it off.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She stopped abruptly and pulled back, apparently fed up with my vacillating, and buttoned my shirt up in a businesslike manner. “You don’t think I can give you up? Go!”

  And I knew she meant it.

  “Damn!” The pain in my groin outweighed any shred of common sense I had left. I grabbed my recently rebuttoned shirt and, in an external exhibition of my internal rending, ripped it off my own body, the buttons flying. Then I grabbed this insanely, infuriatingly beautiful woman and nearly lifted her up the final steps to the bedroom where the pent-up sexual desire of months and months erupted.

  I was so charged up I was almost unable to breathe as we both fell onto the bed, unable to tear one another’s clothes off fast enough. Every muscle in my body, every ounce of strength in me was alive with wanting her.

  I closed my eyes and slid my hands around her bare breasts and let out an involuntary sigh, caressing every inch of her skin, firm and supple and exciting, the velvet softness igniting an ancient longing locked in my soul—a wanting that was endless, fathomless, beyond all sense and senses. Her neck was bathed in that perfume, that scent that had wafted over me the first night I’d met her and had tantalized me again and again whenever the wind shifted in the night air at the barn or she sat next to me in the car. It was a scent reminiscent of fragrant spring flowers mingled with the sweat of nighttime passion, a scent that was ever changing as her body writhed in excitement and my mouth trailed down her belly and into the small golden canyon between her thighs. My lips covered that hallowed space, hot from my wanting her, and wet heat erupted and flowed over me and into me, my own sacred stream.

  A tingling began at the base of my neck and rippled down my back like a mare’s soft, warm breath and bound me to this lover I had known for eons—and whose comfort I had sought in every time and place, her soul my soul, her heart my heart—and once more I was enfolded in her love. I wanted to be in her and with her and around her and on her forever…four years forgotten.

  Two days went by without our ever going outside or taking a call. Liz Chase made love to me as no one ever had, and now no one else could ever touch me. She erased every sexual experience from my past as mere dalliance and became the erotic fixation for all my fantasies, her senses emblazoned on my heart, my soul, and every portion of my anatomy that might possibly be aroused. She wasted no time talking, since we’d been talking for months. Instead, she made love to me so many times in so many ways that I was virtually senseless. I finally understood that fucking someone’s brains out was an actual medical condition. I was ruined. Liz Chase had me, and she seemed no worse for wear.

  “So now,” she said, kissing me, “do you want to forget all this or are we having a relationship?”

  “We’re definitely having a relationship—an exclusive, soul-mate kind of forever-after relationship,” I breathed as she entered me again, pleased with how my body had become her own private river.

  *

  My office bordered on insanity. I carried the memories of lovemaking with Liz to the office with me like a soldier carries a keepsake off to war.

  But I relegated even Liz to the back of my mind as I battled my way through the bullshit. Projects were on hold pending budgeting, rebudgeting, budget cuts, and zero-based budgets. Moles in corporate were feeding back to me that Carlton was funding a large launch of his guitar company and a national rock concert tour on the backs of the core business units’ P&L.

  Our employees were showing signs of fatigue and stress, but another more insidious undercurrent had surfaced—an internal, unspoken us and them. The “us” contingent consisted of those people who catered to Carlton’s whims, told him his plans were on target, and held secret meetings to show him their ideas, circumventing normal channels and unwary bosses. They were like the hyenas in The Lion King, emboldened by the possibility that an overthrow was in the making and people who had yanked them up or dressed them down would now be ousted.

  It wasn’t long after that Mahiserat, visiting Dallas on his way to New York, invited me to lunch. He kissed me hello on the cheek, settled in with his brisket, and told me quickly what a wonderful job Carlton thought I was doing for the company, but that my services were no longer needed. My mind flashed on some of the great men I’d worked for, and how this man who wanted me gone was definitely not one of them.

  “And I’m being asked to go because I’m doing such a wonderful job?” I asked pointedly.

  “It is an irony, is it not?” He slowly chewed the rich, fatty pile of beef. “I know this is fresh news to you—what has happened. Carlton wants to see a new look, a new feel, a new life, that is all. The young, you know, they are not so serious, so investigative, so driven. It is a new way to look at the world, I guess.”

  “So my fatal flaw was bringing too large a flashlight to the frat party?”

  “Aptly put.” He daubed his face delicately with his napkin, checked his watch, and pushed back his chair to leave. “I will see you in meetings later today, and we will keep this between us until all is finalized on paper.”

  And just like that I was off my horse.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I dialed Liz as I drove toward the office, telling her what had just happened. I was in shock and angry.

  “Come home to me,” Liz said. “It’s all right.” She seemed to find a calm spot inside her. “I guess I knew deep down this was coming.”

  “How did you know?” I asked, dazed.

  “When you told me that you’d put your feet in the Yakima River that night after I left you at the restaurant, I thought, she’s washing all those people away.”

  I was depressed, interspersed with panic over the speed with which it had happened, not allowing me time to plan my transition. Much like the Cro-Magnon woman in Clan of the Cave Bear, I was stripped of all trappings related to the tribe, and now they would look right through me, re
fusing to recognize my existence. To them I was dead.

  “Of all times to be with you,” I moaned into the phone. “This is no way for our relationship to begin.”

  “Our relationship began over a year ago. You just weren’t aware of it. And it’s perfect timing. Now you’ll know I didn’t go after you for power or money. I just fell for you.”

  I hung up only when I pulled into the driveway and fell into her arms. We curled up on the couch and she kissed my neck.

  “What kind of cosmic timing is this!” I wailed. “I should be having the most wonderful, sexy relationship and I’m unemployed!”

  Liz diverted my attention to the small package on her hall table along with the rest of the mail. Surprisingly, it was addressed to me—surprising because I didn’t live here and no one else knew I was even seeing Liz. I unwrapped the package with near-lifeless hands. Inside lay a single small oblong stone.

  “How did someone know to send this package to your address?”

  “Don’t know. It’s a runestone, shaped like an arrow pointed toward the heavens,” Liz said and went to her computer to search for the symbol. “Teiwaz, the Viking Rune of the Warrior. Maybe it’s a message from your horse,” Liz said, trying to lighten the mood.

  I dug around in the package trying to locate a note or name but found nothing. The package had been mailed from an address in San Francisco on Telegraph Hill, but without an occupant’s name.

  “Maybe it’s from that docent at the museum. I left her my card.”

  “Not unless she’s moved to San Francisco,” Liz quipped.

  “Wherever she is, I’d like for her to find the painting.” I tossed the package back onto the table, too depressed to be interested in it.

  *

  That night, Liz wrapped around me, cradling me in her arms, and I fell asleep and dreamed I was on a mountaintop with my horse.