by Swan Adamson
Something told me to leave him alone with whatever he was wrestling with. Men don’t like it when you pry into their emotions. I let him be, but I felt lost and out of sync with him—not exactly the kind of feeling a woman wants on her honeymoon.
It’s always weird looking at yourself in minimart restroom mirrors. This one wasn’t glass but a kind of thin metal sheet bolted to the wall. It was like looking into aluminum wrap. The surface had been scratched and gouged by every kind of sharp object imaginable. It reminded me of the windows in New York subway cars, their surfaces mauled by frantic, destructive male energy.
With a mirror like that, applying fresh black lipstick was not easy.
It was just as well that I couldn’t clearly see my reflection. I was starting to look and feel car-tired. My hair was a windblown mess. My skin was coated with dust. My face felt dried out. My breath smelled of meat and stale vomit. Worst of all, my wedding high was pulsing away as fast as blood from a slashed artery.
All I wanted now was to get to that luxurious honeymoon suite, brush my teeth, wash my hair, and take a long seductive bubble bath with my new husband. I wanted privacy, just the two of us. Away from the dads, we could play bedroom games all night long.
Once I’d coaxed four orgasms out of Tremaynne. Maybe tonight I could claim five.
I poured a stream of fiery, heart-shaped red hots into my mouth.
I needed courage to confront the toilet. I hate toilets in gas stations and truck stops. This one was metal, without even a seat. The floor around it was sopping wet. A toilet like that brings out the desperation in a girl. There was no toilet paper. It smelled. Moving closer I could see a big Tootsie Roll of a turd floating in the bowl. Tremaynne’s? It didn’t smell like his shit.
No way I was going to wade in to that vile stall, or touch anything with my bare hands.
The urinal looked a little cleaner. It was one of those low ones designed for kids and the handicapped. I gingerly pulled my pants down, squatted, and peed into it. There was only cold water to wash my hands. No soap. No paper towels, no cloth towel on a roller, no air-dry machine. An altogether icky place.
When I came out, I saw Tremaynne standing in the corner, half hidden by the display of road maps. His back was to me. It took me a moment to register that it was a phone alcove, and he was on the phone.
He hung up, turned around, and saw me.
His dark eyes flickered but gave nothing away.
Maybe it was the red hots taking effect. Or maybe I was so insanely jealous I couldn’t admit it to myself. My face was suddenly burning.
I tried to control my voice. “Who were you talking to?”
He flipped the hair out of his eyes. “Nobody. A friend.” He put a hand on my back and tried to steer me away.
“What friend?”
“Just a friend.”
“Who?”
“For Christ’s sake,” Tremaynne snapped, “do I have to get your permission every time I make a fucking phone call?”
And that was, like, exactly my fear, that it was a fucking phone call. That my day-old husband was calling someone he used to fuck and probably wanted to fuck again. “Why can’t you tell me who it was?” I pleaded.
“Because it’s none of your business,” he snapped.
A sharp sudden half-crazy fear took hold of me. “Is it someone from that group?” I blurted out.
“Earth Freedom?” The moment I said it, heard my fear materialize into words, I realized I’d made a major mistake.
He jerked his hand from my back and brushed past me. His face was tight, angry. I wanted to cry and run after him, but just then the dads came in to pay for the gas.
“What’s the matter?” Daddy asked.
“Nothing.”
Whitman looked at Tremaynne’s retreating figure and then at me. “Did you have another fight?”
“We didn’t have a fight.”
“Yes, you did,” Whitman insisted. “I know body language when I see it.”
I turned away.
“Was it about food?” Whitman wanted to know. “I hate to tell you this, kid, but you married a real food fascist.”
Daddy moved closer. He put a finger under my chin and lifted my head so I had to look at him. “Are you all right?”
I nodded morosely.
“This is your honeymoon,” Daddy said. As if I needed reminding. “You’re supposed to be having a good time.”
“It’ll be okay once we get there.”
I said the words, but I was beginning to wonder.
We didn’t say a word for the next hundred miles. Whitman drove with his left hand and held Daddy’s hand with his right. I resented their calm happiness.
My new husband wouldn’t touch me. He sat scrunched over to one side, staring out the window like a sullen boy.
I was miserable. Why wouldn’t he tell me who he was talking to in the gas station or out in Hell’s Canyon? It must have been a woman. Yes, I was sure of it. He wasn’t thinking about me, his wife, he was thinking about her.
My mind flipped through various seduction scenarios. He’d liked that secret hand job in the car. What could I do next to restore his interest? I had to get him back. It was our honeymoon. We were supposed to be cementing our future. Like Daddy said, this was supposed to be fun.
Whitman turned off on a side road, a two-laner, and we plunged into a thick pine forest. The road curved up to a high, rocky plateau and then down past some small, still lakes that sucked up the hot blaze of the afternoon sky.
Whitman turned down a gravel road. We bounced across an open field and stopped beside a deserted lake.
“Are we there?” I didn’t see any sign of a resort.
“Almost. I thought we could have a quick swim here.”
“Isn’t there a heated pool at the resort?”
“Yes, but you have to wear a suit. My source said this was the best lake for FKK.”
“What’s that?”
“Freie Körper Kultur. Free Body Culture. German for skinny-dipping.”
The dads were already out of the SUV. Whitman pulled out a stack of striped towels. The same towels we used to take to Jones Beach in New York. I flashed on that strip of white burning-hot sand with wall-to-wall bodies, all of them greased and baking in the sun like sausages on a griddle. I was twelve when the dads first took me there. I remembered the hungry glances of the dark-eyed, dark-haired New York men, the way they eye-stripped me wherever I went, and made little noises that only I was meant to hear.
“Coming?” Daddy asked.
“I don’t want to swim in a lake,” I groaned. “There might be fish in it.” Or weeds, or slime, or something that brushed against my legs underwater.
Tremaynne shot me a disgusted glance—like, what a wuss—and got out. He silently trudged after the dads.
“I don’t want to unpack my suit,” I called out forlornly.
“Don’t need one,” Daddy called back.
Yeah, right. Like I was really going to strip in front of the dads and Tremaynne, out in the open. I was no longer the girl who danced, tits flying, at Terry’s Topless. I was no longer a lingerie model. I’d put on weight. I’d become self-conscious about my body. Tremaynne, who never touched refined sugar or junk food, probably thought I was turning into a fat slob.
They were moving farther and farther away, crossing the field and heading towards the stand of enormous pine trees that surrounded the lake.
“Is the water, like, cold?” I called.
They didn’t hear me. The three of them disappeared down a slope.
I sat there for a couple of minutes, nervously nibbling on my peanut-butter cups. The silence hummed in my ears. Then in the distance I heard a faint cry of delight. It couldn’t be Tremaynne? He couldn’t be having a good time with the dads, without me.
I kept a sharp eye out for snakes as I hurried toward the pine trees and the sounds of whooping and splashing. A hot, sun-baked heaviness rose from the earth. The air was breathlessly dry and
smelled like the incense Carolee used to burn at Christmas.
The pine trees reared up in a stiff barricade. I’d never seen trees so big. The ground beneath them was thick with fallen cones and needles.
“Yee-ha!” I heard Whitman yell. And the sound of splashing water.
Their clothes were arranged on big flat rocks near the shoreline. And there they were, all three of them, naked, happily playing in the water. They looked as wet and cool as otters. Whitman’s chest was covered with thick black hair that was turning gray. Daddy’s body was white and completely smooth; he always shaved off the few hairs that sprouted around his nipples. The dads were both in amazingly good shape, although Whitman was thickening in the middle and Daddy’s buns were starting to sag.
Tremaynne was shorter and didn’t work out at a gym like the dads did. But Lordy Lordy, did he look fine. Watching his slim, dark, slippery shape against the sun-dazzled water, I felt my knees go weak with desire.
Tremaynne was an outdoorsman. All that hiking and climbing had given him muscular thighs, a narrow waist, and what the dads called a bubble butt. The hair on his chest was black and soft as sable. It spread in a V from his groin to his shoulders, hiding his small dark nipples like berries in a thicket. I longed to stroke it, lay my head against it.
Dry or wet, my husband always looked good to me. He was short but beautifully proportioned. Women eyed him every time we went out together. He could be criminally charming when he wanted to be.
I figured it must be my fault that he was in such a foul mood. But what had I done? Was it a crime to ask who he was talking to out in the middle of nowhere?
“It’s so cold it burns!” Daddy gasped.
“All in your mind.” Whitman’s teeth were chattering. “Stay down a little longer.”
The dads’ dicks, which I’d seen on a couple of memorable occasions, had contracted in the cold lake water.
Or had they?
I couldn’t be sure. They were jumping up and down in water that came up to their belly buttons.
I looked at Tremaynne’s cock.
It was definitely not contracted.
“I’m going to run back and get my suit!” I called. “Wait for me!”
As I was scrambling back up the slope, I heard Daddy challenge Whitman and Tremaynne to a race. “Out to that big rock and back again. Go!”
That’s what he used to do with me, when I was seven. On hot summer nights he’d pick me up after work and we’d go to the neighborhood pool. I was a good swimmer back then. Racing Daddy toward the deep end of the pool always filled me with furious excitement.
The three of them dove forward like dolphins and headed out into deeper water.
Something in me was flashing Danger! Danger! But I couldn’t identify what the danger was, or who was imperiled. My one and only goal was to get into that horrible freezing water, close to my husband, as fast as possible.
My bell-bottoms and open-toed sandals were totally inappropriate for scrambling up the rocky rim of the lake. The rocks gave way beneath my feet. There was nothing to grab on to. I slid back down. Finally, panting, I picked my way to the top. The forest stretched for what looked like a quarter mile, ending at the grassy meadow where the SUV was parked.
I looked back at the lake. There they were, the three of them, cutting through the water with all the concentrated force of their masculine strength. Daddy was in the lead.
Your husband doesn’t want a marshmallow, a voice in my head angrily scolded me. He wants someone who will share his activities. Starting now, girl, you’d better get in shape.
In my fantasies I had the power and agility of an Amazon. I rode, I ran, I swam, I even flew. Wonder Woman used to be one of my favorite TV shows.
But in real life I was ten pounds overweight and smoked. I didn’t have the lungpower to run. I started out at a jog and was about halfway through the forest when I began to gasp, then to cough. I stopped, chest heaving, lungs stinging, and tried to catch my breath. Sweat poured down my forehead. I coughed up something thick and mucousy.
I tried to continue with a power walk, but a stitch in my side put an end to that. I puffed on. All my muscles and internal organs were, like, twitching and burning. Then something rammed into the open toe of my sandal and I pitched forward, twisting my ankle. My shoe was impaled on a low, half-buried stump fringed with thornlike knobs. The force of my fall had torn the shoe.
I felt like a frightened little girl in a fairy tale. I started to cry. I was all alone and I was afraid. There was no one to help me. Tremaynne and the dads were out in the middle of the lake having fun.
I gingerly pulled my foot free of the stump, then leaned back against one of the giant pines. The sun blazed down in the nearby meadow and out over the open bowl of the lake, but in the forest it was dark and still.
I heard a snapping sound behind me and peeked around the tree.
An elk was headed straight for me.
At least I thought it was an elk. It wasn’t a deer. I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that it was huge, it had antlers, and it was moving toward me.
I couldn’t catch my breath to scream. I flattened myself against the tree. Then, with a sudden jolt of adrenaline, I sprang forward and started to run. My goal was to get into the SUV as fast as possible.
I hazarded a glance over my shoulder. The elk had stopped. It was joined by four or five others. They were smaller and didn’t have antlers. Cows. His harem, maybe?
I crouched behind a tree, gasping for breath, then peered around the trunk. I was certain the elk was glaring at me. Getting angry. He lowered his nose, pawed the forest floor, then lifted his mouth high into the air and let out a weird trumpeting bugle.
The sound totally freaked me out. It was like a voice, a communication, a prelude to action. It was saying something about me. Get out of here! or, Let’s kill her! I turned to run. And then I saw the other one.
It was even larger. A great shaggy beast with black eyes and antlers that rose up like a giant coat rack. It trotted into the field between me and the SUV. There it stopped and let out a fierce, belligerent cry. And so did I. I opened my mouth and filled the forest with a piercing scream.
The elk in the field raised its head and flicked up its ears. It trotted angrily back and forth, just outside the forest. I heard a heavy snort behind me and turned. The first elk was moving in my direction.
An ambush.
This time I screamed “Daddy!”
I couldn’t stay where I was, clasping in terror the scaly trunk of a pine tree. The forest elk was coming closer. It could ram and squash me against the tree, or it could bite off my arm or kick and trample me. It was a wild animal. I didn’t know what the fuck it could do. It was huffing and snorting.
At the edge of the forest I paused for one second to take my bearings. I could see the SUV about fifty yards ahead of me. The field elk stood stone still about a hundred yards to my right. Its body looked tense, like a runner’s before the gun.
I made a dash for it, streaking toward the SUV. I ran as fast as I could. My foot hurt and my ankle throbbed and my mouth was dry and my lungs stung, but I kept going. Halfway there I was aware of two things: the field elk had put its head down and was charging, and, good city girl that I was, I’d locked the SUV.
I could hear the heavy thud of its hooves as it raced toward me. My eyesight became extremely sharp. I knew what I had to do, but I didn’t know if I had the time to do it.
Wheezing, I reached the SUV and darted around to the driver’s side. The elk butted the front passenger door with its antlers. There was a loud wham that shook the SUV. The beast backed away, nose dripping, eyes crazed. It saw me cringing on the other side, let out a furious snort, and stepped back. It seemed to be considering how best to get me. Suddenly, it leaped to one side, turned, and made straight for me.
I screamed and dove under the SUV. I saw giant hooves, hairy legs . . .
Wham! This time it crashed into the driver’s door. The SUV rocked
above me. I sucked in my breath, too afraid to cry, and wriggled toward the other side. With a belligerent snort, the elk backed away. Then it lowered its massive head and tried to peer under the SUV, but its antlers got in the way. It was breathing as hard as I was. Frustrated, it thrust its antlers into the earth and threw up clumps of grass and dirt. Then, with another bugling cry, it bulldozed forward and rammed the SUV again and again. Wham! Wham! Wham!
It was, like, totally weird. I thought, So this is how you’re going to die, killed by an elk on your honeymoon. I moaned one last time, squeezed my eyes shut, and prayed it wouldn’t hurt too much.
A moment later I heard Daddy and Whitman calling my name.
Whitman cried, “Holy Christ!”
I heard the sound of hooves thudding away. I could feel their vibration in the earth. And the vibrations of feet pounding across the field. I didn’t dare to open my eyes so I wasn’t sure what was happening.
“Venus!”
“Honey!”
“Sweetheart!”
Daddy was on his belly, trying to pull me out. Whitman was on the other side pleading with everyone to stay calm.
Dazedly I inched myself out from beneath the SUV. Looked up to see their concerned comforting faces. Oh, the sky was so blue.
Then I felt myself roughly scooped up in a pair of arms and held tight.
He didn’t say a word. Neither did I.
I looked into my husband’s eyes. There were tears in mine. Bette Davis couldn’t have done it any better.
No bones were broken. The SUV was scratched and dented but the door still worked okay. When everyone’s excitement died down and we were on our way again, I rested my head on Tremaynne’s shoulder and held him around the waist. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. His skin was hot and smelled like fresh fishy lake water. He wrapped his arms around me.
“Drink some Evian,” Whitman urged. “Breathe deeply. We’ll be there in half an hour.”
I felt fine. Shaken but extremely alive. In my husband’s arms. I was surprised at how good I felt. But I was the star now, so I had to play it up a little.