by Lynn Burke
She wore shorts, a tight T-shirt, her hair held back with a wide, green headband, and reminded me so much of Red, that I paused in my work as she drew close.
Her sneakers pounded the pavement as she sang half breathless and out of tune to whatever music played in her ear buds. Her brilliant smile caught my breath, and I stared as she continued running past me.
The same heart-shaped face. Longer curly hair, but the same shade of red, bright green eyes…
It’s her. It’s Red.
My body woke like a bear, hungry and ready to hunt. Spinning, I watched her run down the path, her backside calling to me. My fingers itched to dig into her jiggling flesh, my mouth salivated for a bite. A raging hard-on pressed against the front of my broadfall trousers, my balls in an instant tight and ready to explode.
Heart thumping and jitters running clear to my toes, I stared until she passed from sight, my grip on the hammer turning my knuckles white.
Would she turn at the trail’s end a half-mile farther up, or would she continue her jogging elsewhere? I grasped the top rail with my free hand and leaned forward, hoping … waiting, my hard-on throbbing with each beat of my heart.
She appeared around the corner heading my way, and I forced myself to pick up another nail and hammer a board into place. My attention kept shifting to the trail, my ears straining for the sound of her footsteps. Once she came close, I lifted my head and our gazes collided.
Want.
My heart stopped in my chest as my breath left in a whoosh.
Her fingers fluttered as they had all those years ago, her green eyes flashing as she smiled.
I returned her unspoken greeting with a nod and turned away the second she passed me. Grabbing the box of nails and empty jug, I recognized the slippery slope I had slid down once before, but I couldn’t stop my mindset. Within minutes, I dropped the nails and jug on the porch, slammed the front door shut behind me, leaned back against it and ripped at my suspenders to shove my pants down to my knees.
Already a pre-ejaculate mess, my cock jumped as I wrapped my hand around it. My head tipped back against the door as I slid my hand down, imaging Red’s plump lips wrapped tight around me, taking me deep into the back of her throat. I grabbed my balls with my free hand and squeezed, hoping to calm my racing heart and slow my hips from thrusting, but the pain of my grip tipped me over.
“Oh, fuck,” I groaned the words and lifted my head. Semen shot up and outward as my hand slammed down to the base of my cock and back up again, unrelenting in milking every drop of pent-up desire. “Fuck!” I drew out the word and squeezed my balls again, thumping my head back against the door, riding out the waves of spasms jerking through my entire body.
Red…
Panting and staring at the mess I had made on the floor around me, I realized I had never given up control over my sin. I had asked for forgiveness, but never turned away from it as one who is truly repentant would do.
“Fuck!” I enunciated the word harshly, ripped off my shirt and wiped my hands and cock clean, recognizing the fact I had never climbed back up the slope. I had been standing at the bottom for close to six years, my outward life of self-sacrificing servitude to the church a lie.
I also couldn’t find it in my heart to care at that moment. All I could think about was when Red would run the trail again, and that I would save fixing the rest of the fence for the next morning … just in case.
****
Lying in bed that night, I brought back to life every fantasy I had created from Eli’s stories. Fucking Red against a wall, my fingertips digging into the globes of her backside. Slamming into her from behind until her cum dripped off my balls. Jerking myself off all over her back as she lay panting and spent beneath me. Telling her to get on her knees and clean me off with her tongue.
Once more, hot semen shot up across my chest as I grunted my release, but my mind refused to quiet. I wanted more … so much more. I wanted her tied down and marked like the woman in that magazine. I wanted her drawing her knees up to show me my semen dripping from her holes—my mark of ownership. I wanted to claim her mouth, her pussy, her ass, with desire that bordered madness.
Twice more, I hardened and emptied before sleep finally came.
****
Messing with fire, I told myself while heading to the fence the next morning. The temptation—the itch—had never been stronger, and as Eli would say, I didn’t give a shit about consequences.
Two joggers appeared within minutes of each other, both jump starting my heart and crushing me as they turned out to not be my Red. A half-hour passed, and I finished with the last crooked board. I hesitated heading to the wood shop, however, feeling for sure she would come.
Ripping off a perfectly gut rail, I glanced toward town once more, and sure as the sun rose every morning, Red ran toward me. Figuring she couldn’t yet tell I watched her from afar, I stood and stared. Short shorts and a navy sports bra were all that stood between her pale skin and my eyes.
She drew closer, and I picked up the rail I had dropped, only half paying attention to the placement as I drove a nail home with two whacks of the hammer. I stole two more eyefuls, noting the ear buds, diamond studs in her ears, navel, and nose, and a swipe of mascara on her lashes.
Another flutter of her fingers and she passed me by, leaving me hard and lightheaded with the need to feel her beneath me.
Chapter Seven
Same as the day before, I waited for Red to run past on her way back toward town, but she slowed to a walk a hundred or so yards up the trail. She pulled her earbuds out as she came alongside me, her smile freezing my feet in place.
“Good morning.” Her low, raspy voice shot straight to my cock.
“Gute mar—” My face heated, but I kept my focus on her green eyes. “Good morning.” My voice shook.
A slight furrow indented the skin between her red eyebrows, but her smile still shone as light laughter parted her lips. “I’ve seen you before yesterday morning—I’m sure of it.”
While I hesitated to tell her the truth of my obsession in remembering her after six years, she narrowed her eyes and propped her hand on her hip. “I know we know each other—we must have met somewhere. Farmer’s market?”
“No.” I couldn’t tear my gaze from her unsmiling mouth. Her plump lips.
“The Greenery.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“Hmm.” She cocked her head to the side. “Have you been into Westwind Physical Therapy?”
“No.” I forced my attention up to her eyes. “Is that where you work?” I asked, my voice a little more steady.
Light returned to her face, lifting her lips. “Just started. I grew up on the other side of town.” She waved her hand eastward, her head turning that way as well.
My gaze flitted down over the generous cleavage and hardened nipples inside her sports bra. I jerked my head back up again as she continued, my cock hard and willing.
“Left for college, vowed to never return, and here I am.” She turned back toward me, mirth playing with her lips. “We must have run into each other during high school or something.”
I shook my head.
“Another life, then?”
“I’m sorry … what?”
“We must have known each other in another life.”
I stared.
“Oh.” She laughed and tugged on one of the dangling earbuds. “You don’t believe in reincarnation, do you?”
“No, but you’re right.” I cleared my throat and gave completely over to the moment I had been granted. “It seems as though we have met before.”
“Damn it, I hate when my mind gets flustered by a pair of sexy, blue bedroom eyes and I can’t think straight.” Her brilliant smile returned, and her attention moved beyond my shoulder while I scrambled to process what she’d said. “Tough life, huh?”
I shrugged, my heart still racing. “I’ve never known anything different. I enjoy the hard work.” Lifting my free hand, I studied t
he calloused palm and fingers. I glanced up to find her staring at the unmistakable ridge in my trousers, her lower lip between her teeth.
My fingers itched to twine in her long ponytail. I wanted to sink my teeth into her lip.
Red lifted her gaze to mine, and heat ignited again in my body. Her pink cheeks flushed, but she didn’t shy away as Amish women did when caught staring.
“I’m Dani.” She stepped down the rise and held out her hand, the sultry rasp in her voice straining my cock against my trousers. “Dani-Lyn Trego.”
I stepped forward and reached across the fence. “Abel Beiler.”
Her cool hand slid against mine, and sparks of pure lightning shot up my arm. I wasn’t in a hurry to release her hand, and she seemed of the same mind. Her fingertips tightened around the base of my pinky, and my thumb slid along the smooth skin covering the back of her hand.
A quick inhale parted her lips. “Are you sure we don’t know each other from some place?”
“Pretty sure.” I dropped my hold on her and stepped back before I pulled her over the fence. “But, it’s nice to meet you now, Dani.”
“You, too, Abel.” A slow smile lit her face again, and she reached for her ear buds. “I’m running late today so I’ve gotta go, but I hope we bump into each other again soon.”
“Me, too.” I stared as she started off, hammer dangling in the hand at my side, the other hand fisted to keep from grabbing my leaking cock. “Me, too,” I whispered as she glanced over her shoulder and fluttered her fingertips at me.
I didn’t even make it to the house, but veered into the barn and jerked off onto the dirt floor a few feet from the entrance, arm and forehead against the rough-hewn wall.
My mind focused on Dani-Lyn Trego, her hard nipples and the expanse of pale skin she revealed, I didn’t hear the voices of the bishop and deacon, as usual, quoting scripture at me in the back of my head.
The day passed in a blur as I lingered in my fantasies of burying my nose in the red curls between her thighs and shoving my cock balls deep up her ass.
I slept like a baby for the first time in years.
Unable to help myself, I found my feet taking me southward with the sunrise the next morning to pretend-fix the fence, but Dani must have decided not to run the trail.
Same with the following morning.
Friday, and grumpy as an un-milked cow long past milking time, I hoed the garden where I could keep an eye on the trail from the rise the house and garden rested on, but kept the box of nails and hammer close by. Just in case.
Dani made an appearance, and I dropped the hoe like it had caught fire. Nail box and hammer in hand, I strode down the pasture, my hard cock annoyed by my fast stride. She passed long before I reached the fence, but she waved, creating butterflies in my stomach.
When she returned and slowed, pulling the buds from her ears again, I dropped my hammer and leaned on the fence without thought.
“Hey,” she said, somewhat out of breath.
“Hey.” I smiled, taking note of the tighter shorts and sports bra unable to hide her nipples again. My cock ached.
“I had to go into work early the last two mornings so I haven’t been by.”
“I noticed.”
Her eyes narrowed as a corner of her lips rose. “Did you?”
Heat licked at my cheeks, but I didn’t look away from the green eyes that seemed to reach inside of me and grab hold. “Yes.”
She glanced behind me, her eyes moving as she took in my farm. “Is that your place?”
“Yes.”
I caught the quick glance at my left hand. “You live there alone?”
A twinge of sadness pricked my heart, but grief no longer consumed me when thinking or speaking of my family. “Yes. I inherited the place a few years ago when my parents died.”
“Oh.” All trace of happiness drained from her face. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”
“Eighteen-wheeler high-jacked and crushed the buggy they and my six siblings were in.”
Her face paled, and her hand rose to her throat. “Shit. That’s awful!”
“It was.”
“No one survived?” she asked her gaze once more flitting to the farm behind me.
“No.”
Her compassion-filled gaze returned to me. “How do you—I mean, how the hell did you find the strength to go on?”
“One day passed, then another.” I lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “The grief was overwhelming at first, but as time passed, it lessened.”
She shook her head. “I can’t even imagine.”
“Life goes on, whether we want it to or not. I get up and go about my day, counting down the hours until I can sleep.”
“You must be lonely.”
She hadn’t voiced a question, and as I stared into her sad eyes, her empathy and understanding trickling in to soothe a part of my heart that hadn’t been given attention of any sort for years. “Every minute of the day,” I finally said, my voice barely escaping.
“Kind of personal, but why haven’t you married? I thought the Amish married young.”
I slid a hand down my jaw that already sported a dark shadow and had every morning since I had begun shaving at fourteen. “I just turned twenty-two a few weeks ago.”
Her brow shot upward. “You’re only twenty-two?”
For the first time in four years, I actually grinned. Sort of. “That surprises you.”
“Yeah.” She shifted her stance from one foot to the other. “I thought for sure you were older than me.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
Feeling brazen and wanting to take advantage of the moment, I allowed my gaze to slide down the length of her scantily clad body. Pale, creamy skin, taut over muscle and curved hips. A narrow waist and breasts that would more than fill my large hands.
“I courted a girl for over two years,” I heard myself confess as my gaze slid up her neck to rest on the pulse jumping in her neck.
“What happened?” Dani asked, her voice breathless.
I wanted to blurt out the truth to the curious Englisher from outside of my world. The beautiful creature with flaming hair who didn’t care two bits about properly covering her body.
“I can tell you’re dying to unload something, Abel. Spill,” she said with a smirk, stepping closer to the fence. “I promise I won’t tell a soul.”
I didn’t know Dani-Lyn Trego, but I believed the honesty stamped on her face and the strange connection I felt to her.
“There’s always been a part of me that has wanted more than this.” I swept my hand behind me, encompassing the farm. “I have an unrelenting itch to experience life outside of what I was involuntarily born into. I made the choice to commit myself to the Amish church, never having given myself the freedom to learn from mistakes.”
Her brow furrowed. “So you’re chained to your lifestyle?”
“I am.”
“Are those chains unbreakable?”
I opened my mouth to say yes and stay true to the community in order to honor my parent’s memory, but the truth was that I could say and do whatever I wanted. I had told Rebecca years earlier to pursue what she wanted, what she longed for, what would make her happy. While not wise advice for the situation I found myself in, the want to know life outside of the one I had been miserably living for almost three years spurred my decision to dig deeper into the mire at the bottom of the slope.
“They’re not unbreakable.”
Dani’s gaze flitted over my face as though she wanted to read into my soul or memorize every line. “Do you ever … I don’t know, go out? Like, out into my world?”
“No.”
“Is it against the rules?”
“At this point in my life, yes.”
“You’re an independent man. As sad as it is, you’ve no one at home to answer to.” She sucked in her lower lip as she continued to study my face.
Scripture and bits of messages whispered in the ba
ck of my mind, but I shut them out and lost myself in Dani’s green eyes. I felt as though she could read my mind, that peering into each other’s eyes connected our souls on a deeper level than any relationship I had ever experienced.
“You ought to go out with me sometime so you can see the life you’re choosing to miss out on,” she finally said. “No one needs to know,” she rushed on, taking another step closer so I could reach out to touch her if I wanted.
“I’d stick out like a sore thumb no matter where we went,” I found myself saying rather than the “no” the church and my parents would have expected.
Dani’s attention flitted down over my plain clothes. “I suppose you’re right.” She chewed on the inside of her lip as though considering a thought.
“What?” I asked, feeling as though a cliff’s edge suddenly lay before me.
She shrugged and glanced around the brush-lined fence east and west from where we stood. “Would it be improper for you to meet me out here one night?”
A flicker of a frown furrowed my brow. “Here?”
“Yeah. We can star gaze and listen to the peep frogs.” Head tilted to the side, she smiled. “Chat. Get to know one another better.”
“You want to get to know me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I know I know you, and it’s been driving me insane that I can’t figure out where from. You’re hot as hell and intriguing to the point I can’t sleep at night.”
Heat flooded my face, but I didn’t look away from her. “I’ve never met a woman so … honest before.”
Her laughter joined the songbirds sweetening the air. “I’m unapologetically me. If I like something, I go after it. Period. Do … do you think that makes me an evil person?”
“No.” My word came out as a whisper as I stared into her eyes. “That makes you honest. Most people aren’t these days.”
“Are you an honest person, Abel?”
I opened my mouth to say yes, but snapped it shut again.