by Lynn Burke
I crawled onto the bed between her legs, pressing her thighs wider to accommodate me. A squirt of lube between her cheeks clenched her asshole, but she relaxed as I rubbed my thumb up and over her, working the lube past the ring of muscles inside of her.
She moaned and tossed her head to the other side.
“Do you like it when I finger your ass, Red?” I asked, my gaze riveted on her parted lips and the strands of red hair across her face.
“God, yes.”
“Do you want my cock?”
“Mmm.”
I hauled off and swatted her ass cheek as hard as I could.
She shrieked and jerked forward, but I grabbed hold of her hip and held her steady while striking again. “You’ll get my cock deep in your ass, but only after paying for the torture I’ve endured this week.”
Another shriek ripped from her lips as I landed another swat on her other ass cheek, but she didn’t try to pull away. Twice more in the same spot, and she pressed back, a moan slipping past her lips.
“You’re all I can think about,” I said between clenched teeth.
Crack!
“Even when verses are shouting in my brain, all I can see is your bright smile.”
Crack!
“Your perfect tits.”
Crack!
“Your dripping cunt.”
Three more, and my arm ached.
Dani whimpered in my hold, her ass bright red. I grabbed hold of her hips with both hands and touched my cock against her puckered hole. “Time to pay.” With one hard thrust, I pushed balls deep inside of her ass.
“Oh, fuck!” she cried out, hands grasping at the sheets overhead.
Her body clamped around me, and I fucked her as hard and as fast as I could, my balls slapping against her soaked pussy.
Like a rutting animal, I grunted with each thrust, Dani’s whimpers and gasps like fuel to my wild instincts. I couldn’t go deep enough. Couldn’t puncture her soul and sear myself into her for all eternity so that a part of me would always be free.
I neared the end of my self-control. “Play with your clit,” I said between clenched teeth. “Pinch yourself and go over with me.”
Dani reached down and grasped my balls, making me growl, but she quickly released her hold and did as told. “Oh, yes.” She bucked against me, working her clit.
“I’m going to shoot my cum all over you, Red. Now!”
A shriek tore from her lips as her body convulsed, and my orgasm tore through me, her name a prayer on my lips as I pulled out and ropes of white shot over her back and ass exactly as I had always wanted to see.
My last fantasy to ever be fulfilled.
****
Dani returned from the bathroom wrapped in a thin robe, her hair a tousled mess. She perched on the bed’s edge with a wince, staring down at me as I sprawled on my back, completely spent. “Are you okay, Abel? Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick about you all week.”
My time with her had drawn to an end, but I couldn’t find the words. I devoured the sight of her. Flushed cheeks, sparkling yet worried eyes. Her flowery scent engulfed me, and I breathed deep, hoping to memorize everything about her. “I-I’m sorry for waking you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She laid down beside me, hands folded beneath her cheek. “Will you stay with me tonight?”
“I can’t,” I whispered, my throat tightening. “More than anything, I want to wrap my arms around you and breathe you in as you sleep, but I can’t.”
Her brow furrowed as she peered at me as though trying to read my soul. “What’s going on?”
I stared into Dani’s green eyes, my chest aching, muscles trembling from exhaustion and fear. I swallowed and opened my mouth, but closed it again.
“Where’s that honesty I love so much?” Dani’s brow relaxed, and she ran the back of her fingertips along my cheek. “You’ve been forced to make a choice, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” I managed to say.
She heaved a sigh and placed her hand on my bare chest, directly over my heart. “I understand.”
“As much as I’m loving getting to know you—the peace and joy I find when I’m with you—the need to honor my parents and their faith…”
A red eyebrow rose. “Their faith or yours, Abel Beiler?”
I opened my mouth to say mine, but snapped it shut just as quick.
“Have you ever considered that what you were involuntarily brought up to believe might not be the truth?”
“I … no. I’ve never thought to question it.”
“Stay here. I’ll be right back.” Dani climbed off the bed, and I listened as her footsteps faded down the stairs, only to return within a matter of seconds. She entered the room with two books in her hands.
I sat up when she paused beside the bed. “What are these?” I asked, taking them from her outstretched hand.
She wrapped her arms around her waist. “Proof that the Bible you’ve been raised to believe to be the truth is full of inconsistencies and holes.”
I stared at the books in my hands, feeling as though a chasm opened before me in the miry pit I had been fighting to escape.
“Will you do something for me, Abel?”
Lifting my gaze, I found her eyes watery, her lips slightly pouted. “Anything,” I heard myself say.
“Read them. Check the verses they reference. Study the proof. Try to find books that refute what they claim.”
A simple choice. A simple promise. One step off the cliff to tumble into the unknown. Did I want my parent’s faith shattered in my eyes, crushed beneath the weight of my questioning what I had been taught was the truth?
“I will.” Again, I spoke without thought, my mind beating out my heart.
“There are no contemporary writers during Jesus’s time who mention him. Not one.” She glanced down at the books. “The three hours of darkness and earthquake when he supposedly died on the cross? Never happened according to every single historian of that time.”
That knife in the gut feeling clenched my insides, and I glanced down at the books.
“That’s only the beginning,” Dani said. “But don’t take my word for it—or the authors of those books. Check the verses.”
I nodded.
“And when you’re done…” Her soft voice drew my attention back up. A tear slid down her cheek, and I lifted a hand to wipe it off, but she stepped back out of my reach, tightening her hold on herself. “When you’re done, when you’ve come to a conclusion of your own and decide what you want, let me know.”
I bit my tongue to keep from jumping up and sweeping her back into my arms.
“I’ll be here waiting, Abel Beiler.” Twin tears coursed down her cheeks. “I’ve only just found you, and it hasn’t been nearly enough. I’ll wait forever for you to come back to me.”
Gott, the ache in my chest … my own eyesight hazed as I considered her words. Afraid to open my mouth or give in to the desire to touch her again, I nodded and climbed off the other side of the bed in search of my clothes.
Chapter Seventeen
I turned on the propane lamp and sat on the couch since reading a book to refute Daed’s faith in his rocker felt sacrilegious. Before the end of chapter one of the first book, I was hooked. My mind blown.
I grabbed Daed’s Bible and flitted from verse to verse, checking on the inconsistencies the author claimed.
They were true. Every. Single. One.
My eyes grew bleary, my head ached, but still, I read on, the ticking of the wall clock drowned by the ringing in my ears.
Had my parents known of the inconsistencies the author listed? Had they known that what Dani said about the historians never recording a single event the Bible claimed to have happened in Jesus’s day?
I climbed into bed a couple of hours before dawn, one book devoured, but unable to keep my eyes open to begin the other.
What I had considered to be my own faith had been shaken. Right down to the ground. I would read the second bo
ok, but I decided to confront Bishop Stoltzfus for answers first.
****
I expected the bishop thought I had shown up at his house Saturday late afternoon to confess my sins, but speaking of my sexual desires was the last thing on my mind.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Abel.” The bishop and I sat on chairs on his porch, empty coffee mugs on the small table between us. “Obviously, the author of that book believes what he found as inconsistencies to be truth there was no man named Jesus.”
I nodded, leaning toward him … needing answers. Needing him to tell me what my mind struggled to comprehend—and accept.
“We have to remember, though,” the bishop continued, “that the Gospels, the accounts of Jesus’s life, were written by four different men. Each had a different perspective, and while they may have taken part of the same events, were influenced by their lives up to that point. Upbringing, thought process, and the like.”
“But what about the fact Jesus isn’t mentioned in any of the historians’ writings from that time? Surely a three-hour period of darkness in the middle of the afternoon wouldn’t have been dismissed. And, what of the ripping of the veil in the temple? According to this author, there is no mention of it anywhere in contemporary writings.”
Lips pursed, Bishop Stoltzfus stared at the books between our mugs. “Although his evidence points toward a different truth, we’re commanded to have faith.”
“Blindly.” I bit the word off, unsure why such anger over the reading I had done in the previous twelve or so hours churned my insides.
“Faith is the evidence of things unseen.”
In that moment, I realized the stupidity of Bishop Stoltzfus’s words he had spoken so often before. There was no evidence. Faith was blindly believing in something that could very well be a fairy tale like Jack’s beanstalk.
Standing, I slid the books off the table into my hands.
Bishop Stoltzfus stood as well, his heavy gaze on my face. “I don’t believe it’s a sin to question, to search for answers, but spreading these lies to other members of the church—”
“But what if this is true?” I asked, holding up the books. “What if everything we’ve been taught is the lie?”
A muscle jumped in the bishop’s jaw, and the weight of his glower tightened my hold on the books.
“I’ll keep this to myself,” I said as he opened his mouth. “But I won’t stop searching until I have the answers I need.”
Bishop Stoltzfus dipped his head. “Gott’s blessings on you, Abel Beiler. I’ll pray He makes the path of truth clear to you.”
I nodded and turned without a single one of my questions having been answered. If anything, my belief in the books I clutched close had solidified more in my mind.
Climbing into my buggy, I cast a glance around the Stoltzfus farm. Such a simple life. A hard one, I knew, taking in the large garden and tobacco fields spreading off into the distance. A handful of young men—Stoltzfus children and grandchildren, no doubt—hoed between the rows, backs bent, straw hats covering their heads. I expected sweat dripped off their chins from the sun beating down on us.
Is that what I wanted for the rest of my life if the Bible wasn’t true? Our entire community, the Ordnung, was based on biblical principles. With the foundational book being called into question in my mind, the slippery slope I had been staring up at, the righteous life I had always striven for held no meaning.
I headed home, deciding that come Monday, I would spend all day in the library. Search the internet for answers. Truth.
Technology might truly come in handy after all.
****
I read article after article, not moving from the computer in front of me unless another library user needed it. When waiting for another turn, I immersed myself in other books—theology, science, and philosophy. I took out books on world religions—ones older than Christianity—my jaw gaping over stories the Bible writers had drawn from to create their own version of religion.
For, after almost three weeks of study, that’s the conclusion I came to.
I had never been a fervent Christian. I had never understood or experienced what other believers claimed about inner peace and contentment no matter the circumstances surrounding them. An outsider looking in, I had never felt as though I truly belonged.
My parents, wherever they might be, had chosen to believe what they had been taught, and as far as I knew, had never questioned there might be more—other truth than what had been pounded into their brains. While I expected they would have been disappointed in my decision, the truth was they were no longer around. I could honor their memory, but seeking truth and growing as a human being trumped propaganda.
Had they still lived, I know their love for me wouldn’t have changed.
The weight hanging over my shoulders, the shroud of discontentment lifted as my mind came to the conclusions I had hurdled toward since first seeing Dani. Freedom to just be. Freedom to move on with my life and seek out what I wanted and needed to fulfill whatever years I would be lucky enough to have in life.
On the way home from the library on Thursday, I stopped in at the Johnsons. Time to punch in the phone number I had memorized all those years ago.
Eli’s voice made me grin for the first time in a long while. “Hey, cuz,” I said, using his word for me.
Eli laughed. “You sound happy. What the hell is going on?”
“A lot. You free tonight? I’ve got one hell of a to-do list and need your help.”
“I’ll be there at six.”
No hesitation, no questions. Just a simple agreement to drop whatever he had lined up for the night to help me out.
I climbed back into my buggy, grinning like a sixteen-year-old who had just gotten his own buggy. My mind flew free from the constant nagging of voices and verses trying to conform me to what they wanted.
Time to make my life my own.
Chapter Eighteen
I drove straight to the Lapps, and Rebecca’s father met me in the yard as I tied up my horse.
Smiling, I stuck out my hand.
He lifted a brow, but accepted my greeting. “It’s gut to see you smiling, Abel.”
I all-out grinned. “It feels gut to be smiling.”
Two of their younger children ran up to greet me as well, but Mr. Lapp shooed them away after a few minutes.
“What brings you here today?” he asked, glancing at my neck.
The mark had long since disappeared, but he wouldn’t have known—I had avoided Gmay and all social gatherings while un-indoctrinating my brain.
“I’m leaving the community.” There. I had said it outright, cementing my decision.
Lips pursed, he nodded, his brow furrowing. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m not.”
He peered at me. “I can see that.”
“I have some livestock that needs a gut home. Do you have room for a couple of cows, horses, and chickens?”
“So you’ve made up your mind for sure.”
“Yes, Mr. Lapp.” My smile faded somewhat as disappointment and sadness filled his softening gaze. “I know I will no longer be welcome to sit at your table, but I wanted you to know that I will always think of you with fondness and thankfulness for all you’ve done for me.”
Mr. Lapp’s throat worked, and although I had the urge to hug him tight like I had always done with Eli, I shoved my hands into my pockets.
“I’ll continue in my prayers for you, young man, and should you ever decide to return to the fold, our door will always be open.”
“I appreciate that.”
He hitched up a wagon to retrieve my gift to his family, and I shook his hand one last time—the last time, I knew—before he drove back up my driveway.
****
Eli’s car pulled up to my house, and I opened the door. “I need to get out of here.”
“It’s about fucking time,” Eli said, shaking my hand and slapping my back with his free arm.
; We laughed, and I motioned him into the house.
“So, what finally changed your mind after all these years of self-sacrifice and obedience to the Ordnung?” he asked, sprawling onto the old plush blue couch.
“Shit.” I plopped onto Mamm’s rocker. “I don’t even know where to begin. Dani gave me books.”
“Who’s Dani?”
I spilled what I had held from my best friend for over six years. Took me a full hour to tell him everything that had happened to me since that day I had first seen her in the red convertible.
“Holy fuck. If that doesn’t make a person believe in fate…” Eli’s words trailed off as he shook his head. “So now what?”
“Dani is only a part of why I made this decision.”
“Shit. I can’t wait to hear the rest!” He laughed.
I told him about the books, the studying the previous three weeks, and the conclusions I had come to over the complete lack of proof the man Christianity was based on ever existed.
Eli sat and stared at me as the clock ticked in the silence once I finished. “Are you shitting me?” he finally asked, gaze flitting to Dani’s books on the lamp table beside me. “Those the ones?”
“Ya.” I handed the books to Eli and stood. “I’m going to go grab a few things. You don’t mind if I stay with you tonight, do you?”
He flipped through the first couple of pages. “You can stay as long as you need to.”
A rush of adrenaline lit butterflies in my stomach. “Hopefully, it’ll be just one night.”
Eli snickered without looking up from the book. “I can’t wait to meet this Dani woman.”
“She’s … she’s…” I shrugged with a lopsided grin.
“Go get your shit.” Eli laughed again. “Then we’re off to a fucking store to get you some real clothes. And a haircut!” he called as I bound up the stairs.
I stood in my bedroom door and glanced around. A few childhood trinket memories lined my bureau—whittled soldiers, a handful of books full of propaganda. My closet door hung open, revealing the clothing of a plain Amish man and nothing else.