Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  The woman came back carrying something. “Yep, someone turned them in. You’re lucky, I was just about to take these over to Lost and Found before closing up for the night,” she said.

  Omkar inspected the collection of keys to make sure it contained the one that he was looking for. “Hey, thanks,” he said to the woman, who had already turned her back on them. She was checking the room, making sure that everything was in its proper place for her to close down for the night.

  He pulled at Aria’s arm as a request for her to follow him but Aria balked at the pressure. She felt unsafe with his sudden personality shift. “No fucking way. I am not doing this. You tell me what the fuck is going on with you or I am literally gonna walk the fuck out of here and find another place to stay until you can man the fuck up.”

  Omkar put his hand up to her mouth and tried to shush her. She slapped it away. “OK, OK, my God,” he said, leading her by the arm into the aisles of books. The argument was forced to break from their lips at a whisper. Each time the woman tending the library changed her location, they would have to shift where they were standing to stay out of sight.

  Omkar didn’t understand how it was possible that even though she had been the one to diminish the magic between them, suddenly he was now the one justifying himself. “Look, I didn’t mean to, but I saw you getting out of that car with that guy last night and I just went crazy, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. You can’t seriously be that childish, Omkar, what the fuck. What, now I can’t even get a ride from a guy without you thinking I fucked him or something?” Aria’s question was salted with accusation.

  “I never said anything like that. I just don’t know how to trust you sometimes,” Omkar said.

  “Jesus Christ, Omkar, I haven’t even done anything. How the fuck am I supposed to keep your trust when I never even did anything to lose it and you’re acting like I did?” Aria felt like her image of Omkar as the perfect guy was fading. The jealousy that was now governing his words and actions was a whole other side of him and it wasn’t one that she liked.

  “Look,” he said, “you’re going to get mad at me, but I found the letter that that guy wrote to you.” Aria looked at Omkar with a confused expression on her face. At first, she did not even remember the letter that he was talking about. “The one written to you from Luke.”

  He said Luke’s name like the name itself was a curse. Shame shook her body like an earthquake. Despite the fact that she had done nothing wrong, she began to see the conflict that they were in as being her fault instead of his. She thought about deflecting the shame she felt by getting mad at him for going through her things, but decided against it. Even though she felt pain knowing that he had to distrust her in order to do it, it felt wrong to her that the boundaries of “her things vs. his things” should even exist.

  When the lights went off and Omkar heard the last click of the door closing behind the woman whose job it had been to close down for the night, he stepped out from behind the bookshelves and into the great hall. “And just what exactly do you think I said?” Aria asked him.

  “How should I know?” Omkar answered, irritated that the argument had turned into a quiz.

  “Omkar, Luke is a friend of mine. He lives at the car lot. He gave me this the day I went back there to see if the place had been deserted or not. What do you need to know? Would you have rather I burned this letter?”

  “I don’t know what I would have wanted. I guess I would have wanted you to tell me about it when it happened,” he said.

  “OK, fine, I can do that but you’ve got to give me a break too, it’s not like I’ve ever had someone to share this kind of shit with. Quite the opposite, actually, it’s been sort of beaten into me to keep things to myself to avoid whatever consequences.”

  In the brief quiet that came between them, the deserted library seemed filled with an antique chill. Omkar played with the parchment binding of a book on the shelf next to him. When he looked back at her, through the dim light, Aria could see that his eyes were welling up with tears. Though she wanted to comfort him, she could not force herself to move toward him.

  “I just don’t know what I would do without you,” he said.

  “I know. I feel the same way …”

  Omkar cut her reply short. “No, that’s just the thing … You don’t know. You don’t know that you’re all I think about. You don’t know that if my whole life just fell apart, it would all be worth it because nothing else has mattered so much to me in all my life as you matter to me. Aria, you are my yesterday and my today and my tomorrow. And just the thought of you with another man, I can’t stand it.”

  He walked toward the door, hoping to find that it could be opened from the inside, despite being locked from the outside. He had thought that Aria had followed him, but she hadn’t. Instead, she had unzipped her backpack on the floor to find the feather that Luke had given her. When she caught up to him, at first she said nothing. She extended the feather toward him, far enough that the texture of it brushed against his arm.

  At first, Omkar didn’t understand the symbolism of her gesture. “‘Bring me this hawk feather and I will know it means yes, you can give me your heart. If not, you can keep it.’ Omkar, I am giving you this feather because I am giving my heart to you.” Omkar looked down at the feather before he took it between his fingers. He let the feather fall, wanting instead to feel her between them.

  The passion that drove his body toward her would have made resistance impossible, not that it ever existed within her. He ran his hands from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine, gripping her as if torn between one part of him that wanted to preserve her and another that wanted to consume her. When he pushed her against the bookcase, Aria braced herself by gripping the case binding of the books, and when he pulled her away from it, a few of them fell onto the floor. The heaviness of his breath licked the silhouette of her neck before the tip of his tongue could taste it. Beneath the armor of his flesh, the way that he kissed her made the lines that defined them dissipate. She could have forgotten where he ended and she began.

  Omkar’s mind wandered to whether or not anyone could see them. But the feeling of her hand against his cheek brought his mind back to her again. Wantonly she grappled with the unyielding fabric and buttons of his jeans. He tore his shirt up and over his head in response to her. Using his own weight to push her up against the bookcase again, he pulled the collar of her shirt just low enough to kiss the peach of her breasts with reverence.

  Though her tug and stroke could not speak louder of the permission that she was willingly giving him, Omkar restrained himself from stripping the clothes from her with his own two hands. Instead, he waited for the pearl of her naked skin to be revealed to him when she took them off herself. It was far from the first time that Aria had found herself in a position like this. But the usual control that she took was something that the love she felt for him would not allow her to take this time. Whatever power she had, had been given over to the arch and bend of the light that displayed his muscles. Now that her heart was involved, like a prey animal that had been hunted down, she froze, waiting for his next move.

  Omkar knelt down and placed her hands on the back of his neck. He held the back of her thigh, pressing deep kisses with his teeth into the front of it. He pulled her to the floor with him, using his arm like a cradle to buffer the willow of her body from the stone of the floor. At first, Omkar moved slowly so as to learn the notes to the melody of flesh. His skin slid pervasively over hers, so exposed that they could feel the earth’s rotation. In the pause he took to assure himself of her readiness, Aria thought about the fact that they didn’t have a condom. It was that moment that every girl looks back on and calls herself stupid for. But the fear of consequences did not outweigh her desire to belong to him.

  Omkar reached down to insert himself inside her, his fingers sliding against the wet silk of her labia. When he entered the world of her body for the first time, Aria let a g
asp egress from the back of her throat. The warmth and tightness of her fawned over the frame of his erect phallus. The instinct that drove them throbbed in waves that he thrust deep inside her. With the frailty of her femininity in the palm of his hands, the pain that he felt was the pain of not being able to thrust himself loose of the confines of his body enough for them to dissolve into one. With every thrust up to the last, it felt like he took a part of her into himself until he owned her completely. But it did not feel like a loss. It felt like she had found a home. The dew of her wanted to be taken and he had wanted to take it. The storm of their idolatry of each other had left the moon trembling in its wake. Its fragile beams streamed through the window and exhausted themselves across the shine of the floor. The virile fluid of his craving to make her belong to him was warm inside of her. Its slippery fervor had made a delicate marsh of her vulva and thighs.

  Aware of the fact that the library was no place to let the tide of post-coital affection wash over them, Omkar rolled his weight off of her and pulled his boxers back on. He sat over the quiver of her pale body, stroking the pith of her skin and waiting for her to be ready to get up and follow him. The wandering boat of his life had found her. The wind had taken him to her side. The burn of loneliness that had charred holes in its decks could not exist in the climate of the smiles that she afforded him.

  Having given so much of herself over to him, Aria’s muscles were weak and graceless when he finally pulled at her to leave with him. Not wanting to stain her clothes and not wanting to lose the feeling of his skeet inside her, she grabbed one of her socks and used it to line her panties. Omkar had to help her summit the sill of the window that they were forced to open in order to escape. He didn’t drive her home. Instead, he decided to contest the will of his parents by finding a place to park the car for the night.

  Omkar put the hawk feather that Aria had given him on the dashboard and climbed into the back seat, motioning for Aria to join him. When she did, he laid her down and cradled her head like a baby in his lap. “Shona, do you feel OK about what just happened between us?” he asked her.

  Aria nodded her head to say yes but then asked, “What did you just call me?”

  Omkar twisted the word around in his mind, trying to find a satisfactory translation. “It’s a kind of a nickname, kind of like ‘gold’ or ‘beautiful’ or ‘sweetheart’ … Shona.”

  Aria chuckled. “Those are three drastically different things,” she said.

  “Does it bother you if I call you that sometimes?” Omkar asked.

  “No, it’s fine.” Contrary to what she expected, she loved the idea of having a nickname. As far back as she could remember, she had never been addressed with a single term of endearment.

  After a few minutes, the hushed space between them was breached by Omkar’s voice. “Thorns would have bloomed into flowers if I had loved them as much as I loved you,” he said, petting her hair away from her forehead. “I always loved that line. It was in a poem from my country that I read once.” He continued. “I don’t really want to not know where you are during the day anymore.”

  Aria giggled and pretended to hit him. “Are you serious right now?”

  “Hear me out: what if something were to happen to you? I couldn’t live with myself. I’m not trying to control you,” he said.

  “Yes you are!” Aria said, still smiling from ear to ear at his possessiveness.

  “No, I’m not – I just need to know where you are. Can you just do it for my sake?”

  Aria paused for a long time and bit her lip, pretending to deliberate. She intended the suspense to tease him. “OK, fine,” she said, rolling her eyes at him.

  “OK, I’ll get you a phone tomorrow. That way, if you ever need to call me or if I need to call you, then it will be possible.”

  Aria laughed again, “Good Lord, how much thought have you put into this?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know, just days and days, is all,” Omkar said, making fun of himself. “The phone may or may not have a tracking device.”

  The sound of their laughter was softened by the way they so obviously cherished each other. When Aria fell asleep, Omkar spent some time adoring the sweet form of her face. Should lanterns shine, they would all lead him back to her. In their private dark, he found himself helpless against the conquest of her beauty. In those short hours before dawn would return to them, he reminded himself of the vow he had made to make a heaven of her life, for the love that he felt for her was immortal.

  CHAPTER 34

  “OK, I’ll see you at three o’clock,” were the last words Taylor said before hanging up the phone. Aria had called him on the prepaid phone that Omkar had given her to ask if they could meet sometime, at the café on the street adjacent to the Super Sun Market. Having not heard from him in so long, Aria was excited to see him. She was walking to the church to kill the hours between now and then.

  The line for the humanitarian lunch service was longer than usual. It snaked slowly down the sidewalk and there were several people that Aria had never seen there before. From a distance, she could tell that Imani’s typical blithe attitude had vanished. Instead of the smile Aria had learned to expect, a frown now blemished her face.

  When the line had moved far enough to place Aria in front of her, Imani greeted her with a forlorn, “How you be?”

  “I’m OK, how are you?” Aria asked.

  “Oh, you know, I’m doin’,” Imani said, spooning a portion of egg salad into a paper bowl.

  Aria was tempted to leave it at that and not risk the rejection of asking Imani what was wrong, only to be told that she didn’t want to talk about it. “Are you sure you’re OK?”

  The question alone made Imani sigh and start to cry again. She wiped the mascara stains from her lower eyelids. “Life’s just so unfair sometimes, you know it? This boy I known for a long, long time just got shot and I don’t know whatta do with it.” She paused before continuing to speak. “Ain’t nothin’ nobody can do. He a good kid though, a really good kid. It just don’t make no sense at all why these things happen … no sense at all.”

  It felt wrong to Aria, after Imani had said a thing like that, to simply take her bowl and walk away. Instead she rounded the table to stand beside her, so that Imani could continue serving the other people in the line. Imani didn’t know any details, just that the boy had been shot by police because he had pulled a gun on them. Instead, once the floodgates of her grief opened, Imani shared a torrent of details about him.

  “Back when he was prob’ly ten or eleven, he foun’ out this man I been datin’ had left me for another woman. He made this comedy rap battle song about him and sang it in front of everybody at the center. We was laughin’ so damn hard I nearly peed my pants. You know. He had it in his mind to be a rapper.”

  Imani had met the boy when he was five years old through the family center where she worked as a social worker in the mornings. He had been brought in to see her shortly after his father killed his mother and the boy was handed over to the state. “I got a picture o’ him you can see,” Imani said, wanting to preserve some part of him further by helping Aria to put a face to the name.

  But when Imani handed Aria the phone after scrolling through it, it wasn’t a picture on the screen. It was a news article. The man staring back at her was not a stranger, like she had expected. It was the face of Kendrik, the man who she had talked to once while they waited for the lunch service to begin. She had seen him many more times after that in passing. Aria felt sick to her stomach. “Oh my God, I know him … He comes here all the time. I even talked to him once,” Aria said.

  “Police Fire 54 Shots, Report Finds It Reasonable,” the headline read. Aria continued reading. “It is unclear how many of those bullets struck Kendrik McCoy, a 22-year-old black man, but attorneys have said he was hit around 26 times. Police officers responded to a call about a man who had been threatening residents with a gun in Compton near West Piru Street. Officers say they saw the gun in the man’s poc
ket and believe that he was reaching for it when they threatened him with arrest. The shooting has set off demands by the community for police accountability and an independent investigation into the entire department’s training and an alleged pattern of racial profiling. City officials in April said they were inviting US Department of Justice mediators to hear from residents and create a ‘community engagement plan.’”

  Aria continued to read the article until she reached the bottom. The first thought that she had was about his girlfriend at Foot Locker. The locks of his prison bars had yawned loose and promised him a life that was worth living for. He had lost that promise in an altercation that had lasted less than three minutes. Everything about it felt wrong. Imani was not alone now in her incapacity to digest it.

  Kendrik had always imagined that if he were to get shot, it would be by a Cuzz – another Crip assigned to kill him for trying to leave the gang. Not wanting to leave the city, because he had a girlfriend now, he had been lying low and avoiding the parts of the city dominated by the Crips. The day the cops shot him, he had intentionally wandered into Compton, which was Blood territory. The Bloods were a rival gang to the one he had pledged himself to, but because he wore nothing to distinguish himself as a rival, he imagined that he would be safest “sleeping behind the cloak of the sloobs”. But Kendrik was recognized by a foot soldier for the Bloods, a low ranking member who was out “bleeding” (looking for new recruits to join the gang). Kendrik had crossed paths with the man during a conflict that occurred when a group of Bloods were selling narcotics in what Kendrik believed to be Crip territory. The man had parked his car to watch Kendrik, long enough to be sure that Kendrik was who he thought he was. He called a woman he knew and told her to call the police, to report that a man was waving a gun at people, and to describe him and give his location. It was a kind of a “slap back” at the insult of Kendrik daring to be there. He enjoyed the idea of the scare that getting hassled by the police would put into him. He did not imagine that the phone call he initiated would lead to Kendrik’s death.