My cry bathed his face in bright light—I stared up at him, his eyes grew dreamy with concentration as his below movements quickened. As he thrust deeper and deeper into me, Brett buried his face in my hair, his mouth pressed against my neck. I listened to his breath, how it quickened with each rough plunge of his cock, how the beads of sweat trickled like silver bells down his long spine. I lay still beneath him, my cunt raised slightly, and he fucked me endlessly, as if racing his car though the burning lands, while millions of scales fell sparking from the sun, endless and all-consuming. He spoke.
“I love you.”
I said nothing, not believing my ears. His voice was barely a whisper, more grunting and moaning than actual words. He kept thrusting and panting, and I closed my eyes. “I love you. I love you.” Again, barely more than a trickle. I bit my lip, letting the tears run into my hair. I knew if I said anything, the spell would dissipate, the membrane would heal, and the world would be as it was before. I said nothing, and he came in me, a long and shuddering sob falling from his lips into the hollow of my throat, where it mingled with our sweat. I held him as he fell asleep, my arms and legs wrapped around his slick body. I didn’t mind the weight. It was what I was born to bear.
“What did you see that day?” Brett raised his head from me, and the sudden loss of weight startled me.
“What?” Brett rose up on his arms, then to a sitting position. “What were we talking about?”
“Never mind. Here.” He handed me the wine bottle, and I took a long swig, then stuck out my tongue for another hit. As I closed my mouth around the paper, it shifted, and I realized Brett had given me several, folded like a tiny accordion. My face must have given me away.
“You said you wanted to see everything. You will now.” Brett stood up and walked into the woods to pee. I stood up, trembling in the sudden chill of evening, then walked to the river’s edge. I was tired and cold, and I wanted a hot bath and my bathrobe. I waded past the fringe of fallen logs into deeper water, knowing it was stupid of me but not caring. The dragons were gathering at the edges of the boulders, and I wanted to watch up close. I watched as they crowded around my waist, slithering up and down my skin like hundreds of wet hands….
…and my hands were against a rock, my breasts dragging over the pitted, water-worn surface. It was day. My ass rose high in the air while the river stood still all around us, frozen in time. Brett grunted, his body pushed against me, and slammed me down hard against the ancient surface. I screamed as a red-hot lancet of pain slid up my ass, impaling me like an insect on a pin. Behind me, Brett’s hands came down, gripping my splayed cheeks and forcing them even wider, until I felt the skin tear. I screamed again, and the sound hovered in the air before me, an indigo ribbon that spiraled in the slow wind before dropping to the frozen waters below. Another thrust, and more pain, and fear oozed out of me in shining drops, hanging in the air above the waves as time slowed and blackened like burning flesh….
…running through the dark of the woods, and branches chattered overhead while fingers slashed at my thighs, and the blood slicked between my legs in black gobs….
…”PLEASE OH GOD PLEASE!” The screams echoed back and forth among the trees, and I opened my eyes. Pink sunrise stained the skies, red stained my hands, and clumps of dirt clung to my body like leeches. My cheeks burned—I wanted to cry, but my eyes felt swollen and dry. I lifted my hand to my face, delicately patting split curves of flesh….
…a metallic whine and click snapped through the midnight air, followed by a burst of bright light tearing across the space. I bowed my head, letting the strands of matted hair shield me from the harsh light. Something grabbed my jaw and pulled my head up, and the clicks and lights rolled through the air. Smile for the camera. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out except a whistle of breath, and the camera clicked again and again and again….
…the sliver of the sun rose up from my neck, into his hands. I thought of the dry desert, and the cleansing sun, but all I felt was the wet cold of the killing frost as it bled the warmth from my bones. His eyes slid over me, glacier-blue, and then the knife came down, a meteor carving a groove in the ice of my flesh….
….
…I stood in the middle of the clearing, watching the river rush by in the glow of early evening. Bright stars dotted the sky, and the moon waxed glossy and full. I wept. I was alone. But I was alive. I was alive.
He’d left the blanket for me, and I found most of my clothes in a sodden heap by the half-empty jar of jam. No shoes, though. I always seemed to lose my shoes in the woods. I scooped the dirt and bugs off the top of the jam, and sucked at the rest of it as I shambled down the road. Everything looked and felt gritty, tinged with a wash of pink. Blood, I realized. Blood, and the lay of the land. I’d never see him again. I knew that deep in my bones, without question. It didn’t matter. I’d wanted to know that he felt for me. I found out.
Time passed in little increments of pain. I found the main road, and then the highway, and the twinkling lights of Leavenworth pulled me in like that deep-sea creature I’d thought I was so long ago. Cold night air pushed me forward, and I ignored the scream of nerves in my bare feet as I stopped and stood at the edge of the main street, watching the crowds walk back and forth under the holiday lights. Children, families, lovers and friends, all talking and eating, clutching packages of silver and gold, dressed in warm, bright clothing. The smells of Thanksgiving and Christmas filled the air—cinnamon and fresh-cut greens. Autumn was over.
Something gently brushed my aching cheek, and I raised my hand. I hadn’t thought I was crying, and I was right. Flakes of snow, soft and lush, descended like lovers sighs onto my face, onto the town. I stumbled to the nearest pay phone, ignoring the horrified glances and shocked whispers. But no one stopped to help me—most people were so stunned, I was so horribly out of place, I don’t think they thought I existed. I didn’t care, all I wanted to do was go home. I gave the operator my number, and wept like a child when I heard Richard accept the call.
“Oh god, oh jesus. You’re alive. Oh jesus, Tesla, where the fuck are you?” He began to weep as well, and I felt terrible, as if I’d done to him what Brett had done to me.
“I’m in Leavenworth.” Fresh tears rolled down my face as the wound in my cheek flared into life. “Brett left me here. I don’t have any money, can you pick me up? If you have time, that is. No bother.”
“But where have you been? I’ve been going insane! I wasn’t able to file a report for two days. I thought—I thought—”
“But—I don’t understand. What are you talking about? I’ve—” I broke off, and stared around at the streets. Christmas lights and cornucopias crowding the window displays. Snow in the air. The end of autumn.
“Richard, I’ve only been here one evening. Haven’t I?”
“No. Brett came home six days ago, and left the morning after.”
My mouth opened in a silent howl as he gave me the answer my body already knew.
“You’ve been gone two weeks.”
Missoula
The naked chain at my throat shone like a sliver of the sun. I raised my face to the wide sky, squinting at the massive blur of gold dripping down beyond the horizon’s edge. At the end of November, just when it seemed winter had finally settled in, one last burst of summer had descended on the land, a glorious flood of heat and blinding light. Indian summer. One last taste of freedom. One last chance.
A low growl of a car engine drifted across the plain as the wind picked up. “Déjà vu,” I whispered. Something cold swept over my skin as I watched a thin line of dust kick up at the edge of the horizon, as if some great being had descended from that great space beyond, touched land, and was now racing toward me. Something relentless and all-devouring. I thought back to that moment four months ago, when I’d first found the scale, when I’d first felt that distant shadow pass over my grave. Now, everything I’d ever feared in that moment was coming to pass. No hallucinations, though. Not this time
. A demon in his thunderous machine was bearing down on me, as real as sun on my skin, and this time he’d find me, and wouldn’t let me go.
I shifted the open bottle of whiskey to my right hand, and with my left, reached back and pulled out three thick photo packets I’d crammed into the waistband of my jeans. Richard had given them to me the night he’d picked me up in Leavenworth—thinking Brett had killed me, or worse, he’d broken into Brett’s sleeping alcove even as I’d been bleeding into the icy currents of the river. I’d only looked at them once, but once was all I’d ever need. The images still burned inside, blossoming where my love for Brett had died.
Faces, battered and bleeding. Bruised flesh, darker than the triangles of hair between splayed and broken legs. A tooth, balancing like a pearl on a red-stained breast. When I came to the photos of the girl who’d dropped out of school, when I saw how he’d used the handcuffs on her the second time around, I vomited. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The third packet told me the story of a young girl, a girl with a golden scale hanging at her slender neck, and how her life ended in the heat and dust of the scab lands, at the edge of Ellensburg. It could have been me, it should have been me, I remember screaming over and over again. And Richard had held me and said yes, it could have been you but it wasn’t. And now you’ll never forget, and you’ll never let it happen.
The engines howled, and plumes of dust coiled in small twisters. I let out a ragged sigh, trying to still my pounding heart, then took another swig of the whiskey. Richard had dropped me off at the gate an hour ago, and I’d walked out here alone. Despite his fears, I told him to wait. I told him I’d return.
The Mustang stopped about a hundred feet away, and the engine ticked loudly as it began cooling down. Gravel crackled under the weight of the tires. Then the desert was quiet again, except for the crack of the door opening and closing, crisp footfalls, and the swoosh of low brush against faded jeans.
Brett hadn’t changed in the month he’d spent back in San Francisco. In fact, he looked much the same as he did the first day I’d seen him, at the far end of the walkway on campus—an animal in human form, as real and enduring as the flood-carved lands. His shirt flapped open, and I watched the roll of bone and muscle under the dark brown skin. I waited for his terrible beauty to hit me like it did before, waited for that wave of desire and despair. Some strange emotion did pass through me, but it wasn’t the same as before. It couldn’t be—the gold scale hanging at his throat told me so.
He stopped a few feet in front of me, and without a word, held out his hand. I couldn’t play games and pretend I didn’t have them—I was openly holding them. I held out the packets, and he snatched them from me, opening them up one by one to check the photos and the negatives. After he was satisfied, he closed them up, but still said nothing, only standing and staring at me. My fingers clenched the neck of the bottle. I wanted a drink, but I knew it’d make me look weak and frightened.
“That scar looks good on you. It gives you history.” I touched my face. A thin line ran from the corner of my left eye, ending in a curl in the middle of my cheek. It was dark from the gravel that Brett had rubbed into it—the wound had healed over tiny bits of the land, and now I carried a million years of history under my skin. There were other scars on my body, other marks he’d left, outside and in, but this was the most visible.
“It’s not the history I wanted.”
“It’s not up to us. We get what the world gives us, and we make the best of it. How we deal with it, and the scars, that’s our history.” He ran his hands over the ragged lines of hard flesh on his stomach, and smiled in pride. “There’s no say in the matter.”
“I’m not here for history. You know what I’m here for.” I held out my empty hand. Brett said nothing. Not even a smile passed his thin lips.
“What about the photos you took of me?” My voice sounded small and tinny in the open air. “You promised you’d give them back, that was the deal.”
He turned and walked back to the car, again without a word. I took another long pull from the bottle. I didn’t feel it going down anymore. I felt nothing. Brett tossed the packets through the open window into the backseat, then reached into the front. For one hideous second I thought he’d pull out a gun—but it was only cigarettes and matches. He walked back, and finally that sardonic smile began to surface. We both knew what I had to do to get the photos back. Brett stuck the cigarettes in his shirt pocket and stood before me, fingers hooked in the belt loops of his jeans. They shifted down, and dark straw tufts of hair sprung out in little tendrils.
“Yeah, I know what you’re here for. And you know what I’m here for.”
“And you’re not just any man,” I replied.
The land grew silent all around us, as the wind died. His eyes—glacial. And I thought of the great Missoula floods that once covered this land, scouring it free and clean, leaving behind great canyons and cliffs and coulees in less than two days. All that water breaking free, in the blink of the world’s eye. We stood on the scar of a thirteen-thousand-year-old wound, and we were nothing at all.
I bent my knees, and I swear it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life—it was my choice, but I had no other, and Brett knew it. He jutted his hips slightly, and I handed the bottle to him, then slid both hands up his thighs to the zipper. As Brett drank, I slid the metal zipper pull down, watching as the base of his shaft appeared between the shining teeth, turgid and quivering in the thick tufts of hair. I pressed my lips onto his skin, in the deep curve of flesh where his torso ended and the heat and hardness of his cock sprang out. Despite myself, I once again marveled at all that latent power ready to spring to life.
Brett handed the bottle back to me, and I set it on the ground, then pushed his jeans down, letting his cock spring free. Brett didn’t fuck around this time—he grabbed it, stroking it several times until it was as rigid as steel, then pressed it into my mouth. I didn’t resist, letting him grab and hold my head in the vise of his hands while he slid himself in and out, faster and faster, grunting above me in small bursts of sound. He was doing most of the work, and I simply hung in his grip, mouth open as his cock banged back and forth against the back of my throat. My hands hung limp at my sides—I didn’t need to caress or pet him. This wasn’t about tenderness or pleasure—I was a wet and sticky bone-lined orifice, nothing more. All that was required of me was that I stay open and pliant as long as he needed, as long as it took for his cum to hit the back of my mouth and disappear into the slick of my insides, into my soul.
His movements sharpened suddenly, and his thrusts intensified. I could feel that white-hot moment coalesce and quicken, I could sense it in the frenzy of his movements. As I clamped down harder around his thick flesh, I let my saliva-soaked tongue run hot over the piston of his shaft like a flood of fire. A cry like gunfire exploded from Brett’s lips, and he jerked and bucked in my mouth as cum spurted from his swollen tip. It trickled down my throat in little rivers—primal and antediluvian, like rich glacier-fed silt coating the bottom of an endless black lake. Brett shook slightly, adjusting himself in my mouth, and I accommodated him, running my tongue and lips around the tender skin as he gasped and stroked my hair. But I wasn’t fooled. He wasn’t going to pull out, not until every drop from the tip of his head had run deep inside me. I would swallow him as I had no other man.
We stayed in that position for a long time, with his cock resting in my mouth as the warm air of evening fled past us toward the horizon, and the sky flared purple at its edges. In a way, it was comforting for me to envelop him like that, in that strangely intimate way, even if we both knew it was false. But I wondered what it would be like to hold him like this forever, to always have him deep inside me, whether mouth or ass or cunt. It was only when men and women removed themselves from each other, pulled themselves free like the glaciers from the land, ejected and expelled them in a gush of climate change, that everything went wrong. Separation changed the lands, scoured them clean, left achin
g holes and hearts in earth and flesh alike. A revelation stole over me as his cock cooled in my mouth. I was as much a fixture of the land as Brett was. I thought I was insignificant, that I was only a speck, a pebble. But even the shift of a single pebble could change the history of the earth.
Brett stepped back, groaning softly as he pulled his cock from my mouth. I watched as the long column of red slithered from my mouth, wet and smelling faintly of whiskey and salt. I pressed my hand against my stomach as my mouth contracted—there was always a moment after deep-throating when my body threatened to revolt, to send it all back up in a grotesque reversal of the act. I closed my eyes and sat back on my heels, ignoring the bite of rocks against my skin. I was grateful for the pain, actually. It goaded me into thinking beyond my immediate discomfort, into rising stiffly and brushing the bits of rock off my bleeding knees.
“You are good. I’ll give you that much.” Brett’s voice sounded thick and satisfied. He reached for his cigarettes, smacking the pack against his hand in a neat crack until a slender white tube poked out of the paper. He caught it with his lips, and reached for his matches—I grabbed the bottle of whiskey at my side, hefting it like a dagger.
“You’re not giving me the photos, are you?”
Brett only smiled and scoffed as he ripped a match from the book.
“You’re not going to let me go. I’m never going to leave this place.”
“What do you think, you stupid bitch?” His hand held the match to the book, paused as he stared at me. A sly glitter shone from his eyes. “Go on. Run. I’ll give you a head start. Think of it as a thank you, for finally swallowing.”
“I’m never going to leave this place,” I dully repeated. The bottle rose to my lips, and I let the liquid pour into my mouth, dam up behind my lips and collect in the hollows of my cheeks. He struck the match and raised it to his cigarette—as the flame touched the tip, I expelled the whiskey outward in a gush of dark gold.
Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors Page 9