Levi removed the dildo from Liberty’s pussy with a squishing sound. He regarded her fondly. “I don’t mind. Hey. Where’d you put that stone?”
The hair under the experimental patch of sandalwood paste did not come away without the help of the stone. So Liberty had to haul herself onto a chair and expose her pussy to the men’s views. Levi, being the more vibrant of the two at the moment, took the pestle of paste in hand and slowly, admiringly, applied it.
“I don’t want you fellows waiting around town for me,” said Liberty. “While you’re hanging about waiting for something to happen to me, Shady and Moses could be getting away.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” said Levi. “I see you brought the talking board over. We could give that another try, to find out more about the cold water.”
“I believe it’s getting late,” said Liberty. “My father has some company coming over tonight, and he wanted me there for dinner. Ivy is going back to her ranch as usual when she finishes work, so I’m the one who has to carry the social obligations. Boys, I really, really, want you to go find Shady. At the very least, you know where that tree is now, so you can prove Caeser Moxus is dead and couldn’t possibly have signed that treaty.”
It was Garrett who answered this time. He had finally roused himself from his relaxed position and was standing, stripping off his chaps and drawers. Buck naked, he was a gorgeous sight, a veritable statuesque Nubian god with creamy skin flowing over finely molded bones. “We’re not going anywhere,” he repeated.
Levi had finished with the paste and was planing away the hair on her pubic mound with the sharp edge of the flint. It worked quite well, but it was strange to see her everyday hair disappear with the stroke of the blade. She squirmed with nerves. “And shouldn’t you take Neil Tempest with you? He’s the marshal, after all. Does an Indian agent have authority to arrest anyone?”
Levi said absentmindedly, “I sure as hell can, according to the law of Judge Lynch. We don’t need to harass Marshal Tempest with this matter.” He rinsed the rock off in a bowl of water. “He’s got enough to do with all these brawling bog crawlers in town.”
“Yes,” agreed Garrett, wrapping his lower extremities in a light Indian blanket like a toga. “Some of them aren’t traveling on to help build the railroad. The two lines are supposed to meet in Utah. But some of the worst sorts are still lounging about—well, you’ve seen them, Liberty, at the Cactus Club.”
“Yes,” she said remotely, absorbed in Levi’s task. “Most of them have moved on to the end of the line at Fort Steele. Some are just too lazy to keep working. And we get stuck with the lazy ones.”
“Tell us about your wife,” said Levi. He parted Liberty’s labia to scrape inside the lips, concentrating with the intensity of a surgeon. “Where is she now?”
Garrett was pouring himself and Liberty sarsaparillas. “Sadie has gone on to the great beyond.” Liberty had not questioned him about it. Some people did not wish to talk about something that painful and others seemed to find solace in talk. “Typhoid fever swept through our plantation in sixty-five. Took almost everyone, so I decided to join the army.”
“Including your pappy?” Liberty asked.
“Pappy and mammy.”
“What was Sadie like?”
Garrett placed Liberty’s glass of sarsaparilla on the table and paused. “Sadie was bold and brash, just like you.”
“You’ll get your ring back,” said Liberty. “Paddy Worth will make sure of that.”
Garrett nodded. “You missed a spot, O Great DaVinci.”
“I’m not done!” Levi protested.
It felt odd indeed to be bald between the thighs. Her labia lips protruded so blatantly, like a giant cloven hoof. Levi had her sit down in the washtub, where he splashed her and rubbed her with a bar of soap, unnecessarily thorough in his ablutions. Squiggling his fingers against her vulva, he rinsed and made sure she was “clean, properly shaved, and washed.”
Leading her out of the tub, he allowed her to drop her chemise and cover up. “This feels strange,” she said when she stepped back into her drawers. “Every step I take rubs against the lips.”
Levi wrapped his arms around her and kissed her gently. “I welcome the chance to explore you naked, but I know you have to get back to your father’s. Let me walk with you.”
It was quite kind of Levi to escort her back home without making demands. It was her experience that men basically only used one to gain something, sexual or otherwise. It was very rare that a man appeared to do something out of the kindness of his heart, as Levi was doing. Escorting her, staying in town to protect her—he and his partner did things for the sheer goodness of the doing.
Each step of her walk back to Vancouver House rubbed against her newly bald pussy. She felt shameful and excited at the same time, knowing she was shaved under her skirts. She had a perverse and stimulating secret, as though each man who glanced in her direction knew what she looked like naked.
Chapter Thirteen
Simon Hudson was asleep with his eyes open.
It was heartening to know that he still did this. Liberty had to smile when she came downstairs for dinner and discovered her father sitting at his desk chair staring at the wall, an empty whiskey glass before him. Affectionately, Liberty refilled his glass but didn’t try to wake him and went to find the cook to check on the dinner’s progress.
Since she seemed to be the only other guest at this dinner party, Liberty went into the parlor with a copy of Crime and Punishment to read. However, she had just settled into a chair when a movement not ten feet away startled her, and the book flew to the floor.
“Oh!” she gasped, with hand to her beating heart.
The mustachioed fellow from the pharmacy stood there, helping himself to a glass of port!
“I’m sorry you didn’t see me,” he said.
She noted he didn’t say, “I’m sorry to have frightened you.” No, it was all her fault to not have seen him! Still, he was obviously Simon’s dinner guest, so Liberty stood to shake his hand.
“I’m Cole, your father’s business associate, an old friend from college,” he said. “It appears he fell asleep sitting behind his desk, so I came in here for some libations.”
Liberty poured herself a glass of water. “Yes, he’s done that for many years. Falling asleep while sitting up with eyes wide open. Did he do that back in Amherst?”
He laughed—a bit too heartily for Liberty’s liking. But he was an old friend of Simon’s, and she had to tolerate him. “Not back then,” he said. “But when we worked together at the Tool and Die, he sure did. Once, I discovered him asleep by the lathe machine with his hand just inches from the drill bit.”
“Oh, my,” said Liberty. It sounded dangerous, but Cole was probably just reminiscing about the hilarious memories. And it was true that Liberty and her sisters often laughed about Simon’s sleeping habits. Remembering, for instance, the time he’d fallen asleep standing up when he was supposed to be giving a wedding toast. “He could have just been meditating. He does that a lot, with his Spiritualist beliefs. Are you a believer? Were you one of the group containing Alcott and Emerson? My father was very much interested in that Transcendental stuff. It’s possible that I’ve met you before, if you are.”
“I was there when he came to Brook Farm,” Cole proclaimed. Brook Farm was a misguided attempt in the forties to build a utopian communal farm in New York where everyone could connect with the soil and be as one, or something of that nature. Simon hadn’t lasted long there, thank goodness. There was no tea and butter, and if anyone wanted meat, they had to pay extra to sit at a separate table. “Nathanial Hawthorne and I were boon companions,” he bragged.
“Yes,” said Liberty. “After his Brook Farm experience, didn’t Hawthorne write ‘Thank God, my soul is not utterly buried under a dung-heap’?”
Cole chuckled, as if that were just another fond memory that probably hadn’t seemed so rosy and wonderful at the time. “We would share
everything back in those days.” Snapping out of his reverie, he asked Liberty, “So Simon tells me you are a forward-thinking suffragist. That you favor the women’s vote.”
“Why, yes, I—”
“That’s a good thing. A mighty good thing.”
Why is that a good thing? “So you favor the women’s vote, too?”
“Oh, certainly. Why not? The more liberated women become, the better for men, no? Why is it not helpful for men to have women assume a larger proportion of the work? It’s not as though they’ll be taking jobs away from us, because women’s jobs are the ones men don’t want anyway.”
Liberty opened her mouth to protest, but Cole barreled on. “When I saw you in the pharmacy with those two men, I said to myself, ‘Cole. Now there’s a liberated, modern woman.’”
“Oh? And what made you think that?”
Cole wiggled his rather bushy eyebrows. “Two men, my dear. And you were purchasing sandalwood with the two men.”
Liberty started to panic. She tried to bluff. “So? What’s so meaningful about sandalwood? It can be used for many things.” She did not address his obsession with the “two men.”
Cole moved closer, as though about to elbow her knowingly. “It is well-known in more contemporary and stylish circles what sandalwood is used for.”
Liberty had never felt more naked, as though this odious man’s eyes could bore right through her costume. She felt he was leering at her shaved pussy, and she backed away a few inches. “I don’t know what you’re referring to. We were just using it to soothe a burn.”
Cole closed up the gap between them, sidling up as though they shared a secret. “A burn, eh? Those two fellows looked like they were burning, all right.”
Liberty drew herself up. “One of them is the new Indian agent at the fort. The other is an army officer. I don’t believe there was any ‘burning’ going on.”
“Now, now.” Cole lifted a hand to her chin. Liberty jerked away reflexively, but his hand followed, and some of the merriment was sucked from his eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with wooing two men at once for a modern, newfangled suffragist such as yourself.”
How could she say “I’m not wooing them” when she was? “Well,” she choked out. “I wish to woo them both until I can decide between them. That’s logical.”
She had been worrying about how to introduce Levi and Garrett to her father. There was nothing wrong with courting two men. But he would probably find a lot wrong if he knew the extent of their intimacy. She would have to ask Ivy how Father had taken to her arrangement with Neil Tempest and Captain Park or if he was even aware of it. Simon could be fairly oblivious when it came to his daughters. Sometimes there was simply no point in mentioning certain things to him.
And there certainly was nothing wrong with Ivy’s living situation. Dozens of people lived at Serendipity Ranch, helping with the cattle or whatever cattlemen did. But Cole was bringing up a very touchy subject for Liberty. And in a manner that gave her the creeps.
He tightened his grip on her chin, and she was backed up against a settee. “I wonder if your father would appreciate knowing that two men are simultaneously poking his daughter. And one of them a mulatto. Although we did share everything back in the Brook Farm days.”
“There’s no ‘poking’ going on, Mr.…Cole.” She answered truthfully. So far, they had not committed intercourse. If she were a virgin to begin with, she could honestly say she had maintained her virginity. So far.
Cole pinned her to the couch so closely she could feel the heat from his repulsive erection against her lap. She did not wish to be rude, but she would have to extricate herself from this room, if she could find a polite way to do so. “Oh, I’ve heard different. A woman who lives two doors down from your new schoolhouse has witnessed some untoward things going on. She’s quite shocked. Men in various states of undress parading about. If one is to believe her, your two beaus are even fond of spooning each other unnaturally.”
His thumb rubbed Liberty’s lower lip, but she didn’t dare pull away now. Not until she discovered his intentions. She suspected it was Cole himself who had witnessed the untoward things while lurking about in the bushes and spying, which would explain how he had developed a fixation on her. “I might need to tell the town council that your men are sodomites, experienced in Greek love. However, I could be convinced to withhold my knowledge. It will be our secret, Liberty.” Cole breathed booze onto her face, but she didn’t dare move. “I’ll make sure your father never hears of it, either.”
What was in it for Cole? “Would you be doing me this favor out of respect for my father? Because you’re old college friends?” She realized that by asking that, she was also admitting that he spoke the truth.
“Not at all,” Cole said smoothly. He gripped her shoulder with his fossilized claws. “I’d be doing it because I expect certain favors in return from you.”
And he pressed his ugly, dry lips to hers.
* * * *
When Levi returned from escorting Liberty home, he mentioned to Garrett that he’d seen that mustachioed fellow from the pharmacy. The one Garrett had seen in his dream, laughing about Amherst College with Liberty’s father. He had passed him by in the road, and it had seemed to Levi that the fellow had wiggled his eyebrows knowingly. About what, neither one of them could figure. What did the fellow pretend to “know”?
So they spread out the talking board to find out more.
“I wonder if it’ll work with only two people,” Garrett mused. “What did Zeke say?”
Levi said, “That he supposed it would work with two people. Although it might be better if we had a third.”
Just then, as Garrett was lighting a couple of candles to create the proper atmosphere, there came a loud rapping. At first Garrett thought it was the spirits, rapping as they’d been doing during the séance at Vancouver House. He looked about the room, waiting for more raps.
“Hey!” The clownish voice of Ezekiel Vipham came from the front porch. “Let me in!”
Levi rose to open the door, shooting Garrett an exasperated look. “We could use a third, but he’s got to promise not to talk about his mother.”
Zeke fell into the room as though coming in from the arctic. “Hoo, boy!” He went to warm his hands at the wood stove. “I don’t suppose Liberty’s here, is she?”
Garrett said, “She had a dinner to attend at her father’s.”
“Right,” said Zeke. “I wasn’t invited. Simon thinks I somehow don’t create the proper atmosphere that would encourage people to do trade in Laramie. What does that even mean?”
“That he thinks you’re scaring off other merchants?”
Zeke spread his hands wide. “Why would I be scaring people away? I’m perfectly presentable in mixed company.”
Levi smirked. “Why, indeed, would you be scaring people away? It doesn’t behoove your business to be revolting people.”
Zeke grimaced. “He probably just wants Liberty there. After all, you’ve got to admit, she’s much easier on the eyes. Who wants to look across the table at a worn-out, balding fellow like me? Speaking of tables! I see you’ve got the talking board out. Shall we try it?” Without an invitation, Zeke sat himself at the table, and Levi poured him some whiskey to lubricate his thoughts.
Levi had a caveat, however. “Yes, we were going to try it. Just a warning, though. It won’t have anything to do with your mother.”
Zeke’s fingers were already fluttering over the wicker planchette. “Aw, why not? I need to find out more about this repugnant greengrocer who has overtaken Ma’s life.”
Garrett said soothingly, “That’s not as important right now. We need to know about this friend of Simon Hudson’s, the college buddy from Amherst. That’s our question, and we’re sticking with it.”
Levi added, “If we get any answers, you can ask about your mother afterward.”
Garrett thought Levi was being entirely too generous. He started the session by addressing his spirit guide.
“Paddy, are you there?”
YES.
“What can you tell us about this college friend of Simon Hudson?”
The planchette spelled out AMHERST.
“Yes, we know,” said Garrett. “But why does he keep looking at us? What is his interest in us?”
GREEK LOVE.
Zeke guffawed. “Greek love, that’s a good one! Is your guide Paddy trying to tell us that Cole Waters is interested in other men? That’s rich! He’s come all the way to Laramie to sell glass when really all he’s interested in is bumfucking—”
“Wait.” Levi’s voice was authoritative, booming through the room. Loud enough to shut up Zeke, who waited. “You say this Amherst fellow’s name is Cole Waters?”
“Why, yes,” said Zeke uncertainly. “That’s his name, all right. The Waters Glass Company. Kind of has a ring to it, don’t you think? See, water is transparent, and so is glass. I thought it was a pretty flashy name, myself. But if he thinks he can come to town just to get his hands on my johnson, he’s got another thing—”
“Cole Waters.” Levi shot Garrett a meaningful look, his eyes flashing with significance.
But Garrett failed to see the importance in the name. He shook his head blankly, questioning.
“Don’t you see?” Levi shouted, halfway standing from his chair. “The board, last time we used it! It said to ‘watch out for cold waters’!”
Land’s sake. The meaning began to sink in to Garrett’s fluffy brain. “It was just a manual error!” he shouted.
“Yes!” bellowed Levi. “It meant to say, ‘Watch out for Cole Waters.’ Only the planchette must’ve moved onto a D instead of the E.”
Garrett snapped at Zeke, “Probably pushed aside by your stupid hands, you lummox. Worrying about your poor mother in the spirit world when you were busy flailing about, knocking the planchette aside with your bumbling fingers.”
Levi held out a calming hand. “All right, all right. Obviously, this Cole Waters jackass is going to do something to Liberty. But we need to know what. We can’t just run around making accusations—”
Disorder in the House [How the West Was Done 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 12