I felt slapped. I moved away from him quickly as I could. I didn’t cower from him though. Gentry was so angry he should have scared me. He was a powerful man who tangled with bulls and could take on most men I ever met with an arm tied behind his back. He had been a terrifying sight when he tore through my mother’s kitchen when he was just a boy. Now he had another forty pounds of pure muscle. His arms were twice the size they were then. But Gentry would never hurt me. Physically anyhow outside the pain for pleasure games we played when we made love.
“Why did you protect him?” Gentry finally asked. His voice deep and laced with forced composure.
“I was protecting you. You wouldn’t have stopped. You would have killed him. It wasn’t worth it. He’s not worth it.”
“Bull shit!” Gentry leapt up and I involuntarily stepped back. “I know what he did to you! That’s right Gloria and I talk too! I should have killed him. I had the right!”
Gentry’s roaring voice shook through the barn and I was happy I had turned all the horses out today. “I wouldn’t let you do anything that would result in my loosing you! I couldn’t handle a repeat of last time,” I hung my head. I wanted to fight Gentry. Remind him that I stood my own and could give as good as I got anymore.
But I wanted Gentry to relax even more. He pinned me against a stall door.
“It’s not your choice. I have to protect you. To keep you safe. I promised you that.”
We were a mere three inches apart and we locked eyes. “And I have to protect you too.”
I found a sudden jolt of confidence as I undid his belt in seconds, after all practice makes perfect.
“I told you I’m not in the mood to make love.”
“Who the hell said anything about that?” I undid the snap and then the zipper. “You need to blow off some fucking steam.”
I pushed his jeans and boxers to the ground as I hit my knees. I tossed my own hat from my head and heard it hit the ground somewhere behind me as I reached the base of his impressively massive cock and guided it into my mouth. I quickly tied my hair back in a sloppy do and grabbed his ass pushing him into me as far as I could take him. I licked his tip like a swirl ice cream code and heard him groan. Such a perfect sound.
I worked him hard and quick. Gently cupping his balls and stroking them as I slurped and bobbed quacking up and down him. Gentry braced himself on the frame of the stall door. Resting his head on his forearm. His fingers tangled in my hair.
I felt my pussy selfishly clench and drip. This wasn’t about her. It was all about him. I had only had my mouth on his dick a few times since I had been at the ranch. And never gotten to suck him till completion. Gentry preferred being balls deep in my tight pussy and I couldn’t complain.
I opened my jaw wide as I could to take as much of him as I could. Like the rest of Gentry, his dick seemed to have added some muscle tone to it over the years. No matter how I tried, Gentry couldn’t fit completely in my mouth.
But I felt I was making more than enough effort to make up for it. Gentry guided my head back and attempted to tug me to my feet.
“No Gentry,” I said breathlessly as I released him for just a moment. “Let me finish you. Please. Fuck my mouth please.”
Gentry looked me in the eyes for a long moment, as if waiting for me to change my mind. When I didn’t he slammed his dick back into my, chocking me as my pussy flooded. Nothing was a bigger turn on than pleasuring my man.
I felt him clench up and I sucked hard and he growled, yanking out at the last second and exploded on my face. I lapped at the semen he sprayed on me. Opening my mouth to take in his salty bitterness as I grabbed his cock in one hand working it from the root to the tip. Milking him dry. I left him to tremble and rocked back off of my knees.
Chapter Twenty – Four
Gentry
I took a deep breath and gathered control of myself best that I could. In the last fifteen minutes I had been through so many emotions I was left feeling drained. And now I literally had been.
I tucked my tender dick back into my pants and looked down at my sweet Krys. Lord I loved this woman. I reached my hand out and pulled her back to her feet. Taking her hair out of her restraints, I ran my fingers through its darkness and let it lie over her shoulders.
She smiled meekly at me and I kissed her gently, tasting myself on her lips. I wrapped my arms around her tightly and kissed her forehead. “I don’t like doing this. Like this with you. It just feels … dirty,” I confessed.
“Maybe. But, it was fun and you feel better and you know it.”
“I still wish I would have hit him.”
“I know. I couldn’t have imagined what you thought when you saw Jimmy.”
“The same urge to destroy him as I’ve felt since the day I heard about you two. Fear that he came back for you and you decided to leave with him.”
“That is never going to happen,” her eyes were stern as she placed her hands on the back of my head forcing me to look her in the eyes. “Nothing in this world could ever make me choose him over you.”
I sat back on the hay bales and picked her up, depositing her onto my lap. “Doesn’t change the fear,” I mumbled, hating admitting it to her, hell hated admitting it to myself. She lie her head on my shoulder and burrowed into me.
“It’s not true. It will never be true,” she paused, “how much did you hear of all that?”
“Enough. I don’t want your money, his money, whosever money it is,” I rubbed my hands up and down her back and mentally ran through the conversation I had heard between Krys and Jimmy before laughing.
“What?” She asked sitting straight up. “What’s so funny?”
“Might be salty ground to discuss, but why did Jimmy carry on about you like you were the Virgin Mary when he got you?”
She tossed her hands up dramatically knowing damn good and well I was never going to let up until she told me. I could be a pesky annoyance too. She and Gloria didn’t invent that themselves. “Because, I was. To him at least. I was a virgin till my wedding night. Lots of booze, dark sheets imminently sent to laundry. It was easy to fake.”
“But why fake it at all? Was it a contractual to marry him?” I chuckled again thinking of her virtue in a pre-nup.
She shook her head with a pained look in her eyes and suddenly what little pleasure and comedic relief I had been experiencing in that moment vanished. “No, I was just. I was still waiting for you. To change your mind.”
I hung my head. If she only knew. If I had only known, our lives would have been a lot different.
***
“What the hell’s up your ass?” Ed asked as I stormed around the kitchen half – dragging my latest injury, a cracked femur along.
“Tired of being kept up in this house.”
“Bull shit. Been this way since your sister called last night. What the hell you fighting about now? Just go out for the holidays and she’ll quit nagging.”
“It’s not Gloria. I mean I agreed to go but it’s not Gloria.”
“She gave you one of those updates again didn’t she? About that old girl of yours.”
I huffed as I rummaged in the fridge. Wasn’t a damn thing worth eating or drinking in this place. “It’s been four years now. It’s time you move on, Son.”
“I have. She has too. She’s engaged Marrying some doctor or doctor-to-be. In Boston or New York, wherever in the hell she’s at now.”
“When’s the wedding?”
“Gloria didn’t say. New engagement, not date yet.”
“You have a little time then. Can’t do anything for a few weeks around here all racked up anyhow. You know how to order plane tickets,” Ed nodded at his bedroom door. “Still there in the desk and it’s still yours.”
I shook my head. “She didn’t want this back then. She sure as hell won’t want it now.”
***
I had been so terribly wrong. She waited and held on for me as long as she could until I all but forced to move on. Krys had held out a hell of a lot l
onger than other woman were even consider and a lot longer than any woman should have to.
I hated the thought of her in her dorm room, crying, waiting for the phone to ring, a letter to come in the mail, a knock on her door. Anything telling her that I was coming for her, that everything would be alright because I loved her. I did love her back then. I was just to stupid, to proud and to damn stubborn to make things right.
I couldn’t think of that though. The decade we lost when I stopped writing back to her and then stopped opening her letters altogether. Telling myself I couldn’t leave the ranch for even another day let alone the time she needed to be in Boston. But I still fled from the ranch and spent most of the next five years on the rodeo circuit.
If I let myself, I could imagine how perfect the last ten years could have been for us. I could see the children that would be running through the barn aisle past us right now as I held my wife in my arms. I was a nice picture, but thinking of it would eat me alive. It would destroy what we had together now.
We were still sitting, curled up in silence, holding on to each other for what we really were at this point, life support, when a knock came on the barn door.
“Safe to enter?” Brandon called out.
“Smartass,” I muttered.
“He’s not wrong,” Krys told me and yelled at Brandon to come in.
He opened the door cautiously still and stuck his head in. “Jake called. Said you didn’t answer your cell. He needs to know if your still on to ride this weekend. Said you’re down for cutting, roping, bull doggin’ and broncs.”
“I’ll him back,” I told Brandon and dismissed him with a small wave. I had forgotten all about the rodeo. Brandon shut the door and two green eyes looked up at me excitedly.
“The Angel Tree Program that ensures all children have a Christmas and the like, puts on an annual 50/50 rodeo. Fifty percent of tickets and entry fee profits pay for the Angel Tree and fifty percent pays the rodeo contestants. It’s the largest local charity event.
“And you compete in all those events?”
“For nine years now. Ed is an announcer, Robbie’s a bull fighter. The boys all ride, it’s a Mirror Lake affair.”
“But you don’t bull ride?” she asked almost challenging me to say yes. Rodeo events of any kind could be dangerous but it was basic knowledge that most bulls would prefer you if you didn’t get up again. I had faced down many a mean and frankly terrifying bulls back when I was praying for brain trauma and didn’t give a damn if I ever got out of the sand again.
But there was nothing more terrifying than pissing off Krystina DeLouch. She would do more damage than any bull ever dreamed if I told her I was getting back into riding them.
“I don’t ride bulls anymore. Ed and I have an agreement. I stick to roping and horse events and he doesn’t kill me himself.”
“Sounds reasonable,” she smiled and adjusted her hat.
“Ready to look deeper into my world?”
“Our world,” she kissed me.
“I am going to need a favor from you.”
“And what might that be?”
“Your horse. Or well my horse back for the weekend. Thunder Storm is my rodeo prize winner. I can’t be in an arena without him, so I need you to convince him to let me compete. I haven’t ridden him since you got here and I’m not so sure he will welcome the change again the way he’s fallen in love with you.”
“How long till the rodeo?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“I can spare him for that long,” she stood up and tossed me a head rope from a hook hanging on the barn wall. “You better ride. I’ll help Brandon on the frozen water pumps.”
“You’re not exactly mechanically inclined Krys!” I shouted out as she headed out the door.
“Always a time to learn!”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Krystina
Mom slammed the back door that went out the kitchen when she left for the bar. She worked and made enough money to keep the lights and water on and her in booze and smokes, that was about it.
I assume most trailer parks were filled with just down on their luck people or people who might even just not desire high house payments. Decent folk perhaps. Ours had seventeen trailers in the little park, maybe four or five held these kind of folks. For the most part, the park was filled with beings like my mom and her consorts.
The two bedroom trailer was the only home I had ever known and I knew all about it. Meaning I could place each step that mom’s new boyfriend Daryl – or rather her new again boyfriend – was taking. Paper thin walls helped. That meant that they didn’t hide their drunken romps, loud fights, the cussing, the slaps and the punches.
I was opening my junior year English literacy book when I heard Daryl open the fridge. I heard the crack of an aluminum can and the close of the refrigerator door. He was drunk already when I came home from my tutoring job an hour ago. It was barley seven now and he was still drinking. Daryl, with any luck, would be passed out by nine.
I put my ear phones in one ear and plugged into an old CD player. None of the fancy new music download players in the DeLouch house. I heard footsteps on the hallways cracked linoleum. Both the bathroom and moms room were on the other end of the house. I grimaced and squeezed my eyes tight. Hoping I would get lucky and praying for a miracle. My door didn’t shut right so it never latched. Not that there was a lock on it to begin with.
Daryl stumbled into the flimsy cardboard and it flew open. I picked up my pen and tried to ignore his grand entrance and do my homework. But it was no use.
“What’s a puurrteee thing liikee you doi’ stud’n’ on a fine night like, like, to-night?”
“It’s a school night Daryl, that’s what kids do on school nights.”
Daryl was a short portly bastard with a two-day beard, straggly past a cut dishwater blonde hair that had gone unwashed for Lord knows how long.
“Na,” he made it to the foot of my bed only knocking over my laundry basket along the way. He collapsed on the foot of my mattress and I put my book and notebook back in my bag. I wasn’t stupid though. I had seen prison movies. I held onto the pen just in case.
“Purty girl like you should be partyin’ wit me. You so much prutier than you ma. Come kiss me,” Daryl puckered his lips making this horrible, unnerving sound. I jumped to my feet and he swiped out at me, grabbing the back of my shirt. I struggled for a moment against his desperate attempts to pull me back. I heard threads rip in my tee-shirt and I fell free.
I ran. Out of my room and threw open the front door of the house, leaping over the broken cinder block stairs in my bare feet and kept running. Running away from home. Away from Daryl.
Towards the Hollis’. Towards Gloria. Towards Gentry. My Gentry.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Gentry
Krystina’s thrashing and inaudible words woke me in the middle of the night. By the time I registered her nightmare, she was screaming my name. I jolted up right and flipped on the bedside lamp. “Krys! Krystina! It’s just a nightmare. It’s just a dream. I’m here Krys. Right here baby,” I gathered her in my arms and she pulled against me, trying to escape a man who was just in the back of her consciousness. I held her tight to my chest, smoothing her hair and kissing her face until her sobs subsided and she opened her eyes.
“I’m sorry I woke you,” she whispered cordially a few moments later.
“Krys there is nothing to be sorry for,” I assured her.
She shook her head. “I’m a grown ass woman. Things a thousand times worse have happened to millions of women all over the world, still I panic at this.”
“It shouldn’t happen to any of them and it shouldn’t have happened to you either. You were sixteen. Your mother should have protected you. She should have chosen you.”
Krys and I were both nude from last nights activities and I could feel the cold sweat on her skin as I rubbed her back. “Do you want something to drink? I can get you water? Warm milk? Personall
y, I think it’s disgusting but they say it helps,” I babbled.
“No, I’m fine. Just hold me Gentry.”
I lie us both back in bed. Rolling the quilt around her body fixing her to my side. She buried her face in my chest. I didn’t know what nightmares she had about the incident we never spoke of as it came in a few different parts. I didn’t know if she had them over the years or if seeing me again had somehow triggered a relapse. All I know is that she had them and that made me hate her mother – and by extension and to a degree my parents – even more.
Looking back in the calm light of day it’s easy to reason with my parents and their way of thinking. What Gloria and I had begged of them hadn’t been exactly legal anyhow. When I found Krys running in just jeans, a ripped t-shirt and no shoes, completely barefoot down the street a block from our house I panicked for just a second. I saw the tears streaming rivers down her face and the fear that coated her body.
That second passed quickly and in the next I knew I would do whatever it took to protect her, to make whatever was wrong right again. I would die for Krystina DeLouch if I had to and I was ready to kill for her too.
She collapsed into my arms. Her skin cold from the few blocks she had run in the thirty – degree weather that had left snow hanging around in some spots that March. My parents were playing cards with some friends but Gloria was home when I carried Krys inside. I sat Krys on the couch in the living room and wrapped a throw blanket around her.
I shattered a lamp against the wall when she told us. Ready to storm out and kill Daryl. But Kry’s firmly shout ‘NO!’ pulled me back.
Our parents came home straight away when Gloria called. Krys hung her head in shame and embarrassment, refusing to contact police or the Department of Child and Family Services. She apologized for the intrusion on our night, said she had just gotten scared but it was no big deal. Daryl would sober up in the morning and he was bound to be passed out by now.
Police would cause more problems than solutions. There wasn’t enough evidence to remove her from her mother’s custody. Teffy DeLouch was a horrible woman but she held tight to the daughter she couldn’t care for or barely love.
Mirror Lake Ranch: Once in a Memory Page 9