In the taped-off square that day, Breville held me as long as he could. He ran his hands down my sides and over the small of my back and pressed me to him. I thought I could feel his cock through his pants. Maybe that was what I had driven four hours for, to feel that.
Before Breville let me go, he said into my hair, “You are sweet, you are so sweet to me.”
“You are sweet to me, too,” I said.
When we walked away from each other that day, we both turned and we both made the pass through the air with our hands. Steady as she goes, we said with our palms, pushing away the air. Smooth. Until next time, we said with our hands.
Until then.
I made the drive home in under four hours, stopping only once in Motley for gas. When I got back to the cabin, even though it was past ten, there was still some light in the sky. I couldn’t really see it when I walked down to the lake, but once I was out in the water, I could make out the glow in the west. Dark blue, a paring of moon. The water was black, and fragrant— from what, I didn’t know. Maybe it was the smell of the wildflowers and shrubs on the bank, mixing in the moist night air, but to me it seemed like the water itself was perfumed. It was like water in a dream. That’s what I swam in.
I didn’t go far out into the lake— a boat would never see me in that darkness— but I couldn’t stand to stay close to the dock, either. I didn’t want to feel anything beneath my feet. When I was out a hundred feet or so, I just stayed in place, treading water, pushing it away with my hands. It was the easiest thing. The water felt like silk on my hands. No— it felt like water.
I didn’t know what to think about Breville, about how I felt about him, about how I felt more kindness from him in the taped-off square in front of the guard than I had in bed with the cowboy. I thought about the way the cowboy’s skin had felt then, and what it had been like to kiss him. Like swimming in deep water. I didn’t know how a kiss could be like that, unless it was everything in the cowboy coming out, because it was clear he was dark water. There was the moodiness that kept surfacing even in the short time we’d spent together, the barroom dares and fights, the talk about his rigid parents who had disowned him when he was still a boy. And then there was the seizuring and howling he’d done when he came. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but he’d sounded like the wolves I’d heard in the distance one night at the cabin.
But then I thought about lying between his legs, right before I took his cock in my mouth. I thought of the moment right before, and then when I touched him and sucked on him, finding a way to take more of him into my mouth. When I liked a man, really liked him, there was something so sweet, so lollipop-good, about sucking his cock, and that was how I’d felt about the cowboy. I kept hearing him say, No one ever done me like that, and I kept seeing the way his face looked when he said it.
Not that it mattered, since he was gone, but I’d felt both fear and the lollipop-good feeling with the cowboy. I couldn’t make sense of the two things together, so I just turned and floated on my back and let myself think about it all. The cowboy with his smooth skin and Breville with his burning hands. I couldn’t touch Breville, couldn’t know him, and I’d touched the cowboy, but I didn’t know him, either. They were both ciphers. That’s what I lay thinking about, floating, cradled in the fragrant water of the dark lake.
22
FOR MY NEXT VISIT to Breville, I wore a black blazer with no blouse underneath. It buttoned just above my bra, and on my breastbone I wore a necklace of onyx and marcasite. Its triangular pendant pointed to the skin between my breasts that was shiny with perfume.
Breville took it all in as he was supposed to. “Nice jacket,” he told me when we were seated in our plastic chairs.
“Thank you.”
“Nice necklace. Wish I could wear it.”
I didn’t understand his words or tone, but it made me think back to the day he assured me that he didn’t have a homosexual bone in his body, that no one “messed” with him. It all made me wonder about Breville, about who he really was in prison, and what details of his life he edited out for me.
As if he could read my thoughts and doubts and wanted to re-route them, Breville said, “Nice breasties.” As if he were a kid.
“I wish I could suck your nipples,” he then told me, quietly. And wasn’t such a kid.
I had that on my mind, I think, so I asked Breville to tell me what he was like as a kid.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything you want to tell me,” I said. “What did you do for fun?”
“Chased girls and raised hell. What all boys do. What were you like?”
“Oh, I was a good kid. Shy. All anyone had to do was look at me cross and I cried.”
“Tenderhearted,” Breville said.
“I think so. That’s what my mother tells me.”
“How old were you when you lost your virginity?”
“Fifteen,” I said. “When I was in the ninth grade.”
“What made you wait so long?”
“I didn’t think I did,” I said. “Besides, I was fooling around a lot before that. Why? How old were you?”
“When I lost my virginity? Eight.”
“Eight years old?”
“I couldn’t come, but that was the first time I had sex. With an older girl. My cousin, as a matter of fact. She started it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that— it shocked me and I didn’t know how to hide it. But Breville seemed to want to go on talking, so I tried to pretend it was a regular conversation.
“You could have an erection when you were eight?”
“That’s how it got done,” Breville said. “I think I was about a year older when I came the first time.”
“That seems way too young.”
“When I used to get mad at my mom, I’d just run away. Usually I’d stay away until I got laid.”
“How old were you then?”
“Ten, eleven. Then, when I was about fourteen, this older lady took a shine to me. She was in her twenties or thirties. I’d stay with her long enough to get what I wanted, then I’d go through her purse when she was in the bathroom. Steal her money or her dope. What ever I could find.”
“What did she do?”
“Ahh, she got pissed off at me, of course,” Breville said. He sat up as he said that, and when he leaned back in his chair again, he slouched down and stretched his legs on either side of mine.
“She’d try to kick me in the ass,” he said, laughing. “But I was younger and could run faster.”
After he told me that, we sat there not talking. I tried to think about what Breville had just told me, but I could barely take in the information. At eight I was in third grade and liked playing with kittens and my doll house. What ever precociousness I displayed by rummaging around through my father’s girlie magazines was nothing compared to Breville’s early sexual experiences, and they threw a new light on his crime. When he raped that woman in South Minneapolis at nineteen, he did it after being molested at eight by his twelve-year-old cousin, and after ten or eleven years of fucking. And I finally understood the thing he’d told me the first day I came to see him: the love of his mother or grandfather could not save him from the years of underage drinking, abuse, petty thievery, and sexual escapades. By the time he was nineteen, he’d been running wild for a lifetime.
“You’ll have to wear a short skirt one day,” Breville told me then, jarring me out of my thoughts.
When I looked across the aisle at him, slouched down in his chair, I could see something in his eyes that was soft and glittering at the same time.
“I don’t think I have a short skirt.”
“Maybe you should buy one,” he said. “No, that’s all right. You don’t have to. It doesn’t matter.”
He looked away from me then, but when he looked back, he shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I’m just happy you come see me. That you sit across from me and talk to me.”
“Maybe I could unbutton a few more buttons on one of the dresses I have.”
“Do you think you could?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll see.”
“Do you understand what I’m saying?”
It took me a moment to understand what he meant. But then I followed his eyes down to his jeans, and I finally understood what he was telling me.
“It’s just from talking to you, Suzanne. Do you see now?”
“I understand.”
For the rest of the visit, I don’t know what we talked about. Nothing, really. I just sat across the aisle from Breville, between his legs, I let him sit there with his hard cock, talking to me, and when we stood inside the taped-off square, I let him push his cock against my belly for the moment we were allowed in front of the guards.
“Sweet Suzanne,” he said into my hair.
I didn’t have time to say anything back, but when I left the prison that day, I carried all of that— on my skin and in my hair. In me.
23
AFTER I INTRODUCED MYSELF to Jacqui Breville on the phone, she sounded surprised for only a second.
“Alpha has told me what a good friend you’ve been” she said. “I’ve heard some nice things about you.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
We chatted for a moment about the weather in Rapid City, South Dakota, which was where she was living, and I told her I’d been through Kadoka a few times.
“Then you understand,” she said. “All the kids cleared out of there as soon as they could. So did I.”
“Small-town life isn’t for everyone,” I said. “I know it wasn’t for me.”
We chatted awhile longer— about her youngest daughter, about where my family lived, about what I did for a living and how nice it was to have summers off — and it was all so pleasant and light-hearted, I could have been talking to anyone, absolutely anyone, except the mother of a convicted rapist in Stillwater state prison. But why would it have been otherwise? To Jacqui Breville, I was a complete stranger. Even if she did want to fulfill her son’s request to be friendly to me, there was no reason to discuss anything more pressing than the weather.
We kept up the patter a little longer, and then I said, “Well, I don’t want to keep you. I just wanted to introduce myself and say hello.”
“I’m glad you did,” she said. “It was nice to talk with you.”
“It was good to talk with you, too,” I said.
We were so polite it was almost funny. It wasn’t until I hung up that I thought about the phone call from her perspective. Her in-carcerated son, whom she’d been powerless over since he was eight or nine, asked her to talk with a woman who’d been visiting him at prison. And I could only imagine what Breville told her about me. That we were writing to each other, that I came to visit every week, that I was lonely— I had no idea. But I figured Jacqui had seen it come and go, and if I were in her shoes, the question I would have wanted to ask would have been, What do you want with my son?
Or maybe Breville told her my story and tried to get her to understand we were somehow good for each other. And maybe he told her he was falling in love with me. Or that I was falling in love with him. I believe he could have told her any number of things— and not a single one of them would have made sense to her, or answered the question of what I wanted from her son, which was a question not even I could answer.
But a couple of things were clear to me from my short conversation. Breville’s mother not only loved him, she actively supported him, at least as much as she could from another state and nine hours away. If she didn’t, she never would have taken the time to have the nebulously sweet conversation with me that she’d had. And I thought that meant the world— not to me, but to Breville. His mother loved and supported him now during his incarceration, just as she had loved and supported him when he’d been a hell-raising teenager. He had told me that, and I had heard in Jacqui Breville’s voice that it was true. Because in spite of how noncommittal her conversation had been with me, it had, in fact, been an act of kindness on her part to sound so pleasant and friendly to me. What ever else had been going on in her day— and I had reason to believe from Breville that his mother did not have the easiest life— she had done what she could to assist her son in his new friendship or courtship or craziness with me.
When I realized that, it humbled me. It humbled me that on a day when I had been upset and had driven to Stillwater to add my particular sadness to Breville’s plate, he had tried to listen carefully and caringly to me, and when he still felt he had not done enough for me, to help me through what ever pain I was going through, he had offered up the one thing he had to offer, which was the telephone number of his mother an entire state away. He had given me what he could think to give me on short notice, and sometime in the days after my visit and before today’s phone call, he had called his mother and told her something— that I was going through a hard time, that I could use a friend, that he cared for me— and he had asked her to talk to me. And she had. Perhaps all the reserve I’d heard in her voice had been a response to the reserve she’d heard in my voice. I didn’t know.
What I did know for certain was that I felt some of the same self-consciousness I’d felt in the visiting room the day Breville had sung to me. He’d offered up that goofy version of “Goodnight, Irene,” and the thing was so corny I almost couldn’t stand to listen to it. But there he’d sat in the visiting room among his fellow convicts, singing to me.
It was almost more than I could bear.
24
THE NEXT NIGHT I was lying in bed with Breville’s latest letter fanned out on the pillows in front of me. I’d gone for a swim for a long time, and I felt cool in my skin and the light cotton nightgown I wore. Breville’s letter was from days ago, and I’d seen him since I’d received it, but I still liked to have his pages in front of me. I wanted to make sure I wrote about what ever he asked me about, and it helped me connect with him as I wrote if I saw his words in front of me.
This night I was trying to describe what my orgasms were like, but I doubted if what I wanted to say would sound compelling to anyone but me. I figured Breville would want to hear that a good fuck made me come, but it wasn’t the truth of my life, and it wasn’t what I wanted to write.
“The most intense orgasms I have are often the ones I have alone,” I wrote instead. “Not that I don’t come with men— I do, especially when they go down on me, and especially when they slip a finger inside as they eat me. But for sheer intensity, the orgasms I have when I masturbate with my vibrator win out. I have one orgasm, and if I wait a couple minutes— just long enough for the strongest contractions to subside, but before I come down from the mountain, so to speak— then I can have another orgasm and an-other. It is easy to come again and again, and there is no worrying about a partner, or worrying about being selfish. Which is not to say that I prefer being alone— I prefer being with a man and kissing and sharing all the closeness and passion. But I know my body, and I know how to come like that, over and over.”
I was thinking what I could possibly write next when I heard someone pull into the driveway. It wasn’t a driveway, really— just a patch of grass worn thin beside the cabin— but I heard the sound of the motor and saw the headlights shining. At first I thought it was someone who’d gotten lost and needed a place to turn around, but the engine shut off and the lights went out, and in the moonlight I could see the truck from the side window.
After the second knock, I opened the door of the cabin, but I kept the screen door latched.
“Can I come in?” the cowboy said.
I didn’t answer but stood there in the doorway, watching him, watching the night air around him. I didn’t turn on the light out-side or in the kitchen. I didn’t want him to see me, and I didn’t want to see him. I just wanted to hear what he had to say.
“I would have been here earlier,” he said. “But I forgot the way to your place. You’re a hard person to find.”
&
nbsp; “You found me.”
“Can I come in?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You act like you don’t know me,” the cowboy said.
“I don’t.”
“But I know you.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I said. “I thought you were in Wyoming.”
“I was. I came back to see you.”
“Why not tell the truth?” I said. “Did your friends get tired of you? Throw you out?”
“I told you. I went back. Look at my eyes. I’ve been driving since yesterday. I need a fucking shower. I’ve driven up and down this road four or five times, trying to find this goddamn place.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be found.”
“Jesus Christ, Suzanne.”
“Well, at least you remember my name,” I said. But I unhooked the screen door and let the cowboy step into the kitchen. And then I put on the light. I wanted to see exactly who was standing in front of me.
He was off crutches but still in a leg brace. Still limping. He stood, shaking his head. I just kept on looking at him.
“Here’s what I think. I think you came down here to night from Blackduck,” I said. “I think your friends finally got sick of you and threw you out.”
“You’re pretty smart,” he said. “But you have it all wrong.”
“I’m smart enough,” I said. “What part did I get wrong?”
“All of it.”
“Okay, I don’t know where you’re living. All I know is the bars are closed now, and that’s why you decided to come out here.”
The cowboy half-stepped toward me then. And the next thing he did was slow, deliberate. I saw his arm moving, but it happened so gradually I didn’t feel I had to move away, because I knew I could at any time. The cowboy reached toward me and slipped a couple fingers between my legs, pushing the cotton of my night-gown back against my vulva. And he kept his fingers there. Holding me.
“Is this bar closed?” he said. “Can I still get a drink?”
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