Promise Me

by Brent, Cora

  Orion smiled as the man took an anxious swallow from his beer glass. He rose and withdrew a twenty dollar bill.

  “Thanks for the service,” he said, giving me a tepid smile before hastily exiting.

  Orion went to the window, staring. I heard the sound of a car engine starting.

  “Goddamn BMW and he’s just passing through.” Orion appeared to be talking to himself.

  Kira appeared and noted his tense posture. She looked at me questioningly.

  “Promise,” Orion bellowed, still staring out the window. “You ever see that dipshit before?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Just asked me how long I worked here. I told him for years.”

  Orion nodded, turning to me. “You lied. Why?”

  Kira started to say something but Orion hushed her with a glare.

  “Why?” he asked again.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “He was making me…uncomfortable for some reason.”

  My answer seemed to be what Orion expected. “Yeah,” he said softly. Then he shook his head and thudded out of the building.

  Kira sidled over and squeezed my arm. “What was that about?”

  I shrugged. “I really don’t know.”

  When Rachel emerged from the rest room, I gave her a brief account of the incident with the odd stranger. Now that it was over I wondered how much of my internal alarm was of my own making.

  “Orion chased him off,” Kira finished.

  Rachel seemed to be thinking. Her soft lips were set in a stiff line.

  “Rachel? Is there anything to worry about?”

  Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “No, hon. I’m sure he was just a lonely traveler looking for a drink and some company.”

  Despite being in the company of Kira’s brisk chattering, I felt a little off balance the rest of the day. When I heard Gray’s bike roll up I ran outside, craving the comfort of his arms.

  “My girl,” he sighed happily, kissing me on the neck and holding me close while I inhaled the scent of hot leather. I didn’t want to let go.

  He rubbed my back. “Promise? Something wrong?”

  “No. I just missed you.”

  “Missed you too, angel.” He kissed me.

  Then he drew back and pointed toward the western quadrant of the sky. “Look.”

  It was another haboob, bearing down with ferocity like a wide, beige tornado. Gray rubbed my arms, staring at the sky.

  “Weather radar says it’s being chased by a hell of a storm.”

  Orion appeared and stood next to Grayson. He seemed wired, tense. “Fucking wash might overflow like it did a few months back.” He looked at Gray pointedly. “Need your help with something.” He began marching over to the open garage attached to the house. He didn’t look back to see if Gray would follow.

  Gray squeezed my hands, kissed my forehead. “I’ll be right back.” He looked at me more closely, tipping my chin up. “You sure everything’s okay?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “I’m just still a little out of sorts. You know, because of the news about Josiah Bastian.” Even saying his name brought a sour distaste to my mouth.

  Grayson kissed me again before following Orion. He glanced back once and smiled when he saw me watching him. I turned back to watch the dust cloud gathering strength in the west.

  The last time I had seen one of those forbidding clouds I had stared into it with open fascination, feeling lured by its churning depths. Now I only felt a blossoming anxiety. I wanted to be indoors, removed from its reach. But even as I cast one more fearful glance behind me before I shut the door to the Riverbottom, I knew it wasn’t the storm which nursed the disquiet in my soul.

  It was something else.

  PART THREE

  “Come to Arizona, where Hell spends the Summer.” - Modified travel slogan, circa 1930s

  “Hope begins in the dark.” – Anne Lamott

  “I’d grown to adulthood without ever understanding the power of physical touch. It was hedonistic. It was glorious. And coupled with the story of the heart it was everything.” – Promise Talbot

  Chapter Twenty Two

  GRAYSON

  Grayson twisted the greasewood twig in his hands and a few of the waxy leaves fluttered to the ground. He didn’t like this. Not the part about club business, that didn’t phase him at all. He didn’t like leaving her.

  First there was the news of that crazy prophet’s death, then today this oiled city piece of shit showing up out of nowhere. He knew now why she had appeared so rattled when he rode up. Orion told him about it first thing. Before he laid out the details of the business at hand.

  Orion watched him with a shrewd expression. “Be less than twenty four hours,” he shrugged.

  “I could bring her.”

  Orion scoffed. “Fuck no, you can’t bring her.”

  Gray broke a few more leaves off. He could smell the resinous secretion of the plant. It was a distinct odor synonymous with the post-rain scent of the desert. “What do you make of that asshole today?”

  Orion paused. “Something off about that shithead, that’s for sure. Could have just been pimping around though.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Hey,” Orion slapped him on the back in brotherly fashion. Orion held him in high regard, Gray knew. He’d lent him the money for his bike the day he arrived in Quartzsite. And then, after Colorado, he refused to accept any more payments. “Those fucks up there in so-called god’s country? A pack of dick-gnarled cowards. They’re not gonna chance a battle with real men.”

  Gray bent his head, not answering for a moment.

  Orion turned a nearby wooden barrel upside down and sat beside him, getting serious. “You know if it ever came to it, I’d stand with you, right? So would all these fucking guys.” He reached over and tugged at the corner of Gray’s cut. “That’s what this means.”

  “Yeah, I know that.”

  Orion lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. “You think I’d leave my own girl here if I thought there was something to worry about?” He tapped some ash onto the floor. “Besides, Teague’ll be around. Havasu’s too far a ride for him these days. He’ll keep an eye on shit.”

  Gray tossed the creosote stick out into the dirt. The storm was growing closer. “Twenty four hours?” he said.

  Orion nodded. “Fucking max.”

  Gray got heavily to his feet and stared outside as the wind began to churn the dry ground wildly, obscuring the view of the trailers lining the acreage behind the bar.

  Orion considered the matter settled. “We’re out at six am.” He ground out his cigarette on the grease-spotted cement and Grayson started to walk away. “Yo, Gray?”

  Gray turned around. Orion’s blue eyes, always intense, were trained on him with something resembling affection. “It’s good, you know. You and her.”

  “Yeah,” Gray agreed with a slow smile. “It’s damn fucking good.”

  That big blue-eyed bastard flashed a vulgar grin. “Noted. Wasn’t talking about the fucking though. Now you go get into yours and I’ll get into mine.”

  “Six am,” Gray muttered and left, pausing at the Riverbottom in search of her.

  The door to the bar was propped open with a sizeable river rock. He could see her inside, talking to Rachel. Promise laughed lightly and ran a hand through her hair. She was dressed simply, but sexily, in a clingy white t-shirt and a denim skirt. Gray let his eyes roam slowly over her petite body, remembering every inch of her. His hard rise started immediately. God, she got to him every time.

  His arousal faded as his mind interrupted with the painful recollection of how she’d come to be here. He wished that part of the story was different, but it wasn’t. Gray always made a conscious effort not to remember the man’s face because the thought of that fat bastard’s hands hurting the girl he loved was a murderous lightning bolt across his heart. If that son of a bitch ever, ever dared to breathe in Promise’s directio
n again, Gray would do far worse than what he threatened that bleak day in Blythe. He wouldn’t wound the vile piece of shit. He would kill him.

  She caught his movement out of the corner of her eye and turned in his direction. The genuine pleasure which lit up her face at the sight of him took his breath away. It always did. She bounded across the bar and into his arms, searching for his mouth. He gave it to her, tasting her, wanting to bury himself in her again. Soon.

  He felt, rather than heard, her startled gasp as he lifted her into his arms and carried her off. Promise was so light, so small against his body. It was hard to believe she could bring him to such a furious conclusion every time. Even harder to believe was the way she welcomed him inside and responded just as ardently.

  The storm was bearing down in earnest. He could taste the airborne desert in his lungs as the wind kicked up wildly. And beyond that was the scent of rain.

  He had to put her down as he unlocked the trailer door and she went immediately to the work of stimulating him where it counted. Gray pushed his hand underneath her skirt and between her legs, wanting to see if she was ready. He groaned over the slippery desire he found there.

  Promise was eager. “Tell me,” she whispered, stroking him just right.

  Grayson smiled as he closed the door. This was one of the things he loved about her. Promise had overcome what had been done to her body, and to her mind, embracing the art of sex with a vehemence which surprised even him. She loved to hear his words. So he let her have them.

  “I love looking at you. You get my dick hard as fucking iron in the space of a heartbeat.”

  She removed her shirt, sliding her bra from her shoulders. Then she shot him a nasty little grin and unsnapped her skirt, reaching her hand inside, past the loosened skirt waistband, into her tight panties.

  “Jesus,” he swallowed, his breath coming hard and fast. “Let me see.”

  She showed him.

  “I love you,” he told her.

  “I love you too, Gray,” she said. “Now come here and fuck me good.”

  He almost lost control when he grabbed her. The feel of her soft breasts against his chest was nearly enough to send him over the edge. She pushed her knees all the way back, spreading herself as far as could be as he plunged into her.

  Gray had never had this with anyone else, the feeling of melting and moving together as one. He’d had a lot of girls in that honeyed youth before the days of hell and prison but he scarcely remembered any of them. Then six long years without, only his hand and his mind to keep him company because he was in a world of men and couldn’t find anything exciting about them. After he got out, the treacherous Talia had been his first mistake.

  He heard the soft moans coming from Promise and felt the rising heat of their friction. She was getting close. He watched her face as she spun higher and then stiffened with a scream, crying out her love for him before she sealed her mouth on his.

  After he’d filled her with his hot climax he gathered her to him, stroking her naked back as she sighed with spent pleasure. Grayson loved her desperately. In a halting voice he told her how he would need to leave her, just for a little while. The rain started falling outside. It wasn’t a flat, steady rain of the sort he remembered from New York. Rains in the desert were rare and furious. When the sky opened up over this dry ground it meant to punish.

  She propped herself on one elbow, looking anxious. “Gray, a man was here today.”

  He nodded. “I know. Orion told me about it.”

  Her green eyes were troubled. “What do you think?”

  “Probably nothing, baby.”

  Promise kissed his chest. “Do you have to go?”

  He played with her soft hair. “Yes. But you know I’ll come back. And I’ll think of you every minute. I dream about you, did you know that?”

  She was pleased. “What kind of dreams?”

  Gray touched her lightly between her legs. “Guess.”

  Promise laughed and hugged him, allowing him to cradle her against his chest with their limbs hopelessly tangled together. “I love you so much, Grayson,” she said sleepily. “I never get tired of saying it.”

  “I never get tired of hearing it. I love you too, angel.”

  He held her and stroked her, saying nothing else about his dreams. He hadn’t lied; it was usual for him now to awaken hard and ready after his subconscious played the movie of their most passionate moments. But there was another side to the wanderings of his mind. The memory of her bruises, the look of terror in her eyes. The overriding fear that those bastards would find her and exact whatever sick revenge they twisted into righteousness. She’d been candid about the bigoted teachings of the church. Gray had understood everything anyway the moment the ‘dark devil’ epithet spilled out of that fucker’s mouth. Gray was sure knowing about him would double their fury. And spell her doom.

  They won’t get you, angel. Over my dead fucking body and not even then.

  Orion felt certain there was no real connection between Promise’s past and the man who had walked into the bar today. Gray trusted Orion’s judgment. The Defiant President knew more about human nature than any twenty head shrinks. Yet Grayson had his own sources to draw from.

  In Picacho there had been a man named Ritorsky, a mealy former account who’d been caught embezzling from the state. His blinking, myopic little face seemed to conjure a special rage among the masses. He was brutalized consistently. The dumb shit must have thought it was a sharp move to tattle on his cellmate for being in possession of a forbidden tattoo gun. Guards came in, stripped the cell and doled out a punishment for the contraband.

  Months passed and Ritorsky seemed to settle into a quiet existence as someone newer and weaker showed up to pounce on. But it was borrowed time. The man he’d wronged was already in for Murder One and he was only waiting.

  Ritorsky was sitting in a corner of the chow hall, meekly eating his chicken and thinking about spreadsheets or caviar or whatever the fuck kind of bullshit ran through of the head of a man like that.

  Someone paused casually in front of him and whispered something in his ear. Ritorsky let the hand holding the chicken fall limp as he blinked up at speaker. A split second later he was shanked in the throat with a crudely sharpened stick of wood. The killer quickly moved on as the blood shot from Ritorsky’s pierced artery. He burbled his death gasp probably not even knowing what had hit him. He hadn’t seen it coming. He thought time had made him safe.

  Grayson knew different. Nature was full of predators who had a lot of patience.

  They watched. They waited. And eventually, always, they struck.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  I tried not to cling to him. I knew he was reluctant enough already. He held me for a long moment at the precipice of the wild desert outback as the sun committed to its daily struggle across the sky.

  “Coyotes,” Grayson said with a smile, pointing to a couple of grayish blurs darting among the ironwood. I heard the men beginning to make their way to their bikes in a flurry of hard cussing.

  “Defiant up!” Orion bellowed and started his engine.

  Gray took my face between his hands and kissed me with slow sweetness.

  “I’ll miss you,” I said.

  “Just one day,” he said, giving me one last regretful look.

  I tried to smile, not wanting to add to his anxiety. The thought of spending the night without him beside me was almost unbearable. I shook my head at my own foolishness. I was a grown woman. Being alone for a day wouldn’t kill me. Still, I was grateful that Kira had extended the invitation to stay at the house for the night.

  Orion seemed restless to get underway, but Gray paused by Teague’s trailer. Teague was standing outside wearing nothing but a dirty pair of jeans, his arms moodily crossed.

  Gray said something to him that I couldn’t hear and Teague glanced at me and nodded tiredly. Gray slapped his shoulder and quickly reached his bike. He and the rest of the Defiant men, except for Teague
, followed Orion out in a mighty roar of engines and dust.

  I hadn’t asked Gray exactly why the club needed to go to Lake Havasu and he hadn’t offered to tell me. Kira had mentioned more than once that Orion didn’t talk club business with her. She had shrugged and said her father, leader of another club before his murder, had been of the same mind. That was just the way of it.

  It would be hours before Rachel would be up and about, getting the bar ready for opening. Kira tended to be an even later sleeper so I was on my own for a while.

  I settled into the shallow sofa which, though a bit musty, was comfortable. Kira had given me a book, The Quartzsite Trip. She joked that it might be the only novel specifically about Quartzsite, or at least bearing the ‘Quartzsite’ name in the title. It was an easy story to enjoy. Set in the early 1960s, an unusual English teacher established the custom of bringing a diverse group of his students on a weeklong camping trip to Quartzsite. Reading it made me regret that I had missed out on participating in traditional high school.

  I was nearing the end of the book and kept rereading once scene in particular. It was the last night of the trip and a hard rain began falling, the kind of fearsome deluge I now knew was part of the perils of desert life. In the wake of the downpour, several of the students noticed odd little fish-like creatures darting around in the sudden pools of water. Tadpole shrimp, their teacher told them. He went on to explain how those abruptly hatching eggs had likely laid dormant for untold millennia. The town of Quartzsite, Arizona was once covered by a great ocean. The eggs of these tiny creatures had been left behind when the water ebbed and the land changed. They survived in their latent state under extreme conditions until a certain level of water pressure awakened them.

  Then the tadpole shrimp would hatch. They would live. They would lay more eggs. They would die. It seemed like an incredibly long time to wait in order to spend such a cruelly short life cycle. I made a mental to tell Grayson about it. Such things fascinated him.

  I put the book down reluctantly, looking at the clock. It was nearly eight. Rachel would be waking up soon to get the bar ready to open. Anyway, now that I had torn my eyes away from the pages I was troubled by the stillness all around me. I’d heard Teague slowly sputtering down the road on his bike about fifteen minutes earlier. As I looked around the trailer, Gray’s absence tugged at me acutely. I would be glad for some company.