I felt an almost overwhelming sensation of—love, completeness, belonging—coming from Mare, and glanced over at her to confirm it. She was smiling, eyes shut, living wholly within in the moment. She was home.
I came over and wrapped her in my arms. She leaned against me and we stood, together, the peace of the world moving around us.
Later, we unpacked and she showed me the basics of camping. All of the gear in our packs was at least ten years old and thoroughly used, but it was high-quality stuff. I was able to get the tent up after only three tries amid Mare’s riotous laughter, and I returned the favor while she attempted to start a fire.
“Stop that!” she said, as I fell over, holding my sides from laughing as Mare pinched out a spark from the end of a hank of hair which had escaped her thick braid. “Do you have any idea how long that’ll take to grow out again?”
“Four months,” I gasped. “Give or take a trim.”
“I think I talk about my hair too much,” she growled, and gave up using the magnesium starter in favor of a good old fashioned wooden match. Soon, a small fire was carefully banked within a ring of stones, a cookpot heating on a flat rock Mare had carefully positioned above the flames.
“Watch the fire for a few minutes,” she said. “I need to make a call.” She turned and headed down to the lake. The sun was on the verge of disappearing, and the deep blue hollows of the mountains were rimmed in an indescribably pure orange-red. The sun’s halo lit Mare as she stood on the shore, and…
I smiled as she began to sing.
Mare doesn’t sing too often. I’ve caught snatches of song when she’s in the shower, and while her voice isn’t operatic, it’s lovely and rich. An Irish singing voice, she calls it, good for melancholy and not a whole lot more. Which is why I wasn’t surprised by what she chose to sing to the mountains, that old staple of sorrow, a woman’s lament:
Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.
The summer's gone, and all the roses falling,
It's you, it's you must go and I must bide…
The bowl of the lake caught the song and spun it up, up, carrying it out into the wilderness. I had no doubt that Mare’s voice could be heard for miles around. The echoes were almost like a chorus, accompanying her through those last few notes. As they faded, so did the last of the sunlight.
I joined her on the shore as a large slice of white moon began to rise. The mountains that had been backlit in golds and reds were now silvered, the warm day quickly sliding into a chilly Alaskan night.
A perfect night.
Mare leaned over and whispered, “If you’re going to get laid on this trip, it’s got to be now.”
As I said, a perfect night.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mare likes to undress me. She says it’s like unwrapping a gift. And who am I to deprive her of an activity she enjoys? I’m not a monster, after all.
There, in the moonlight, Mare started with my shirt. Her hands moved across the fabric, flat against my chest, stopping as she found my nipples.
“Cold?” she asked aloud, as she nibbled on one and toyed with the other, tugging on my skin through the shirt.
“Stimulated,” I replied through the link, and shivered as she bit down a little harder. As I did, our link trembled, not from weakness but from a quick pulse of energy between us.
“Don’t lie.” Mare ran her hands down my bare arms, causing me to shudder from the sudden chill as she pulled warmth over me and then took it away. “That’s rude.”
“Sorry,” I whispered, as she slid her hands beneath my shirt and lifted it up.
“Don’t talk, either.” She took my nipples between her teeth and her fingers again, now all the more sensitive without the shirt between us. “Don’t say a word.”
I gasped as she began to tease me with her tongue; she smiled. She was in the mood to be in control. There was a memory creeping through our link, a memory of another night like this, a memory of Mare and another lover silvered in the moonlight by this very lake. I couldn’t see him clearly: the years had stripped the details away. I got the impression that he had been very athletic, and they had been very much in love.
“Who was he?” I asked. I wasn’t breaking the rules if I didn’t speak aloud.
“Summer fling,” she replied, smiling. She had meant for me to see that memory. That long-ago night had meant a lot to her; it had been a special time in her life.
But she didn’t want to relive the same experience. The two of them had been college students, fumbling towards a more mature understanding of what it meant to be lovers. Mare wanted a new memory to set beside the old, a comparison of who she had been and the person she had grown into. I understood that feeling all too well. Joining OACET had taken our sense of identity and shattered it into a million pieces. That old memory of Mare’s was something pure, something she had managed to hold on to during the worst time in her life. In that memory, she knew who she had been. Now, she wanted to explore who she was, if she still maintained her own unique identity despite the changes she had experienced…or if she was someone wholly new.
I was honored that she wanted to share this with me.
“Tell me what you want,” I said.
“This,” she told me, as she pulled my shirt over my head. She wriggled out of her own shirt and dropped it along with mine. “And this.”
She paused, and then added, “I want to feel the edges blur?”
A question. A very intimate question. Because if we could share a body so I could learn how to walk within the woods, then we could go beyond that during an act as intimate as sex.
Far beyond.
It pushed the boundaries of trust. A lot. Mostly because it opened up the memories of those lost five years. After all, if you were suddenly granted the power to feel the same full sensory experiences as your partner at the same time as your own? Wouldn’t you do that? As often as you could?
Hell yes you would!
…until you realized you couldn’t make it stop. Ever. That these other people were in your head all the time, and sex made it worse because skin contact deepened the bond. The sudden joys of experiencing life as other people became an exhausting, never-ending torture in which you could no longer tell where your identity ended and theirs began. You took the only escape you could, and retreated as far as you could into your own psyche, hiding. Unable to come to terms with how you have lost all connections with what made you…you.
When Mare and I are together, we almost always maintain an active link. The exception is during sex. It’s too easy to remember a time before today, a time we would gladly kill brain cells to forget. We usually break the link right before things get sticky, and enjoy our shared pleasure from within the comfort of our own bodies and minds.
Usually.
We had left the link active during sex before. We chose to do this in a place where one of us felt comfortable and secure, so that one half of the joined person we became would know they could find their way back, and help the other come through. I couldn’t think of a better place to do this than here on the shores of Mare’s lake.
I answered her by reaching down and unhooking her bra. I let it fall to the ever-growing pile of fabric. Then, slowly, I tilted her chin up so I could look into those beautiful green eyes.
A kiss. Her lips against mine.
And we started to breathe together, slowly, taking our mental walls apart.
A taste of lake water on our lips, fresh and cold. Our breath, our skin, warm from the day’s long walk. The sweet pulse beneath her skin…my skin…our skin.
To the fire, where we lay down beside its warmth. An old flannel blanket beneath us, cradled by the soft loam where the forest met the water. Our hands, fingers together as we kissed. Hair, long and red, spread out across the blanket. More kisses along the neck, down to the breasts, small and perfect. Each nipple needed deep attention, firm lips to cover them, to tweak them bet
ween tongue and teeth.
Hands, moving along sleek thighs, muscles tensed from holding a larger body above a smaller one. The shiver of fingernails along skin, lightly carving a path up, up, up to where a pair of shorts gets in the way. Buttons, a zipper…an erection pressing through light cotton briefs.
Oh, God.
The briefs are pushed down, down. Cold air brushing against exposed skin, against a ready cock. One hand around it, joined by another, both large and small, stroking together. Pleasure singing along the link, along both bodies.
The large hand moves away, moves down to the body lying on the blanket. Soft skin—so soft!—and then another pair of shorts. Those are in the way, those need to go, but before we cast them off we slow down and press our hand against the denim, rubbing our thumb along the center line.
Ah, what a feeling! The rough cloth hard against our hand, hard against our clit. The thumb begins to move in circles, teasing, sending shivers along our skin. We are wet: we are frustrated. We need to move on and we don’t want to stop, and we writhe on the blanket from both pleasure and indecision.
Finally, the shorts come off, revealing light cotton panties. These are torn away; there’s a small tuft of red hair, and legs, long legs, which wrap around out back. Large and small fingers dip inside to make sure we’re ready—yes—and we kneel down, our cock sliding through this softness, into this warmth.
Two small gasps, coming as one.
And then we began to move.
Slow strokes, long strokes, deep enough to cause us to cry out from the pressure. Our breath frosting as we move a little faster, as we start to pant.
Faster. Faster. Faster!
Oh, God—
A moment in which the world stops. A rush of release.
Then, clarity.
We fall back into our own bodies, both of us laughing, and very much in love.
CHAPTER EIGHT
For the record, it wasn’t the first time I’ve woken up with a gun pointed at my face.
It also wasn’t the first time that gun had been held by an extremely angry male relation. This particular male relation was framed by the tent flap. He had the appearance of a length of old leather that someone had left to dry in the sun, with green eyes. Those eyes were a little older, a little foggy with time, but I still knew them.
I blinked to clear the sleep out of my own eyes, then used my chin to tap Mare on the top of her head. “Hey, babe?” I said quietly. “We found your grandpa.”
Mare sleeps like the dead. She made a noise like a constipated tiger and burrowed into the solace of our joined sleeping bags.
Her grandfather cleared his throat. “Mare-Bear, get away from that man right now.”
That did it. Mare’s head popped up. “Pappy!”
She was in his arms in an instant. Her grandfather pulled her out of the tent and swung her into a mighty hug, grinning. It was impressive for a couple of reasons: first, he was a seventy-plus year-old man tossing Mare around with one arm; and second, that gun stayed pointed straight at me the entire time.
It was one wacky-looking gun, a silver revolver with a barrel nearly the length of my shin. I activated my implant and did some cyborg trickery where I ran the gun through a photo database, and the closest match came back as a Smith & Wesson 460XVR. Ah, yes. A gun for when you needed a highly portable cannon.
Pappy did not fuck around.
I sat up, hands where he could see them. Mare had insisted that we sleep fully clothed, for which I was suddenly profoundly grateful.
Outside the tent, the reunion was still going strong. “Josh!” Mare called, as she dropped barefoot to the forest floor. “Come out here and meet Pappy!”
I locked eyes with her grandfather. He gave a tight nod and slid the gun into a holster made for a short rifle, but gave the leather a quick pat. I got the message: I wasn’t about to be shot…at least, not in front of his granddaughter. Or, at least not in front of his granddaughter at this moment.
I crawled out of the tent and stood, right hand out. “It’s good to meet you, sir—”
“Missed the wedding invitation,” he said, touching the butt of his gun.
Mare gave him a playful slap. “Stop it, Pappy. We talked about this in high school. You can’t go around threatening the people I date.”
“Can, too.”
He said it as though it was supposed to be a joke, but Mare whapped him again, with a little more force. “I judge my worth by my brain, not my body,” she said. “So does Josh, which is why he gets to share both.” She shot me a look to let me know this was the wrong time to bring up how I appreciated her for her body as well as her mind, but I had figured that one out for myself.
Now, Pappy shook my hand. “I trust her judgement,” he said. He didn’t crush my hand in his own. He didn’t have to. That game was for children and adults who can’t read the room.
“So do I,” I replied.
That seemed to satisfy him. “All right, Mare-Bear,” he said. “You found me. You can go on home.”
“Like hell.” Mare reached into the tent and started yanking out our overnight gear, rolling up the sleeping bags in record time. “Dad sent me out here. He’s scared for you.”
Pappy spread his arms wide. “I’m fine, Mare. Hale and well, not a scratch.”
“Good,” said Mare. “Great. Who’s blood was it?”
“Hmm?”
Mare shook her head. “Try again, Pappy.”
“I don’t want to drag you into—”
“Pappy!” The sleeping bag hit the ground as Mare’s frustration ramped up. “I haven’t seen you for more than five years! Do you think I’d be out here if it wasn’t serious? Until those blood tests came back, Dad thought you were dead!”
They stared at each other. It was strange, how much Pappy looked like Mare. From what I knew about him, I had expected her grandfather to resemble the hardened soldiers I had met in my time in government. And he did…but I was beginning to realize that Mare looked like those soldiers, too.
PTSD is a hell of a thing.
Pappy relented. He sighed, and pointed at me. “I’ll tell you everything, as soon as he’s gone.”
“Nope.” Mare began shoving our gear into the packs again. “He’s here because I want him here, and I still want him here.”
“I don’t.” That hand went back to the handle of his gun again.
“I do.” More efficient shoving. The campsite was quickly becoming nothing but clean forest floor again. “Josh understand people, and…I don’t. Not anymore. I’m either a wrecking ball or…or a wreck.” Those words came out as a whisper, with Mare’s busy fingers pausing for a brief moment in their tasks. When they resumed, her voice was reinforced with steel. “I didn’t know how much trouble you’d be in. I still don’t know! What I do know is that when we get back to civilization, you’ll need someone to keep you from getting in worse trouble. And that’s Josh.”
She handed me a wad of clothing. I went into the woods to change, far enough away to give them privacy. And—
Let me make this perfectly clear: I don’t do passive. I’m such an extreme extravert that it causes me physical, mental, and emotional pain when I don’t have anyone around me. All of my instincts were shouting at me to go back and take control of the situation, make Pappy talk, put Mare at ease.
As I said, PTSD is a hell of a thing. Right now, my instincts were wrong. I knew that. I knew that better than anything. There was a family conversation that needed to happen, and if I was nearby, it would keep swinging back to me. I knew this, and fought the impulse to go back and open my big mouth, even as my hands shook as I struggled into the shirt and shorts.
Instead, I activated my implant, and reached out through the link to Sergeant Hungerford’s phone. She answered after a couple of rings, a frog in her throat from the early morning. “Agent Glassman?”
“Yes.” Agents can hold phone calls in our heads. It’d be magic, except I’m told we sound exactly like we would if we were ha
ving a normal phone call, so I suppose it’s just technology. “Did I wake you?”
“No.” There was a pause and some background noise, as if a coffee cup was sliding across a countertop. “What’s your status?”
“We’re safe and about eight miles in. I’ll have Agent Murphy call you back to report on her grandfather.”
Hungerford chuckled. “So you found him, then.”
I grinned; the sergeant was sharp. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”
“And he’s not injured, or you’d be asking for help.” Correction: the sergeant was razor-sharp. “Does the person who broke into his house require medical attention?”
“We’re dealing with a lot of unknowns.” I realized we still had no idea about the source of the blood at Pappy’s cabin.
A long pause. Then, “Agent Glassman, a little advice? If he’s killed someone, this will be his second serious offense. A trial is going to go badly for him. If he wants to stay connected to civilization, it’s in his best interests to give himself up as quickly as possible.”
Hungerford wasn’t saying much, but what she had left out was everything. If Pappy had killed someone, she was advising him to go into the woods and stay there. No more cozy cabin on the edge of the forest. No more Sunday brunches with his son, who had a bum knee and wouldn’t be able to hike in to visit his father.
And? Let’s face it. Pappy might be harder than granite, but he was getting on in years. At some point, there’d come a day when he wouldn’t be able to get his own food, or might have a bad fall, or…
“I care about that old jackass,” Hungerford added. “Make sure he does the right thing.”
“I will,” I promised her. “Agent Murphy will be in touch shortly.”
We exchanged goodbyes and I broke the connection. Then, freshly dressed in another man’s clothes, I headed back towards camp, making as much noise as I could to let them know I was coming.
The Alaska Escape Page 4