The Power of the Dog

Chapter Fourteen
Pastoral

San DiegoCounty, 1998

They get up early and ride.

“There’ll be people looking for us,” Callan tells her.

No kidding, Nora thinks. When they finally stopped driving last night and pulled over, she’d demanded to know just what the hell was going on.

“They were going to kill you,” Callan answered.

He found them a cheap motel a little ways off the highway and grabbed a few hours’ sleep.

He shakes her awake at four and tells her they need to get going. But the bed is so nice and warm she pulls the blanket up over her mouth and settles in for just a few more minutes. Anyway, he’s taking a shower-through the cheap, paneled walls she can hear the water running.

“I’ll get up,” she thinks, “when I hear the water stop.”

Next thing she knows, his hand is on her shoulder, nudging her awake again.

“We gotta get going.”

She gets up, finds her sweater and jeans where she tossed them over the room’s one chair, and puts them on. “I’m going to need some new clothes.”

“We’ll get you some.”

He looks at her sitting on the bed and can’t believe she’s really with him. Can’t believe what he did, doesn’t know what the consequences will be, doesn’t care. She’s so beautiful, even looking tired and rumpled in clothes that do smell. But they smell like her.

She finishes tying a shoe, looks up and catches him looking.

It’s always cold at four in the morning.

Can be the middle of summer in the middle of the Amazon jungle-if you just got out of bed at four in the morning, it’s still cold. He sees her shivering and gives her his leather jacket.

“What about you?” she asks.

“I’m okay.”

She takes the jacket. It’s too big but she wraps the sleeves around her and the old jacket is soft and warm and it feels as if his arms are holding her like they held her last night. Men have given her diamond necklaces, Versace dresses, furs. None of them ever felt as good as that jacket. She climbs on the back of the bike, and then has to push the sleeves up so she can hold on to him.

They head east on Interstate 8.

There are mostly just truck drivers on the road, and a few old pickups full of mojado fieldworkers headed for the farms out by Brawley. Callan drives until he sees a turn-off for something called Sunrise Highway. Sounds about right, he thinks, and turns north onto that. The road climbs in sharp switchbacks up the steep southern slope ofMountLaguna, past the little town ofDescanso, then runs along the top of the mountain ridge, with deep pine forest to their left side and, hundreds of feet below the ridge to their right, a desert.

And the sunrise is spectacular.

They stop at a pull-off and watch the sun come up over the desert floor, lighting it in tones changing from red to orange and then into the subtle panoply of desert browns-tan, beige, dun and, of course, sand. Then they get back on the bike and ride some more, along the mountaintop, as the forest gives way to chaparral and then to long stretches of grasslands, and then they come to the edge of a lake near the junction with Highway 79.

Callan turns south on 79 and they drive around the edge of the lake until they come to a little restaurant sitting right by the water.

He pulls up in front.

They go inside.

The place is pretty quiet-a few fishermen, a couple of men who look like ranchers and who glance up from their plates as Callan and Nora come in. They pick a table by the window with a view of the small lake. Callan orders two fried eggs, bacon and hash browns. Nora orders tea and dry toast.

“Eat some real food,” Callan says.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Suit yourself.”

She doesn’t touch the tea or the toast. When Callan’s done wolfing down his eggs they go outside and take a walk along the lakeshore.

“So what are we doing?” Nora asks.

“Taking a walk beside a lake.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” he says.

There are pine trees on the other side of the lake. Their needles shimmer in the breeze, which kicks up little whitecaps on the water.

“They’re going to be looking for me.”

“You want them to find you?” Callan asks.

“No,” she says. “Not for a while, anyway.”

“The way I feel,” he says, “I just want to live for a while, you know? I don’t know how all this is going to turn out, but I just want to live for a while. Are you good with that?”

“Yeah,” she answers. “Yeah, I’m real good with that.”

He does want to take some precautions, though. “We’ll have to get rid of the bike,” he says. “They’ll be looking for it, and it sticks out too much.”

They find a new vehicle a few miles south on 79. An old farmhouse sits down in a bowl off to the east of the highway. One of those classic white-trash front yards, with old cars and old car parts scattered around outside an old barn and a few dilapidated shacks that might have once been chicken coops. Callan steers down the dirt road and stops the bike outside the barn, inside of which a guy in the inevitable ball cap is working on a ’68 Mustang. He’s tall, skinny, maybe fifty years old, although it’s hard to tell under the cap.

Callan looks at the Mustang. “What do you want for it?”

“Nothin',” the guy says. “Ain’t sellin’ this one.”

“Sellin’ any of them?”

The guy points to a lime-green ’85 Grand Am sitting outside. “The passenger-side door don’t open from the outside. You gotta open it from the inside.”

They walk over to the car.

“But does the engine run?” Callan asks.

“Oh, yeah, the engine runs real good.”

Callan gets in and turns the key.

The engine comes to life like Snow White after the kiss.

“How much?” Callan asks.

“I dunno. Eleven hundred?”

“Pink slip?”

“Pink slip, registration, plates. All that.”

Callan walks back to the bike, takes twenty hundred-dollar bills out of the sidesaddle and hands them to the guy. “A thousand for the car. The rest for forgetting you ever saw us.”

The guy takes the money. “Hey, anytime you don’t want me to see you, come back.”

Callan gives Nora the keys. “Follow me.”

She follows him north on 79 to Julian, where they turn east on 78, down the long, curving grade to the desert, across a long flat stretch, until he finally pulls off on a dirt road and stops about a half-mile from where the road stops, at the mouth of a canyon.

“This should do,” he says when she gets out of the car, meaning that the fire won’t spread here in the sand and there probably won’t be anyone around to notice the smoke. He siphons some gas from his spare tank, then pours it over the Harley.

“You want to say good-bye?” he asks her.

“Good-bye.”

He tosses the match.

They watch the bike burn.

“A Viking funeral,” she says.

“Except we’re not in it.” He walks back to the Grand Am, gets in the driver’s seat and slides over to open the door for her. “Where do you want to go?”

“Somewhere nice, somewhere quiet.”

He thinks about it. If anyone does discover the bike’s skeleton and connects it to us, they’ll probably think we headed east, across the desert, to catch a flight somewhere from Tucson or Phoenix or maybe Las Vegas. So when they get back to the highway he backtracks west.

“Where are we going?” Nora asks. She doesn’t really care; she’s just curious.

Which is a good thing, because he answers, “I don’t know.”

He doesn’t, either. He doesn’t have anything in mind except to drive. Enjoy the scenery, enjoy being with her. They climb back up the same road they came down, into the mountains, to the little town of Julian.

They drive right through-they don’t want to be around other people-and then the road starts heading down again as the terrain slopes toward the coastal plain to the west, and the land flattens into broad fields and apple orchards and horse ranches and then they go down a long hill, from which they can see a beautiful valley below.

In the middle of the valley there’s a crossroads with one highway going north and another going west. There are a few buildings scattered around the junction-a post office, a market, a diner, a bakery, an (unlikely) art gallery on the north side, an old general store and a few white cottages on the south side, and beyond that there’s nothing on any side. Just the road cutting through the broad grassland with cattle grazing on it, and she says, “This is beautiful.”

He pulls off on the gravel driveway beside the cabins. Goes into the old general store, which now sells books and gardening stuff, and comes out a few minutes later with a key. “We got one for a month,” he says. “Unless you hate it. Then we can get our money back and go someplace else.”

It has a small front room with an old sofa and a couple of chairs and a table, and a small kitchen with a gas stove and an old refrigerator and a sink with wooden cupboards above it. A single door leads to the tiny bedroom, which has an even tinier bathroom-shower, no bath-in back.

We’re not going to lose each other in this place, she thinks.

He’s still standing tentatively in the front doorway.

“It’s fine with me,” she says. “How about you?”

“It’s good, it’s fine.” He lets the door shut behind him. “We’re the Kellys, by the way. I’m Tom, you’re Jean.”

“I’m Jean Kelly?”

“I didn’t think of that.”

After she showers and gets dressed they drive the four miles back up the hill to Julian to shop for clothes. The one main street is flanked mostly by little restaurants selling the apple pie that is the local specialty, but there are a few boutiques, where she buys a couple of casual dresses and a sweater. But they buy most of their clothes at the hardware store, which sells denim shirts, jeans, socks and underwear.

Down the street Nora finds a bookstore that sells used paperbacks, and she buys copies of Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, The Eustace Diamonds and a couple of Nora Roberts romances-guilty pleasures.

Then they drive back down to the market across the highway from their cottage and buy groceries-bread, milk, coffee, tea, Raisin Bran (his favorite), Grape-Nuts (hers), bacon, eggs, sourdough bread, a couple of steaks, some chicken, potatoes, rice, asparagus, green beans, tomatoes, grapefruit, brown rice, an apple pie, some red wine and some beer-and sundries-paper towels, dish detergent, toilet paper, deodorant, toothpaste and toothbrushes, soap, shampoo, a razor and blades, shaving cream, a hair-color kit and a pair of scissors.

They’ve agreed to take some precautions-not to run, but not to be needlessly foolhardy, either. So the Harley had to go, and so does her shoulder-length hair, because while Callan’s looks are pretty ordinary, hers aren’t, and the first thing their pursuers will ask people is if they’ve noticed a strikingly beautiful blond woman.

“I’m not so beautiful anymore,” she tells him.

“Yeah you are.”

So back at the cottage she cuts her hair.

Short.

Looks in the mirror when she’s finished and says, “Joan of Arc.”

“I like it.”

“Liar.”

But when she looks in the mirror she kind of likes it, too. Even more so after she dyes it red. Well, she thinks, it’ll be easier to take care of anyway. So here I am, short, short red hair, a denim shirt and jeans. Who’d have thought it?

“Your turn,” she says, snapping the scissors.

“Get outta here.”

“It needs cutting anyway,” she says. “You got that ’70s look going on. Come on, just let me trim it.”

“No.”

“Chicken.”

“That’s me.”

“Guys have paid a lot of money to have me do this.”

“Cut their hair? You’re kiddin'.”

“Hey, it’s a big world out there, Tommy.”

“Your hands are shaking.”

“Then you’d better hold still.”

He lets her cut it. Sits perfectly still on the chair, looking at her image and his as she stands behind him and snips away, brown locks of his hair falling first on his shoulders and then on the floor. She finishes and they look at themselves in the mirror.

“I don’t recognize us,” she says. “Do you?”

No, he thinks, I don’t.

That evening he makes chicken broth for her and steak and potatoes for himself and they sit down at the table and eat and watch television and when the news comes on about a meth lab blowing up and bodies found he don’t say nothin’ to her about it because it’s clear she don’t know.

He tries to feel bad about Peaches and O-Bop, but he can’t. Them two ushered too many people into the next world, and you had to know it was always gonna end that way for them.

Like it’s gonna end for me.

He feels bad about Mickey, though.

But the news also means that Scachi is tracking them down.

She has a rough night-she can’t sleep, and she doesn’t want to see what’s on the inside of her eyes. He gets that-he owns a lot of the same pictures. Only maybe I’m more hardened to them, he thinks.

So he lies behind her and holds her and tells her Irish stories he remembers from when he was a kid. Well, he sort of remembers them, and he makes up what he don’t, which isn’t too hard because you just got to talk about fairies and leprechauns and shit like that.

Fairy tales and fables.

She finally nods off about four in the morning and he sleeps, too, with his hand gripped on the. 22 under the pillow.

She wakes up hungry.

No shit, Callan thinks, and they walk across the highway to the restaurant and she orders a cheese omelet with link sausages on the side and rye toast with lots of butter.

The waitress asks, “You want American cheese, cheddar or Jack?”

“Yes.”

She eats like the condemned.

The woman sucks down that omelet as if it’s her last meal, as if they’re waiting outside to walk her that last mile, down to Old Sparky. Callan suppresses a smile as he watches her wield her fork like it’s a weapon-those link sausages don’t have a chance-and he doesn’t tell her about the small smear of butter at the corner of her mouth.

“Didn’t like it?” he asks.

“It was wonderful.”

“Get another one.”

“No!”

“Cinnamon roll?”

“Okay.”

“They were baked fresh this morning,” the waitress says as she sets down the huge pastry and two forks. Nora goes outside and comes back with The San Diego Union-Tribune and scans the personal ads.

“Kim, from her Sister. Family Emergency. Looking for You Everywhere. Urgent You Contact.” With a phone number. Typical Keller, she thinks, covering all the bases just in case, as is the case, I’m a free agent on the run of my own free will. So Arthur wants me to come in.

I’m not coming, Arthur. Not just yet.

If you want me, you’ll have to find me.

He’s trying.

Art’s troops are out in force. At airports, train stations, bus stations, shipping ports. They check passenger manifests, reservations, passport control. Hobbs’ guys check immigration records in France, England and Brazil. They know they’re on a fool’s errand, but by the end of the week one thing seems certain: Nora Hayden hasn’t left the country-at least not on her own passport. Nor has she used any of her credit cards or her cell phone, tried to get a job, been stopped for a traffic offense or put her Social Security number down to rent an apartment.

Art puts the heat on Haley Saxon and has her threatened with everything from violating the Mann Act and running a disorderly house to being an accessory to attempted murder. So he believes her when she swears she hasn’t heard from Nora and will call him the instant she does.

Neither his listening posts on the border nor Hobbs’ across it pick up a trail. Not her talking, not anyone talking about her.

Art drags an accident reconstruction guy out to measure the depth of Callan’s motorcycle tracks, and the guy does some mojo with the dirt and tells Art that there were definitely two people on that bike and that he hopes the passenger was holding on tight because it was moving fast.

Callan couldn’t have taken her all that far, Art reasons. He couldn’t have taken a prisoner on a plane, a train or a bus, and there are so many places a prisoner could get off the back of a bike-at a gas station, a red light, a junction.

So Art narrows the search to within one gas tank’s radius of the junction of the dirt road and I-8. Look for a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.

He finds it.

A Border Patrol helicopter flying over Anza-Borrego looking for mojados spots the scorch mark and lands to investigate it. The report comes to Art right away-his guys are monitoring all the BP radio traffic, so he has a guy out there two hours later in the company of a Harley dealer who has a meth-possession rap hanging over him. Dude looks at the charred remains of the hog and almost tearfully confirms that it’s the same model they’re looking for.

“Why would anyone do something like this?” he moans.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes-shit, you don’t even have to be Larry Holmes-to see that a car followed the bike in there, someone got out of the car and then everyone took off in the car again and went back onto the highway.

So the reconstructionist goes out again. Measures the depth of the tire tracks and the width between tires, takes a cast of the tire marks, plays in the dirt for a while and tells Art that he’s looking for a smaller-size, two-door sedan with an automatic transmission and old Firestones on it.

“Something else,” a Border Patrol guy tells him. “The passenger door doesn’t work.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Art asks. Border Patrol agents are experts at “cutting sign,” that is, reading tracks. Especially in the desert.

“The footprints outside the passenger door,” the agent tells him. “She stepped backward to let the door open.”

“How do you know it’s a she?” his man asks.

“These marks are from a woman’s shoes,” the agent says. “The same woman was driving the car. She got out the driver’s side, walked over to where the guy was standing, stood and watched. See how the heel is heavier where she stood for a few minutes? Then she walked around to the passenger side and he walked around to the driver’s side and let her in.”

“Can you tell what kind of shoes the woman was wearing?”

“Me? No,” the agent says. “But I’ll bet you’ve got guys who can.”

Yes, he does, and the guy’s on a chopper heading out there within half an hour. He takes a cast of the shoe and takes it back to the lab. Four hours later he calls Art with the results.

It’s her.

She’s with Callan.

Apparently of her own free will.

Which boggles Art’s mind. What are we looking at here, he wonders, an advanced case of Stockholm syndrome, or something else? And while the good news is that she’s alive, at least as of a couple of days ago, the bad news is that Callan has broken through the radius of containment. He was in a car headed east with a “prisoner” who at least appears to be cooperative, so now he could be anywhere.

And Nora with him.

“Let me take it from here,” Sal Scachi says to Art. “I know the guy. I can deal with him if I find him.”

“The guy killed three of his old partners and kidnapped a woman, and you can deal with him?” Art asks him.

“We go back,” Scachi says.

Art reluctantly agrees. It makes sense-Scachi does have a prior relationship with Callan, and Art can’t pursue this much further without drawing attention. And he needs Nora back. They all do; they can’t make the deal with Adan Barrera without her.

Their days have settled into a pleasant routine.

Nora and Callan get up early and have breakfast, sometimes at home, sometimes at the place across the highway. He usually goes the high-cholesterol route, and she usually has unadorned oatmeal and dry toast because the place doesn’t serve fruit for breakfast except at Sunday brunch. They don’t talk much during breakfast; neither of them is a big talker early in the morning. Instead of conversing, they swap sections of the newspaper.

After breakfast they usually take a drive. They know it’s not the smartest thing to do-the smart thing would be to park that car behind the cottage and leave it there-but they’re still in their fatalistic mind-set and they like taking the drives. He’s found a lake seven miles north on Highway 79-a beautiful drive through oak-studded grasslands and rolling hills, big ranches on the west side of the road, the Kumeyaay reservation on the other. Then the hills give way to a broad, flat plain of grazing land with hills in the background to the south (the Palomar Observatory sits like a giant golf ball on top of the highest summit) and a big lake in the middle.

It isn’t much of a lake as lakes go-just a large oval of water sitting in the middle of a larger plain-but it’s a lake, and they can walk around its south end and she enjoys that. And there’s usually a large herd of black-and-white Holstein cattle grazing on the east side of the lake, and she likes looking at them.

So sometimes they drive up to the lake and walk around; other times they drive into the high desert out past Ranchita to Culp Valley, where huge round boulders are scattered around as if a giant had suddenly walked away from his game of marbles and never came back to reclaim them. Or sometimes they drive just up the hill to Inaja Peak, where they park and climb up the short trail to the lookout point from which you can see all the mountain ranges and, to the south, Mexico.

Then they come home and fix lunch-he has a turkey or ham sandwich, she has some fruit she bought at the market-and they take a long siesta. She never realized until now how tired she’s been, how flat-out tired, and how much she must need sleep because her body seems to crave it, easily falling asleep anytime she lays her head down.

After their siesta they usually just hang out, either in the front room or, if it’s warm, out on the small porch. She reads her books and he listens to the radio and looks at magazines. Late in the afternoon they walk over to the market to buy food for supper. She likes shopping for one meal at a time because it reminds her of Paris, and she quizzes the guy behind the meat counter about what’s good that day.

“Cooking is ninety percent shopping,” she tells Callan.

“Okay.”

He thinks she enjoys the shopping and the cooking more than the eating because she’ll spend twenty minutes picking out the best cut of steak and then will eat maybe two bites of it. Or three bites, if it’s chicken or fish. And she’s incredibly fussy about the vegetables, which she does eat massive quantities of. And while she buys potatoes for him (“I know you’re Irish”) she makes brown rice for herself.

They cook dinner together. It’s become a ritual he really enjoys, shuffling around each other in the tiny kitchen, chopping vegetables, peeling potatoes, heating oil, sauteing the meat or boiling the pasta and talking. They talk about bullshit-about movies, about New York, about sports. She tells him a little bit about her childhood, he tells her a little about his, but they leave out the heavy shit. She tells him about Paris-about the food, the markets, the cafes, the river, the light.

They don’t talk about the future.

They don’t even talk about the present. What the hell they’re doing, who they even are, what they are to each other. They haven’t made love or even kissed, and neither one knows if that’s a “yet” or what it is. She just knows that he’s the second man in her whole life who doesn’t want to just fuck her and maybe the first man she might really want. He just knows that he’s with her, and it’s enough.

Enough just to live.

Scachi’s driving Sunrise Highway when he spots it-a run-down farm that looks like a used-car lot. What the fuck, Scachi thinks, and pulls in.

Your typical goober in the seed-grain cap ambles over. “Help you?”

“Maybe,” Scachi says. “You sell these heaps?”

“I just like to work on them,” Bud says.

But Scachi sees the flicker of alarm cross the guy’s eyes and plays a hunch. “You sell one a while back, the passenger door don’t work?”

Bud’s eyes pop wide like those suckers in the TV ads for the Psychic Friends Network, like, How did you know that?

“Who are you?” Bud asks.

“Whatever he paid you to keep your mouth shut?” Scachi says. “I’m the guy who’s going to pay you more to open it up again. Alternatively, I’ll seize your house, your land, all your cars and your autographed picture of Richard Petty and then put you in prison until the Chargers win the Super Bowl, which is, like, forever.”

He takes out his money clip and starts peeling off bills. “Say when.”

“Are you a cop?”

“And then some,” Scachi says, still peeling out bills. “We there yet?”

Fifteen hundred bucks.

“Close.”

“You’re one of them sly goobers, aren’t you?” Scachi says. “Taking advantage of the city slicker. Sixteen hundred and that’s as big as the carrot gets, my friend, and you don’t want to see the stick.”

“An eighty-five Grand Am,” Bud says, shoving the money into his pocket. “Lime green.”

“Plates?”

“4ADM045.”

Scachi nods. “I’m going to tell you pretty much what the other guy told you-anyone asks, I wasn’t here, you didn’t see me. Here’s the difference-you sell me to the highest bidder…” He pulls out a. 38 revolver. “I’ll come back, stick this up your ass and pull the trigger until it’s empty. Do we have an understanding here?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Scachi says, putting the gun away.

He gets back in his car and drives off.

Callan and Nora go to a church.

They’re taking one of their afternoon drives and pull off Highway 79 at the Kumeyaay reservation, to the old Santa Ysabel Mission. It’s a small church, little more than a chapel, built in the classic California Mission style.

“You wanna go in?” Callan asks.

“I’d like to.”

They walk up to a small abstract statue beside the church. It’s labeled THE ANGEL OF THE LOST BELLS, and a plaque beside it tells the story of how the mission’s bells were stolen back in the ’20s, and how the parishioners still pray for their safe return so that the church will regain its voice.

Someone stole the freaking church bells? Callan asks himself. Typical. People can’t leave nothin' alone.

They go inside the church.

The whitewashed adobe walls stand in stark contrast to the dark hand-hewn wooden beams that support the peaked ceiling. Incongruous but inexpensive pine paneling lines the lower half of the walls, beneath stained-glass windows with depictions of saints and the Stations of the Cross. The oaken pews look new. The altar is colorfully decorated in the Mexican style, with brightly painted statues of Mary and the saints. It’s bittersweet to her-she hasn’t stepped foot in a church since Juan’s funeral, and this reminds her of him.

They stand in front of the altar together.

She says, “I want to light a candle.”

He goes with her, and they kneel together in front of the votive candles. A statue of the Baby Jesus stands behind the candle, and behind that is a painting of a beautiful young Kumeyaay woman looking reverentially up to heaven.

Nora lights a candle, bows her head and silently prays.

He kneels, waiting for her to finish, and looks at the mural that takes up the whole right-hand wall behind the altar. It’s a vivid painting of Christ on the Cross, with the two thieves nailed up beside him.

Nora takes a long time.

When they’re outside she says, “I feel better.”

“You prayed for a long time.”

She tells him about Juan Parada. About their friendship and her love for him. How it was the murder of Parada that led her to betray Adan.

“I hate Adan,” she says. “I want to see him in hell.”

Callan don’t say nothing.

They’re back in the car maybe ten minutes when she says, “Sean, I have to go back.”

“Why?”

“To testify against Adan,” she says. “He killed Juan.”

Callan gets it. He hates hearing it, but he gets it. He still tries to talk her out if it. “Scachi and them, I don’t think they want you to testify. I think they want to kill you.”

“Sean, I have to go back.”

He nods. “I’ll take you to Keller.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

That night they lie in bed in the dark, listening to the sound of crickets outside and to each other’s breathing. In the distance a pack of coyotes launches into a cacophony of yips and howls, and then it’s quiet again.

Callan says, “I was there.”

“Where?”

“When they killed Parada,” he says. “I was part of it.”

He feels her body tense beside him. Her breathing stops. Then she says, “For God’s sake, why?”

It’s ten, fifteen minutes before he says a word. Then he starts with being seventeen years old in the Liffey Pub and pulling the trigger on Eddie Friel. He talks for hours, murmuring softly into the warmth of her neck, and tells her about the men he killed. He tells her about the murders he did in New York, Colombia, Peru, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico. When he gets to that day at the Guadalajara airport he says, “I didn’t know it was supposed to be him. I tried to stop it, but I was too late. He died in my arms, Nora. He said he forgave me.”

“But you don’t.”

He shakes his head. “I’m guilty as hell. For him. For all of them.”

He’s surprised when he feels her arms wrap around him and pull him tight. His tears fall on her neck.

When he stops crying she says, “When I was fourteen…”

She tells him about all the men. The johns, the jobs, the parties. All the men she took in her mouth, her ass, herself. She looks into his eyes for the revulsion she expects to see but she doesn’t find it. Then she tells him about how she loved Parada, and how she wanted revenge, and how she went with Adan, and how it led to so much killing and how it hurts.

Their faces are close, their lips almost touching.

She takes his hand and puts it under her denim shirt and on her breast. His eyes open, he looks surprised, but she nods and he brushes her nipple with his palm and she feels it get hard and it feels good and when he lowers his mouth to her breast and licks and sucks it’s like she blossoms in his mouth and she feels herself getting soft and moist.

He’s hard. She reaches down and opens his jeans and feels him and his moan vibrates on her breast. She frees his cock from his pants and strokes him and he tentatively unzips her pants and reaches in and touches her pussy with one finger and she says It’s good so he dips his finger into her wetness then rubs it gently on her bud and feels it swell and get hard and after a while her back arches and she groans and cries and he slides his mouth down and sucks her and licks her like he’s healing a wound and her body tightens and arches and she grips his hand as she comes and he strokes her neck and her hair and says It’s okay, it’s okay and when she stops crying she bends down to take his cock in her mouth but he says I want to be inside you, is that okay and she says Yes and he asks again Is that okay and she says I want you in me.

She lies back and takes his cock and guides it to her and he gently pushes and she wraps her legs around him and pushes him in harder and then he’s all the way in and he looks down at her beautiful face and her beautiful eyes and she’s smiling and he says God, that is so beautiful and she nods and tilts her hips up to take him deeper and he feels this sweet place inside her and he slides out and then back in again and she is all sweet slippery heat to him, she is shimmering silvery wet, she strokes his back, his ass, his legs and moans So good, so good and he reaches for that spot with his cock and touches it and there’s sweat on her lips and he licks it off, sweat on her neck and he licks it off, he feels the sweat running between her breasts onto his chest, from her thighs onto his thighs, a sweet sticky wetness between her thighs she’s wrapped around him so tight, he says I’m going to come and she says Yes, baby. Come in me, come in me, come in me and he pushes into her as deep as he can and holds himself there and then he feels her pussy squeeze him, grip him in place, and she pulses on him and he comes, screaming, and then screams again, and then crumples onto the warmth of her shoulder and she says I love feeling you inside me.

They fall asleep like that, with him on top of her.

He gets up early, while she’s still asleep and goes into town to get groceries so that he can wake her up with the smell of blueberry pancakes, coffee and bacon.

When he comes back, she’s gone.