Through a Glass, Darkly (Assassins of Youth MC #1), page 14
But just yesterday Gideon had mentioned again spiriting Vonda and me away. He didn’t seem to have a clear picture of exactly what we’d do, though. If we just went to his house, it would be simple for Allred to send some men to drag us back the second Gideon went to work—if he’d even have that job after pulling that stunt.
So everything was up in the air as I ferried seven squalling children in my king cab truck. Picnic stuff was in the back, and I had planned to take them up a trail to a waterfall none of them had ever seen, with a swimming hole they could frolic in, and a hanging garden to shelter them. I could tell them about the erosion of the freestanding natural arch on the way. My sister-wife Tazmin followed with a similar load of kids.
I lolled under a cottonwood just breathing in the beauty of the day. I was reading my favorite Langston Hughes poem, To Artina. He wrote, I will be God when it comes to you. I had to read the poem several times to let it soak in. He was obviously deeply in love to be playing God like that.
I couldn’t get over that Gideon wasn’t gone at the Altar of Sacrifice Mine like he normally was—he was sleeping soundly in my own backyard. Was it selfish of me to wish things could stay like this eternally? Things weren’t so bad there in the compound, when Allred wasn’t calling for me, whipping me with his belt or whatever handy item happened to be sitting there. I loved my sister-wives and their children and I was certainly never lonely. Aside from that unearthly desolation, that separation from my maker.
I knew that by binding with Gideon, I was buffering myself against this birthright of loneliness. Was I cheating God, taking away what he intended for us? Maybe eternal desolation wasn’t our birthright. Maybe consummating our love was.
For I was certain Gideon loved me as I loved him. He just had to, to spirit away an old woman like me and her child! With this in mind, I lifted my red dress over my head. I wore a modest one piece bathing suit underneath, more than I normally had been wearing, and I was dying to get into the water.
Tazmin and I couldn’t get our hair wet, so I did the breast stroke around the cool hole for awhile.
“Some of us have been talking,” Tazmin said, paddling in place next to me.
Uh-oh. “Oh, yes?”
“About your Gideon.”
My Gideon. I smiled inwardly. Already they knew he was my Gideon.
“We want our turn to nurse him, too. Why should you get all the fun?”
I was aghast. “Oh, so it’s ‘fun’ now, changing the dressing on a shooting victim?”
Tazmin was about five years older than my thirty, but she acted five years younger. “Why, yes, if you want to be blunt! Who wouldn’t want to get a chance to touch that gorgeous stud’s body? Let’s be blunt, Mahalia. I’ve lain with no one but Allred and frankly, that gets old. It’s worse than laying with no one, if you know what I mean.”
Did I know what she meant? I was blunt, too. “Does he beat you too?”
She rolled her eyes. “How do you think I broke my arm last year? It wasn’t from falling down the stairs. I’m not that clumsy. Listen, I know it’s our lot in life and blah blah. I have to live with the fact that I’ll never be touched by another man until my dying days. But you’ve got to share the wealth with that statuesque stud of yours.”
Stud of mine. I liked that even more. “Well. He’s much better today. In fact, he went out on a few visits with Allred—”
Tazmin’s eyes turned round. She looked at something behind my shoulder. I paddled in a circle to see what she was looking at. Oh, my squash. A grinning Gideon stood there, plain as day. His gauntness was clear to see under the thin cotton of his t-shirt, under the cut that had been pierced by a bullet. He looked boyish today, freshly shaven, his lovely auburn hair almost sparkling in the lacey light and shadows cast by the cottonwood tree leaves.
Tazmin’s look was distinctly hateful. It was a look I thought we’d been taught not to give others. “Well, lookie here. You even get your own cabana boy.” And she swam to the opposite side of the pool, full of hate.
I splashed some water at her, just for the sake of doing it, and swam swiftly to Gideon’s feet. I hauled my torso out of the water, clinging to the red sandstone for support. Looking up at him this way, the package that swelled the crotch of his jeans looked enormous. His stomach was practically concave with the minimal amount of food he’d been eating, though he seemed to love the homemade sourdough bread I kept bringing to the cottage. “You finished with Allred’s visits?”
He just would not stop grinning. “Yeah. He just wanted me to go around to some mining suppliers, introduce me to them, that sort of shit.”
“So everything’s good with Allred?”
“Yeah. He gave me the deed to half the mine.”
“Wow. He must be real grateful you saved his life.”
“All in a day’s work.” Gideon squatted and reached a hand out for me. He pulled me out of the swimming hole and I felt like a giant beached manatee, streaming a river of water down the sandstone. “I brought my own picnic. I see the kids have torn into yours.”
I laughed, eager to wrap at least my lower torso in a towel. But Gideon kept snatching it from me, his face betraying no emotion. “Give me my towel!”
“You look better without it. We can use it to sit over here in this grove of cottonwoods.”
We picked our way through the little forest of cottonwoods mixed in with birch.
“We shouldn’t go outside of earshot of the kids,” I said, when Gideon seemed to want to push farther.
“But isn’t that other gal watching them?”
“Well yes, but…”
Grinning, Gideon consented, and let me spread my towel in a sandy spot. We seated ourselves Indian style, my fat butt barely fitting on the towel. I was so self-conscious I almost cringed away from Gideon. Even during the bath tub incident, I’d been fully clothed in my red dress. It was all right for little kids to see me like this, of course. But a grown man?
Gideon gestured at me with a beer bottle, asking me if he had my permission. “Oh, go right ahead. I just have a…thing against it ever since my husband…I mean my first husband…”
“Oh, he was an overdrinker? I can understand why you don’t like it.” Gideon reached into the bag and took out two sandwiches he must have gotten from our Cornucopia deli. The Jeffersonian Butte was on Allred’s land, heading up toward Zion, meaning Gideon still hadn’t left the property since being shot. He handed me one without asking me what sort I preferred. “Did he…get out of control?”
“You mean like beat me? No, but it meant he stayed out late a lot of the time and he didn’t want to come home to a lecture. So instead he’d ride his scoot drunk and come home at six AM when I was just getting up.” I’d almost forgotten there were times that were less than idyllic with Field. Compared to the nausea and loathing I felt when I thought of Allred, life with Field had been a romp through the park.
Bluntly, then, Gideon asked, “Does Chiles beat you?”
I sat up straight, fingering my sandwich. I was starving—the kids had leaped on all the food we’d brought—but didn’t want to come off as a complete cow. I had to be ladylike with my food. “What makes you ask that?”
“I’ve seen bruises, Mahalia. And I’ve seen the way you cringe and cower in his presence.”
I shrugged. “No more than any other woman cringes in his presence.” I sighed. Why was I protecting Allred? “But yes, he does beat me and most of his other wives. We’re just chattel to him. It’s his way of asserting authority over us, obviously. He can’t just rape us. He has to beat us while he’s doing it.”
Maybe I should have been a little more circumspect before I’d told Gideon the truth. Fire raged in his eyes. He smashed down his sandwich without even having taken a bite, and he whipped mine from my fingers too. On his knees, he took me by the shoulders.
“He’s never doing that to you again, hear me?”
I nodded, dumb.
“Listen. You’re my lamb, my mama. No one’s ever going to touch you from here on out, you understand? And I’m going to make you my old lady as soon as you get over the stigma of having been someone else’s property for so long.”
I tried to shrug it off, but really, it felt good having a man so protective of me. Field had abandoned me so many nights to go party with his idiotic friends and I’d always felt so unimportant. For the first time maybe ever, it sure seemed like I was number one in a man’s life. “I love you, Gideon.”
Oh, my sin! What in gopple dampin’ fruit dumpsuits was I thinking? Declare my love for a man who—well, actually, there was really no reason not to declare what was clearly the truth, but it had been years since I’d done so! It put me in a vulnerable position, laying my cards on the table like that. Why didn’t I just ask him to smack me across the face? Same thing. Same results.
But he didn’t. True, he didn’t do the expected, romantic comedy thing, and declare his love for me, too. But he bent me backward so I flopped—again like a beached fish of some kind—onto my back, and he dove headfirst between my thighs! I went “ooph” real loud and clapped my hand over my mouth, hoping the splashing kids tearing into the picnic basket wouldn’t hear me.
He didn’t take down the straps of my suit. He just commenced to biting and licking my thighs until my inner sex was clutching and grasping for an invisible penis. His breath was warm on the virgin skin of my upper thighs, the hours-old beard scratching with a thrill I’d never felt before.
“Mahalia,” it sounded like he said, over the rustling of millions of cottonwood leaves overhead, “I want nothing more than to make you happy. I want you to feel bliss”—and he took a little bite and lick from my thigh—“and joy when I touch you. I want you to know that heaven is my mouth, eternal paradise is my cock, and everything to do with me is sheer rapture. Like this.”
Fingering aside a strip of my bathing suit, Gideon dipped his head and swiped a lick at my clitoris.
“Ah!” I must’ve jumped two feet in the air, clutching the leather of his cut at the shoulders. Son of a motherless goat, was he actually going to lick me there? Field had never done that. It had never occurred to me to ask. Gideon was truly a man of the world, a player!
One hand clutching sand, the other leather, I panted and tried to relax into it. I just couldn’t get over the idea that he had his face buried in my labia. Thank God I had just been swimming! How could he not mind it? Not only did he not mind, he seemed to be eagerly lapping away like a cow at a lick.
Every time he’d swipe his fat tongue against my lengthening clitoris, I relaxed a little bit more into it. His confidence rubbed off on me, and soon I was even jiggling my hips a little to indicate when I liked a particular move, a certain squiggle or stroke. I squeezed my handful of sand as he zeroed in for the kill. That he was experienced and worldly made me feel even more brazen and ribald, my breasts heaving, my hips wiggling like a downright slut.
“Ah—ah—ah—” I sounded like one of those porn videos I’d accidentally seen Parley Pipkin watching once. I sounded like a sweet little girl being taken advantage of by this rough and tumble biker—and in a way, I was!
I was the innocent brazenly taking a tumble in the sand with this gritty, rugged tattooed man. I was sealed to another man—and the details of that were enough to curdle your whey—while spreading my thighs for a man who had done bad, bad things in his time. He dealt in weapons. No doubt he ran drugs, too. They all did. He’d committed murder right before my very eyes, and probably not for the first time, yet here I was, wantonly shimmying my very pussy against his hungry mouth!
The promiscuity of it all made my blood boil, and soon I could feel that certain tension in the walls of my sex, the squeezing of my uterus that let me know I was about to orgasm.
“Don’t stop—don’t stop—don’t stop!” I whispered urgently.
And he did just that.
Wham. The power and intensity of the orgasm swept me away. All my female organs were squeezed by an outside agency. The first contraction was the biggest. I nearly decapitated poor Gideon with the horsepower of my grip on his shoulder. He kept lapping away, though, sending me higher and higher with each successive contraction. They rolled up and down my channel, clutching my ovary, my tubes, any organ that happened to be in the way. It was almost frightening, the force of this sort of orgasm, one brought on by another man’s illicit tongue.
As a player, he knew when to back off, when to slow down. My head felt like it was floating in the trees above, light as a particle.
The wind had picked up. The nearby bushes rustled.
And Gideon lifted his head like a buck listening for a predator. “What the…” he whispered.
I struggled to raise myself on my elbows just in time to see dark blue skirts of a woman—it could only be Tazmin—skipping away through the woods.
“What in blue blazes?” I said, louder.
Gideon leaned on one elbow, wiping his face with his forearm. “Yeah. Exactly my response. I know we weren’t too secretive and all, but I’m pretty sure that other chick just saw us.”
“Tazmin,” I said with disgust. “She’s incredibly immature. I hope nothing comes of this. Should I talk to her, do you think? Does Allred know you’re here?”
“Nope. I just took off on my bike once we were done meeting with people. Yeah, maybe try talking to her. Get the lay of the land. See how much she saw, what she plans to do about it.”
I sighed deeply, trying to retain my dignity by sitting cross-legged with spine straight. “I’ve been horrified at God’s lack of intervention between me and Allred.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, the usual dilemma. What sort of God allows women to be beaten? If it’s us who had a hand in creating this world, shouldn’t we take responsibility for the evil as well as the beauty? Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the bad things I see, Gideon. Look at poor Dingo and his friends.”
“Oh, don’t I fucking know it.” As though he’d just had sex—which he sort of had—Gideon took a cigarette from his cut pocket and lit it. I didn’t mind it outdoors. It even had a good aroma some of the time. He looked like a youth with his hair mussed from rubbing against my thighs. “He keeps telling me about these groups of Lost Boys up in Salt Lake and elsewhere, Park City and Bountiful I think he said. In a way, I think it’s uplifting to know we participate in creating events. It means we have the power to fix them.”
“Yes, you helped Dingo. He was going through trash cans and now he has a regular home.”
“And a regular job to do. When I get out of Cornucopia I’ve got to bring him down to Bullhead to meet Papa Ewey and the rest.”
The silence that fell then was heavy with the question. How was I to get out of Cornucopia? Gideon could just ride off, no harm, no foul.
He seemed to pick up on this. He tore apart a piece of grass, his face tight with concern. “Burning Man.”
I frowned, too, picking up my sandwich he’d smashed earlier. The roll was kind of squashed to one side, but my stomach was growling. “I’ve heard of that. That Breakiron guy used to always talk about it. Some kind of hippie get-together in the Nevada desert.”
“Exactly. They’ll never find us in that crowd, even if they send someone looking for us. I was given three tickets by one of those riding club guys at the High Dive. The three of us can go there, you, me, Vonda. It’ll be like a honeymoon for us, me making you my mama. I’ll hold off on getting you a ‘Property Of’ patch after what you’ve been through.”
Of course my instant reaction was to balk at the idea. A hippie commune, really? But after my initial thought, suddenly it started to make sense. “We could hide out there for however long the festival goes on.”
“A week, I think. Breakiron always talked about wanting to go to his first ‘burn.’”
“I can see that. Isn’t it all about naked, muddy orgies?”
“I get that impression, but I think that’s easily avoided. Family values and all.” Gideon quirked that grin that always melted my heart. “Breakiron said it gives everyone ‘complete personal transformation.’ I think we can steer Vonda to the enlightening and spiritual aspects of the place, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes.” Vonda had only briefly met Gideon, while knocking on the cottage’s door and suchlike, although she knew we were plotting something. “We can expose our genitals to the full moon, and maybe even smoke marijuana.” I giggled. I’d smoked it once with Field and it knocked me over. Maybe just a puff or two this time.
“That’s my girl. By the time we come back, Allred will have had a chance to get used to you being gone. You can store your personal effects in my house. I can’t see him breaking in to get clothing, and Dust Bunny and Dingo will be there.”
“And Kimball and Rayd and the others?”
“Yeah. We might as well move them in at the same time. I’ve got my old roommate Sledgehammer on standby, waiting for the moment something happens. And after seeing that woman in the bushes just now, I have a bad feeling it might be imminent.”
“Yes. Tazmin has always been sort of a jealous person. I might as well go talk to her right now.”
Gideon stood with me, taking my hands. “Good. And don’t worry. I’m not going to let the woman I love come to any harm.”
My heart was fit to burst. He’d finally said it, even if indirectly like that. When I kissed him, I just wanted to turn into liquid energy in his arms. But I had to go talk to Tazmin. What she planned to do would directly affect the rest of our lives.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GIDEON
While I was completely expecting the visit, I wasn’t really ready to act upon it.
I had to wing everything when Allred Lee Chiles came knocking at my cottage door.
Actually, he didn’t knock, of course. I left the door open in case Mahalia wanted something. She was only sixty yards away in that weird train-like saltbox house of hers, dozens of tiny bedrooms side by side upstairs. I could see her window from mine, and a few times I’d caught her looking down at me. I’d waved, but since it was daytime and no lights were on inside the cottage, she hadn’t been able to see me. But it’d warmed my heart.
