Through a Glass, Darkly (Assassins of Youth MC #1), page 22
“‘Spirit prison’?” asked Slushy.
I let Sledgehammer explain. It was good for my men to start learning the ins and outs of Cornucopia’s lingo. Especially if they were going to be pushing up on some of the refugee women I imagined would be streaming out of there in the coming months and years. Already Sledge had developed a sort of paternal relationship with Kimball. The fact that they were the same age led me to think it would soon be more than that, once Kimball traded her sensible black shoes for biker boots.
Sledgehammer spread his hands. “After you die, there are two places to go—paradise or spirit prison. See, you actually imprison yourself in this afterlife hell by being disobedient to the gospel while you lived. I like it. It takes away the idea there’s a vengeful God sitting up there on his throne, casting thunderbolts and decrees down on us. Spirit prison is only a temporary abode, though. Chiles will have the chance to repent.”
I snorted. “I doubt he will. He’s too full of himself.” Then I realized I was speaking as though Chiles was eavesdropping from his special prison, and I hurried to move on. I was neither a believer nor a non-believer at that point. I liked some of it and rejected some of it, as I did most religions I’d heard of. “Anyway, Slushy, your answer is yes, we’ll keep trading iron and using the fundies to funnel other things, once we establish those connections again. What were you saying about Sledgehammer?”
“Well,” said Slushy, “you mentioned that in Bullhead, you were a butcher. We’ll need to launder the gun or drug money. We can insert it down in Bullhead into one of Papa Ewey’s businesses. I can layer it through my offshore channels, and have it come out at the other end in your new butcher shop.”
Dust Bunny giggled. “Come out the other end.”
“New butcher shop?” queried Sledgehammer.
“Right,” said Slushy. “I aim to revitalize the downtown area. This way you guys are seen as saviors of the local citizenry, knights in shining chrome riding in to save Avalanche from becoming a ghost town.”
I said, “Several citizens have already approached me, telling me how glad they are we’re here.”
Slushy nodded. “There are oodles of opportunities downtown, and I think if Sledgehammer opens a butcher shop that might also sell groceries, you’ve got a new legit business that also benefits the community.”
Sledgehammer nodded. “Sounds good to me. I’ve talked to several ranchers. We can advertise grass-fed beef, that sort of thing.”
Slushy shaped his hand into a gun and aimed it at Sledgehammer. “Exactly. You can sell premium juice and offer reusable shopping bags. Have a deli with a place to eat out front.” It was obvious Slushy had put more thought into this than either I or Sledgehammer had. “There’s a place with hardwood floors I have in mind just up the street at the corner of Crosstown and Watchtower. We need to gentrify, take this ramshackle place back from the fundies. I was even thinking of starting up a local farmer’s market, but I don’t think we have enough people yet.” He shuffled some papers. “Yosemite Sam, what did you do in Bullhead?”
Yosemite Sam jutted out his lower jaw. “I ran a smoke shop.”
“Okay, that’s no good for the family atmosphere we want to portray, especially since Gideon here just quit. How’s about a coffee shop? That could go in conjunction with Sledgehammer’s deli, in the same block.”
Yosemite shot, “I thought fundies don’t drink coffee.”
“These ones do,” I said. “They do a lot of things regular fundies don’t. Mahalia is sort of going back to her mainstream church roots, but she’s sure as hell going to keep drinking coffee. I think the coffee shop sounds great. All in favor?”
Although it was Yosemite Sam’s livelihood at stake here, it was a club matter. Everything in town would be a club matter from now on in. We were literally rebuilding Avalanche from the ground up, infusing the town with our money, ill-gotten though it may have been. It was voted that Yosemite Sam would run a coffee shop, and Maximus, who’d retired from his soils engineering job, would reopen the musty, crumbling barber shop complete with barber shop pole out front. Dust Bunny and I would of course run the mine. Dingo would continue to be our IT guy. He’d work closely with Slushy on banking operations.
One last agenda item remained. I said, “According to Dingo there’s supposed to be an encampment of his Lost Boys up in Bountiful. Once Dingo’s patched in, I aim to take a ride up there, see if any want to join up. We need more manpower if we aim to turn this town around.”
Of course that was agreed to, and I was finally able to adjourn the meeting. Once out in the bar area, I headed for Dingo, giving Skippy a break tending bar. But Mahalia waylaid me, an urgent look on her face.
She took my lapels in her hands, the only person on earth who dared touch my colors—my “Prez” patch. Her years-long ordeal with Chiles was wearing off, and she bloomed with sensuous curves. She was experimenting, too, with fashion, many tips coming from Vonda. As a result, some of her experimental choices were distinctly teenaged, like her current flirty cheerleader’s skirt paired with a short-sleeved sweats decorated with puffy knit balls. Well. She was learning. It was all an improvement over the nun’s clothes of Cornucopia. “Gideon. I can’t wait any longer. I need you now.”
Whatever Mahalia meant by “need,” I was there to serve. We’d even cleaned out a back store room to serve as a sort of hotel room for members who didn’t have a place to live yet. Yosemite Sam was living there now until we could repair a two-bedroom cottage he’d bought near my house. He wouldn’t mind if we found comfort there.
She practically dragged me to the little room. The window looked out on the spires and mesas of Zion, the cinnamon and caramel layers of sandstone formed by eons of erosion. Not a bad little view for a tiny cramped bachelor’s pad.
Slamming the door, Mahalia pressed me to the wall. “You were gone when I woke up. Vonda said you all came here for a meeting.”
“Chapel,” I gasped, taking her tiny chin in my palm. “We approved your safe house. Only, the name’s changed. Sledgehammer came up with Save Our Baby—”
Mahalia shut me up with a kiss.
She’d been like this lately, and it was fine with me. Being liberated from her prison camp seemed to enliven her, give her freedom to act like a modern woman.
I was glad to believe in her ideas about life after—and before—death. How could something immortal just suddenly begin in time with our birth? I liked the idea I’d be reunited with her in our blissful afterlife. It wasn’t a static, bland reality in that realm, but an ever-changing, vibrant place where we’d keep learning and growing.
And I’d be with her. Forever.
MAHALIA
I was an insatiable libertine. I was still having nightmares of Allred Chiles’ last moments. What could have happened versus what did happen. If things had gone slightly different at any given moment, my sleeping brain spun that out into frightful tales of violence and mayhem. I wasn’t used to seeing blood spurt so freely, and I’d just witnessed two men being shot to death.
But my waking self was finally free of the influence of Allred’s perverted, corrupt soul. The freedom steeped me in joy. On a primal level, I was probably reacting to Gideon as being my savior. And I wanted to repay him for his kindness.
So I cut him off when he tried to tell me about my new building. I knew that whatever it was, it would be something beneficial for me and the business. I kissed my man deeply, feasting on the warm sensuality of his mouth. Gideon was a thoroughly passionate man—not that I had experience with many of them—and he brought out all the inner sensuality in me I’d never known existed.
Sure, Field was a competent lover. I’d loved him more on an intellectual, sensible level than a sexual one. With Gideon, sex was one of the most important angles of our relationship. I showed him that now as I ignored his business talk and weaved my fingers through his silken auburn hair, massaging his scalp in tiny circles. I bit his upper lip, drawing it toward me, while slipping my tongue against his upper palate. My other hand lifted the flimsy shirt from his abs so I could feel naked flesh, rotating my thumb against his six-pack, feeling the gunshot scar over his liver. Gideon was back in fighting shape after his heroic efforts to change the face of marriage in Cornucopia.
I knew they’d killed Field. The OSHA report had concluded it was an act of God that had taken the parking brake off that day. The trajectory the behemoth piece of equipment had followed was impossible to duplicate. Field standing in just the right spot with his back to that incline was strictly coincidence, putting rocks into gabion baskets to build a wall. I knew better. The foreman, seeing Field squished like an insect specimen, had run the opposite direction, taking off in his pickup truck, not stopping until he reached a bar. He’d already known Field was dead.
Allred had wanted me for another wife. What was stopping Verlan Turley or whoever took over Cornucopia’s reins from doing in Gideon? We would have to be on the watch forever.
He slanted his mouth against mine, murmuring, “Let’s do it up against this Doobie Brothers poster.” I could feel his smile against mine. Yosemite Sam’s feeble attempts at interior decoration were admirable.
“No. Wait,” I said.
I dropped to my knees like an elevator.
Gumming Gideon’s prick from outside his jeans, my fingers unwove the puzzle that was his big pewter belt buckle. He fell against the wall with a thud, slightly tearing the concert poster.
“Oh. God. Good God.”
I’d never blown him before. It wasn’t in my repertoire of sexual tricks. Admittedly, that box of tricks was fairly tiny. I’d only executed the movements of a blowjob under duress before. Doing it of my own free will was going to be a fresh, new experience, so I’d read up on it. I wanted it to be an unrelated act to what had gone before—like something learned from the internet.
Gideon’s blazingly hot penis nearly slapped against my cheek. It almost seemed to burn my palm as I rubbed my face drily all over it. I lifted his ball sac and did the same, spicing up my caresses with tiny licks from a hard, fast tongue. His balls were hot and tangy—the scent of sex.
When he grabbed my shoulders and arched his hips toward me, I lost it. His commanding, sinewy grace was too much for me, and his long, heavy cock pulsated in my palm with a life of its own. A flood of oxytocin rushed from my brain down my spine, causing me to jump to acts I would’ve considered unthinkable months before.
I swallowed his penis almost whole.
It was like a magic act, gulping that pole. One second he was screwing it into my palm with erotic rotations of his lean hips. The next second, it filled my throat so deeply I imagined I could feel it up against my tonsils.
I think I did it right, because his low groan reverberated against those tonsils. It almost tickled, so I gulped, and gulped again. The saliva started to flow as I sank his pole again and again down my throat. I got into a rhythm of plunging and gulping, plunging and gulping.
At first it seemed impossible, what I was doing. How could any woman swallow such a plump, long dick? But I found that if I relaxed my throat muscles and fell into a steady rhythm in a sort of Zen way, I could take more of his meat.
Then I started lapping away. At first I just covered the underside, massaging the bulging vein with my tongue-tip. Then, on a backstroke when the shiny, excited glans would slip dangerously against my palate, I tried tickling the slit with a few licks. That made him twitch and jump. I wasn’t sure if this was good until he uttered,
“God, Mahalia. Sweetness, sweetness, sweetness. Stop. I want to come inside you.”
This made my heart soar in more ways than one. I’d told him I wanted to get off the birth control pill because I was wary of the hormones. He’d said fine, he understood, and I’d assumed it meant we’d add rubbers to our repertoire. But we’d “raw dogged” it three times since then, with no letup in sight. To my mind, it indicated a deep and enduring love. That he was willing to risk having a baby when things were so chaotic and uncertain let me know his love was sincere.
And that gladdened my heart more than anything.
Again, he slid his fat dick inside me with no preparation. He lifted me by the underarms and didn’t even sit me on top of Yosemite Sam’s rickety desk. He just brushed aside my short skirt, fingering away the strip of nylon that served me as panties these days. The few short strokes of his fingers against my clitoris were all I needed for warmup. I was already slick and primed to go.
Fucking Gideon Fortunati was like nothing else I’d ever experienced. It had never occurred to me it could be so lusty, so laden with emotion. Forgetting what came before Gideon, like my amnesia of what I’d experienced before my painful birth, was a sweet mercy. If my concentration wasn’t fixed on my current reality, I could never tolerate this earthly awareness. Like the glorious paradise I’d been cradled in before birth, a tender grace of forgetfulness separated this man from the acts of the man who had gone before.
The amnesiac veil isn’t there to harm us, to make us tear out our hair in frustration. It’s there so we can live in the here and now without bemoaning our existence every waking step of the way.
I reached an arm down so I could cup his balls. They were full and round, almost hard as he plunged into me. I squished them in my palm with precome gliding my hand. It seemed just the thing he needed to tip him over the edge and into the abyss from which there’s no return.
His groan was from a deep abyss too. “Good God in an evil…”
He never finished his beloved catch phrase. He was too busy spending inside me, swiveling his hips to jam his cockhead far up against my cervix.
I thought I could feel it gushing there. Of course, they say there’s no sensation, very few nerve endings, in the cervix. But I know I felt his tight, shiny corona burst inside me, over and over in short, forceful gushes. I met his thrusts with my own, clutching his pole with my inner muscles.
I flung my arms around his neck for dear life. Gideon, oh Gideon, master of my reality. It was almost frightening loving him so much. The extent to which one loves is also the extent to which one is plunged into agony when one loses the object of one’s affections. But it’s the age old question. Is it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?
He stayed wedged inside me for a long time. It seemed as if someone knocked on the door and opened it a sliver, but I didn’t care. I was in a safe place—the clubhouse of the Assassins of Youth, Avalanche Chapter. It didn’t get much safer than this, pinned by the Prez to the wall covered with a country rock poster. Those Prospects, those newbies outside in the bar area, it was their job to protect us. They could just wait.
At length, Gideon withdrew. I loved the warm rush of semen that trickled down my inner thigh. He looked warmly at me. I touched the tip of my nose to the drop of sweat on the tip of his nose. His panting against my throat forced a massive shiver up my spine.
“Ah, shit,” I said. I was starting to swear like a biker because I was around them twenty-four seven. “I forgot to tell you. My sisters—”
“Your sisters are here,” echoed Dingo from the doorway.
“Thanks!” I called out, rearranging my clothing into a presentable style. “Yes. I forgot to tell you. Last night I texted my sister Oaklyn. They’ve been dying to come down and meet you. I told her today would be a good day. I hope that’s all right.” I was already accustomed to the practice of asking my man’s permission before doing something. That wasn’t a fundamentalist tradition. That was a biker’s.
“Of course. And the other one’s name?”
“Cambria. Oaklyn’s the nurse.”
“Ah. I’ll remember that. Like Oakland, California.”
“Sort of. Mormons have creative ways of spelling names. But Cambria’s spelled just like the town in California. It’s confusing.”
I made as if to go—Dingo was waiting right outside in the hallway, I could tell—but Gideon took hold of my upper arms.
“Hey. I wanted you to know, I’m beginning to understand your beliefs.”
I smiled. “Beliefs?” There were plenty of them, to be sure.
“Yes. I think I know that our existence hides a core that holds all of our eternal past and future, right?”
I was surprised. “Yes. Something like that. That’s good.”
“But within this framework, we have utter free will.”
“Yes! Utter free will, yes.”
“I could’ve run from you. I could’ve said to myself ‘shit, she’s high maintenance. She’s too hot to handle.’”
My smile faded. “You could have, yes. I’m not the most attractive flower in the bunch. And I have a child with another man.”
He never lost his idealistic smile. “But the fact that I didn’t, that I fought hard for you, means my love is deeper for it. Why would someone give up something that’s so hard-won? I fought like a bitch for you, Mahalia. There was a reason for that. You’re a stunning goddess. Your haunted eyes tell me your whole story. But there’s more hidden at your core. And I want to know everything about you.”
I had to laugh, I was so overcome with emotion. “You’ll be waiting a long time to find out all of that.”
Gideon bent to kiss me, but Oaklyn was shrieking, “Mahalia! We finally found you!”
Cambria added, “This tiny burg is hard as hell to find.”
“I couldn’t keep them out of the hallway,” Dingo said apologetically.
There would be plenty of time for Gideon to kiss me. I trusted him with my life and the life of my precious daughter. That meant we’d be together, sealed unto all eternity.
I took my sisters out into the bar area, where several Assassins drooled over them. I was off the antianxiety medication after weaning myself slowly, and Oaklyn wanted my unused bottle. She’d been having a hard time with the guy she was dating. I went behind the bar to find my purse. That’s when Dingo told me the club had approved a trip to Bountiful for him to bring back some of his fellow Lost Boys. He saw me taking the bottle from my purse.
