by Sybil Bartel
Exactly. “And you’re no fifteen-year-old.”
He turned his head away, and for a long moment, I didn’t think he was going to say anything more. Lying there still like a statue, his muscular arms at his sides, his long legs with his well-developed thigh muscles, he was all man. There was nothing teenager about him.
“I do not know how old I am,” he quietly admitted.
“How is that even possible?” Where the hell was he from? “Did you grow up in the Glades?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t know your exact age?”
“No.”
“Your mama or your daddy never told you?” Was he off his rocker? “You got amnesia?”
“I do not know who my parents are. What is amnesia?”
Dang. “Amnesia is where you don’t remember nothin’ from your past.”
“I remember everything.”
“Except who your parents are?”
He sighed like he was put out. “You have one mother, one father?”
“Um, yeah.” Ain’t we all?
“I had many.”
What the ever-loving heck? “What’s that, like that TV show where that guy has a bunch of wives? What’s it called, polygamy?” Was he for real?
He looked toward the door. “Was that your mother who called you?”
“Yeah. How many mamas you got?” Now I was intrigued. More than I should be. I’d never met anyone like him.
He ignored my question. “She will not come looking for you here?”
“She’s afraid to leave the house.”
He frowned. “Ever?”
I nodded. “Never.” Moving closer to him, I sat beside the blow-up mattress I’d stolen from the gas station convenience store where I worked. “So tell me why you have a lot of mamas.”
“That is how I grew up.” His gaze drifted over my jeans. “Do you always dress like that?”
I laughed, I couldn’t help it. “You’re beat all to hell, cut up, infected and lying in a garage on a stolen air mattress, and you don’t know who your mama is, but you’re worried about what I wear?” The second the words left my mouth, instinct kicked in and it clicked. “Your family do this to you?”
His chest rose with an inhale, and despite him lying flat as a pancake, his shoulders went straight and proud. “I survived being vanquished.”
“Vanquished.” Now it was my turn to not know what the hell he meant. “What does that mean?”
He looked me in the eye. “I was cast out from River Ranch.”
Her eyes went wide, her mouth opened, and for the first time, I heard her whisper. “Hot damn.” She stared at me as if I were an apparition.
I did not ask if she knew what River Ranch was. I did not have to.
“That’s…. You…. Shit.” She shook her head and swallowed. “That’s the most violent cult in like all of America. All of history.” Her hand covered her throat, and her voice pitched higher. “I hear they cut people up in itty-bitty bites and eat them.”
“We are not cannibals.”
She moved back from me. “But you cut people up?”
“I do not cut people up.” I buried them after they were already dead.
“Well, that’s a relief,” she said sarcastically, before her mouth popped open again. “Oh my God! That’s the branding on your back! The double R’s, with one backwards, that’s what that means, doesn’t it?” She shook her head. “I can’t believe I didn’t even realize it. I mean, I saw it, but I thought, you know, your name was like Ron Roberts or something. But River Ranch? Oh, sweet Jesus, Lord have mercy.” She scanned my body. “They did this to you?”
I nodded once.
“Why?”
“I gave a female a flower.” I did not know why I told her the truth, except I was tired and sore.
“You gave. A female. A flower?” she repeated in stilted speech.
“Yes.” I closed my eyes.
“Oh no.” Her foot pressed against my leg. “You don’t get to go to sleep after droppin’ that kind of bomb. You need to tell me why they did this to you, and if they’re gonna come lookin’ to finish the job.”
I opened my eyes and glared at her foot then her. “They will think I am dead.”
She ignored the hostility in my stare. “The same way you think I believe you’re only fifteen years old?”
The memory of River Stephens, River Ranch’s founder and leader, standing over my prone body, telling the elders to beat me until I took my last breath, then toss me in the swamp replayed in my mind. I ground my teeth. “I am dead to them.” I had held my breath and lain prone, not letting one sound escape during the last beating they gave me.
“Lord have mercy,” she repeated low and quiet.
“There is no God.” Not the kind I had been forced to believe in growing up.
She shook her head as if she felt sorry for me. “I wouldn’t believe in Jesus either if I looked like you.”
I changed the subject, not sure if I was more angered by her presence or intrigued. “I need to sleep.”
“Oh, sure.” She leaned over and tucked the blanket around me again then sat back. “Go ahead.”
“What are you going to do?” I had never taken my sleep in the presence of a female.
Sighing, she looked toward the door. “Probably stay a spell.” She looked back at me wistfully. “Make sure you don’t stop breathin’ in your sleep.”
Did I need to worry about her suffocating me? “Where is my knife?”
She reached under the mattress. “Right here.” Pulling her arm out, she held it up to show me, then she shoved it back where she had taken it from. “And for the record, it’s rude to pull a switchblade on a girl.”
“For the record,” I repeated her saying, the words sounding ignorant and foreign, “do what I tell you next time.”
She half laughed, half snorted. “You think I’m gonna listen to you?” She patted my shoulder and gave me a condescending smile. “How cute.”
Vulnerable, undressed, unarmed, and wounded, I wiped my expression clean and lowered my voice. “Come here.”
Without hesitation, she leaned toward me. “What’s wrong?”
The scent of female and flowers settled around me and adrenaline surged.
I moved.
Grabbing a handful of her hair with my injured arm, I reached for her wrist with my other. Using my good leg, I leveraged my foot and brought her down at the same time I rolled. Hitting the cold cement floor, grunting through the pain in my ribs, I held her hair and her wrist and landed half on top of her.
She let out a gasp of surprise.
Using my weight to hold down one of her legs, I gave her a warning. “You kick me, I will make you bleed.”
“With what?” Eyes wide, she didn’t resist my hold, but her free hand grasped my wrist as I held her hair. “Your knife’s under the mattress.”
Dizzy, weak, my head spun with my sudden movement, but my body still responded to the female underneath it. Hard, I shifted my weight. “There is more than one way to make a female bleed.”
Pink flushed her pale cheeks. “I’m not just a female.”
“You are right.” She was an untended female. One I was in no position to care for.
Her eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”
“What do you think it means?” I used my waning energy to shove her thigh wide with my knee, and the full length of my desire landed between her legs.
She sucked in a sharp breath. “You need to get back on your mattress.”
I pulled her hair, pressed down on her wrist, and thought about every way I wanted to enter this infuriating female. “Remember who you are speaking to, female.”
“I’m speakin’ to a no-good, ungrateful jerk who needs to remember the woman he’s threatenin’ dragged his sorry ass half a mile across a swamp and SAVED HIM!” Raising her head despite my hold, she yelled the last two words at me.
It was instinctual.
My mouth landed on hers.
Punishing and hard, I thrust my tongue in.
I had never kissed a female.
Not on the mouth.
Angry, at her, at the world, I lashed through her intoxicating heat without reason or skill. Teeth gnashing, lips twisting, I stroked, I swirled, I demanded. I ate at her mouth like I wanted to feast between her legs.
But she did not kiss me back.
She did not move under me.
Still as a frightened deer, she lay prone.
The females on the compound had never lain prone.
They did what they were supposed to. They writhed, they cried, they whimpered—they submitted.
This female did none of that.
Not even in her stillness was there submission.
Yanking her head back by her hair, our mouths ripped apart and I glared at her. “What is wrong with you?”
She blinked.
No writhing, no reaction, no submission, she simply blinked. She did not even cry. All females cried when you took them the first time, but she did none of it.
“Where are the tears?” I demanded, but as I said the words, a feeling of sickness descended.
She blinked again.
“Speak,” I barked.
Hoarse and haunting, she obeyed me for the first time and spoke. “I’ve never been kissed.”
He rolled to his back, and the arm that had the shoulder I’d reset draped over his face.
Low and growly, his voice came out quieter this time. “Leave.”
My lips tingling, I stared at the huge, long bulge under the boxers I’d stolen from the gas station convenience store, and I felt wetness soaking my panties. I’d diverted my eyes like a proper lady when I’d taken off his wet jeans and put dry boxers on him the other day, but I wasn’t diverting my gaze now. An ache, almost impossible to ignore, was pounding between my legs and anger surged.
“You can’t leave me feelin’ like this,” I snapped.
“Like what?” he asked, his voice an entire octave lower than a moment ago.
“Like I’m on fire,” I accused.
His arm lifted and his head turned. Stark blue eyes focused on me. “You do not get to enjoy it. You endure it.”
What? Oh hell no. My hard nipples and pulsing female parts said otherwise. “Like hell I don’t.” I’d read those girlie magazines at the gas station. I was supposed to feel good, real good.
His eyes narrowed. “You do not cuss. You do not take pleasure unless I give it, and you do not disobey.”
What the ever-loving hell? “I’m not your servant.”
“You are female,” he spat.
“I am a woman,” I practically hollered back, equally angry and flustered by his almost naked and huge, muscular body.
“No,” he enunciated. “You are not.” His nostrils flared. “But take your pants off and I will make you one.”
If I’d been standing, I would’ve stumbled back.
Make me a woman.
Make me a woman.
Sweet Jesus help me, I wanted to shove my jeans down right then and there. Down all the way to my ankles, because all I wanted to do was spread my legs wide and make this horrible, relentless, pounding, pulsating need in my very core go away.
But more, the possibilities opened like a cabbage rose and my mind was a flurry of thoughts. Daddy wouldn’t have a virgin to sell. I wouldn’t be desirable to some sick biker with a virgin complex, and the sudden fire this strange and maddening but beautiful man had lit in my body would go away.
And maybe, just maybe, if I played my cards right, he’d take me away from here and I’d never have to look back.
But those were crazy thoughts. Those were the kinds of thoughts my mama would have. Needing a man to rescue you, take care of you… be with you.
But who was really taking care of who here?
When I didn’t respond, he tipped his chin once. “I smell your desire.” Then he did the one thing that would send me over the edge of indecision faster than a blink of an eye.
He taunted me.
“Take your pants off.”
My eyes narrowed. “You think I won’t?” If you told me to go right, I went left. Always had, always would.
“I know you will not.” His stare stark, his face impenetrable, he laid down the gauntlet like a professional.
And I picked it up.
Possessed by the devil, total loss of all dignity, sanity gone just like my mother—I didn’t know what my excuse was, other than he said I wouldn’t do it.
So I stood.
I stood so fast, all the blood rushed to my head.
Then, before sanity could take hold, I shoved my jeans to my ankles. Sitting back down, my bare naked behind hit the cold concrete floor, and I kicked my cowboy boots off. My mouth, not one to be left out by my crazy, followed suit and I made the second-biggest mistake of my life.
“Make me a woman,” I demanded.
Beaten within an inch of his life, blood soaking through the bandage on his side, he didn’t hesitate.
He came at me.
Quick and sure, his strong, huge hands grasped my knees and shoved them wide.
I yelped, and his mouth was on my pussy.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” I fell to the ground, and my eyes rolled back in my head.
He tongued me.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” I grasped at his hair with both of my hands and forgave my mother for every single second of her addiction.
Never in my life could I have imagined such a feeling.
Soaring, nirvana, tingling—one single touch from him and sanity left me.
Nothing I ever thought I would feel from a man’s touch happened. I didn’t hate it. I wasn’t shy. I didn’t feel shame. I wasn’t afraid. My entire reason for breathing became this man’s hands and mouth on me. His tongue, rough and firm, circled over my most private, intimate place like he’d circled through my mouth, and I started to shake.
His calloused hands moved down my thighs and I shivered.
His fingers joined his mouth, and that was all I could take.
My back bowed, my legs came off the ground, and I was a shooting star. Careening through the night toward an explosion that would obliterate me, I came.
My very first orgasm, I came.
My life, my hopes, my dreams—everything changed.
But he wasn’t finished.
One taste and she consumed me.
Her sweet scent filled my head and my mouth, and a relentless need for more took over. She instantly became an addiction to pleasure I had been preached to and warned about my entire life.
I did not care.
Shoving her knees wide, I ate at her.
I wanted her desire coating my face, my hands, my member.
Not my member, my cock.
I was no longer River Ranch, and I did not want to tend to her, I wanted to fuck her.
I wanted to hold her down and fuck her until she dripped down my shaft and my seed filled her womb.
I wanted to fuck her so hard she released too many times to count.
I wanted to fuck her until she cried for me to stop.
My tongue thrashing her, my thoughts consuming my head, I missed the telltale pulsing, and she was releasing. Constricting, shaking, her back arched off the ground and she let out a low, guttural moan.
I shoved two fingers into her and bit the center of her pleasure.
Except my fingers did not sink inside her.
They hit resistance.
Her groan turned into a scream, and she jerked away from me as she spit out an accusation. “What are you doin’?”
Conditioned by compound life, I reached to pull her back out of habit, but when I saw tears well in her eyes, my hand froze on the soft flesh of her thigh. “I am making you a woman.”
A tear slid down her cheek. “That hurt.”
“You are a virgin.” It was supposed to hurt.
Naked from the waist down, another tear slid down her other cheek. “What do you know
about it?” she asked defensively.
I had taken females and made them into women. I had taken sisters old enough to be my birth mother. For years, I participated in the nightly offerings in the men’s quarters where the designated females lined up on all fours with their shifts pulled over their heads.
I knew mating.
I had been schooled on how to take a woman for as long as I could remember, because the brothers on the compound talked. Out of the presence of females and the leader, there was no subject off-limits. I knew every forbidden curse word for every act and body part, but sex was always the main topic. In detail. Most of the brothers liked to make a female cry. They bragged about their nightly takings, equating their virility to the amount of tears a woman shed. But a few of the brothers did no such thing to the females.
They coerced, they fondled, they kissed.
They made the females moan and writhe under them.
They got the women to willingly put their mouths on them.
Those were the brothers I had studied.
Those were the brothers I had learned from.
Any man could make a female bleed, but I gave pleasure while doing it. I knew how to fuck, and I had no shame. But witnessing her distress, I did not want to talk about what I knew. I did not want to think about this female in front of me, bare from the shoulders down, in the men’s quarters on the compound on all fours like the designated females made to service the men nightly.
This female in front of me had never been taken, and until this very moment, that had never mattered to me.
Tears had never mattered.
But this female was crying, and it was mattering.
“Come here,” I demanded, low and controlled as an anger I did not understand battled for redemption.
Her legs closed, and she shook her head. Then her gaze darted to the wound on my side. “You’re bleeding again.”
I did not care. “Come here,” I repeated.
Indecision on her face, she bit her bottom lip. “It hurt.”
I would not lie. “Pleasure is not without pain.”
Her fear compounded in her expression as her eyes went wide. “Always?”
Still on my knees, one hand braced on the ground holding my weight, I did not move. “No.”
“Is it going to hurt again?”
