by Fran Seen
Watching Charlie cook me breakfast, was, in a word: panty-melting.
“Enjoying the view?” Charlie caught me objectifying him. I ducked out of sight, shrugging on one of his flannel shirts and opening the top drawer of his dresser to retrieve clothing for my bottom half. I stepped into a pair of boxer briefs, since my undergarments had been compromised last night during the heat of our interaction.
“Good morning,” I greeted him, suddenly overcome with shyness. I wasn’t certain what our boundaries were today. Had our situation changed? I wasn’t sure whether to kiss him or keep my hands to myself.
“Morning. Hope you’re—” He looked up from piling bacon on a plate, and his gaze raked over me. The fork in his hands dropped to the floor in a loud clatter. The piece of bacon attached to the prongs was gobbled up by Wayah before Charlie could snatch it up. “Hungry,” Charlie finished, clicking the gas off, and the flame under the pan subsided. He rounded the kitchen island, closing the distance between us in two strides.
“Starving,” I mumbled, arching my brow. Charlie bent down to grasp the back of my legs, lifting me off my feet. I wrapped my thighs around him and laced my arms around his neck.
“I’m hungry for a good morning kiss, bearslayer,” he requested with one side of his mouth turned up, but before our lips touched, his eyes darted downward. “Are you wearing my underwear?” he shot me an accusatory look followed by a wolfish grin.
“Yeah.” A blush curled up my neck. My face was so close to his, I almost spoke into his mouth, “What are you going to do about it?”
He set me on top of the chilly granite counter and pushed himself between my legs. His lips brushed mine as his hands framed my face. “Did you use my toothbrush, too?” He pulled away, and his grin grew wider.
“And if I did?” I prodded, batting my eyelashes.
“Bad girl,” Charlie said in a low voice as he kissed my neck, nibbling all the way down to my collarbone. Without warning, he tugged the boxer briefs down to my ankles, parted my knees, and trailed a line of torturous kisses along my inner thigh. I barely had any time to react. I fisted his hair as he bent down between my legs, rendering myself totally unable to suppress the moan on my lips when he guided his tongue across my slick skin, flicking my sensitive clit along the way.
“I love the way you taste,” he breathed against me, and my body melted like butter in response. My heels dug into his back, and after only a few moments, I couldn’t control the impulse to grind myself against his mouth. I cried out for mercy as Charlie pushed me over the edge.
When I opened my eyes, his jeans were nowhere to be seen. Charlie stood several paces away, stroking his erection, looking down at me like a hungry wolf.
“I need to be inside of you,” Charlie said with a furrowed brow; he seemed troubled by it. His gaze lingered on me as he sat down at the kitchen table. I followed him, unbuttoning my shirt and letting it slide down my shoulders and onto the floor. His eyes flicked to my breasts, and I tried to ignore the chills that swept through my body. Teasing him, standing just out of reach, I cupped my breasts as he watched me with a set jaw. When he couldn’t tolerate any more torture, he stood to snake his hands around my waist and pulled me onto his lap with my legs straddling his thighs.
“I’ve been wanting this so long,” he groaned against my lips, darting his tongue into my mouth. After we broke our kiss, moments later, my eyes scanned him, resting on the lines of his face, trying to memorize every detail. His golden gaze turned dark with desire. “All you have to do is breathe, and I’m under your spell.”
Oh my. I lowered myself down onto Charlie’s lap, and the moment he entered me, a gasp escaped my throat. My skin turned fiery as my body became acquainted with his size. I arched my back, rocking against him with his hands guiding my hips, setting our pace. We started slow, but as we fell into a delicious rhythm, Charlie pinned me against him, thrusting hard and deep. I’d never felt so full. He made me moan into his mouth with every pump.
“Yes. Fuck me, Charlie,” I begged, throwing my head back and squeezing my eyes shut.
“Look at me,” he grabbed my face, pressing his thumb against my bottom lip. Our eyes locked. “I love it when this sweet mouth says dirty things,” Charlie growled, plunging his tongue into my mouth and slowing his pace. Savoring the heat of his body pressed against me, I reveled in the roughness of our kiss. “It’s taking everything I have not to explode inside of you.”
Charlie ground his hips into mine, slow and deliberate, until my skin felt like it was going to buzz off me from want. I dismounted and bent over the kitchen table, offering myself to him. As he entered from behind, the table wobbled underneath us. He drew out and slammed back in before circling his arm around my waist, lowering his hand to pleasure me with his fingertips. As I pulsed around him, Charlie grunted, plowing into me with deep, powerful thrusts. His tiny moans transformed into ragged groans and a string of filthy whispers in my ear. With my body operating on unbridled lust and growing hotter and hotter with each moment, I pushed back against him, meeting him with every pump. A wave of pleasure washed over me, sucking me into the tide, causing me to tremble and clench around him.
“Oh God, Doll. Yes,” Charlie yelled, and a swell of heat entered me, followed by a slow throb. We were a sweaty mess by the time he withdrew. He grabbed my hand, and we wandered up the stairs to the bathroom and piled into the stone shower. Under the waterfall faucet, we scrubbed each other down with bar soap suds and made out like rowdy teenagers in the steam.
By the time breakfast was served, I was starving. “I might malnourish,” I said, collapsing into the same chair we romped in.
“I’ve already eaten,” Charlie smirked as he set plates of bacon, toast, and eggs in front of us. A few moments passed before I registered his remark. I popped him on the shoulder and smirked back. He wagged his eyebrows at me, and I wriggled my nose in response. It didn’t matter that breakfast had gone cold, because it was the most delicious breakfast I’d ever eaten. We washed our meal down orange juice and coffee.
After breakfast, Charlie mumbled that he had something to show me. “We’ll walk,” he called out when he spotted me standing beside his truck.
“I feel weird walking around commando,” I blurted out after a few steps across the pasture. The grass grazed my knee caps and tickled my thighs.
“I promise not to tell the squirrels your secret,” he flicked his gaze to me and a lopsided smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. We walked a mile across the rolling pasture, finally stumbling upon a well-worn path through the tall grass which slithered up to the tree-line ahead. A breeze whipped through my hair, sending my golden curls in every direction. “Try not to step in a gopher hole, Dolly,” Charlie teased after I swatted hair from my face. “Luckily for you, it’s kiddie mountains ahead: only hills, no cliffs.”
I cut my eyes at him and a blush rose in my chest from the memory of tripping in the pasture the night previous. “That was not a gopher hole. It was, at the very least, a bear den,” I scowled.
“A bear den!” Charlie shot back, animating his face. “I had no idea bears made dens on the edges of pastures.”
“Maybe that’s why Ol’ Smokey eluded you for years,” I stiffened my mouth to an expression of complete seriousness, and then proceeded to poke Charlie in the rib. “You should really be more aware of your surroundings.”
“Can’t argue with that logic,” he laughed, retaliating with an attack of pokes along my belly. I almost collapsed from giggling, out of breath from the foreign, ragged sounds vibrating in my throat.
I never giggled.
Never.
“We’re here,” Charlie announced when wet met the edge of the woods. I whipped my head around but didn’t see anything, only a row of trees and rock strewn about. “This is my favorite cemetery,” he called over his shoulder, approaching a circle of small rocks with a baby spruce at the center. He crouched beside the tiny tree and ran his fingers along the blue needles. “This is where my f
ather is buried.”
“Here?” I scanned the horizon for headstones, grave markers, fake pastel bouquets, tombs, or crosses, but saw none. Instead, an incline of smaller spruces to mature trees surrounded us, overlooking the little string of cabins in the valley. I furrowed my brow and looked to Charlie, “Where?”
“Here, ogin,” he waved me over to the baby spruce. “When someone from our clan passes, they are reborn here. We bury our dead in wooden boxes, or with nothing at all, so that the earth may reclaim them, and they, in return, can give life back to the earth,” Charlie started, explaining that, during the burial process, the deceased were planted with a pine cone. Within the scales of the cones were seeds, and over time, as the body decomposed, it provided nutrients to the earth, giving way to the perfect environment for life to bloom. Spruce trees held a special place in Cherokee ceremony. Since the leaves remained green all year long, the Natives believed the plants didn’t sleep for the seven nights during the Earth’s creation, and were regarded as important plants in ceremony as well as medicine.
“Life is an endless cycle of give and take, love and loss, birth and death. This place—” Charlie cradled a palmful of dirt and let the wind carry it from his hand. “It’s a beginning and an end.”
I stared down at the tree that had grown from Charlie’s father’s last memory. Mr. Blackbird was buried with a brave and hopeful notion. Charlie’s favorite graveyard wasn’t a final resting place at all. It was a promise. A promise that the past would continue to change the future; a promise that a memory wouldn’t fade into oblivion; a promise that a life wasn’t only what was said and done, but a person’s essence breathed into the creatures around them. I glanced at the myriad of tiny trees surrounding, all at varying degrees of maturity, encircled by smooth river stone, with needles swaying in the wind, untethered and free. As the woods grew denser and taller ahead, I could still make out the outline of stone circles encasing each one.
We stood in a graveyard without graves, filled with people who believed in a life without end. One day, where Charlie and I sat, crouched and whispering, the saplings would be a canopy of blue needles and towering conifers, whispering and swaying in the mountain breeze.
“I can see why it’s your favorite, Charlie,” I said as he led me to the edge of the burial ground. We perched on the hill’s cusp, under the shade of the branches, where we sat, side by side, overlooking the new life before us.
Charlie relayed stories of his father, Lloyd Blackbird—loving husband, strict father, automobile mechanic, Native government official, and Jeopardy enthusiast. After Lloyd’s death, the Blackbirds sorted through his belongings, and found over five hundred VHS tapes of Jeopardy recordings.
“Pop used to make us all sit in front of the TV after dinner, and if we answered Final Jeopardy correctly, we got dessert. No exceptions,” Charlie squinted at the sun and grinned at the memory. “Which is why we were all called Stick Indians in school. Thin as rails, us Blackbirds. Or I was, at least, until puberty hit me...like a freight train.”
I chuckled at the thought of Charlie hovering in front of the TV, vexed by Final Jeopardy:
“Annie Sadilek, an immigrant girl from Bohemia, inspired the title character in this 1918 novel of the Great Plains.”
Young Charlie’s forehead would dip in confusion as he weaves through his reading comprehension lessons, but when he realizes he doesn’t know the answer, he slaps his knees in frustration and says, “Goddamn it, Pop. All I wanted was a scoop of Bluebell.”
“It was important to Pop,” Charlie continued, running his fingertips over the stray freckles on my arm. “For his children to have an education. My grandfather couldn’t read or write. My dad had an elementary school education. But he was bound and determined to grant his children something intangible...something that couldn’t be taken away from us. To him, the ultimate gift was knowledge.”
Charlie reclined back, placing his head in my lap and staring up at the cloudy blue sky. He seemed relaxed and happy. He tugged on one of my loose curls, making it straighten out then spring back. I seized the opportunity to trace the outline of his jaw, down to the dip of his collarbone, where his tanned chest poked out of his halfway buttoned shirt.
“Lloyd Blackbird sounds like he was a stand-up guy who loved y’all almost as much as y’all loved him,” I said, growing solemn thinking about my own father and his unattainable expectations.
“How did your mom die?”
It was funny—I didn’t remember telling Charlie my mother had died. Perhaps he noticed her absence because I never spoke of her. I dodged the topic without second thought, leaving my interrogators to either believe my mother bit the pickle, left her family to claim roadie-status on tour with Van Halen, or that me and my sister were immaculately conceived and raised by a single father.
The latter was disproven rather quickly.
“Behind the steering wheel of her Jeep, picking me and Minnie up from school. We’d pulled out of the carpool lane and were turning onto the main road,” I remembered. “Mom whipped around to yell something into the backseat, where we were bickering over the glitter notebooks Minnie had won for being star student three months in a row. I wanted one and she wouldn’t share, so I was crying and Minnie was yelling and Mom was scolding us both. And then we were rolling into a ditch from impact, and the airbags shot out of the dashboard like bombs from a cannon—not that the airbags made a difference for Mom. She’d taken the brunt of the impact and wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. When the car finally stilled, she wasn’t in the front seat anymore,” I rubbed my forehead, trying to suppress the images of blood and glass.
“Minnie managed to unbuckle us both, and we climbed out of the overturned car through the broken window. It was weird. Mom was facedown in the grass, not moving. As we approached, yelling, asking if she was okay, begging for her to wake up, I saw her mangled torso, with her arms wrapped around her, like they had no bones. Even at eight-years-old, I knew she was broken. I knew my mom wasn’t going to be okay,” I breathed, and Charlie’s fingers intertwined with mine. I avoided eye contact so I could continue. “Minnie held me back, locking me in her arms with enough force to crush my ribs and squeeze the oxygen out of my lungs. She told me not to look at Mom.”
“My mother was cremated. Never buried in the ground. Dad couldn’t stomach the thought of having to look at her broken body in a casket, so, instead, Mom sits on the mantle, reduced to nothing but ash and dust,” I laughed without humor. “And my sister, well, she tried her dang best to fill Mom’s absence. Bossing me around, making herself the center of everyone’s universe. But we never ate at the dinner table again. We never watched TV as a family. We never spoke about Mom. It’s like she never existed in the first place,” I lowered my eyes down to Charlie, who was staring at me intently. “But she was the glue that held us together. We’re just jagged pieces without her.”
“I’m sorry, ogin.” And I knew he by his somber tone that he meant it. Charlie moved his fingers from a golden curl, and his thumb found the dimple in my cheek. I raised my eyes to the blue smoke in the distance, cradling the mountain caps.
“Charlie,” I started, unable to stop myself. “I want you to know that the real culture shock isn’t your Native traditions or your insistence on counting your undiluted blood quantum or whatever,” I said, relishing in the softness of his thick hair under my fingertips and wishing we could sit on the hillside for eternity. “It’s meeting your entire family and realizing that they would all rather spend their spare time together than apart.”
Sweet Lemonade & Bitter Sentiments
Only when the sun was high and turning my pale skin pink did we leave the grassy knoll. “I’ll race you,” I challenged Charlie when the wooden frame of his cabin came into view.
“Challenge accepted, bearslayer,” Charlie shot a wolfish grin my way. “Prepare to be annihilated.”
“Whatever.” I bit my lip and tried to think of an intimidating comeback, but came up short.
“‘Whatever,’ huh? I’m shaking in my boots over here,” Charlie teased, waving his hands in the air. “On the count of three,” he looked to me and I nodded, preparing myself for take-off. “One...two...”
I bolted before he said three. His legs were longer than mine, so a head start was only fair. Charlie trailed for a moment, but his lengthy stride overtook me after several hundred yards. I jutted my hand out to deter him, hoping to knock him off balance, but he dodged my hand and mumbled something that sounded like bad girl, questionable morals as he whizzed by. I propelled forward, urging my short legs to move as fast as possible, all while scanning the ground for those notorious bear dens. Consumed by fear of stumbling over my own feet, I didn’t notice that Charlie had stopped running, short of reaching the cabin, and I slammed into the back of him, ricocheting off him with an oof.
“What the fu—” I started, scrambling to my feet and brushing the dirt off my legs, but my words caught in my throat like a handful of rusty nails when I spotted the focus of Charlie’s attention.
“Ossie,” Charlie stepped forward with tense shoulders. The driver of the Chevy pick-up truck parked beside his Ford stepped out, and I gasped when I caught sight of her obsidian, waist-length hair and pissed off expression. She stalked toward us, keys jingling in her clenched fists. Harrah’s Casino bartender sported a scrunched snarl and an air of indignation. “What are you doing here?” Charlie glanced around, unclenching his fists even though his jaw remained tense. I stood in his shadow, trying to get a better glimpse at the girl he called Ossie with a mixture of contempt and guilt.
“I knew you were a prostitute,” Ossie spat at me, balling her fists and puffing out her chest. I backed away, confused and offended by her name-calling and generally unpleasant and uncalled for disposition.
