He came and went so fast that it was like trying to catch a snake in tall grass. And both times I caught a glimpse of him that week, something twisting and cold and alive clenched in my belly. It scared me, but sort of fascinated me, too. That’s the thing about bad boys and snakes, isn’t it? Pretty, but you can’t ever tell for sure which are the kind that can hurt you.
That Saturday was mercilessly hot, even for June. An unhealthy gas mower rattled and coughed next door. I fussed in the garden, trying to make up for the days of neglect it had suffered while I was locked at the office. I missed the big patio garden at the old house, wanted to make this one something pretty so next spring I could look at it and not feel like I’d lost everything when Danny and I split. So I could have something beautiful that was mine.
And I liked the feel of earth between my fingers or drying on the backs of my hands all cool and crumbling, I liked the smell of it, I didn’t even mind the squirming of the worms I turned up sometimes. They were like little parts of the clay that had come alive, and it gave me some hope that in the grave of my old life, some life might be turning yet. You learn all about it, if you read even a little – doesn’t matter what you read about . . . medicine, farming, or books about plants. You learn about rhythms, cycles; dying, breaking down, growing again. But reading, reading isn’t ever the same as having dirt under your nails.
Thick, purplish vines grew through the seedy old slats of the wood fence, some thick as fingers. Wild grape? Hell, I didn’t know. I was just learning the names of flowers. Weeds were still exotic and strange. Whatever the vine was, my shears weren’t big enough to cut it. I needed one of those hook-headed nippers. Didn’t know the word for that, either. Next door, the mower stuttered to a halt. I rose, wanting – and not wanting – to ask if they had any. The angry woman and her angry husband worried me. The vines were coming from that side of the fence, after all. What if they got angry at me for cutting them? Danny had done all the yard work, before. I was sure there was some kind of a rule about these things, and I didn’t know it.
I went to the fence, figuring I’d just ask for the nippers and then beg forgiveness later, if it came to that, but my words stuck in my throat like pea-gravel. He crouched there on the other side of the fence, picking grass out of the undercarriage of the mower. Sweat stuck a few tangles of hair to his face. His eyes came up before his head did and our stares locked. For a long time he looked at me. Really looked. His eyes were the eyes of something never tame. I looked away. I wasn’t pretty anymore, and I knew it. How dare he stare like that at me?
I managed my request, though I don’t properly recall what I said. He tipped the mower down, and vanished into the garage’s cool dark without a word. I retreated to the other side of my yard and pretended I’d never talked to him at all. I thought of the mountain lion Danny and I had seen cross the road as we drove to the lake three dry summers ago. God, he’d moved like that. Like something hunting, smooth and purposeful.
I’d ripped up a third blind handful of oxalus and verbena when I heard the thump. I turned, then stood. He’d jumped the fence and now stood ten feet from me, looking around, looking me over as though he owned my yard and me, too. I felt the smears of dirt on my knees, the bits of leaves and grass stuck to me, my hair shifting out of its rough ponytail and falling into my reddened face.
“Thanks,” I said. He held the shears low at his side. I didn’t move to take them.
At last he came toward me through my unmowed grass, his dirty fingers brushing the nodding, silver seed-heads. The rough blades sawed against his jeans. The sighing sounded like something prowling through savannah grass.
He kept his eyes fixed on mine, stared me down. God help me, I knew what he was, and I was too afraid even to run. An angel? No. Not a devil, either. He was an animal. Completely apart from heaven and hell. Part of the earth.
Then he was too close and I could smell sweat and damp hair, sunshine melting on skin. The smell reached down into me and shut off the part of me that wanted to flee. Only the animal part was awake, and that part wasn’t scared.
He looked at me with a slight narrowing of the eyes that made me weak in the joints, and pressed the clippers into my hand, closed my limp fingers around them. Then he went back over the fence without a word, all six feet or more of him, flashing a piebald blot of sweat on the small of his back, and for just an instant the rough black edge of a tattoo showed under his left sleeve.
I let the vine grow. It was too pretty to cut. I used the shears to prune some roses instead, and stuck the cuttings into some new-turned earth to see if they’d take. You never know, right?
I came in an hour later, dirty, sweaty, with wetness between my thighs. All those thoughts I shouldn’t have would find their slippery way out somehow. But when I went to the shower, I saw the blood. The change was starting early in me; I’d gotten used to not bleeding on time, or ever, I’d gotten used to the idea of that part of me being empty, barren, dead. And now this, this shocking reminder of unwanted life, of treacherous, hidden activity. The yardwork must have squeezed it out of me without my knowing. That, or it was the lunatic full moon taking me for a loop.
I swore at it, like it was a dirty trick.
I washed the dirt off my hands and the blood from my thighs, and I pretended to forget the boy. But it had been planted deep, that nasty little seed. I could feel it, a crampy ache that might’ve been that monthly curse making up for lost time, and might’ve been pure frustrated lust. It felt like I was trying to bleed it out. But it just sank the thorns in deeper and hung on.
I lay awake that night, late, the summer heat boiling in me. I’d heard him return, the bike snarling, and I stubbornly had not looked. Now I lay near the cracked window and listened to another fight. I heard his voice, knew it was his even though I hadn’t heard him speak and could not now make out the words. Just shouting, rising temper. Dad must’ve heard about that tattoo. And I knew I shouldn’t, but I was drowsy, half-dreaming; nothing seemed wrong. I let my fingers play on my skin, closer and deeper. I was so sleepy I forgot, until my fingers found the wetness inside me and brought it out, mixed up with blood. Wandering fingers plucked at the sticky knots of desire.
The fight stormed hard, and I hid my face in the pillow and moaned. Just the sound of his voice burned me inside. And I hated wanting him, what it did to me, but I hated ignoring it even more, so I kept on until I exploded, full of shame I was too old and worldly to believe in, but at least satisfied.
Near dawn I woke from a fitful doze, cursed at the streaks of red on my pillowcase, my sheets. I tipped it all into the tub, sauced it with peroxide, and left it to sizzle while I went out back to water the plants. If I didn’t get to them before the sun came up, they’d burn dry.
He was there, leaning on the fence, watching mockingbirds dance over the wild honeysuckle on my back fence. I watched him for a few stolen minutes before he shook his head slowly, not questioning my right to look so much as telling me that he knew I was there.
I didn’t try to talk, just brought him the clippers back.
Closer, I could see welts on his pale skin, three of them. Two across his forearm, one on his jaw. His eyes were bottomless and still. Then he turned away even as my hand flew to my own hot face. I went inside, more shamed than I had been, and watched from the window.
He went into the garage and didn’t come out. Pissed off, I figured, for me having seen what the belt had done to him. How could anyone strike their child like that? How could anyone harm such a beautiful creature? But like all animals, he never questioned his lot. No, he bore it.
When I checked on the laundry in the tub, I caught a glimpse of my own startled eyes in the mirror. One of my cheeks was striped with bands of Indian red – I’d touched my face in my sleep, and hadn’t washed it off.
I thought for a moment that the after-the-fact embarrassment was going to kill me, then I just started to laugh, hopelessly. It didn’t matter, did it? I didn’t matter. Not to someone his age.
I wa
shed my face and my hands until the mirror steamed and hid my reflection from me. In the mist I still knew what I was. When I didn’t have to see myself.
We exchanged no words after that, only looks. He could unmake me with a glance. No more than that. Two months passed. He slept outside sometimes, when it was balmy. Those nights, I watched him from my window as he lay on that beat-up picnic table, and wondered if he was awake or dreaming, and what he might be dreaming of.
I’d’ve offered him a place to stay, but when I spoke to him all of twice about maybe getting out, he just looked at me as though he didn’t understand my words and turned away like he was a wolf and I’d offered to tame him. No, he was a wild thing, and didn’t want help or interference. So I only watched.
I’d touch my own treacherous body while I watched him pine for his freedom out under the stars, and I felt guilty for finding beauty in his captive pacing. And when he lay there I’d wish for him to touch himself, so I could see what he looked like, all of him. He was no stranger in his skin. He lived there, with his bruises and welts, and the lattice of scars on his arms. I knew every inch of him would be beautiful.
To my surprise, some of those rose cuttings took root, and as I nursed them I felt a needful pang in my chest. Something wicked and strange had sprouted, too, in the red soil of my heart. And in there it was all squirming snakes and thorns.
The worst fight yet came in August, near the moon. I was bleeding again, heavy, like it would never quit.
I got caught by surprise, outside, when the fight came. Both his parents came down on him like thunder for not going to Wednesday church with them. I heard every word of what they called him, and where they told him he would go for being that way. He didn’t deny it. No point in him trying to explain the difference to people who’d never suffer witches gladly. Oh yes, I knew – I’d seen the pentacle on his arm, knew why he wasn’t wanted.
The difference was, I’d had some schooling and a few good friends and a lot of life to bring me past my ignorance and fear. They still lived in a century-that-was. For all they knew, the sun swam in the salty sea above the roof of the world. Was the boy’s belief in the new pagan creed more or less primitive than his parents’ rejection of it? I wrestled with that one while they fought over imaginary differences, each side indefensible to the other, both squinting against the light of reason.
In the end, he just said he’d leave, which was what I’d been hoping, waiting for, but even so the heart ran right out of me like saltwater out of a sponge.
His folks went to church to pray for his already-burning soul. I went inside and ate leftover chicken curry I didn’t bother to heat and drank my peach iced tea without tasting it. I worked on a presentation I had to give to the head of the art department, and pretended I cared about advertising and the southern market, and pretended that, at forty-one, I did not have a crush on a boy. I went to water my flowers again, near midnight. I was learning about them, I thought. Their rhythms, their need of rich, dark soil, their reaching thirst.
“I saw you earlier, through the window,” he said, scaring me so badly that I jumped. He lay on his back, sprawled across the picnic table, so still I hadn’t seen. “Listening?”
I nodded, guilty. And he stared. Boys just don’t look at women like me that way. I was round as a pet rabbit, soft backside and thick legs, too heavy by twenty pounds even for my height, with hair that did nothing but fly away in cowlicks and eyes no real color at all, and dammit, I was supposed to be invisible to his breed. It would’ve hurt less if I could’ve been sure he didn’t notice me. But hope . . . Jesus, it hurts like hell.
“Why don’t you come over here?” he asked easily, persuasive in its simplicity. His stare never left mine. He smiled, but only with his eyes, a friendly squint. It was a blatant come-on.
I shook my head. No way. Ever. He got up, and a couple of seconds later the fence rattled as he jumped it. Just like that he’d invaded my comfortable, private little space again. This time I stood my ground.
The yard seemed too small to contain him. All his feral energy, his strength, no fence could hold that. All that bound him was his own skin, and it seemed as though that, too, might change any second under the shifting moonlight.
He kissed me and I went supernova between the thighs just from the liquid-soft feel of his tongue. He didn’t play, but dove into it with all he had. In three seconds I was trembling. His hands found a way into my clothes. My own flesh was too tight. If I could’ve, I’d have torn my skin right off to let him at the bones of me.
His fingers found my sore nipples and I almost cried out. I tried to beg him to stop and all I could manage was a stammering “Please” repeated into his panting mouth. He silenced me with his tongue and pulled my shirt off, baring my breasts to the moon. He took my nipple in his mouth, flashed me a look from those wounded eyes. Were they black? Brown? Green? His lips were soft, so soft, but his teeth were sharp.
Where he kissed me, he left flowers of wetness to bloom in the breeze. His tongue smoothed down my belly. Clever fingers worked at the drawstring of my pants. He was already nuzzling my hip, smelling me. I felt his hot breath.
“No,” I panted, pushing at him. He had slipped the ties, now he was reaching down. I made a wretched sound. “I can’t. I’m bleeding.” Hadn’t I moved past that shame when I was fifteen, along with the rest of my enlightened generation? Evidently not. This was just too primitive, too private. Even with Danny, I kept to myself during my bleeding. And now this boy whose first name I didn’t even know wanted to . . . what? Share it?
He hesitated, hands on my backside, looking up at me. Moonlight silvered him. His hair was night itself. I wanted to remember him like that forever. It was all of him I could ever have, a glimpse of a wild thing. In a moment he’d rise, he’d vanish into the dark like the ghost of every dream I’d had about him.
Then his fingers curled in the jersey knit, tugged. My pants slid down my thighs. I gasped, tried in desperate embarrassment to pull them back up, to push him away, but he took both of my wrists in one hand. “No,” he told me, when I fought him again. “Shh. Be still.” He tugged my panties down and put them aside, ignoring the clean white of the pad spotted with red. I was stiff with horror.
His face brushed my belly, tender. “I don’t care,” he said. Just like that, laying it all aside.
I made a sound in my throat. I wanted to call for help, call for someone to save me from his touch, from my own body, but my pounding heart ran away with the words.
He looked up at me. “Let me taste you. All of you.”
And, oh, oh, if his words hadn’t won me, his touch would’ve. His hands traced me like something holy. I’d never touched myself like that.
He planted his tongue in the well of my navel, pushed it down. I felt the rasp of new beard on his cheek. My belly tightened. He nuzzled the swell, dug his fingers into the earthy weight of my ass, and pushed his tongue into me, right up among the light curls and in, to where I burned for him. He made a sound like a sigh. I grabbed his shoulders and hung on while he knelt before me in worship, drinking from me.
His tongue slid back and forth, slow strokes, searching, and as I began to tremble he found the stiffened bud of my clit and swept his tongue over it, firmly. He wound a hand between my thighs and a finger up into me, stroking it in and out, pressing his tongue down from time to time to lick at it. He was tasting me.
His upper lip rubbed against my button, and I ground against him, gasping helplessly, too shocked and overwhelmed to be ashamed. I felt myself dripping and didn’t know if it was blood, desire, or both. He got another finger into me, stretching. Grass tickled my shins. I pushed my fingers into his sweat-damp hair.
When he looked up at me, blood had smeared one side of his face and trickled down his neck. It looked black, beautiful and awful at the same time. He kissed my belly, left a Rorschach print there, and stared up in worship that wasn’t weak and scared like I’d seen on the faces in church as a girl, but was something f
ull of pride and a terrible, terrible hunger.
I stared at him, half-hung on the edge of desire, still pulsing where his fingers were in me. My blood ran down his wrist. He just watched my face, put a thumb between my folds and toyed with my clit, worked his fingers in me. My knees shivered, wobbled. I leaned on him, my hair hanging in my face. I didn’t think I could, standing up like that, but I did – I twisted up inside and then exploded, like a thunderstorm. My legs buckled and he caught me.
We went down in the grass, and before I could find the rhythm of my breath again he had fought his clothes off. I might’ve been scared before, but after seeing him . . . now there was nothing to it. Simplest thing in the world, really.
The silky black of his new tattoo stood out on the moon-white of his skin. His scars were silver. And here and there, the shadow of a bruise. I couldn’t pity him. He didn’t seem to need it. His body was unthinkably lovely, broad and lean and young.
I stared and he let me, didn’t even talk when I pushed him into the grass and gave him the once-over, head to foot, with my hands, my mouth. His kiss tasted like copper. On his throat, blood melted on my tongue. He had a fine belly, soft-skinned, firm, downed with just a little hair. His skin tasted of salt. The smell of him was in my nose, in my mouth, and when I put my tongue on his velvet cock, he arched and moaned. I tasted him, from the hair at his root, right up to the salty tip. I put my mouth around him and he begged. Not with words but with his breath, the shifting of his hips and the fists he made in the flattened grass.
At last, strong hands rolled me onto my back. He leaned above me and looked down with dark, dark eyes that caught the light like stars. The earth was my anchor, cradling me. He shook his hair back, wiped his face on his tattooed shoulder, smearing a little blood there. I spread my legs for him, as simple a choice as that.
He found home and sank in, one easy stroke, the length of him surprising me less than the hard grinding of his width on my pubic bone, up inside. A little pain came, too, because it’d been too long, too long, but that was all right. His hips skated along mine, his body pressed close. We both grunted, and then I took a big breath and moaned. When he began to move, slow and hard and fierce, I arched against his hips.
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