by Anthology
“For two hours straight those pigs tortured you. The hardest part wasn’t what they did to your body, was it? It was the mind fuck. Not the body rape.”
“How do you—” The rest of my sentence was, know. How do you know? But I couldn’t finish.
He started to strum slowly in the guitar, then pick out little melodies, riffs I knew he played on bass for the band. “The mind is its own mindfuck. It’s brutal. You can handle getting the shit kicked out of you as long as you know what to do with your mind. If you can tuck it away and not let it drive you nuts. It’s hard enough to turn off the mind when you’re doing something simple, like walking on a roof or trying to fall asleep. It sabotages you.”
I think that’s the longest stretch of words I’d ever heard him say. And he seemed to be improvising a bass line now as he talked. Piano melodies kept flashing through my head unbidden.
“But the body can only handle so much before the mind kicks in and tries to destroy you.”
“Maybe that happened.”
“You wouldn’t be in the car with me if that were true.”
“You presume to know a lot about this.”
He got a brooding look on his face and went silent for well over a minute. And then:
“Let’s just say I know a lot about disconnecting your mind from your body when someone’s hurting you.”
“Explain your tattoos.” That came out of nowhere, but my brain just blurted out the first thing I could handle. Processing what Tyler meant about knowing how to make the mind run away when the body was being hurt was too much. Too fast, like a wave of emotion you can’t ride out. You have to bail on the wave and come back to it later.
“What? Why?”
“They have a purpose, right? Plus, it’s late and I need you to keep me entertained with your scintillating conversational skills.”
He laughed. “You want me to explain them all?”
“We’ve got about nineteen more hours to go, so...”
“With nineteen hours we can cover my tattoos, your rape, and probably describe our lives back to being fetuses.”
“It’s a plan.”
He snorted and shook his head, downing the last slice of his pizza. I’d forgotten about mine and grabbed a piece. The second I bit into it my stomach growled. Thank God it just growled and didn’t gurgle or roar. I hadn’t eaten anything since the gummy bears, which finally seemed to have declared a truce with our digestive tracts.
“This one was for my mom,” he explained. “It was my first.” The shades of red in the rose were more nuanced than most tattoos I’d seen. All his tats looked like a pro had done them. Back at my university plenty of people had tattoos, but anyone heavily sleeved like Tyler tended to have a few very rugged looking ones done by friends.
He didn’t.
It dawned on me. “Your dad was a tattoo artist?”
He stiffened. “No. One of his friends.” The atmosphere in the car changed and I didn’t understand why, but I was determined to get him to talk. If I was going to pour my guts out about the rape, he’d have to tell his secrets, too.
“This one?” I stroked my finger along his forearm and he jolted, the touch like electricity between us. I wanted to do it again and again, an unexpected wave of lust rolling over me like a fog bank.
“That’s a mandala, stretched out and wrapped all along that arm.” The colors, muted mauves and yellows, brighter reds and greens, with subtle blues as highlights—were extraordinary.
“What about here?” I touched his other arm, and again a shock of arousal coursed through me like an injection.
He looked at me with a smoldering intensity that made heat pool between my legs.
“That is a labyrinth,” he said softly, his finger tracing where I’d just touched. He took my hand in his and extended my pointer finger, running it like a race car along the path, slow and deliberately. The motion was intensely erotic for no reason other than the shift between us.
It was like he was making my finger make love to his skin.
That’s the moment I realized I really did want to make love with him. And not just to hit “reset” on my life.
Tyler
Holy fuck. Maggie was killing me, with her questions and her touch. The car became filled with this cloud of something charged, sexual and deep. When she touched me I hardened, my body responding like it had been waiting for a thousand years for a drink of water.
And now a lake had appeared.
The car swerved slightly and she jerked back her hand. “Sorry,” she muttered.
“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have grabbed your hand.”
“No, that’s fine. Thank you for explaining the tats. So there are really only three?”
I nodded. “You dye your hair when you get upset,” I said, pulling up the short sleeves of my shirt, displaying my colorful arms and showing as much of the wrapped labyrinth and mandala as I could. “I dye my skin.”
“When did you have them done?”
“The rose was when I was sixteen. Then the mandala a few years ago. I did some moving work for a guy and he couldn’t pay me, but his brother was an accomplished tattoo artist.”
“You bartered for tattoos?” For some reason she found that funny and started laughing.
“The only other thing he had to pay me was meth, and—”
“Gotcha.”
I just nodded. She did get it. She really did. I yawned, stretching as much as I could in the tight quarters of the front seat.
“You need anything?” I asked. She was eating the final slice of her pizza and just shook her head, eyes on the road.
“Nuh uh.”
“Coffee?”
She scrunched up her face in an adorable way and tilted her head, nodding. I handed her one of the thermoses Lena had packed, what...nearly ten hours ago?
Maggie swallowed her food, then took a long drink.
I yawned again.
“Take a nap,” she said gently.
“I need to help you stay awake.”
“You can sleep. I’m pretty wired.”
“I was, too, until just now, suddenly...” Again, I yawned, and curled up a little in the seat. It wasn’t so much a physical feeling as a mental one. This was a lot to process in such a short time. I was dog tired. Maggie must be, too.
“You know, we could pull over and I could try to learn stick.”
She laughed. “It took me three weeks and half a clutch to learn. It’s not something you just pick up in an hour or two.”
“But I’ll try.”
Maggie patted my shoulder as my eyelids drooped. “Sleep. The best thing you can do right now is to be well-rested for the concert.”
And within seconds I was out.
***
It was the kind of dream where you know you’re dreaming in your dream, and that seems perfectly normal. I was with Maggie and we were driving in a convertible, the wind whipping her rainbow hair behind her like a long scarf. Impossibly long, two or three car lengths on the wind, like a ribbon of multi-colored silk.
The sun was shining and the most perfect music I’d ever heard was playing on the radio. She laughed, the sound like a language I knew before I was the self I am now.
And then the car slammed into a giant boulder.
I jolted awake, my head banging against the car door. Maggie was screaming and the car was in the middle of the road at a strange, cock-eyed angle.
“What happened?” I shouted.
“Fucking armadillo!” It took me a few seconds to sit up and realize I’d really whacked my temple, but not from a full-blown impact. Maggie was shaking and twitching in her seat, livid. It was daylight, which meant I’d been asleep for a long time. I looked at the clock.
8:42 a.m.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “I slept forever.”
“Fucking armadillo!” Maggie turned the key. The car just ground down, the ignition not firing.
I quickly looked around. We were in the desert. In the middle of no-f
ucking-where. I couldn’t see any cars, but I could see for what might have been miles in the early morning light.
I rubbed my eyes and took a quick regrouping. Maggie didn’t look injured. All I had was a head bump. But the next car flying along this road at eighty-five miles per hour was going to hit us.
“Stay there,” I said, opening the door and walking to the front of the car.
Whoa. Damage. The car was at a diagonal and from the looks of it, I assumed she’d swerved to avoid the “fucking armadillo” and hit...something. There was a long streak of red paint on the guardrail. That matched up with the damage I saw on the car.
“What are you doing, Tyler?”
“Giving the armadillo mouth to mouth.” I could see it. She hadn’t missed it. The thing looked like a potato bug wearing armor, turned upside down and motionless.
“That’s not funny!”
“Put the car in neutral.”
“What?”
“We need to push the car out of the way. Someone’s gonna hit us and we don’t need this day to get any worse.”
“Fucking armadillo,” she muttered. “Did I really kill it?” Her eyes were so bleak as they met mine that I almost lied, but she’d see the truth soon enough.
“Yes.”
And then the waterworks began.
Crying women are the worst. So far, through all the mess we’d been through in under twenty-four hours, Maggie hadn’t cried. Not once. And now she was bawling over a dead armor-plated rodent.
Fucking armadillo.
“Maggie! Maggie!” I called out. “Put it in neutral. I’ll push it back to the side of the road.”
She ignored me and just sobbed.
I sighed and walked back to the driver’s side. I tapped on the window. She lowered it.
“I’m sorry you killed the armadillo.”
“That’s n-n-n-o-t helping!”
What the fuck was I supposed to say?
“We need to move the car. We don’t want to make this situation worse.”
“It c-c-c-an-n get worse?” Her sobs dissolved into a weird high-pitched laughter combined with snot.
“If a semi takes out the car, yes.”
She moved the gear shift into neutral and started to get out of the car.
“No. You stay and steer.”
She listened. Small miracle.
It took a lot of muscle, and the next day my quads would be screaming, but we got the car off the road faster than I thought we could. Once we were out of danger I went to the opened window and checked out Maggie.
She was muttering the words “fucking armadillo” over and over, crying.
Oh, boy.
“Hey, let’s call someone.”
“Who? The armadillo undertaker?”
“I was thinking more like a tow truck.”
She reached into the console for her phone and stared at it in disbelief. “No bars! No fucking bars!” I gently took the phone from her to confirm and—yep. No bars.
Another armadillo slowly made its way across the road, pausing to sniff the carcass. Maggie cried even harder, words coming out of her in a disjointed kind of babble.
“I’ve never killed anything in my life and I didn’t see the armadillo and I was going eighty-five and trying to get you to L.A. and I follow all the rules and now the armadillo’s wife is an armadillo widow because I was too stupid to tell Charlotte and Darla no and—”
An ominous sound crackled the sky behind us.
This part of Arizona doesn’t get too much rain, and we were about to be treated to an unusual weather event that promised to make the roads quite slippery and hazardous. Not that it mattered, with the car in this condition.
“You have got to be kidding me!” she screamed, scrambling to get out of the car. Maggie took off at a dead run through the wide, baked ground by the side of the road, weaving to avoid small cactuses and bushes, just running. Her feet kicked up dirt as she ran, leaving a handy trail I could use to find her when she was done.
I wasn’t about to follow her. You don’t follow a hysterical woman. You wait until they’ve calmed down and then you help pick up the pieces.
At least, that’s what Dad once told me in a drunken, sad moment.
As I watched her run, then slow down, then drop, I realized something.
She had risked her life to get me to L.A.
It was time for me to risk my heart for her.
Maggie
I run. That’s what I do when I can’t figure out what else to do. I’d tried so hard to let Tyler sleep, because the whole point of this insane road trip was to get him to L.A. so the band could perform, right? That meant the poor guy should be reasonably rested and have a chance to practice. He couldn’t really do that without a bass, but I could, at least, let him sleep.
But all those hours alone with my own thoughts had put me into a highway trance, and as dawn broke and my coffee supply bottomed out, I was dead tired. Driving while exhausted is hard enough.
Driving while emotionally reeling is a completely different matter.
And then that fucking armadillo appeared out of nowhere.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Armadillo,” I said aloud, as if that would matter. I kept running, not wanting Tyler to see me. To talk to me. To try to rescue me. All the talking had percolated while he slept, making me realize that deep inside, some part of me had picked Tyler to ask for sex two months ago because my intuition told me he was so much more than he seemed to be.
And I was right.
A cramp seized my calf and I stopped, dropping to the ground, rocks digging into the heels of my hands.
I have no idea how long I sat there, studying the silty dirt, until I heard the telltale crunch of shoes on the ground, walking slowly toward me. The sky was an ominous greyish-brown right over us, as if a cloud had decided to mindfuck me.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
“Turns out the armadillo is alive.”
“What?”
“Yeah, it just sort of got up and walked away like nothing happened. I guess it was stunned or something.”
I just blinked, my mind like a spinning top. “That’s what you want to say to me? Of all the things you could come over here and say, you want me to know the fucking armadillo is okay?”
“You seemed to care.”
“I—I—God, you’re such a—a—I don’t have enough words to describe you!”
He made a very masculine hmph sound and sat down next to me.
And then it began to rain.
Chapter Ten
Tyler
“This is officially the worst day of my life,” I declared, drops falling on me like they punctuated my words.
“Second worst for me.” She sniffed, then wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands.
I whiplashed my head around and stared at her. Jesus, I was an asshole. What a horrible thing to say in front of her.
And then I thought about it for a second and sighed.
“Yeah. Me too.”
“You’ve experienced something worse than this string of events?”
I just blinked. Once.
She gave me a look like she was annoyed. “You don’t understand what it’s like. To lose control like that....”
“You’re not the only person here who’s ever been....you know.”
“You know...what?”
“Violated.”
My words hung in the air like the echo of a gong, like the memory of sound. I couldn’t say the word rape because that felt too big. What happened to me when I was thirteen was—
No. Not getting into it now.
Her lips parted and I saw the tops of her teeth, white and straight and right there, resting against her lips like nothing had changed.
She just stared at me, breathing hard, her chest rising and falling like nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
I made a sound through my nose, a short huff that was supposed to cover my screaming soul.
“Yeah. Right. This is the part where you give me that crumpled face look. The one where you tell me I’m a really nice guy, but—”
And then her body was hot and full against me in a flash, warm, wet lips exploring mine, her hands hungry and in my hair. She cut off my words.
They were the wrong words, anyhow.
I pulled back from the long, slow, searching kiss, my mouth bruised and sweetened by hers. “I need to know something, Maggie.” The rain made her look so achingly sweet.
“What?” She was panting, too.
“Why you didn’t kiss me until now?”
I could hear her breath coming in fits and starts, could feel her pain and struggle in the rhythm of it. I couldn’t take back my question. Didn’t want to. What she said next determined the direction of my soul.
“Because,” she finally confessed, “I’m imperfect.” Her forehead pressed against mine and her fingers stroked the back of my neck, like she’d done it a thousand times before.
And like she knew she’d do it a million times more.
The roar of a truck engine made a strange putt-putt sound as it slowed down, forcing us to turn and look. A dude in a bigass, rusty tow truck that coughed and gasped as its engine tried to keep going came to a halt on the road next to us.
“You folks need a tow?” the driver called out.
Maybe something was going right today.
Make that two somethings.
I squeezed Maggie’s hand and left her to help the tow truck guy, a man named Andy who looked to be a few years older than me and about as different as was possible. He was at least six-six and so skinny he looked like a praying mantis. Super-dark hair and dark eyes, with a long, shaggy cut and a beard. One so thick it had things stuck in it, like stray kittens and Jimmy Hoffa.
We got the car hooked up and the three of us climbed into the tow truck, all soaking wet.
“Where to?”
“What is there?”
He paused. Andy actually chewed on his cheek, then said, “Well, we got one car repair place and one kinda campground. So your choices are pretty small.”
“A choice of one is always better than a choice of zero,” Maggie said, shivering next to me, her wet body crowding mine. I sat between them on the cracked vinyl seat in a cab so big six people could have fit comfortably.
