by Wolfe, Layla
“Don’t. Just don’t, you hear?” was all Ford would say on the matter. “Now, Duji, how abso-fucking-lutely sure are you about this Cutlass storehouse out by Mormon Lake?”
“Three hundred and ten fucking percent,” said Duji.
“That’s mathematically absurd,” said my brother, who’d been invited in on the meet.
Apparently potential prospects weren’t supposed to speak up, though, for a few brothers bodily lifted Robert and took him into the backyard to toss him in the pool. After taking off the black leather cut with barely any patches on it, of course.
I tried flirting some more with Turk, but apparently his brother’s word was gold, for he barely looked at me again. Later that night, it struck me that maybe Ford was simply following Cropper’s rules when he warned his brothers away from me. Cropper wasn’t there, so maybe Ford was just echoing the same confusing thing he’d told me at the high school.
So instead of feeling proud, I became angry and confused again. So what If Cropper liked to watch? I liked to watch, too!
CHAPTER SIX
MADISON
I had had a few of the watery Budweisers by that time and had dared to break into Ingrid’s schnapps. The clear liqueur was too sticky sweet for me, but I wanted to get a little trashed. I was messaging Sabrina on my laptop—of course she knew about my whole crush, the kiss in the swimming pool, everything.
MADISON SHELLM: Now he’s just out in the garage playing with his electronics.
SABRINA McMURTRY: I’m confused. Why can’t you and him just go to a hotel like everyone else?
MADISON SHELLM: Exactly, my dear. Why the fcuk not?
SABRINA McMURTRY: Yo’ure hot and he shoudl be glad you want him. He needs to learn a lessn.
MADISON SHELLM: What sort of lesson?
SABRINA McMURTRY: That’s you’re not gonna wait forevber.
MADISON SHELLM: I just really want to get fducked.
Sabrina was right! She was damned right. The booze had given me liquid courage, and I was already at my bedroom door by the time Sabrina typed:
SABRINA McMURTRY: It’s not like Flagstff is that far from Pure and Easy, anway. He can always visit
I didn’t want to go through the dining room where Ingrid was conducting business with some toothless wonders, so I went out front and around the side of the house where there was a separate entrance to the garage. I knew from the bikes parked out front that only Ford and Cropper were here—looked like even the “grunt” Robert had taken his white Dyna on an errand.
I was going to confront Ford. I was going to interrogate him until he either admitted he wanted me—which he’d done at the school—or told me to get lost. If he wanted me, he was taking me to a motel to fuck the stuffing out of me. No ifs, ands, or buts. Cropper didn’t even have to know.
Instead, I was about to encounter the most stupendous, life-changing sight of my life.
The door was ajar so I just shoved it open. I immediately stopped short, sucking in air.
There, by the feeble sixty-watt light of a clip-on work lamp, Ford sat back astride a work bench, sensuously jacking off.
I went utterly numb. It was a scene I’d only dared to imagine in my most insane, most frenzied masturbating sessions.
What. The. Fuck.
It was better than my fantasies. Shirtless, he leaned back on one palm, bringing the glorious muscles of his chest into sharp relief. Because the garage had no air conditioning, his pecs were slicked with sweat. That infuriating, softly oily line of hair that defined the centerline between his molded abs, well, I was finally able to see where it joined the shiny bush of his pubic mound. He leaned casually back, his hips thrust forward, the shiny, greasy limb of his cock in his fist.
I admit it—I went weak in the knees. I had to cling to the doorjamb. Luckily an iPod in the garage was playing some Led Zeppelin tune—“When The Levee Breaks,” if I recall correctly—and it had muffled my footsteps.
Ford was taking his time. Whatever lubricant he’d used made the bulbous cockhead shine like an enormous, taut mushroom he choked in his grip. He took his time easing his fist back down his pole. When his hand met with the root of his cock, he smeared his palm over his mound to take a handful of his balls. His hips twitched and his head rolled back, displaying the fine silhouette of his powerful throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he tried to swallow.
It was an art form, as though he were making love to himself. It turned me on so mightily I felt the lips of my pussy bloom and fill with blood. Tiny bubbles swam before my eyes. I had to remember to breathe—I was about to pass out from lack of oxygen. I took tiny, unobtrusive breaths, deathly afraid to interrupt the scene playing out before my eyes.
Then he moved to pleasure himself with an overhand stroke. He slithered the massive length of veined prick between his fingers, snaking his fingers around the shiny glans. He massaged his own cock as though intending to torture me with the most erotic sight of my life.
The Saint Christopher’s medal shivered in the pit of his throat. He was choking back his own gasps.
I should have run over there and inhaled that beautiful cock down my throat.
I should have burst into the garage and mounted him. My pussy was slimy enough by now, steaming up my little panties, that I could have mounted him and impaled my virginal cunt on his big fat tool.
I waited a few split seconds too long.
My hesitation, my fear of grabbing the gusto by the horns or whatever they say, that’s always been my downfall.
Maybe if I would have jumped on Ford, the end result would have been worse. No one will ever know.
I can’t help think, if I just would’ve rushed Ford, we could have made our stand together.
Instead, hot putrid breath on the back of my neck chilled me to the bone.
“You get off watching, don’t you, little girl?”
I twirled around, but Cropper only held two clammy fingers to my lips. Instinctively I grabbed his wrist to yank his hand away, but he pulled me away from the door. His entire ape’s body pressed me against the outer garage wall. It nauseated me to feel his hard-on poking against my groin, and at least I was able to twist my lower body so it wasn’t facing him.
He had me pinned by the upper arms to the wall and he was grinding that annoying stiffy against my hipbone. His breath seemed to make a halo of smoke and alcohol fumes against my cheek. “You get off watching my not-so-little boy jacking his dick?”
“He’ll hear you, Cropper,” was all I could think to say. I stomped on one of his boots, but with my feeble sandals against his steel toes, it was probably like a fly. “Be quiet.”
“Right. You don’t want him to know you’re out here, spying on him invoking the Oscar Meyer love spell.”
As funny as that would normally be, with Cropper’s little johnson poking insistently at my hipbone, ah, no…it wasn’t.
“Listen,” I seethed, “I just came here to ask him a question. Why would I want to interrupt a scene like that? Listen, Cropper, just let me go, and no one has to be any wiser.”
“But I’m wiser.” I didn’t know what that meant, but to Cropper it meant he now pinned me to the wall with his entire body, leaving his hands free to roam up my ribcage. “You’ve been teasing me with these bouncy melons and now I want to get a feel myself. Ooo. I’m gonna come in my pants once I get this delicious hooter in my paw. I’ve had to look at these babies bouncing and jiggling for a year now, you cunt, and now I’ve got you right where I want you. Ooo, nice big hard nips—just like bullets.”
He had yanked the neckline of my wifebeater so my tit was nearly exposed, and now he squeezed it like a giant zit. When he bent to take a bite or something, I squirmed aside and bashed his skull with my forearm. I’d had to fend off insistent losers when sleeping up at Coyote Buttes, so this was nothing new.
I wasn’t free, though. My punch had as much impact as a piece of tissue against his thick skull. It only enraged him. Now he yanked my neckline with both hands, an
d both tits obediently popped out like champagne corks. I cursed the day I’d ever thought of the genius idea to tease Ford with a sexy bra. It was all coming back on me now.
He smacked my boobs, once, twice, three times. He backhanded them and they just bounced as if pleased!
“You like it rough, eh? I should know. Torino isn’t rough enough for a slut like you.”
My mouth was too dry to spit at him, so I kept trying to knee him in the crotch. It’s amazing how much stronger most men are than most women. We couldn’t get the best of them if we lifted weights all day, just by sheer virtue of their muscle mass. Cropper kept side-stepping my knees, and finally he just backhanded me across the cheekbone.
He didn’t do it nicely, either. A trail of warmth trickled into the corner of my mouth, and he hit me again. It didn’t really sink in that he meant to harm me until I tasted the metallic ooze on my tongue. I saw slick carmine splashes on his knuckles. “Cunt,” he kept growling. “You don’t turn down the President of the Bare Bones and live to tell the tale.”
When I was good and stupefied, he flipped me around to face the wall. With a handful of my hair in his hand, he dragged my face along the splintery wood while growling in my ear.
“You like to watch, eh? I’ll give you a show. Here. This is what you came here for, isn’t it?”
I didn’t know what he meant. I was never truly afraid until he mashed my face up against that hole in the wall.
Yes, there was a one-inch hole drilled in the garage wall. It took several moments for me to figure out what was going on. Cropper kept mashing my skull this way and that. But at length I had a clear view of Ford’s workbench through this sick little peephole.
Jism flowed over his hand and his head was thrown back in a blissful sigh. The edges of his mouth curled up with satisfaction as he choked his beautiful dick, and a sob finally wrenched from me. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I could only peek at perfection, like some twisted pervert, but my life itself would only be a warped joke.
“That’s what you wanted, right? Watch him jerk that giant hambone…watch the spunk squirting from his big meat…” I don’t know how long Cropper had been jerking himself against my ass. Robert Plant kept wailing about the levee breaking, weeping and moaning, and having no place to go. I didn’t know whether to be happy or angry that it was a very long song.
As the blurry image of Ford got up to grab a rag and wipe off his long, purple cock, I suddenly felt this jiggling against my ass. The dry pumping of skin against skin was totally familiar to me from my childish romps up at Coyote Buttes.
Even weirder, Cropper was growling, “Your lily-white Torino isn’t such a goddamned fucking saint either, Missy Mammaries. His skin ain’t so lily-white, and you don’t even want to face that he’s building a fucking bomb that might blow some white boy testicles off a few Cutlasses.”
None of this really sank in at the moment. Without a free hand, Cropper couldn’t yank down my cutoffs, so he had to hump his hose against my jeans-clad butt. I squeezed my eyes shut tight so I wouldn’t have to look in the strange perverted hole in the wall, and Cropper continued to grunt.
“You want that young, thick pecker, don’t you, you cunt? You’re just a whore like your mother. All you can think about is his long, thick, pretty tool, and sucking it down your cum freak throat. I know what you think about when you’re in the shower caressing your plump, juicy titties. Well, guess what, slut? You’re never going to lick my son’s tasty dick, because you’re all mine. All…mine. You serve only me from now…on.”
He grunted those last couple words, and he even relaxed the hand that smashed my face to the wall as he milked his lizard on my butt. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I just elbowed him in the solar plexus to give myself a few inches of room to escape. I ran up the path, toward the back yard.
The music finally ended with a long resonant feedback note. As I rounded the corner by the pool, I heard Ford emerge onto the side path. “Oh, hey, dad. Didn’t know you were there. You wanna take a look at my device? I’m putting it in this soda can and I think I’ve got the right mix down.”
The twisted sicko still probably had his jingle bone in his hand while talking to his son. Even sadder, Ford probably didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about it.
My head was swimming like an action movie with images, thoughts, and God forbid, feelings. As I yanked open the sliding glass door to the kitchen, of all the stupid things that could’ve possibly happened, I ran right into my brother Robert.
“Dude!” Robert cried, grabbing me by the upper arms. “You’ve got blood on your face!”
“I know—I’m just going to wash it off, listen, Bobby.” I drew him back inside the kitchen, next to the sink so Ingrid and her cronies couldn’t hear. It was my turn to rattle Bobby now. “I want you to fucking promise me. Never ever join that fucking Bare Bones gang or club or whatever they call it. Never ever, you hear?”
Bobby, of course, was confused. He thought I liked the club. I had thought that, too. “But why, Maddy? Wait—did that fucker Torino do something to you? Is that why your face is bloody?”
“No, it wasn’t Torino, and you’ve got to promise me, Bobby. Don’t ever ever prospect in to that fucking stupid club, no matter what happens.”
“But—what else am I supposed to do? I’m going on a run with Torino tonight to Mormon Lake. It’s not like I’ve got any mad skills in any other department. I’m kind of useless, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Don’t go on that run, Bobby. Don’t go. Listen to me. You’ve got to believe me. And you’re not fucking useless.”
“Why—is something bad going to happen? Tell me, Maddy. Tell me. I deserve to know. Where are you going?”
I ran directly to the bathroom. Slamming the door shut behind me and locking it, I frantically crawled up and down the walls like a kid with a magnifying glass. On one side of the room was Ford’s bedroom, on the other side, Ingrid’s walk-in closet.
There. About a foot above the shower head and six inches over, on Ingrid’s side of the wall, was the peephole.
I pounded the fucking butter-yellow wall with my fist. I screamed like King Kong, figuring Ingrid and her customers wouldn’t care.
Fuck it. I didn’t care.
Sabrina was right. Ford needed to learn that I wasn’t going to wait forever.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FORD, 30 years old
“It is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another person, not with the mind, not even with the heart.” ~ Henry Miller
He was too old for this shit.
Ford Illuminati felt about a hundred years old as the nurses wheeled the gurney away.
They had made her look so natural, as though she were sleeping. The nurses took out all the tubes, turned off all monitors, even brushed her hair.
There was no one else to look at her. Just Ford.
He didn’t know what to do next. He couldn’t just rush out of the hospital, looking like a selfish asshole, even if he was only trying to run from the specter of death. He knew there was a chapel somewhere in the hospital where he could pray. Like a good Catholic boy, that’s where he headed now. As he followed the arrows down various hallways, he dialed his old lady, Corinne. He hadn’t talked to her in the thirty-six hours he’d been sitting vigil in ICU. She claimed she had an aversion to hospitals.
Ford exhaled deeply when Corinne answered. “It’s over.”
There was a brief silence. Then, “Well, that was quick, anyway. You must be relieved.”
Relieved? That was a strange choice of words. But then, Corinne had been acting strangely all week. “I wouldn’t say relieved. I’m heading to the chapel to pray.”
“That’s good. You pray. What was the official cause of death?”
“Multiple organ failure. Just one thing after the other, all right in a line.”
“I’m very sorry. Listen. Before you go, I wanted to tell you something.”
Ford punched the elevator
button with his forefinger. He didn’t need any more burdens at the moment. Corinne was very high-maintenance, but the sort of trophy old lady who had gotten him places he wouldn’t ordinarily have gone. She was highly connected in Pure and Easy society and liked to organize the club’s charity poker runs, for one. Cropper had shoved Corinne on him, and she was hot, so Ford had gone along. It was good for the club’s image.
“Yes.” She probably just wanted more money for clothes.
“I can’t be with you anymore.”
That wasn’t entirely a surprise, either. Corinne wasn’t like the other old ladies. She’d never really fit in. This last week, those differences had stood out like a fire hydrant at a poodle convention. While many brothers and their old ladies, having heard about Ford’s vigil at the hospital, had paid their respects in person, Corinne had stayed away. She’d always been in downtown Flagstaff, shopping. The other old ladies had hung around the germ-riddled hospital hallways getting Ford coffee and snacks he hadn’t eaten.
Right now Turk, Riker, and their old ladies were down at the hotel suites they’d rented, getting some rest. Tuzigoot, Faux Pas and Duji had been by, but had gone back to Pure and Easy on business. No one had expected Rebekah Quail to die so quickly, if at all. Nobody seemed more relieved than Corinne.
Ford got into the elevator where three or so people were already standing. He didn’t care what they overheard. “You know you’re going to have to move out of the house. I’ll give you some alimony for a few months, but it’s not going to last forever. Your dad will have to take care of you again.”
Everyone in the elevator stared at him as though he were speaking in the Crimean Gothic tongue. Ford didn’t give a shit. It wasn’t nearly as callous as it sounded. He wasn’t married to Corinne. Their relationship had been mostly for sex and appearances. Ford was sole owner of the contemporary Southwest McMansion up on Mescal Mountain with views of the red rocks that surrounded P&E, Pure and Easy. Why would he leave, and Corinne stay?
