Knowland counsels me that the betraying bitch deserves to die, and I decked him with a right cross to his left cheek. When he was on the ground looking up at me, I scowled as rudely as he does and told him never to mention her to me again.
I know what he’s thinking. It’s always revenge for my Provincial Lord. He may call it justice, but we both know what he really wants. Queleah, his little whore, tried to explain to me that it’s because he loves me. I shrugged her off. I know the sentiment is real. I know he cares like the brother he’s always been. But I cannot have him going after my bride like he’s on an crusade. That is not what my Utopia means to me. We have our order. Marrying her was throwing chaos into that order and he knows I’m to blame as much as the woman I love.
I’m sure she’s thinking she does me a favor leaving.
Her letter to me was tender but blunt. She doesn’t intend to return.
My dearest, Keven Brannoch, I am so in love with you there are no words to express the sentiment I feel in my heart. It aches with a pain I cannot describe. My body still bears the scars of the lashing and the cane that attempted to purify me. How I struggled to feel that purification! How I grappled to understand the mystic secrets of your world, so that I could become its greatest sister, and for you, its most honored wife.
But I have failed you and myself. I have realized the stupidity of this venture of ours and how much I’ve hurt you trying to be a woman that I am not. Every day has been torture for me. And as I found my loins descend into a frosty cool, I knew that your pain would start to surface. This all came on so slowly, like a glacier descending inch by inch by inch to cover everything warm and growing in its path.
I am a coward. I can’t face your pain, but I can try to alleviate it. In part. I know my leaving is going to hurt you deeply. But I know that it will be far better for you that I disappear so that you can warm again and not know this horridly cold woman I’ve become. We have proven that some things in this rocky world of ours just can’t be done. To mix our cultures was a mistake. I was miserable in the confinement of this marriage, and you were becoming discontent.
As peaceful as your Utopia is, it is not my world and your life cannot be my life. I must have a real life to go to, and I’ll never find it unless I leave here and return to my Southern home.
You will be with me my life long, the insignia I wear and the brand that still feels strange on my ass can never be removed. These reminders of you I’ll cherish, as I think of the two of us, when I was innocent of your world, and we lay together on the beach and you did horrible things to me and my body loved it. That will be my memory and I hope yours.
Teagan
I saw her decline, witnessed the weariness in her face, the joy in her slowly slipping away. I took her to the beach one day, just to bring back the personal alchemy that marked our first days. But by then, she was already too much unlike herself to feel anything. I am as empty as she is. And, for all my contemplation, there’s nothing I can do but hope time will heal at least half my heart. The other half will remain in her hands.
There’s a knock on my door.
“Come in.”
Knowland. Of course. He chides me daily. Can’t give it up. At least he’s not harping about revenge. I don’t want her dead, even if I might have wished my own death in the last several days.
“I could go South to find her,” he suggests—maybe for the hundredth time.
I shake my head, “No. You won’t go find her. She doesn’t want to be found and the South has a thousand places where she can hide.”
“But how many women in the South sport her tattoo and her brand?”
“She’ll wear long-sleeved dresses and never have sex; and even if she’s questioned, she’ll laugh it off, saying her marks were given to her by another lover and she’s stuck with them. Because the South doesn’t know any better, they will believe her.”
“I could find her, you know I could.” He looks at me sincerely, and I almost find myself agreeing to his stupid plan.
“Maybe you could,” I finally say. “But I have nothing to say to her anymore.”
“Nothing to say?” He doesn’t understand me, never has.
“No, nothing to say,” I repeat. “Give it up. The sooner you do, the sooner I’ll forget about her and quit worrying you.”
“You better be right, man, because I swear I’ll hunt the bitch down whether you like it or not, if you don’t pull out of this gloom.”
I smile—not particularly warmly, or like I mean it, but being the first he’s seen from me in three weeks, Knowland thinks he might have gotten to me. I’ll let him believe it and nurse my sorrow in private. It’s probably better that way, anyway.
“I’ll follow your prescription, friend. Just bear with me.”
“Days. I’ll give you three days.”
“You will not!” I get up laughing and knock him with my elbow in fun.
“I know what you need,” he tells me seeing how I lighten.
“And what’s that?”
“A good whore.”
“No, no, I don’t. And please don’t find me one.”
He snickers and I’m sure he hasn’t listened to a word I’ve said.
Chapter Thirteen
It takes several weeks of walking to get where I need to go—as far South as my poor legs will carry me, as far from clean smells and untainted ocean air as I can go. I breathe easier when I get to one of the steamy cities that remind me of where I grew up. It is not that I greet the place with fond memories, I don’t think people in the South would ever describe their memories that way. But it does feel comfortable, and I’m not as anxious. I stay in the city a day, looking for a printer that could use my talents. Most just want my ass, and I refuse. I can’t even think of sex. It seems to lie dormant within me, laying forgotten in a now quiet corner of my body. In order to feel alive again, I need to get beyond the belief that I’m irrevocably married to a saint. Eventually my crotch will shout and I’ll have to listen. But certainly not with the first man that proposes sex to me, and not the second or even the third. Maybe if I can fend off the offers for some months, when I finally relent, I won’t feel so indecent. I sometimes get angry with Keven Brannoch that he made me have a conscience. I was never guilty about sex before I found Utopia.
I finally find a decent place to work. It’s out of the city in a small town at the foothills of the mountains. The air seems clearer, though I can look across the valley and see the smoky fog that hangs like a putrid cloud of yellow against the pale blue of the sky. If I look straight up, the sky is bluer. I’m thinking these foothills might not be as trashy as it is down in the middle of that fog.
The fellow I work for has a small press and a wife—interesting phenomenon for the South. Marriage hardly ever entered my thoughts before I traveled north. But now, I’m aware that there are many married people. They just keep their unions quiet and live to please themselves, not worrying what other people think. Of course this pains me, wishing that it could be Keven and I. But yet, after a few weeks in my new job, I put the thought out of my mind.
“What is that mark on your arm?” my employer’s wife asks me one day.
I laugh and gaze at the pretty insignia of a flower that appears there. I’ve tried hard not to associate this with Utopia, just Keven. Sometimes I wish I could get rid of it, but then that would be impossible. “A sign from a lover. It’s the sort of thing that’s done in other regions. I loved him and it was very pleasant. But I couldn’t stay with him, so I’m here now.”
“Why couldn’t you stay?” she presses me.
I try to frame some sort of explanation and I find it hard. Finally I flip off a saucy retort, “He was an ass.” I almost sound as though I believe it. It seems to be enough to placate her curiosity. And when I’m not engaged in the midst of my work, my times with her are quite pleasant.
I am surprised one afternoon to find her alone in the shop. Her husband is making deliveries and she approaches me with the sam
e strange look I remember in Queleah’s eyes. She’s a buxom woman with breasts I often admire, especially because she wears blouses that are cut low across her bosom. I know she does this for her husband who loves to ogle her lovely form as they work. She is of my height, but much more plump. The first time I saw her, I knew I could be aroused by her. Perhaps I knew instinctively that we’d be lovers. If I could only bury my face in the perfume of her breasts.
When she is on me, I stand, feeling quite awkward with her hands combing my shoulders. She is so kind, and from that kindness my legs begin to quake, and all that was asleep in me begins to stretch and yawn and come alive with an energetic vigor as though I’m newly born.
She pulls at the shoulders of my dress baring skin that trembles from her touch. As she exposes my breasts, I am nearly in tears seeing how she looks on them with tenderness and lust combined. I’m all too reminded of that same look on Keven’s face, but I won’t brush her aside. My cunt aches and my body roars. I know I’ll be unhappy if I allow this sexual flood to languish unheeded. As she bends down to kiss my breasts, I watch them quiver excitedly, little Goosebumps appear in a flash and are gone as my skin starts to warm from within. She covers each nipple with her mouth and sucks, and the effort become a hearty squeeze of sensitive buds, until I feel strong jolts shoot electrically down the channel to my steamy cunt. I swoon into her, hardly able to keep on my feet. We paw at each other’s bodies, and I have her breasts as bare as mine in seconds, my mouth going avidly to smell her skin, the essence of some flowery perfume. I taste her sweat and a trace of honey that perhaps lingers from when her husband had her body last.
Taking me into the back of the printing shop, she drops into a fabric chair, and pulls me down into her lap. I am all over her with my hands, thinking I might cum myself just from the feel of her skin against my fingers. Dropping to the floor at her feet, I draw her skirt above two generous thighs seeing a thick forest of dark hair beginning to glisten from her dew. She parts them wide so I notice the purply-pink of her cunt winking before me. Feeling the smoothness of her skin, I rub my breasts against her fleshy legs and then move with my mouth to explore her female snatch. It reeks with more perfume and the sweat of half her day already spent. She sighs, swept by a lust that holds my head to her cunt with her hands—though she hardly has to force me to eat from this pleasant feast. I joy to find her moan melodically as my tongue dives into her portal. Licking juice, sucking her clit, I finally rub with my fingers, burrowing deeply with my hands, as I keep my mouth over her throbbing bud. Jerking into my face, I can tell she’s cumming. Her cream tastes tart and I lap it until her body stops its spasms.
“Come here, little one,” she purrs languidly and I sit on her great lap again. As her lips go to mine, her hand goes under my dress and she begins to play. I feel the jolt of orgasm almost instantly. It has been so long. The first snap through my groin is like a bolt of lightning, but she doesn’t stop there. “Ah, another please,” I’m begging. Her fingers bring a second and after some time, a third climax, until I collapse exhaustedly against her. I’m still horny and would love a thick dick in my pussy, but hands must suffice. As her fine hands comb every inch of me I become alive again.
“What is this?” I hear her speak as I lie on her with my head against the back of the chair.
Before I can think to reply I find my skirt at my waist, the woman inspecting my branded thigh.
“Good God in heaven, why have you been so marked?”
I’m not good at covering my distress over her discovery.
“You a criminal somewhere?” she wonders.
I’m sure I am by now, but what can I tell her?
“That man I spoke of,” I say.
“Does he do this to all his women, or just you?”
“I have no idea since I left him.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Hardly. Just the first stab, then I felt nothing until it began to heal. That was sometimes painful.”
“You’re sure you’re not condemned?” she asks me.
“I swear.” And that is the truth.
“You lie to me, I leave you in street,” she warns.
I’m not sure she believes me, but I make light of it, pull down my skirt and hop from her lap, reminding myself how great my body feels enjoying sex again.
Two days later my employer tells me there is no more work for me to do. I know he’s lying, but I also know he’s scared. I doubt my female lover gave my brand much thought after she told her husband. But because you’re taught to fear such things, I am forced to leave.
I suppose wandering is part of my life, but I regret having to leave these kind people. It is four days before I find another position in a town just a short distance from the last. Here I’ll be a seamstress making dresses and pants. It’s not easy work with the hours I’m required to be at the machine, but I need the money. I’ll work here a while, fending off the lewd looks from my boss, until I have enough saved to move again.
At break one day, I sit outside, glad that there is some breeze coming my way, though it is not the kind that refreshes the spirit like I felt in the North. This breeze agitates me. From off the desert it rises howling through the valleys, in part dispersing the yellow fog, but mostly it burns the eyes with hot heat and stirs the soul for crazy kinds of things. I am restless, worried that it means something in particular. But then, I’ve been tricked more than once into believing that signs from heaven like silvery slivers of moons are foreshadowings. I was once tricked by the celestial prime-movers in Utopia. Not again. I banish the thought from my mind.
I drink coffee while I take my break, which is something to relish—good coffee is rare, and this is very fresh. It only aggravates the heat in me raised by the desert winds, but I have to relish something in this wasteland. The coffee must suffice.
Late in the day, the machine room boss pulls me from my work and leads me to the back of the shop. I have already fended off his sexual advances twice and am growing weary from the effort. I might easily give in, being so horny without any relief since my voluptuous female lover, but this man is not to my liking. I wince just thinking of his lips on me. I could never be his lover, and the thought has so repulsed me, I’m afraid I’ll have to quit this job sooner than I planned. His constant groping leaves me feeling dirty.
At the back of the shop, I find the boss has no sexual intentions for me at all, but has brought me to see two men.
“Is this the one?” the man with a shaved head and a black goatee asks.
“The only one it could be?” my employer tells him.
“Where do you come from?” this bald man addresses me.
“Where is anyone from? I was raised in the valley under that yellow fog.”
“Where did you commit your crimes?”
“I’ve committed no crimes.”
“Take a look at her wrist,” the second man says—one with a pudgy pushed-in face and tiny eyes that only seem to squint.
The first man takes my arm from me roughly, and pulls up my long sleeve to find the tattoo.
“Where did you get this?”
“A lover.”
“Where was that?”
I shrug. I know that too much information is dangerous.
“Tell me!” he orders me like an inquisitor.
“A lover. A village north of here, but he’s gone now.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Show me her ass!” the second man demands, and I’m forced to turn around while my skirt is drawn over my hips and Keven’s brand on my left ass flank appears for them to see. The bald man pokes it with his fingers. The pain is gone, so I only wince because the feel of him bothers me. I think I’m aroused, but I don’t pay any attention to these erotic surges. I cannot be foolish now. “Nice ass,” he purrs with a lewd scowl.
“Collar her!” The pudgy man orders him, and before I can fight him off, the bald man has a crude metal collar clamped around my neck, locked in place.
“Wh
at are you doing!” I shout.
“Arresting you.”
“Arrest? What have I done?”
“I have no idea,” the bald man sneers, “but with marks like these you’ve certainly escaped some confinement.”
“And what if I have? There is no jurisdiction here that can condemn me.”
“There are in other places. We simply hunt for women like you, and your pretty head will bring a fine price.”
“You cannot do this,” I try rebelling against the hands that hold me fast, but as I attempt to run from the room, I find I’m tethered by a chain and jerked back the instant the slack’s drawn tight. “No, no no!” I scream at them.
“I will gag you, bitch, in a second,” the scowling bald man warns me. “Don’t say another word.”
I plead with my eyes, believing him.
“Maybe if you’re lucky, where you’re going someone will know you’re not an escaped slave.”
“A slave?” I forget the warning.
“There are many slaves to the east, in some of the mountainous climates. But you probably know this already.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“The provincial prison,” he answers.
“Prison!” I gasp angrily.
“She’s said enough, gag her,” his pudgy friend orders, and I find a fat piece of leather shoved deeply inside my mouth, fastened with a strap around my head. My hands are tied behind me, and I’m taken outside to a motorized van that has been sputtering gasoline and making a noisy racket—the backdrop for this terrifying play since it began. My stomach is queasy as the fumes get inside my lungs, though I cannot cough with the gag in my mouth.
***
After two days riding in the clattering van, my body shakes even when I find myself walking on solid ground again—as though the vibration is still inside my memory, firmly entrenched there.
The subterranean cavern where I’m imprisoned has dozens of stalls along a corridor, each separated from the next by a thick plaster wall. I see that there are women in each four by six cubicle. We are ordered not to speak with each other—warned that we will be disciplined if we do. In the daytime, sun streams through the open ceiling above us. At night we see no stars as trap doors drop over us just as the sun sets, and the sky turns a beautiful purple, and what few stars can break through the atmosphere begin to shine. Before the doors descended on my first night of captivity, I believe I saw Venus beginning to burn through the atmosphere. Perhaps that is the last time I’ve smiled.
Chaos in Paradise Page 10
