It’s never giving up, even when we’re running with rats.
Our feet carry us past the glitz and glamour, into ghettos that feel homegrown. LED ads are exchanged for broken streetlights, and shoes dangle from powerlines instead of storefronts. The only superheroes in sight are drug dealers and pimps, hustling in fur coats and alligator loafers.
Above a Korean food restaurant run by a Middle Eastern family is the dump letting us pay for a closet-size room in cash. We bolt through the thin cardboard-like door into our air deprived space, collapsing onto the mattress in a tangle of limbs, lips, and moans.
Poesy straddles my hips and rakes her hands over my scalp, knocking the beanie back to expose a headful of blond hair she brushes through her fingers.
“Fuck me with those glasses on,” she says in a sex-doused tone. A small smile turns up her lips.
“Whatever you want.” I slip my hands up her thighs, under her dress, and around her bottom, slowly stroking her hot center over my cock.
“Anything?” she asks, tilting her head back and closing her eyes. Poe’s small chest heaves, and her nipples harden under a pink and orange rose design.
“You know I’d give you the world.” I sit up and lift the dress over her head, baring perfect, round breasts. “I’ve killed for you, girl.”
She hums as I drag my lips across her throat and trail my hands down her back. I press a kiss over her pulse and open my mouth to taste her soaring heartbeat. Warmth burns my tongue, slowly stretching through my body until fever deliciously burns through my veins.
Her small palms cradle my face tenderly, peppering it with tiny caresses and whispers, before a love-like-fire tugs my shirt until the stitches snap and the cotton rips down the middle. She shoves me back and laughs like a mad person, tousling dark hair and biting her bottom lip until a drop of blood drips down her chin to my chest.
“There’s something I’ve always wanted you to do,” bleeding and blushing says. She slips her hand into her panties, observing me observing her.
“Say it,” I utter.
Licking blood from her lips, Poesy cries out when she slips her fingers into her pussy. I watch from under hooded eyes as she pleasures herself, knuckle deep and soaking, moving back and forth above my waist. My girl’s thick eyebrows narrow as pleasure blankets her form in goose bumps and sweat, and sweet sounds escape her wounded lips.
“Baby.” I grip her wide hips.
Before she comes, I flip Poesy onto the mattress and fall between her trembling legs, thrusting hunger against her pelvic bone.
“Tell me what you want,” I say.
Caged between my arms, I watch her grip the bedsheets and open her legs wider, needing me closer, harder … violently. Pulsating hazel eyes lock with mine, delirious and wild, and she imprisons my stare until I’m lost in love and obsessed with the way her tongue slides across her lips.
“I want your gun.” Poe cups my dick in her hand, squeezing it to the brink of passionate uncomfortableness.
“It’s yours.”
“No.” She shakes her head, reaching around my side, placing her palm flat on my lower back. Her fingertips skate under the waist of my jeans near the gun that never leaves my side. “This one.”
Deadly and beautiful, the .44’s dull surface gleams in white moonlight flooding through the window over the bed. Poesy handles it with grace, treating our weapon as if it’s the most precious thing in the world, studying every dangerous curve and bend.
She kisses the barrel, smearing blood across the revolver when she drags it over her lips and down her chin.
“What are you doing?” I ask breathlessly, unable to look away as death sweeps across life’s throat, loaded and eager to be fired.
Loaded and eager to live.
Poesy glides the pistol between her breasts, lower, lower, lower until she traces a circle around her bellybutton with its tip.
“Stop,” I say, meaning and not meaning it. My heart pounds deeply, hammering hard enough to tear down the city around us one building at a time.
“I don’t want to,” she whispers, slipping the barrel of the gun beneath her black lace. “You don’t want me to.”
Finding it near impossible not to completely drop my weight—to cover every inch of her with every inch of me—hoping to sink to the inside, I lower my forehead to Poesy’s as the pistol disappears between her legs.
My girl arches away from the bed, pressing her chest against mine, and moans long and loud. She works the weapon in slow strokes, circling her hips like she would if it were my dick she was fucking and not my gun.
“You’re insane,” I tell her, dragging my lips along the side of her face.
Kissing down her slim form, I hover above Poe’s heat and pull her underwear to her ankles, throwing the dark cotton and lace over my shoulder. I press her knees apart, spreading her wide open. Warmth bursts through my body at the sight of danger slipping between her folds, pushing against the spot that makes her scream.
Brass buckles clank as I unfasten my belt and unbutton dark denim, never taking my eyes away from hell and heaven.
I’m reaching in for my cock when she turns the gun on me.
“Hands up, sucka,” she says slyly. Her legs are open, and her nipples are hard. Poesy’s chest rises and falls with heavy breaths.
Heaps of unfortunate individuals across the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave have stared down the long barrel of my gun. They shake, rattle, and roll in the face of demise, begging for their sorry lives, wishing they would have done things differently. None of them welcome mortality like I do.
“I saw your picture on the news and heard there’s a big, big reward for your capture. They say you committed some terrible crimes. They say you should be sentenced to death.” Poe aims steady on my drumming heart. She hooks her calves around the back of my legs, locking me in place. “How do you plead, bandit?”
“Guilty.” I grab the barrel and hold its muzzle to the center of my chest. The pistol’s slick and warm with my girl’s arousal.
“Me too,” she says. Poesy sits up, letting the trigger guard seesaw from her finger, back and forth. She drops the pistol from the side of the bed, and it hits the floor with a loud thud.
Vibrant green-yellow eyes watch my face from under long lashes as she pulls my jeans down, exposing my manhood. She licks the tip before wrapping her lips around the head and slowly guides my entire length into her mouth, past her throat.
I tangle my hands into her hair, guiding her on and off my dick.
“Look at you,” I say in a thick tone. Pressure builds in the pit of my stomach like a corkscrew, turning and turning and turning. She brings me to the edge of saneness with swollen lips, just enough teeth, and a treacherous tongue. “So fucking perfect.”
I lure her head back by a fistful of black tresses, and my cock slips from her lips, resting against her chest. She wipes saliva from her mouth on the back of her hand and smiles dreamingly. In one fluid motion, I guide her onto the mattress and sink between her thighs, entering her totally. Poesy inhales an audible breath near my ear, firing a chill down my spine.
The warmth in the night worsens as I move in and out of her, covering us with a thin sheen of sweat. She holds me closer, kissing the salty dampness from my chest and under my jaw, and buries her fingers into my flesh like an anchor.
“I’m here, you son of a bitch,” she whispers like she has so many times before. “I’m here.”
Hours pass into early morning, hushing the city to a low hum. There are no police sirens, honking, or noise from the eatery below. It’s just Poesy and me left alone in this dim, sleeping, convicted world, sheltered from a pursuit that’s plastered our photos on televisions and published our names in newspapers—banishment.
If only for a while, we’re safe in each other’s arms, locked away in our own version of triumph.
I take her from behind, slowly and tiredly, spellbound by the way my reason for being’s figure bends and curves beneath my hands.
Poe looks back under her long lashes and hooded lids, with an intensity that captures us in an airless spin. It ignites a tingling passion, and we make love until the sun shoots light over the horizon.
When New York cracks an eye to the new day, Poesy and I fight to keep ours open longer. We’re thoroughly fucked and powerless against exhaustion, under sheets that smell like sex and dust. My girl has half of her body draped across mine, with her ear over my heart’s beat.
“I can’t be anywhere else other than with you, Lowen,” she says softly. “No matter what happens, we have to stay together.”
“I know,” I answer.
“In this life or the next.”
WE COVER THOUSANDS of miles for the next four weeks with no rhyme or reason, through high-trafficked areas and dirt roads that lead to dead ends. I’ve changed a flat tire on the shoulder of a West Virginia highway, and we ran out of fuel somewhere between Indiana and Missouri. The Four-Four Bandits robbed two convenience stores in Tennessee; before that we took it back to our roots, heisting a credit union in South Carolina.
I’ve started collecting newspaper clippings from articles covering our crime spree. It’s become a compulsion to read each and every one, if only to see who they’ve printed exclusives from. The media has gone as far as interviewing old elementary school teachers and cousins neither one of us knew we had.
“Poesy is my mom’s sister’s second cousin by marriage. Twice removed,” one of them said. “I always knew something was wrong with her.”
Most firsthand encounters from the people in our lives are farfetched, but statements from our parents are brutal, harsh doses of reality. We’ve left loved ones behind, and their words are as hopeless as the reporters who chase them down for a comment. Even Mr. and Mrs. Ashby’s pain is felt through ink printed words.
“We want our daughter home, safe and sound. The rest can be worked out.”
“Fuck them,” Poe says after I’ve read the statement to her. “I can guarantee they were paid to do the interview.”
With her eyes veiled under a large pair of sunglasses, she turns up the radio and focuses on the road, not interested in hearing anymore. But I continue to read the paper we picked up at the last rest stop, curious to see what the FBI knows and where they are on our tails.
“Lowen is a good boy,” my mom is quoted as saying. “He would never purposely hurt a soul. There has to be an explanation. There has to be.”
For their safety and mine, I haven’t spoken a word to my mother or Gillian since the First Division robbery went bad. To involve either of them in our delinquency would be incriminating, and ripping their lives apart in such a way isn’t something I’m willing to risk.
“Have we been to Alabama?” Poesy asks, nodding toward the approaching freeway sign.
I toss the newsprint onto the backseat, unable to stomach another testimonial from the past. My sister has yet to comment, and I fear the day she does is the day I pick up the phone to apologize for not being a better brother.
“I don’t think so,” I answer, clearing thick emotion from my throat. Tears burn my eyes.
Five hours later, we arrive in Oakheart, Alabama, a sleepy town identical to every other sleepy town we’ve come upon in the last year. A half-moon illuminates the weary community in dim gray light, causing the aged church and cemetery to look haunted. A stray dog runs across our headlights, and a man riding a horse along the side of the road waves as we pass.
We approach a traffic signal hanging from a cable above the intersection and stop at the red light. At what’s considered the center of town, with a burger joint, general store, and gas station, it’s apparent Oakheart doesn’t offer commodities to outsiders.
“Should I get back on the highway?” Poesy asks, slowly rolling through the green light as she looks around. “Do you know what I would do to stay at a Hilton? Fuck, a Best Western?”
“Keep driving.”
The smell of burning patties is soon covered by the stomach-coiling scent of cow manure and feed. Scarce streetlamps disappear altogether, and clouds cover natural light, leaving us wandering in the dark. We encounter nothing but farms for miles, all with signs of life. I’m beginning to lose hope for this corner of Alabama when Poe slams on the brakes and points ahead.
“Look, Lowen. All of the lights are off.”
I follow her finger toward a one-story home a mile away from the last dairy farm. As we get closer, a yellow-orange tractor parked in the middle of the yard comes into view, as well as a decayed wooden barn and a swing hanging from the porch, swaying in the light wind.
Poesy parks and turns off the headlights, wrapping us in utter blackness. The sounds of crickets singing and the breeze sifting through the trees fill the cab of the car once I open the door. My girl and I carefully exit our vehicle, afraid to breathe … afraid to think too loudly.
A cow moos in the far distance, and Poe kicks a rock against the chain-link fence surrounding the property.
“Shit, sorry.” She stumbles beside me.
My heartbeat picks up, hammering against my chest as adrenaline fills my veins like a drug. A brand new chain and lock are wrapped around the entrance gate, and the massive lawn leading toward the house is freshly mowed. No one is here, but this place isn’t abandoned.
“Stay behind me,” I say quietly, reaching back for my pistol.
We jump the fence and jog up the dirt driveway, toward the back of the house. We see an old horse trailer, and hay bales are stacked along the side of the barn, but the land is vacant. Poe stays back as I search the perimeter of the estate to make sure we’re alone, and I don’t lower the .44 until I’ve confirmed we are.
Left unlocked, the back door creaks when I push it open to the small kitchenette. Squares of linoleum floor tiles are lifted and pulled back, and the stove and refrigerator are an old-fashioned green. Thick orange curtains cover every window, and the archaic kitchen bottom leads toward brown shag carpet.
“It smells like my grandparents’ place,” Poesy says longingly, tiptoeing behind me.
Decades of home-cooked meals have permanently embedded an oily and baked scent through the walls, sparking a homesickness that’s hard to swallow. Warmth that can’t be duplicated in hotels and motels envelops us as we walk through the house, past framed family photos and two bedrooms.
“Electricity’s on.” Poe flips the master bedroom light, illuminating the mid-sized space. She walks past the bed toward the connecting bathroom. “And that water.”
My girl lifts her shirt over her head, tossing it onto the counter, knocking over glass bottles of perfume and Centrum Silver. She turns on the shower, and as the bathroom fills with steam, I notice there are no toothbrushes in the holder. I open the closet to find empty hangers.
Poesy steps under the stream of hot water and moans in pleasure. “Oh my gosh, Low. Nothing compares to home showerheads. This water pressure is amazing.”
I turn off the bedroom lamp and burn candles throughout the house. We’re a mile or two from the next house, but we can’t chance someone driving by and noticing the lights on.
Add breaking and entering to our long list of crimes, but this place is too nice to leave.
“We should be good for the night.” I slip my weapon into the front waistband of my jeans, tucked over my shirt. “But I need to stash the car farther down the road. Will you be okay here? Where’s your gun?”
“I’m good,” she sings, shaving her legs with a stranger’s razor.
When I return from hiding our most recent vehicle in a ditch an acre from the road, Poesy’s wrapped in an ugly pink robe. She rubs moisturizers and wrinkle creams around her eyes before bending down to search under the cabinet to find shower caps and ancient curling irons.
“Score!” my girl shouts, holding up a box of black hair color. “I guess I should have looked through this lady’s things before I took a shower.”
It’s only now that I notice her locks have dulled to a muddy brown, and her roots are an inch long
and blonde. Poe smells clean, soapy, and soft. For a moment, she’s the girl who used to write me dirty letters when I was in prison, yellow-haired, golden-skinned, and blameless.
The counter in our apartment was cluttered with face masks and cleansers. Our life on the run has limited her to hand soap and hard water.
“Have you raided the fridge yet?” she asks, placing the color to the side for later.
“No.”
Poesy faces me, wide-eyed and light on her bare feet. “Take a shower. I’ll make us something.”
The greasy, salty aroma of browning hamburger meat bites the pit of my stomach, setting off an audible grumble as I stare at my reflection in the mirror. A stranger with my eyes looks back at me, picking at homesickness that’s slowly narrowing around my throat.
Two weeks’ worth of facial hair is coarse on my face and neck, and the cross tattoo I’m in the habit of hiding is concealed under thick makeup. Waves hang over my ears and in my eyes, and my ends are a lighter shade of blond than the rest.
Lathering rose-scented soap in my hands, I scrub pink suds up and down my face before rinsing them away under hot water. I pat dry my face, tattoo unveiled, before using the razor Poe used on her legs to shave my stubble.
I cut myself three times and grit my teeth through the burn as beads of blood stream along my jawbone. Since my hair trimmer went out two states ago, my own option is to shave my head with a rusty set of beard trimmers. It snags my hair between the moving blades and cuts unevenly, but a half hour later, I recognize myself again.
After a shower, I join Poesy in the kitchen and watch her drift among the refrigerator, stove, and sink with ease. She licks the spoon she mixed butter, milk, and boiled potatoes with, and lowers the flame on the vegetable-beef mix. Her face is void of stress lines and worry, and my girl smiles brighter than she has since she met me by the prison gates when the timer goes off and she pulls a tin of brownies from the oven.
“How much longer?” I sneak in behind her and bury my face between the soft robe and her neck.
Low (Low #1) Page 21
