by SM Johnson
I made myself be still.
When he started sawing in and out of me, pushing in, pulling back, I couldn't stop the screams.
His hand settled over my mouth, muffling me, stifling, and I could smell myself, my ass, on his fingers, and I stopped screaming long enough to gag.
He let out a loud grunt and shoved into me with a particularly vicious jab, then apparently he was done. He slapped my ass as he pushed himself out of the truck bed, leaving me lying there, gasping, my pants and underwear still around my knees.
"You know, Jer," he said, peering at me over the side of the truck box. "Your dad's abusive. Somebody could call that in, you know? Send you to a foster home. Or maybe a relative's house."
I struggled up to my knees and tugged my jeans up, then stared at him, lifting my hand to my ear, flicking my eyes to my fingers to see them sticky with blood.
I stared at the blood. Touched my ear again.
Message received, and very, very clear.
"No," I said. I meant to say it loud, maybe even yell, but all that happened was my lips formed the word, and no sound came out at all.
He laughed.
My old man came through the side door then, with a plate of sandwiches.
I almost threw up. He'd gone off to make lunch while I was raped.
"Come on, Jeremiah," my dad said. "Quit fucking around and have a sandwich."
I wiped my hand on my jeans. He hardly looked at me. If he saw the blood from my ear, he pretended he didn't.
Had I noticed before that my old man was subservient to his older brother? I'd have to think about it, but later.
My ass hurt so badly I almost cried climbing out of the truck bed. All I wanted was to be away from them, to wash him off of me, out of me, maybe go to sleep.
It was a day or two later my father mentioned my uncle would be coming around more, helping me fix up the Ranchero. "Lucky for you," he said. "He's better with cars than I am."
It was all I could do not to vomit.
She.
She has her head buried in her arms, leaning on the table, shoulders shaking with sobs, but silent.
She's crying, and it's pointless, but still adorable.
I stretch forward and press my fingers into her hair, stroking, gentle.
"Are you crying for me?" I ask, lowering my mouth to her ear.
She startles, but just a little.
"Yes," she says, voice muffled into her sleeve. "And I'm crying because all I ever offered you was a candy bar."
"Ahh, but it was so much more than anyone else offered, ever. And perhaps it was all you had."
What else could she have given me, that I would have accepted? Probably nothing, this shiny, stupid rich girl, this bright penny.
She raises her chin then, pushing her head harder against my fingers, and now I tangle both hands into her hair, holding on, clinging. And I press my cheek beside hers, just for a second, before tilting my head and licking her tears away. But it's not enough, and so I turn her head toward me, using my hands in her hair to steer, and lick her eyes, one at a time. "Cry for me," I say. "Feed me your tears."
And she does, shuddering in my grasp. I catch her tears on my tongue as she produces them, and it gives me a happy shiver, a tingle in my scalp that works its way down, catching in the hardness of my groin for a long minute before tumbling all the way to my toes.
God. I could almost eat her alive.
I decide right then and there I will take all her tears. I'd run out of my own, long before I ever met her, but she’ll give me hers, and perhaps someday I'll learn how to cry again. And maybe, then, my losses will hurt less. Maybe I'll heal.
I pull her from the chair, mostly by her hair, and she stands before me, looking at me, and she doesn’t look scared or angry or freaked out, just… curious.
I undress her slowly, like a package wrapped in fine paper, and she lets me, making no protest or complaint whatsoever. I toss her clothes, one item at a time, onto a kitchen chair. Shirt, bra, jeans, panties, and socks. She shivers a bit, but says not one word. She doesn't stop me, or ask me to stop.
She flinches when I ease her to the floor, position her on her back, probably because the ceramic tile is cold. I kneel between her legs and reach to pinch her nipples, hard enough that she gives me more tears, and I have to stretch forward to eat them.
I'm thin enough I don't even have to unsnap or unzip my black jeans to tug them down. I don't wear underwear, so I'm just… there, ready, and pressing into her. She tilts her hips, accepting me. I keep pinching and hurting her, keep drinking her tears, though I don't know why she lets me, or why she doesn't say a word or even make a noise.
She.
Who has never known pain, could accept mine and give me her tears. She was perfect. Why was she so perfect?
I'm angry and confused and it feels like I'm fighting her, although she's not fighting me. Just one stroke, two, and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, and it feels all wrong, yet something about the wrongness pushes me over the edge almost immediately.
I finish inside her.
I shift down her belly so I can look, spread her pussy lips with the fingers of both hands to isolate her clit, swollen and poking out of the little bit of flesh that wants to shield it. I hold her apart with the classic V of one set of fingers so I can shove the same fingers of the other hand into her cunt and stir them around in my spunk, getting them good and wet. Then I pull them out and slide one (just one, because I don't really want to hurt her) into her anus.
I don't look at her, I can't. Because I'm too fucking mean, that's why. God, she's so tight around my finger it makes me moan, like it might cut off my circulation. She doesn't moan, just makes a tiny whimpering sound, short and high-pitched, and I say to her, "I want to see you come," then purse my lips and blow a solid, tight stream of air over her clit.
And… she comes.
She wiggles a little underneath me, and her head thrashes from side to side, her hair whipping across her face, obscuring her expression for seconds at a time. When I dare to look, her eyes are rolled back into her head, and, I swear, it's no lie, her pussy has flooded, so much that her juice has joined my finger in her ass, and it's loosening her up, just a little bit.
I purse my lips and blow a steady stream over her clit again, and she hitches her breath and makes a mewling noise, and the shiver runs through her entire form, like an aftershock.
I want to press my fingers over her mouth and nose, make her smell herself, but it's too mean and I don't do it.
Chapter 3
He fucked her on the kitchen floor. She didn't argue or protest or tell him to stop. It seemed silly to resist, like a delay of the inevitable. He hurt her. She could still feel the ghost of his finger there – plunging and cruel, grasping, mindless of Pretty receiving his cruelty. And yet that felt inevitable, too, and long overdue. As if she'd had it coming all along, and he was just getting around to doing it now.
After... he helped her to her feet, helped her put her clothes back into place, as if she had merely fallen to the floor for some unknown reason and required assistance to find equilibrium.
Part of her wanted to cry, part of her knew he'd changed her again, just this one simple thing, and it made her want to laugh and laugh, as if changing her was the point.
No wonder society deemed his penchant for the subversive to be dangerous. No wonder he always seemed to make sense – he did make sense. His was the voice cutting through society's bullshit.
He was brilliant, her Jeremiah Quick.
She remembered. She remembered it all.
He touched each of her eyelids with one gentle finger and she felt it like a thank you.
"Come with me," he said. "I want to show you something."
His come dripped from her, leaving an uncomfortable cold patch in her underwear, wet and slippery against her flesh. It felt somehow like the response to thank you.
She nodded and let him steer her toward the mudroom, toward the back door
that was never locked. He jingled his car keys in his fingers while she shrugged into her well-worn leather jacket.
Quick turned back once, seeming to scan the kitchen, eyes probing the dark of the dining room, and beyond, to the heart of the house, the room where big, comfortable chairs lived, the kind designed to cradle adult limbs. A couch long enough for a grown man to stretch out on, or sit next to small boys playing video games.
They would be all right.
Still, Pretty bade them a silent goodbye as she tucked her phone into her jacket pocket. She would return to them, find her way through the labyrinth, but she would not be the same as she was now.
Every Sarah needs her quest, right? She followed Quick to his car and settled into the passenger seat, willing to go wherever he wanted to take her. Would he be the goblin king, or the cherished friend she would love madly, warts and all?
Jeremiah drove across the bridge that spanned the St. Louis Bay between the city where Pretty lived now and the city they'd grown up in. It was full dark, and as the car passed beneath the span, all the bridge lights went out at once.
For one aching moment Pretty wished she knew how to pray.
Was it a sign, an omen? Or was it Quick's magick, a talent for turning Light into Dark?
Just a few miles past the bridge he pulled off the freeway and into the rest area where a State Representative got busted for having sexual contact with a minor. Craig's List sex shopping, the news reported, and not the Rep's fault the boy was only seventeen. He'd misrepresented himself. Probably.
Dude, Pretty had thought, your wife's going to be pissed. The story didn't tell her anything she really wanted to know – they never do, do they? How much trouble is the man in at home? Is the silence stretched and cold? Do words rise in his throat, then shrivel and die before they pass his lips?
Are the wife's eyes gleaming with the suppressed glee of I told you so? Or bitter with the pain of betrayal?
He wasn't even a Republican. She'd had to look it up, sure the House Rep (D) notation had been a mistake.
She giggled, softly.
Jeremiah Quick asked what was funny. She told him.
He cocked his head slightly to the side, as if listening for something, then said, "The self-righteous love to scream their outrage." His posture tensed, and his words came with an intensity that filled the interior of the car with pressure. "It's the screaming part they like best, because they don't want anything to change. They are… glad to see their peers fall. It validates their superiority. It gives them esteem somehow." He shook his head, lowered his voice. "Our people, on the other hand, are curious about the details, the human experience, and rather than revel in swaggering arrogance, we're capable of empathy."
She knew what he meant. Only her own people would try to imagine how it would feel to be that man, that real person, in that circumstance. What came before, how do you live with yourself after?
She imagined it, wholly.
She imagined it for Monica Lewinski and John Wayne Bobbitt, Casey Anthony, the kids who got lost in their dark and brought guns to school. The pain beneath the act. Humiliation that knew no bounds. Some deserved it, perhaps, some didn't. Like… the old dog Bill. You'd think he was the first politician to tell a lie. Blow the President in the Oval Office? She'd have done it, just for the sheer audacity of doing it. No doubt.
Jeremiah was getting out of the car, and Pretty followed. She had no memories of him in this particular place, and a thrill danced through her that they were already making one. Right. Now.
He walked past the ever-so-charming concrete picnic area, across a small expanse of lawn, and leaned on a barrier erected at the crest of the hill to keep stupid people from tumbling down onto the freeway.
The view was of the Aerial Lift Bridge and the shipping canal that gave Duluth its claim as a tourist attraction.
The lights that dotted the residential hillside paled against the ink-black smudge that was Lake Superior, a yawning black mouth of riptide and nothing. Dare you dare you dare you it chanted as Pretty wandered closer to Jeremiah, tucking her hands into the pockets of her jacket.
He pulled on her sleeve, maneuvered her so she was between his body and the barrier, and leaned against her as if holding her captive, her stomach pressed against the wall.
He was solid behind her, long, sinewy, lean. He was still too thin – and yet the weight of him had her sucking in her breath, near panicked by his proximity.
"Don't…" she wanted to say, and…
"Leave my life alone"
…but together they made perfect sense, for she knew now he would NOT, and all her "don'ts" weren't going to make any difference, because he would change every single one of them to "please."
Perhaps that was his magick. Perhaps she would learn some of it.
"Jeremiah Quick," she said, and the cool autumn breeze lifted his name into the wind.
"Shh," he said. "Names have power."
She nodded. "So. This is weird," she said. "You wanna neck in the car, see if we get caught? Cause a scandal?"
He laughed into her ear, a low chuckle, and his hands massaged her shoulders for a second, then roamed down her back, slid into her pockets, his fingers sliding over the backs of her hands.
She was acutely aware of the touch of his skin, knuckles bulging like mechanical joints, curling around hers, not just her own fingers, but all the muscles and joints of her fisted hands.
He worked her fingers free of their tight clench while breathing into her ear.
She hadn't realized the fingers of her left hand were clenched around her phone, her lifeline, until he slid it out of her pocket and flung it over the idiot-barrier and down the hill.
His arm settled then around her waist, firm, almost clutching her against him, and he leaned his weight into her more, until her breath was nearly gone.
"You did not just do that," Pretty gasped, feeling dread close her throat – all her obligations, contacts, emails – everything, tumbled down the hill.
The iPhone's Where's my wife feature completely defunct.
Yes. The truth. She'd been expecting her husband to retrieve her before this thing with Jeremiah went too far.
Shit.
Another truth: this thing had already gone too far.
He laughed, then pointed down the hill, toward the lights. Her eyes followed as his fingers traced the shoreline east, then a slight jab north, toward the old neighborhood. "We didn't have them. Didn't need them. You don't need it now."
She mourned her phone, down there in the weeds, abandoned. Or perhaps mourned herself, abandoned to this arbitrary decision she had made to follow Jeremiah Quick without knowing, exactly, what he wanted.
"Fucker," she murmured. "I'd have given it over to you, if you'd have asked. But I would have liked to tell my husband everything's all right."
"Really?" he breathed into her hair. "Lie like that? How do you know anything will be all right, ever again?"
She shrugged against him.
"Just a feeling," she said, and pretended, for a few seconds, that he didn't hate her.
"Still so shiny," he said. "Doesn't anything slay you?"
"Of course it does." She could taste her own impatience. "I've had pain. I deal with it, let it flow into me, through me, and then out again. I don't grasp it. I don't let it hang around to stagnate, or allow it to poison me. I make my way in the world, Jeremiah, but I don't let the world get in my way. And yes, I am all right. I would go to the ends of the earth, give up everything, to have this time with you. I just did."
"Do you remember Martin Luther King Day?" he asked. It was such an unexpected question that she laughed, despite her panic about her phone being halfway down the goddamned hill.
"I remember the fallout more than the day. Do you realize I had to have Becky Brewer rewrite every absence excuse my mother wrote for the next two and a half years?"
His mocking laugh came from right next to her ear. "Such a goody-two-shoes, you were," and she nodded,
the top of her head bumping his jaw, making his teeth click together.
"What about it?" she asked, to cover the fact that she didn't remember the details. "We missed the parade."
"Fuck the parade. We had our own, through the skywalk, around the ice arena."
"It was the first time I'd seen curling," she said, thinking of the push of brooms and the heavy, slow slide of the stones across the ice.
"It was the first time I saw you – away from everyone and without the good-girl mask."
She didn't feel like laughing anymore, in fact, she felt like she hated him, and wanted to hurt him, bruise him. He really was cruel.
"And you didn't like me, still," she said, the words a hot breeze, dry as dust, more pathetic than any of her tears.
"It wasn't like that," he said, and his right hand pulled free from her right pocket and wrapped around her, so he had both arms around her now, holding tight.
"What was it, then?"
"It was that you tamed me with chocolate, capable of trapping me forever with your kindness and your sunshine. Dark things shrivel in the light. I wasn't ready to stop being who I was, or to become the person you would make me. And I knew when I was finally ready, I had to have a boy. And that's something I could not change. Not even for you."
She thought about those words, just resting against him, letting her body relax. She liked the feel of him against her spine, long and lean, stick-thin, and so fragile the wind might decide to take him away. Who was anchoring whom, she wondered for a second, but only very gently.
So. He was gay. And yet.
The wet crotch of her underwear reminded her there was more to sex than orientation or love. Regardless of love, there was and always would be a bit of Mine attached to every thought of him, every memory.
He steered her away from the wall, and back to his car.
