He works at the knot of laces on his right combat boot. “Oh no, you get first pick. This night’s for you, baby.”
I lean to plant a lingering kiss on his lips before plucking an old school Tiesto album from the bag. A little bit of trance to start off the evening? Don’t mind if I do. And when the first sweet notes of “Ten Seconds Before Sunrise” echo off the walls, they tell a story of life after death, love after loss, and every other beautifully impossible thing that proved us wrong in the end.
I dump a small pile of coke onto the CD case on a bench, and Gideon hands me his pocket knife to chop it up. When I’ve formed four, inch-long lines, my body heats with adrenaline as I lean over them, tooter to my nose, and inhale my two.
While Gideon snorts his lines, I dance, and when he finishes, he watches me, rubbing his dick. “God, you’re sexy.”
I work my way to him, twirl around to grind him with gentle strokes of my ass. He gropes my body, and the fire is lit. His mouth moves across my skin the way the sun paints fields of flowers with soft rays . . . or snow, if you want to count the addition of some quality cocaine.
We strip each other naked, and he leads me into the pool, snatching a set of Cocoa Butter body wash, shampoo, and conditioner from his bag. He sets them on the tile ledge that encircles the pool, so that they’re within arm’s reach, then he holds me tight against him as we descend the slick, algae-covered ramp into the equally green-lined pool.
I cup some water into my hands to inspect it. “It’s clear. Yay.”
“Let me wash you?” he asks, with a lick to my earlobe.
“Mmm . . . I’d love that.”
With a strong arm, he dips me into the water so my hair is submerged. After he brings me up, he squirts shampoo into his palm, and begins to lather my hair. I love this song, this man, this pool . . . everything right now. Never have I seen more beautiful tile mosaic work, or architecture. And the smells, mood, music, everything in this moment is perfect. I don’t ever want to come down.
After my hair is cleaned, conditioned, and rinsed, Gideon lathers up his hands and washes my body from head to toe, propping me up on the ledge. When he gets to my lady parts, the cleaning becomes rubbing me off. “That feels so good, mmm . . .” I spread open wide and he moves closer, rises on his toes and slips his dick inside of me. He fucks me slow, and I melt into every thrust, every retreat, feeling the build.
“I love you so much,” I say, gripping his strong shoulders.
“I love you, too, baby.” He thrusts hard and deep. “I could fuck you for hours.” He pulls out and sets me down with a kiss to my lips. “But let me get clean first.”
“My turn to wash you.” I take the bottle from him.
“Oh, yeah?” He dips into the water to wet his hair.
“Yeah. Let me get a good look at all those sexy tats and muscles.”
I squirt shampoo into my hands and stand on my tiptoes to reach the top of his head. He closes his eyes as I massage his scalp, and goosebumps rise on his back and arms. “Wow . . . That feels fucking amazing.”
As Elements of Life continues to serenade us, I move on to the rest of him. I massage the lather into his skin, kneading the pictures that’ll keep part of him a mystery forever.
“What does this one mean?” I touch the intricate circular design on his chest.
“It’s a Celtic knot. The symbol for alchemy.”
“Been through some changes, too, have you?”
After a long silence, he nods. “Yeah.”
I work my way around to his back, to the black raven wings tattooed on either side of his spine. When I asked him if it meant he was a fallen angel, he told me no; he was no angel to begin with, but he did know how to fly, once upon a time. He’d wanted to become a pilot, and had spent hours in the air, only to be notified of a slight color blindness that would bar him from ever becoming a professional pilot. When that dream crashed and burned, he settled on law enforcement.
“What about this one?” I trace a symbol between his shoulder blades—a thick, black letter Y with a circle around it. “I asked you once, but . . . can’t remember if you ever answered me. Did you?”
After a few seconds of no answer, he turns. “Grace, I . . .” In his hesitation, the gravity of a looming confession.
“Hey”—I take his hand—“it’s okay, you don’t have to. Let’s just have a good time tonight.”
He gives me a relieved half-smile. “Okay.”
Now that we’re both clean, I leave Gideon in the pool to crank the party up a notch. I snatch the robe from its peg and dry my hands before taking out Nine Inch Nails The Fragile and putting Tiesto back in his case. When I press “play,” and the guitar notes, followed by heavy bass and drum beat of “Somewhat Damaged” pump through the tiny speakers, I laugh at the perfect absurdity of it all. We’re snorting coke, bathing, fucking, and listening to Nine Inch Nails in the baptismal of a billion-dollar mega church. Trent Reznor might be proud.
I dance a little to entice Gideon from the water, and I make my way to the bench to divvy up some more lines. This time I lay out two fat rails and give Gideon first take. As he snorts his share, I finger myself, and when I bend over for mine, I guide Gideon to me, stroking him until he’s hard again.
“Fuck me while I snort my line? Please . . .”
“My pleasure.”
I bend over to snort my line, and he grabs my hips, plants himself inside of me, hard as stone. And after the narcotics have been rocketed into my bloodstream via my sinus cavity, Gideon pounds me from behind as the freight train barrels down its tracks.
As “The Day the World Went Away” begins, Gideon pulls out and guides me to the baptismal again. Just being immersed in water for the first time in months is enough to make a girl orgasm. I sit on the tile ledge, prop my foot up on the glass, and he fingers me.
“Mmm . . .” I run my fingers through his strings of wet hair. “I wanna try something.”
“Oh, yeah?” He digs deeper, sucks on my bottom lip. “Whatcha wanna try?”
I take his other hand and make a fist.
“Grace, I have big hands. I doubt I’ll be a—”
“Try.”
“I don’t wanna hurt you.”
“You won’t.”
After some hesitation, he fingers me again, alternating sucks and licks to my pussy, and that familiar fire from his unknown darkness burns in his pupils. He spits on his fist, coats it with his saliva, then works his fingers in and out. In three circular thrusts, he tucks his thumb inside of me, too, and his fist is swallowed by my warm, wet hole.
“Oh, fuck.” There’s pain at first, but it only catapults the pleasure. I’ve never felt so whole, so filled, so damn good in my life. He works it faster, and when I’m nearing orgasm, he wraps my hair around his fingers and tugs again, showing gentle ownership of every hole and piece of me.
“Can I fuck your ass, baby? Please, I want to so bad.”
“I’d love for you to fuck my ass.”
He removes his fist, and I flip over on the ledge. I position my knees on the tile, hands on the narrow, white wooden bench along the wall in front of me. Gideon’s hungry for it, using more force than I’m used to from him. He scratches my hips when he grabs them, cramming his dick into my ass without even trying to work it slow like he usually does. I don’t know why, but his manhandling fucking turns me on.
“Oh, God, yes.” I push against him with force, he gives my hair another yank, and fucks me harder, water splashing all around us. He pounds my ass until he’s throbbing inside of me, filling me up with his sweet cum. His groan of ecstasy makes me come, too, and we’re a wave of filthy wetness and heat, breaths and hearts pounding; this is our baptism. We’ll never be clean, so we’ll bathe in the glory of our dirty love.
We hold each other and breathe, laugh, and cry during “We’re in This Together.” This album was written for us, for this specific moment on our timeline. We lie there for a moment, shivering, and something blooms inside of me. I
think of Evie and the first time I made her come with my fist, and then I’m thinking about everything that’s happened since then. I try to cap it off, to make the thoughts go away, but they come on strong and I’m overcome with immense grief I can’t contain, or control.
When “The Fragile” begins, and I hear the words that described my Evie, it clips the sutures from that wound, spreading it open to bleed out. She was always so fragile . . . Now, she’s gone, and I’m scared of losing Gideon, too, even though he’s not fragile at all . . . or is he? It’ll happen, it’s inevitable, because that’s what always happens. They all leave in the end.
I struggle to catch my breath as the chaos in my mind spins out of control. In a pocket of lucid reason I’m aware I’m having a PTSD episode, but knowing what it is and stopping it from happening are two different things.
“What’s wrong, baby?” Gideon moves closer to me as I heave, but I can’t make words for what this is. I just rock myself, trying to tame it, fight it, will it away, but this is a big one. It blindsided me when I least expected it—just like her death in my arms.
For a while, I lie there in a ball, willing the tempest to subside. But like a ship caught in a storm at sea, the waves batter my flimsy raft and I choke on water, fall overboard, and I’m drowning. Gideon clutches me, but I push him away.
“Talk to me, Grace,” he says, but he’s too far away, and the words don’t make sense, don’t want to come out in their normal way, as if everything were okay and we can talk about such devastating things, no problem. But it’s not okay and it never will be. There are no words adequate enough to describe this loss—like trying to make the Earth continue to spin without the sun, or the tide continue to ebb and flow without the moon. Evie was my sun, my moon, my world, and I let her slip away. There’s nothing but darkness, now. Nothing but hunger, thirst, and death.
When “The Great Below” begins, it speaks for me. There’s no hope for me, just like there was none for her—for any of us. And I’d give anything to hold her one last time, to tell her how sorry I am for my wasted life, and for wasting hers. The tidal wave crashes, and I’m washed away, into that empty space inside of me where she fit perfectly.
She left me here.
I let her go . . .
I miss you so much, Evie.
Why did you let me die, Phelia?
I see her lying there in the aisle below me, they’re ripping her apart, and she’s calling for me. Please don’t let me die, Ophelia!
“Evie!” I eject from the baptismal, grab my rifle and stumble down the steps, and Gideon chases me into the aisle.
“Grace, stop, please.”
I slip on the last step and fall, smacking my thigh against the wood.
“Grace!” Gideon tries to help me up but I swat him away, scrambling to the empty spot in the aisle where my Evie just was.
“She’s not here,” I sob into my hands. “She’s not here!”
“Grace, you know it wasn’t her.” He holds me tight, crying with me. “She’s never coming back, baby.”
“No!” I break free from his arms and cock my weapon. “No!”
I aim at the stone crown of thorns and fire until my rifle is empty and my ears are ringing, then I throw myself to the ground. Gideon curls up behind me, holds me tight.
“I saw her,” I cry. “I saw her!”
“You have to calm down, honey, okay? Breathe—”
“I miss her so much, Gideon. It hurts . . . too . . . much.”
“I know you miss her, Grace,” he whispers. “It hurts me, too. For you.”
“How do I live the rest of my life like this? I still feel her inside me, every single day.”
“You can’t see this now, but it’ll get easier. It’ll fade, get bearable, I promise. It’ll never stop hurting, but one day it won’t kill you inside anymore. You have to keep fighting, keep taking those breaths one at a time, and one day you’ll look back and see how far you’ve come. You’ll walk through that pain, that fire, and realize you’re a phoenix.”
Twenty
Once I’m calm enough to peel myself from the floor, we set up our camp for the night on center stage, with our battery-operated nightlight in the middle. Jesus and the pool are behind us, and our invisible audience awaits before us. We are quite a show.
After our last few lines of coke, we smoke some weed and sip the champagne, and for a few hours, the entire world around us disappears. Not that much is even said. But Gideon and I have developed a way of being silent with each other that’s not at all lonely. Silence is safe, and it’s become a way of life. A way of us. Especially after one of Grace’s “episodes.”
“You okay, baby girl?” He traces a figure eight on my forearm, gazing into my eyes like he did that first day in the waterslide tower, when I woke up as Grace.
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize.” He squeezes my hand. “You’ve been through a lot. I’m sorry I haven’t found you any pills yet. I have been looking, though.”
“It’s okay.” I sniffle. “Long as you don’t leave me for being a crazy person . . .”
He hugs me tighter. “I would never do that. And you’re not a crazy person.”
We lie there in silence for a few more minutes until Gideon mumbles something.
“Huh?” I roll over to hear him better.
“We may want to go there one day—the Tunnels. It might be good to keep in mind as a last resort.”
“Okay . . . ? But what about here, until then? We’re going back to get Missy and Logan soon, right?”
“Yeah.”
But his tone doesn’t convince me he’s confident about the move.
“What’s wrong? You don’t think it’s a good place?”
“I don’t know, Grace. It’s so hard to say. Who knows what’s right anymore.”
After another long silence, I ask the question that’s been on my mind for days. “When do you want to go to them? Your family in New Mexico?”
“Well . . . I was wanting to go soon. But now that you’re . . . We can wait a while. We need to plan ahead. And we need to make sure you can travel okay, in case we have to travel by foot for any length of time—which, inevitably, we will.”
We kill the bottle of champagne and smoke some more weed as we spiral downward from our cocaine high. Now I remember why I hate coke. This part sucks. I sit up, antsy, and take a cigarette from my bag, then stand to light it, taking a long drag. “I’m gonna walk for a minute.”
“Don’t wander too far.” He stretches, then rolls over onto his back. “Take a firearm.”
I snatch it from the ground and strap it over my shoulder before hopping down the steps. I take a slow walk around the front part of the sanctuary, inspecting my damage. The bullets chipped the stone in a few spots—eyebrow, nose, forehead, crown—but you can still tell who it is, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m forgiven.
Something slams against the wooden door, and the noise sends me flying to the back staircase. It comes again, and the door flings open to the thunder of boots against the floor and men shouting orders. I bolt up the staircase, terrified for Gideon, but something tells me it’s more important that I get away.
I crouch beside the toilet, pressed against the wall, praying I don’t soon hear gunfire.
“Well well,” a man says. “We’ve been looking all over the goddamned globe for you, Tyler. Time to go home.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Yeah you are. Where’s your girlfriend?”
My heart thumps and my blood runs hot. What’s happening? How do they know Gideon? How do they know about me?
“She’s dead,” he says.
“Right. And unless you want me to further investigate that, I suggest you get your ass up, grab those lovely weapons right there, and head this way.”
For what might be hours, I crouch beside the toilet, gripped by shock, fear, anger, and utter devastation. Gideon’s words replay in my mind as my new reality sinks in
.
I’ll never leave you, Grace. Never.
But he did. And now, Gideon’s secrets seem a little more important . . . and a little more like lies. I’m angry as hell at him for keeping them from me now, and angry at myself for not pushing him to share them. Now he’s gone, and to where, I have no clue. It might as well be forever, and he might as well be dead—same as me. How do you find someone in a world like this? How do you survive alone in this place? And do I even want to find someone who, for months, lied to me by omission?
Yes. He may have lied, but in my heart, I know Gideon, and he would only do it if he thought it was for my own protection. Unless he’s a really good liar, which I don’t think he is. He knew that I knew he was withholding information from me; he never tried to hide that. What he did hide was the information.
When I dredge up the inner strength to go on, I move out from behind the toilet with my rifle in a tight grip, still rigid from the tear in our day, our life, our forever future together. As if one of my lungs had just been plucked from my chest, along with what’s left of my heart, I stumble down the narrow staircase, numb, disconnected, struggling for air. This isn’t happening; it can’t be. Gideon’s the only person I have left in the world. He can’t be gone, too.
But when I turn the corner from the stairwell into the sunlit dawn of the auditorium, the space is empty. My bag’s behind the stage, along with our two katanas, tossed there, as if Gideon had done it hastily, for me.
When I get to the steps of the stage and climb them, I drop beside my backpack and take out a cigarette. What now? I light it and take a drag, then fold in crippling sobs, but they’re cut short by a sharp pain in my lower abdomen. It’s so startling that it takes my breath away, and I stop crying to groan. It comes again, stronger this time, along with a warm gush sensation, wetness between my legs.
With a trembling hand, I reach a hand down my pants and touch the wetness, then pull a blood-covered finger back up. Fuck. If this is what I think this is, I’m about to fine-tune some new additions to my PTSD.
From my backpack, I remove a CVS dish towel and rip off the price tag, then stuff it down my pants and between my legs. My abdomen seizes again, the worst cramping I’ve ever experienced, and tears roll down my cheeks.
Murray's Law Page 11
