I knew better. I sneaked back into our pup tent and lay down to sleep off our monster meal—white brats burned black over an open fire and served on pretzel croissants with whole-grain mustard and ketchup and dill pickle spears, hot corn pone, German potato salad and egg salad that Pog had brought from the Lair, six half-gallons of half-melted ice cream ditto, s’mores, and a staggering number of beers. Pog had offered us baked potatoes and corn on the cob roasted in foil over a wood fire, but we were full, so she shut them in the grill over the dying fire to slow-cook for supper. Cricket had had an idea for egg nog to use up the other four half-gallons of totally melted ice cream, and Pog, for a miracle, not only let her use a dozen of the eggs she’d brought, but also her cooking gear to whip the egg whites into meringues, which got laid out on paper bags under a foil tent on top of the warm grill. Cricket also used a bottle each of dark rum, brandy, and bourbon in the nog. I think all that booze reconciled Pog to sharing her outdoor kitchen space.
If lunch was a calorie-fest, supper was gonna be ugly. I’d have licked my lips but I was too pooped out. I fell asleep.
When I woke late in the afternoon, Cricket’s head was lying on my foot and her arms were wrapped tightly around my knee. She drooled on my ankle. More insects were buzzing, seemingly right on top of the tent. I could hear water trickling nearby. Somewhere just outside my current range of hearing, familiar voices murmured.
I remembered Cricket’s wild idea. I dialed back my hearing. No, don’t bother me with any of that, I thought. Only if it sounds serious. I figured my inner soldier-child would know if there was a reason to panic.
Speaking of the kid I once was, there was something I used to do in the night when I got scared. I would picture setting a trip-wire for bad stuff. For what? Just stuff that was bad. You know. Stuff.
I set the mental trip-wire all around the pup tent.
Now I could relax and enjoy feeling Cricket dogged up against my leg like a toddler cuddling a teddy bear. It was a lot like sleeping with a really big dog. I dropped off again to the sound of her gentle snores.
When I woke again, it was almost dark.
I checked my trip-wire. Nope, no visitors.
The next moment I nearly jumped out of my skin. Cricket was crawling into the pup tent. I’d slept through her waking up, letting go of my leg, crawling out, no doubt peeing in the woods, and approaching again.
I guessed that trip-wire was working. Only warn me about bad stuff.
“You were really out,” she said, as if reading my mind. “I brought food.” She reached outside the tent and brought in a big covered platter, handed it to me, then reached again for a second platter. Then a couple of plastic tubs. Forks and spoons. A roll of paper towels.
“Sheesh. Pog let you take all this?”
“She knows we’re the ones who like it quiet.”
That made me look closer. Cricket looked different somehow. She wore her too-young face along with the stretch-model limbs she used to play basketball. Yet I couldn’t help seeing her years. Sometimes it seemed she was putting on youth like a bathrobe, just so her teenagers wouldn’t freak out seeing Mom naked. Other times, she seemed to be about nine years old for real. Today she seemed all mixed up. Or maybe I was. Old, young. Approachable but innocent.
“Quiet.” I nodded, knowing that word alone would have some effect.
I yawned and uncovered the platters she’d brought. Each one held two big baked potatoes smothered in melted butter and sour cream. Three fire-blistered corns-on-the-cob. Biscuits. Six chicken thighs, marinated in balsamic vinegar and then grilled. Pasta salad, coleslaw, orange Jello with raisins and grated carrots in it, good lord, I hadn’t tasted that since we lived at Fort Bragg in the seventies. A chunk of cake so big and black with chocolate that I knew Pog had cheated and bought it at CostCo.
We ate for a while.
“Did we leave any beer?” I said.
Cricket crawled to the tent flap and reached outside. “There’s only a couple left. But—” She came back in, holding a sandwich bag. “There’s this.”
Pog never fails. The baggie held cigarette papers and about half an ounce of weed.
Full of good food, we took our stash out of the pine wood and down the hill in the gloaming, to a spot where big rocks pushed up out of the meadow, and the land dropped away suddenly to a steep gorge. We had an excellent view of a hot pink, green, and yellow sunset. Way down in the gorge bottom I could hear a creek tinkling in the twilight. Cricket flopped down on a rock. I sat next to her and rolled a joint. She seemed quiet, as always when she was out in nature.
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“You want me to talk?”
“Sure.”
“I’m thinking about that party.”
“Yeah? What?”
“The fact is, it was nice to see some of those people. But—” She paused. “It shocked me how I didn’t care. Maybe it was living in the Loriston Home. Everybody you know dies,” she said impressively, as if this insight was news. “Only sooner, in a place like that. Maybe I learned to stop caring.”
I shrugged. “How much caring counts as caring?” I lit the first joint and handed it to her.
She sucked on it and gave it back. “Good question,” she squeaked. In a moment she let the smoke out on a sigh. “My family cares. I know they do. But they have busy lives. Even Sharon, who drives me crazy, she cares. She can’t find the time to see me very often. And if she did, we’d drive each other even crazier. Keeping me locked up in the Loriston Home is her way of caring. Ah, shoot.” She accepted the joint again. “I’m just making excuses for myself. Everybody cares as much as they care. And I can’t. Not anymore.” She toked moodily. “You stop being a person when you lose interest in your family. I’ve seen it happen.”
I had some smoke. “Huh. I wouldn’t say you’ve lost interest in people. Just those people?”
She smiled at me, and I felt warm, knowing I was on her list of interesting people. She said, “I guess.” Her smile faded. She was really worried about the state of her soul.
“I don’t care about many people either,” I said. “Probably five or six. Our team. I guess I’d count Ish,” I added.
It had never bothered me that most people didn’t matter in my life. I’d never noticed. The Army life doesn’t encourage personal relationships. Once my parents were gone—
“Your parents didn’t have a lot of friends?”
Mind-reader. “Nope.”
“That must have been depressing.”
Damn Cricket. In an instant I felt a black feeling welling up into my throat, and tears stung my eyes. I sucked hard on the joint, handed the roach to her, and busied myself with assembling a fresh one.
Because of course she was right. It had been a depressing life. My mother had been depressed, and my father too. Their little habits and medications had kept them good soldiers right up until they killed them. Although that sounded as if they’d died quick. They hadn’t. My mother took twelve years to die, and my dad five.
How had Cricket stood that nursing home, where everybody was going down ugly?
To keep her from probing more, I poked back. “Didn’t you have friends at the Loriston Home?”
“Sure.” She finished the joint and rubbed it out hard against the rock. “And then they died.”
I glanced over at her. She was staring down into the gorge. I hoped she was listening to the sparkling creek and not seeing the bottomless dark creases between the rocks.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’d begun to see how Cricket was indomitable and fearless and forever young, with her bucket list and her curiosity. Thanks to her idle question, I could again feel the child buried in myself, a child who was tied up and silenced and numbed—and then was taught to do those things to herself.
For the first time, I didn’t thank Dad for getting me that defense contractor job. I now wondered if he had known it was a gateway into the Regional Office.
My heartbeat thump
ed in my mouth for a long moment, weighing that question.
Probably not, I decided. If he had known that eternal numbness was available, he’d have grabbed it for himself.
I felt a touch on my hand. Cricket took the new joint from me, and then she put her hand back on mine. I glared hard into the gorge, forcing the tears back. I didn’t move my hand.
A fresh voice behind us said drily, “I hope you brought enough for everybody.”
I twitched like a wild thing.
Slowly, Cricket got to her feet and turned around.
A park ranger was standing a few feet behind us, looking at the unlit joint between Cricket’s fingers. She was forty-something and, in the fading sunset, an orangey-sandy color all over, as if the sun had bleached her skin and hair to match her uniform. She gave us a no-nonsense smile. “Smoking in the park is illegal.”
“We’re being careful with the ashes and butts,” Cricket said. “See?” She pointed to where she’d stubbed out the first roach.
“Ladies, I’ll have to—”
Cricket stepped forward and lifted her gaze to the ranger’s face.
Speech died on the ranger’s lips.
Cricket murmured, “We’re very, very careful.” I heard the succubus frequency hum in her voice.
The ranger backed up a pace.
Cricket didn’t move. I could tell she was expanding her field of influence. I could feel it myself, as if a cloud of Cricket energy was filling the air. It felt so much like Cricket—alive and happy and loving every minute of simply breathing. I rolled onto my side to watch, feeling the lingering warmth in the rock under me, smelling the glorious pine scents in the air. Down in the gorge, an owl hooted.
The ranger looked from Cricket to me and back to Cricket. She smiled slowly, less cop-like now, as if she was thinking, Ah. She’s one.
I dilated my demon eyes so I could see better.
Cricket reached out a hand as thin and pale as a twig and tucked the unlighted joint into the ranger’s shirt pocket. “You have a good day,” she said. She patted the pocket delicately. “The best day ever.”
The ranger heaved a big breath, backed up another pace, gave us a salute, and walked away.
Cricket flopped nonchalantly beside me again, looking pleased with herself.
I blurted, “I didn’t know you were, uh.”
“I didn’t know, myself. Seemed like something I should try.” I heard a smile in her voice. “This new life is doing wonders for my bucket list.”
I rolled another joint in record time.
“All my life, all the husbands I’ve had and all the sex, I’ve never had sex with a woman,” she said slowly. “You think you’ve had it all. And then something shows you how your life has been this narrow rut in a big wide road.”
I toked. I passed the joint. She toked. She smelled happy. The falling dusk stopped feeling depressing and now seemed alive.
At full dark, I brought the cooler full of empty beer bottles back to the campfire. Reg restocked it with full bottles. I lugged it back through deep black pine-shadow, bent double under the trees until I remembered again to shrink myself shorter.
When I arrived at the spot where we’d pitched our tent, I couldn’t find it at first. Disoriented, I dialed up my night vision, but that didn’t help. Then I sniffed. The tent was right there. I could smell new plastic tent fabric and recent weed smoke and the remains of our supper. I just couldn’t see it.
Cricket appeared out of the darkness. I nearly dropped the cooler.
“What—” I began, but silenced myself.
She had a pile of curling pine boughs in her arms. “Put it down.”
I dumped the cooler down on the soft pine-needle floor of the wood.
With a knee she nudged the cooler, then laid her armload of pine boughs over it.
Oh. She’d covered our tent with pine boughs.
They smelled amazing.
“For privacy,” she explained.
I nodded in the darkness. Then I said, “Nice,” because I didn’t know if she had her night vision dialed up.
“You did something this afternoon, didn’t you?” Cricket said, turning the cooler so it would open on the side nearest the tent mouth. “To keep us safe.”
I explained about the trip wire.
“Neat. That trip wire, that’s succubus magic?”
I grunted. I didn’t tell her it was out of my Army-brat childhood.
“Is it to keep bears away? Do you think we can take a walk in the dark?”
I hesitated. Then I thought of how she had handled the park ranger. “To give us privacy.” I waited, my heart thumping, while she said nothing. “And no, I don’t think a walk is a good idea. I don’t want to trip over rocks and sticks the whole time.” It was a lame reason, but she said more nothing.
We crawled into the tent. Immediately, she squirmed onto her back and stuck her head out the tent mouth. “Look up.”
I copied her. The pine needles under the tent smelled amazing. I stared up at the trees, dense overhead, but in a gap between masses of black branches, I could spot the distant sparkle of a star. My shoulder was jammed against hers. I remembered Cricket’s “people geometry.” We fitted together in the pup tent doorway, comfortably but snugly. Where she touched me, I imagined I could feel her body humming gently, as if her engine never really shut down. Truck-size engine in a little bitty woman. My own engine began to rev up. Good smells came off me.
We lay absolutely still. I stopped squinting and relaxed, just let my eyes soak up the darkness above us. Pretty soon I saw more stars, sparkling like distant fireflies in an endless forest.
I thought about Cricket’s narrow rut of a life. It seemed pretty big to me, viewed from my own past, confined to a single house and two sick, depressed, dying people, and then a desk at the Regional Office. If she’d said that to me when she first moved in, about sex with women, I’d have panicked and moved to a lounger in the kitchen. Now I just panicked and lay still. I was thinking about what I’d been avoiding thinking about.
That day at the dog beach had really rattled me. I couldn’t remember cutting loose like that, ever, no matter how much weed I’d smoked with the team. And when we got back, that wrestling match in the shower! That was why I’d insisted we move our tent way out here. To get as far away as possible from Jee and Reg and their eternal snogging. That was why, wasn’t it? I mean, why did Reg and Jee have to be screwing in the Lair all the time? Sex was work, not play. I’d always been so sure I was sexless.
Panic said something terrifying in my head: I can’t go back to the Lair. I can’t live like that, with them. Naked all the time around me.
I thought, All I have to do is reach across this blanket.
I thrashed from one extreme to the other, and my heart rammed into my throat with every beat.
Cricket was talking now. I calmed enough to catch her saying, “—nothing but curiosity. A phase, you know? My great-grandson, back in the aughts, he already came out, but then he fell in love with this girl, and all his drag-queen gay friends said it was just a phase. I wouldn’t mind if it was a phase. I haven’t had a phase of anything except an allergy to melons the second time I was pregnant.”
She was such an idiot. A sweet, kind, babbling idiot.
I was feeling free for the moment, free of me and the past and the friggin’ Army and doubt. I breathed in the air under the thick black canopy of the pine trees in big gulps.
Why couldn’t I just turn into an owl and fly up into these trees?
Why didn’t I just reach across this blanket?
So I did.
CRICKET
Cricket had felt a little guilty right up until Amanda said, for privacy. Then she relaxed. Then she knew she wasn’t just leading the kid down the garden path.
Although she was definitely leading. There was something in Amanda you didn’t see unless the air tasted right, the ground had to be under her feet, there had to be trees, or lots of water. Cricket had been maneuvering si
nce she moved in, trying to get this secret face of Amanda to face her. It was people geometry. When the hidden shapes inside turned just so, the puzzle opened. It was beautiful. And then Cricket wanted to get closer.
This was why marriage was the only way to live. This intensity. One on one, face to face. It was a roller coaster of discovery and beauty and opening to each other, day after day, until the two of you fit together like dancers.
It hadn’t occurred to her until this moment that, all this time, she’d been wooing Amanda.
She lay still as a mouse on her back, shoulder to shoulder with Amanda in the black pine wood, not looking but listening, smelling, feeling Amanda’s heartbeat quickening, Amanda’s skin warming, Amanda’s pulse beating through her shoulder. She felt light-headed and bodiless, as if she was bird-watching and had forgotten herself in trying to hold still, look, listen.
Then Amanda reached for her. Cricket’s blood thickened suddenly, making her limbs deliciously heavy. She waited until Amanda had chosen, had definitely made her move, before she too moved. And they fit together perfectly.
AMANDA
Three-forty-five in the morning, I was wakened by the hoot of an owl right over our tent. At first I thought it was Cricket waking up. I listened extra hard for her breathing, then her heartbeat.
She was still lying on my chest.
She slept like a baby, heavy, conked out. Ironic. Cricket’s hour of dark thoughts was now mine, and she was sleeping through it.
I panicked. Her weight on my chest was like a reassuring blanket. Bits of my body still zinged from her touch, making me feel alive and hungry for more. I couldn’t remember a world more silent, peaceful.
And my heart squeezed in panic. I was afraid to breathe.
I held absolutely still. No reason to wake her up. If I could give her one night without this dark, wakeful hour....
...What? What would it mean? Four hours ago I’d been in a sensory frenzy. Every nerve in my body had felt wonderful. How often does that happen? I didn’t try to slow it down while I made a careful decision about whether I should feel it. It felt good and I just ran with it. But what, after all, was it about?
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 79
