Damnable Grace

by Tillie Cole

  “Fuck, Red,” he hissed as his hands moved harder and faster at my core. I stroked him up and down as he kept me solidly in his arms, never letting me fall.

  I fought the urge to close my eyes. I wanted to watch AK. I wanted to see him, without the potion or the drink. I wanted to watch this man who had brought me to this lodge to help me simply because he wanted to. I had been wanted by many men before, but not for any other reason than sex. I could not be entirely sure, but when AK’s dark gaze watched me, when he offered me his hand, and kissed my cheek when he thought I was sleeping, I did not think it was for only his pleasure.

  I was not sure, but . . . but I hoped, and I prayed, that he actually liked me. For me. Not my body. But just . . . me. I did not understand how that could possibly be true, but I desperately wanted it to be.

  AK leaned his head forward and took my lips with his own. He kept his hand at my core, slipping back and forth, and then inside me in a slow, rhythmic motion. His tongue sought entrance to my mouth, and our mouths fell into the same rhythm as our hands.

  When AK kissed me, the whole world fell away. All the pain and demons that clouded my brain fell into a blissful void, locked away as the taste of him consumed me, chasing the dark. I moaned into his mouth, AK catching my cries and swallowing them whole. I felt the telltale tingles build at the base of my spine. I clutched him tighter, meeting his gaze again as he worked his fingers into me faster, one, two, then three fingers, until he hit the spot inside me that I knew well, that I’d been trained to stimulate, the one that when AK pressed against it, broke me apart into shattered shards of glass, my body nothing more than light. The long cry from my throat sailed on the wind, echoing around the waterfall.

  AK’s breathing stuttered. Then he stilled, and never taking his eyes off mine, he came into my hand, his hips jerking as his release washed away with the water. His black pupils almost eradicated the brown of his irises, and his cheeks were flushed with pink.

  Our eyes remained on each other, locked in some silent yet poignant bliss. AK kissed me again, not using his tongue this time, just his lips, his soft, sensual lips. They caressed mine as though I was special to his heart.

  As though I was worthy of such of affection.

  My eyes welled up. His hand moved from my core and stroked up and down my back, soothing my thoughts. His lips worshipped me. I never thought I would ever understand the meaning of a kiss. How it could momentarily stop your heart from beating, or how such an innocent touch could make you feel so incredibly cherished.

  I took my hand from AK’s length and quickly fastened up his jeans. AK pulled me back closer. “I fucking like you, Red,” he said hoarsely.

  My eyes closed at those words, and I shook my head. “Why? How could you like someone like me?”

  AK pressed a single kiss to each of my closed eyes. When I opened them, he said, “Because you understand.” His words were barely above a whisper. Before I could ask him to explain what he had meant, a slow smirk edged on his lips. He kissed my cheek. “You’ve caught the sun,” he said. “We’d better go before you burn.”

  I looked at him and saw nothing but bronzed, perfect skin. He had several scars scattered around his body, some large, some small, but I did not pay them any mind. We all bore scars, whether on the outside or in. AK gave me one more swift kiss on my lips and started to move away, but I placed my hands on his face. His skin was warm under my palms, whether that be from the sun or his release. “Red?” His brows pulled down.

  “Thank you,” I said, when I could find the words. I gave him a watery smile. “Thank you for bringing me here. For taking me from Meister . . . for it all.” For treating me as if I am more than a whore, I wanted to add, but refrained. AK’s shoulders sagged, and he exhaled as if he had been holding onto that breath for a very long time. “I have no idea why you have done all that you have done for me, but . . . thank you.”

  AK did not speak, but he held my stare for several seconds. “We’d better go. The sun won’t be your friend if we stay here much longer.”

  Keeping me in his hold, AK took us back to the edge of the pool. He helped me stand on the uneven ground and climb out of the water. I was thankful for the cool water on my skin when the heavy sun immediately beat down on my face.

  AK picked up the bottles of water from the ground, then held out his hand. I sighed and slid my hand into his. The walk back to the lodge was quiet, yet more comfortable than I had felt in . . . years. His affection had somehow become a salve to the constant fire of regret that burned, never-ending, in my heart. And this temporary reprieve, this short moment to be able to breathe, had everything to do with the man that led me home.

  The one my heart was suddenly leaning toward.

  *****

  I took a nap and showered, for once not thinking about anything else but AK. I looked in the mirror; my skin was kissed by the sun, more freckles than I ever thought possible peppering my face. A smile came onto my lips when I remembered AK telling me he liked my freckles. My face, a sky full of stars.

  My red hair.

  Red.

  Night had fallen, and AK was outside cooking on the grill. I dressed in a loose black dress I had taken from the closet in AK’s room. The material hung off my shoulders, baring my skin, for which I was thankful. I was slightly burned on my face and arms from today’s sun.

  AK turned his head when he heard me come outside, He was already sitting down. There were various items of food on the table and meat on the grill behind him. He lay back on the reclining chair, staring at the stars in the black sky. Smiling, I walked past AK to take the seat beside him, but he took my hand and pulled me down onto his lap. I gave a small cry of shock when I landed on his thighs.

  “You’ll be sitting on here with me from now on.” He pulled me down until my head lay on his bare chest and my body pressed against his. His hand was immediately in my hair, stroking through the long strands as if it calmed him somehow. His skin was warm; it too had been burned slightly by the sun. But it smelled heavenly and felt even better under my cheek.

  I sighed in contentment. AK got up to get us some food. We ate side by side, not saying much, just content to be by the other’s side. When we had finished, AK lit a cigarette. I curled back into his chest. I was sure if I never left this spot again that would be just fine. I watched the white smoke soar up above us and drift into the blackness of the sky, shapes swirling and dancing in the night air.

  “It’s so beautiful out here,” I murmured. I tried to count every star, but it was impossible, there were so many. “I do not think I have ever truly looked at the night sky before. I am sure I have never really looked at the stars before you compared my freckles to them at your home. Yet now I find myself wondering what they look like up close, if they are as beautiful as they appear from here.” I shook my head, amazed at the fact that I was here, doing something as idle as looking at the stars. I ran my hand across AK’s torso. “And here I am. With you, in this unfathomably blissful place.”

  “Red,” AK said gruffly and pulled me closer to his side.

  “It is true.” I thought of my days back in the commune. No man would have ever lain with me like this, not without sex having been performed. He would never have stroked my hair. Played and joked with me in a waterfall’s pool. Affection held no place in The Order. Love was shared through the act of sex. And as a Sacred Sister, it was never gentle or pure.

  Yet here was AK, holding me for no other reason than he wanted to.

  I was wanted.

  “When I am here, with you . . .” I said softly, feeling my heart beating too fast at what I was about to confess. “When I am with you, it is easy to not think about my life before. I . . .” My cheeks burned with embarrassment and a sudden wash of pain. “I have never been with a man who saw me as anything but someone in which they could find their release.” My stomach sank at that sad truth. “It was all I was ever meant for, AK. To give pleasure to men for our Lord’s cause.”

  I li
fted my head from the crook of his arm and rested it on his chest. He was looking up at the sky. His cigarette was burning in his hand, and his jaw was clenched. He must have felt me looking upon him because his eyes rolled to meet mine. “It is true.”

  Shifting my leg over his, I lifted my dress. AK’s forehead creased with confusion. I pulled my dress higher and higher, until my inner thigh was exposed.

  “Matthew 4:19,” I said. “‘And he saith unto them, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’” I turned my thigh and ran my finger over the tattoo that the prophet had commanded all of his Sacred Sisters to wear. AK was frozen as he stared down at the tattooed scripture leading to my core. The place Prophet David said men desired most.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” he asked angrily. Pulling down my dress, I placed my hand on his shoulder and guided him to lie back down. He did so, reluctantly, and I placed my head back on his shoulder and my arm around his torso.

  “Prophet David declared that certain women in The Order were meant for a special service. Revealed to him by God, as a way to bring in more members. He claimed that this scripture, particularly the words ‘fishers of men’, had a bigger meaning than we knew. He claimed that God had revealed to him that women from the commune, handpicked by him and his disciples, would become such fishers of men. Men were the goal, the prize for the prophet, and we—the Sacred Sisters—were the bait.”

  AK had become incredibly tense beneath me, but now I had started, now that I had begun to unload this burden from my soul, I could not stop. I wanted to speak these words, words I had never spoken before. “They came for me when I was ten years old.” I closed my eyes, remembering that day in great detail. Brother John taking me away to be trained.

  “I had been touched before by men. Children at the prophet’s communes were freely touched by anyone who wished to do so. There was no age that was deemed too early. In fact, Prophet David encouraged our parents or guardians to touch us first, to show us what God’s love felt like so we would not be alarmed when other men and women came for us sexually too.

  “When Brother John came for me when I was ten, to tell me I had been selected to be a Sacred Sister, I had tasted grown men on my tongue, and they had tasted me. I had been touched in every way but full sex.” I winced, still remembering the week that followed. “Though it was less than one week later when I was introduced to that act.” My thighs clenched together as I recalled Brother John laying me down on the bed, his naked body climbing above me. I flinched as I remembered his breath on my face and his hands skirting up my bare thigh. And I remembered his length as it pushed through my innocence. The tears, the blood, the pain and the shame . . .

  “Phebe.” AK turned his body to face me. I had not realized the tears were on my cheeks until he wiped them away. His hand cupped my face, and his thumb stroked along the damp skin.

  “For days afterwards, I tried to stay hidden in the corners of rooms. But every day Brother John came for me and took my body again. He took me until I managed to block out the pain. Until his touch and attentions became the norm for me.”

  I swallowed and looked up at AK’s face. It was filled with thunder. His teeth were gritted together. I reached up and threaded my fingers through the hand that was on my face. I lowered it to my chest and kept it near my heart. “Then the training started. Older Sacred Sisters would come to our rooms every day. There were about twenty of us when I trained. All similar in age and all receiving our first sexual encounter from Brother John. More lessons followed. Lesson after lesson on how to hold a man’s length, how to stroke it until he begged for more. How to take a man in our mouth and entice them with the subtle movements of our body, how to make them fall into our arms and give themselves over to the Lord through our bodies. We fished the men and they always took the bait.”

  “They trained you to fuck?”

  “Yes,” I said and hated that it was the harsh truth. “In the commune at first. Prophet David often invited men who were important to our cause to his many communes, both domestic and abroad. I never knew what they were there for—business, we were told—but from the age of ten I was called to seduce them. Many liked young girls, even more so when we could service them in bed with the skill of a woman twice our age. And I did it all happily . . . eventually. I came to believe in what I was doing so much that I rejoiced when I was chosen by a visiting male from the lineup. Even more when I reached the age of fourteen and was sent outside into the world. Only the best Sacred Sisters were sent outside of the gates. Those who excelled at pleasing men.”

  I could tell by AK’s expression that he could not speak. So I continued. “I had never been outside of the commune before. There were so many sights and sounds that made me scared. But the brothers who would drive us out into the towns would keep us safe. They would keep us focused.” I sniffed as I recalled walking into the hundreds of bars I visited as a child, then later as an adult. “The men always took the bait. When they saw us coming in they would practically salivate on the spot. We would dress seductively, take them back to the bus that took us into the town. We would give them pleasure like nothing they had ever felt, and then we would convince them to return to the commune with us. And they mostly always came. Especially when they saw what awaited them there. More free love. More women . . . little girls.”

  “The pedophilic cunts,” AK snarled. “I’m glad I put a bullet through that fucking dick’s head. And took out dozens of the other cult fuckers too.”

  I stilled and blinked at AK, allowing his words to sink in. “You . . .?” Surely I was mistaken. “You killed Prophet David? You were the devil’s man that took his life?”

  “Yeah.” He pulled me closer to him. “I fucking watched that pedo prick fall as my bullet got him right between the fucking eyes.”

  My breathing sped up at his confession. In the commune, I had mourned the prophet’s death as though my heart had been ripped in two, but now, after everything that had happened, knowing that AK had been the one to slay him only made me want AK more.

  I lifted his hand and kissed along his fingers. “Thank you,” I whispered. He would never understand the level of my gratitude. Yet with that enlightenment came my greatest pain.

  My regrets illuminated.

  AK held me close as the tears fell from my eyes. He pressed kiss after kiss on my forehead. He made me feel safe. “There have been hundreds upon hundreds,” I confessed and felt the deep shame run through me like a sweeping tide. AK was as still as a statue underneath me. “I have serviced so many men I do not even know a number. Sometimes by choice and sometimes by force.” I sucked in a breath. “But if it was the latter, it was because I had failed as a Sacred Sister.”

  “What? What the fuck does that mean?”

  “If the seduction was not well performed, or my whisperings of God’s scriptures were not strong enough in conviction, sometimes the men would be unkind and take away our will. They would take the tithe of our flesh for our failure.”

  “Rape?” he growled. “You’d be blamed if they raped you?”

  “It happened sometimes,” I said, remembering the first time I had a knife held to my throat and was beaten as the man thrust himself inside me . . . in my every entrance. I remembered Meister and how he had been one of those males. “Meister did not like to be seduced; he liked to take. He took pleasure in extracting pain from my body. But the less I protested, and the more I allowed him to do with me what he wished, the more his possessiveness of me grew. I could see him becoming addicted to me, day by day, and I was frightened. But Judah ordered me to be beside Meister as long as he wished.” I closed my eyes. The rest of that story was blurred, due—I knew now—to the drugs. “He never gave me up.” My fingers stroked over AK’s face. “Until you came to claim me from his command.”

  “You’re never going back to him either,” AK said firmly, and I felt my heart break at the promise.

  Fresh tears flooded my cheeks. I could not believe this man was fighting for me.
“I do not . . . I do not know how to live in this world, AK.” I swallowed. “I do not know how to be anything but a . . . whore.” I laughed without mirth. “People on the outside world would talk of us. ‘God’s whores,’ they named us in the bars. Prophet David and Judah would call us ‘David’s Whores’. It is what Meister wanted me to stop being. I was to be his whore and his alone.” I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the salt from my tears sting my lips. “In this world, whores are not revered but punished. What man would ever want a woman like that as his life’s love? A woman who had taken men in every way possible? Who had sucked and stroked and fucked so many men that she could not recall a single face among the masses?” I shook my head, choking on my words. “Who would want a woman who lost her innocence as a ten-year-old and was frequently touched before that?”

  And then I felt it rise up within me. My most secret confession, my deepest pain. I tried to hold it back. I had tried to hold this, my biggest regret, inside for so long. But I could not. AK was safe. Here was a safe place for me to shed this guilt.

  I had to finally let it free.

  “What man would want a woman who was with child at the age of twelve?”

  As the words left my lips, I felt AK tense underneath me. His breathing stopped, and his hand stopped moving on my back.

  “Phebe . . .” he eventually said, softly. My eyes scrunched up as I hid my face in agony. I shook my head, trying to not let the floodgates of those times open in my mind, but I could not resist. So I let my story—my sins, my failure—spill forth . . .

  I looked in the mirror and ran my hand over my stomach. The bump was so large now that Brother John had taken me from Sacred Sister duty and ordered me to rest. My back ached, and since this since this morning, waves of blinding pain had clenched my stomach, making me scream. Martha had told me this was normal, that this was my baby coming. She had been assigned to stay with me. She had been with child, too, but delivered a few weeks ago. Since then, all she had done was cry. She had been punished for those tears, lashes taken from her flesh, yet she could not stop crying.