Dear Abby (8 page)

"I am not an abusive spouse,"
Ixazaluoh
spits, suddenly rigid with affronted anger.
"I don't beat or bleed my devotees!" Betrayal and pain lance across
Ixazaluoh's
expression. "Is that what you think of me?
That I am no better than a Panther god?"

Abby reaches up, tangles her fingers in
Ixazaluoh's
hair and pulls her back down for another kiss.
"No," Abby says, because the hurt on
Ixazaluoh's
face was real.
And harrowing.
"Devotee?
Is that what I am?"

"Will be, soon,"
Ixazaluoh
murmurs against her mouth.
"Tomorrow."

"At the
solstice."

"Yes."

"And what does it involve. How much of
me do you dictate? How much do you take?"

"Your life is your own to live, Abigail
Irene Williams,"
Ixazaluoh
says. She sits up,
kneeling between Abby's legs. "Your choices are your own. You may go where
you wish and do as you wish."

"Then what do you get out of it?"

Ixazaluoh
reaches down and
takes Abby's left hand and brushes her fingernail against the bruise on the
meat of her thumb. A shiver of pleasure so intense crawls across Abby's skin
that she actually bucks, her eyes rolling back in her head.

"Your knowledge of me keeps me strong.
Your belief in me keeps me alive. And whatever you care to dedicate to me
sustains me—a meal, a creation, an orgasm."

"You mean
,
me
fucking someone else will
feed
you?"

"Yes."
Ixazaluoh
is grinning at how crude and incredulous Abby is. She can just tell.

"And that's it? I say yes, and I come
'home' with you tomorrow, and then you let me go?"

"No,"
Ixazaluoh
murmurs and shifts closer, pressing Abby's thighs
open wider, brushing her other hand over her
mons
,
cradling her sex gently, possessively.
"No, I will never let you go.
But you may leave, and that is what you meant."

Abby thinks about it. She thinks about it for
a long time, and
Ixazaluoh
lets her. She simply
strokes her thumb across Abby's palm, soothing, gentle,
patient
.
She doesn't move her other hand, and it feels… safe.
Caring.
Protective, instead of possessive.

"I want to say yes," Abby says at
last. "But it doesn't really matter what I say, does it?"

"No,"
Ixazaluoh
admits. "It has already begun and you are mine. But I would prefer that
you enter into it willingly and with an open heart."

"Okay," Abby says. "Okay.
Yes."

Ixazaluoh
leans down and
kisses her again, gentle and sweet and Abby thinks she might be crying, but she
isn't sure. Tears mat her lashes, roll across her temples, but they may not be
hers. When
Ixazaluoh
sits up again, she raises Abby's
hand to her mouth and kisses that too, sending ripples of pleasure radiating
out from that point, across Abby's body.

"H-holy
sh-shiiiit
,"
Abby pants.

"It gets better,"
Ixazaluoh
says, and produces something small and thin from
nowhere.

"What's that?" Abby asks, getting
her right elbow under her so she can get a good look. "Is that a
needle?"

"Cactus
needle."

"Oh, I'm not…" Abby stutters,
flushing. "I'm not into pain-play. Please."

"This is not for sex.
Shhh
. Trust me."

And, for reasons that Abby isn't entirely
sure of, she does. So she goes still and waits, and watches.

Ixazaluoh
pricks her with the
cactus needle, directly over the pen-cap bruise, and right before her eyes, the
dark stain grows, shifting under her skin like a living thing.  Abby
spasms in fear, yanking her hand away and shaking it as if she could dislodge
the ink in her flesh like an errant spider. It only makes her wrist hurt.

"Abby, watch,"
Ixazaluoh
says, grabbing her arm and holding her still.

The ink grows into a bigger blotch, gets a
bit thin and long, like a cylinder. It stops growing, pulses a little, and then
settles. It looks like a faded tattoo.

"It doesn’t look like anything,"
Abby says. "It doesn't… I can't feel it. It doesn't hurt. What is it
supposed to be?"

Ixazaluoh
leans down and
kisses Abby's palm, and then tongues the stain. Abby can feel
that
, holy
hell,
she can feel
that
, all the fucking way
down. She gasps and sways into
Ixazaluoh's
body, presses
her face against her lover's neck, and struggles to catch her breath.
Ixazaluoh
chuckles and releases her hands, winds her arms
around Abby and pets the back of her head, soothing.

"It will be clear tomorrow, my
dearest,"
Ixazaluoh
says.
"One
more night.
Say you'll come. Say I may keep you."

"Yes," Abby says, in a fit of
bravery. "Yes."

Because if she says no to this, if she
refuses this adventure, then what kind of travel writer is she?

☼

Abby meets
Ixazaluoh
out by the main gates, at the employee bus stop. Nobody looks at
Ixazaluoh
, though Abby gets a few strange glances. She is
dressed in the only other nice outfit she brings to resorts—a breezy white
cotton sundress with a square neck and butterfly sleeves. It's very flattering
to her cleavage, and it skims her hips in just the right way to show off her
curves without betraying her belly. It swings full, just covering her knees.
She's got her regular brown leather sandals on, though, instead of her strappy
heels, because Abby has no idea where she and
Ixazaluoh
will be walking. Maybe she should have worn her tennis shoes, but they clash
with the dress and something in Abby wants to be pretty for her lover.
Goddess.
Whatever.

She grabs
Ixazaluoh's
hand for courage as the bus pulls up, and instantly the people around them seem
to forget she exists.

"Oh," Abby says as
Ixazaluoh
pulls her onto the bus. The driver doesn't look
at them, doesn't ask for fare,
doesn't
watch them sit.
"You don't actually work at the resort," Abby asks as they take seats
in the very back of the bus. Nobody around them can hear her, either.

"No,"
Ixazaluoh
says. "But there are many, many people at resorts, many more than there
ever are in a town.
And so few of our children still believe.
The Christian pantheon, they are greedy. They gobble up the world. We have
become like poachers, we must find those capable of seeing amid the flocks of
others. We are made so small, Abby. We fight for everything we receive."

"I don't believe in anything,
though," Abby says.

"You believe in yourself."

"No," Abby demurs.

"You do,"
Ixazaluoh
insists. "You have just not acted upon it. And you believe in doing right
by your brothers and sisters. You believe in honesty. You have a strong heart
and a good soul. You have a faith and so you can see."

"But why
resorts?"

"I cannot leave my homeland. But the
world comes to us. People come and go in great waves. I can meet thousands,
millions of people very easily. I can touch them all.
Very
easily."

They are silent for the rest of the bus ride.
Abby tries to decide how she feels about being actively hunted by… by whatever
it is that
Ixazaluoh
is. 
About
being
prey.
Something crawls up her spine, splashes against the
back of her neck in a hot-cold surge of prickling sensation and she realizes
that while she's scared, while the thought of being stalked and seduced and
owned
is terrifying, she also very, very turned on.

It is the most amazing feeling on the planet
to be
wanted
.

☼

The bus is empty when the driver stops on the
side of the highway.  He just sits there, door open, and
Ixazaluoh
pulls Abby out into the warm night air.

"What was that?" Abby asks,
watching the bus vanish down the empty road.

"He thinks he was stopping for railroad
tracks."

"Did you do that?"

"Not me, no.
It's not my…
area,"
Ixazaluoh
admits with a glinting smile,
the
more
smile. "Come, this way." She leads them to a dense
row of trees and Abby realises that this is the boundary between the road and
the true wilds. There is a mature forest behind this line, dim and shadowy.
A jungle, dark and packed and dangerous.
Abby feels absurdly
foreign and very, very fragile.

"There's no path," Abby protests.
She's wearing
sandals,
she's going to trip on a rock
or get stabbed by a branch.

"Yes, there is. Trust me, Abigail,"
Ixazaluoh
says, and Abby does.
Because
she's been asked to.

They walk in silence for a long time. Abby
isn't sure if it's minutes, or hours, or days. She doesn't trip on anything,
and eventually she cranes her head back and watches the stars through the canopy.

Eventually she becomes aware that they are
being watched. She doesn't see the
eyes in the shadows so
much as
feels
them. The way they look at her is like
caresses. They stroke up her exposed calves, down her naked arms. They slide
over her breasts, linger on her
cheeks,
dip into the
hollow between her thighs. The gazes are physical things and she sucks in air
through her teeth, shocked and
so fucking turned on
that her legs
threaten
to go out from under her.

"Patience!"
Ixazaluoh
snaps at the darkness, exasperation thick in her voice. "Brothers,
sisters, please.
Patience."

The eyes blink closed. The touches recede.

Abby clings to
Ixazaluoh
,
hands wrapped in her brown shirt, only when she opens her eyes,
Ixazaluoh
not dressed like a resort worker any more.
Instead she looks like she stepped straight from
an
anthropology
textbook. She is wearing a top of woven blues and greens.
The patterns look like waves, and it is
squarish
,
sticking out from her shoulders, making her look large and powerful. She's got
a beautiful necklace on, thick and large, almost like a collar, and it is blue
too—blue stone, blue beads, and blue sparkles, like the sea at midday. Her
skirt reaches the ground, tubular, slightly stiff,
woven
as well. Her feet are bare and incongruously, her toenails are painted a
bright, beautiful sea-green.

"It's a nice pedicure,"
Ixazaluoh
says, following her line of sight. "I want
to keep it."

Abby laughs, but it comes out small and
strangled sounding. It echoes in the open air around them and Abby looks up,
startled. They aren't in the middle of the forest any more. They are in a
clearing. Well, barely a clearing. It's less like it was man-made and more like
the trees
are
too scared to encroach. In the middle of
the clearing is a low stone bench. It looks nothing at all like a slaughter
stone from a ziggurat or Stone
Henge
, but all the
same, Abby feels like a sacrifice when
Ixazaluoh
leads her to it and encourages her to sit.

Abby clings to her fingers. "You promise
you won't hurt me?" Abby is trembling, sweating, her hands feel clammy and
her forehead itches with it, and god, she's never been so scared and so turned
on in her life.

"I promise, my love."

"I just... it's just that..."

"All those
stories of human sacrifice?"
Ixazaluoh
asks.

Abby nods.

"Some supplicants
were
slaughtered,"
Ixazaluoh
admits. "But some only suffered what
the Europeans, in their ridiculous desperation for prudery, called the
little
death
."

"Oh," Abby breathes.

"But if it will make you feel better, I
will give you three requests."

"Requests?"

"You may give me... rules, if you
like,"
Ixazaluoh
says. "I will follow them
if I am able."

"But you won't if you can't," Abby
says. "Or... don't want to."

"Correct. But I will try. Is that not
reassuring?"

Abby swallows.
"Yeah."
It's not exactly the explicit relationship negotiation she's used to. Normally
if people intend to break their promises and punch through their partner's hard
limits without their say so, they usually don't admit it.
Which,
perhaps, is more honest.
Makes
Ixazaluoh
just a little bit more trustworthy.