Wanderlust (14 page)

Hunter turned me in his arms. His eyes
were clear in the waning afternoon light of the kitchen, and Laura
had been right—he looked happier. I remembered how he’d been in the
diner, mysterious but also…scary. Intimidating. And kind of sad.
Laura seemed to think the change was due to me, and I couldn’t
really be sure. It shouldn’t matter to me if it was true, but it
did.

He pushed my hair from my forehead and
pressed a kiss there. “Are you okay here? Do you want to
leave?”

His solicitousness felt at once
foreign and comfortable. He was a little crazy, swinging back and
forth between cruelty and kindness, but I sensed that the former
was an act, a meanness he forced on himself as much as me. This
seemed natural, and I decided to embrace it for the night.
Ironically, he would be himself for once, and I would be the one
playing a role.

We ate dinner while James regaled us
with tales of fishing with Billy at the nearby river. Apparently
this house butted up against an area popular for camping and inlaid
with trails.

I ended up telling them about all the
places we had been. We’d ended up going through Little Rock after
all, though I left out the fact that Hunter had bribed the owner of
the bath house so we could have a private room in the hot springs,
which was technically against the rules. I told them about digging
for quartz crystals and showed them the necklace Hunter had ordered
made from the pink-tinted gem I’d pulled from the earth with my own
hand. I told them about rock climbing and fly fishing and then ran
out of time and breath before I’d even gotten to tell them all the
things we’d done.

Hunter had been very true to his word
when he’d promised to show me new things.

Strangely enough, we’d come closer to
my end goal. I had mapped the route enough times to know that I
would probably have passed through here on my own if I had made it
this far. Kind of weird that Hunter had been going the same
direction. Or had he driven this way just for me? I knew he’d
looked through my things, which would include the picture of the
dam.

The idea that he could have done
something that nice for me was too much. It expanded my chest so I
couldn’t breathe. It was easier to ignore the good along with the
bad, and pretend we were just a regular couple on a little road
trip to nowhere. A couple of wild explorers with no bond at
all.

I laughed alongside them during
dinner, included like we were some sort of extended family on
holiday…or at least how I imagined that would be. I didn’t have a
large family—only my mother, and I doubted I would even see her
again. Even though our relationship had eroded to almost nothing, I
missed her. I especially missed her when Billy grinned at his
mother and told her he loved her with his mouth full.

We finished dinner with some frosty
chocolate pudding, the perfect conclusion to an idyllic day. It was
made of plastic, this day, pretty to look at but an imitation
nonetheless.

After dinner we cleared the table and
continued quiet conversation until James whisked Billy upstairs for
his bath. Laura mentioned something about fresh towels for us and
disappeared, leaving Hunter and me at the table. I wondered if
Laura had engineered this so we would be alone, but that didn’t
make much sense as we’d be alone together all night. She’d already
told us which room was ours—the bedroom downstairs in the basement.
One bedroom, one bed.

Hunter toyed with his mug from
after-dinner coffee, apparently lost in thought. I should have been
nervous, wondering what would come next, but somehow I wasn’t. We’d
have sex tonight, probably. And it wouldn’t really hurt, would it?
It wasn’t like Hunter could be rough with me while the family was
just upstairs. It would be regular sex in a regular house…exactly
what I’d always wanted and all of it made in sand, destined to melt
away with the next salty wave.

“
Hunter,” I
said.

He grunted softly, though his eyes
remained fixed on an unseen destination in the distance.

“
How did you meet
Laura?”

His gaze met mine. Turbulent. Pained.
“Why do you ask that?”

“
She seems to trust
you.”
And I want to trust you.
But how can I do that? Help me.

“
She came to me in
trouble.”

“
What kind of
trouble?”

His smile was sad but tinged with
something sharper—something like hatred. “There are men out there
who would hurt a woman. Emotionally. Physically. Can you believe
that?”

I didn’t answer. My heart thumped in
my chest.

“
I couldn’t, at one time.
Couldn’t imagine what would make someone be cruel like that. It
didn’t seem human.”

“
And then?” I
whispered.
What changed that you are the
way you are?

“
And then I realized we
aren’t all human, at least not the way we were supposed to be.
Sometimes our soul dies and then we’re just…muscle and bone walking
around, with no purpose, no morals to contain us.”

I remembered the way I had felt in
that motel room: only skin, no heart. Only a body, no
feelings.

“
What made you that
way?”

Something glittered in his eyes,
something that made my breath hitch in my throat. “You know, don’t
you?” he asked. “You know what would make a person like this. What
might take away their power, their consent.”

He spat the last word, as
if it were vile. What was he saying, that
he
had been raped? It didn’t seem
possible. And yet, I knew it was true. It was as much a confession
as I could ever hope to get. It was a crucial piece of the puzzle
even if I couldn’t yet step back and see the whole.

I wanted to cry but my
eyes were dry as bone, wide and shocked. He was strength and
vitality, how could someone…? How could anyone…? But they had. He’d
fought off three men at the diner, but somehow one man, or maybe
more than one, had overpowered him enough to do
that
. How helpless he must have
felt, how worthless.

“
I’m sorry.”

He sucked in a breath. “You would
apologize to me? After what I…”

My insides twisted at the few words of
admission, the small sign of his guilt. “I let you.”

“
Don’t fool yourself. I
made you do it. You aren’t responsible for any of this. I absolve
you.”

I absolve you.
The words didn’t sound as strange as they should
have spoken out loud.

“
Your room is ready,”
Laura said cheerfully, emerging from the hallway with the basement.
I wondered how much of the conversation she had heard, but her eyes
were guileless, her small smile genuine.

I almost wished she had heard, so
someone else could know without the pain of telling her. But she
was clueless, and I was still alone.

Hunter seemed to recognize my
disappointment. He smiled sadly. “You won’t find friends here. At
least, not ones who will stand up against me.”

* * * *

I lay awake, held captive by the
iron-hard bands of his arms, clenched in his legs, completely
imprisoned by the hot brand of Hunter’s body. He overpowered me,
overheated me until I sweat and wriggled uncomfortably in his
embrace.

“
What?” he said,
slurred.

I froze and remained still for a few
minutes until his breathing evened out, then I pulled gently from
his arms. I made it to the edge of the bed when he caught my wrist.
He tugged me back, and I slammed against the hard wall of his
chest. Breath whooshed out of me.

“
Where are you going?” His
voice was gravelly with sleep.

“
Drink of water,” I
managed to get out.

He released me. “Go then.”

I stumbled to the bathroom and cupped
the water from the faucet in my hand, sipping it, gulping it down
greedily while I wondered if I’d lost my one chance to get
away.

The bathroom light shut off, plunging
me into darkness. My hands fell open, splashing water in the basin.
I felt the air rustle behind me then his hands grabbed my hips,
yanking down the underwear I’d worn to bed. I grasped the edge of
the counter, expecting him to enter me from behind.

Instead he spread my legs even
farther, so I could barely keep my balance except for his hands
supporting my thighs. Then I felt the touch of his tongue on my
sex, gently running over the outer lips and between. He suckled me
and kissed me, and I understood it to be an apology in the dark, a
plea for relief from the anger I harbored for him. But anger was
like a flame and without fuel, it would gently peter out. I was
awash in pleasure, rocking gently against his face, completely
succumbed to wherever the currents would take me.

His lips found my clit, sucking me,
nibbling me. He licked there insistently with the hard, insistent
press of his tongue, and I cried out softly and came in small
shudders, feeling wetness spill from my sex into his
mouth.

When I had come, I tried to move away,
but he held me in place, leaving bruises in the soft inner flesh of
my thighs as he held me open for more of his mouth. The curl of his
tongue, the lightest touch of his teeth. My fingers ached from
holding onto the counter, but I thrust my hips madly, wildly, until
I came again and a tear ran down my cheek.

He released me then, but only to pull
me over to the bed. He tossed me onto the sheets like I weighed
nothing, like I was nothing, and I splayed there, waiting patiently
for whatever he would do. He shrugged down his jeans, and even in
the dark I admired his form. Now I could only see the lean lines of
his silhouette but I knew from experience how his abs were marked
by the muscles there, his hips sloping inward, his body beautifully
formed.

He climbed over me, straddling my face
with his knees. He liked it this way, I had learned. He liked the
control it gave him, and maybe now I understood better why. I could
do nothing but take the broad head and thick shaft into my mouth.
He controlled the depth, the angle—everything. I couldn’t even move
my hands, my arms trapped tightly to my sides.

He pushed into me again and again,
rocking and rocking, muttering about how fucking sexy I was, how he
couldn’t control himself around me, how he wanted to do everything
to me, everything, everything and I would let him, wouldn’t
I?

“
Wouldn’t you?” he asked
me, but my mouth was full of him, and I could only mumble a muffled
answer, my tongue undulating futilely against the underside of his
cock while I said
yes, anything,
everything.

“
You trust me, don’t you?”
he asked. His eyes were black in the dark light, glittering down at
me. He pulled out so just the tip was in my mouth and leaned down
so that his mouth was closer to my ear.

“
You trust me not to break
you?” he whispered.

And it was ridiculous, of course,
because I couldn’t trust him at all. I knew that and so did he, but
I nodded, rocking the hard, pulsing flesh in my mouth as I did so.
He released a small amount of precum, salty and sharp on my tongue.
The taste of it made my sex clench and liquefy, because we were in
tune like that. Even when our mouths spoke lies and our hearts
cried out, our bodies knew how to communicate with each
other.

At my acquiescence, he reached back
and pushed my hands to my sex.

“
Touch yourself. Make
yourself come.”

I rubbed the same way he had rubbed
me, fingers pressed against the hard nub and pushing,
frantic.

He pushed back inside my mouth, deeper
this time. Slow and steady but farther in. In fact, I hadn’t
realized how far he could really go—that he must have been holding
back all this time. He hit some barrier, and I felt my eyes widen,
panicking.

“
Keep fucking yourself,”
he muttered, and my fingers sped up.

With a grunt, he pushed deeper,
popping back into my throat, and I felt my eyes roll back. It
stretched and pained me, but my sex throbbed with the entry,
welcoming him. I kept rubbing my clit, and it felt almost like an
orgasm but instead of a few short pulses, it seemed to climb even
higher.

He reached down and covered my nose,
pinching gently.

“
We’re going to do this,”
he whispered, though I wasn’t sure who he was talking
to.

Tears streamed from my eyes and fell
down the sides of my face. He was blocking all my air, with his
cock, with his fingers, but the weirdest part of all was that my
fingers never stopped.

Everything grew hazy and dreamlike,
like the whole world going out of focus except for the sharp and
blinding pleasure of my sex. I might have screamed around his cock
as I came, shuddering and begging and feeling more than I had ever
thought possible.

I was reborn in that moment, burst
into flames like a phoenix and floating in pieces to the ground.
There was scorching pain and hope for a future unknown. I felt his
cock pulse in my mouth, felt the seed flow down my throat, filling
me up and keeping me warm—giving me sustenance to rise up from the
ashes.