The bungalow was tucked into the green obscurity along the mountain road a few miles east of Larsen’s Peak. The place was well kept if not exactly tidy. Townes had moved in a year before, and spent the first few months repairing cracked walls and broken terra cotta tiles. He’d painted all the rooms as well as the exterior, and built beds where herbs and vegetables were thriving. There was a small barn about forty yards on an uphill grade from the house. He didn’t know what kind of animals it once housed, but he’d set up a tool bench and had the 71 Pontiac Grand Ville he’d found in Foley Springs towed there. It was his self-prescribed detox therapy.
He let Siren in the front and watched her walk into the sparsely furnished front parlor and study the room with slow curiosity. For a moment she seemed unsure of whether she was supposed to sit down or wait to be told. She took it in from one corner to the next, even though there were only a small couch with a couple of stacks of books on the floor beside it, a board across two milk crates to serve as a coffee table and a cheap television set on top of another milk crate.
She was smiling like someone had just told her a secret.
Townes started to wonder whether or not she was actually beautiful, or if he were only trying to convince himself he’d rescued something precious. But rescue didn’t seem to fit whatever it was he’d done. He supposed he’d helped her in some manner of escape. He wanted to believe he’d done it to help her more than simply to hurt Cray, but he didn’t know.
There were a few small things to do, and they needed done quickly. The adrenalin crash was already bearing down hard and fast.
He gave her a moment to stand in the doorway to the kitchen before approaching and putting his hand on her shoulder. She turned her face without turning her body.
“C’mon.” He led her into the bedroom at the rear of the house. There was only a mattress on the floor, with a lamp and stacks of books right beside. Siren’s eyes lit over everything, but Townes kept her moving until they were standing in the bathroom. It was small, consistent with the rest of the house, and if not for Townes’ size it wouldn’t have seemed cramped with both of them standing in it. There was an old, clawfoot tub with a plastic curtain on a rod and hand held nozzle that had been added on.
“You partial to a bath or shower?”
She flashed a smile, as if the offer had been something more. “Sure would love a bath. Ain’t hardly took the time in a while.”
Townes pushed the curtain wide open and leaned over to run water. There was generic soap and shampoo on a clip-on bracket just below the bracket for the nozzle. He held his hand under the spigot until the temperature felt right. He straightened and turned back to Siren to tell her she could adjust the water the way she liked, but he fell quiet when he saw she was naked, his raincoat in a rumpled crescent around her feet.
Her eyes were on his face. He wanted to turn away, but he didn’t want to turn away. The soft terrain of her body dug at his peripheral vision like that road you thought you should’ve turned onto but didn’t in a moment of doubt…and then you look up and find yourself lost.
“Tomorrow we’ll go out and get you some proper clothes. I’ll see about finding you something passable for now. Won’t be fancy.”
“Ain’t nothin’ fancy myself.”
He touched her face and flashed back on the way she’d looked cumming on his hand back at the crossroads. The way her body had crumpled slightly, and her nectar had covered his fingers. The near cloying silk of her upper thighs. The way her eyes had closed while her face lifted to the sun and her body squeezed his fingers as if it had wanted to keep them.
“We’ll find you something nice,” he said.
“Come in the water with me, T.”
She reached for his belt and started to pull it loose, but he caught her by the wrists. He was a few breaths away from being as hard as he’d been before, but it had felt so much like being alive it scared him far more than bleeding in a ditch or walking into the house of the man who’d put him there. He hadn’t realized until that moment of Siren’s crest how living was more dangerous than dying.
“Such things aren’t meant for everyone.” He loosened his grip on her wrists and she pulled her hands away.
“Ya know,” she grinned. “You could jus’ keep me here and I wouldn’t never need no clothes.”
He almost joined her in the giggling.
“You’d be a fine thing to keep, Siren. Very fine.”
“I s’pose ya could if ya wanted. For a while anyway.”
“A while?”
“Til ya got tired. Everybody gets tired sometime.”
He turned and left the room. In his closet, there were half a dozen Oxford shirts he never wore. They’d probably fit her like an oversized dress until he could get her something better. There was a pair of flip flops that looked like they’d fit her well enough. They’d been lying on the closet floor when he moved in, but he hadn’t thrown them away like he had the other women’s things that had been left hanging and in his way.
He brought one of the shirts and the sandals to the bathroom. She was sitting upright in the tub, the water slowly rising around her hips. Her breasts pillowed between her arms with her hands thrust down between her knees. He could feel her eyes on him while he dropped the sandals on the floor and hung the shirt on a hook on the inside of the door. When he left, he shut it and realized you could still hear the water running. It wasn’t much – if anything at all – but it was the kind of nothing you wouldn’t notice being alone.
He went to the mattress and knelt on the edge, crawling forward on his hands until he was lying face down. He hadn‘t so much as bothered to take off his shoes. The sound of water running in another room made him think of rain.
And then he was gone.
There was a knee pushing into his ribs. The sun was an hour away from breaking the jagged horizon. Her hand was resting on his upper thigh, and her forehead was pressing against his arm. Warm pulses of sleepy breath washed against his arm just below the hem of his T shirt sleeve.
She was naked, and his shoes had been removed. The contact was light as a soft brush, but constant. Unconscious. Except the pressure of her knee.
A memory came to his skin of the way her hands had moved beneath his shirt under the desert sunrise. She was nothing more or less than a living thing – alive the way a bird or fish was alive to slice air or water with the arcane magnificence of pure motion. He remembered thinking how she seemed to melt around the slide of his fingers, and now, so aware of the closeness of her hand on his leg, he felt himself begin to go hard again.
He rolled away from her, off the side of the mattress, and got to his feet. He stood and watched her sleep a while, watching the subtle rise and fall of her body as she breathed. He wondered if she felt as peaceful on the inside as she looked on the outside. Her hand was still resting in the space he’d just been in, and her knees were still tucked snugly to her breasts. She was in nearly the exact position she’d been in when he found her, but lain down on her side.
He felt the odd sense she reminded him of something without knowing what it was. Maybe she only reminded him of her, like a circle of feeling that closes back in on itself.
Leaving her to sleep, he went into the bathroom and shut the door. The shirt he’d found for her was still hanging on the hook where he’d put it. He pulled the shower curtain back around the rod and turned on the water. Stray tendrils of steam were already beginning to lace the air by the time he took off his shirt and jeans, leaving them piled on the floor.
He looked down at the bullet scars in the trunk of his body. No one had ever touched them the way Siren had. Not even Nessa. But Nessa had seen their ugliness. Siren’s hands had traveled him blind.
They were part of him now. Rebirth marks he’d stopped paying attention to. He touched his heart. It was beating like a baby trying to punch its way out of his body. It didn’t seem right to blame the myriad fumbles of the human spirit on a blind muscle with one purpose – to march like a silent slave from beginning to end – and yet a thousand ways to stop it in its tracks.
His hand slid down his body until palm and fingers were tracing the swollen warmth of his cock. The head was wet. Slick. And when his fingers brushed over the crown more sap oozed out. He reached forward with his free hand, bracing his palm against the door, and leaned against his outstretched arm as he smeared himself over the tightly stretched skin of his shaft. His cock was like a foreign thing somehow, and yet the fingers of sensation lacing through him gripped hard.
He started to question his wisdom in bringing Siren here. Even his motives. Her climbing into his bed wasn’t supposed to happen.
The flesh trapped in the tight glide of his fist was too solid to belong to his body. The pounding waves of heat coursing through his shaft had to come from somewhere outside him – somewhere closer to the burning core of all natural forces. The widening spiral of desire inside him was nothing but a kind of alien energy. It wasn’t the offspring of his flesh and soul as the image and scent of the naked waif lying in his bed swarmed his mind.
Everything always breaks down. The fire of revenge still burned like dying star at the center of his being, yet it was all over and gone. Hate had failed him as swiftly as love.
He stroked harder. Faster. Pumping the rigid spine of flesh until he felt himself hurling through Siren scented space. She was like the air he was pulling into his body – a thing outside him that rushes in the door and fills all the empty corners. Slick fluid thickened in the hard curl of his sliding fingers. The same fingers he’d pushed inside her. The thought of the frightful delicacy of her pussy lacquering his skin sent waves of tremors through his bones.
He stopped short and pushed away from the door. He stepped into the tub, the heavy swagger of his engorged cock pulling his consciousness into the river of oblivion flowing through him.
The hot spray stung. He realized he’d neglected to pull out his ponytail, but he ignored it and bowed his head into the water, feeling the steaming pinpoints of heat strike and run down his body. He reached between his thighs and cupped his balls, giving himself a firm yet careful squeeze before sliding his hand back over his shaft.
He began to stroke himself again, closing his eyes while steam gathered around him in the small space. He was watching her face transform into a mask of both freedom and surrender as she leaned into the curl of his arm behind his truck in the desert. Pausing his stroking caress, he spat in the palm of his hand and gripped his cock again, saliva mixing with his precum as his hand slowly slipped along the unyielding shape of his shaft and balls.
He wanted to believe that look on her face had been rare, that she’d melted into her release with none of the baggage they’d both left behind. Maybe the best people like Siren and him could hope for would be these fleeting moments of blind forgetfulness.
Everything came down now to the memory in his arm of the shape and tender weight of her body and the ardent scrape of his hand over the clumsy strain of his cock. Echoes of her sighs were swirling through his head when the soft click of the door opening and closing shut them out. The curtain parted and he was holding his painfully swollen cock as she floated into the space in front of him.
“Don’t say nothin’, okay?” She reached for the head of his cock while he held his grip on the shank. “I know ya ain’t gonna fuck me so I ain’t gonna ask. Heard enough nos to last me. Change yer mind about that yer gonna have to do the askin’, but just ‘member I ain’t sayin’ no. But ya gotta let me do what ya done for me. Not takin’ me out like ya done, but what ya done back there behind yer truck and it felt like a few minutes of love. I know ya know what I mean.”
He knew.
He let go of his shaft, and Siren knelt down in the tub, still holding the head of his cock while she held his arm with the other hand for balance. It was the first time he’d noticed her seem in danger of clumsiness. She slid her hand down his shaft, holding him at the base where his own hand had just been. She gripped him tightly – without hesitation or apology – and the raging beat of his pulse was overpowering, and deep inside of everything he was made of.
She leaned forward and kissed his dome. It was a dainty, lips pursed kiss, as if she might’ve been kissing his cheek on his way out of the house to some nondescript job that would bury his spirit under the oppression of normalcy. Crawling alive and punctured out of a junkyard ditch to fight death and torrents of rain was the only reference he had to the soft, wet touch of her lips. Nothing mattered but the smoldering point of contact.
A few minutes of love.
Let everything go but her.
Just a few minutes. Just this simple kiss, light as the air under the wing of a migrating bird.
She backed away with a quick swipe of her tongue across his cockhead. He reached up to grip the curtain rod on both sides, careful not to pull it all down on top of them. She lifted his prodigious cock and laid a kiss on his balls as tender and sweet as the one on his head.
Care. Just a few minutes’ worth.
“Hand me that razor and shampoo, will ya?” Keeping his left up on the rod, he reached back with the right and handed her each item one at a time. “Been a while since ya shaved, I guess. I done this before. Won’t cut ya, I promise. Not even by mistake.”
“I trust you, Siren.”
He put his right back up on the rod while she dribbled shampoo all over his cock. Leaving the razor and shampoo bottle on the floor of the tub, she let her hands glide over his rigid stalk and balls. It seemed as if her hands had been made to fit around his contours. His attention was evenly diverted between the rolling slip of her fingers and her face as she studied his cock.
She looked up. “Guess you figure I seen a lotta dicks.
“Don’t care.” Breathing was quickly becoming a higher priority than words.
Townes’ cock and balls were thoroughly lathered, but she kept on caressing him. He began to imagine she was massaging his pulse as much as the flesh it was pounding through.
“Don’t know when I’ve seen a man and his cock so alike. Hard and thick as a truck. Angry but gentle kind of. Quiet and dangerous. Far far away.”
“Anyone ever tell you you talk a lot?”
Siren chuckled and looked at his face. She moved her hand in a tight, corkscrew slide along his shaft while cupping his balls with the other.
“Never had two words to say to a naked man before. But you started talkin’ to me right off. Questions like nobody bothered with before.”
Her left hand moved from his balls to the root of his cock, gripping hard enough to stanch the blood flow while the right stroked harder, faster. Tighter. Townes gripped the curtain rod harder, straining to keep from ripping it down until Siren suddenly broke off. Pausing. Looking up at his face again.
“Guess you put the idea in my head about bein’ known to somebody in a perticular way. Like it don’t have to be such a bad thing. You walkin’ up on me like ya done. Talkin’ like ya done. Like I handed you this chunk ‘o my life and you handed me this razor here.”
“Few minutes of trust,” he told her. Gripping the rail above. Looking down as she looked back up.
“Few minutes whatever ya want.”
She pulled her face away and reached for the razor. Then she started shaving off the long neglected stubble around his cock. She was careful and patient, rinsing the blade every few passes and manipulating his cock and balls to get the most out of the blade. The more carefully she handled him, the hotter his blood ran. The harder he yearned to be touched.
She ran her fingers all over the smooth areas around his cock and balls, seemingly to check for any stray stubble, but she had him smooth as a basket of ripe plums.
“Told ya I wouldn’t cut ya. Want ya to feel me, T. Much as ya can.”
She set the razor down and curled her delicate fist around his cock, gripping him just below the ridge of his head. With the left, she formed a tight circle around the base with her thumb and forefinger. She started stroking with the right. The lathered scrape of her hand felt intimately familiar, as if she knew his cock at least as well as he did himself.
He uttered a groan that sounded like her name. She had his blood trapped in the straining extension of his stalk. Sensation of electric light bottling up inside his flesh. A vague sensation of flight.
“I keep thinkin’ about it,” she said, her voice slightly staggered with the exertion of her stroking.
“What?” A word at a time was as much as his breath could keep up with now. Tendrils of that light bottled up in his cock were beginning to flicker throughout his body.
“You fuckin’ me, that’s what. How it’d be. What we’d feel like all meshed up together. You’d cover me right up like I was buried alive in somethin’ alive.”
“Siren…shut up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“T.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Shut up.”
She was starting to breathe deep and loud as he, her arm grinding through graceful jabs that sent tremors through her breasts. His chest felt like stone underneath as he watched the burnt cherry tips quivering down below her concentrated frown.
The moment he felt himself tumbling forward – toward her – she quickly released the base of his cock from the hard grip of her finger and thumb. Riptides of blood shoved hard through his veins while he tumbled harder and faster.
Electric light burst through the tip of his cock.
Gasps like a dead man coming back to a bad life out of a muddy ditch. But he was here now, in her hands, shivering through this soaked blessing of love that wasn’t really love.
Siren was uttering some expression that sounded like surprise, but then he lost his footing on the right and went down on that knee, colliding with the side of her thigh, the curtain rod twisting and bending down with the pull of his weight.
The curtain bunched around them on the right. The spray kept hitting his back, his wide body shielding her. Siren’s hand was still moving along the inflated shaft of his cock, but there were spatters of cum everywhere. The look in her eyes petrified his heart with shame.
Fear.
Slowly, she let her hand slip away from his cock. She looked like she wanted to back away but didn’t have anywhere to go.
“Guess it’s better ya don’t fuck me after all,” she said. “You scare me, T. I think maybe you fuck like you’re killin’ somebody.”
He reached back and grabbed the nozzle off the bracket. Then he hunkered down further, with his legs stretching forward around her hips. He rinsed himself off her breasts and belly – took her hand in his and rinsed her knuckles – rinsed his cock and upper thighs.
He reached back again and shut the water off. He folded himself forward and pressed the crown of his head into the top of the valley between her breasts.
“However scared you think you are of me,” he said, “I’m fucking terrified of you.”
He felt her hand on his wet ponytail, smoothing it down his spine. He reached around her body and held, closed his eyes, and inhaled the scent of clean, wet girl.
