“Echo,” he said. “It’s time to get started.”

She had to blink a few times to get focused. Hawke was sitting on the bunk opposite hers in the trailer. He was leaning onto his elbows down on his knees, watching her face even though the cropped T she went to sleep in had ridden up over her left, candy tipped breast. She wasn’t even aware of it until he reached over and gingerly pulled the edge of the T shirt down to cover her nipple.

She smiled and closed her eyes again. The sound of her new name made it feel like the morning of some mythical tomorrow. She caught a brief sense memory of the night before when he touched her palm with the tip of his finger.

“Come around behind the house when you’re ready,” he told her. “Don’t wear anything you’re afraid of getting messy.”

By the time she opened her eyes, he was halfway to the door. As she watched him walk out, she wondered how a man his size could move without making any noise. He might have come off as bulky if it weren’t for the fluid air about him. Even moving around his cramped kitchenette last night reminded her of the way he’d been moving through his Tai Chi exercise when she’d walked in.

She kicked the sheet off her legs and swung her feet to the floor, taking a moment to wonder what Hawke meant when he said messy. She pulled off the T shirt she’d slept in and got up to look for something else to wear. She slipped on fresh panties and finally found a man’s button down shirt hanging in the cramped little closet adjacent to the sleeping section.

In a pair of flat heeled sandals, she went out of the trailer and walked around to the back of the house. It wasn’t nine o’clock yet, but it was already eighty-five.

There was a makeshift, open air shower to the side of the rear entrance, with dark slate stones for a floor and a hand held nozzle attached to a hose. There was a dingy, white plastic patio chair set on the slate, and to the side was a matching plastic stand.

Echo turned her back to the house and looked over the valley below. She saw the long snake of road she’d driven up on yesterday. The sight of where she’d been didn’t seem to connect anywhere with the last twenty-four hours of her life. Then she spotted the big willow tree up the slope and realized that’s where Hawke had come from the afternoon before. A moment later he came out of the house with a large coffee mug in one hand and a plastic bag in the other.

“Didn’t know if you were a coffee drinker.”

“Oh yeah.” Her eyes lit up at the sight of the coffee. She took the mug and drank. It was black, but it had enough sugar.

She kept sipping and watched him take scissors and hair dye out of the bag and set it on the little plastic stand. He toed off his sandals and then pulled off his T shirt, standing in a pair of dark, drawstring pants as he gave her a couple of minutes with the coffee. The sight of the scissors made her nervous. She passed her free hand through her hair two or three last times, but found herself distracted by the small tattoo of some kind of symbol on the left side of his chest, a couple of inches above his heart. It looked like writing in some obscure alphabet.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Why don’t you take a seat.”

He nodded toward the plastic chair, and she blew a sigh of resignation as she set her cup down on the plastic table and sat. Hawke moved behind her and wrapped a towel around her shoulders, then guided her head back. He picked up the nozzle and started to wet down her hair. He poured shampoo in his hand and started massaging her scalp. His fingers felt as if they knew her skull. They were patient and firm. He handled her hair like something that mattered. She didn’t know whether or not to be surprised.

Then he rinsed her hair and guided her head back upright. He picked up the scissors and started cutting around the base of her neck. Her locks fell away in long, wet strands. The air hit her neck and shoulders in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time. She almost forgot to worry about whether or not he knew what he was doing.

After he finished cutting, he rinsed her hair again and patted off the excess water with a towel. He walked in front of her and took a jar of Vaseline out of the bag and started to thumb-smear a bead all along her hairline. He was focused on what he was doing and didn’t seem to notice how she watched him. She let her eyes dart toward the dye, curious to see what color she was going to be.

“Never had dark hair before,” she said. Some kinds of time just needed killing.

“The color of a person’s hair is one of the most noticeable things about them. You’ll be a lot harder to recognize now.”

He was rubbing the jelly all around her neck.

“Yeah, okay. Just never changed my hair before.”

“Why would you?” he shrugged.

He pulled a pair of rubber gloves over his hands and positioned himself behind her again. The sun touched her throat as her head leaned back into his hands. When he started smearing the black dye into her hair, a short snicker escaped her throat.

“Afraid I’m ruining your head?” he asked.

“Not really. I can do pretty well fixing the cut as long as you don’t hack it up too badly. I was just thinking how my fate is literally in your hands.”

“Not really,” he noted quietly.

She kept going as if she hadn’t heard him. “Then again, I’ve spent half my life letting someone else read the map. I guess that’s how I ended up in Hell. Now I’m here trusting a man I haven’t known twenty-four hours to navigate me through the trickiest part of the road.”

“I just provide a service,” he said. “It’s not about trust. It’s just business.”

A brief silence fell while he combed the dye evenly through her severely shortened locks.

“So this is what happens. Live or die turns into a stranger’s business. Maybe I’m just getting what I deserve.”

She felt the careful drag of the comb punctuate his brewing thoughts.

“It’s always like that. For everybody,” he said. “Live or die is out of your hands, and it’s out of mine. But you took your own map back or you wouldn’t be sitting here, so that’s something. Just follow your instructions and you’ll be fine. No one will ever find you. Hell is where you’d be if Trey ever catches up with you, but we’ll make sure that won’t happen.”

She sat upright and turned to look at him at the sound of the name.

“You know him?” She had to squint to see anything.

Hawke nodded.

“How?”

“Prison.”

She hadn’t known Trey was ever in prison, but it made sense. The fact Hawke had actually known him then was still too surreal to process. He set the comb down and picked up the plastic shower cap. She kept her eyes on him the whole time he stepped back around in front of the chair and pulled the cap over her head, tucking her hair up underneath. Then he peeled the stained gloves off his hands and tossed them aside.

He took the little plastic stand and tipped everything off it, setting it in front of her and sitting down so their knees were almost touching.

“Trey, The Monk and me were all there at the same time,” he said.

His eyes were cast on her lap, where the split in the lower half of the shirt parted to reveal her panties, but she felt his gaze was somewhere else, his eyes averted downward in a gesture of deference. She felt the same sensation she had the day before when the car had spun out of control.

“I know you’re wondering if we were friends,” he went on. “This is his signature I wear on my face.”

She touched his face and ran her fingers along the long curve of scar tissue. She didn’t expect him to sit still for it, but he did. Silently. She felt his hand settle on her bare thigh at the same time.

She thought of the long scar running down the inside of Trey’s leg and realized Hawke was the one who put it there. Now she knew why The Monk had sent her to Hawke when she’d asked him for help.

“It’s not like you think,” she said. “You think people turn away because it makes you ugly. It’s just extreme. Extremes make most people nervous. It’s not that they don’t want to see where you are – they’re afraid to see where you’ve been.”

She put her other hand on the other side of his face and he lifted the shirttail, exposing more of the ink on her hip.

“The tattoos are going to take time to change,” he said. She could tell he was still taking in what she’d said in the back of his mind. “Or else you’re always going to have to be very careful about ever letting them be seen.”

He hooked his finger under the edge of her panties and pulled them aside to reveal more of the image. He traced the lines with the tips of his fingers. No one had ever touched or studied them the same way. He did everything with her hands on his face. She didn’t want to let go for some reason.

“Three days ago I fucked two guys on Trey’s living room floor. They were friends of his. That’s all I knew about them, even though they had me in the middle, one of them up my pussy while the other went up my ass at the same time. It was for Trey and a bunch of his other friends. It was always for Trey’s friends. Fucking gutter trash that made him feel like the grand impresario. Just another one of his little parlor shows he liked to put on for his freak buds. He’s like a dog telling jokes to its fleas. But I fucked ‘em both like I meant it. It’s just something I always knew how to do. Fuck, I mean.

“They were drinking absinthe and sitting there like a bunch of opera critics, except the arias all ended with cumshots. They had lots of laughs and plenty to say. Critics rating the soprano’s performance. Open debate on the way I was grinding those fucks on the rug. Even the color my slit turned soaking wet and pounded hard for the boys.

“Trey even asked us to stop in the middle of everything and move ‘cuz they wanted a better look at my asshole. It’s something he’d do, make sure we all knew he had the best view of me getting plugged in, always reminding me he was there. But I think he just likes watching better than fucking. Fucking’s too much work.

“But then he told the one in my ass to spank me. So he did. I tried not to flinch, but it took me by surprise. He laughed and just smacked me harder. However hard he smacked me they just kept telling him to smack me harder. He hit like a fucking girl but they all loved it. He finally got so excited he pulled out and started spanking his cock.

“The others were laughing and telling him to squirt on my ass, but he just whacked himself so hard he started shooting everywhere and he ended up squirting half his cum on his buddy’s balls. His buddy freaked out, like he was too big a stud for that shit, but his cock started twitching and he shot off like a firecracker. He waited until he was done before he just shoved me off onto the rug and got up and started pushing his buddy around for getting spunk on his balls.

“Everybody was laughing, except the guy with cum on his nuts. He was puffing up and telling everybody to fuck off, but he kept rubbing his balls the whole time, like he couldn’t get enough of feeling his own cum spattered nuts.

“I don’t even remember if Trey bothered telling me their names. Thing is – I know I wouldn’t have been listening if he had. What’s the fucking difference if it was Bill or Bob?

“Anyway, later on, you think one of those motherfuckers would look me in the eye without that what a nasty little fuckwhore you are gleam in their eye? You’ve probably never seen it. It’s like someone’s looking at you but not seeing you. Even Trey, like always. He’d get this fucked up glaze in his eye like he wouldn’t dare touch me in front of his friends. But it never failed. He never wanted me to clean up. Just wait for him. He liked me used up and messy.

“So,” she finally paused, “a little score on your face isn’t what makes you ugly. Even if the devil himself put it there.”

When Hawke finally looked up at her face, there was the same guarded silence in his eyes that had been there every time he’d looked at her long enough.

Nothing had changed. She waited to see the clouds of derision pass through them, but they never came.

His hand slid off her thigh and he lifted her arm with both hands, holding it up and studying the illustration just as he’d studied her hip. Exaggerated red tail hawk descending on thorny roses.

“We’d have to go some to find an artist who could do a passable job of altering these,” he mused. “We’ll work around it. There’s always a way.”

“Okay.” She nodded.

He set her hand down on her thigh and came upright, facing her without flinching.

“Some days are sunny and sweet,” he said. “Others you just get caught in the shitstorm. It’s just whatever the day blows over you. Doesn’t hurt to have a good umbrella, though.”

She reached to touch his naked upper body before he had a chance to keep going. “You’re here now because you finally realized how much stronger you are than all of them,” he said as her palm moved across his chest. “It’s like that guy who got his friend’s cum on his balls. He’s walking around feeling like he’s got a stain on him now. Even if he’s aching for more. But I think you know the only stains are the ones we put on ourselves.”

He had a way of smiling with his eyes without having to use the rest of his face. She could feel her cells changing over – driving her toward that next minute of newness – while her own smile hit her face. He smirked, looking at her as if the shower cap made her look silly.

“You know, Echo,” he said, brushing his knuckles across her cheek. “I think you’re gonna look beautiful with dark hair.”

***

Hawke watched Echo kill time through the rear window of the house. In about twenty minutes, she could take off the cap and rinse her new hair. After he’d gone inside, she took off the overshirt and sunned herself in the chair. Nothing but scant, white panties and tattoo ink. She almost looked relaxed. Her breasts sat on her crossed forearms like rose tipped delicacies that sent a feeling of restlessness coursing through his veins.

He tried to reconcile the image of her sitting there now with the one she’d revealed out of her life with Trey. A feeling of responsibility nudged at the edges of his consciousness. He didn’t know if he’d feel the same way without his own history with Trey. He wanted to believe he would, but he wasn’t convinced.

There would have been a kind of elegance in the things she’d done for Trey and his friends. It was ingrained in her. A stirring of sensation swirled in his cock as he began to think of her with unmentionable shades of pride and jealousy.

Soon, the cap would come off her head and she’d look different. He’d teach her how to be someone else, while the same essence that made her what she was would always remain inside. She’d learn how to disguise a basket of gold as coal. They were about to create a woman who would never really exist.

She was going to be a magnificent ghost.

He turned from the window and went to the sofa where the backpack full of cash was lying where he’d tossed it the night before. He picked it up and quietly carried it out of the house across to the trailer. He went inside and left it on the bunk she’d slept in.

The clothes she’d been wearing the day before were strewn across the other bunk. There wasn’t much to them. A scant pair of shorts, T shirt and panties. Something about it felt sad, as if there was somehow less of her to help disappear from the life she was fleeing. But the truth was that she would be easy to notice wherever she went, and he knew Trey well enough to know he would never give her up easily.

He picked up the T and held it to his face. When he inhaled he felt like his head filled with something that had been part of her. He felt light headed and put the shirt back down. He looked at the scant, rumpled panties lying next to it. Knowing how bad an idea it was, he picked them up and held them to his face. The rush of her scent forced his pulse to spike.

It felt like his entire consciousness was filling with something raw and primal. She became a stark reality that drove his blood. His cock swarmed with sensation while images of the animal she became on Trey’s living room carpet jolted his brain. Depraved lust elevated to gestures of grace and power. The animal she became was inside him now.

He closed his eyes and sat on her bunk, pressing her panties to his face with both hands. There were faint traces of body soap filtering through the patina of her sweat and honey. As always, his body was still and centered, but inside his bones began to rattle.

He took one more lingering breath and put the panties back where they’d been. He wanted to inhale her again, but he needed to keep his head clear. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d met anyone who’d spent as much time alone as he did. She was the entire list.

He floated silently out of the trailer and walked around the house to the back. The shower cap was lying on the slate around the shower nozzle, along with long, discarded strands of blonde hair that didn’t seem to belong to her now. She was spraying herself down, head back as she fingered out the strands of hair.

The spray glistened, ringing her dark head in a halo of sparks. The water and her body seemed like parts of the same continuum. Her skin had a buttery quality, and she moved around inside it as if she were connected to something unseen but there in the air surrounding her.

When she cut the spray and palmed the water off her face, Hawke’s senses brought the pungency of her essence back to life in his head the moment their eyes met. She seemed perfectly at ease with her nakedness as he stepped toward her and picked up the face cloth he’d brought out earlier. He held her by the back of her head and wiped the remaining Vaseline off her face.

“You look like a gypsy woman now,” he said.

“Guess I’ll be living like one. On the road and all.”

“For a while.”

He dropped the cloth and picked up the conditioner from the dye kit. She bowed her head and let him massage the conditioner through her hair. The scent of the conditioner blended with the sense memory of everything he’d inhaled through the panties in the trailer. His fingers worked her skull with firm patience, and he felt her hands come to rest on either side of his bare torso.

“Hawke…”

He couldn’t answer. It would’ve been better if they could have done all the talking they needed with their hands.

“…I get scared,” she went on. “Like it comes and goes. It’s not all the time.”

“Being scared isn’t always bad.”

Her hands made small passes over his skin. “I think I’m more scared of fucking up than anything else.”

“That’s good, except most of the time we don’t know we’re fucking up until much later. Seeing you reminded me of that.”

He took his hands out of her hair and took hold of the nozzle. She was still touching his sides, her palms tracing slow, familiar circles. Water dripped off the tips of her breasts. Her nipples were thick now, and her shaven pussy was never completely out of his peripheral vision.

“How?” she asked.

“Years ago,” he told her calmly, “I had the chance to kill Trey. There was a riot, and no one would’ve ever known. But I didn’t want to have to live with that. Even a sociopath like that. But now, seeing you…a glimpse of everything he’s done ever since…maybe it’s just as bad having to look you in the eye and know I could’ve spared you everything you ended up going through.”

He squeezed the nozzle and started rinsing the conditioner out of her hair, using his free hand to finger-comb the strands back.

“Now I know why you scarred each other up so bad,” she said, tugging the knot on his drawstrings. “You’re the complete opposite of each other.”

The pants fell around his ankles, and keeping her left hand on his hip, she caressed his cock and balls with the other. The blood pouring through his body turned into something vaporous while his shaft inflated in the stroke of her hand. He quit finger-combing her hair and held the spray just above her head a few seconds more. Then he cut it off suddenly and let it drop and dangle off the hose against the side of the house.

He reached for her face with both hands, but she was already sinking down to her knees. She warmed the head of his cock with her breath as she massaged his growing shaft. Her left hand moved under his balls, cupping and rubbing them as he swelled in her stroking fist.

“There’s another thing,” she said, letting her tongue flash across his cock head. “If you’d killed him back then, we wouldn’t be here like this now. So maybe everything went the way it was supposed to.”

She leaned in and took the dome of his cock into her mouth. Hawke held the sides of her face and watched her cheeks move as her tongue rolled around the ridge of his head.

The moment the slick heat of her mouth enveloped his flesh, everything was suddenly magnified: every touch, gesture and furtive glance. He would never be able to see her objectively now.

He could feel the heated ooze of his precum seeping onto her searching tongue. He fingered dark strands of hair back from her forehead and ears. He almost didn’t recognize her. Even the ink on her body seemed different. She wasn’t the same woman who’d driven up the day before.

“So this is the way it was supposed to go?” he uttered between the quiet rush of each breath.

She slipped her moist lips further onto his considerable shaft and lifted her eyes toward his face. The exotic color of her irises darkened as her look defied him to say otherwise. She looked at his face with neither sultriness nor innocence. Nothing but the unvarnished truth flashed in the wet jade of her eyes.

Hawke knew the only thing about being faced with the naked truth was there was nothing to do but believe it.

He traced the ring of her lips with the pad of his thumb, feeling the restless motion of her tongue inside her mouth. Her eyes averted as she moved her head, sliding her lips back and forth along his cock while she fondled his churning balls in the palm of one hand.

She wasn’t used to the new length of her hair as it kept slipping loose from behind her ears and dangling in her face. Hawke laced his fingers into her damp locks and pushed them back. He didn’t want to look away from her face. He wanted to see her eyes again but she wouldn’t look up.

His cock felt like pure, throbbing heat as she fucked him with her tautly pursed lips. The wet ring of her mouth slipped along his burning flesh with steady patience. Unhurried determination. She was focused, but on herself as much as him. She was there to take as much as she was willing to give.

Blood gushed through his body with fresh force, while the hand under his balls slid further. She clawed up a fistful of his ass cheek in her left, pulling him open while the middle finger of her right pressed lightly against his rim.

Hawke’s fingers curled into fists, grasping Echo’s short, dark hair as his deepening breath transformed into a tide flow of snarling. She was pulling air into her lungs almost as desperately as Hawke, uttering sudden gasps around his cock while the tip of her finger ground harder against his tight hole.

When her finger made a careful surge up inside him, the grip of his fists tightened on her hair. He wanted to tell her everything sweeping through his mind, but he was lost, falling through the warm, dark space of her touch and wet heat.

Her fingers clawed harder into the tight muscle of his ass, while the finger inside him began to rock in and out to the second knuckle.

Hawke breathed in staccato grunts while air rushed in and out through Echo’s nose, her mouth remaining in constantly building motion along his pulsing shaft.

Suddenly, he released his grasp on her hair and beat his fists against the side of the house as his cum burst like a sudden storm in her mouth. She quickly yanked her finger from his ass, sending a wave of gushing sensations through his body.

He could feel the muscles in her mouth move as she drank down the rushing flow of his cum. They became a single river of sensation, two tributaries flowing together as her desire to run and live merged with the marrow of his bones.

After everything went dark and light, he remembered to look back down and discovered her still holding his cock in her mouth with closed eyes. Her tongue rolled in lazy circles as he brought his hands back to her face. Her skin felt soft as orchid petals, but his heart had only begun to learn just how durable this Echo could be.