She closed her eyes behind the shades and leaned against the headrest. Hawke had parked alongside a row of rat palms and walked a block and a half to a drab, unassuming ranch house that looked like all the others in the neighborhood.
She took a deep breath and remembered the feeling of his hands. The way he’d caressed her skull that morning had put a slow storm inside her mind. The reality of how much she was relying on his help to disappear should have been at odds with the sense of impending freedom that curled around her like an aura. But it wasn’t.
It had been a long time since she’d thought trusting anyone, especially a man, was a good idea. In the beginning, her trust depended on a backpack full of cash, but when she discovered he’d given it back, everything rolled upside down. Whether he’d meant it that way or not, the gesture made it feel like he’d taken a willing step inside her personal conspiracy.
Trust was like an old pair of shoes that didn’t fit when they were new, but after you walked around inside them for a while they take on the shape of your feet. Echo had slipped them on without thinking and now she was getting ready to make the run of her life in them.
She wasn’t sure when she really fell over to trusting Hawke. It wasn’t any single thing she could name. There wasn’t any single moment. The way he’d cum had almost even frightened her. Something had come over him she’d never seen before. She remembered feeling the stark sensation his soul had shaken loose somehow and left his body to hover over them and watch. Everything else he was made of had poured molten down her throat.
She felt the shapeless pieces floating inside her.
His hands had slipped off the sides of her face to her shoulders and he guided her up to her feet. He’d started to wash her body, wetting her down with the nozzle and lathering her with his bare, soapy hands. His hands had been firm but careful, and she’d started to feel like a piece of sculpture being shaped an artisan’s hands.
He’d touched her without shame or apology, gliding slippery palms over her aching breasts, down the split between the spheres of her ass, between her smooth thighs, fingers brushing the awakening lips of her pussy. She’d bent forward, a long, deep sigh escaping her as her feet spread wider.
His left arm had curled around her body, holding her steady as she opened to him. Reaching more deeply between her legs, his fingers sank into the meat of her upper thighs. He scrubbed and massaged her, tucking her body tighter into his, leaning over until his face was against her neck. She felt his breath hitting her skin while his fingers slid through the swarming heat of her pussy, digging along her furrow and drawing a bead of her own moisture up over her bud.
He kept whispering “Echo” as he massaged her leaking slit. He put his lips against her damp neck and kept saying it as if he’d been forming complete sentences out of her name. He made it sound natural, as if had been her name all along.
His arm clasped more tightly around her, trapping her breasts under his tensed muscles while two fingers slid inside her, pushing and pulling as the motion of his lips against her neck changed from her whispered name to hungry kisses. Soon his fingers searched out the swelling of her clit. She turned her face in a needful reflex to kiss, but she could never turn far enough as he gripped her even more tightly, holding her until she could barely move except to grind against the thick finger pads mashing circles over her throbbing nub.
He never stopped, until her body shuddered in his hold, quivering against him while waves of intoxication undulated through her core. His cock was beginning to swell against her hip, but he never made a move except to hold her upright and swirl his fingers in constant motion over the breaking synapses in her clit.
This kiss against her neck turned back into a whisper of her name.
His cock was rippling with heat against her hip, but he never moved except to hold her tighter.
“Don’t you wanna fuck?” she asked, confused and a little irritated by his restraint.
“I don’t think I can help you very well if we fuck,” he said. “No one knows as well as I do what you’re breaking free of. I want to make sure you get where you really need to go.”
“The male of any species always protects the animal he’s fucking,” she said, her breath almost back to normal.
“Yeah,” Hawke agreed, “it’s just that it never seems to go that smoothly with human beings.”
She wanted to turn her face and be kissed, but she didn’t know if he was ready to feel her tears against his scar.
In five years, Trey had only made her cum once by accident. Even the dope hazed cluster fucks he supposedly put on for his friends were really all about him in the end. He was a vortex of psychotic self-absorption. His leering sycophants were no better, and it had always been up to her to look out for her own need to release. She took care of herself. She always had.
Later, when she went back to the trailer to change and found the money on her bunk, she had to sit down and let it all settle. She kept wanting to ask about it the whole ride into the city, but there didn’t seem much point in it.
It’s hard not to ask the questions you already have the answers to.
She thought back on the story Hawke had told her about her new name. Maybe Echo never really disappeared. Maybe it had only seemed that way because Narcissus didn’t have the vision to see her. Maybe she would tell it that way if the occasion ever arose.
She startled back into the moment when Hawke was suddenly jumping back in the truck. He tossed a slip of paper into her lap with numbers written on it and started the engine. He drove out of the neighborhood too fast for the short, residential blocks they were driving through.
“What’s this?”she asked, picking up the paper.
“Your second birth,” he said. “New social security number. That’s your ticket to everything.”
She silently thumbed through the sheaf of doctored cards and computer printouts.
“DW was with us all in prison,” Hawke went on. “Hacking charges. All that took him less than an hour. You’ll need to report stolen license and credit cards, and then you’ll get authentic ones, but you’ll be in all those systems. There’s a birth certificate for Echo James on record now in Cincinatti, and that’ll be enough to get you a legal passport.”
She nodded. “Echo James?” she said curiously as she read the name and number on the slip. “So that’s me, now, huh?”
Hawke kept driving faster. The muscles in his jaw were tensing, and Echo was still trying to decide how to ask the question when he went ahead and answered.
“Something’s up with The Monk. We’re going to have to step up the schedule.”
***
Hawke put his driving in check. Echo was nervous enough. She was rubbing her arm where the tattoos lay under her blouse. There was a cast of pensive determination on her face, and Hawke realized it was her way of looking worried. Two or three miles outside the main spoke of the village, Hawke pulled off the road onto sand half packed down by cars.
They were surrounded by an open valley spotted with scrub, and a few yards ahead of the truck stretched a huge, iron sculpture of a Chinese serpent dragon. There was a rusty, rough intricacy about it, with a massive head and a long row of arches stretching out behind as if its long body were slithering through the sand. It stretched half the length of a football field, and it was so bizarre and impressive a thing to find in such a place it almost erased the sudden news the worst part of Echo’s past was threatening to catch up with her before she’d even had a chance to escape it completely.
Hawke shut off the engine and mused over whether or not to tell her what DW had told him while setting up her new life, but it would have been redundant. She already knew. She was trying not to look at him as he sat drumming his fingers on the wheel. She put her hands in her lap and started doing something fretful with them.
“What is this?” she asked, allowing herself a brief distraction with the dragon.
“This local guy. Makes these things and puts them out here in the desert.”
She nodded as if it all made sense. He wondered if he should bother telling her it was a mistake to trust him more than he trusted himself, but he kept quiet. His eyes drifted to the filigree of ink on her hip where the cutoffs didn’t cover it all. He was aware of her watching his face as he studied the design. He reached across the seat and touched her decorated skin.
He suddenly realized he didn’t wonder what she’d be made of wrapped around a crisis anymore. It was what he’d been seeing in her ever since she’d arrived, but he knew she was still wondering as much about herself. Then he remembered that moment of grace in the way she’d crumpled in his arms through the shudders of her orgasm that morning. It was her body that collapsed, he who held her up, yet he was the one who broke inside.
“I can get ‘em changed,” she said, laying her fingers over his as they traced the lines and colors in her skin.
He shook his head. “When I was watching you yesterday from under the willow tree it was one of the first things I thought. You struck me as an impossible thing to hide. Like you were vibrating off the deep end. But since then…I’ve seen the way you look around and take it all in…like if you were decorating a room you’d put all the furniture inside it first before you started moving it around.”
She was looking away from him. Out her window at the dragon’s tail.
“You’re like a raven now,” he kept going. “Yeah, you’re worried, and you should be, but you know there’s always a way through things.”
“Yeah,” she said out the window. “Long as you find it in time.”
“That’s the thing about ravens,” he told her. “They always seem to figure it out.”
The tattooed part of her skin felt warmer than the rest somehow. She pressed his fingers deeper into her flesh.
“They say ravens mate for life,” she said. “But I don’t know how they can know things like that. Not for sure.”
He was quiet a moment longer. “I don’t think you should do anything to change the tattoos,” he finally said. She started to say something but then didn’t. “Yeah yeah, I know. They’re like the flag of your whole life. And I’m supposed to tell you to change them. Wear clothes that cover them up. I’m supposed to teach you how to change everything, down to the way you talk and move. But I don’t want to. The more I know you the less I want to see you change into something else.”
She turned her face back into the cab and looked at him with embers in her eyes.
“Most people who come to me need changing to begin with…but you…you’re like this Maori warrior princess, all inked up to be more beautiful and fearsome.
“Thing about Trey…he’s no more or less than a rattlesnake. Step in his nest and he’ll strike, but get him too far out of his comfort zone then all he can do is hiss and writhe until something bigger or smarter puts him out of everyone’s misery.
“Just keep moving,” he said. “Trey will never make it as far as you will.” He stopped a moment and took a breath. “I don’t know what else to say. I can’t remember when I’ve said this much all to one person.”
She leaned across the cab of the truck and put her lips to his scar. They never pursed into a full kiss – just touched him - light and warm. His palm slid to the inside of her thigh, and a light rush of her breath blew across the signature Trey had left on his face. He thought about the way breath was nothing but air you pull down inside your body only to push it back out along with a little bit of whatever you’re made of. He closed his eyes and dug his fingers into the stingy meat of her thigh.
“I think I knew that,” she said, laying her head onto his hard shoulder. “It’s not really Trey I’m running this hard from. It’s me.”
They sat in silence a moment or two, just looking out at the big, rusty dragon head. The tips of his fingers slid under the frayed hem of her cutoffs, just at the edge of her panties underneath. It felt like vibrant heat was pouring off her skin.
“He probably knows The Monk sent you here by now,” he said. “The sooner you go the better.”
Her face turned into his shoulder. “We won’t have enough time, will we?”
All the possible things there wouldn’t be enough time for hung in the air – memories that would never get off the ground.
“No,” he said, “but you don’t have time for any unfriendly confrontations, either.”
“What about you? What if he comes looking for me?”
“Your business with Trey is finished. I can explain it to him in a way he’ll understand.”
Desert wind was blowing fine dust through the tall, rusty arches of the dragon’s body. Echo’s face moved against his shoulder while her hand came to rest on his thigh.
“Do you think people are the sum total of everything they do?”
“Almost never,” he said. “We’re supposed to believe actions speak louder than words, but it’s a person’s thoughts that trump it all. People do all kinds of things, but what’s inside doesn’t always align with whatever’s on the outside. Whatever somebody does…what they’re really made of can be a lot more or less than it looks like.”
“Even psychopaths and whores?”
“You mean like you and Trey?”
She nodded against his shoulder without lifting her face.
“Especially psychopaths and whores,” he said.
“Sure,” she replied with weak conviction. “Is that your party line for all the whores you help escape their own catastrophes?”
Hawke sighed and shifted his weight, bringing his hand up from her thigh and gripping a firm but careful handful of her hair. He guided her head toward the rearview mirror, leaning in close so both sets of eyes were reflecting back from the rectangle of glass.
“Everything I do is bullshit,” he said. “No one can ever teach you how to be someone else. No one can make you into anything you’re not already made of. But if you think someone like Trey treating you like a whore makes you a whore then you’re wrong.”
Her eyes were darting back and forth between his and her own in the mirror. “What if that’s all I am?”
He tightened his grip on her hair and leaned them both closer to the mirror. “Look at her,” he said, staring into the reflection of her eyes. “Can you look at her and believe that? Can you look in those eyes and say it out loud?”
An indefinable sense of longing pushed against Hawke’s chest from inside as he watched moisture and shadows wrestle back and forth in Echo’s eyes. A brief tremor passed through her body and she turned her head down and shook it. She turned away, and he got out of the truck to give her the moment to grieve alone.
He walked toward the massive, rusty dragon’s head, standing more than twice his height where it rose up out of the sand. Five arches stretched out behind it, with a massive, iron tail jutting up out of the sand on the other side of the road. Hawke suddenly remembered it was the year of the dragon, and he estimated Echo had probably been born in another dragon year.
Live or die, it looked like it was going to be her year after all.
He sat down in the shade under the big head and leaned back against the dragon’s wide throat. Nothing ever seemed urgent under the desert sun, never until it got low and the burn of day flipped over and turned to pure chill. The chill was hours away, but Echo’s time was already here.
DW’s message from The Monk hadn’t really come from The Monk. Too many questions about Echo and Hawke weren’t right. DW had agreed with Hawke, that Trey had likely caught up with him in the trailer where he lived and did his business in information and introductions. Echo would have found out about The Monk through Trey, and even she had to have known it would only be a matter of time before he knew which way she’d turned. It would have been better if it had taken him longer to find out, though.
Hawke was only slightly worried about The Monk. Even Trey wasn’t crazy enough to kill him – not when all his prison sons like Hawke and DW were paying attention - but what he was capable of doing to Echo given the chance wasn’t an option.
She had to go. Hawke would wait, and when Trey showed up looking for her, they’d finish the business that had begun in prison years before. He would bury Trey under the willow where he meditated. He’d sit on the grave of the only true enemy he’d ever had and breathe his way into moments of grace. It wouldn’t matter what color Echo dyed her hair.
Hawke watched her cry in the truck. She was a living thing about to break into blossom, and she was rubbing off on him. For the first time since he could remember, a curiosity about love had settled down inside the meat of himself, and all he could do about it now was mourn.
***
Echo watched him lean his head back against the dragon and close his eyes. She wiped her own with the backs of her hands and got out of the truck. When she got close, he looked up and reached for her hand, pulling her down to sit with him in the sand. She followed his hand down in a natural gesture, sinking onto the sand between his legs and leaning back against his body. He was wider and harder than she was. It felt like a familiar place to be.
Hawke’s chest moved against her body with his breath. His chin came to rest on the top of her head while his hands laced across her belly. She thought about the look on his face when he’d gotten back in the truck at DW’s. The urgency was clear in his eyes without having to say the first word. She’d known. Her stomach had rolled over with dread, knowing she would have to run before she was ready.
Sitting as they were, nothing seemed urgent in the moment. Hawke seemed to just flow around her, the way it had felt that morning behind his house after he’d washed her hair. It was disorienting to feel embraced through a harrowing time.
His chin moved and settled onto her shoulder, bringing the side of his face the scar was on next to hers. The sensation of strength flowing into her from the cradle of his body lit up a sense of the strength already inside her.