For A Good Time, Call... (16 page)

When
I was panting again, whimpering against his exploration, he leaned
over, reaching into the nightstand and pulling out a condom foil. I
watched as he slid it on, watching me with a fierceness that was
almost scary.

He
moved forward, going down on his forearms, and taking my lower lip
between his teeth. I felt his weight settle on top of me, his chest
hair teasing my hardened nipples. His hips pushed against mine and I
felt his hardness against my inner thigh.

“You
ready?” he asked, then smiled. “I mean, I know you're
ready,” he said, licking his lips, tasting me there still. “But
are you sure?”

I
smiled up at him, my arms going to his shoulders. “Never been
more sure of anything in my life,” I said, leaning up and
planting a quick kiss to his lips.

He
reached down between us, settling his cock at my threshold, pausing
there, pressing but not penetrating. I rocked my hips against it,
shameless with my need. He made a chuckling sound somewhere deep in
his chest then, with his eyes on mine, he thrust once forward,
pushing all the way inside.

A
surprised cry escaped my lips as I felt his thickness spread me, just
shy of painful, a tight pulling sensation that felt foreign but
right. Like I had been missing it all along. “Fuck,” he
said, dropping his forehead to mine, taking a deep breath. “You're
so fucking tight,” he ground out from between clenched teeth.

I
felt my insides pulling at him, begging for the motion I needed. The
motion he wasn't giving me.

“Hunter,
please,” I whimpered, my hands grabbing at his shoulders.

He
lifted his head, looking down at me, a smirk on his face. “Please
what, baby?” he asked, innocently.

I
half laughed, half groaned. “Please fuck me,” I said,
digging my nails across his back.

“Well,
if you insist,” he said, pulling out and slamming forward
again.

He
smiled down at me then withdrew again, rocking his hips into my
quickly. Because we were both too desperate to take it slowly. We
were both too close already. My hips rose up to meet his thrusts,
pulling him deeper. I felt myself tightening around him with each
thrust forward.

To
my ears, everything sounded muted. His harsh breath, his quiet
groans. My own moans. But I knew I was loud enough to wake the
neighbors, completely lost in him, in the sensations I had never felt
before.

“That's
it,” he said, sounding winded. “Come for me baby. I want
to feel your pussy grab me.”

My
hips rose to meet his one more time and I felt myself teeter on the
edge then plunge over, my body shooting into my orgasm so hard that I
saw white. My fingers raked across his back as I cried out his name,
burying my face in his neck.

“Fuck,
Fee,” he growled out as he slammed forward, twitching deep
inside me as he came.

We
laid there exactly that way for a long time, our hearts slamming in
our chests, our breathing ragged on each others skin. Hunter turned
his face slightly, kissing my jaw, before pushing up and looking down
at me. “Not that the phone sex wasn't great,” he started,
smiling in a tired way. “but Jesus Christ, Fee,” he said,
leaning down and kissing me once more before moving off of me, out of
me, and turning away for a moment.

I
felt oddly empty when he was gone, completely aware of my nakedness,
but unconcerned with it. I watched his back until he turned back to
me, sliding into the empty space next to me. He slipped a hand under
my shoulders, turning me onto my side and pulling my across his
chest.

We
laid like that for a long time, my leg moving up over his hips. His
hands moved lazily up and down my back, stopping just below my tattoo
that was burning sightly from all the squirming around. “You
alright?” he asked, sounding half asleep.

And
I was. Maybe for the first time ever, I was fine. Good even.

Beneath
me, he drifted off to sleep, his hand still and heavy at my hips. I
traced shapes on his skin as I breathed in his sawdust soap smell
that still clung to him despite not actually being around any sawdust
that morning.

So
that was what sex was supposed to be like. That was what I had been
missing, what my body had begged for until it gave up. Until it
forgot to want it anymore. Now the floodgates were open, and I
wanted. Oh, how I wanted. I almost felt bad at how much I was going
to take advantage of Hunter. Up and down the hall and through the
floor.

I
woke up a while later on my back, my arm thrown up over my head,
asleep and throbbing painfully. Hunter was on his side next to me,
his hair wild and his eyes hazy. He was staring at my chest. When he
noticed I was up, he reached out, touching one of my scars.

“How
do you feel about these?” he asked.

I
pulled my arm down, feeling it drop heavily to the mattress. “Feel
about them?” I asked, still struggling against my sleep-cloudy
brain. “I hate them.”

He
nodded, still stroking the soft skin. “I could cover them,”
he said, looking up at me.

“What
do you mean cover them?”

“Well
you know what underbust tattoos are, right?” he asked. “They're
really popular now.”

I
thought of all the pictures I had poured over. So many of them with
girls holding their hands up to cover their nipples as the tattoo
draped under one breast, moved up between them, then draped under the
other. They were always intricate, lace-like. Beautiful.

“Yeah,”
I said carefully, not letting myself hope too much. “But...these
are... big scars. Can you even tattoo on a scar?” I asked,
knowing how I had never grown hair on the marks between my legs when
I hit puberty.

“Yeah,”
he said, stroking again. “A lot of women tattoo to cover
mastectomy scars now. Some even tattoo ink bras over their breasts to
hide them. It covers.”

There
was a heaviness in my chest as the realization settled in. I wouldn't
have to live with them. Pretend they weren't there. Avert my eyes
when I looked in the mirror. I wouldn't spend every day of my life
with my awful past etched into my skin. All thanks to Hunter.

“Will
you do it for me?” I asked, my voice sounding more emotional
than I wanted it to.

He
looked up at me for a second, then bent down at kissed the center of
each scar. “Of course I will.” He said it easily, like
that had been the plan all along. “I could maybe do something
about these,” he said, touching the word without a trace of
hesitation. “I saw a woman tattoo a phoenix across here. It
went up her belly and the tail went down over the side of her thigh,”
he said, stroking his hand down over my self-inflicted cuts. “These
could be a memory too.”

And
I would think twice about slicing into something beautiful that he
had painstaking made a part of my skin. True, maybe I would just find
a new place to cut open. But there was a chance, albeit small, that
the sayings were right: time does heal. Maybe that was what this was.
Maybe this was healing.

“Hey,”
I said quietly and his eyes met mine. I found no strangeness there.
No disgust. But, better yet, no pity. I leaned down, grabbing his
face and pulling it to mine, letting myself kiss him with every
failed hope, lost dream, every frustrated moment of low self-esteem,
every hidden, dark, secret, shameful thing. I kissed him like
therapy. Like I could pour it all into him and finally be free.

And
he sensed it. His hands went to my face, cradling it softly as I
purged all the old away, leaving room for the new, for him, to sink
in.

He
pulled away slowly, giving me a small smile. Then laying down on the
mattress next to me, rolling us both on the sides to face each other.

“So,”
he started.

“So...”
I said, smiling.

“Tell
me your story, Fee.”

“My
story?” I asked, sounding confused. Because I was. I had
already told him the awful, ugliest parts of me. I told him things I
had never told anyone and he wanted more. “You want more?”
I asked, feeling uncertain.

“Oh,
Fee,” he said, reaching out to touch my cheek. “I want
everything.”

Sixteen

How
were you supposed to start? How do you tell someone the entire story
of your life? How do you find those kinds of words?

As
if sensing my dilemma, he let his hand drop, grabbing mine. “How
about your mother. Tell me about her.”

My
mother. I had such guilt about my mother. I remembered when I left,
how I had learned to hate her. Almost as much as my father. More at
times. Because she was supposed to protect me. She was supposed to
save me from his torment. And I hated her for letting me suffer while
she stood by and did nothing.

It
took me a long time, maybe a year after I found what had happened, to
forgive her. To understand. “My mom was damaged. She was raised
with an abusive father. I think it was easy for her to just...
continue the cycle, bow down before another abusive man. And she was
never good enough for my father. He was always picking at her. At how
she cooked, how she cleaned house, raised us. But, most of all, how
she wasn't a religious enough woman.”

“But
she must have had a rebellious streak to teach you to read,”
Hunter said, nuzzling his face into my neck.

“Yeah.
And she named me Fiona. I was supposed to be Mary, but because my
father didn't go in the delivery room... my mom named me Fiona. After
her mother. And,” I said, thinking of her running out barefoot
in the snow, her eyes wild. “when my father was doing this,”
I said, waving toward my crotch. “she... set the living room on
fire.”

“What?”
he said, popping his head up.

“Yeah.
I guess she knew she could never make him stop. And he seemed like he
would be happy to carve into me until there was nothing left, that's
how angry he was. So she took a stick and set the side of the chair
next to the fireplace on fire. She waited until it was going good and
ran out and screamed for my father.”

“Wow,”
Hunter said, reaching out and rubbing my hip.

“Yeah.
I felt so bad for not realizing what she had done for me while I was
growing up. The small ways she had looked out for me. Protected me.”

“You
see it now,” he said, shrugging.

“Too
late though,” I said. “I was so angry when I ran away
from home. So, so angry. I had been beaten that morning for not
getting my chores done early enough. I had to go have breakfast with
my grandmother and my father was in rare form. I couldn't even sit
down when I got to Gram's house with my backpack I said was filled
with my sewing, but was actually spare clothes and the money I had
stolen out of my father's bible. When my grandmother went into the
kitchen to get the tea, I ran. I ran and ran and ran, every step of
the way cursing my father and mother.”

“It's
never too late to tell her you saw what she did, Fee.”

“But
it is,” I said. “The day I ran away, just hours after she
knew I was gone, she knew I would never be in his grasps again, she
took my father's hunting knife, the same one that cut me up, went out
into the woods and killed herself.”

“Jesus,”
Hunter hissed. “Fee... I'm so sorry.”

I
shook my head. “No. Don't be. I realized after I heard about
it... two years later... that that was all she had wanted to do for
twenty years. Twenty years she spent being belittled and beaten and
forced into humiliating sex with my father. She had thought about
death every day. But she endured it. For me. Because she needed to
protect me. She needed to prepare me for the day when I would escape.
Like she never could. And once I did, she got to have her own sort of
escape too.”

Hunter
scooted closer, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me close. “So
what happened after you ran?”

“I
ran here. Even living like I lived, shut off from the world, I had
heard about the city. My father ranted and raved about the sinners
here. About it being the new Sodom and Gomorrah. People fornicated on
the streets. Men sodomized each other. Women lifted their skirts to
good, religious men who crossed their paths, pulling them into their
debauchery...”

“Sounds
like a fun place to be,” Hunter said against my shoulder.

“Exactly,”
I said, smiling. “I figured if there was one place he wouldn't
go to find me, it would be a place damned to be consumed with fire
and brimstone. So I made my way here, taking a buss for the first
time, a train for the first time. Then I stepped out of the station
onto the streets and I knew I was home.”

“Where
did you go?”

“Well,
that's the thing,” I said, shaking my head. “I wasn't
exactly prepared. It had been such a rash decision and I knew so
little about money and how to take care of myself...”

“You
were on the streets,” Hunter supplied, moving away to look at
me.

“Yeah.”

“For
how long?”

“About
two years. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. I mean it was bad. I was so
hungry and cold and scared... all the time. But I was on my own. No
one was going to beat me for not being godly enough. No one was going
to carve me up like a turkey. And no one told me I couldn't do
things. Like read. Learn. I went to the library and I read...
everything. I ate what people felt bad enough to feed me. I put up my
walls and I tried to figure out a way out of it.” I thought
about the makeshift showers in the fast food bathrooms. The cleaning
myself up so I could go for interviews. The jobs I could never keep
for very long. But they offered me some money. A way to buy a phone.
To buy rental time on a computer cafe. A way to start my business.