Two Medicine (19 page)

“You gonna serenade me?”
she asked, looking up at me with her big, dark eyes.

“I
do
take requests,” I said a little
low-voiced, because I was staring back into her eyes and it made me
nervous and full of adrenaline at the same time.

I looked down at my guitar
neck, staring at the strings, desperate to think of a song I could
play that she’d know, or even like. I was drawing a blank when she
slide so close to me our hips were now touching, along with
everything else. She smelled so good. “Teach me something,” she
said quietly.

That helped. I had one
sure-fire song in my repertoire to teach someone in a pinch – it
was the easiest guitar song to play that was ever written, at least
the easiest guitar intro to a song ever written –
Silent Lucidity
by the
band Queensryche.

I slide the guitar over to her, which seemed
a huge instrument as her little arm draped over the front of his to
pluck the strings, as she cradled it in her lap.

I told her how to play the
two little notes at the beginning, and, since she was familiar with
the song, she was thrilled when she started playing it. She laughed
openly, obviously delighted at the sound of the song coming from
the strings, and she kept playing the two little notes as she
looked up at me, throwing her a strand of her dark hair back with a
shake of her head and then staring up at me again.

I leaned over and kissed
her, and it was on the neck that my lips touched. Her neck was
suddenly just there in front of me, so soft and smooth and exposed,
with little strands of hair meeting the nape – an area I could not
resist. I kissed her neck up and down a couple of times softly,
then moved up to her lips and we kissed, tentatively at first, then
deeply, pressing my lips heavily into hers, tasting her, then
backing away slightly to let our lips lightly touch, my arms around
her back and head. The guitar slid down off her lap onto the floor.
She caught it with her foot as it almost hit the floor and let it
rest softly down, even as we kissed.

I pulled her cheek aside
and kissed her neck again, both sides, as she pulled her long
straight hair back from my way. The arrowhead earring tickled my
nose. I kissed the little area where the neck meets the shoulder,
on her right side – a little spot I had been craving since I had
first seen her. She rubbed my back and then held the back of my
head while I kissed her, her hands buried in my hair.

We leaned back down into
the bed and I began kissing her silently as I lay on her left side,
half on top of her, but not wanting to crush her. I must have told
her she was beautiful about a million times. She whispered that she
loved my eyes and the way I looked at her. I kissed her head and
chest and shoulders, her neck and earlobes, that little spot below
the earlobes...

She stopped for a second
and smiled, and she said, “I wanted to do this the moment we met…
But you seemed so… unapproachable.”

Odd, given that fact that
I felt I had stared at her like a vulture when she first walked in
the store that day.

She kissed me and then she
rolled onto the top of me. She sat up, straddling my waist with her
prefect, brown thighs gripping me. My hands found her bottom and I
gripped her by her cheeks, my hands digging into her firmness. But
then she pulled my hands off, smiling, and scooted off the bed and
walked over to the door. I thought she was about to leave for a
moment, but then she switched off the light, and in a dimness only
illuminated by dusk outside the half-closed window she came back to
me, sitting back on top of me exactly as before.

She pulled my hand up and
slid it up under her t-shirt. I felt her small breast, her little
firm nipple between my fingers as I squeezed and held her in my
hand, and I began slide my other hand under her shirt.

She stared down at me as I
caressed both breasts, but I couldn’t see her face in the dim
light, just her silhouette. I felt too self-conscious to speak in
such a moment, and I thought she felt the same. But suddenly she
leaned down and kissed me, and then whispered in my ear, “Are you
for real? Can I trust you?”

“
I’m as real as you are,
Alia.”

Our lips were together
again, and then a blanket was over us as our clothes and our fears
and our doubts were shed. I entered her hungrily, beneath the
covers, smelling her fragrance and I held her so close that it felt
like we pressed into one. My hands explored every inch of her body,
all of the parts I had watched, and I kissed her a hundred
times.

Fifteen

Somewhere in the middle of
the night, I awoke and we were still cuddling, entangled – her face
on my chest and our legs intertwined as we held each other. She was
awake; I could feel her eyelids blinking and brushing against my
chest. Crickets chirped outside the window, and I could see a
clear, star-heavy night sky outside, through the branches in the
window.

“Will,” Alia
whispered.

“Yes?”

“I just want you to know that you made me so
happy when you asked me to spend time with you. Thank you for
hanging out with me.”

She said it so quietly
that it was hard for me to hear her tone of voice as she spoke, but
it sounded like she was almost pleading, but I couldn’t be
sure.

“Being with you,” I said
back to her, “is different than it has been with others. I don’t
know what it is, something about you… I had sworn off trying to
find someone to be with when I moved here – at least for a long
time.” I reached up and cradled her head in my hand.

I felt the tip of her
finger touch me on the lips, and then linger there for a moment.
She pulled it away slowly, and I felt her shudder.

“
You make me feel like I
can actually maybe be happy someday, Will, and I’ve never really
felt that,” she whispered. “All I want in life is to be with a
person who loves me, despite knowing everything about me, you know?
Someone who misses me when I’m gone?”

I kissed her on top of her
head, and she snuggled up closer to me, holding me tighter. “I even
missed you these last few days. I wondered if you would come back
at all,” I said in a voice heavy with feeling.

“I’ve never told anyone
this, Will,” she said. She repeated my name as if she liked the
sound of it on her lips. “But I want to move… to California. I want
to be an actress. It’s so stupid and corny that I don’t tell
anyone. But if can just get out there and work somewhere, anywhere,
be on the stage, or TV, I wouldn’t want anything else. Except
you.”

She squirmed even closer
into my arms. She reached up with her hand and ran her fingers
through my hair, kissing my neck and the underside of my
chin.

For a time, we just lay
there, her head on my chest, cuddled up to me. I stared up at the
dark wood paneling on the ceiling and just breathed in the scent of
her hair. I wondered about her dream of moving to California, and
thought it was no crazier than me moving to Two Medicine. The
crazier the dream the better.

I pulled her on top of me
and we kissed again, this time slowly, in no hurry. As we moved
together, now knowing each other better, I whispered in her ear a
thousand times that I loved her.

Sixteen

BAM, BAM, BAM! I opened my
eyes wide as the loud booming sound came from my door, instantly
wide awake. BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM! Larry; it had to be Larry. He
was pounding on the door with his big, meaty fist.

“WILL!” Larry bellowed,
“YOU’RE 30 MINUTES LATE TO WORK!”

I looked next to me on the
covers where Alia had lain all night. She was gone.

“
GET UP!” Larry shouted,
pounding on the door again.

I was furious at his
intrusion, treating me like a kid who overslept the bus to school.
“All right, I got it!” I shouted.

I heard him stomping down
the hall and back down the stairs to the kitchen. There was no sign
of Alia. It had not been a dream though, I told myself as I sat up
wearily in bed, because I could still smell her fragrance on the
pillow. I then noticed that she had left the necklace that she had
been wearing that night on her pillow. It was a small black string
necklace with a little stone arrowhead on it.

As I got dressed,
intentionally taking my time just to piss off Larry, but skipping
my usual morning shower, I grabbed the necklace on my way towards
the door. Pausing by the mirror, I put it on. It was small on me
and hung pretty close to my neck, like a choker almost. But it made
me feel like last night was more real and that a part of her was
still with me, so I wore it. As I left my room and trotted down the
stairs, I wondered how Alia had gotten home – probably had called a
friend yet again.
But why had she left so
silent and secretly?

All that day I worked the
front store in a haze, ringing up peoples’ selections of souvenirs
while barely looking at them, wrapping some of the more fragile
things like mugs and glasses in brown paper, and making change
robotically. Larry had left half way through that day to get
supplies in Browning, saying he said he wouldn’t be back until late
that night, which was welcome as far as I was concerned.

I kept reliving my night
together with Alia in my mind, running little movies of our time
together. It seemed like a fantasy but I could smell her on my skin
under my polo shirt, and I could almost taste her still, just
almost – so it had to be real. I imagined her breath on my neck
again as I held her close as we slept. It was a long shift, and the
whole day I kept wondering when I would see her again.

When it finally came time
to close, I counted down the register and locked the front doors.
Ronnie, who had been working in the back, came up to me. “How about
a bonfire tonight?” he asked, yawning. “I feel like burning some
things.” He shook a cardboard box he was holding and smiled at me
as he rattled the contents.

I looked warily at the
box. “What you got there buddy?”

“
It’s a
surprise.”

We walked back towards the
kitchen. Ronnie looked sideways at me, “So did you fuck
her?”

I shook my head. “Even if
I did I wouldn’t tell you, dude.”

He laughed at that. “That’s a yes.”

I didn’t answer; to
explain my night to Ronnie would have cheapened in, devaluing it to
the level of some drunken one nighter, of which Ronnie was a
master. I just pointed at the kitchen and nodded for him to go in.
He snorted and marched ahead of me; and we finished up closing down
the kitchen without any more talk about Alia. The necklace danged
from my deck as I washed the dishes left from the day’s shift, and
I imagined her coming in through the back door with a big smile,
giving me a hug. She didn’t appear, however.

After we finished
I went looking
for Katie
to invite her along with us to the fire that night. I tried to make
it a point to invite her every time Ronnie and I hung out, because
I knew she was lonely and sad, always reading her books and sipping
her tea, perpetually alone and moody as a result. She liked
solitude, sure, but also she seemed unhappy alone. And that night I
found her sitting on the back porch of the store, lit by the fading
sun light above Rising Wolf’s peak. She was reading a thick,
leather book; and the sunlight made her hair shine, giving her an
angelic, otherworldly aura.

“
Hey Katie, how was
kitchen duty?” I sat down beside her, taking in the vista of Rising
Wolf towering over us, backlit by orange and red sunlight streaking
across the sky, igniting the long, thin clouds that stretched out
to the horizon.

“
Peachy,” she said,
looking up at me after a moment and then back at her book. “Sorry I
didn’t help you guys clean up, but some guy ordered like 20
Huckleberry shakes today and the blender broke in the middle of
making them. I just dumped it all in a bucket and froze it to make
ice cream – gave him and his gang of kids the whole bucket to make
amends.”

She spoke in a voice that
was always a little bored and a little irritated at the same
time.

“
Watcha reading?” I asked
her, trying to get her on a subject more in her line.

“
The Bible.”

I looked down at the book
as if she held some rare antique in her hands, or was reading
Egyptian hieroglyphics. I don’t think I had ever seen anyone just
sitting around reading a Bible, outside of church – even in church
for that matter. My own religious upbringing had consisted of one
yearly church service on Christmas, and that wasn’t guaranteed
either. The Bible in her hands gave the glowing sun halo in her
hair an even more spiritual effect.

“
A little light reading?”
I asked.

She smiled slightly, “This
book is actually full of intrigue, betrayal, sex, violence, love,
death, war, peace… so I’d say that’s a definite ‘no.’”

She folded a corner of the
page and closed the book. The cover was very worn, like someone had
paged through it a million times. Thinking back to my church days,
I had always noticed that a much-used Bible develops a personality
of its own. Handled and careworn like a favorite baseball glove,
they took on the shape of the owner. Katie’s was battered and
bruised.