about ready to bust my load wide open but I pull out again anyway.
“Please,” she moans, shaking her head from side to side, “I need…”
I climb on top of her. “Look at me.”
She’s drunk with passion, can hardly hear me. “Wha-“
With a roar I grab her face in my palm, my fingers digging into her soft cheeks until she winces.
“Look at me, Loren Savage! You better open up and fucking see me!”
She opens her eyes and there must be something terrible about the look on my face because they widen with alarm. That’s when I plunge into her again. Hard. Deliberate. She responds with a wild buck of her hips and a scream of pleasure that’s swiftly drowned with my mouth.
I’d told her I wouldn’t kiss her and true to my word, this is no kiss. This is a ruthless invasion of tongue and force that doesn’t let up until we are both trembling from the spasms of our violent climax.
“Oscar,” she sighs softly when I finally let go of her.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
No, that’s not this night. That was another night, a long time ago. It happened to two utterly different people who are long gone. They won’t be coming back.
I don’t watch her as she pulls her clothes back on. I sit there on the edge of the tailgate, naked and hollow, saying nothing. Every ten seconds or so a flash of lightning burns the sky and shows the mountains hiding in the dark. The wind kicks up slightly, rustling the dry mesquite leaves and stirring the dust on the desert floor.
Ren is beside me now, waiting. Waiting for me to say a word, waiting for me to hop back in my truck and leave her out here to find her way back alone. Without acknowledging her at all I manage to locate my clothes in the dust.
The used condom has already been tossed somewhere into the darkness. Usually I’m scrupulous about such things but fuck it. The desert can keep that one little sordid piece of us.
Once I’m behind the wheel again, Ren climbs into the passenger seat beside me and folds her hands primly in her lap as I steer the truck back to Atlantis. There are lights on in the big house, not surprising since it isn’t really that late. It’s not even nine o’clock.
I brake to a stop about fifty yards away from the house, close to the sadly overgrown plot of what was once a fake cemetery in a dozen old west movies. On one side, the caretaker’s house squats behind the dark, silent brothel. On the other the white clapboard church stands sentinel. Last week when I ducked inside there I noticed weeds poking through the floorboards and thought it was possible no one had walked the floor in years. I suppose that for Spencer the old church is simply not a caretaking priority. It’ll probably just fall over one of these days. In the distance, the faded letters on the broad Mercantile are visible if I squint. I allow myself to have a few seconds to take in what I can see of the place in the dark because I’ve already made up my mind.
This will be the last time I ever see Atlantis Star. This will be the last time I see Ren.
She already has her hand on the door but she pauses without opening it. If she’s waiting for some poignant last words she’s not going to get them. Even though my heart is full of chaos, confusion, even sorrow, it has to be this way. If I ever had any doubts that we’re an unhealthy mix, that frenzied fuck fest in the desert just answered everything.
I never really did want to hurt her. Not years ago when she kicked me out of her life, not when I landed back in Atlantis amid all the surreal camera craziness and not even tonight when she opened her legs and begged me to.
She was, and is, the owner of my heart.
She whispers my name. “Oz.”
I have to pretend I just don’t hear it because I’m aching to pull her against my chest and stubbornly keep her no matter what it might do to my sanity.
I just turn my head and face the open window. It’s as definite a refusal as I can muster without saying the words. If I try to say anything right now I know I won’t end up leaving. And at this point I’m leaving as