Chapter Twenty-Seven - OLIVER
We breathe heavily for several seconds. My head bowed down into her breasts. My hands wanting to touch her everywhere at once. But if I let go of the cold, stone counter I’m gripping, I might collapse on top of her with relief.
On the wall, Younger Katya says, “Hey, Mr. Buckeye. You can plant your seed in me if you want.”
In the present, we laugh immediately at the sound of her voice. All smiles and satisfaction.
“Is that right?” I hear Younger Oliver saying.
I don’t need to look at the movie on the wall to know what’s happening. I am holding her tight. She is giggling like the girl she was. Squirming in my arms, blushing furiously with heat. Slightly embarrassed at her provocative words.
She has no idea what those words mean to a man like me. A man who wants roots more than the tree he grows in his living room.
But I know what they meant then and I take them to heart now.
How do you plan anything when all you see in your future is threats? When you have things hanging over your head like rape, and secret societies, and murder? How do you live with the fact that even when you’re in control, you’re never in control?
I wish the worst sin they had on me was murder.
I’ve watched that movie hundreds of times but Katya hasn’t. I didn’t put it together until after she’d gone. We had been dating—if you could call it dating—for about two months. We used to meet only at the church but we got bored with that quick enough. Pretty soon she’d show up outside at the bus stop. And then every day after work she was out there across the street. Sometime she wore the uniform. If she had sex on her mind. It drove me crazy because she only did it to tease me. Wave her jailbait status in front of my face like a temptation.
Not that I cared. I didn’t care.
You can plant your seed in me any time you want.
Nothing could stop me from fucking her when she asked for it.
But a girl is silly at that age. Innocent. Even girls like Katya, whom I have always known was a lot less innocent than she let on.
“Fuck me,” Younger Katya says. “Right here against the window.”
It’s funny that she was bothered by the idea of the large garage-door windows when she got here tonight. Because I fucked her up against them dozens of times back then. And there was no brick wall around the parking lot back then. No pine trees around the inside perimeter for privacy. No mirrored glass to hide behind.
But I don’t blame her. Times have changed for both of us.
“I have a surprise for you,” Younger Oliver says in the movie.
“I have a surprise for you,” I say, staring down at her peaked nipples as I make my plan.
Older Katya tips her head back and exposes her throat to me. It’s so… defenseless. She bares herself to me with her throat, not her nakedness. “Tell me,” she says. That scar is every vulnerability she has ever experienced wrapped up into one silver-white line of potential death.
On the wall the movie has skipped ahead to more sex. We recorded something almost every day we spent together. Sometimes it was just a quick thirty-second video if we were too busy having fun to care. But we always recorded the sex from start to finish.
“Stay here,” I say, looking her in the eyes to make sure she understands. She smiles as I pull back, tuck my dick away and zip my pants up so I can walk over to the drafting table I have on the other side of the room. It’s one of those slanted ones. I use it to design bikes and there are a dozen or so partial drawings of something I’m planning to build over the winter.
I glance over my shoulder, afraid for a second that she will disappear before I can capture her properly. But she’s just sitting there. Her shirt ripped open. Her face red from the sex. Her skirt hiked so far up her legs I can almost make out the lips of her pussy from here.
She smiles. Eases my mind with that smile.
And I look at my desk, find the brush markers sticking out of an old beer stein that says Breckenridge Oktoberfest, and grab a whole fistful of them.
“I know what you’re doing,” Younger Katya says in the movie just above my head.
I look up at her for a moment. Enjoy her as she was. Then turn away and enjoy her as she is now.
Older Katya knows what I’m doing too. Because she’s already taking off her clothes. Her blazer is on the floor. Just a puddle of dark blue wool. She slips her white blouse down her arms as I approach the counter and put my tools down, lining them up in a neat row from blackest black to lightest gray.
Katya stands and lets her little schoolgirl skirt fall down her legs with her underwear. She steps out of them and turns to face me. “What will you write about?” she asks.
“The same thing I always write about,” I tell her, grabbing a bunch of paper towels off the roll standing up on the counter and turning on the faucet so I can get them wet. “Get up on the counter.”
She places her hands flat on the stone and sits. Then lifts herself up to her full height above me.
I uncap a brush marker and close my eyes for a second to picture it all in my head.
And then I begin.
I start on her foot the way I used to. A stupid Roses are Red poem. Just something small and childish that can fit across the top of a foot. My touch affects her the same way it always did. She’s ticklish.
I smile at her as I make the letters. Fancy R’s and loopy L’s.
And then I move to the next foot and write a childhood rhyme. Red Rover, Red Rover, I’m gonna bend you over.
If I had a lot of time, I’d decorate it with flowers. But I doubt we’ll get that far tonight.
My hand wraps around her calf, another sensitive spot that makes her gasp, and then I begin a beautifully scrolling poem about something a little more serious.
You are in front of my window
Ready for me to take you
I remove your clothes and keep your rose
And when you leave
A part of you stays behind.
I use both legs to fit it all. When I look up at her she’s frowning. “What?” I ask.
“I wish you took my virginity.”
I glance at the movie on the wall. Katya is moaning as I lick her pussy. Her legs hiked up over my shoulders. Her hands holding on to my longer hair like she might float away.
The music is back. That hypnotic thrum that seems dark and ominous, but so completely captivating at the same time.
“Leave the past where it belongs,” I tell Kat now. “Time to move forward. Now sit and lie back so I can get to the best part.”
I hold out my hand so she can use it to lower herself. When her back hits the cold soapstone counter, she hisses some air through her teeth.
“You won’t be cold for long,” I say, rubbing her breasts.
Katya closes her eyes and enjoys the moment as I drop my pants to the floor, step out of them, and then climb up next to her, lifting her legs up to give me access. One knee on each side of her ass. Her legs drape over my legs until we are both comfortable.
My hand is on my cock, pumping it a little to get myself hard again. It doesn’t take much. I’m always ready for Kat.
I ease forward. My knees painfully pressing on the stone island until the tip of my cock finds the entrance of her pussy. I enter her and then relax.
I place both of my hands on her hipbones, helping her move in sync with me. It’s a long, slow fuck. Agonizingly slow. A slow you can only accomplish if you’ve recently come and your thoughts are more about the act of sex than the end result.
But we’re not fucking.
We’re making art now.
I leave my dick inside her as my marker takes on a life of its own. I sketch out the motorcycle on instinct only, switching between different shades of black and gray. I have been drawing bikes since I was little. My father had a habit of doing this too and there is one particular sketch he did that hangs on the wall in the Fort Collins Theater. A gift to my Aunt Rook back when they were young together. The bike belongs to my mother now, but it was Rook’s at first.
It’s the same drawing that graces my father’s back. My mother’s handiwork. And I always found it interesting that so many of the people in my life were interconnected by this one particular piece of machinery. My sister Jasmine did my ink years ago. Before I ever even met Katya. When the road was nothing but a dream that slipped me by and life was dark.
Every few minutes I stop sketching so I can fuck her. Flick the top of my dick up against her clit and make her whine and whimper.
“I can’t take it,” she mutters, over and over again each time I do this. Her hips rising up to make me penetrate her deeper.
But we both know she can take it. And we both know I’m fucking her deeply. I’m in her mind. I’m in her heart. I’m completely surrounding her soul.
When I start the lettering—a fully complete circle of words that ring the bike on her, just like they ring the bike on me—she begins to beg. “Let me come,” she whispers. “Please, let me come.”
I say nothing because this is the best part. He words and my words are different in every way. But in context, they are the same thing.
Around my bike they spell out my longing for a new life, a new direction, a new way forward.
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
And around her bike they spell out the satisfaction I could only find in her.
I give you my love more precious than money,
Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
Around her bike they are the completion of a journey.
I put my marker down and let out a sigh. Katya opens her eyes. “Are we done?” she asks.
I shake my head slowly. “No, darling. We’re just getting started.”
I fuck her for real then. For the first time since we met, I fuck her for real. Everything that came before this moment is junk. Trash. Pretending. Fake. And everything that will come after is genuine.
I place my hand over the tattoo just above my cock. The last promise I made that last night we spent together as kids.
You express me better than I express myself.
You shall be more to me than my poem.
And yes, I was a kid too, even though I was twenty-four. Everything that came before that night I inked my promise on her body was childhood. Silly wants and wishes. Delusions and hallucinations. The world of dreaming just for the sake of dreaming. Younger Oliver and Younger Katya are gone.
There is only here and now.
I kiss her when we come. Her moans filling my mouth like my cock fills her pussy. The music playing on repeat. The sex tape that is so much more than a sex tape. It is art and I would play it in public to pay homage to our love, if I could.
I don’t care that she’s here to betray me. I don’t care that she’s made a deal with the devil. I don’t care what my friends think of that. And I don’t care about the consequences.
I love her.
The heart wants what the heart wants.
I will throw everything away to keep her. I will betray everyone I know. I will make my own deal, sell my own soul if I can just walk beside her in this life. Hold her hand as we face the reality of our decisions together. Give her a home in me, in my love. A safe place where no such thing exists.
I know she is filled with lies. Lies people told her. Lies she has told me and lies she has told herself.
And I don’t care.
I have tried to be in control of things for as long as I can remember. It sucks. Making all the decisions sucks. Hiding from the past sucks. Keeping secrets sucks. I know hers, and now it’s time for her to know mine.
I have been in control for far too long and this is where it ends.
I give it over to her freely. Willingly. Completely.
This is where it ends.
In the background the movie is still playing. We are still fucking, and laughing, and oblivious to everything that comes after.
More… gimme more… gimme more.
“Oliver,” she says. I can feel her heart beating fast against mine. We are artists and we paint our pictures with sex. “Take me to bed.”
I smile about all of it. The lies, the betrayal, the anger and the hurt.
None of it makes any difference.
“Sure,” I say, getting up off her and then offering her my hand so I can pull her up from the black stone slab.
If sacrifices must be made on the altar of life… well, I’m OK with that.
There is no gain without pain. I came to terms with that fact a long, long time ago.
I lead her across the room and up the stairs, our naked bodies and bare feet absorbing the chill of the dark night. We make our own heat when I turn on the camera sitting atop the tripod and get into bed.
New movies filled with new memories. New art to replace the old.
It’s all I need.
Just her and me and the camera to document it all.
I want more.
More lies, more betrayal, more deceit, more fucked-up beginnings that lead to more fucked-up endings.
Bring it on, motherfuckers. We’re ready.
More… gimme more… gimme more.