Chapter Twenty-One - Tyler & Maddie
TYLER
The balls.
That’s where she knees me.
Right in the balls.
And I’m not gonna lie, it feels pretty good.
“Maddie!” I stage-whisper. (Which is a term I learned back in good old Speech and Debate.) “Maddie, stop thrashing! It’s me.”
She stops flailing but I can feel her still shaking underneath me, her coiled energy causing her to vibrate. She is what in Sanskrit is called Kundalini and what is represented in imagery by a female serpent.
Yeah. That sounds about right.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she shout-whispers back.
“Helping!” I say. “Saving you from whatever the fuck! You didn’t check in. You were supposed to check in. You didn’t check in. So I’m here. This should not be surprising.”
“I’m not surprised!” she says. “I’m…” I wait for it but get no more words. She just stares at me.
Finally, “What?” I say.
And then she grabs my face and kisses me on the mouth. Hard. And I know it’s been less than forty-eight hours since she last pressed her lips to mine, but it may as well have been since time before time. Because I think I’m gonna start fucking crying.
Grabbing her face in return, I kiss her hard back, and then my hands are fumbling down her sides, reaching for her ass. She grinds her hips into me as I claw at the bottom of her dress, dragging the material up her legs and digging my fingers into her skin.
“Stop,” she says. “Stop.”
“No. Why?” I pant, still kissing.
“Uh…” She gestures outward with a we’re-in-the-middle-of-a-beach-out-in-the-open-with-drug-lords-and-armed-guards-and-shit-all-around-us look on her face. And, I can’t deny it, she makes a good point.
But still.
So I shrug and keep kissing her, letting my hand find its way up the inside of her thigh, under the hem of her dress, pushing her panties aside and discovering that she’s already wet.
“Doesn’t seem like you think it’s that bad of an idea,” I murmur, still nibbling at her red, pouty lips.
“We. Could. Get. Killed,” she grunts out in between gasps of breath as my fingers slide inside her.
“Yeah, well, this is how I’d want to die,” I tell her.
“Uh-huh,” she whines, and nods her head. And then she’s seizing my belt, unfastening it, and working my pants down my hips. She uses her feet to push them all the way down to my ankles so that our lips don’t have to separate as we continue recklessly, wantonly, foolishly consuming each other’s life force.
Because she’s right. This moment—this here, this expression of passion and love for each other—could get us killed.
So we may as well make it fucking count.
MADDIE
This is a bad, bad idea. Bad? No. Catastrophic. But I don’t give a shit. I want him so much that I don’t care if we get annihilated in a meteor shower of bullets. Or in an actual meteor shower, for that matter. Or if the sea decides to become angry and swallow us whole, dragging us both into the briny unknown. I just don’t care. I want him.
I want him to purge me of the feeling of Carlos. Of Carlos’s body against mine. Of his lips on mine. Of his fingers touching my skin. I want to feel Tyler inside me instead and, in this most ridiculously unsafe of situations, feel safe.
I take his cock in my hand even as he pulls my underwear down. He has to contort himself to draw my legs free of the fabric, but I won’t let him go. His dick is throbbing so fast. It feels like I’m holding his heart.
With my dress hiked up and my bare ass resting on the sandy beach, I can close my eyes and pretend that we’re somewhere else. On some island vacation somewhere. Maybe twenty, thirty years from now. Still hot for each other. Still ready to fuck any time, any place.
It’s so weird. I’m not a schmaltzy chick. All that destined-to-be-together crap that people believe in, I don’t. Not usually. But after all this time and all that I’ve been through and all that he’s been through, the fact that we’re here now, together, well… I mean there are seven billion people on the planet, and yet here we are.
So maybe this was all supposed to be. Maybe everything’s gonna turn out OK.
I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing. I wonder if he’s as scared as I am, but willing to put it aside for this chance to hold each other this way. I don’t know for sure if he feels the way I do, but I do know that just in case everything doesn’t all turn out OK…
We may as well make it fucking count.
TYLER
I press my lips to hers again as I thrust my hips forward and enter her. She throws her head back and moans, but just as she does, I hear some shouting in Spanish off to my left. I know she hears it too because she stops moaning and we both freeze for a second. We try to stop our breathing, but both of us gasp in and out in short, sharp bursts. But we manage to still ourselves, me resting inside her.
After a moment the voices disappear off into the other direction and I lift my head to see if I can spot anything. I see nothing but beach and sea and the lights of the—whatever the hell it is. City?—that Carlos has built for himself here. And then my eyes are back on her.
This whole thing is so totally over the top that I can’t help but find it funny. I tap her on the nose with my index finger and she looks at me oddly.
“What?” she asks.
“I love your fucking nose,” I say.
“Yeah?” she responds, beginning to move her hips again.
I swallow and manage to croak out, “Yeah,” before I lose interest in speaking and grind along with her.
She’s holding my ass now. Her fingers pressing into my skin. Pushing me into her deeper. Her eyes are closed tightly and the expression on her face is caught somewhere between joy, pain, and that look people have when they’re dreaming and to them, in that moment, the dream is real.
My hands are on her hips and I hadn’t noticed before, but they wrap almost all the way around her. I have large hands. I can palm a basketball no problem. But even still, it strikes me just how fragile and malleable her flesh is under my touch.
Pulling her back and forth under me causes her to want to make noise, but she knows she can’t, so she’s stuffing it down. When she comes, all that pent-up energy has to go somewhere though, so I’m bracing for the pornographic air-raid siren that’s likely to echo out of her when she lets go.
To counter the fact that she’s trying not to scream, she digs her fingers into to me harder and harder. As if all that noise has found its way into her limbs and is trying to escape. I can feel her nails digging into my ass cheeks and the sensation of it make me harder. And as my cock stiffens even more, it fills her up entirely, pressing against her pussy walls, consuming all the space inside.
She’s biting her lip, trying not to make any noise. “Goddamn it,” she whispers, turning her head to the side. Unfortunately, I’m not helping matters because everything she does is driving me crazy and it makes me fuck her that much more enthusiastically.
The puffs of air leaving her nose let me know that she’s close. There’s the hint of a whimper along with her breathing and I’m gasping now too. But just then…
More voices. Again in Spanish. Shit.
I lift my head to see if I can spy anyone, but Maddie doesn’t care if anyone’s there. She just wants me. She wants my attention. I know, because what she does now gets it back on her in a hurry.
MADDIE
As my finger finds its way inside his asshole, I’m not sure how he’ll react. I’ve actually never done it to a guy before, I don’t think. But in my understanding, it can go either very, very well, or very, very badly. And I didn’t know I was going to do it. It just happened.
I was already clinging to his ass for dear life and then when he took his gaze up and away, I… I dunno. I panicked or something. I don’t want it to be over just yet. I know that we need to hurry and get out of here, but I want us to be the ones to decide we’re ready to go. Not be forced to stop what we’re doing just because we might get killed. I mean, hell, people die every day, right? But what’s happening between us now happens… well… never.
As my middle finger slides in between his ass cheeks and finds the opening inside, his head snaps back to face me. His eyes are wide. Not in surprise exactly. It’s something else. I think it’s… delight. In fact, I know it is. Because he’s got a little smile. And the smile turns me on so much that I push harder. Just a bit. Seeing how far he’ll let me go.
The smile spreads and he nods a tiny nod that says, It’s OK. I can feel myself biting my bottom lip as I press my finger deeper and a noise comes out of him, from the back of his throat, like a stifled groan. Like he wants to moan and say dirty shit to me, but he knows he can’t, so he stuffs it down and it’s just a squeak.
And he’s pounding into me now. I feel that he wants to be as far into me as I am into him. And he takes one hand off my hip and works it between our bellies so that he can land his thumb on my clit. I shake my head at him because I don’t know if I can take it. But he smiles and nods his head at me as he begins rubbing me savagely.
If we are to die tonight, let it happen now.
I know that’s a morbid thought, but it’s the one that lands on me.
I’m not a dumb person. I’m not a naïve person. There are many, many people who have suffered immeasurably more than I have. I’ve seen it. And there are those who have suffered more than I can imagine, who I’ve never seen. But my pain is mine. It happened to me. And even though it may make no sense, I held onto it because to share it would make it less mine.
But now I have. Shared it. I’ve shared everything. With the one person in the world who could’ve abated it sooner and didn’t. The same person I blamed for compounding it. And the only person who could have ever really understood it. And it doesn’t feel like it’s less mine. It feels like it’s just… ours.
And so, if we are to be taken away from each other in this world, I’d rather it happen while we are totally, completely joined than not. In French, orgasms are known as le petit mort. The little death. So hell. Let’s just go fucking all in.
My lips press together and I nod at him, trying to let him know that I’m about to come. But his eyes are closed and his expression is contorted, which I think is him trying not to come yet. What a gentleman. So I do what I have to do to get his attention. I slap him across the face with my free hand.
His eyes pop open like he forgot where he was, but he never lets up on the churning energy that propels him in and out. And when my eyes widen and I nod, he gives me a tiny, urgent nod in return. His thumb strums at my clit. My finger drives deeper into his ass. My hips make tiny circles under him as his back arches and crashes down with each penetrating thrust. And at the moment I come, he does too. Both of us struggling not to make a noise as the tiny grim reaper waves his sickle and we die in and around each other in exquisite anguish as our mute desire gives way to the sound of crashing waves.
TYLER
When I was ten, they demolished the Aladdin Hotel and Casino on the Strip. Scotty, Evan, and I skipped school to watch it in person. It was an implosion. Four floors of dynamite that went boom and brought the entire thing down on itself. Implosions are deceptive, because they just look like a collapse. Like it seems less messy and violent than an explosion.
They may be less messy in that they consolidate the debris to a more manageable space, but they are no less violent. The power, the force that’s required to bring a building down is just as severe as that required to blow it up. Entropy. Chaos. All that science shit. But when all is said and done, the only thing that matters is that something extremely fucking major is happening to a physical object.
Without the ability to scream, or moan, or shout, “Oh, fuck yeah!” what Maddie and I experience is something akin to an implosion. All that force. All that shared energy. All that power between us. It just causes us to collapse into each other.
Her body goes limp beneath me, drained of all its strength, and I fall limp on top of her, equally spent. It’s not that we fucked so hard. We’ve fucked harder. It’s that we were both revving at an insanely high acceleration when we crashed into each other. And now we should be allowed to rest.
But we can’t.
I pull out of her, and it’s the loneliest my cock has felt in a long, long time. Probably ever. The look on her face when I exit makes me wanna murder somebody. I mean, the truth is it makes me wanna cry, but I can’t afford to do that right now, so I convert that sorrow into anger.
Because as I pull my pants up and she cleans herself off, I am reminded of where we are. I almost forgot. Hidden behind this dune, bathed in the wash of a Christmas moon, it felt for a second like we were actually living the life I wished for us when she was packing in her bedroom. In some hidden locale, stashed away in paradise, living out our days off the grid and all alone.
But yet again, I hear shouting in Spanish from down the beach and remember, yeah, we ain’t there just yet.
I grab her panties when she’s not looking and stick them in my pocket. I don’t know why I do it. I just want to keep this moment with me for longer or something. It’s weird, I suppose. Or else it makes all the sense in the world. I dunno.
And then, leaning close to her, I whisper, “Hey. So, what happened? Why didn’t you check in?”
“I couldn’t,” she says, straightening out her dress and sitting up next to me to also look and see if anyone might be coming.
“Why? Did he, like, fucking tie you up or something?” I want the answer to be ‘no,’ but a small part of me wants it to be ‘yes,’ so that before getting out of here I can feel justified in killing this motherfucker.
“No. No, we had dinner and then he watched me sleep.”
“He watched you sleep?”
“I think so.”
“Jesus.” Then I amend with, “I mean, he’s not wrong to want to do that, but still… Fucking weirdo.”
“Yeah. Tyler?” she says, with more concern than makes me comfortable.
“Yeah?” I stroke her cheek.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” Huh. That is not what I expected to come out of her mouth next.
“Whattayou mean?”
“I mean… I mean, yeah, I know I didn’t call, but shit, dude. I had it under control.”
“Well, I didn’t fuckin’ know. And we had a deal.”
“Fair enough, but the deal didn’t include you starting a full-scale war with the guy.”
The phrase “full-scale war” lands on me hard. “Shit. I am Rambo,” I mutter.
“What?”
“Nothing. Look, I’m fuckin’ sorry, but I don’t care what kind of warranty you got when you bought that drone. Shit’s defective.”
“Or you can’t fly it.”
I’m not arguing this point right now. “Hey! All I could think was that something fucking awful had happened to you and I had to come get you. If I had done it my way, I would’ve just crashed through the front door and started looking to make sure you were all right. I thought I owed it to you to be a little more tactical.”
“So you’re saying this is my fault?”
“Yeah. Maybe? Little bit?”
She looks at me like she can’t fucking believe my gall. And she shouldn’t. But then she laughs. She laughs the laugh of a person you’ve known your whole life but who still manages to surprise you. She laughs the laugh that you laugh when you’re infuriated and scared, but when you step back to look at everything, it’s just too ridiculous not to laugh. She laughs the laugh of a person who loves you.
Me.
Who loves me.
She loves me.
And that’s all that matters in the world.
Well, that and the distant shouting I continue to hear that reminds me we still have to get the fuck out of here alive somehow.
“What’s with all this?” she asks, referring to my dark clothes.
“Tactical night operations. I slipped it on when this went from a daytime raid to an evening affair.”
“An evening affair,” she repeats.
“Yeah. Sorry I didn’t bring a tux. This’ll have to do. But look, while I could chat fashion choices—you look great, by the way—all night, we gotta get the fuck outta here.”
“No shit. Where’s your car?”
You know those moments in life when someone asks you a question that you know the answer to, but your brain just malfunctions and it’s like they’re speaking, I dunno, Basque or some shit?
I do.
“What’s that?” I ask, like I didn’t hear her.
“Where’s your car? Can we make it there from here without being seen?”
Again, it’s like she’s talking Zulu.
“My car… Yeah. Um. So…”
This is not a moment when you want to be slowing down the forward momentum of a situation by explaining a lot of shit, so in this second, I’m figuring out how to explain clearly but still efficiently. Her mouth is open in a way that suggests maybe if she prompts me to speak, she’ll somehow plant the words in mine.
Just like when I went to tail Logan into the strip club the day he got his ass kicked by Maddie and I found myself playing checkers instead of chess, not thinking two moves ahead… Boy, do I have egg on my face now.
And then something either fortunate or unfortunate happens, depending on how you look at it.
It’s fortunate inasmuch as I am spared the embarrassment of explaining to Maddie what happened to Chocolate Thunder. (That’s what I named the Defender. So dubbed after my favorite basketball player of all time, the great Darryl Dawkins, who played on the Philadelphia 76ers with Dr. J. Before my time, but in clips I’ve seen, dude was a savage on the rim. RIP, Double D. Wow. So not the time to be thinking about this…)
It is deeply unfortunate in that apparently even thinking about Unlucky Logan has summoned him into being. Because from behind us, in the total opposite direction from which we’ve been looking, I hear what feels to my ear like the bolt of a Kalashnikov rifle being cocked, followed by, “Tyler. My amigo. So good to see you again.”
I close my eyes, take a breath, open them and see Maddie looking terrified, before I turn to—sure enough—see good old Logan strolling up with his fucked-up face and his AK-47. Shit. Unlucky Tyler doesn’t have the same ring, but it’s what I am at the moment. Or maybe just Stupid fuckin’ Tyler. But. I gotta be me. So…
“Logan! Oh, shit! Are you my Secret Santa? Well, color me surprised.”
Logan smiles a little and nods. It looks like it hurts him to smile, with his busted chops and all, and that makes me happy. Ricky, who is on Logan’s six, and who looks incredibly unsettled, does not smile. Eh. Fuck him. I know it was a solid joke.
In reference to Ricky, I say, “Hey, look! It’s your girlfriend! I haven’t seen the two of you together since I fucked him up in the alley that time. Wow… Logan. I gotta say, he looks like he’s healed up from that beating. You? Buddy. Did Maddie have another go at you?”
I like that move for a couple reasons. One: It lets Ricky know that I’m not stupid enough to blow his cover. I can tell he appreciates it because his body language shifts ever so subtly. And two: It pisses Logan off.
On the other hand, Maddie is looking at me like I’m out of my mind. Which, I mean, shit, I am. She shouldn’t be that shocked. She knows me pretty good. Anyway.
Logan keeps smiling and nodding. I swear to fuck, it’s like the guy went to cartoon villain school or some shit. So silly. But, sadly, whether it’s silly and cliché or not, when the butt of an AK smacks you in the chops, it stings a bit. Even me.
My head snaps back and I black out for just the tiniest of seconds. I can feel my knees get weak and I almost think I might actually go down, but then my nervous system rallies, everything comes back into view, and I shake the lights back on.
I smile and ask, “That wasn’t my present, was it? ’Cause honestly, it’s kind of a shitty gift.”
I can tell he’s a little confused by the fact that I’m still standing, and he winds back like he’s gonna give it another try, but when I lean my face toward him and point at the spot on my cheek where I suggest he aim next, he grabs Maddie by the arm instead. Fuck. Shit. Goddamn it. Did my fucking wise-ass behavior just make life worse for Maddie? Son of a bitch.
He shouts something to Ricky in Spanish as he’s dragging Maddie away and Ricky comes up next to me and punches me as hard as he can (I’m guessing) in the ribs. And no kidding, it’s the best punch I’ve ever been hit with. He nails it perfectly. Right in the soft spot just below the rib cage. Not quite a kidney punch, which I’m supposing he avoided on purpose, but in a pretty tender location and with enough force that I feel it. I’m impressed. I’ll have to remember to compliment him later.
As Maddie’s being dragged off, she looks over her shoulder at me, her red hair being blown about in the night sky, the urgent confusion and pleading in her eyes. I tense to go charging for her immediately. Ricky grabs my arm and pulls me back.
“You will fucking die,” he whispers to me.
“Yeah? And?” I ask him.
“And so will Maddie.” Fuck. He’s right. “I can help her, but you gotta let me. Don’t fuck me here more than you already have.”
I glance at him. He means it. I can tell. I nod and shout toward Maddie, “I’ll see you later, babe! We’ll unwrap presents and roast chestnuts and shit!”
Ricky steps in front of me, gets right in my face. “What the fuck is wrong with you? The both of you?”
I contemplate the answer to that. There’s so much to unpack in the question, I don’t even know where to start. So, I just shrug and say, “You don’t find us charming? That’s weird. We’re super fucking charming. Everybody says so.”
And when he grabs my arm and starts leading me toward whatever the fuck is waiting for me inside, I swear to God, he cracks the hint of a smile.