Broken and Beautiful Read online

  His hips started thrusting into my mouth and I let him control the rhythm. His hands cupped my head and I imagined what we looked like, him so tall and fair, fucking into my mouth.

  It was hot.

  He was groaning, pushing deeper, and I eased back a bit because he was huge and I didn’t want to choke. That would undoubtedly freak him out.

  I found his balls with my hand, contemplated sticking my finger up his ass, but there was no time. He was groaning and jerking into me and I squeezed his sack, just a little. Just enough and he cried out—roared, really.

  Totally Viking.

  And he came in thick spurts down my throat. Across the top of my mouth.

  When he stilled, I slipped back away from him, my lips slightly sore from being stretched and I suddenly wanted to fuck him. I wanted the pleasure/pain of that girth inside me.

  He reeled back, away from me, totally unsteady on his feet.

  Wide-eyed he stared at me and I wiped my lips. He groaned and reached for me, pulling me up off the desk so he could kiss me.

  He was cleaning me up again, like we were animals. Softly and sweetly he stroked my back, my hair. I stepped forward and he was so agreeable he moved backward, and I walked us to the futon, where we collapsed in a messy heap.

  Sweat was cooling on my body and the loft was impossible to keep warm in the Minneapolis winter, so the chill coming from the cold window behind me made me shiver.

  “You’re cold,” he said.

  “I am.”

  Not cold enough to get my clothes. Or to leave. I was cold enough to drape myself against him and let his body heat against the front of me do battle against the cold at my back.

  “Here.” He shifted and I shifted with him, like a baby possum or something. He grabbed the sleeping bag on the floor and unzipped it, snapping it out around us so it covered us like a cape.

  “Better?” he asked.

  I nodded. Tequila. Weed brownies. A shattering orgasm. The weight and depth of the conversation our bodies had been having while our mouths could not talk at all—it all suddenly piled on top of me.

  “I should go,” I said with a yawn.

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “If I stay I’ll fall asleep.”

  He shifted us sideways on the futon, arranging us face to face, the sleeping bag over us. A warm flannel cocoon that smelled like campfire and Luka.

  “What are these?” he asked, his fingers sifting through my necklaces. The feather. The key. The shell. The bead. The tiny little silver skulls. The six quarters. All bronzed.

  “Found things,” I said, my eyes drifting shut. “Just…found things.”

  “You found quarters, bronzed them and made necklaces out of them?”

  “They were in my father’s pocket when he died.”

  He stilled. I stilled. I had never told anyone that before and he took the words like he knew that.

  Gently he untangled the chain from my hair, straightened them all around my neck and put his big hand over them. Like they were a secret both of us were keeping.

  I woke up to a room so cold, when I exhaled I could see my breath. The snow blanketed the window, making it impossible to tell what time it was. It seemed dawn-ish. Murky and half-lit. But thanks to all the snow it could be noon.

  I was also alone on the futon.

  Downstairs there was a thunk and a clink and I finally registered the smell of coffee being made.

  Shivering, I pulled on my pants and my tank top, but still freezing I grabbed Luka’s flannel shirt from the floor and put it on.

  It was a dress on me. No amount of sleeve rolling could make it fit, but it was warm. So it stayed.

  Luka was cleaning up the mess from the party. Walking around the fringes of my shop with a garbage bag, gathering red plastic cups. He wore the jeans from last night and the black Henley that fit him like another skin.

  Petey snuffled through the corners, licking up chips and meatballs that had fallen on the floor.

  My mouth went dry at the sight of Luka. My entire body responded with a pulse of heat that made me blush and sweat. Uneasy and unsure. I felt impossibly young in this moment. Younger than I had in ages. Maybe ever.

  My equilibrium was all off and I didn’t know how to put it right.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said from the staircase.

  He started at the sound of my voice and looked up at me. Inscrutable again. There was no sign of the man from last night, holding my head still as he fucked my mouth. No sign of the man who licked my fingers clean. Who ate me out with such life-changing enthusiasm.

  He was aloof Luka again. Careful and wary.

  Hmm, I thought. This was not going to be a familiar morning after.

  “I’m happy to do it,” he said. “There’s coffee.”

  On the edge of the small kitchen’s counter was the wooden tripod thing with a suspended linen pouch. There was a jar of coffee beneath it.

  “That’s a coffeemaker?” I asked.

  “It is.”

  I took the jar and poured some into a clean red plastic up. “Is it from a museum?”

  His lip curled slightly. “It makes very good coffee.”

  After a sip I had to agree.

  The silence was broken by the soft thunks of red plastic cups hitting each other in his bag and the howl of the wind around the building.

  We were very alone.

  “Why haven’t you finished those wings?” he asked, pointing up at the huge wings hanging from the ceiling. The Christmas lights were off and they looked sad up there, unfinished.

  “Too many other paying projects,” I said, but it was hardly the truth.

  Luka watched me for a long time as if waiting for me to elaborate, and I realized with a start that he knew I was lying. And that he was hurt by that.

  And disappointed.

  He went back to cleaning up, the tips of his ears red. His signal—that he was feeling something huge.

  Fuck.

  “My dad and I were working on them when he died,” I said. “My dad was a welder by trade and while he was real proud of me and my art, he never worked with me. But I’d finally convinced him to do the wings with me. He did the frame and I was doing the detail work and that’s…that’s as far as we got.”

  I took another sip of my coffee. People asked about the wings all the time. Every model, every other artist. The guys from the shop down the street—but I never told anyone the truth.

  Except Luka.

  “How did he die?” he asked.

  Jesus, he was really asking for everything, wasn’t he?

  “New Year’s Eve six years ago. We went to a corner store in our neighborhood to get some chips for me and some cigarettes for him, and some meth-head held the place up. Dad got shot.”

  “You were there?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And your mother?”

  “I had no mother. She…left when I was a kid. It was just me and Dad.”

  “I’m sorry for that too,” he said.

  “Me too,” I said. “It would have been nice if she’d stuck around.”

  He tossed another cup in the bag. And then another. They made a hollow, wet sound.

  “You really don’t have to do that,” I said.

  “My father took us into town a few times a year,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken. As if he had to say this now, right now, or it would never be said. The words ran from his mouth as if escaping a fire. “Different towns for different supplies. He rarely went to the same place twice in one year. He was obsessed with us being found. In making sure it never happened.”

  I held my breath and he was holding his. The moment strung like a filament about to break between us.

  “But we always went to this town just outside an Indian reserve in Canada. There was a woman there and when he decided I was old enough, he paid her to have sex with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I sai
d, because it sounded awful.

  “He told me before I went in that the woman—I didn’t even know her name—she shouldn’t enjoy it. That I had to make sure she didn’t enjoy it. He told me the clitoris was the devil’s doorbell and I nodded, like I understood such a thing. Like I even knew what a clitoris was. We lived out in the bush, I barely knew what a goddamn doorbell was. He told me that if she moaned, if she asked me to do something I should hit her until she shut up.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “And then he just…shoved me into this room with this woman. And I was so freaked out. Like…” He stared up at my wings. “So freaked out. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even look at her. But she took his money and I pretended like I did it and we went back every year. Her name was Cindy. She had two kids. A granddaughter.”

  There was literally nothing I could say. So I was silent.

  “Then a few years ago he told me I wasn’t going on that supply run and I was…” He tossed another cup in the bag. “I was so relieved. He was gone for a long time. Two weeks. And fuck…it was the best two weeks of my life. It was just me and the work and…it was perfect. I even started to think he was dead. And that I could leave this house we’d made. I could go anywhere. Do anything. But…then I just kept remembering how he told me that if we were found it would be bad. And suddenly being found seemed scary. It seemed impossible. I had no idea how to act in those towns we went to. How to live or work. I hated the way people stared at us and whispered about us. I hated the way I looked compared to them. Like some hairy, wild animal. That’s how I felt, like he’d made me the perfect wild animal. And the only thing I was good for was this life of ours. This weird, fucked-up off-the-grid life that was so hard. And so grim. And so lonely.”

  I remember interviewers asking him why he didn’t just leave and he’d said that he didn’t know he could. I saw the truth of that now, the terrible invisible prison he lived in.

  “One day I was checking the traps and I came back and I could tell, even before I went into the house, that something was different. It smelled…all wrong. Like blood. And other things. I went in and the girl was there. Anna. A lump on the bed, bloody and naked.”

  I was breathing hard. I wanted to tell him to stop. That I knew. That I’d watched the news, but this wasn’t about me needing to know these things, it was about him needing to say them. Out loud. To me. To someone.

  “She moaned and Dad hit her—his knuckles were already bruised and bloody like he’d been hitting her for days. And then he said he brought her for me. Because he knew I didn’t like the old lady outside the reservation. I…” He shook his head, sagging a little. “He kidnapped that poor girl for me.”

  “No, he did it for himself. And that was just part of his shitty justification.”

  He seemed to run out of steam, like the clockwork mechanism that had been wound up and kept him moving just stopped and he was mired in guilt and grief all over again.

  “You fought your dad,” I said, remembering the news reports in detail. “You knocked him out and you grabbed Anna and walked sixty miles to Elk Falls.” A town of less than 80 people. He walked into a liquor store with a Canadian Girl Guide in his arms who’d been kidnaped from a campground five days earlier.

  “I didn’t understand what was happening,” he said. “At the hospital and then at the police station. I didn’t realize that people thought I’d taken her. I didn’t understand why I was being handcuffed and why the police were yelling at me. And then I realized they wanted my father. So, I took them to my father. They arrested him. Anna’s family got me a lawyer. I couldn’t believe it. They said I was a victim too and they fought for me. For months. And then after the trial, the police and all those people…they just let me go.”

  “Just…like that?”

  “Just like that. There was a social worker who gave me her card, who told me I could contact her at any time. That she would do what she could to help me, and I took her up on that. Ended up in Minneapolis with the big game vet. And here.” He glanced over at me, shy with his blue propane eyes.

  To me.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  He threw a few more cups into the bag and I shifted off the stool and walked toward him. I knew he was watching me, even as he threw more garbage in the bag. I knew he was aware of me, just like I was aware of him.

  Closer I crept, waiting to see if he would tell me to stop. Tell me no. But he didn’t. He set the bag down and turned to face me. So big and wide and beautiful and hurt.

  I put my arms around him, his thick waist. And he slipped his arms over my shoulders, pulling me close until until I was in the cocoon of him. I wished I was big enough to do the same for him.

  “Thank you for last night,” he said into my hair.

  “Thank you,” I said and squeezed him closer.

  I felt his cock against my stomach, growing harder.

  “Sorry. I’m just…attracted to you.”

  I shook back my hair and grinned at him. “How lucky for me. As I am attracted to you too.”

  He touched the hair along my face, my cheek. The corner of my lips.

  “I feel like all I know how to do is be alone,” he said. “It’s the only real skill he gave me. And I’m so tired of it.”

  “You were at a party tonight,” I said. “That’s not alone.”

  He smiled at me, humoring my lame attempt at humoring him.

  “You’re not alone now,” I told him. “I’m here.”

  If this were a movie I might take off my shirt. Show him how not alone he was.

  But it wasn’t a movie.

  And this man was complicated in a way I could not take lightly. I could not diminish.

  But he seemed frozen somehow. Stuck.

  Fuck, maybe it was like a movie.

  I took off my shirt.

  His ears went red again. His eyes went wide.

  I peeled off my bra, and my brown nipples got hard in the cold of the loft.

  “I’m a virgin,” he said.

  My heart thunked, like bad plumbing when you turn on the water for the first time in a long time. Like it wasn’t quite sure it could handle what was expected of it.

  “Okay. Take off your shirt.”

  His eyes flared and then he grabbed his shirt at the neck and all but tore it off his body.

  “Your pants,” I said.

  And those came off just as fast. He stood there naked but for a pair of socks. His cock growing harder as I watched. Suddenly Petey came sniffing around, his nose going right for Luka’s junk, and we both laughed.

  “Uh-oh,” Luka said, covering himself with his hand and shifting sideways. “Go lie down, Petey.”

  Petey whined once and did what he was told.

  I met Luka’s eyes and we were both smiling. Our hearts light despite the darkness we came with. And I was almost grateful to Petey for showing us that we had both inside us.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I said.

  “Race you.”

  He won because I took a detour to the bathroom and my big box of condoms. With one in my hand, I charged into the room, and he pulled me onto the futon, into the blankets. Our skin was chilled and we ran our hands over each other, warming ourselves with our breath and our own heat.

  I cupped his cock in my hand and he sucked in a breath, just as I did when his fingers found my sleek folds. He was dry and I was wet so I shifted forward and slipped my leg over his hips, so his cock was pressed up against my pussy. He ran through my folds, not inside me, but against me.

  “Oh my God.” His head rested against my shoulder, his breath along my breast. “You’re so hot. So wet.”

  I hummed something in my throat, some nonsense, because the head of his cock nudged my clit and my brain was buzzing with this pleasure. I held him against me with my hand, sliding myself along the hard ridge of his cock, and slowly he found the rhythm, moving in a little tiny thrusts against me. We were both slippery and hot,
our fingers tangled. He licked my breast. Sucked the nipple into his mouth.

  “That feels so good.”

  “Yes,” he hissed.

  He was a virgin and I was clean and on the pill but still I put the condom on him, watching him watch my hands as if I was performing some mysterious ritual. And then I slid him down so on the push up, he slipped inside me.

  “Oh God!” he cried. His eyes wide.

  For a second I couldn’t move. He was big and wide and I was not totally ready, but the stretch and pull of him felt good. Felt real.

  In years of feeling as little as possible, it felt good to feel all this pleasure and the laughter and the grief and yes, a little of the pain.

  “Are you…okay?” he asked. Those ears of his almost neon.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  “I’m going to… I want—”

  I knew what he wanted. I pushed him over so he lay flat on his back and I got up astride him so he was buried all the way inside me. And now I was ready. Now I was wet and swollen and still it took me a second to get used to him inside my body.

  His hands on my hips were so careful, so gentle. And his eyes on my face were completely reverent.

  “You ready?” I asked, smiling at him, my heart somehow too full and not full enough.

  He nodded, his neck flushed, his eyes hot.

  Slowly, I lifted up and then down. I rocked forward and then back. I watched his face and saw what he liked. I moved his hand to my clit to show him what I liked.

  We were hushed and not at all hurried. I leaned forward, pressed my chest to his and he wrapped his arms around me, so tight I could barely move. He thrust forward and I thrust back and we found our way.

  “Yes,” he moaned. “Yes. Oh, God…yes!” His hips lifted up into mine hard and fast and I braced myself on my knees, letting him fuck me the way he needed. And when he was done I fucked him the way I needed. I pushed his thumb against my clit and braced myself against his shoulders.

  When I came it was with a sob.

  I could feel him pushing my hair back, petting it over my shoulders. Touching me in such a complete and casual way.

  And then he stopped.

  “You’re crying.”