At least that’s how I would handle it.
If I had a woman.
Studying the soaked girl beneath the trees my cock stirred, wanting to be between those lips.
Beyond that, I needed to shield her from danger.
I prided myself on being immune from the female predicament. Too much trouble, I reminded myself.
The girl fucked up my rescue plan by bolting further into the underbrush. The wind howled through the trees, sounding like a pulsing waterfall, and the back of my neck tingled.
After this, she’d owe me one.
The scrub was too thick to enter. I found her crouching like a frightened heroine in a horror movie. Pressed against the dense berry vines; her violet-blue stare clutched at something in my soul.
That crippled soul unfurled its sooty, black coil from the pit of my stomach, where it had rolled into a tight, protected pellet years ago.
She was the sun, and my being stretched towards her like a sprouted seed, feeling the intensity of her heat lick at my surface even while rain soaked me through.
The warmth flamed into a craving at the sight of her sopping wet clothes which clung to her like a second skin. Her nipples popped through the pink scrap of a top as if they were flipping me off, saying, “Fuck you, you ogling perv.” Her ridiculous miniskirt sucked itself around her thighs.
I wanted to own her.
She shrunk away as if she could read the dark thoughts harbored in my mind, and I tried to calm her, “Hey, I won’t hurt you. It’s cold out and it’s getting late. Not to mention the fact that you’re underdressed for this storm. You don’t even have shoes on.” I offered my hand, “Why don’t you let me take you somewhere warm?”
“Somewhere no one can find me? What do you think I was born yesterday?”
I liked her sass.
She reached beneath her heel to pick up a hand sized rock and threw it directly at my head. Her aim was excellent, but my reflexes were faster.
I ducked sideways and allowed the rock to sling past.
What I expected to be an inconvenience was quickly becoming a serious pain in the ass.
“I was trying to do this the nice way, little girl, but you leave me no choice.” I rushed at her, ducked my shoulder and lifted her off her feet.
She kicked and screamed while I carried her back to my car. I pinned her thighs into place with one arm, but her claws scratched at my back. Starlight burst behind my eyes and blood surged through my veins.
I raised my right hand and brought it down as hard as I could on her jiggling ass. She snarled like a mountain lion when I smacked my palm across her cheeks. The wet rain amplified the sting, no doubt.
“Let me go!” She sounded shocked and lay limp across my shoulder.
I still felt the scrape of her short nails across my back. Lust came over me like thunder crashing against the mountain.
It made no sense.
I’d just met the girl.
“Look, I can see that you’re scared. But no matter what you’ve gone through, it doesn’t give you the right to treat me with disrespect.”
“You spanked me!”
Damn straight.
Unacceptable behavior deserved punishment.
I set her down next to the passenger door and said, “Let’s start over.”
My fist clenched. What happened to turn her so skittish?
I swiped a finger across her lower lip and said, “You’re safe now. I promise you that. You don’t have to run anymore. Whoever is chasing you can’t get through me.”
She scoffed, “You’re sadly misinformed.”
I’d offered her protection and had the power, men, and reputation to guarantee it.
The question was, what would keep her safe from me?
3
Eva
A scrappy, desperate setting where a girl could wind up a barefoot prisoner, locked inside a decrepit woodshed and sold for sex.
“The trim scene.” That’s what they called it in around here.
No, it wasn’t a diet or exercise regime.
Sure, the phrase sounded glamorous, like an elegant night spot where you’d meet sophisticated friends. A place where you’d attend parties that shocked and surprised you. Where someone was getting a blow job in the corner or maybe latex-laden dancers swinging in cages suspended from the ceiling.
Only a few days ago, on the run and broke, I’d hoped to turn my situation around and followed a friend’s advice who knew I needed quick cash.
When my dad died, hanging onto the apartment became impossible. We’d always scrabbled our way through life together, him working in the fruit fields and me helping in the summer. But when cancer took him, the chemo bills became my inheritance. A double whammy: grief and monetary ruin in one blow. It was a hocus pocus I’m brokus moment, and trimming seemed like the answer to all my problems.
“Go trim pot.” My friend said.
I wondered, what does that even mean?
Leaves had to be trimmed off marijuana buds to sell them. Most farms paid more in a week than what I made in a month at the department store.
No way, no how were the rent and dad’s remaining hospital bills getting paid on store clerk wages. Talk about kicking someone when they were down. Your love one died of cancer? Hey, don’t forget about those chemo bills.
Lyle was one of the last illegal growers out in these hills. My car barely made it to his grow site which I’d read about on a bulletin board in town. I soon learned female employees earned extra wages as sex workers for Lyle. Pot wasn’t the only thing he was farming out. I needed the money, but mouthed off when he hinted I could earn extra by getting naked.
I still felt his greedy eyes on me, one hand in his pocket and the other resting on the crotch of his dirty overalls. He put the padlock on the door of the shed and promised, “Tomorrow I’m cashing in on that blow job you owe me. You’re a shitty trimmer. Gonna have to earn your keep some other way. That mouth of yours looks like it’ll do the trick.”
Escape was my only option.
Lyle made a grave mistake leaving me alone in that empty outbuilding which smelled of spilled gas and worm shit. He whistled as he walked away from the hut. A sociopath’s shortage of conscience meant he could kidnap a girl, plan to turn her into a sex slave, and not pay her for the work she did trimming his weed—all without a single, solitary sense of doing wrong.
I learned on Murder Mountain that paranoid growers always buried stuff in their backyards. I hedged every bet that Lyle or his predecessors were no different. The door to his sleeping shack slammed shut, and my palms patted the ground all around me, kicking up an aged machine-oil scent. The floor was concave at the back corner. I dug up the dirt with my nails, unearthing a coffee can with a wad of bills and a hammer in it.
Smashing Lyle’s brains out with a construction tool was tempting, but fleeing the crazy motherfucker, even more so.
Every squeak of protesting wood made me flinch, a chilly worm of fear gnawing at my spine, but I finally pried a nail out of a plank on the back wall with the hammer. I kept at it until I’d removed three whole planks and made a gap big enough for me to slip through.
Lyle took my shoes, thinking that would keep me from running, but I took off down the dirt road towards the two-lane highway, ignoring the sharp pebbles underfoot.
Please, let some benevolent farmer find me and take me to safety.