Elena's Lovers & Hush!

Chapter Two-1

Chapter Two

Returning from Spain, Los Angeles was in the midst of the bruising spring heat when the pavement burns and the air is filled with putrid smog. It was a time when Elena was thankful that The Bistro where she worked was just a block down the street and around the corner. If only the recital hall where she practiced her cello were as close she wouldn’t have to think about going out in the vile air at all. What a bitter return after days of clear cloudless skies, and blues that she thought she could walk inside and feel with her whole body.

For five remaining days in Spain she closed her eyes a thousand times while sunbathing, only to open them expecting her dream with Nikos to continue as if it was a serialized novel. But there was never a robust blonde Greek on the other side of her eyelids, never the windswept light-haired locks, never the powerful muscles, never the depth of his oddly colored eyes doing tangos in her soul. He was right. She couldn’t forget him. As long as she was in Spain, Nikos remained with her, especially right between her legs, as if his mouth were perpetually massaging her interior spaces with that artful style. He walked with her, ate with her, slept with her and was the focus of a dozen moments, when her hand was required to satisfy the longing; though it would never feel the way it felt with his potent prick buried deep, or when they lay side by side.

In LA, the memory haunted her, Nikos rising like a ghost to mock her after a while, his smile turning into a sneer, his laugh, a chortle, his touch too rough. She didn’t want to think of him this way, so she changed subjects in her brain and went on to other things, refusing to acknowledge that the man had so mesmerized her that she’d forgotten all sense of time, place and reality.

One thing she didn’t forget was the obvious coincidence of dream and flesh, the resemblance of Nikos to the male presence in her dream just before he appeared. Maybe that dream never ended, and Nikos had simply been a more substantial version of the earlier mind escapade. It was a good explanation, though it still didn’t explain the scarf, and the love-bites, and her shaved pubis.

If Sandra hadn’t understood, no one else would either. Nikos was doomed to be a distant memory, pushed further and further back as weeks went on. Only in the middle of the night would she dare to remember him, when the raw energy of the day became too much for her to handle, and letting off steam through her cunt was the only way she could fall asleep again.

***

“I’m going to Flagstaff for a few days,” Elena announced to Sandra and their other roommate, Darcy, as she watched the two naked women pull jeans over their hips, and tiny tight-fitting tops over their naked chests. Watching their slightly erect n*****s become obvious, Elena wondered what it would be like to touch another woman’s breast.

“In the middle of summer?” Sandra said. “That drive across the desert?”

“I miss Gretchen, and she’s invited me to play in her string quartet for a summer music festival. Besides I’m a slut for anything musical.”

“You’re a slut for anything,” Sandra retorted.

“No more than you. Though if you stopped to notice, I haven’t been screwing around much lately.”

“Yeah, you’ve been damned boring,” Sandra replied. “So the cure is Flagstaff.” The blonde grimaced.

“Not the cure, just a few days away.”

“Suit yourself,” Sandra replied. “But we have a real nasty party coming up, and you’re going to miss it.”

“You know, it might do Elena some good to get away,” Darcy said. “Make her normal again. You haven’t been the same since that weird thing in Spain.” She turned to the brunette sitting on the bed. “You ever get that fabulous lover thing figured out?” she asked. Standing in front of the mirror, Darcy fooled with her curls. Not happy with the look, she ran a comb through her hair. Still not liking the result, she moved to the bathroom and began running water over her head.

“I don’t think about it anymore,” Elena answered. “He’d be history if he was real or fantasy, so why bother.”

“But it was spiritual?” Sandra said sardonically.

“That’s exactly why I’m not talking about it or thinking about it,” Elena said. “Whether you like it or not he changed me, and I don’t know how or why, but I refuse to let you beat me up about it.”

“Okay, okay, I know he was special. But you’re right, he’s history. So is Flagstaff a spiritual quest too?”

“No. I’d just like to get out of this town for a week, away from all the madness.”

“Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me,” Darcy agreed, as she wrapped a towel over her head and returned to the room.

“Okay. Miss the best party of the year,” Sandra said. “We’ll live to tell you about it in juicy detail.”

Elena snickered, imagining her two best friends dressed in leather or something just as outlandish, getting high and drunk and very horny before it was over.

***

There was a long stretch of vacant road on the way to Phoenix, though she’d be turning north. soon going into the mountains. Elena didn’t bother with the air conditioner, in spite of temperatures zooming to a hundred degrees, the sweat on her upper lip, and the burning sun shining on her since sunrise. She wanted smogless air to breathe. It wasn’t even a subconscious thought that she was looking for Spain again, the same kind of arid warmth, and clean breezes. She probably should have driven north to San Luis Obispo to duplicate the feeling of the Mediterranean Coast, but then Gretchen was in Flagstaff far from the fresh salt smell.

Leaving before sunrise, leaving the lights and the hazy glow of LA behind, she felt the city drop away from her as if she was sailing in a hot air balloon, dropping ballast every few feet so that she could rise higher and higher. Gretchen had talked about her staying with her in Flagstaff, permanently. The idea was tempting. A year of wild highs and devastating lows, left at the altar, the accident, a coma, a victorious recovery—no wonder she was fantasizing about a man to rescue her from all the hurt inside. Obviously LA hadn’t been the solution; maybe the high mountains would be.

She drove for hours, wide awake to the disappearing night, but when the sun rose steadily before her in the sky, her eyes ached, and by ten o’clock when they drooped dangerously from sleepiness, she pulled into a rest stop, thankful for a shaded awning where she could park the car out of the rays of searing sun. She took a long drink of icy water from her thermos, splashing some against her breasts, the trickle making her tank top wet across her breasts. Her head falling back against the seat, she closed her eyes and melted away, thinking just before she drifted off that she was walking through dreams, the visages of long forgotten people appearing to her out of nowhere.

She was being pulled, limbs tugged at, drawn, pawed, jerked; leering faces, sneering lips, scornful taunts by those with vacant faces and the power to alarm her; she was shrieking for them to stop. Visages disappearing, she still felt them, their fingers clawing at her. Someone was begging her to come with them, pleading with a crying voice.

But then, eyes descended into view more stark that all the rest: a dark man’s eyes with a strangely shifting glance. Coal black as the Sierra forests at midnight, she saw both the darkness and the stars as they held her in their magnificence.

“You’re rescued,” were his words, though she didn’t hear him speak, or even see his lips move.

Running, running through sand dunes naked with him, they jumped into a drift that moved like powdered snow.

Then there was a bed made of rough-cut timber in a rude home high on a hill. His body descended to hers, taking her naked, with naked power. She descended into herself, into the pleasure of body and soul, her heart swelling with thankfulness and relief.

When the dark-eyed man pulled away from her, there was another body, and then another, and one more still—all the leering visages of her earlier visions returning to her with fresh faces and flesh that feasted on hers. Her legs wide open, she was s****l territory. They made her smile contentedly. And when these interlopers were finished with her offered orifice, the man with dark eyes returned, and lay with her in the end to comfort her.

A heavy drum beat blasted through her head, a funky hip-hop sound with speakers pounding a dozen feet away . . . Elena woke with her body jerking so that her shoulders ached instantly, twisting abnormally.

She stared, seeing the rest stop being run wild with a car full of kids, crazy looking kids with mismatched clothes, and stringy hair, and bottles of liquor. One empty bottle was smashed into the side of the restroom wall. They must be drunk.

Panic stuck, she rolled up the window, and tried the ignition. A funny groan from the car’s guts made her wince, then the annoying sound of nothing, no starter, no engine, no pleasant roar. The panic was reaching her throat which felt as parched as the desert on either side of her. Trying the ignition again, there was nothing still; though her attempts to start the car drew the attention of the kids.

One sauntered to her. “Help you, ma’am,” he sneered as his raised voiced reached through the closed car window. It was getting too hot and too stuffy inside, but she wouldn’t put it down even a crack.

“No. No. It’ll be fine.”

“Doesn’t start, does it?” he shouted to her.

“I just flooded it.”

“Doesn’t sound flooded to me.”

“But, I did.” She tried smiling pleasantly.

“Nice t**s,” he said eyeing her sweaty wet chest. Her n*****s were hard, poking through her top.

Another kid approached the car. This one had no hair at all, but a hundred strands of beads around his neck.

“Please, I’ll be fine,” she said, praying that the boys would leave her be. The blood was rushing too fast, to her throat and head, but she couldn’t let him know that. She smiled as if she were in control.

She was dying to open the window, thinking instantly of the danger of smothering in the desert heat. She cracked it slightly when the kid wasn’t looking, thinking she’d feel a fresh burst of air, but it was just more heat that poured inside. The car lurched, some kid jumping up on the back, seeming to do jumping jacks on the trunk the way the car bobbed up and down.

“Would you tell your friend to stop?” she shouted to the leering one who hadn’t left her door.

“He’s not my friend. Just another asshole,” the boy shouted back.

“Please, if you’ll just mind your business, I’ll be getting on.”

“Yeah, sure,” he jeered. He and the bald friend laughed. Elena thought she could smell the liquor on his breath.

“Just please, leave me be,” she said.

Adding to the deafening noise that was making her ears hurt, the sound of a gunning motorcycle engine came out of nowhere. Then a sharper sound like a car backfiring, the piercing blast riveted attention away from everything else. The brats and Elena turned to see a man on motorcycle, climbing off, having just fired the pistol he brandished in his hand.

“Get away from the car,” he bellowed at the kids.

Elena’s head pounded as if the bass woofer was belting sound in the middle of her brain. She was near tears, but too frightened to let them pour free. One look at the man’s savage stare, the kids scattered, then sped off in their car, taking their hideous music with them. Then it was just Elena and her swaggering rescuer, standing at the side of the car, as threatening as the stringy-haired boy. She wasn’t rolling down the window, not yet, not certain whether she’d gone from one catastrophe to one worse.

“They’re gone,” he told her the obvious.

She nodded at him, nothing more. For reasons beyond her comprehension she was staring into his eyes and finding them a treatment for the wrenching panic. She took a deep breath and then another, and finally released her clenched shoulders. It had felt as if there’d been hands on either side, holding her so tightly she was paralyzed.