Anything She Wants Read online

  “Fuck ‘em,” Sadie says, and then she fucks me instead.

  Sometimes I think the uniform is Sadie, and everything else is a mask. Close as we’ve become over the years together, there’s still a distance. I think that I know Sadie, that Sadie is defined by her job, her muscle. But there’s more to her than that muscle. Something hidden under the toned, sleek flesh, the biceps I love to run my tongue over, the hamstrings and quads that trap my head in place so all I can do is struggle, giggle and lick.

  There’s more. It’s in her dark eyes and her ferocious dedication.

  And the way some nights, she wakes up crying.

  * * *

  “So, what’d you do today while I was off saving the world?” Sadie asks and I choke on my lemonade and sputter.

  Saving the world is meant to make me laugh. We live in a county that’s all of two hundred and sixty four square miles and houses more deer, wild horses and grazing cows than humans.

  Just after six p.m. The sun’s still nearly overhead. It’s early July and it’s quiet and dry and hot. We’ve set up a child’s wading pool on the deck of our tiny cabin, but neither of us has our feet in it. We’re desert rats and love the heat. A bead of sweat rolls down Sadie’s straight nose. I watch it, wishing I could follow it with my fingers, my tongue. Down to her lips, her mouth.

  I know what I want to answer, too. I’d love to tell her I spent the day painting the distant dusky Sierra and turning the mountains into a fantasy land, maybe a dragon sweeping around a peak, maybe a knight in armor climbing Peavine. No one who sees my work knows the disconnect between the reality of the Sierra and the fantasy worlds I paint.

  That’s what she wants to hear. That I followed my heart. I painted. I got so wrapped up in distant imaginary lands that there’s no dinner waiting for her post-shift, post-run, post-gym and pre-sex.

  But I can’t. She could support us both. I could paint. My own sense of honor means I spent the day calling quasi-law enforcement agencies and state demographic keepers and county DA offices and court clerks, ferreting out interview subjects for an article on domestic violence, its prevalence in Northern Nevada, cause and effect, occurrence and result. Reasons and revenge. For a women’s magazine that pays pretty well, likes my work, and has little to do with my passions.

  “You worked, didn’t you?” Sadie’s tipped her head back against the cheap mesh lawn chair, which is snagging her hair into the weave. She watches me from under mostly closed eyelids.

  “I started,” I tell her. “I painted the background, and blocked some features, and I worked up the concept.”

  Lame. Lame. Lame.

  Sadie purses her lips, stares up at the sky, less like she’s inclined to buy this nonsense than as if she can’t believe I’m asking her to. “Seriously?” she says finally, rolling her head across the back of the chair and opening deadpan eyes to look lazily at me.

  Well, I did.

  “Didn’t you once tell me that background is, I don’t know, background and that you can do damn near anything because it just gets covered up?”

  My turn to smirk a little. I love that she listens to me. From somewhere on the alternate highway heading between city and county, I can hear a pack of motorcycles snapping and downshifting. Overhead, a couple of military jets scream toward Fallon. Somehow, otherwise, the day is utterly silent. We don’t get cicadas in Northern Nevada, so there’s no street-light-on-the-fritz buzz, and the crickets don’t start their summer death knell until August. We can see our nearest neighbor’s house from here, but just barely and there’s a grove of cottonwood along a tributary of the Truckee River between us and some haphazard willows that this evening move gently in an almost non-existent breeze.

  “Didn’t you also tell me,” she continues, since I haven’t spoken, “that concept is what you do when you’re bored? Test yourself. Block out paintings. Daydream them up.”

  She’s looking at me over the top of her lemonade bottle held carelessly between long fingers. The sides of the bottle will only sweat in Nevada’s dry heat where they’re touched, then moisture gathers and streams.

  I squirm a little in my scratchy chair.

  “So while you were working on…” She eyes me. “A business journal article?”

  “Women’s magazine,” I fill in.

  “While you were working on the women’s magazine article, did you happen to finish the laundry? Or make dinner? Or—”

  My scrunched up face makes her stop. She’s only teasing, and at any rate, we have more than enough of everything to make damn near anything for dinner and it’ll be too hot to eat for several more hours.

  I focus on the bottle in her hand again, and think of moisture gathering.

  “What am I going to do with you, Jill?” Without taking her eyes off me, she runs her tongue up the side of the bottle I’m so fixated on. “Come here.” And when I start to rise, “No. Crawl here.”

  Sun-warm boards under my hands and knees. I skirt the pool, distracted for an instant by a wasp buzzing just above the still water. I wish she’d ordered me to strip. Being way out here in a tiny cabin with intermittent internet and no delivery, and no backup for my sheriff’s deputy, means a twenty minute drive to the nearest grocery store when some essential ingredient is missing and dinner prep is in progress. It also means being naked outside feels decadent, but isn’t likely to result in arrest. Over the years, Sadie has bent me over the porch rail and used her mouth, her hands, her imagination and once, memorably, a willow switch. She’s tied me to corner posts and ordered me to do chores wearing only Crocs, a hat, sun screen and a smile.

  Now I daydream that my waving ass is naked as I crawl to her. By the time I reach her, Sadie herself is naked, sprawled in the lawn chair with her hips on the rolled metal edge, her legs spread wide and her invitation evident. She smells musky, thick and deep and wet, and like the shower gel she used at the gym, and like her own personal Sadie smell.

  So many things I want to ask. With Sadie I always want to ask. What do you want tonight? What would make you happy? Happiest? May I? Can I? Let me! But I only wait until she growls and pulls my head up, not down, her mouth on mine, hot and tasting sweet from the lemonade. She bites my lip and only then does she let me go, pushing me down, pulling the back of my head in tight. I’m surrounded by her and this is when I feel safe. This is when I’m happy.

  She’s drenched, soaking wet, the way I know means she’s been thinking of this for a long time and sometimes I like to tease. A few tentative licks, my tongue grazing the outside edges of her labia, just flicking by her already hard clit.

  Not tonight. Tonight she pulls me down hard when I try to play, all those muscles coming in handy for her. My teeth graze her mound, tugging flesh, biting a little. I didn’t mean to, but Sadie makes a sound deep in her throat that’s unmistakably approval. So I bite. Graze. My teeth run over her lips, the inside of her slit. I lick hard up the center of her, bite at her clit, then settle to a rhythm of licking and biting and fucking with my tongue. All the while her legs tighten convulsively around my head, shutting off sound, muffling crow song and desert wind and her rough panting until all I can hear is my own movement, my own steady drumbeat of heart.

  I never know when Sadie comes. It’s always an inside thing. She freezes, goes still, as if she’s afraid of scaring off some wild animal she’s trying to get close to. She stops breathing each time, just long enough for me to start to wonder if I’ve somehow killed her. Then a gasp, a slight tremble, a sigh as every single one of her golden muscles loses tension. But that’s after. Post-come.

  Anything else would be letting her guard down.

  The sun hot on my shoulders, on my ass which is still covered in jeans, and Sadie’s legs, pinning me close, all of that’s a distraction and I miss the exact instant. I would anyway. But I know when she sighs, and slumps, limp, and pulls away. Just enough that I can kneel and rest my head on her lap.

  “Damn,” she says, and I absolutely agree.

  * * *
>
  When the sun goes down and the desert cools enough, we go inside.

  “Tell me about the article.”

  She’s drying the dishes as I wash, putting them away. Something mindless flickers on the television, an old sitcom, maybe; there seems to be an over-indulgent studio audience.

  “Domestic violence,” I say over the water spraying a stainless steel frying pan. “Statewide angle, but especially the rural counties.” Cow counties, they call us in Northern Nevada, but there are plenty of humans in them, behaving badly.

  Sadie knows the stats as well as I do, maybe better; she responds to a lot of the calls. But when I glance up and see her face, she’s gone still, as if something has frightened her. No, that isn’t it. In the shadowy night time kitchen we can’t ever get quite properly lighted, she looks like she’s seen a ghost. Something she completely didn’t expect to see. A surprise return from her past. Not a happy one.

  “Sadie?”

  She waves a hand, long brown fingers wrapped around a tea towel. “I just hate it. Such an easy topic to exploit. Tear jerker, you know? Like those damn pink ribbons.”

  Sadie has a deep hatred for the breast cancer conspiracy, as she calls it, as though she thinks just the sight of pink ribbons, looped, is enough to give someone breast cancer. But this isn’t like that and waving her hand doesn’t change the fact. Besides, it stung.

  “You think that’s what I’m doing?”

  She stares at me in the half dark for an instant, then laughs and hugs me. “Of course not. I’m sorry. You know what I mean. It pushes my buttons. Those cop and court shows on TV? Battered wife equals instant sympathy. It’s a beat-the-chest-wailing mentality.”

  I gape at her. Just a little. “There’s got to be some way I can work that into the article.”

  Amusement. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Haven’t I made it clear you’re always on record with me?”

  Mock annoyance as she glances at me. “Haven’t I made it clear—” She stumbles and laughs.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything.” When her arms slide around me, for just an instant I wish she was still in her uniform. Sometimes just feeling the gun on her hip, the wide belt and the baton is enough to send me fantasizing for most of her shift. I get very little painting done then, too, and what I do accomplish I definitely can’t sell.

  “Can I play with your gun?”

  She doesn’t even get mad anymore. No lectures about how it’s not a toy. Since the beginning, it’s been my fantasy: her gun, unloaded, carefully checked, sliding up inside me. That hard, unyielding darkness, the trigger guard against my clit, hand grip against my ass, Sadie’s hands on my breasts, pinching my nipples, playing hard.

  But she’s never given in. Most of me is glad. It’s a stupid fantasy. Guns aren’t toys.

  I still ask.

  “Go in the bedroom,” she says. “I’ll give you something to play with.”

  I know what she means.

  * * *

  The baton, the way it’s shaped now, not the mashers cops and robbers hit each other with in old movies—those little bat-shaped weapons—but today’s police baton with the handle and the martial arts training, it’s got history.

  In the bedroom, Sadie lights candles. We rarely have the overhead lights on here, or even bedside lamps. Candles in the dry of the desert are idiotic and dangerous. We do it anyway. Sadie slides down beside me on the bed, the last of my clothes falling away, and she nips my neck, runs her fingers down my throat, over my breasts, stopping only to tease, to press and pull and move away. I’m already aching for her touch. Instead of letting her hands travel farther, she hands me the baton, twenty-four inches of hard wood, ridged and bumpy in spots, smooth in others.

  I wish she’d cuff my hands to the headboard, use her teeth and nails and tongue and baton on me herself. But Sadie likes to watch. And making her happy often makes me happier than getting exactly what I wanted would.

  Her mouth is on mine when I start, her hands in my hair. Her mouth is still hot, sweet and hard on my lips. My hands slide down to my breasts. Hers follow.

  “Here,” she says. “You don’t do it hard enough.”

  Intense pain and pleasure. She pinches hard, twists my nipples and pulls, grabs handfuls of breast to squeeze. My hands move down, guiding the baton, holding the handle until it’s between my legs, and then I just hold the long end of it, the handle down where it can catch on clit or cunt or asshole, the long slick length of baton sliding hard and hot through my lips, touching nearly everything at once. My hips rise up as if reaching for a lover’s touch.

  Sadie bites my mouth and whispers in my ear. “Fuck yourself with it. Make yourself come. I want to feel it.”

  Feel it. Hear it. Because I’m not quiet. My head goes back and I start to make strangled cries as I move the baton faster and faster, still bucking against it, holding it against me rather than inside me, and Sadie reaches down and moves the handle, shoves three fingers into my cunt and I tumble over, shouting, everything in me seeming to grasp, catching at something ephemeral and true that glides just within reach. Just for an instant.

  The orgasm crashes through me. I shudder with the waves of it, sinking back down slowly, the candle lit room coming back into focus. Sadie’s face. Sadie’s mouth. Sadie’s fingers in my mouth. Sadie’s body against mine.

  Sadie.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night I wake to her screaming. The disconnect and terror are instant. She’s not beside me in the bed. She’s gone off to sleep in the guest room, then, which means she was restless and dreaming and tossing. I’ve told her, every time, I don’t mind. Sleep is my super power. I can always get back to sleep. I want to be there for her. I want to help her go back to sleep as well.

  Let me help.

  At least don’t throw up barriers like half a cabin’s distance between us. My toes catch on the sheets. I ram a leg into the bedside table. I rebound off the door jamb. She should definitely be awake. Anyone could hear me coming. Between blows and explosions of swearing, I call, “I’m coming. Sadie, wake up, I’ll be right there. Sadie?”

  She’s awake by the time I reach her. Sitting up on the edge of the daybed, a broken kind of sobbing, the kind of crying performed by people who don’t do it very often.

  “Sadie?”

  I’ve asked her. She’s never answered me. I’ve come to respect it. Her right to own her past. Even that sounds pompous, even if I mean it.

  Tonight when I say her name, she turns to me and holds out her arms and right now she doesn’t look like my dusky warrior, with those big brown eyes and still hard muscles. All that muscle, quickly softening and dissolving, has let her down. There’s a real girl in there, underneath.

  I just sit down beside her and wrap her in my arms and even though she’s bigger than me—taller, broader, more—I enfold her easily.

  Her crying doesn’t cease. It grows stronger.

  “He used to beat her. Almost every night.” Some of the strength flows back into those muscles. Her fists clench. One of them smacks the top of her thigh, hard enough to bruise.

  I don’t think I actually ask who aloud. But she answers.

  “That bastard. My father. Almost every night. Like goddamned clockwork. He didn’t even drink.” She says this as if it’s irony. As if, of course, if he drank at least that problem would compound or explain or exacerbate the other. Not excuse.

  She’s still now. A quarter moon shines in the southwest window, big enough to provide light. In the shadows, her tears look dark.

  “And then he killed her.”

  The frown covers my face before she finishes her sentence. She can’t see me. I’m slightly behind her on the bed. But…

  “Sadie, your mom died of…” Breast cancer. Oh. Or maybe she didn’t.

  Maybe every one of those stupid pink ribbons is a reminder. A reminder of the story, and the truth.

  When she turns to look at me, moon
light illuminates her face. She’s clear and present, awake, not dreaming. Fully aware.

  “Oh, my god. Oh, Sadie.”

  When she reaches for me and I hold her, for once I’m doing the holding. For once I’m the one doing the caring. For the first time, I think she’s truly here. Maybe now Sadie can learn to trust me. Maybe now the uniform will be the mask and what we have, the safe place we’ve made, can be reality.

  * * *

  It takes a long time for the crying to stop. A long time before there are only occasional hiccups. She rests her head on my shoulder. My arms still surround her.

  When the crying finally does stop, I feel her muscles tense, bunching, as if she means to throw me off, sit up, take charge. Move on.

  Maybe she’s done enough of that already. This night isn’t going to slide quietly into her closed off past. She’s opened the door and I’ve seen the demons there. Now together we have to do something about them, the same way she takes care of the daily demons in her job. “Cows, Jill,” she’d say, if I told her that. “They’re cows.”

  “Lie down,” I whisper, and she starts to shake her head as if I’m some idiot who thinks this would be a good time for sex. “On your stomach. Oh, just lie down, Sadie.” And when she does and I’ve got her t-shirt off her, I straddle her narrow hips, dip my fingers into the lotion on the bedside table and start digging into her golden flesh, feeling the muscles give under my hands, tension draining, resistance ebbing. Sadie is muscle, and in those muscles tonight I feel trust.

  Alphas

  Harper Bliss

  Robin’s hair looks meticulous again. I wonder if she stops at the hairdresser every morning before work. It must be statistically impossible to have a good hair day every day of the week. Does it fall as gloriously on Sundays—

  “Kate?” Bruce cocks up his eyebrows.

  “Yes,” I say quickly, not having a clue what they’re discussing.

  “You and Robin will work this case together.” He aligns the stack of papers in front of him without taking his eyes off me. He gives me a swift nod to indicate his word is final.