III

Rawlins undressed in his living room while Lyla took a shower.  Despite driving another hour and a half with the heat blowing, his clothes still felt tacky.  Leaving them in a heap on the terra cotta floor near the couch, he clicked on the television and padded naked into his bedroom to rummage for a pair of sweatpants and a dry T-shirt.

Lyla had left the bathroom door ajar.  He listened to the water run.  He wanted to go to her, but whatever silence she was in felt like something that didn’t need to be broken.

He found what he wanted and went back to the living room.  The fire was on every local channel.  Rawlins didn’t want to hear it and kept flipping channels, but the same news had been picked up by all the networks.  At first, it just seemed irritating they’d bother paying so much attention to an event with no body count, but considering the severity of the fire, the lack of casualties had captured everyone’s curiosity.

Then there was the disappearance of Lyla Simon, a minor celebrity, along with reports of a man no one in the crowd seemed to know who’d found a way out for at least fifteen people, and then walked back into the building at least three more times to help those who couldn’t get out on their own.

Dazed witnesses claimed their lives had been saved with scattered, conflicting accounts, so the authorities were planning to search the wreckage for bodies when daylight arrived.

Rawlins knew they wouldn’t find any.  Three people he’d never even seen stood in front of the news camera and claimed they, too, had been carried to safety by the unknown rescuer.

The end of the report finally addressed the issue of the nightclub being operated in a building that violated nearly every fire safety regulation on record.  Pretty soon, there would be twice as many lawyers on the case as firefighters.

“Shit,” Lyla said from behind, giving herself away as she leaned against the doorframe between the living room and Rawlins’ bedroom.  She was wearing one of his T-shirts now and he realized the dress she’d been wearing onstage was the only clothing she’d had, except for the panties he assumed were still lying on the floor of his car.

He turned around to face her.  She looked down briefly, tugging nervously at the hem of the shirt she’d scavenged.  Her nipples created jagged points in the plain, white cotton.  She stood with one foot crossed in front of the other.  Her thighs were like a pair of crossed fingers.  Rawlins smiled, but turned back to the television while he could still breathe.

Flipping to another channel, the same report came on somewhere in the middle.  Same dazed victims answering the same questions from different talking heads.

…whereabouts of Haitian-born rock star, Lyla Simon, remain in question while firefighters scour the smoldering wreckage…

“Yeahhhh,” she said, suddenly standing next to Rawlins.  “So now I’m a rock star.  Yesterday I was just…”

“Just the same as you are today,” he said, turning to study her profile.  She didn’t look proud or regal to him.  The lines of her face were much too refined, her complexion the kind of deep that would burn his soul down hot and fast as a shotgun shack if he kept looking at her.

But he kept looking at her anyway as she stared straight ahead at the news.  “Look at them,” he went on, “telling the slivers of truth they know of someone else’s story.  And yet…here you are…”

“Gone,” she said.

“Yeah.  Gone.”

“But sooner or later they’re going to figure out I’m not lying in all that rubble.”

With his eyes on the television, he put his arm around her and drew her close.  She floated into him, warm and inexorably present.

“What would you like better?  Sooner or later?”

“Later.  For sure.”

It looked like no one had figured out the back exit had been bolted shut.  Rawlins suspected they’d piece a share of it together by the time they started investigating.  He knew he should tell her, even though it probably hadn’t had anything to do with her.  There were over two hundred people inside, and any one of them could have had an enemy that bad.  There was enough going through her mind right now. 

“I don’t need to hear them tell about it like they knew what was going on,” she said.

Rawlins flipped channels and stopped on some network playing an old Cow and Chicken cartoon.  He started laughing.  Harder than he needed to.  Lyla held onto him silently, until he finally shut off the television and walked Lyla toward his bedroom.

“Think you can sleep?” he asked as he led her down to the bed.

“I don’t know.  Probably a good idea to try, though.”

Rawlins pulled back the sheet and stood by while she got under it.  He leaned down and kissed her slowly.  Deeply.  Breathing.

He rose back up and went into the bathroom for a shower.  He left the door open and she called in, telling him not to take too long.  Afterwards, he toweled off and walked naked back into the room.  She was lying on her back staring straight up at the ceiling.  When he pulled back the sheet and joined her underneath, she curled in under his arm.  The movement was naturally fluid, as if they’d rehearsed it.

He was sleepy, but he lay against his pillow listening to her breathe.

“I remember seeing you,” she said after a few minutes of silence.  “You were up on that balcony.  Remember?”

“I remember.”

“You looked so calm.  Like everything was burning down but nothing really bad was going to happen.  Then you just jumped right down.  Like you do that kind of stuff every day.  I mean…what are you, anyway?”

“Drive a rideshare is all,” he said.

“You walked through it like you were sipping tea.”

“I just had a feeling,” he said.  “Weird, huh?”

“Yeah.  Weird.”

It was quiet for the next couple of minutes.  “I’m glad we didn’t end up going to a motel like we were talking about before,” Lyla said.  Absently musing.  “It’s safer here than a motel.”

Rawlins didn’t know what to say.  He liked having her in his house.  He spent long stretches of time out here barely seeing or talking to another soul without a second thought, but it didn’t strike him as a good idea to be alone on a night like this.  Whatever a night like this was supposed to be like.

It seemed like a good time to tell her about the back door, but then she turned to her side and molded her body against him and nothing else seemed very important anymore.  The hem of the shirt she was borrowing was up around her waist and the warmth of her bare pussy against his hip felt natural, even if her body was a new entity yet to be fully discovered.  A sense of everything being in its rightful place overwhelmed him like whispers out of his own spirit – as if he had the power to tell himself secrets he didn’t know.

The stars were in one place, and Lyla was in another.  He felt the weight of her face against his chest as he breathed – each pull and exhale a moment of perfect belonging.  Her smooth thigh slid up his legs, coming to rest against his cock.  Her dreadlocks flowed around his neck and shoulder, tickling against his chin.

“It’s like I don’t remember you before the explosion,” he said.  He reached for her thigh and rested his palm against her skin.  “I mean I do.  But I don’t.  Like the fire changed you into someone else.  Someone common.  Like me.  No fame or talent to speak of.  But like…I don’t know…just some girl who could be walking down any street in any town in the world…everyone knowing you like the girl next door, but nobody knowing anything at all about the fire that runs in your veins…it’s like you’re more precious somehow.  More beautiful.  You’re like the sad little quiet girl who could never wear perfume ‘cuz the perfume got jealous of your skin…”

He quit talking when he realized she was fast asleep, and held her close while he stared at the ceiling.  Darkness and silence became the same thing.  Like something alive.

Sometime later, Case became aware of a wet sensation on his skin.  Heat.  Wandering lips and a rolling tongue.  Everything was dark while his body filled with a deep rush of breath.  He was floating on the river of blood pouring into his thickening cock.

He opened his eyes.  Lyla’s dreadlocks were fanned around the trunk of his body.  She was naked now, kneeling between his legs as she leaned onto his cock, patiently sucking him back to life, cradling his balls in the palm of her hand.  Only now did he realize he’d fallen asleep.  He groaned and Lyla ignored him.

The angle of her head changed as his shaft grew inside her mouth.  She was soon riding the upper half of his cock with her lips, sliding over his flesh in a corkscrewing motion while she wrapped her hand around the very base with a tight, confining grip.

Rawlins was there and nowhere else.  Lyla took every cell of his awakening hunger into the wet, fleshy swirl of her mouth.  The steady stroke of her lips drew the pounding throb of his pulse more and more deeply into his shaft while the snug grip of her hand stanched the flow of his blood.  It was almost as if she were trapping his blood inside his cock, driving the pressure pulse in his veins to impossible heights.

He was barely aware of his surroundings, having been awakened before he could remember falling asleep and being pulled headlong into a state of pure delirium.  He wanted to touch her.  Stroke her face.  Participate somehow.  But all he had strength for now was giving in.  He felt his spine begin to arch as his hips leaned into the bobbing suck of Lyla’s mouth.

The rhythm of her lip strokes never changed, rock steady as the beat of her music.  It was the hammering of Rawlins’ pulse that changed, spiraling higher and harder as his breathing grew deep and staggered.  With her locks forming a curtain around her head, he could barely see the details of her face.  He watched the subtle motion of her slinky body as her ass made an unconscious dance in the air.

Then her finger came up to nudge against his ass, grinding with gentle insistence against the puckered knot of muscle.  Rawlins uttered a weak yowl underneath the rush of breath Lyla’s finger seemed to force from his body.  She nudged her finger deeper, entering his channel halfway to her second knuckle.  Her mouth suddenly felt like a roiling cauldron of opulent sin.

Then the subtle pump and stir of her finger sent a current of heat coursing through the straining cockshaft trapped in the hot suck of her mouth.  Wet, supple lips in a silk scrape along the length of his marble hard flesh.  His heels ground into the mattress as his muscles tensed into defined relief.  She fucked him deeply with her finger several times before suddenly whipping it back out from the clutch of his rim.

“Ly…!”  The rest of her name ended up strangled down inside his breathless throat as she released her grip on his shaft.  He went halfway into a blackout as he felt the frothy heat of his own cum pulsing into her mouth.  She swallowed him down with a muted whimper, but he kept giving her more.

Finally, Rawlins felt himself float back down to where he was – lying there on his bed – Lyla gradually releasing his cock from her mouth and looking back up at him with a smile.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Uh…yeah.  Sure is.”

It was the first time he’d seen her smile.

IV

He spotted her about a hundred yards out, walking naked into the desert.  The darkness of her body was stark against the blazing ocean of dead white surrounding her.  The washed-out browns and greens of the scrub and cacti looked more like rumors of color than actual colors.  Under the glare of noon, she was the one thing on the horizon that seemed to be glowing.

Rawlins took off after her at full speed, forgetting he was still naked and barefoot too.  He’d only stepped outside to see where she was.  He hadn’t thought to warn her about rattlesnake nests, but it was the last thing he would’ve thought about after the way she’d lulled him to sleep, and then waking up to wonder if the entire night before had been a surreal dream.

Sweat was already beginning to coat his body as he sprinted toward her.  He came to a stop a few yards behind her, calling her name and waiting for his breathing to come back down.

When she turned around to face him, it was as if he saw her fully for the first time.  She seemed as natural to be standing where she was as on any stage.  Her breasts stood out full and proud, her areolas a scant shade darker than the skin surrounding them.  The round taper of her thighs culminated in a slight gap not much wider than a pair of fingers where her pussy was tucked in between.

She was the complete antithesis of anything dangerous or harmful.

“I never heard this kind of quiet before,” she said.

Her eyes were gleaming with a mixture of excitement and content, as if she’d just stepped into some lush wonderland for the first time but somehow knew it was home.  She seemed completely unaware of their nakedness.

“Lyla.  There’re snakes out here.  Bad ones.  You gotta be real careful where you step.”

For a moment, a look of concern crossed her face.  She scanned the arid ground in all directions, but then the smile came back.

“How’s that ankle?” he asked.  Even from where he was standing, he could tell it looked more swollen than the other.

“It hurts, but I can walk okay.  Better than last night.”

He nodded, imagining the next thing to do was take her hand and walk her back to the house.

“Mr. Rollins…”

“Rawlins,” he corrected.

“Mmm, okay.  Sorry.  You got a first name?”

“Casey.  Back when I used to have friends they called me Case.”

“Okay.  Case.  Guess I shoulda waited before I came walking out here, but you’re here now.  Long as you are, nothin’s gonna touch us.”

“I don’t know.  We’ve both been through…”

“That’s just the point.  We been through the fire.  You saved all those people.  I mean…yeah.  You saved me.  We’re…I dunno…in this other place.  Like we been set apart.  Can’t you feel it?”

“Mostly I just feel dizzy.  Like my head’s all full of steel wool.  I’m not sure how much I even remember, really.  Mostly the sound of your voice, and the way you looked stalking up and down that stage.  And then later, Jesus, Lyla, the taste of you.  Everything else is kind of blurred.  Just fire and smoke.  Smashing open that door.”

Her smile never changed as she listened.  “You don’t have to remember it, Case.  Just feel it.  Can you feel it?”

He paused and tried to feel whatever she was talking about.  His body ached pretty much everywhere from muscle strain, but everything from inside the club from the moment he jumped off the balcony was hazy.  The details all seemed to be there, but everything seemed so loosely connected in the light of the next day.

“All I know for sure is I feel this kind of happiness about you being here.  A contentment like.  Sure, I don’t know you.  Not really.  But I can look at you and see you’re okay and that’s enough for something warm to spread out inside me.  Everything else before is real, but feels like it was all in some other dimension,” he finally told her.

She stepped closer, his arms wrapping around her as their bodies pressed close.  Her breasts pushed into the middle of his trunk.

“Just feel it, Case.  Nothin’s gonna touch us but us.”

Their bodies were an odd fit.  Rawlins was tall and broad while Lyla was petite and compact.  She felt as solid as he, but she seemed bigger onstage than she was inside his arms.  His cock was pressing against her not much lower than her sternum while the side of her face was pressed against his chest.  He turned his head and rested his cheek on the pillow of her dreadlocks.

“I’m glad you feel safe here.”

“Yeah.  Safe.  But something more.  Like…protected.”

“I guess that must be my job, huh?”

She snickered briefly.  “Hope so.  After everything…everything you did…I’m pretty sure there’s no place else for me but right here.”

“I know we came through something, but it’s strange, except for what they’re saying on the news I’m pretty fuzzy on the details now.”

“Hard times do funny things to your mind.  It’ll come back to you sooner or later, I’m sure.”  His cock started to swell against her body.  “Guess you remember the important parts,” she chuckled.

His hands moved onto the tight spheres of her ass.  He was going to apologize, afraid of it being the wrong thing at the wrong time, but she moved against him, her body urging on his cock.  A vulture called from somewhere high above.  He knew what it was looking for.

“Funny.”

“Come again?” she said.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but it’s like you’re somebody else.  Somebody I never knew about before.  It’s like you’re not this singer I’ve been listening to since your first album.  Somebody who puts all that heart and soul out into space.  And such things are hard not to wonder about.  You think…all that’s more than just a voice.  It’s love and heartbreak and everything that fits in between.  You wonder where the song ends and the singer begins.  And how it would be to just hold onto or even love such a person.”

He trailed off a moment.  His cock kept growing bigger and harder.  His fingers dug deeper into the improbable firmness of her ass.  Her breath pulsed softly across his skin.

“But now,” he went on, “even last night behind that warehouse, you weren’t the singer anymore.  Just Lyla, this girl I met in a burning building.  And it feels like we took part of it with us when we ran out.”

Lyla slipped her hand between their bodies and curled it around his cock.  Her touch brought a surge of blood to his flesh and she stroked him calm and easy, but pulling a throb into his rigid flesh that felt like it would never go away.

“Remember that thing you said about not wanting me to fuck you just for being grateful you saved me?”

“I remember.”

“It was never about that.  Not then and not now.  It’s about you being the kind of person who’d do such a thing if ever called upon, and about me not having any doubts.”

Rawlins spotted the snake coiled up in a slender patch of shade cast by a cactus.  It was perfectly still, seemingly oblivious to them.  He didn’t say anything about it, not wanting to alarm Lyla and risk attracting its attention.  He started to wonder if she might’ve been right after all that no harm could touch them.

“Ever consider the possibility we don’t live completely in this world?”

“Crossed my mind,” she said.

“And I think maybe you’re the one protecting me, really.  Like you’re the only reason things happened the way they did…why I did what I did.”

“Probably not.”

“Yeah, maybe.  All I know is you feel like everything beautiful.”

The snake slithered out of its coil and swam across the sand heading away from them.  It might as well have never been there.  It reminded Rawlins how it all had once been the bottom of an ocean that didn’t exist anymore.

Lyla was oblivious to it.  She stood there with him as if he’d never warned her about snakes in the first place.  She arched her body backward, giving her hand more space for stroking his aroused cock.  He was throbbing now, the plentiful ooze of his precum wetting her fingers as they rode the length of his shaft up and down.  Over her shoulder, he spotted the vulture falling into a dive.

It felt as if Lyla’s stroke were pulling him down out of the sky, out of aimless circles scanning for scraps of flickering life.  He slid his right hand from her ass around her hip and slipped it between her thighs.  She widened her stance in the sand and he touched her slit.

“Nothing touches us but us,” she said again.

The lips of her pussy were already slick and distended.  He pushed a finger inside her.  Her smile went a little dreamy and he wondered if he looked that way to her.  Then he sank his finger completely into her.  He held it still a moment, watching her eyes hood over, then slowly let it curl in search of her sweet spot.

“This is what us touching us feels like.”

He pulled his finger free of her pussy and raised it to her mouth.  Her eyes pierced his as she parted her lips and took his finger inside her mouth, sucking her own nectar from it.  Then he lowered his hand and slid his fingers back inside her, swirling as he pumped the length of it in and out several times.  When he pulled it free, he brought his hand back around to her ass, burrowing his cream-slicked finger against the taut bud of her asshole.

“Yes, Case,” she said, pushing the tips of her breasts against him with a deep heave of breath.  “Touch me as deep as you can.  Deep as you dare.  It’s the only way.”

He pushed his finger through the tight resistance of her rim, slowly sliding deep.  The other hand kneaded her cheek, pulling and spreading her while her grip on his cock tightened, her fist pumping his shaft more forcefully.

There were things he needed to tell her.  Things he wanted to ask.  But his voice shut down behind his fight for breath.  He brought his left hand between them and started rubbing her clit while he rocked his hips, fucking the tight grip of her hand.

She made a whimpering sound that almost resembled his name.  When she started to cum, her ass clenched down on his probing finger in hard spasms.  Her hand on his cock lost all sense of coordination, pumping wildly at his stalk, grasping too hard and yet never hard enough.  Cum flowed from his cock, spilling over her hand and onto her shaking breasts.

After, they laughed at themselves.  The main road cutting through the area toward Twentynine Palms was about eighty yards to the west.  Beyond it, there were a few more miles of scrub and a bank of mountains.

Rawlins knew the strange mist of attachment surrounding them would eventually dissipate.  Lyla had a life and career to go back to that had nothing to do with an almost-was homerun hitter who’d never taken his own career seriously enough.

Then there were the disturbing reports on the news he’d scanned just before coming out to find her.  Investigators had already figured out the back door had been tampered with.  There were implications of foul play.  Speculations of insurance fraud, negligence and everything in between.  The undetermined whereabouts of the Haitian born singer with a cult following.  But he didn’t want to think or talk about any of those things now.

He wasn’t sure if everything had gone by in the blink of an eye or slow motion.  He remembered every, pristine detail of the beginning of the panic, bodies on the nightclub floor that were still breathing.  He remembered swinging that ax at the back door.  Then everything was a swirl of undetermined motion up to the moment he saw Lyla sitting on the curb – the way the pout of her pussy had puffed out between her upraised thighs – the way she’d looked up and acknowledged him.

Now they stood naked and barefoot in a desert kingdom ruled by rattlesnakes and vultures.  His hand was covered with her nectar while hers was covered in his cum.  He leaned down and kissed her plush mouth with all his might.  Their searching tongues fell into the deepest conversation of all, and for a moment he forgot there was anything alive in this desolate world but her.