The Most Wanted (27 page)

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.” Annie was biting her lip. I could see she was crying too. “Here,” she said. “Your hair’s all messed up.” I pulled one of my red ribbons out of my pocket and Annie helped me put it in my braid. The guard was polishing the front of her badge with a piece of tissue paper, not looking at us. Then Annie had nothing left to do. She picked up her purse.

I said to her, “I love you.”

She really cried then. Like the day in the car. A few weeks ago, that was all. Finally, she said, “I love you too.”

The matron and a guard with a rifle walked me over the back grounds to the trailers. There were three. Behind a fence, about fifty yards away, a few inmates were working on patching a piece of fence. Why would they do that? I thought, crazy like. It would be something on the order of digging your own grave. They all stopped and looked at us walking, and one of them said something real loud in Spanish that sounded almost like a coyote yipping in the dark. I heard the guard cock the rifle as the matron opened the steel trailer door with a key from her ring. He pointed the gun at the door while I walked through. And inside, there was Dillon.

He was sitting on a nice clean couch just like a regular person, wearing a beautiful green chamois shirt, without leg irons or anything. I ran right into his arms. And from his arms, I listened to him agree to all the rules, about voluntarily opening the door to a knock every two hours throughout the night, about emergency procedures. And then I heard the door close, and then lock, from the outside. We were alone.

For all that came and went and was built and shattered after that, I would not have had it any different. Dillon held my face in his two hands and said to me, “There’s this part in the Bible. About looking for your loved one’s face and coming forth to meet her. It says, I have found thee. I have found thee. You’re here, Arley. You’re mine.” He kissed me then, and he picked me up and set me on the couch and got us Cokes and turned on the radio. We sat down beside one another and Dillon smoked two cigarettes, and he just stroked my hair over and over, and every time I’d start to say something, he’d say, “Just wait, honey. Just a minute.” And then, when I was about to start getting nervous he was out of love with me already from waiting too long, he pointed to the radio, and the guy was saying, “This one here’s for Arley and Dillon. On their honeymoon night. You be good, y’all. And you be good to each other.” I just couldn’t believe it, that somehow he’d got someone on the outside to call and make this request for us, for right that time. It was “And I Will Always Love You,” the Dolly and Vince version, the good version, not that whiny old Whitney thing. While it was playing, Dillon laid me down on the couch and kissed me and lay on top of me, and when the song was almost over, the deejay broke in and said, “Let’s do that one more time, folks. You only get one honeymoon night, now.” And they played it all over again.

It was like Elena said. I’ll give her that. When my mouth opened, and Dillon put his tongue inside, just a little at first, and then more of it, it wasn’t sick and it wasn’t gross. It was like drinking at a fountain when you were so thirsty you couldn’t imagine you ever thought of anything else in your life but water. Dillon didn’t even try to touch me through my clothes. He just reached behind me and, with just one hand, unhooked my bra faster than I could have done it myself and lifted my shirt over my head the way I do for Desi. “Arms up,” I say to her. ’Course, he didn’t say that to me. But I put my arms up that way, and then I was half naked, cuddled under his shirt. We lay there that way for a moment, and then he started to talk, slowly. “Don’t be afraid, Arley. I’m your husband, and I love you with all my heart. And I won’t do nothing to hurt you. And anything you don’t want, you just say stop, and I swear I will stop.” He pulled my skirt down and my stockings, never making me get up, never making me feel any of those things I’d been afraid of, like big and clumsy and ashamed. And then I was all the way naked, lying under him. A couple of centimeters, I thought, a couple of wisps of cloth, and his body would be full against mine. So much was going on, I had to force myself to concentrate: on the muscles in his legs tightening and letting go, on the slight scrape of his chin against my chin, our mouths by now practically inside one another. A kissing chin, Elena called it later, what I had the next morning, a place below my lips buffed raw by Dillon’s beard, which must have grown back stubbly overnight.

Dillon leaned back then and stood up, and I shut my eyes, and my arms snapped down over my body like a pocketknife closing. “I got to look at you, Arley,” Dillon said. I heard him opening his zipper, heard the
shush
of his clothes falling.

“No,” I said. “No way. We don’t know each other well enough.”

“Don’t know each other well enough? Honey, I’m your husband.”

“Doesn’t mean I know you.” I couldn’t figure out what to do. That couch felt bigger than a basketball court. I didn’t know whether to roll over or curl up in a ball. The radio was playing “You Never Can Tell,” and the fabric under my face, its plaid of yellow and red, suddenly seemed as loud as the song. But Dillon lifted me up—I still wouldn’t open my eyes—and kept me right beside him while he opened the couch into a sofa bed, and then I lay down and he lifted the sheet and put it over me. Through my eyelids, I could see the light change, and so I kind of looked. The light from the guard tower was sweeping and gliding, and now it was the only light in the room. It swept over Dillon, who had nothing left on, and I took in my breath. He was so beautiful, I had to shut my eyes again. But I’d seen his dick standing up full and purple against his belly—not like I’d imagined, though, but really straight up.

No way is this going to work, I thought, sweat breaking out on my wrists. This sure as hell can’t work, because if he tries to put that thing in me, it’s not going to bend, and it’s going to sprain or I’m going to get bad hurt, one of the two. But then I figured he’d know, so I just opened my arms, and he lay down with me. I put my mouth against his shoulder. He tasted like the mouth guard I used to wear playing field hockey—like clean rubber, pliant and smooth. He told me that he wanted to kiss me down there, and I begged him not to. I couldn’t imagine him wanting to, even, though I’d heard plenty of boys did it. “Don’t be scared,” he said. “I’ll touch you first, just a little, and if you don’t like it, we’ll stop for a while.” And he ran his hand down my belly and laid his finger flat against me, rubbing at first gently, then a little faster. It doesn’t sound very beautiful, but I can only describe it as a sting. And before I knew it, I was turning my body to follow his hand, making sounds like I was straining to breathe. “Arley,” Dillon said, “are you crying, honey? Are you afraid?”

I didn’t think I’d be able to talk, but I said, into his shoulder, “I’m not crying.” He started to rub on me again, little slow scrubbing, and this time I tried not to make the noise, but it kept coming.

“I’m sorry,” I gasped.

“Don’t be sorry, Arley,” Dillon told me. “It means I’m pleasing you. It’s good.” He put his mouth on my throat, then on my left breast, and I flashed on the sight of Cam and Elena. This was it. And happening to me. To Arley Mowbray, who never even let a boy kiss her except Curtis Melby in second grade. I opened my eyes and peeked down, at Dillon’s blond head swiveling away, at my breast rippling, and then I shut my eyes and stopped making pictures in my mind at all, and wherever he went with his mouth on me, my brain went to that part and called out for me to come over, and there I stayed. “I’m going to kiss you now, honey, suck on you a little.” And though I didn’t really want him to, I let him. It didn’t seem so strange, after all, by then.

I watched the guard-tower light sweep, sweep, searching like an eye, and felt Dillon’s mouth tugging, his tongue inside me, nerve explosions like little darts across and up and down, feeling things done to me I never imagined you could even let happen, much less describe to yourself at the same time. And then there was the knock at the door.

I pulled the sheet up over my head, and Dillon jerked his jeans up over his hips and went to open the door.

A big hefty man in a green uniform was standing there, his hands in his pockets. He was the same man I’d seen in court. He wore no gun. “I am here to check on your welfare, Mister LeGrande, and that of Missus LeGrande, as required. . . .”

“She’s fine, Mister Southwynn,” Dillon said, his voice reedy and nasty. “She ain’t no different from how she was when the other folks left. I’ve done nothing to change her.”

“Sorry to disturb you. Beats us looking through the observation window, though, don’t it, Dillon?” the warden asked softly.

Dillon waited a moment and then said, “I reckon.”

“Please sit up, Missus LeGrande.” I poked my head out, with my eyes closed tight. “Are you all right? Do you need anything?” The warden’s voice was tired and kind.

“I’m fine,” I said. And then the door clicked shut. Dillon came back, and we lay there side by side.

“Touch me,” he said. “Bring me back to life.” Of course, I’d never touched a boy, but I figured it would be okay so long as I didn’t look. “I’ll guide your hand,” he told me, and he wrapped my hand in his. It was hotter than the rest of him, and soft, so soft, soft as rose petals, really. I don’t know how they can call it hard. It felt like its own thing, like it was living, moving; it filled under my hand and Dillon’s as he pushed roughly up and down.

“Don’t hurt . . . yourself,” I told him.

“Honey, it don’t hurt,” he told me. “A man can take a lot of friction.” And all of a sudden he stopped, and sucked his breath in, and rolled away and said, “I want to make love to you now, my wife. Is that okay?” I just nodded my head up and down. He rolled his leg back onto me, his silky hairs tickling and brushing my thigh. And then I remembered.

“We have to use the . . . things,” I said, sitting up, my hair springing out of my braid all at once. “We have to.”

Dillon sighed. There was a loudspeaker announcement outside; I couldn’t make out the words. Then the lonesome sound of a whistle. Night call, Dillon murmured. Recreation was over, and it was time for a cell check. This is prison, I thought. This is prison. Jesus Christ. I wanted Annie. I reached for Dillon’s hand. “Arley,” he said, sharper, rubbing my palm as if it were stained. “I don’t have any diseases or . . . anything.”

“I know.”

“It’s not as nice with one of those. You can’t feel everything. I want to fill you, girl.”

“I can’t get pregnant.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “Then what are you worried about?”

“I mean, I can’t, I won’t, I don’t want to get pregnant. Not tonight. Not now.”

“You’re a married woman.”

“I’m fourteen, Dillon. And I live at home and I have no money at all. And my mama would kill me deader than Elvis. No fooling.”

“You don’t have to stay there. You could live with
my
mama.” We both went silent. “Well, okay, maybe not. You could go on the state.”

“I won’t do that.”

“Why not? You’re just a kid. And just ’til I get out.”

“I won’t be a welfare mother. Like in the magazines. No.”

He got the condoms out of the box. “Let me put it inside you first. Once. So it’s really me who goes into you the first time.” I lay back. “Open your legs, honey. Open for me.” He kissed me soft. I felt it, like someone at a door. Pushing, blind. He steadied it, with his hand. “Arley, honey, this will hurt some.” His face was hot, his cheek hot against my cold one. The red ribbon I’d used to lace in my French braid snaked over my shoulder and caught in my mouth. Dillon nudged it away, then took it in his hand and slowly wrapped it around one finger.

“Just do it,” I told him. And he did. Like a needle as thick as a knife, for an instant. I dug my fingers into his shoulders and he yelped, and then the pain started to melt and my muscles to melt, too, and he started to rock me, and while it didn’t exactly feel normal, it was working. I am fucking, I thought. Me. Arley. My God. “I would wait for you, honey,” Dillon said through clenched teeth. “But I can’t.”

“Get it, then!” I told him. He ripped the packet open with his teeth and fumbled to slip the condom on. It didn’t feel any different to me, except his body changed as it got more serious for him. He skimmed over in sweat, cool as a porpoise, and bucked and arched, almost like I wasn’t even there. Then he shook drops off his hair and stared down at me.

“You get the number of the truck that hit me?” he asked. When he got up, he looked like he’d been in a fight. “Arley, Arley, Arley,” he said. “Now you’re mine.” I started to get up too. But Dillon motioned me over, raking through his pale hair until it stood on end, funny. “Now I have you, I’m not done with you yet.” He came back with a cigarette, and he stroked my belly while he smoked it, and then we did it again.

I had to use the bathroom after that. There was a toilet and a sink with some towels behind a screen. It was open at the top. I guess they assume that if you can make love with someone, you also can pee in front of him, but I had no idea how I was going to manage to go in front of Dillon. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I told him. “Can you go outside and wait? I’m too embarrassed.”