“Room Eighteen.  It’s right over my head so keep it down.”

“No problem,” I tell her and flash a smile because she seems like the kind of woman who doesn’t get rewarded with smiles every day.  Her lips twitch but she merely stands there and observes me with caution as I head back to the car.

I’d packed haphazardly, with the bulk of my clothes shoved into two black plastic bags and stuffed beneath the passenger seat.  In the end I decide I don’t feel like picking through my crap in the dark front seat so I grab it all and head upstairs.

There’s a couple engaged in a tense standoff on the opposite end of the upper balcony.  They exchange hissing murmurs which sounded complicated and then abruptly the man scoffs, “Fuck this shit,” before lumbering down the spindly staircase.

Meanwhile, his woman leans over the wrought iron side and whisper screams  “Wayne!  WAYYYYYNE!”

I’ve had enough of people today so I get indoors and toss my bags in a corner.  It’s early and I’m not tired at all.

There’s a ‘How goes it?’ text from Brock so I tap out an answer and then switch the thing off.  Unlike virtually every other member of my generation, I don’t wear my phone like an arm.  I feel better when I’m not connected.

I really wish I’d packed a few books.  It’s rare for me to be without a book.  Maybe I ought to pick up one of those e-reader things so I can just click on whatever catches my attention.

The television only offers a handful of channels and two of them are showing World War II movies.  Another one seems to be some sort of public access outlet where a group of women sit around a chipped tile table and mispronounce the names of expensive wines.

I’m about to give up and pass a few minutes beating off when I flip to the last channel and notice it’s one of those celebrity shows featuring news about people with gummy grins and collagen lips.  Not that I care two pubes about whether Ark Deveroux abandoned his pregnant wife for his nineteen-year-old costar, but I happen to catch a few words of the marquee traveling in slow motion across the bottom of the screen.

“Born Savages, featuring the descendants of the legendary Hollywood family, begins filming this week in a remote, undisclosed location.”

I wait to see if the bubbly host will run a segment about it, but there is nothing else said and the show closes with a fish-faced selfie of some actress I’d never heard of who’d apparently appeared in a campy adaptation about teen werewolves living in Miami before she wound up in rehab.

I shut the television off.  If I want news about the Savages I know where to find it.  If I want to get a glimpse of Ren I know where to find that too. There have been some weak moments over the past few years where I typed her name in to a search engine only to be cut to the bone by the fact that she grows more beautiful with each phase of the moon.  I’ve sat there in front of a laptop, stupidly drinking in every graceful movement she makes as she’s unknowingly tailed by some weirdo who had slyly shadowed her around during her casino shift and then posted it to YouTube.

Even in that short glimpse, Ren’s pride was written all over her.  She moved with sure purpose and didn’t make time for distractions.  She never was and never will be the kind of woman who craves the glare of the spotlight.

So why this?  Why now?

Everything I’ve ever known about Loren Savage screams that something had to have veered terribly wrong for the proud, intelligent girl I once knew to agree to the cheap fucking sideshow that this thing is destined to be.

Ren hates cameras.  Ren hates attention.  Money wouldn’t be enough of an incentive for her.  I can’t make any sense out of it.  But maybe that’s because I never really understood her as well as I thought I did.

The lights cut off.  Abruptly, as if they are candles snuffed by a cool breath.

Now I hear it outside, the wind.  It’s probably a chronic companion to the land here, more so than the desert and its variable moods.  The brown valley that cradles Atlantis Star is full of almost tranquil stillness, where sometimes it seems even a loud exhale will disturb the scene too much.  Other times the furies of nature threaten to lift every grain of sand from the desert floor.

Strange that in the scope of my transient life I spent so little time there yet it somehow remains the centerpiece of my heart.  It’s the place that lives in my dreams and keeps me company in the darkest, most forbidding of caves.

There are heavy footsteps roaming the balcony outside my door.  A man’s voice howls into the wind as the utter blackness of the stormy night prevails.  He mutters a drunken slur and retreats.

“I’m sure.  I’m sure.  I want this.”

“Damn, I love you, Ren.” 

I go from being all cool and composed to being so hard I ache.  I’ve got my pants down and my dick in my palm in a flash.

Sure it eats at me a little, the knowledge that I’m getting off on the memory of a teenage girl, but we’re not kids anymore and if I had something better I’d use it.  Every other female I’ve ever put it to before then and since then, they just all run together in my brain like they’re really all one pussy attached to replaceable heads.

But I remember every second with Ren, the way she curled her fingers around the back of my neck and gasped when I pushed deep inside the tight place that hadn’t ever been breached before.  I kissed her.  I told her things I meant completely.  I made her promises that should have come true.  Once I was in there I never wanted to leave.

It was more than that though.  It was a soul-to-soul connection that I’d never known before, haven’t even glimpsed since.

It was consuming.

It was shattering.

It was something that was forbidden in that time, and in that place.

I stroke my own shaft and pretend it’s her soft hand on me.  I close my eyes and make believe her hot mouth explores slowly, licking the sweet spot just south of the head.  That’s how I come, hard and violent, with the vision of unleashing myself inside her mouth, my hands gripping her head and not letting go until she swallows it all.

The wind grows stronger.  The thin walls of the motel rub against one another and groan from the strain.  It sounds like a strange sort of sex ritual, lacking rhythm or pleasure.  I wonder how many of the other rooms are occupied, how many other errant travelers wait in the darkness.  A town this close to tornado alley would have a storm siren but I hear nothing.

Impatiently I smear my own essence on my bare thigh and listen.   The wind begins to lighten just as my thudding heart starts to slow down.  Eventually the sounds recede to a vague crackling of dry leaves and an occasional growl of thunder.  There is a stirring of people as they resume their night.  A few congregate on the balcony outside, murmuring and laughing over a private joke.

The lights are still off.  I hop off the bed naked and turn all the switches off so the lights won’t blind me when the electricity resumes.  After a quick shower in the pitch darkness, I return to the narrow bed, strip off the towel and sink into the lumpy, well-used mattress.

I’ll see her tomorrow.  Every cell in my body vibrates with that certainty.

I don’t know what she’s done since I’ve seen her last and I don’t care.  Right now I can barely remember the details of my own life these past five years.

They are irrelevant.

All that matters is getting to her even if I have no clear plan for what comes next.  It doesn’t matter if every fucking camera-toting gossip in the country wants to watch it happen or if she screams at the sight of me and tries to run in the opposite direction.

It’s happening anyway.

CHAPTER EIGHT

REN

Monty isn’t in a friendly mood when I find him.  That’s not surprising.  My older brother has been sunk too long in his own bad temper to shed it on a whim or for a camera.