But Randy needed more. He took down his teepee, threw it in his truck, and drove away. Jack remembered standing there, bewildered, while Randy’s truck got smaller. Jack wondered sometimes if Randy was his father, but Deborah was somewhat vague on that point.
Then they’d stayed with Jim and Consuela, in the Yakima Valley, until Deborah met Manuel. They moved into Manuel’s trailer in the peach orchards. Manuel taught him Spanish, how to fight, how to change the oil in a car. Then Manuel got in trouble because he didn’t have a green card, and had to go back to Mexico. After a while, Deborah decided she had to follow her heart and go to Mexico, too.
“You’ll stay with Tavia,” she told the totally freaked-out Jack.
“But why can’t I come?”
“Oh, it’s complicated, baby. But I’ll write you letters, and I’ll send for you real soon. You’ll love it with Aunt Tavia. Her commune has lots of kids, and a swimming hole, and a tree house and everything.”
Off he went, to Tavia’s commune, near Olympia. He got letters, but they came less and less frequently. He was just getting used to it when Tavia fell in love with Mick, a guy from Oakland, and decided to move to California with him. Mick didn’t want Jack to come. “The family thing is just not my scene,” Mick said firmly.
So he went to Uncle Freddy’s place in southern Oregon. In the meantime, Deborah broke up with Manuel, who was “too enmeshed in his culture,” the letter said. She decided to go to India to study yoga with a guru, “to get her head straightened out and recover her sense of self.” Shortly after that, Tavia broke up with Mick, left Oakland, and moved to Los Angeles with a guy named Mike.
Jack had trouble keeping it all straight. But he liked the mellow, benevolent Uncle Freddy. He liked the garden, the farm, the mountains. He had almost begun to allow himself to think of the place as home when the bust happened. The time he most hated to remember. He hadn’t thought of it in years. He stared at the barbed-wire tattoo around Vivi’s slender wrist. Tracing it. And realized that her eyes were open. Studying him.
She scrambled on top of him, folding her arms over his chest. Questions in her eyes. She wanted to talk. It terrified him. Too much reality would chase away that feeling. But even so, he wanted to know her. Her history, her dreams, her hopes, her plans.
No, on second thought, maybe he didn’t want to know her plans.
Chapter
8
Vivi felt so relaxed, sprawled on Jack. Her body just couldn’t get enough contact with him.
“So?” she prompted him. “Shouldn’t we talk?”
“Probably,” he said cautiously. “I’m not feeling very articulate.”
“Hmm.” She shifted, breasts brushing his chest, her crotch rubbing against his thigh. He hardened beneath her. Ready for more. The man was tireless.
“You just wait a minute,” she said. “We should talk before we make love again. This is too easy!”
“What’s wrong with easy?” He groped for a condom and ripped the package open. “We can talk if I’m inside you, can’t we? Nothing’s stopping us.”
“Like I’m supposed to chitchat while a two-hundred-and-thirty-pound sex god is nailing me to his bed with his enormous thing, giving me multiple orgasms? Puh-leeze.”
“Consider it a challenge,” he suggested, rolling the condom over his cock. “I won’t move. I just want to be inside you. Please?”
He nudged himself inside and stared into her eyes for the whole, long, tight slide to his balls. She fit over his pulsing shaft like a skintight glove. She blushed, from her chest on up. She was the one who started to move. She couldn’t help herself. Manipulative bastard. He knew she couldn’t get enough of him.
She’d have felt embarrassed, if she weren’t so busy working herself up to another climax. She flung the covers back and rode him, chest heaving, back arched. He touched her breasts, held her, played with her clit until she collapsed over him in spasms of pleasure.
After, she lifted herself up onto her elbows, hazy with residual pleasure, and realized that he was still hot and huge and hard inside her, staring into her eyes. “Ah, Jack?” she ventured. “What about you?”
“What about me?” he said. “I’m fine. Didn’t you want to talk?”
“But, ah…don’t you need to come?”
He gave her a swift grin. “It’ll wait. No hurry. I want to hang out, miles inside you. My dick is in heaven. It wants to take up residence.”
She buried her laughter against his silky mat of dark chest hair. “If you say so.” She pulsed her stretched, quivering vaginal muscles around him and tried to compose herself. Here went nothing.
“I was wondering…if you’d go with me into Pebble River, like Margaret suggested,” she said. “To look at rentals. For my shop.”
His face stiffened. “You know what I think of that idea.”
“It’s what I plan to do,” she told him. “I know you think I’m married to the road, but I took that path by necessity. Not by choice.”
“Please. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
She sighed, in frustration. “They’re not promises. I’m just telling you my plans. Why won’t you listen to me, Jack?”
He shook his head. “Duncan will kill me if I let you do this.”
She jerked up onto her elbows. “Duncan does not make my decisions for me! I am almost broke, Jack! And I cannot hide forever!”
He let out a heavy sigh. “I see that.”
She took another chance. “And you can’t say there’s nothing between us,” she said, resolutely. “Not anymore.”
“I’m not saying that. But let’s just stay in the moment. Let’s not look at it too closely. If we do…” His voice trailed off.
“It’ll disappear?” she finished.
His silence was her answer. She drooped down onto his chest, feeling him shifting and pulsing. Reminding her of his presence inside her.
“So we can’t talk about the future,” she said. “What can we talk about?”
“The past,” he said. “Tell me about your past.”
She blew a wisp of hair out of her eyes. “Big topic. Want to break it down a little for me?”
“Tell me how you became an artist,” he suggested.
“Ah. Well, it was a challenge. Lucia sweated for years, trying to turn me into a civilized human. I was a wild animal, even though I loved her to pieces from the start. Hyperactive, hot tempered, foulmouthed. I got bad grades. I had impulse control issues. I got into fights.”
“I’m not surprised.”
She ignored that. “Lucia was determined to make me respectable. She wanted me to study something that would make me good money, turn me into a pillar of the community. She loved art, but she liked classics. She didn’t understand wild experimental art. We had a hell of a time, fighting it out.”
“And you won?” He twirled her hair around his finger.
“Not at first. I compromised. I agreed to study graphic design. I tried, I really did, but I was miserable, and my grades sucked, and I ended up losing my scholarship. Lucia was furious with me.”
“And? What did you do then?”
She shrugged. “I waitressed, I tended bar. Was a bike messenger for a while. Saved enough to reenroll in art school, one semester at a time. And I survived on art show openings for a couple of years.”
He looked puzzled. “How’s that?”
“You know those wine-and-cheese receptions at art galleries when a new exhibit opens? You can find one every night in New York, if you inform yourself. Cheese, crackers, grapes, strawberries, mini-quiches, puff pastries. If you’re too broke to buy groceries, they’re great.”