Abduction (6 page)

“What about the pack? Why would I steal your backpack, sleeping bag, and twenty pounds of canned goods, and nothing else?”

“Maybe you put that together so you could give me the hiker lost in the woods sob story.”

A malicious look came over his face.

“Maybe,” he pushed her knees apart and leaned in until his face was just an inch from hers, “you thought you’d get a fuck with a rock star out of your poor, lost little girl drama.”

His heat settled on her skin, his hot breath caressed her lips. Her legs locked open by his fierce prying. His jaw flexed and she felt he might be a man about to rape her or some animal after her throat. He might bolt her down, a mastiff on raw meat. She had turned white. Her eyes welled with tears that did not spill. She was shaking.

Seeing her terror he recoiled from her, looking as though he had been hit in the stomach.

“Or maybe I’ve lost my mind,” he said, barely audibly.

He stood.

“You’re cold.”

He said it awkwardly, absentmindedly, as if other words had been taking shape in his mouth. He stalked away to his bedroom and came back with a sweatshirt. He held it out to her, and warily she reached out to take it from him, not pulling it on but clutching it to her chest, watching him watch her. At last it was too much for her, she could not no longer bear his gaze, his presence, the threat of him. She felt her self-control slip away.

Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

“Please,” she whispered, trying not to let her silent tears rise to a torrent of hysterical sobbing, “please just let me go.”

A strange expression came over his face and stayed with him through a terrible silence.

“I’m sorry.”

He said it very softly, the strangeness shaping his expression creeping into his voice, and her chest went painfully tight. It sounded like the prelude to a terrible sentence.

“I am sorry for being so rough with you.” He went on, still speaking in soft tones, his odd expression resolving to fear mingled with pity. “You really can’t hike out. Not only would you not be able to walk all that way to a town, it’s dangerous in the woods—

bears, wolves, cougars. I can’t just let you go. But you can stop crying. I’m not going to shoot you, and I’m sure as hell not going to…molest you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Why on earth would I think that?” she wanted to scream, but angry sarcasm was taking a back seat to fear. She said nothing.

“Look, I know I’m acting like a maniac, but you broke into my house. It’s impossible for me to buy this implausible story of yours. I can’t trust you. But I don’t want to hurt you.” Then, as much to himself as to her, “I’m not going to hurt you.” Something in his tone inspired a bit of credulity. The flood of tears threatening to burst from her subsided and her trembling lessened slightly.

After a long silence he added, “You can stay here.”

He had said “can.” Maybe she was free to go after all.

He ejected the clip from his gun.

“I’m going to put this away, so you can stop being terrified of me, and because I just don’t feel comfortable walking around with a loaded gun.” A long pause. Then he looked at her, and when she had met his eyes he spoke in a heavy tone devoid of the rage and pity she had heard earlier.

“But I warn you. Don’t fuck with me.”

This line, which smacked of trite male bravado and which would have made her laugh two weeks earlier, now filled her with real fear. He stood up, went to the kitchen and pulled the whiskey bottle from its shelf.

“Want one?” he called to her absentmindedly.

When she did not reply he looked her way and she shook her head “no.” Vaughn finished making his drink, went to his bedroom, closed and locked the door.

After he had retreated to his room she sat there on the sofa, trembling and tired of trembling. When was the last day she had lived without being horribly frightened? A week ago? Longer? She was exhausted with fear. She sat there, watching the fire, wondering what to do. The pack lay at her feet, disemboweled. She could load it back up, grab the gun from inside the sleeping bag in the little bedroom, and run. Get away from schizoid man. Take her chances with the wilderness. She wondered if Conrad was out there, looking for her. If Vaughn was telling the truth, if there was really no way to hike out, would she die out there in the forest? Die of exposure, of starvation? If she injured herself, would the wild animals come, drawn by the smell of blood, and eat her alive? With the gun she could defend herself.

Or kill herself.

Or she could stay. She could stay and hope that this man’s violence had been a product of his own fear of an intruder. A fear she could understand. He had said he did not want to hurt her. That he would not hurt her.

It was difficult to believe him. A week earlier it would have been different. But now, after all that had happened to her, she could not quite convince herself that this new man would leave her alone. She had felt him, hard against her, when he had tackled her out in the muddy field. He had hesitated—she knew it—fighting an urge to take a different course, to do something other than take her inside for an interrogation.

But he had not done that other thing. If he had wanted to hurt her he could have done so already. But he had not. And he had not made her his prisoner. She had been the other one’s prisoner. But this man had left her there in the living room, free to leave.

And there was the gun. If he tried to come for her in the night, there was the gun.

Reluctant, unsure, she decided to stay. She went into the little bedroom and closed the door. It had no lock. She stoked up a fire in the wood burning stove, then plunged her hand into the bowels of the sleeping bag and pulled out the handgun. She double-checked to be certain it was loaded and that the safety was on, then put it under her pillow. She climbed into bed and pulled the covers up under her chin. Turning onto her side she burrowed her hand under the pillow until she could just sense the cold metal of the gun against her fingertips. Laying that way, she eventually fell asleep.

In his room Vaughn assaulted his second glass of whiskey.

The situation was impossible.

The third one. The third!

He didn't know why he hadn't killed her. Shot her through the window the moment he had seen her and drawn his gun. After, once she had seen him, it was her fear that confused him. Kept his fists off her. Kept his bullets out of her.

And now he was trapped there with her. How the fuck had she gotten there?

Found him? Judging by the state of that filthy wad of clothes in the garbage and the cuts and scratches he had seen on her legs, she had been badly chewed up by the forest on her way from wherever. As much as he wanted her gone, it would be a shit thing to let her go running barefoot back into the woods, possibly to die.

He thought back over the way she had run, her terror screaming truth. How he had caught her, forced her to the ground. The way it had felt to hold her down, under him, her tiny strength struggling against his, both of them breathing hard from exertion, from the adrenaline of fear.

He felt his prick stiffening.

He would never have…. He could have killed her, if she had tried anything like what those others had done. But he would never…He had said “molest” when he had realized what she was afraid of. Her tears and her pleading had made him feel ashamed. He had not been able to say that other word, and so he had assured her he would not molest her.

He took another gulp from his glass. In spite of his guilt, his suspicion of her was overwhelming. Even her tears, however earnest they appeared, seemed dubious. Like her bullshit story of losing her way from her campground.

Again the memory of her, small and panting, caught in his arms. At the thought of it he felt his cock swell. And a little twinge of nausea. But he couldn't drive the scene 52

from his mind. Her under him in the mud, her delicate neck and arms slick with rain, his total, undeniable power over her. Almost unconsciously he began slowly running his hand over the underside of his hard-on. Suppressing his feelings of repugnance he urged on his erection with thoughts of how he had felt, his hard cock pressed to her ass, knowing she was powerless against him. Then, thinking of what he might have done, he shoved down the waist of his pants and began really stroking himself.

They were out there, in the mud. The rain pelting and soaking and chilling him, shrinking the world. Darker. Closer. Just damp humming and a merging of disjointed rhythmic panting.

She had come to hurt him. To destroy the last shreds of a life torn apart by those who had come for him before her. With all the rage which they had earned, which he had suppressed, denied for over a year, he would punish her.

Hate burned at his core, melting pity, swelling and rising up to burn away reason.

He was lava, hot and heavy and searing and seeping into all her crevices and gaps. Her most desperate struggle a mere throb, a tiny warm pulse beneath his drowning force.

Soon his heat would rend her—body and spirit—to nothing.

Her little pulses throbbed now and again as his fingertips clawed down soft flesh until they hooked over thick gray stretchy cotton. He pulled her sweats down to her knees, then pulled down the boxers. His boxers. Her ass. Pale smooth skin. The dark shadow of the deep cleft promising revenge and satisfaction. He imagined her struggling, whimpering, crying beneath him as he undid his belt and the fly of his jeans, holding her still with one arm belted under and around her as he stroked his hard cock a few times through his boxers before pulling it out, thrusting it into his open fist, feeling it 53

flex in his hand, the very feel of his own hardness, length and girth making him harder, bigger.

First, her cunt. Forcing her down onto her hands, then down further, until she had to lay her pale cheek on the wet ground, wrenching her legs apart with his own, he entered her from behind, suddenly, brutally. A violent tremor shook her body against his. Ramming into her, yanking her back against him by her hips each time, huffing and grunting with each thrust he fucked her, hard and deliberate, each brutal stroke firing his need, urging him on with fresh desperation. More, more, more. He was fucking her with supreme urgency, and he needed more.

Her ass. That tighter place. Shameful place. More to feel there. Fuck yes. He unsheathed his cock from her pussy and pressed the cunt-slicked head to the tight little rim of her asshole. Just the thought of pushing in, stuffing the swollen tip of his prick past that resistant clench made him want to come.

Wait. Wait.

With a determined grip he began feeding her ass his hard cock, inch by inch, first forcing her open with the rounded end, the tight little ring gripping and squeezing him as he finally pushed through, then, with a heaving grunt, sank into her with the full length of his shaft. The conquest accomplished he began pumping furiously, a raging climax bearing down on him, fast and hard.

Her little pulses swelled and quickened as his hard heat widened her gaps, seared hidden softer hotter flesh, filled dark recesses. Her screams were incinerated as they hit the air, never sounding. She was drowning under him, her lungs filling with his 54

obliterating heat roiling over her from above, rent and torn by his cold hardness from below. The incinerating hate voided his core, filling and obliterating her.

He came back to himself. He was a man again. In his room again. Taking off his t-shirt and using it to clean up the mess he had shot onto his stomach and chest.

His rage sated his gut rolled, and he gagged on his shame, slumped under his self-loathing.

What am I, a fucking rapist now?

He had not had a twinge of sexual feeling in months, and the first thing to get his cock hard had been the feeling of a woman struggling to get out of his violent grip. The first fantasy he had jacked off to was that of raping some girl who had done nothing to him. He thought he might puke. He tried to burn away his nausea with three big gulps of whiskey. Then, knowing hours of insomnia were in store for him, he set the empty glass on the night stand and went to bed.

When he awoke the next morning, when he remembered there was a strange woman sleeping in the next room, a bilious mixture of rage, resentment, and remorse rose in Vaughn’s throat. This cabin in the woods had become his one place of refuge on this shitty earth, and here was some stranger, just like those others for all he knew, destroying his privacy, his solitude, his precarious feeling of security.

But then, she had seemed so fragile, sort of broken, and so frightened of him. He had grown so used to being commodified, pawed and tracked, he had nearly forgotten that he was a big, intimidating man who could frighten a woman. With a gun. He remembered the fantasy he had jerked off to the night before and a clammy fist of shame squeezed his gut.

He got out of bed and put on the a clean shirt and pants before going to the bathroom to brush the morning-after whiskey taste out of his mouth and take a leak.

Heading toward the kitchen, he found her sitting at the dining table, reading
Crime and
Punishment
.

She looked up from her book to his stare. A dark shadow of beard stubble made his face seem paler. He was haggard and disheveled, and looked scarier than he had the night before. At the same time, though, that thick, towering, rough man looked…fragile. A cracked concrete column.

“I borrowed this from you,” she said apologetically, indicating the novel. “I hope you don’t mind.”

She wished she could evaporate from his sight. Last night she had been afraid he would attack her. Now, as he glowered down at her, she felt like she was really the intruder. She felt hated.

“No. Just don’t get any ideas about the ax I’ve got outside.” He nodded toward her book and with an effort he smiled, trying for a reassuring look.

Unsure what to make of his questionably comic reference and his uncomfortable smile, she tried to joke back.