Atticus smiled.
“Did she take up for you?” he asked. He sat with his hands hooked around his legs, his back hunched.
I nodded proudly.
“Sharla Martin,” I began, “was the meanest girl on our block—she stole my bike one day and rode around me in circles, taunting me with it. ‘It’s my bike now,’ she said, grinning like a hyena. ‘Ain’t nothin’ you can do about it neither.’ Then Sosie came out of the house, dressed in a pair of shorts and polka dot rain boots”—I threw my head back and laughed hard at how stupid my sister looked in those shorts and rain boots—“and she stepped right up to Sharla Martin, grabbed one handlebar of my bike and stopped it right there in the cul de sac. ‘Get off my sister’s fuckin’ bike, you ratty-haired bitch,’ she told her. All of the kids watching, gasped. So did I. Then Momma, who had been watching the whole thing from the kitchen window, came storming outside to lay down the law. Sosie was grounded for a week for using curse words. But I got my bike back. And Sharla Martin was never mean to me again—she and my sister became best friends after that.” I shook my head and rolled my eyes.
(I thought about my sisters for a moment. But only a moment.)
“She was a good sister,” Atticus said about Sosie.
“Yes. She was a good sister.” My voice broke off.
“But what I remember most about Sosie was she liked to tickle me until I peed myself. God! I hated her for that!”—I roared with laughter—“Out of nowhere: watching TV or eating lunch on the lawn or riding together in the backseat with Momma and Daddy to Grandma Mary’s house for Thanksgiving; Sosie would just start tickling me, and I’d pee myself every single time. Momma was mad she’d made me pee all over my dress. We had to pull over at the nearest store and buy me a new one before we got to Grandma Mary’s. I was always nervous around her, thinking at any moment she was going to start tickling me.” I stopped. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Atticus grinned at me under hooded eyes, and suddenly I got that same nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach I’d always felt around Sosie.
I whirled around and tried to crawl away on my hands and knees; I shrieked with laughter as Atticus pinned me.
“No! Please! Atticus no!” My laughter filled the air; tears shot from my eyes; my legs kicked, and my arms flailed as his fingers dug into my ribs.
“ATTICUSSS!” I shrieked; tears streamed down my cheeks.
He stopped seconds before I wet myself.
I couldn’t breathe for a long time as I lay there on the warm summer grass under the hot summer sun looking up into the bluest summer eyes I had ever seen, regarding me with more love and affection than I had ever known.
“You’re like an angel,” Atticus whispered, his gaze sweeping my face. “You’re my angel.” He dipped his head and kissed my lips.
I lay beneath him; my hands found the end of his shirt and I pulled and tugged, wanting to take it off. And he let me. I ran the palms of my hands over his muscled chest, feeling every line and curve that made his body so young and strong and beautiful underneath my fingertips.
He dipped his head again and took me into a deeper kiss, moaning against my mouth, giving me his breath, his life, his everything.
“I’m still a little sore,” I whispered onto his lips, and then kissed them lightly, “but I don’t care. I want you. I need you. I need everything that you are and everything you were and everything that you will be. I feel like I…need you to survive.”
(You have no idea, Thais…you have no idea…)
I kissed him again, and Atticus returned it in kind. “Is that…wrong?” I asked. “Should I not feel that way?”
I felt the warmth of his tongue trace my bottom lip, then his teeth tugging at it; his hungry mouth on my chin, my jawbone, my throat, and I thought I might die from it alone.
“No, love,” he said hotly onto my mouth and then kissed me deeper. “If it’s wrong then we’re both damned to Hell.” Our kisses became uncontrolled, ravenous; he pressed himself against me.
“You admit that you lied, then,” Atticus said between kisses. “I did hurt you yesterday—why did you lie?”
My fingers speared within his hair, grabbing him with small handfuls in case he tried to get away now that he knew the truth.
“I just didn’t want to make you feel bad,” I said.
Atticus lay some of his weight on top of me, but not enough to smother me. He kissed my eyelids, the left and then the right, and he kissed the little hollow beneath my nose. (And I kissed her mouth again because I couldn’t get enough of how sweet she tasted.)
“Well, I’m not having sex with you this soon after,” he said, pressing into me below. “But I’ll do something else for you.”
“What will you do?”
A nervous and excited knot formed in the lowest part of my belly. Oh, my Lord…what is he going to do? What could he possibly do?
Atticus moved downward, on his hands and knees; he lifted my dress to my waist, exposing me to him and the summer air and the cloudless sky and the heavens above us. His mouth caressed me, every rib, one by one; my navel, my hips, my inner thighs.
I’m going to die…Lord, he’s going to kill me with his mouth; he’s going to kill me with his touch…and I don’t care.
My lips parted with a gasp of air, and my head fell back against the grass when I felt his fingers part me and caress me. And when his tongue touched me, I moaned and my back arced and my breasts rose and my hands gripped the grass beneath me, freeing it from the soil. And when I felt the explosion go off inside my belly and my thighs clamp around his head, and when I tried to crawl away from him, he held his head firmly between my legs; his big hands gripped my thighs, forcing my body in place, refusing my desperate need to escape his lashing tongue.
We lay on the grass together afterward, looking up at the blue sky, feeling the heat on our faces.
We said nothing for a long time.
I wondered how he could make me feel the way he could, to make me experience so many different emotions without fainting from the crushing weight of them all.
(I wondered why there was no blood…)
44
ATTICUS
“I think we should go a little farther out,” I told Thais the next day. “We need to see if there are any other cabins nearby; search them for supplies.”
She wore her only pair of pants; her sockless feet were shoved into the oversized hiking boots. We each wore a backpack, packed with only things we’d need for a short trip away from the cabin. And as always, we carried our guns.
We headed north, in the opposite direction of where I’d dragged Mark Porter’s body and covered him with leaves and tree branches.
“You should go back and get it,” Thais said about his backpack full of supplies. “He doesn’t need the stuff anymore. And we do.”
I agreed to go back and get it later.