Chapter 19
Once they were sitting in the truck and had caught their breath, Thora could ask the question that haunted her. “Did you actually
see it ring?”
“No,” Lee said. “I was arranging my pillow when it happened. I looked up and I couldn’t see anything out of order. I couldn’t
even tell which bell rang. Why did I say we should stay in there?”
“Let’s go wake up Mack. She can’t get any madder at us today after the owl incident.”
He turned the key in the ignition, and nothing happened. The car was dead. Suddenly the air acquired a thickness, like nothing
could move through it. A pit opened up in Thora’s stomach. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever told Lee the omen they’d concocted
as kids about what the ringing of a bell in that room meant. Namely that someone was about to die. In any case, she wasn’t
going to remind him.
“Jumper cables,” she said. “One of us must have them, right?”
Lee hopped out and looked around, both his truck and her Jeep.
“What the fuck?”
“Nothing?”
She turned the key in the ignition again. Dead, dead, dead.
“You’re an Eagle Scout kind of guy. How do you not have jumper cables?”
“I was never any kind of scout. My mom considered them a paramilitary organization for children. Nonetheless, I keep jumper
cables in the truck. Where could they be?”
Thora was less sure she had them. The workings of the Wagoneer had been Cody’s domain, so fervent was his love for her old
vehicle. He probably should have gotten it in the divorce.
He sat back in the driver’s seat again.
“If you don’t send you proof-of-life text tomorrow morning, Mack will come again. She will either have jumper cables . . .”
“Or she will rip us limb from limb.”
“It’s a risk we have to take. It looks like it’s a full moon, but that is not enough light to safely get to Woodhill on foot.”
“Not to mention it’s like ten miles.”
“I know, I know. I have two sleeping bags in the truck. The kind you can zip together into one big sleeping bag. It’s a clear
night. They’re rated for a pretty low temperature.”
Of course he had two sleeping bags that zipped together in his truck. How much sex had he been having in the back of her great-uncle’s truck anyway?
“I’m not sleeping in the bed of your truck.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Tons better. “I do, actually.”
As they hiked Moonrise Mountain, Thora thought about how she and her cousins had created legends about the summit. Gory ones, with human sacrifices and horrifying rituals done by people who had gone mad in the woods. People touched by whatever eldritch horrors skulked in this ancient forest.
She could imagine a different legend now. One where she ruled over this mountain. She had the power to say what went on here,
and no horror, eldritch or otherwise, would stand in her way.
“You know it gets colder the higher we go?” Lee asked.
“You said the sleeping bags were rated to low temperatures.”
“Doesn’t mean we need to push it.”
Oh, he’d be pushing it all right.
When that bell rang, it woke her out of her trance. She had been trying to receive communication. No, she was giving the communication
now. This mountain was hers, Juniper was hers. She was claiming it, setting down roots, setting pen to paper, fucking doing
it all.
And Lee was coming along for the ride.
Her stoner older cousins had filled her head with their stories about the French fur trapper who ate psychedelic mushrooms
and leaped off the summit of Moonrise Mountain, thinking he was going to be caught by the moon.
There were stories whipped up during the Satanic Panic about the slab of rock at the summit being an altar for the Satanists—always
summer people, never a local—to do their child sacrifices. Predictably, any actually missing children usually ended up drowned
or kidnapped by a parent, but the Satanists made for a better story.
They were all stories. But Thora was the boss of the story, forever and always, and she was making this new one in her head
true.
“You’ve been to the summit, haven’t you?” she asked.
“Sure, the view is great up there . . .”
The view will be great all right, she thought.
“. . . during the day. What are we going to do up there at night?” Lee continued.
Once, during Cody’s summer visit to Juniper, she was brave enough to wake him in the middle of the night and ask for what
she wanted sexually. He had denied her, but Lee was made of sterner stuff.
“You’re going to worship me under the light of the full moon. It’s how I’m going to claim the power I need to get a handle
on everything going on at Juniper.”
She was waiting for Lee to say what Cody said. You’ve lost it. What do you mean, worship you? Isn’t that illegal?
But Lee was his own person. Deeply, truly, always his own person. She loved that about him, she found herself thinking, and
she didn’t shy away from it.
“Wow,” he said simply.
“Too unhinged?”
“The right amount of hinged, I think.”
The other options were to call the cops or call a priest, neither of which she would be choosing.
They hiked swiftly, both to keep warm and because Thora’s invitation to Lee, vague as it was, put some extra pep in his step.
Their breaths puffed in great clouds. Thora imagined the mountain air inhabiting their bodies. No longer separate from nature,
they draped the mountain in a cloudy mist themselves. She felt one with everything, expansive, huge. Whatever trifling force
was trying to oust her from her home would never win when she had the entire mountain on her side. And next, the moon.
She wondered if she should give Lee specific instruction, but he seemed like he could take a concept and run with it. When they got to the summit, he zipped the sleeping bags together and laid them out on a soft bed of moss beside the stone slab. They would sleep there eventually.
The moon was bright enough to cast the mountaintop in silvery shadows. The Milky Way was visible in the sky, that cloud of
breath puffed by the center of the galaxy. The stars were new to her. The cast of stars treading the boards of night’s stage
in the summer had exited, making room for autumn’s constellations. Given New York City’s night skies of homogenous reddish
purple, this new starfield felt miraculous, fresh. Perfect for the occasion. Something brand new in a familiar setting. Rediscovering
Moonrise Mountain, Juniper, herself, Lee. Inviting Lee to discover her.
He pressed her against a vertical wall of stone and kissed her. She felt the penetrating cold of the rock, an opposing force
to the heat of his lips on hers. She knew this would be the balance for the night, and even as it made her lose her breath,
she embraced it.
They wore their pajamas under the random extra clothes Lee had in his truck. Bundled in one of his jackets, she reveled in
the fact that it fit her and that it smelled like him, fresh sawdust and something herbal.
He slipped his hands underneath the jacket, under her camisole, up over her breasts. His hands felt like the starlight, magical
and new. She put her arms around his neck, pulling him in for a deep kiss. Their shared breath was minty cool, ready for bed.
He kissed her neck, and it was like a meteor shower, streaks of light raining down on her everywhere.
In between kisses, he whispered in her ear. “How do I worship you?”
He could have shouted that question; there couldn’t have been a soul for miles. But the whisper was between the two of them,
quiet and sacred.
“Let the moon guide you. What does she want you to do?”
Thora felt wild saying this, a lunatic in the original sense. But something in her told her that if she questioned this, it
wouldn’t work. She had to trust her instincts, she had to trust the moon, and she had to trust Lee.
He turned to gaze at the moon, her curious face watching them. The haze of their freezing breath around them cleared. If she
was laughing at them, at their hubris in thinking they had anything new to offer her, she hid it well.
“She’s telling me to eat that pretty pussy.”
Thora sent up a brief prayer of thanks to the moon.
Lee braced his hands around Thora’s ribcage and hoisted her into a sitting position on the flat-topped boulder. She was shocked.
Never in her adult life had she been picked up, a treatment she thought was reserved for the women literally half her size.
Lee was so fucking strong. Tears threatened to spill, but she contained them. Things were only just getting started.
The boulder was the perfect height for him. Thora’s legs hung over the edge of the boulder, and Lee fit himself between them.
She could lean down to kiss him, his tongue seeking hers and moving in a rhythm that spelled out her future.
They kissed like that until she stopped noticing the cold of the stone under her. Her blood was beating with a pulse so insistent
it felt like it was from outside of her, knocking to get in.
Lee pushed his jacket off Thora’s shoulders, and he sucked at the tender skin where neck and shoulder meet. She shrugged out
of the jacket the rest of the way, skin prickling against the chill air and Lee’s ministrations.
“Can we take this off?” Lee said, fingers on the hem of the camisole, and she treasured that pronoun. They were in this together,
and she nodded, the camisole placed gently beside her.
The cold made her nipples taut, and Lee took advantage, pulling each in turn into his mouth, flicking gently with his tongue, before the feast continued downward.
He kissed her stomach, round and soft, murmuring praise into her body.
“You are so gorgeous, a dream come true.”
But this was her dream come true. Who knew dreams could align like this? She felt so powerful, like she could grant anyone’s
wish, bring the whole universe into harmony. She smiled and lay back against the rock.
“I want to taste your skin every day, forever.”
She could grant him that.
He tucked his fingers under the waistband of her pajama pants. She arched her back to help the pants over her ass, and then
they were past her thighs, and off altogether. She was fully nude atop a mountain, staring up at the full moon. Lee’s kisses
on the insides of her thighs were blessed points of warmth against the cold. He pulled one thigh atop his shoulder, and then
the other. Her breaths became shallow as his kisses drew closer to her center, with maddening slowness.
The need she felt, for him specifically, seemed to heighten. It wasn’t only her mouth or her neck or her pussy that needed
him. It was every cell in her body, vibrating together in some weird way that kept her alive, and if he stopped, they all
might stop vibrating and she’d fly apart into particles.
She couldn’t say this, that he was keeping all of her particles together. So she said his name, Lee, again and again, her favorite syllable.
When his tongue touched her clit, at long last, she sighed with the relief of it.
He set to work. Licking her, pushing one finger into her, then two.
Nudging her with his nose. He pushed his tongue into her.
Pulling it out again, he ran his tongue along her hungrily, in long strokes.
Then his tongue circled her clit. When he sucked on her, it became too much to catalog.
A riot of sensations, replacing all thoughts, collapsing time but expanding pleasure.
He found a pace, fucking her with fingers and licking her clit, and she was swept up on moonbeams into the sky itself. She
came, crying out Lee’s name, gripping his hair, opening her eyes only briefly to see the mystery of the Milky Way.
He didn’t let up, and the orgasm continued, cascading into another with no lull. A new level of pleasure. Lee continued, with
hungry moans and eager fingers, to explore her as she panted and cried out. When she thought she had found the edge of pleasure
she said no, let’s be brave, let’s see what else is there, and a new height would be found. Lee kept lifting her up until she was weeping. Mostly with joy, but also grieving the good
sex she’d been denying herself unknowingly.
When he pulled away, her body slack and spent, she wanted to reciprocate.
The top of the boulder was hers, but when she regained her legs, clumsy as a tiny fawn, she led him to the sleeping bag.
“The moon told me to go down on you, too,” she said.
“The moon loves us both, doesn’t she?”
“Or she loves a good show.”
He lay on his back and she knelt over him. She imagined the moon watching her while she took Lee’s rigid cock into her mouth.
Lee ran his hands over her back, tracing delirious shapes as she worked. When her jaw got tired (not a feeling she was accustomed
to), she sat back, letting her hands sub in.
“You’re magic,” Lee said. If this night was meant for her to feel powerful, it was working. She was hungry for a little praise.
“How so?”
Lee opened his eyes, and suddenly the phrase “looking at her like she hung the moon” made sense. “You’ve changed everything. Me, the mountains, the moon,” he said between panting breaths.
She kept stroking him, slowly enough so that he could still form words. “How have I changed you?”
He didn’t answer right away, that infuriating pause while he gathered his thoughts. She lacked the patience for it tonight.
Deciding to live with the mystery, she bent back down and licked up his length. He murmured something indecipherable as her
lips closed over him again. Once she found her rhythm, all he could do was groan in pleasure, a sound that fueled her.
He placed his hand over hers, sunk into the carpet of moss, moments before he came. It was a gesture to remind her that whatever
was happening, they were together now.
She swallowed his come—leave no trace!—and they collapsed together in the sleeping bag, exhausted.