Chapter 12 #5
held his index and middle fingers to Shannon’s lips, inserting them gently into her mouth so she could suck on them. He ran
his own tongue up and down the valley between his fingers, now glistening with their shared efforts.
He took his time. He understood a woman’s body unlike any man Shannon had ever been with. The way he touched her, explored
her, stroked her—never rushing, taking his sensual time, building her anticipation. With repetitious motions of pulsating
pressure, Fenix swirled his wet fingers around and onto her clitoris, stimulating emanations of delight through her. Then
he would bring his fingers back to his mouth to lick her pleasure off of them, savoring the taste of her.
And he surprised her. Just as she was about to peak, Fenix boldly thrust four fingers into her and hooked them upward. Shannon
felt every joint and knuckle as he stretched against her, sending her over the edge. “Oh, Fenix!” she moaned, arriving all
over his beautiful hand.
As she panted and gasped, he brought his lips to one of her hard nipples, caressing it with his tongue. Shannon’s eyes rolled
back in her head.
Yes, Fenix was not most men.
Once her passion subsided, her body still tingling in afterglow, she beheld his face. She certainly had a type: devastatingly
pretty boys like Sunbern and Fenix. And that was why Shannon was risking it all to continue seeing him, even after reconnecting
with Sunbern.
“I’m going to miss you,” she said.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Fenix replied. “I’m just scared you might not recognize me when I return.”
Shannon tapped him on the nose teasingly. “Don’t be silly. I’ve always known exactly who you are.”
Fenix grinned. “You’re right. I’m just trying to guilt you into coming with me.”
She shook her head sadly.
“Yes,” her lover said. “Your unfinished business.”
She leaned over to kiss him.
“It’ll be all worth it in the end,” Shannon promised.
“I feel funny . . .” April moaned, her stomach bubbling.
She was sprawled on the massive lamb leather couch in the center of the dance floor of their RV’s discotheque room. Years
ago, the Sun cousins had converted the primary bedroom into their own private club when it became clear to them that they
were not going to sleep much on these desert reunions.
Above her in the darkness shimmered hundreds of tiny Aprils in a glittering kaleidoscope, all of them giving the same grimace
back to her. The disco ball revolving above her was far too big for the space, but it was iconic. It had once hung in Studio
54’s private cocaine room, until it was lost in storage for decades before being rediscovered and won in a Sotheby’s auction
by a very lit Sunbern on his twenty-fifth birthday.
Kneeling in front of his DJ stand, Sunbern stared in a deep trance at the flashing lights on his turntables. The music was
on autoplay and was filling his ears with the concept of sound, but his brain was not receiving it as music. Instead, the
physical manifestation of each note would shoot out of one of the flashing lights, until it hit the back of his eyeball at
just the right spot, activating a seventh sense in which sight and sound were fused together.
“Or is it sixth?” he murmured to himself aloud. His voice looked and sounded like stale coffee. Sunbern blinked, finally breaking away from the blinding lights, and fell into a child’s pose on the bloodwood floor. “Yeah, Ape, I feel funny too,” he said. “This stuff isn’t very euphoric.”
In the corner of the discotheque, Wayward was staring at his phone, but not at the screen. He was inspecting it, turning it
over, watching it pulsate in his palm. “Who are you?” he asked it quietly. “What do you want from us?”
April sat up and massaged her belly. “We’re all definitely fucked-up, but I don’t think this is molly . . .”
Behind her, Lola paced back and forth in an increasing panic, wringing her hands as she fought futilely against the dams that
were bursting in her brain. “Have you guys ever heard of black molly?” she moaned. “That dark stuff in Sunbern’s capsules
wasn’t MDMA. It was powdered mushrooms! We’re all shrooming!”
“Oh, lame!” April groaned as she looked over at Sunbern, who was instantly backed against the wall with his hands held up
defensively. “Sunbern, why the fuck would you dose us with shrooms?”
“Hey, I didn’t know they were shrooms! It’s not polite to ask someone what free drugs they’ve just given you!” Sunbern cried.
Lola leaped over to him and smacked him on the side of his head, hard. “That’s EXACTLY what you do when someone hands you
free drugs! What the heck is wrong with you, big cuz?!”
Oblivious to the reluctant trippers, Wayward turned over his phone, inspecting the gold Sunfang logo on the back. “Isn’t it
funny,” he said to himself, “that the only people on earth with Sunfang phones are people in the Sun Clan?” He remembered
how he was handed his first Sunfang phone on the first day of middle school, and how it had felt like a rite of passage to
have the same exclusive phone as his older cousins. “But . . . why?” he asked the phone. “What’s so special about you?”
Wayward watched, mesmerized, as the phone suddenly began to grow an ear.
“Mercy! Mercy!”
Wayward looked up as Sunbern cowered under Lola as she pummeled him.
“Mercy!” he repeated. “You assholes never complained about my free drugs when we were kids!”
When Wayward looked back down, the phone ear was gone, but his suspicions were confirmed. He turned off the phone and slid
it far away from him.
Lola fell to the floor beside Sunbern. The whole room around her was pulsating sporadically, like an ailing heart at the precipice
of infarction.
Sensing her anguish, Sunbern protectively put his arm around her, even though he was still hurting from her blows. “Hey, Lo,”
he said weakly. “Take it easy, okay?”
Lola could only shiver against him.
With great effort, April heaved herself off the sofa, forcing herself to focus as she attempted to step back upon the plane
of reality. But instead she crashed her head against Sunbern’s vintage disco ball, blasting glinting fragments in all directions
like shooting stars.
“Ah, fuck!” she groaned, rubbing her forehead.
One of the disco pieces was flung all the way to Wayward, landing on the floor in front of him. Wayward picked up the tiny
mirror and saw his reflection, finally gaining perspective. He looked around.
“Wait,” he then asked, “where’s Bindi?”
Under slivered moonlight, Bindi scampered across the Mojave Desert, chasing an iridescent lizard whose alluring scales glittered back at him.
The puppy was unaware of the wild dangers all around him, oblivious to the dark shadows gliding across the cold sky, nonchalant about the crouched figures eyeing him from behind rocks.
No, all Bindi cared about was catching his lizard, even though the safety of the RV had long since disappeared behind him.
The lizard, who up to this point had been humoring this clumsy-footed would-be predator, finally grew tired of the chase and
dived into the roots of a Joshua tree, vanishing from sight. Bindi pawed at the spot where the lizard had hidden, but to no
avail. His new playmate had abandoned him.
Then, somewhere in the distance, something howled. Bindi perked up at this, as though finally cognizant of his unfamiliar
surroundings. The puppy looked around him, sniffing the air in search, but the comforting smell of Wayward had long since
faded away.
Instead, a frigid breeze snaked its way across Bindi’s small body, causing him to shiver—and it was a shiver of genuine fear,
which was an emotion that the sheltered pup had seldom felt in the past. Bindi began to whimper as he realized that he had
made a crucial error.
Perhaps, he thought, if I stay right here, Wayward will come find me. Wayward was new in his life, but Bindi also knew that
Wayward cared about him and would surely notice he was missing.
Yet it was too late. As a cloud engulfed the nearly new moon above, blanketing the desert in darkness, a tall, silent creature
appeared out of nowhere, encroaching upon Bindi from behind. Trembling, Bindi turned around.
Before the puppy could react, the creature reached out and snatched him away.
“BINDI!” Wayward screamed as he ran through the desert, his voice echoing across the vast emptiness all around. “Bindi, where
are you, boy?!” He stopped to listen, but there was only silence. That was, except for the manic hyperventilation coming from
behind him.
“Weiwei, slow the fuck down!” April called out, many paces behind Wayward.
“Not all of us run goddamn marathons!” Though she was tripping less hard than before, the shrooms finally beginning to release their psychic grip on her mind, she was still having trouble gathering her bearings, and had already run downward into the dirt beneath her more than once.
Huffing and puffing as well, Sunbern jogged behind her, carrying a limp Lola in his arms like a sack of sad potatoes. Despite
the freezing temperature, he was slick with sweat—Lola could not have weighed more than ninety pounds, but the four of them
had been frantically searching for Bindi for at least two hours, and his arms felt like they were about to fall off.
“Just put me down, big cuz,” Lola groaned. “I’m so dizzy.” Unlike the rest of them, her psychedelics had not worn off; in
fact, they were amplified by the darkness of her surroundings. “Just leave me here,” she said again.
But Sunbern kept going, cradling her closer. “No, Lo!” he said insistently. “We’re sticking together. We’re the Sun cousins,
and we stick together.”
“Oh, Sunbern,” Lola scoffed at him, though not without pity. “You are so easily fooled.”
Sunbern meant to ask his baby cousin what she meant by this, but at that point they had reached Wayward, who was on his knees,
his face in his hands, shaking his head in a mounting panic.