July 1998
The Nevada sky grew hazy with the heat and the dust and in the distance the first signs of the lightning storm to come grumbled and roared. I sat curled up in a chair in the living room listening to the thunder and I could feel my heart beating and my body growing tense. A lighting storm outside was the harbinger of a different type of storm inside and I wondered briefly if tonight would be the last night, if tonight he would hurt me so badly I would finally break the spell he had cast over me and walk away. The slamming door caught my attention as he stormed into the house and when I looked at him I couldn't breathe, and just for a moment I stared. Jack Little Horse Delgado, my recent drug of choice, and the most beautiful man I had, or have, ever seen. He glowed to me, he was half Piute, half Lakota Sioux and I have never seen another creature as intense as this man.
We had met a few weeks earlier at a bar in Caliente Nevada, I had only intended to stop for a few days on my way back to Idaho, but I took one look at Little Horse and I was hooked. I met him at one of the bars, and when he walked in, all six foot three of him, I remember seeing images of great feral cats in my mind. His waist length pitch black hair was held back in a single braid and his face held me captive for a moment. His face was all harsh angles and planes, with deep set dark brown eyes, the classic Sioux nose, which could double as a beak and a cold hard smile. His body was like his face, hard, and I don't mean that made in a gym hard, Little Horse had gained his muscle tone from long grueling hours of work I remember smiling at him and instantly recognizing how dangerous he was and not caring.
I went home with him a few hours later, and the next morning I watched him work out on his roof. Little Horse's love was martial arts as well as Native American hand to hand combat styles. He used to laugh and say he was born a hundred years too late and how the art of battle had been lost with the Indian Nations. "Counting coup," he used to say, "must have a man feel like a God." Little Horse was angry in a way most people simply didn't understand, he embodied 200yrs of rage, a rage that had been passed down to him with his brown eyes and black hair, a rage that held him as close as his honey brown skin and beat with his wild Lakota heart, it was the rage of his ancestors and he kept his rage under a tight rain, until the lighting flashed across the sky and then he needed to ride the lighting.
A short bust of thunder brought me back to the here and now, and I looked up at Little Horse and shuddered at the wild look in his eyes.
"I'll be on the roof," he snarled.
I watched him walk up to the roof as the first streak of lighting streaked through the sky and fear crept up my spine. I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Jose Cuervo and a couple of shot glasses and followed him. I stood for a moment watching him, in nothing but his jeans as he worked his blade skills and my eyes never left the knife in hands. Blades of all kinds fascinate me and we are old friends. Taking a quick shot of Tequila I stripped out of my clothes and pulled my hair out of my barrette, and naked I walked through the door and into the storm.
After tossing back a shot of tequila I stepped into the battle circle he had created for himself, and at first he didn't realize it's me, and for a moment the blade hovered gently at my throat. Little Horse looked up at me and grinned at my naked body ant the shot of tequila in my hand.
"You should leave," he said softly.