There weren't many places to hide in Fort Pratt.
A little town of thirty thousand out in the east Colorado prairie, Fort Pratt didn't have the teeming crowds you could lose yourself in. There weren't subways and buses you could use to disappear. There weren't any mazes of back allies where nobody looked.
If you wanted to get away for a tryst, you went to the derelict sugar mill.
A tall, ragged old cluster of four white silos with a big nineteenth-century brick building clinging to the side, it was a haven for all things you couldn't do in public, but you couldn't do in your own home either.
I ducked through a rusted-out hole in the chain-link fence around the mill, scaring up crickets and wasps as I waded through the waist-high grass. As I stepped in through the doorless entryway, I saw a woman sitting on a lawn chair in a little makeshift kitchen, a man behind him.
He wasn't menacing her. He was massaging her shoulders. Fifty years ago, this old sugar mill would have been full of male vagrants fighting each other and forming gangs and dragging women around by the hair or whatever they did back when men ran things. But times had changed. When the Women's Power Movement had replaced husbands with wives in charge of the family, and the Justice and Female Leadership Act made men legally beholden to their wives, things had changed all up and down society. Now that a man couldn't get a job unless he had a woman's sponsorship, down-and-out men attached themselves to women who would have them. Sometimes, the women would build up little harems of diamonds-in-the-rough. The women weren't always beacons of civility themselves, but at least they required their men to stay clean and groomed and sit up straight and eat with a knife and fork. From the stories my grandma had told me, homeless men before the matriarchal age hadn't even been able to manage that.
I, thankfully, wasn't here to trawl for boyfriends. I already had one, and he and I always met on the top floor of the beet mill.
I climbed the brick staircase to the dark upper floor, lit dramatically by little square shafts of light that filtered through the grid-paned windows. I sat by what had once been a window but had now crumbled into a gaping hole in the wall, and I waited. I checked the time on my digital wristwatch—I left my phone at home in case anyone tried to use the GPS to stalk me and find out what I was doing—and saw 5:57 PM. I was three minutes early.
Austin's timing was impeccable. Ten seconds after the clock struck 6 PM, I heard scrabbling on the wall outside. I peeked over the edge, and a ladder was leaning against the wall of the building, just barely reaching up to the lip of the hole. And Austin made his way up. Tall, athletic, with dreamy hair flowing from beneath his baseball cap and a cool but determined look in his eye, he was a dream in denim jeans and a tight T-shirt. I always had him meet me by climbing the ladder because I thought it would be too obvious that we were meeting if we both entered the mill through the same door. Or at least, that's what I always told him. I didn't really believe that. The truth is, I had him use the ladder just because it was more romantic to have him climb up to meet me, like a cowboy Robin Hood saying hello to Maid Marian.
He levered himself up, not at all winded. "Cary," he said, "how's your life?"
It was always 'how's your life?' Never 'how's it going?' or 'what's up?' or 'how you doing?' He said what no one else said, and for some reason, I liked that.
"Hey Austin," I smiled my happy-to-see-you smile and sat against the wall. "What's happening?"
"Still in good shape after all."
"I got good news," I told him. "My sister finally got that job she was looking for."
"Wonderful!"
"Yeah, and she's earned it. No more of having a deadbeat sister, because now she's an independent woman." I smiled. "And now she'll finally be off my couch."
He sat in front of me, our eyes just a foot apart. "About time, right?"
I let my feelings out. "It's not that I'm mad she needed the help, it's just that she really needed to be on her own, you know? It wasn't good for her, relying on me, because you need to be able to help yourself, or else you're just not an adult." I pretended my sister was in front of me and told her, "I love you, but I'm not your mother, so you've got to take the initiative here."
"So now," he said, "You've got your house all to yourself."
"Yeah. Think I'll put up a home theater where her desk was, now that all that space is freed up."
"You could do that..." his voice trailed off suggestively, and he sat against the wall next to me, let his limbs go slack and gave me the bedroom eyes. "It also means you can have friends over."
It was Austin's best attempt at being subtle. For a man, it wasn't bad. I responded by kneeling on his lap, my hands on his shoulders. "Now," I said sarcastically, "if I only I could think of someone..."
He answered my touching in kind. First, his hands lay gently on my ribs, where he had learned that I liked him to start. As I kissed him, he edged his hands farther down to my waist. His palms massaged over my stomach, stoked the heat underneath it. Then he plied my hips.
I sighed out my comfort and melted against him, my chin on his shoulder, my body draped over his chest. I could feel his heart beating, fast and vital. I could feel his breathing push gently against my breasts.
I started to fondle him back. I palmed his chest, felt his male nipples through his shirt. I ran my fingers along every line of his muscles, tracing paths I knew well. He had showered just before leaving his house, but there was already a little sheen of sweat on his skin, inevitably on a late-June day like this. He felt warm, earthy, alive. My hands made their way down to his lap where I felt the little metal bulb. It was the chastity cage I had put on him. It was, literally, an ironclad promise that he was committed only to me.
He could not feel my fingers, but he could feel his cock moving under their pressure, and his breath ever-so-slightly caught. I looked at him, saw him trying to look suave even as he blushed. He mostly succeeded.
"I've been saving myself for you all week," he said.
All week, since the last time I had had him.
"Do you want it?" he tried.
I gave a little hum of consideration. "Next time," I told him. "I don't really feel like it today." Sex was fun as hell, but it was just fun. Cuddling made me feel supported and loved. It made me feel like a wife.
He let it go. Bless him, he was enough of a gentleman to know that my pleasure came first.
"Maybe you can take me to your house," he whispered in my ear. "If we're going to get serious, we should get used to living together."
I sighed bitterly. It was his one flaw as a gentleman: he wanted me to take the first step. I was free to marry him, even without his mother's permission. A few months ago, I'd asked her for permission anyway, and she had thrown a frying pan at me. After that, I had just assumed that Austin would tell her off and show up at my door in a suit and bow tie, ready for marriage. Instead, he'd done nothing. He had expected me to do all the work.
"Get away from her first." I said. "It's not that hard."
"It is that hard. The police will be after me."
It was true. We lived eight miles apart, and a man couldn't legally travel more than five without the permission of the woman of the house—and since he was single, that was his mother. But I still wasn't impressed. "Come on," I told him. "you know that shouldn't stop you. I'm not asking you to go rob a bank for me, alright? Just come to me. Don't make me come to you."
"Cary, I love you, but you shouldn't ask me to break the rules for you."
Fair point, except for one thing. "Now hold on, Austin, you know damn well you're not afraid of that. Just being here, we're breaking the law by trespassing, and I haven't heard a peep about that. You're just scared to defy your mother."
"No I'm not!"
"Then prove it. Prove to me you're willing to do something big and you're not too scared." I restrained myself from calling him a mama's boy—not that it was groundless, but I wasn't mean enough to say it.
"Why don't you just marry me now? Then I'll be legally bound to you." He forced a horny smile. "Then you can do anything you want to me, and you don't need anyone's permission. Why not?"
"Because I don't want to marry a mama's boy, okay?"
Okay, I guess I really was mean enough to say it.
He gaped back at me. Those words had cut right through him.
I slipped off of him. "Austin, I want to love you. I really do, because you're pretty and you're sweet and... it just feels good when you're around. Okay? But you've got to get away from her. I'm not going to make it happen for you." It hurt, telling him what he didn't want to hear. It wasn't really what I wanted to hear either. Part of me wanted to lie to myself that he was perfect just the way he was, marry him, take him home and keep him. But if I did that, I knew the lie wouldn't last. I'd be bitter about having to rescue him, and that bitterness would fester like an old sore. And then I'd turn into one of those angry old wives who one day snaps and beats her husband. I couldn't do that, especially not to him.
But I did love him. So I gave him a quick little kiss on the lips before I dismounted him.
* * *
I was at my day job, stocking the shelves at the grocery store when it happened. Well, it'd be more honest to say I was slacking off and chatting with my friend Patricia. The store had a cafe that was only half-occupied at most, so she and I set up camp at a vacant two-person table and chatted about life.
Patricia worked at the truck stop down the street, where she sold diesel and cigarettes and beef jerky and checked the male truckers' travel permits that their wives had signed. She and I were talking about news and friends when I got the call.
It was a number I recognized. It had been on my contact list once, and I had taken it off, but I still knew the number. I tapped 'accept,' put the phone to my ear and forced myself to sound bored as I said, "hello?"
"Cary, you slut! What have you done?" Austin's mother was as diplomatic as ever.
"Now I'm picking up on some hostility here," I replied, "so can I ask if you're upset with me for something?" I still sounded bored, but now I was doing it just to tweak her nose.
"Where is Austin?" she demanded.
My eyebrows rose. "Well I don't know, where is Austin?" it was a dumb thing to say, but it was all I could think of. Had he really...?
"He's gone! He's supposed to be in bed, and he's not there!"
"Mrs. Branby," I said, wrinkling my nose, "you sound like he's eight years old—okay?—and he's not. He's a man." I grinned. "Believe me, I tested him out myself."
