The rusty red hoodoos looked like people gathered on the mountainsides. Some were tall and thin, others were shorter, broader. They had heads and shoulders. Some of them had arms, or they looked like they were wrapped in ochre serapes. Michelle had never seen anything like them before.
Alejandro briefly shifted his eyes from the highway to her face. He smiled. In a smooth, lilting voice, he said, "When I was a kid, I used to pretend they were Apache Indians, watching me. On a windy day, you can hear them sing a mournful song."
Michelle returned his smile, then glanced down at his hand on her lap. He'd set it on her knee an hour ago, but it had made its way to the top of her thigh. She laid her hand on top of his.
"What?" he asked. A mischievous smile played cross his lips.
"You know what."
Alejandro laughed and turned his hand to grasp hers. His long, tan fingers interlaced with her pale ones, and he gave a light squeeze.
I am in love with this man. As sure as those Apache hoodoos are spying on us. It's a sure sign of the beginning of the end.
"What's that look for?" he asked.
Michelle told her inner voice to shut the hell up and smiled back at him. "Nothing. It's very pretty here."
"I thought you'd like it." He squeezed her hand again and looked back at the road. Ace of Base's
All That She Wants
played on the radio, and he absentmindedly mouthed the words to the chorus while she resumed her daydreaming.
The beginning of the end.
Yes, it was time. She'd been dating Alejandro Alemán for three months now. That's how long Michelle's two previous relationships had lasted before the bottom fell out. There'd been Duncan, who'd only used her to get at her then-friend, Robin; and then there'd been Joe, who was just a plain old jerk. After Joe, Michelle put a moratorium on men. Men were pigs, and she hated all of them.
It was right after the fall semester started that her roommate asked her if she wanted to go to a Dave Matthews concert. Her roommate was already going with a group from the engineering firm where she worked, and they had an extra ticket. Michelle had never heard of Dave Matthews, but she'd heard talk of the concert on the radio. Her first round of tests wasn't for another couple of weeks, so she agreed to go, and that was where she met Alejandro.
Alejandro was a petroleum engineer, in his second year at the firm, and his dark eyes and easy smile caught Michelle's attention right away, but it was his lilting Mexican accent that made her knees go wobbly, which was followed quickly by her ban on men. She spent the first hours of the evening talking and rubbing shoulders with him, and when Dave Matthews started singing "Crash Into Me," Alejandro turned to her. "Would you like to dance?"
"What? Dance? Here?"
Oh my God.
"Yes. Here." His dark eyes bore into hers.
Michelle glanced around. No one was dancing. There wasn't even a dance floor. Plenty of people were singing and waving their arms in the air, but not one of them was dancing. She didn't care. "Sure."
Alejandro took her hand and pulled her into the aisle. He wrapped his arm around her, and they swayed back and forth to the music. He sang in her ear, "Sweet you rock, sweet you roll...."
Oh my god, why does his voice have to be so sexy?
It was the sexiest moment of her twenty-four years, she was certain of it.
Against all her convictions and good judgment, she went home with him that night and had the most incredible, mind-blowing sex of her life. Even as she moaned through her orgasms, she knew she would regret it.
Enjoy this, because you won't see him again after the morning! That's how guys are. Don't forget that.
It was easy to forget, though, when Alejandro kissed her ear and told her how sexy she was in his lover's accent while he jammed his cock inside her.
It was her intention to steal away in the morning before he woke.
Beat him to the punch line, sister
. This plan didn't work, either. Instead, she awoke to the morning sun dancing across her face, and with Alejandro's tongue exploring the delicate folds of flesh between her legs. She was hardly aware of what was happening before she exploded with another orgasm.
They'd been together ever since. He brought her flowers. He took her to dinner. He wooed her. Sometimes, she thought he was her good luck charm, because all the crap that had happened before him just didn't matter anymore.
Nevertheless, there was that voice in her head, and it was getting louder. Sometimes, she thought she was just paranoid, but then she started noticing some odd behaviors. Strange looks. Spending more time at work.
Oh yeah, you should go ahead and break up with him. He's working on his exit.
But she couldn't. She was too sucked in. She'd just have to brace herself and try not to fall apart when the inevitable happened.
Then Alejandro did the inexplicable. He invited her to spend Thanksgiving with him and his family in west Texas. He wanted her to meet his mother, his father, his four sisters and older brother. Two siblings were married with young children. Then there were cousins and old high school buddies and an old math teacher whom Alejandro wanted to visit.
Michelle didn't see the point, but since she wasn't close to her own family, she decided to go.
After we get back, that's when he'll drop the bomb
. Why not? Her father had chosen Christmas Day to tell her mother that he was leaving her for another woman, so Michelle knew there wasn't anything sacred about the holidays.
Alejandro had warned her that he'd grown up poor, and she quickly learned he hadn't lied about that. His parents' home was a small ramshackle of a house, but his family was nice, and everyone seemed happy. Neither of his parents spoke English, though, so Michelle usually felt out of the loop. She sat with the family at the dining table and tried to enjoy the conversation, even though she didn't understand anything that was said. Alejandro or one of his sisters would translate every now and then, but usually, Michelle just sat and tried to disguise the fact that she felt very left out.
I don't belong here.
She was relieved when Alejandro leaned into her ear on Thanksgiving Day and whispered, "Tomorrow, we'll get away, just the two of us, I promise."
Michelle squeezed Alejandro's hand, then turned to look at the hoodoos again. They did look like Indians. Tall. Mysterious. She imagined their mournful song, and a chill ran through her.
~~~
Alejandro pulled into a rest stop that had several picnic tables, each shaded by massive cottonwood trees. "I want to show you a special place. We call it Rock Pile. My family had many picnics here when we were growing up." Each picnic table was on the edge of what, indeed, looked like a mountain of granite boulders. Most were about ten feet in diameter, but many were even larger, and they stacked to a height at least a thousand feet above the plain.
He parked the Cressida, and Michelle looked back across the horizon as she got out and shut the car door behind her. There were a few mountains scattered about, but they were all different from this pile of rocks. They'd driven for hours through the flat Llano, and then, out of nowhere, these odd rock formations appeared. "How on earth did this get here?"
"From a volcano, millions of years ago, and deposited here by a glacier. You like it here?"
"I do. I love it." She breathed in the sweet aroma of the creosote bush that permeated the air.
"I love it here, too. If there was any oil, I'd give up my desk job and work in the fields, just so I could live here." He nudged her back against the side of the car, pushed his lean body against hers, and took her face in his hands and pressed his lips against hers.
She thought of him working in an oil field, in a tank top and jeans, covered in dirt and oil and his muscles glistening with sweat. She shuddered with lust. She was going to miss Alejandro.
"There's that look again." He smirked at her, then cast his eyes across the landscape. "Right there. I'd put a little house right there on the side of that mountain. What do you think?"
"It would be a long commute from Houston."
"Where's your imagination, woman? Work with me here." He kissed her again. "Do you want to eat now, or later?"
They'd picked up an order of fresh tamales in Fort Davis. Michelle had never cared for Mexican food before meeting Alejandro. He introduced her to the authentic fare, and after five days at his mother's house, she knew she'd already put on five pounds. How Alejandro was so trim, she didn't know.
"I want to take you for a hike. We should eat now if you're hungry."
"No, I can wait."
"Okay. Come with me." He took her hand and led her up the side of Rock Pile.
~~~
It was warm, in the upper 70's. Everyone had talked about how unseasonable the weather had been. Both Michelle and Alejandro had paused from climbing to remove their jackets and tie them around their waists.
From a rock climber's perspective, the climb wasn't difficult. The rocks formed a natural staircase all the way up. The problem was that some of the steps were several feet high, and more than once, they arrived at a place where they couldn't ascend any more. Then they had to backtrack and search for another route up. There were massive cracks between the rocks, and plenty of places where a hiker could twist an ankle, or worse, slip and fall a dozen feet or more.
"My sisters and I used to climb all over these rocks whenever we came out here. We did some stupid shit back then. I wonder what we would've done, if one of us had fallen and broken a bone." He pointed at a prickly pear. "Careful. Cactus."
Michelle stepped over the angry thorns.
Alejandro continued, "In the summer, you have to be careful for rattlesnakes. They're less active in the winter." As though on cue, they heard a loud rattle echo through the rocks. Alejandro's eyes widened. "Unless it's unusually warm."
Michelle froze. "What do we do?"
He smiled. "Don't step on it. Follow me." He ascended the next stone, and held out his hand for her. They climbed a little more, then Alejandro stood on top of a smooth, flat rock, spread his arms out and took in a deep breath.
Michelle turned to look around them. She could see for miles in all directions. To the north were more mountains, fewer to the west and south. It was mostly open plain, vast and flat, beige, dotted with green, and covered by the biggest, bluest sky. The sun was warm on her face, and the breeze felt good. "It's so beautiful! I wish I had a camera."
"It is beautiful."
