Next, Gogo kissed back up Vern’s spine. She licked the hollow between her shoulder blades. Each sliver of contact startled Vern in its intensity. Gogo hadn’t yet touched her anywhere particularly erotic, but, pathetically, she was already approaching a level of desire she’d not yet experienced before. An unappeasable hunger coursed through her.
Gogo drew her tongue along the side of Vern’s neck. She grabbed Vern and pulled her around so they were face-to-face.
“Are you okay?” Gogo asked, breathless.
The pause in her attention brought Vern temporarily back to coherence, and in that coherence, doubts and memories asserted themselves. She could see Ollie. Smell Ollie. Reverend, too.
“Vern?”
“Please don’t stop.” Vern’s voice was weak and raspy, and she thought this was what it meant to sound lascivious. The way she keened, was that the noise bad women made? Was this her downfall, this act?
Gogo pinned Vern’s lips with her own and threw a possessive leg over Vern’s body. She ran her hand up and down Vern’s back as the two rocked their hips desperately into each other. Vern, emboldened as raw feeling took over, wedged her hand under the belted waistband of Gogo’s jeans so she could get to bare skin.
They pulled each other’s pants and underwear down until they were both naked. The throbbing between Vern’s legs was desperate to be moved against, and Gogo pressed her fingers there.
“Is it okay if I…？” asked Vern, reaching out to touch Gogo. Gogo nodded. The sound of her moan when Vern’s hand gripped her unwound Vern one more revolution. They rubbed each other in furious heat until their finishes rushed them, Vern’s first, then Gogo’s.
Their breaths came turbulent and frenetic as they grasped each other. Strung out on the feeling of their union, Gogo pressed a final kiss against Vern’s forehead, then confessed her eagerness for Vern over and over and over and over in muttering whispers. Vern would call it worshipful, but this thing between them was not god-stuff. They were as two animals, heat, blood, mortal. They were, thank fuck, earthbound, no different than dirt or rotting logs, in no danger of becoming ether, of being raptured and stolen away from this moment.
Vern tried to conjure up some feeling of regret for what just passed between them. She invited shame in, welcomed it into the home of her ill-built heart. But for once, she could not feel bad. She could not view their act, their precious, carnal, desperate act, as anything other than the soft beauty of a kind of living.
* * *
THE WORLD took on an easiness after her evening with Gogo. The next day, the unanswered questions she still had beat at her less furiously. She wasn’t even angry to find herself in Gogo’s bed alone, a note on the bedside table saying she’d gone on an errand with Bridget.
Vern ambled to the living room and sat on the coffee table across from where Howling lay on the sofa. He was still sleeping, his eyelids gently aflutter and his breaths rickety and small. Feral sat in a large velvet chair he’d dragged—scratching the wood floor—from Bridget’s room to the woodstove. Two dolls and a stuffed lamb, gifts from Bridget, sat in his lap. He was giving them a make-believe bath.
“Make sure you get behind their ears,” said Vern.
“Of course,” said Feral. “I’m the mam. I know what to do.”
“And inside, too, where it’s all waxy and crusty.”
“Bobo!” Feral cried to his little lamb. “Bobo, stop fooling around! You gonna slip and crack open! Mimi! Stop drinking the soapy water! Chrissy! Don’t you dare think about taking a piss in this pristine tub!” He scrubbed them with a scrunched-up piece of paper he was pretending was a sponge. “Mam? You think they clean?” asked Feral.
“What you calling me? I thought you was the mam,” she answered back.
He flung his mouth open wide as if he’d made a grave error, one which he’d not be able to forgive himself for. “You’re right,” he whispered.
Vern laughed at the poor thing—she couldn’t help it.
“It aint funny. I’m responsible for them,” he said. “I can’t forget I’m their mam.”
Feral patted his dolls’ heads. “Be still now while I comb this beautiful bird’s nest. Chirp! Chirp! Little birdies, fly away now.” He was back to his smiling self in no time.
Howling awoke with a groan at his sibling’s loud chirping. He blinked his eyes into focus, then stared at his mam.
“Hi, sleepyhead,” said Vern. “You’re sleeping in late.”