Chapter 9

Church

Parked on a trail in the woods, hundreds of trees and bushes circling them, Jake crawled all over Ramona in the spacious trunk of his jeep, her blouse draped on the passenger's seat, and her skirt rumpled up her waist as she smashed her puckered lips against his. His fingers disappeared into her curls as he lied in between her thighs, still fully clothed, on the edge of giving in to his carnal urges. If and when resistance did part, she'd be nude and ripped into in a fraction of a second.

Her squeaks and tiny moans inflamed his sexual appetite, so he moved on to tugging at her bra's band. She stiffened under his advancements as a virginal apprehension conquered her more confident and adventurous mindset.

"Don't be shy for me, baby," he spoke into her ear, nibbling on the lobe.

She breathed in and out erratically, nodding with nervy approval. "It's just no guy's seen them before."

"Ya mean your breasts?" he asked softly.

"Well, those, and...you know, down there."

The seductive devil in Jake cheered at her confession. So she was still pure.

"My modest peach," he sighed, trailing kisses along her neck and bare shoulder. "You're going to let me take a nice, long look at them here, eh?"

"Yeah...you can see them," she said, cueing him to unhook and rid the green undergarment. Her flesh warmed up as if the sun was just outside the car, his leering eyes dead on her exposed, jiggling breasts. Gripping each one tenderly, he traveled down her body.

She pulled his shirt off and ran her hands over his hairy chest, murmuring, "Let me kiss your neck," when his head was moving too far south. Eventually she'd have to tell him she didn't want to have her virginity taken in the trunk of his car, romantic as the setting was.

He grunted morosely; the waistband of her panties was in his fingers and he'd rather backtalk Mama than surrender it, but they had all night, he figured, so he shifted himself upright to sit on his knees and took her into a secure embrace. She looped her arms around his neck, biting and sucking on his chin and collarbone. As she buried her face in his tuft of chest hairs, he took hold of her underwear for a second time, but just as he peeled them down past her buttocks, she flinched back, shaking her head.

"Not here, like this, Jake," she said with some regret. "I think in your bed would be better, with a condom and maybe a towel, for if I bleed."

His expression could've been imaged for the dictionary's definition of disappointment. "You're sure? You can lie on my jacket. I don't care if you get blood on it. And I'll, uh, pull-out."

"That's not very gentlemanly," she taunted, her hand slithering downwards unsuspectingly. "Here, I'll try to make it up to you." Her focus on his fly, she clumsily unfastened the button and zipper, then pushed his pants and boxers down, her bout of bravery diminishing upon seeing a real-life penis.

"Oh, that's more graphic than the bio book's was," she laughed.

Breathing huskily, he teased, "And bigger, eh?"

"You cocky son of a gun," she giggled, skimming his length with her index finger. Her beam melting, she said, "Sorry if this is sloppy."

"Your little virgin hands'll improve with practice, love," he assured her, his forehead on hers. She took him. A foreign sensation akin to dominance hatched in the core of her being, the look on his face a fusion of strain and relief. It was a look she'd only seen on men in movies and read about in books.

"Oh, fuck, 'Mona."

She flushed deeper. "Um, was that okay?" she asked with quiet delicacy a chef would use with a food critic dining on their recipe.

"It was fuckin' beautiful," he replied, a stoical expression growing on his face as he ogled her covered private parts. "Now lay back down for me."

"Oh, Jake, you don't have to-"

"On your back," he requested, seizing her predatorily. "I'm gonna make you scream and cry."

Meekly, she did as she was told.

The forest's insect and animal inhabitants skirting the jeep were spectators to Ramona's womanly racket, and if she were just pitches louder, she might've woken up the murdered corpses buried nearby.

...

Coming out of his slumber at the crack of dawn, Jake sat up and stretched out his sore limbs and joints. Sleeping on the car floor was not comfortable, Ramona would see for herself whenever she returned to consciousness.

His eyes stung from the ray of sunlight streaming in through the windshield, and once he blinked several times, waiting for his retinas to adjust to the light, he opened the trunk door and climbed out, stark naked, into the wilderness. He plodded to the nearest tree with aching legs, urinated on the bark, and got back into the jeep, reclosing them in. Their clothes had substituted for a blanket and pillow, though her head was propped on his chest most of the night, his right arm linked around her, holding her tightly.

Jake could have admired Ramona's nudity right here in this trunk for centuries. Her snoozing, lightly snoring form was breathtaking to him, as was her taste and scent. He was overjoyed to now have two pairs of his girlfriend's dirty panties to flaunt in Francis' face. Francis may have lost his virginity first, but he'd become a papa second, Jake easily and proudly deduced.

Although watching her sleep was entertaining, he had a busy schedule ahead. His apartment was ready to move into that day, so he had to spend the afternoon packing and transferring his belongings.

"'Mona, angel, up and at 'em," he said, gently nudging her. He fondled her breasts as she lazily peered up at him.

"Hello, handsome," she yawned.

"Ya sleep well?"

"Not really," she laughed.

"Me neither. Hey, I've got a few things on my plate today...so tell ya what, I'll drop ya off at your house, and we'll do something fun tonight, eh? I'll probably be finished by seven."

"Oh, shoot. I was hoping we could maybe get some breakfast…"

"My utmost apologies, my sunny dea," he said, planting a wet kiss on her mouth. "Cross my heart tonight'll be special."

"I get to choose where we go, then," she negotiated, removing his massaging hands from her breasts so she could sit upright and dress herself. "What's 'day-uh' Italian for? It sounds pretty."

"Goddess."

"Oh." Her skin warmed, and a twinkle came to her eyes. "Thank you. That's lovely." He pulled his underwear and pants on, then picked her underwear off the floor and pocketed it. "What're you doing with those?" she asked with rosy cheeks.

"Use your imagination." He winked. "I'll call you before I swing by. Then you request wherever you wanna go."

"Fine by me." A troubled look appeared on her face. "I have to pee. Do you have any napkins or tissue in your glove compartment?"

"Nah, uh, here, just wipe with this." He handed her his jacket. A sleeve was already crusty with his mess of hours prior, so he didn't mind a splotch of her pee on it.

"Are you kidding?" she scoffed.

"Unless you wanna wait till you get home to go." He shrugged.

"No, I have to go now. I've had to pee first thing when I wake up since I was a tot." She reluctantly took his dirtied jacket out with her and squatted against a tree. When she finished, she got into the passenger's seat and kissed Jake again before he drove them out of the woods. He anticipated what she had in store for him when nightfall rose.

"She's kinky, ain't she?" Francis said, a wolfish smirk on. "Did she start drooling when she saw your uncircumcised, European c-"

"Shut up," Jake snapped. "Why don't ya scram and go bug your Lucille donna?"

"I'd love to, but I can't. I'm befriending her foremostly, remember?"

"She a gargantuan tease?" Jake chuckled in his opportunity to deride Francis' situation.

"Shut up."

It wasn't fair that Ramona was head over heels for Jake, Lucille still moping over Hindrance. On top of that, she seemed to consider Francis beneath her, as if he were scum.

His third suitcase packed, Jake withdrew the panties' from his pocket and snorted the crotches of them like a crackhead would cocaine. "Are you jealous, my brother?" he asked, waving the garments in the air pretentiously.

"The tables will be turned one of these days," Francis vowed, his arms crossed as he stood at the doorway. He chose not to go to the hassle of renting his own apartment. The benefit of residing in the abandoned summer restaurant was being out of the law's and civilians' way; he was lying as low as he could while taking minimal risks, whereas Jake felt it obligatory to impress his lady with a place in the city, dumpy as it was.

"What do ya mean by that?" Jake asked, stripping his bed of its sheets. "You sayin' you're gonna have my 'Mona someday?"

"No, you goddamn nincomshit, I'm saying when Lucille's my property, we're gonna have it lots better than you and Boobs."

"Choke on your spit, you baldin' bum." Jake was gratified to watch Francis' face screw up in loathing fury.

Francis was self-conscious and mortified about the medical condition he'd supposedly inherited from their paternal grandfather. He'd started shedding abnormal amounts of hair at seventeen, and had to wear a toupee by the youthful age of twenty-one. He envied Jake for dodging that genetic bullet, although Sloth had his misfortune in common, just a patch of hair atop his pointed head. Their sole similarity hadn't caused the vaguest bond to stir between them, but conversely Francis was more disgusted with himself.

"Give me one of those panties, and I'll leave ya to your devices."

"Fuck off."

"Can't I at least have the pair that stinks less?" he implored. Jake's scowl nailed into Francis, who'd have been obliterated then and there if looks could kill, but he still wasn't fazed. "C'mon."

"You'll have to tussle me for it like we did for the panties you stole out of the girls' locker room at the YMCA back in our teens," Jake negotiated, and just as the fellow pervert lunged at him, he stuck his foot out and tripped him, then snorted, jogging out of his former bedroom, towards the shack's front door.

"Hey, ya don't get dibs on the jeep, Jake!" Francis hollered, pursuing him outside. "Both Ma and I need it on the daily."

"Eh, just jack a new car." The suitcases, pillow, sheets and blanket were piled in the trunk, his mattress already fastened to the roof of the car.

"Ma's gonna have something to say about this," Francis warned, speaking of the devil, as the very woman stomped out.

"You go elsewhere to stay, you get your own damn car," Mama said, siding with her eldest son as always, in Jake's eyes.

"But, Ma-"

"No buts, Jake! I'll let ya drive your crap over there, then ya gotta come right back 'cause the jeep's here to stay."

"Ugh, alright, si, Mama," Jake conceded. His schedule extended as he tacked on the need to rob somebody of their vehicle, implementing a ski mask, threatening tone of voice, and pistol. That method was their key to possessing their latest 'family drive', the jeep, a year earlier, after their old station wagon's engine smoked one late winter morning, obscuring Mama's line of sight, causing her to careen into a ditch and scramble out and down the lone road as the smoke thickened, shaded a gray dark as her soul. Stranded, she'd charged five miles home, in her exhaustion freeing the few bags of groceries she'd rescued from her sore fingers onto the porch, greeting her cozy, unaware sons with her own, special brand of rage, loading their ears with enough of it to give them scalding migraines. The memory wasn't charming, but they'd swiped a new, enhanced car in the end.

"Well, see you two in an hour or so. I'm going to organize my apartment somewhat before returning." He drove off down the dirt road with plans to hustle, Ramona's evening treat for him his chief motive.

The apartment's adjoining parking lot had fissures that could pop tires, but this was to Jake's minimal concern. He collected his third floor suite's key from the landlord and stepped into blackness through his destination's door, having to fumble around the walls to his right and left to locate the light switch. The main room was two thirds the size of the shack's, and it was barren except for the light gray carpeting and an abandoned raggedy armchair.

'Great, no television,' he glumly thought, carrying his suitcases into the single bedroom, the bathroom directly across, and the compact six-by-six foot laundry room at the hall's extremity. The kitchen was mildly roomier than the laundry room, opening into the upper left side of the main room. A refrigerator, oven and sink were available, but there was no microwave or toaster to complete it, much to his chagrin.

He tossed his luggage into the center of the bedroom, then left to acquire his mattress from where it lied tethered atop the jeep. He dragged the spring and cotton material-filled case through the apartment's lobby, to the thankfully fixed elevator. His muscles still sore from his nightly rest in the trunk, he doubted heaving the thing up three flights of stairs would have done his pain well.

Making the bed, a vision of Ramona spread over the sheets as he thrust into her animated in his mind. Even when he put his curtains on his window's rod, he imagined banging his lover against the sill, her orgasm musical. Instead of shunning these lewd daydreams away, he had fun with his pretending, assured they would be real in due course.

He sloppily hung his shirts and jackets up in the closet and folded his pants and underwear into the dresser drawers. His shampoo was set inside the cupboard below the bathroom sink, the bathtub prompting an idea. Once Ramona's innocence belonged to him, they'd bathe together in balmy water and bubbles with the company of a bottle of champagne, or soda, if she wanted. While they soaked, he'd ask her to move in with him.

Sometime that week he'd run out to the market and purchase condoms just to appease his lady, though he hated them like Francis did his balding head. He didn't know whether Ramona's surprise for him was sex or dinner, but he assumed the latter because she had work tomorrow and would be the sorest waitress in the diner if she were thoroughly wrestled with all night.

So the upcoming Friday would be best for her, Jake reasoned. He'd cook them dinner, bring her over, and see to it that she ended up in his bed, naked, tired and tousled by twilight.

In the meantime, he had to return the Jeep and land his felonious paws on another car a distance outside of the city. The clock ticking, he set out to accomplish.

A partially chipped, bright red Chevy pickup truck stopped in the Hersden's driveway at eight o'clock. Jake fished through his new stolen car's glove compartment for a matchbox, his Zippo on his nightstand back at the apartment. Finding nothing of the like in there, he ignored his nicotine craving and snapped the compartment shut, the pistol he'd threatened the previous owner with buried under the registration and a pair of Ramona's panties. The Chevy's previous owner was an old man looking to be in his mid-to-late sixties, so holding him at gunpoint and commanding that he surrender his truck had been relatively simple for Jake.

Ramona walked out into the driveway a few spins of the minute hand after he'd parked, her curly hair up in a bun, and a conservative satin gown hugging her figure. She gaped at the change of vehicle.

"One of my cousins offered this to me since he got a new one recently," Jake explained, effectively masking the statement's falsehood. "I gave Francis the Jeep."

"Oh, it's nice! He let you keep it for free?"

"Yep."

"That was cool of him." She climbed into the passenger's side and clicked her seatbelt in. "Drive us to Castor Road, and I'll tell you where to park from there."

The front of his pants felt snugger at her unrevealing words. He had a wonderful, selfish hunch that she was fixing to pamper him, and the self-effacing dress was just to delude him. He'd be finding out the truth four miles from there.

"So that's what you had to do today, pick up your cousin's truck?" Ramona asked with a cute, toothy smile.

"Yeah, he lives about a couple hours from here. Francis accompanied me so he could drive the Jeep back. I needed my phone connection fixed, too. Remember how I told ya the line was fuzzy all of the sudden some seven weeks ago?"

Ramona nodded. "And you just now decided to fix that, huh?"

"Eh, it wasn't my first priority. And I'm over at my Ma's a lot, so I just use her phone. I wasn't really making many calls anyway, till I met you."

She gave him a quizzical look. "Um, is that so?"

He brought her left hand to his lips to smooch her knuckles. "It is."

"Jake, I love you."

A whoosh of relief and pride struck. "I do you, my dea," he replied easily, rewarding the back of her hand with another kiss. "But you already knew that."

"No, I just hoped for it," she said, her expression giddier than he'd seen it in a while.

Arriving, they walked hand-in-hand up the parking lot of one of Astoria's handful of churches. A date in the House of God was not on Jake's mental list of places he'd expected to visit that night. In his entire life, he'd never stepped foot in a church, nor had he even been too close to one. In all frankness, he feared he'd burst into flames immediately upon entering the edifice, but Ramona's thrill to be here with him was lucid. There was no way in hell he'd halt in his tracks, refusing to venture any further.

"We were here just this morning," Ramona said, leading him nearer to the broad front doors. "You haven't been here, have you?"

"No." He gulped as his eyes locked on the giant, intimidating cross stretching off the roof. It symbolized everything he wasn't, let him know his kind didn't belong in a sanctum of holiness but a ditch of hellfire for his load of committed sins he had yet to be sorry for.

"It's open for forty more minutes, and nobody else is here except for Reverend Taye who's probably in his office, so I thought it'd be a splendid time to show you around inside. It's ethereal, in vibe and appearance, even though I'm used to it from seeing it each Sunday for the last twenty years."

She pushed them through the doors, into the massive, towering room lined with rows of polished, wooden pews, every window high above made of stained glass, depicting holy images that cast a peaceful glow of the orange sunset. A large crucifix was mounted on the wall behind the podium on the stage in front. The pillars, snow-white as Ramona's gown, were eye candy almost as sweet as the windows.

Jake barely deciphered the warmth of his girlfriend's hand as he drank in the view his sights were formerly virgin to. An inkling of guilt swelled in him, his throat clenching, as the recent memory of jacking an elderly person's means of transportation surfaced. Did God see that no-no? Did He care? Jake swallowed, and reminded himself as he'd done at times before that the tales of the bible were to be taken with a grain of salt or less. If there was a book of truths for him to follow, it was all in his mother.

"Isn't this perfection, Jake?" The feminine coo of her voice jolted him out of his momentary mull of self-awareness.

"It is, uh, an entrancing sight," he said, eyeing the confessional past the right's middle pew. Oh, if he had the balls to confess, he'd be cooped up in that booth for months, possibly years, but in the end would his soul be cleansed? Would that be worth the hassle?

"My parents got married here, and by the same pastor who delivers sermons now. Isn't that something?"

"Yes, that is neat, 'Mona." A basin half-full with a clear liquid that was likely holy water had Jake pondering if sipping it would ignite his organs. His being was akin to that of a demon's after all, but oddly, his feet were not smoking from touching the holy stone floor.

"Sit here with me," she instructed, perched on the front left pew. He did, lacing his arm around her middle. "I was baptised right by that podium when I was a baby. So was Dylan. This could be psychosomatic, but I've felt this bond of sorts with God all my life. This bond is what inspires me to carry out what good I can. I donate to charity occasionally, and I'm paying for a thick portion of Dylan's tuition, as I think I told you. Whenever I do a good deed, even if it's something kinda insignificant, I feel righteous, like I've made God proud...I wonder if Dill experiences this, too, and just doesn't talk about it, or if it's just me."

Jake was at a loss for words. He utterly could not relate. Quite on the contrary, he felt righteous when he stole or, as of the last month, had his personal priestess with him.

"I believe you are a blessed woman, baby," Jake opinionated. "Your heart is incredibly bigger than mine's ever been." His lips swept the shell of her ear. "You're the closest to Heaven I'll ever get."

She tensed. "Don't say that."

He frowned in confusion. He'd meant to flatter her. "I'm serious, 'Mona. There's a history to me you cannot know of. I've been a wrongful man many times."

"No, you haven't," she said, thinking he was speaking nonsense. "You're not that wrongful for your smoking, which I hate and wish you'd quit."

"I've harmed people," he blurted, using her as an outlet that was close enough to a confessional.

"How so?" she inquired, perplexed, her brows knitting. "Like, you bullied when you were a kid or something?"

"In a sense," he shrugged. His mother had been the culprit for bullying him and Francis into murdering and stealing. Much as he revered the goblin, she was to blame for what he'd become. "I've taken things that aren't mine. I've lied left and right."

"But you aren't evil, Jake. Everybody does wrong sometimes. You don't boil down to some...full-blown symbol of all that's heinous, though." She rested her head on his shoulder. "So I'm certainly not the closest you'll make it to Heaven."

His vague admissions were futile. She was and would forever be best off blind to the majority of his biography.

"Would you be my sacerdotessa, Ramona?" he asked, careful not to beg. "Won't you at least be my priestess?"

She eased into him, nodding. "I can be."