His laughter reverberated against my hypersensitive skin and bones. I felt like a very happy drum.
"No, it's not normal, but I feel the same and, anyway, are you normal, Delilah?"
I swallowed hard. That question had dogged me all my life. "Probably not. I just want to understand. How can GQ guy co-exist with Sinkhole Slimeboy?"
"How can edgy, virginal Del co-exist with tigress Delilah?"
I just laid my cheek on his chest and rubbed my Lip-Venomed mouth over his nipple until he bent to take my mouth with his.
"You want to talk?" he asked finally.
"A little."
He lifted me atop the granite sink surround, my back to the mirror. "You want to know about Ricardo Montoya, FBI agent."
"You. I want to know about you."
"Can't we just fuck?"
The bad, blunt word revved my momentarily idling engine. "Sure. But I don't smoke. I won't want a cigarette after. I'll want information."
He closed his eyes. Opened them. "What do you want to know?"
"Need to know. That's what we call it in the reporting trade. The need to know."
Ric searched my eyes, then nodded and waited for my first question.
"Just…how you escaped that awful background, that rotten start in life."
"Like you did?"
"In your own way." My fingertip brushed the corner of his mouth. "Talk, Montoya, or I'll torment you for hours in bed."
"It couldn't be worse than this," he said soberly, then sighed. "Okay. The facts: You know the coyotes made me find the dead and raise them as zombies. Even as a four-year-old I knew what I did was wrong. The dead want to rest. But I was a small child, bewildered that my family had traded me to these monsters."
I inhaled with a hiss. "Traded! And here I always longed for a real family, my birth parents-"
"My people were untaught peasants, Del. They didn't understand a boy who could only dowse for dead things, not life-giving water."
"Do you have any memories of them?"
"Only of standing alone, over the dried-up body of some small desert creature. When the coyotes came, saying they'd heard I was useless but could employ me, they passed me on without a thought."
"How awful."
"When you're poor, you must be worth the beans to feed you."
I leaned my forehead on his satin shoulder. "How could the zombie trade be starting up then, before the Millennium Revelation?"
"The MR was a public announcement. They don't call it the "Revelation" for nothing; nothing happens overnight. Evil is always ahead of the curve."
I nodded. "I want to know about after. Right after you got away from the coyotes. How."
"One day U.S. border agents raided and collected my uncouth masters. They rounded up me with the goats and burros."
"And?"
"And." Ric took such a deep breath that my head on his shoulder heaved up and down as if riding an Atlantic swell. "The leader was ex-military, a decorated major-turned-D.C.-bureaucrat doing a final, pre-retirement field assignment. I was considered a feral child. His wife was a Georgetown University psychologist. They had no children. I was a 'fascinating case'. I went home to them, which included a couple years in behavioral labs."
"This was better?" I asked, horrified.
He nodded. "Better. My…adopted mother is a brilliant analyst. She pioneered a method of breaking through to abused or isolated or autistic children with me."
"And adopted you."
"Not officially. That's why I'm Ric Montoya, not Phillip Burnside, Jr."
"How did you get your name?"
Ric smiled nostalgically for the first time since I'd known him. "She and I sat down with a baby name book and a surname history book. We went through Latino names that didn't remind me of my keepers. That's how my father got leads on the identities of the captured coyotes, who weren't talking."
I could picture that. The sophisticated American career woman and the wary, half-wild Mexican waif poring over name books as if they were fairy tales. Although randomly named, at least Ric had a memorable moment about the occasion. He wasn't named after a street like me.
"Why didn't they formally adopt you?"
"They were a couple complete unto themselves, never wanted kids. I became a canvas on which they could paint something permanent, a tribute to their union."
"You make them sound so… cold."
"They were people of the mind, not the emotions. They gave me my mind back and let it expand a thousand times. I'll always be grateful. I'll always be ambivalent. Do I love them or do I owe them? Do they love me or do they love what they made me become?"
"Adoption is so… major."
"Maybe not being adopted is not so bad, hmm?" He kissed me softly on the neck. "I have no quarrel with them. I respect them and do anything they want as long as I don't lose any part of the self they worked so hard to find and develop."
"They don't always understand that."
"No. An understatement. They were not happy when I left the FBI to consult. But they don't know about my dowsing facility." Ric grinned. "So now I have the same family issues as any ordinary American kid."
"And I still envy that."
"Don't. You're not alone any more. You are my family, Del. " He pulled me close to him, my legs straddling his hips, our pelvic heat melding. He whispered a Spanish phrase,"Tuvestir mi consuelo" or something.
I knew most of the words. Tu. You. Mi. Me. Vestir. Dress. Clothe. Consuelo? Wasn't that a woman's name? I still didn't know much Spanish, but I did remember an Italian nun at Our Lady of the Lake -Sister Maria Consolata. Her name meant "consolation, comfort."
"You clothe me." Consuelo made it, "in comfort."
I broke our kiss to brush my lips against the faint bruise on the left side of his throat, the heart side.
"Then put me on," I whispered.
Chapter Seventeen
First he had to extract me from the skin-tight leather jeans he lusted to remove without laying me horizontal.
This became a long, inciting process involving sliding and turning along the walls, kissing and laughing and breathing hard all the way through the bedroom into a room I'd never seen. By then he could lift my bare butt atop a cold marble table top and shimmy the leather off my legs, one by one.