Heaven or Heathen for Vicki

Taylor put her hand in the center of my chest and started pushing me backward. "Get lost Haven. Go. Leave. We have things to talk about and you should not be here to listen."

I held up my hands, "Okay, alright, I'm going. But don't tell her too much. Please, please, please," I begged even though I knew it was fruitless. I just hoped Taylor wouldn't frighten Vicki away.

I gave them more than an hour. They probably wanted two, but I wanted some of Vicki's time that night, too. When I walked in they were sitting in Taylor's living room, shoes off, feet up, and they had several photograph albums spread around them. Their make-up was a mess. I suspected they had been laughing so hard tears had fallen more times than they were willing to tell. Taylor had three empty beer bottles on the small table at her end of the couch, which meant she was no longer watching what she said and Vicki had two beer bottles by her seat.

"Oh my God, Taylor, what did you tell her?" I simply had to ask the question, it was screaming in my frontal lobe.

"I didn't get a good look the other night," Vicki grinned. "Ah, do you still have that little round scar on your ass?"

"What!" I was yelling. I knew it wouldn't do any good, but I had to get it out of my system or I'd bust.

Taylor sniggered, "You know, where you had the tattoo cut off."

"Taylor, did you show her yours?" I challenged.

"I will not!" Taylor exclaimed, jumping to her feet. "That's not fair, Haven."

I folded my arms across my chest. "You told her about mine, show her yours."

About this time, Vicki could see a royal battle looming and she decided to play peacemaker, "Never mind, Taylor. I'll ask him later."

"I don't think so, Vicki." I watched Taylor as I told Vicki, "Maybe we can wait until Pete gets here and ask him if he knows about it."

"You wouldn't dare!" Taylor was still battling to retain at least some small piece of her privacy.

"Okay," I agreed. "But the next time you two get together, remember I know a few secrets, too." Only because I knew Taylor and she knew me, she also knew that I could not play poker without my face giving away when I had a good hand. I started laughing. I was soon laughing so hard I couldn't hold it in any more. I plopped down on the couch, pulled Taylor down beside me, and had an arm around each of my girls.

I kissed Taylor on the temple and Vicki on the lips. "Okay girls, clean up your mess, I'm gonna take Vicki home and pour her in bed."

** ** **

It was an interesting prospect getting Vicki home after drinking two beers with Taylor, particularly because she had done so on an empty stomach. Convincing her to leave Taylor's house wasn't too difficult, although she stopped in the middle of the street, saying she needed to go back and ask Taylor something.

Holding the car door open for her and helping her sit down and put her feet in the car was not too bad, even if she wanted to lean her head over against the back of the seat so she could rest a minute. It didn't occur to me to buckle her seatbelt until I was in the car.

"Fasten your seatbelt, Baby." I no longer wanted to bite my tongue when I talked to her like that. She fumbled for a moment and then raised her hands to allow me to reach across her to pull the seatbelt across her and get it latched.

"Those shots are not easy to do, are they? I think I spilled some on my dress."

"What shots, Baby?" I was beginning to understand and the next time I saw Taylor, I might murder her.

Vicki stumbled around but finally managed to explain, "Oh, Taylor poured something out of a bottle into little glasses while we sat in the kitchen before we started looking at the photo albums."

"Oh, and what did the bottle look like?"

After a moment's thought, Vicki answered, "Ah, I think it was sort of square with a black label."

Now I understood. If an ounce, or less of Amaretto in a cup of coffee, as Alice had prepared, gave Vicki a fuzzy head, what would two ounces of Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey do? To that overload, add two bottles of beer to a slender woman who was not accustomed to any alcohol. The result was what I was trying to get home and into her bed.

"I need a bath, Haven," Vicki giggled.

"You don't have a bath, you have a shower."

"No, I have a bath," she said again, not bothering to hide her giggle.

"In the other bathroom?"

"Uh huh, no, the bath is through the door, you know the other door."

"The other door?"

"Yes, in the bathroom. There's doors to the toilets and another to the bathtub."

"I guess I didn't notice it. Okay, you can have a bath."

"Are you going to wash my back, Haven," Vicki giggled and reached her hand over, trying to stroke my arm.

Oh my, I have a happy, affectionate drunk on my hands and I'm stone cold sober. Now, how is that going to be fun? It was not fun. I managed to keep Vicki awake long enough to get her keys from her and open the back door before I opened her garage and pulled her car inside. When I got back to the house, I followed the trail of discarded clothes to her bedroom and discovered the artfully applied tiles on the far wall of the bathroom disguised an opening. One side had two separate semi-private stalls, each with its own toilet. The opening on the other side led to a small room with a bathtub. However, it was not just a bathtub. It was a monster bathtub. I swear a whole family could take a bath, all at the same time and invite a couple of the neighbors to join them.

Vicki was naked, sitting on the side of the tub, with her elbow on her knee and she was resting her head on her upraised hand. It just seemed easier to get her in the bathtub than try to hold her up long enough to wash her in the shower.

"I'm sick, Haven."

"I know baby." The exhaust fan in the other small room had not completely dispelled the aroma of an unfed drunk. However, that was a subject I would discuss with Vicki when she was sober. After filling the tub and taking my clothes off, I managed to get Vicki into the bathtub and cleaned up, before she was comfortably tucked into her bed. She resisted but finally drank the small bottle of sport drink I found in her refrigerator. I took the towel from around my waist and got into bed with Vicki, pulling her into the curl of my body, praying I could figure out how to make this wonderful woman love me.

Although it was something I had instigated, I was promising myself I would never let Taylor get anywhere near Vicki again. A small person, or even a normal sized person, cannot keep up with an Amazon in a drinking contest, even if they have more tolerance for alcohol than Vicki did. Two minutes later, I was wondering what Vicki had told Taylor, and then I did not care. Whatever the problem was, we would work it out, and live with it.

** ** **

Although she was not happy about it, I had Vicki up early the next morning, drinking a cup of coffee and staring at a good breakfast, before I went home. I wanted to change clothes and spend my second day off, reviewing the files I had abandoned the previous day. Before noon, I had a report half finished, requesting a full review of both files, including a more thorough review of the toxicology reports. I was hoping to determine, if possible, the type of poison that killed Robert Corley Dawson and Gwendolyn Victoria (Harris) Adler, with the intent to change the files from unresolved deaths to closed status.

No one had ever connected the dots to discover the relationship between Theresa Marie (Cooper) Engels and her half-brother, Robert. As I was explaining the family connection to my supervisor, his face began to register a clear understanding and he started nodding. He had been one of the original detectives and had interviewed Theresa Engels after her brother's death. When I mentioned that I had met Vicki Dawson, and had a personal interest in the young woman, he said I should not be concerned about a relationship with her. There did not seem to be any reason to suspect she had any involvement in any of the deaths. She was at least as much a victim as anyone else.

I checked with Vicki late in the day. She had eaten a sandwich at lunch and taken a long nap. I told her I would pick up something for supper and come by about dark. She told me not to come by too early, she had a late appointment with Taylor, but promised it would not be a repeat of the previous day's discussion, it was a professional appointment. She mentioned that she was finally going to exorcise her demons. I told her Taylor was good at doing that, she'd been doing it for me for a long time.

** ** **

"Haven, are you going to show me that scar on your ass?" Vicki wasn't looking at me as she pulled bar-b-que out of the paper sack I put on the kitchen table.

"Nope," I answered as I filled two glasses with ice and looked in the refrigerator for the big pitcher of tea she had made when I called to tell her what I was bringing for our supper.

"Why not?"

"There is no scar on my ass. At least there isn't one because I had Taylor's initials cut off. It's a joke."

"What?" It was obvious Vicki didn't understand.

"It was the way we defused all the guys who wanted to date Taylor. We joked that we were lovers, knew each other's bodies intimately, so they would leave her alone."

"You'll have to explain better than that."

As we were going through the various stages of puberty, Taylor and Tony, and I, had a number of conversations about sex, passing along the rumors and stories we had heard at school. Tony passed along his parent's instructions about girls remaining pure until marriage. I think I had similar ideas, too. My mom became our unofficial advisor because she was easier to talk to than Taylor's mom was. Tony didn't want to listen to advice; he just wanted to know enough to practice his skills. Taylor's folks were in their forties when she was born and they were rather prudish. Mom said it was up to Taylor to make that decision, but she should know something about what she was deciding. They had some pretty intense girl talks.

Taylor was in gym class one day and some of the girls were looking at a handmade tattoo on one girl's upper arm. The girl and the boy had tattooed their initials on each other, like a mark of ownership. Taylor spouted off that she thought a more intimate place was a better place for that kind of a mark. She bragged that she'd put her tattoo on my ass.

I grinned when I told Vicki, "Taylor always has exaggerated about things." A girl in the gym must have told her boyfriend. Anyway, the message started getting around. Some guy stopped me at football practice and asked if I had Taylor's initials tattooed on my ass. I can't remember what I said, but it was probably something non-committal, like, "And what if she did?"

That afternoon I asked Taylor what she'd said and she admitted the exaggeration. We tried to think of a place where we would say I'd put my initials on Taylor, but we couldn't decide. The afternoon ended up being a minor session of playing doctor, including Taylor feeling my uncontrollable, ever-present erection, and me holding her budding breasts.

We managed to keep the farce going for a couple of years. I knew I couldn't keep hiding my ass from the other guys when I got to high school, so we came up with the idea that we'd had a fight and I'd had her initials cut out. A few months later, one rainy afternoon, I was running down the stairs and slipped. I got a huge splinter in my butt. My mom pulled the splinter out, but she didn't get one little sliver, it became infected and I got a huge boil. When the doctor lanced it, it left a scar. That's the scar I have on my ass."

As I was telling Vicki about the splinter, she shuddered and then she started laughing. "That's like poetic justice, huh? Say it and it becomes reality or something like that."

"Yeah, but it didn't stop Taylor from exaggerating things. You can't always believe all those stories she tells about what we did when we were kids. I don't remember events happening like she tells them."

"So, you'll didn't go skinny dipping in the neighbor's pool while they were on vacation?"

"Oh, yeah, we did that."

"And...you didn't shave her legs the first time?"

"Well, yeah, I did do that. But she asked me to do it."

"Oh yeah, and that locket she wears doesn't have a lock of your hair in it?"

"Well, yeah, but that was her mom's idea. Her folks gave her the locket for her sixteenth birthday. It's an antique and they were worried that Taylor would try to change the photos every year. Instead, her mom suggested she put a lock of hair in there. She put a lock of her hair on the other side."

"Not any more," Vicki was shaking her head. "She says it's reserved for the next man she agrees to marry, if she can find one she likes more than the first one."

"Did she say anything about Pete? She won't tell me anything about him. I haven't asked Pete, he's sort of a private person and I don't want him to be jealous."

"Yeah, she said he's a keeper," Vicki smiled a soft smile, one of those a woman has when she is thinking about someone else's happiness.

As we ate our supper, Vicki added more information about her afternoon appointment with Taylor. She blushed when she said Taylor thought Vicki's visit to Bat's Pub wasRisky Behavior. Vicki said she didn't give much thought to her reasons for stopping at the pub, other than the day was depressing and she didn't want to go home to an empty house. Vicki was concerned that she was becoming hermit-like, because she avoided leaving home, even for small errands, and then once away from home, she did not want to return. Taylor said those were symptomatic of some level of depression but that Vicki seemed to be able to deal with it, except for some unusual times and it was getting better.

"That means I was lucky." I didn't realize I had spoken aloud, until Vicki asked me to explain. "If another man had asked you to dance, you might have taken him home with you."

Laughing lightly, Vicki complained, "I didn't bring you home with me. You followed, all by yourself."

"Damn, what did you expect me to do after dancing with you and the way you rubbed your breasts against me? Then I kissed you in the parking lot and you told me to call you. I was a bloodhound trailing something I wanted so badly I wasn't thinking with the right head."

Vicki looked at her fingers, flexing them and resting them lightly on her thighs. "Haven, I'm not going to apologize for...for the other night."

Vicki was shaking her head as soon as I started telling her, "Maybe I shouldn't have been so rough."

"No, don't...I mean, I...well, I wanted you to..." Vicki still couldn't look at me.

I put my finger across her mouth, "Vicki, please. I'd like another chance." I heard my voice break, but I didn't stop telling her what I wanted. "I really wanted to do that last night, but Taylor's drinking contest sabotaged me. I'm not sure she didn't do it on purpose to make me take the extra day to think about what I want."

Vicki looked up at me, "What do you want Haven?"

"I've been thinking about that." I couldn't say it any plainer than, "I want you and some time to show you I'm not just a fucking animal."

Without saying a word, Vicki stood, took my hand, and led me to her bathroom. We stood there in that fabulous room and just looked at each other for a very long minute. I'm not sure which one of us moved first, but I had Vicki in my arms and I was kissing her. It wasn't the rough kiss I'd forced on her in the parking lot at Bat's, nor was it the easy kisses we'd shared in my room above the garage. The way I kissed her was something I'd never experienced before. It was as if I was sharing my soul with her and taking part of hers inside me. I didn't want to stop holding her, kissing her, or showing her how much she meant to me.

I know we undressed each other and I know we stepped into the shower and washed each other, but it was more like worship than any other feeling I could describe. Every movement was exquisite, every muscle sublime in its tone and definition. I honestly had visions of kissing every inch of her body until I knew hers as intimately as I knew my own. The sensations were incredible as I relished the exquisite shape of her body, and how she made me feel.

I remember sitting on that wooden bench with Vicki standing in front of me as I was drying her. I had my cheek resting against her with her arms wrapped around my head holding me to her. I had my hands on that wonderful ass of hers and I did not realize she was crying until I looked up at her.

"What is it Baby?" I asked moving my hands up to hold her face.

She looked around the room for a moment, and then back down at me, "This house used to be...like it was my fortress. As long as I was inside no one could come harm me or take anything away from me, but it's not enough anymore. It was my safe haven. I need a different kind of Haven now."

** ** **

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