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The thoughts I have of plowing into her, bent over the milking stall, are shameful. She’s innocent, I’ve made sure of that, but the sound of her gentle voice coming through the wall at night haunts me.
It turned from the soft sing-songs of a little girl into the chirping pop songs of a young teenager.
To now, the muffled moans of a young woman calling out to someone named…Daddy.
If her fantasy man is anyone other than me, I will find my way into her dreams and castrate the motherfucker.
I’d never loved a woman before her. I’ve felt the low buzz of lust long ago, but being the freak of Mumford my romantic life did not have a course set for a happy ending. They teased and toyed with me as I grew into an adolescent. Then exposed their cruel games in the most public of places for the entertainment of the whole class.
Luring me out on a Friday night under the lights of football field, dressed in a fifty-year old suit with cuffs that brushed above my ankles and a suit jacket that strained over my shoulders and needed another six inches in order to button.
How I believed I had been voted homecoming king I’m not sure. Youthful delusion, when the most popular girl in school holds your hand and tells you she’s wanted you for years. Eighteen years of being an outcast turns a young man hopeful. When the carrot was dangled, I lost myself in the glimmer of being accepted.
Only, as I stood on the sidelines that night, the Mumford High School stadium filled, the cruelty of women exposed itself to me in a blinding white light.
She held my hand as we walked onto the field, our crowns held up as the crowd roared. The homecoming court surrounded us.
Her crown was placed on top of her head.
Then mine was handed to me.
Confusion dulled my senses as the stadium went silent. I looked over to see her smile, then nod at the others.
As my hands held the crown, six girls surrounded me wearing their pink and purple gowns, fingers slipping under my suit jacket as I tried to piece together this ceremonial ritual.
I was not king. I was the joker. Standing on the field, my pants and underwear at my ankles as the crowd once again roared.
Before Ruby was born, I farmed and believed the lie that there were good women out there as my grandfather always said, I just needed to make the effort.
Every effort was met with lies and deception. I did not fit into this part of the human experience and after my own mother ran off with a salesman, there was no convincing me of the benefits of female companionship.
Until Ruby.
She’s shifting her weight back and forth, holding a red Solo cup. I watched as one of the other teenagers handed it to her, sloshing beer onto the front of her skirt, making me want to explode from the woods and throw the dark-haired beer delivery boy to the ground.
Ruby has not raised the cup.
Instead, as I watch, she eases it behind her back, dumping the foul yellow liquid on the ground. As her friend Marcy leans in to her boyfriend, Ruby lifts the now empty cup, pretends to guzzle it down, swipes the back of her hand across her lips then tosses it into the fire.
Good girl.
My good girl.
I saw her for the first time when I was twenty-nine and she was two. My stepbrother Reginald had a fling with her mother in the back of a limo somewhere in LA, and although he knew she’d given birth, he kept his fatherhood hidden from the family. Living in jets and between the east and west coast, Reginald was summoned to court after Ruby’s mother was killed in a car accident after a night of drinking.
Reginald was thrust into full-time fatherhood and I became an uncle.
My entire world changed when I looked into those trusting blue eyes staring up at me, arms raised like she’d been waiting for me to come for her.
“How did you do that?” Reginald had asked. “She hides from everyone. Doesn’t even let me pick her up.”
Now, from my place in the cool woods surrounding the open field filled with the youth of Mumford, my gut twists as Marcy and her boyfriend David huddle near Ruby, leaning in as Marcy presses her hands together in a begging prayer and David looks around, bored.
Ruby shrugs on a reluctant nod, scanning the edge of the woods as I tuck behind a thick oak. Hiding is not easy when you are six feet seven inches and pushing up on three hundred pounds. But in the darkness, I’m undetectable. I’ve become an expert at hiding over the years as my obsession with Ruby turned from protector and guardian to something else.
A dark hunger gripped me as she grew into an adult. I resisted for as long as I could. In the last year, the urges swelled as her body did the same. Her tiny five feet of blossoming womanhood pushed me over the edge and on her eighteenth birthday, I gave in.
I watched her through the keyhole in the bathroom door as she unzipped the red full-length gown I’d made for her just for that day. I prayed for forgiveness as I pleasured myself to the sight of the young woman I was sworn to raise, standing naked, staring into the mirror, her fingers squeezing the spray of milk from her dark, gathered nipples.
