Page 35 of His Virgin Vessel

Chapter Fourteen

Asa

When I woke up, the afternoon sun was already peeping through the blinds on the motel windows. I looked down at the figure curled up in the bed beside me. Corinne looked so tiny, so vulnerable, and fragile. It was hard to believe that this little creature was the same one who had utterly exhausted me and repeatedly drained me over the last twenty-four hours.

When you're a kid, and learning about sex for the first time, there are some pretty epic sessions. At that age, every time feels like it might be the last time anyone will ever let you do this, and so you just want to keep doing it, on and on, forever, and, at that age, you have the stamina to damn near make it happen. I remembered some long weekends with one girl or another (maybe Fiona even), where we never seemed to leave the bed. Objectively, I supposed, I had had frequent and athletic sex with someone before Corinne. But this had been something else. It wasn't just my body that felt spent, it was my mind. I was mentally exhausted, and I never even knew that sex could do that. Who knew your brain had anything to do with it? But even that wasn't the whole story. Was it possible for a soul to feel spent? If there was a finite amount of love in the human body, then I felt I had poured mine all out to Corinne last night. I had nothing left to give, and, yet, felt a deep desire to give her more. It was not just that I had never known sex like this. I had never even known that sex could be like this.

I had always treated sex like a sport, a pastime, or a hobby. It was something fun to do with whoever happened to be around. But, with Corinne, it was so much more, and I found myself oddly horrified by the idea of ever doing it with anyone else. I had thought it last night, and I was sure she understood that I could never belong to any woman. And, yet, in an odd way, I did. Corinne had a hold on me, in that I could not see past her to other women. They no longer existed. There was only her.

All of that was going to make today especially hard, because this was the last day I would see Corinne, the last day we would spend together. There was no other way. On the one hand, we had had a good—if brief—run. On the other, we had completely screwed things up from top to bottom. But, whichever perspective you took, the only way forward now was for her to go back home to be with her father. I was resolute that I was not going to ruin her life. It was bad enough that I had dragged it down to this point. Things could not go on like this, and I knew what I had to do next.

Slipping out of bed as quietly as I could, so as not to wake Corinne, I pulled my clothes on and headed for the door. Thinking again, I went back, located Corinne's phone in her pants' pocket, and took it with me.

"You got a phone?" I asked the woman at reception, who was idly leafing through a magazine.

She looked up at me as if I must be the lowest form of life on earth for not having a cell phone, but, of course, I wasn't about to use a cell phone that had been taken off me by police while I was in custody. I doubted that the local sheriff's department had bugging facilities, but who the hell knew these days? There were kids in their bedrooms who could take all the money out of your bank account without getting out of bed. I wasn't going to risk it.

"There." The woman said, pointing at a pay phone that might have last been used during the Nixon administration.

"Thanks." I took out Corinne's phone and scrolled through the numbers looking for 'Dad'.

"You know," drawled the woman at the desk. "For future reference, that thing in your hands can also be used as a phone."

"Battery's low," I lied.

The woman shrugged. Working in this particular motel, she knew damn well I was lying, but she also knew better than to pry too deeply into the lives of her clients. Running a place like this, you quickly learned to ask no questions, to see nothing, and to never remember a face.

The phone rang a couple of times before a familiar voice answered.

"Dugas."

"Hi, Sheriff. It's Asa Covert."

I would have paid good money to see the sheriff's face at that point, but all I got was a very long silence before he spoke again.

"Is my daughter all right?"

Once again, I found myself having to grudgingly respect Brian Dugas. If the first words out of his mouth had been anything else, then the whole purpose of this conversation might have changed, but he clearly cared about Corinne, and that meant I had to go ahead with what I had been planning.

"She's fine."

"I want to speak to her."

"She's sleeping. And I don't want her to know that I'm making this call."

There was another pause, as Dugas pondered what I had said. "What is this call?"

He was a smart man. "This is me reaching out to make a deal."

"You broke the last deal we made."

"Now, we both know that you made that deal under false pretenses," I said.

"So, you decided to revenge yourself on me by going after my daughter?" Anger was creeping into his tone.

"That's not how it is with Corinne and me, and I think you know that," I said, shutting him down, not giving way. Dugas respected strength, and I wasn't about to give an inch. "I was trying to do what I thought was best for her, and I'm willing to admit that it didn't go as planned. But I think that if you hadn't chased me last night, then you'd have been genuinely pleased with the outcome."

"You were speeding!"

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