Kelly was wobbly-legged as Cheryl dragged her out of bed, grabbed her own purse, and carried her down the hallway to the bathroom. Kelly was drunk from a night of orgasmic abandon, having experienced the type of release from care she had not thought possible in the past, in what Cheryl had called, “the world of failed cocks.”

Soon she was standing dazed before the tub as Cheryl laid out her clothes, got the water running, removed Kelly’s spent and caked makeup. Cheryl wore no makeup of her own, none, but was reasonably pretty without it. She whistled playful as she tossed the pads in the trash and fluffed Kelly’s hair, “I like you without it. If a hard bitch like me can get by without makeup, a pretty little thing like you can make do. Besides,” she said as she stepped into the tub with her, “Savage doesn’t like makeup.”

She blinked as Cheryl sponged her face, the two of them standing together in the hot water.

“Who is Savage?”

“Savage is my old man, my husband. His government name is Ronald, but that hardly fits. You’ll like him, honey—and don't you worry, he'll like you.”

Kelly recalled dating Bobby Felder a few years ago, a real smart college guy who quoted lines from Indian and Chinese love poems and sex manuals. He had always told her that he would place her upon “the Golden Terrace” one day, some place of exquisite pleasure, a place where she was held in high esteem. When she looked at Cheryl as the older woman sponged her down in the water, her standing face to breast, and noted the label-style tattoo “Savage Property,” on Cheryl’s waxed pelvis, she felt a chill that both frightened and lightened her. Then her super-sexy biker-bitch girlfriend squatted and kissed her knees while she soaped Kelly’s shins, then looked up with a dark light in her open eyes and purred, “Honey, we’ve been looking for a girl like you for years. Cheryl Girl is taking you away today, away from the land of failed cocks and crack-smoked heads.”

She then dropped the soap, stood to her full height, looming over Kelly like a naked stature of liberty, and kissed her wetly. It was happening again, she was being taken away above herself by this savage woman, who was all the more effective in her seduction for not being a dyke. Cheryl then soaped her body and kissed her neck while she looked away, out between the curtains—the pink lace ones her Aunt Sue had gifted her and which Jase had put cigarette holes in after their last argument.

The lather soon became more than that, a kind of cleansing of the past year rather than of the past night, which drew her inner Bo Peep—which is what Aunt Sue had always told her was her secret conscience, her safe place inside when the world went wrong—to the gently streaking sky outside her window. She was drawn to the distant dawn that was creeping toward her house unsafe, her nest undone and she felt like flying, like some just-freed bird fluttering high above the golden terraces and empty promises of men.

Her eyes still on the crease of the distant dawn, visible through the ruin of her favorite housewarming gift, opened more widely. Then the sky seemed to open as she did at the command of Cheryl’s man-strong hands, as if dawn were a woman, opening before the world, announcing possibilities previously hidden.