Madeline Sheehan - The Soul Mate

“It happened again this morning,” I sighed.

“Woman, you need to just let nature take its course. You’ll feel a lot better once you get it out of the way.”

“He’s going to want more than that and I can’t give it to him. I can’t even bring myself to give him that. I’m not ready.”

“You might change your mind once you take that ride.” She cut her dark brown eyes at me, a knowing smile on her face.

“Ugh.” I rolled my eyes. “Clan living…” I shook my head.

“Hey! It was a long time ago. But it was…” She grinned. “Memorable.”

“Speak of the devil.” She nodded back toward the food tent. Gerik was rounding the corner, coming directly from the living lot.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “His hair is braided.”

“Let it go. It’s just hair.” Becki muttered.

“I doubt it was just hair.”

His long, blonde hair was braided with a few new beads woven throughout them. I always braided his hair in the morning and took them out in the evening; he had me doing it for the past two months and it had become part of our routine. I liked it, it felt…good and not just because being near Gerik felt abnormally good. I had always brushed my little sister Tahyra’s hair and styled it.

Three guesses at who braided it today? I wondered at what else they had done? My stomach knotted at the thought of them together intimately.

“Nice hair,” I said without thinking about it first. That was me, always doing without thinking. My mouth had a brain of its own. My daddy always said one day it was going to get me in a world of trouble.

He froze mid-step at the sound of my voice and turned to look at me. “Don’t start this with me, yeah?”

Start this with him? What a joke. He completely crossed the line this morning and he knew it.

I crossed the distance between us, my body instantly reacting to the nearness of him. I ignored it, as much as anyone could ignore an onslaught of emotional and physical perfection. But he didn’t, he never could or would; his eyes grayed and his face tightened.

Willing my frustration and lust to turn to anger, I shoved hard against his massive chest. He didn’t move. I was suddenly sick of all these men and their bodies made out of solid rock. Give me a pudgy stomach to sink my fist into. I’d at least like to hear a nice grunt or something. Any sort of acknowledgment of pain. Even a little grimace would’ve been nice.

I pushed him again. In return he heaved forward with his chest. It was just a small movement but it was enough and I stumbled backwards.

“Is something wrong Trinity?” His nostrils flared. “Something you want to talk about?”

I laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh and I shouldn’t have done it but there was no middle ground when it came to Gerik. In order to ignore this anomalous attraction, I had to try and shut down completely. I became cold and distant, repressed my brains normal responses to him to be flirtatious and sensual. It was the only way: black or white. There was never any gray area with Gerik and me, unless it was the color of his eyes and that color that was for me and me alone.

I turned to leave but he snatched my wrist causing heat to flare where he touched me. It shot up my arm, arrowed through my chest making my breasts swell and ache, then spiraled down toward my stomach before settling in between my legs.

I faltered.

It took every ounce of sanity left inside of me to glare at him but I managed it and he glared right back, unwilling to release me.

Both our bodies were tense and strung as tight as wires as we silently fought. He wanted everything from me and I wanted… Well that was the problem wasn’t it? I didn’t know what I wanted. The emotions pouring out of us were already past excessive and well on their way to redundancy.

“You feel that, yeah?” He leaned downed and pressed his lips to mine. His kiss was like a shock to my already overloaded system. My heart was thumping hard and fast against my chest feeling like, at any moment, it might explode.

“That’s me inside you, Trinity. I’ve always been there and always will be.”

I gasped against his mouth as my body betrayed me and swayed forward, collapsing against him. The electric sensations he was somehow creating within my womb spread like wildfire across nerve endings. My insides writhed and stilled, thrashed and throbbed until the final explosion left me grasping to stay standing, fighting for breath, as it threatened to end me completely.

Gerik held me steady against him until the quivering inside of me had subsided, and I was again able to hold my own body weight. Nevermind the fact that I was still breathing quite heavily.

“Feel better?” He whispered, his breath against my cheek beginning to stoke a fire inside me that had yet to die. A fire I feared, that with Gerik, would never die.

I swallowed hard and tried to nod.

“It’s only you, Trinity. I keep telling you that, yeah?” He tilted my chin up until I was drowning in his two deep blue pools of blue. I never wanted to leave his arms, never wanted to let go, never-

“Gerik?” Becki said softly, appearing next to us. “Trinity and I have clothes to wash and if you don’t let her go, we’re not going to get them done before daylight runs out.”

I’d never been so grateful for dirty underwear before.

I followed Becki to a large metal basin where three large piles of clothes waited for us. She threw me a large clump of soap and I dutifully started scrubbing clothing against a washboard.

I had never before been a big fan of manual labor. It had also never crossed my mind that someday I would find myself burdened with such a large amount of it either. Here my days are longer than ever before, eaten up by washing clothes and dishes, cooking and serving food and playing with children who are not mine. I fall into bed at the end of the day bone tired with aching muscles and sore feet and yet…I feel a fulfillment that I can honestly say I’d never experienced before.

Technology, even the simplest forms of it, had made people’s lives so much more accommodating but it had also disconnected us. But here, in this Romani camp, we are forced to interact just to survive. It was a forgotten way of life, yet, to the Romani it was all they’d ever known and they worked hard to keep it that way.

Staying in tune with the earth and keeping their families close, passing knowledge along to the next generations was what the Gypsies considered the right way to live. They never wasted a thing. They didn’t litter or purposely pollute. Everything had a use or a purpose. The land we lived on was sacred, it gave us life and in return they gave back to it. That, to me, felt right and I respected them for it.

“So…” Becki said.

I paused in my scrubbing to rub the itch on my nose with the inside of my elbow, careful not to get soap on my face. “What’s up?”

“How would you feel about cooking duty tonight?”

I narrowed my eyes. “No one cooks at night, what are you talking about?”

“I’m supposed to make jerky tonight, but I promised Hockey I’d meet him in the back lot later.” She scrunched her face up at me like a cute little puppy dog.

“Pretty please, Trinity? I’ll be your best friend!”

I rolled my eyes. “You already are.”

She jumped up, clapping her hands. “Great! I so owe you one! I’ll be right back, I’m going to go tell him we are on for tonight.”

She ran off, her hands still covered in soap.

Hockey and Becki had been together for a few months. They were polar opposites. Whereas Becki was loud, Hockey was quiet, Becki liked to drink and Hockey didn’t, Becki wouldn’t read a book to save her life and Hockey constantly had his nose buried in them. Becki had dated half the guys in camp and I’m pretty sure Hockey hadn’t dated anybody until Becki. Still, they were pretty adorable together; she did all the talking while she dragged him around behind her.