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Karen Jones in A Red Dead Redemption 2 Prequel.	By : Nickamano Category: +M through R > Red Dead Redemption Views: 3084 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Red Dead Redemption 2, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 5
- 6
Epilogue – Redemption.
1914.
Karen Jones sat slumped low at the filthy, stained poker table. She was drunk, bored and exhausted. These days the poker table was perhaps the urban centre of town, the fun bit. It sat in the back corner of the back room of the rundown old tavern in Van Horn, the only one still surviving.
Like the tavern, Van Horn was practically a ghost town itself, though it had been many a decade since it had been described as a lively port town.
Its occupants these days were really just made up of those few who had roots there and were unwilling to move on. The rest were the usual rough types, bandits and other criminals all essentially hiding out in the lawless town. They spent their days making trouble and spreading their meagre wealth pointlessly between each other, usually through gambling games, the same handfuls of dollars circling around and around endlessly.
Then there were those who were dying, or wanting to die or were already dead inside though their bodies hadn’t been told. Karen was any one of those latter three examples.
She spent her waking hours drinking and gambling when she could afford it, whoring when she couldn’t. She occasionally ate a meal when her winnings afforded her the luxury. But she mostly gambled. She was fortunate in a way, she had no pimp, she was only infrequently robbed or fucked without getting paid. She was mostly left alone, or rudely tolerated. Just like everyone else slumming it in Van Horn.
It had been a long time along this particular downward spiral. Since the whole Van der Linde fiasco, she could hardly remember anything that had happened to her, not in any detail. Not that she wanted to remember.

She had shuffled away from that godforsaken Murfree cave in the night, apparently only a day or so before the thing had imploded anyway, at least according to Javier.
She had stumbled across Javier Escuella, a couple of months after leaving the gang. At first, Javier had been angry with her for her abandonment of them, he had seen it as a betrayal of Dutch, as disloyalty. Karen had kept her mouth shut, at least he hadn’t lifted his hand to her, merely snarled and spat while he vented.
Even through the haze of grief and booze she had been bathing herself in at that time, she had clearly recognised the division in the gang, those who questioned Dutch and those who blindly stuck by him. Javier had been among the latter. So, Karen had let him have his rant. Fortunately, he had still had his long-standing fondness for her and turned instead to reminiscing of good times, memories of her and how they had worked together on more than one bank robbery. He forgave her, gave her some money and allowed her to share his hotel room, in the days before he moved on south toward Mexico.
Of course, she had known that the Mexican had always been quietly smitten with Karen, and he had jumped at the chance to fuck her. In return, he had filled her in on the events leading up to the ending of the gang. Of the final train robbery, of Arthur and John’s betrayal and of Micah’s murder of Susan Grimshaw, not altogether a surprise. She had always hated Susan, but some snake like Micah Bell? It was a shame to have gone out at his hand.
He told her about the race across country, pursued by the Pinkertons that came right after. He had heard plenty of shouting in the night sky, Arthur’s voice and John’s, Micah’s. He had ridden with Dutch for a short while but they had all become separated in the forests of Roanoke, and he hadn’t seen anything of any of them since.
He reminded Karen that of all of them, Arthur was almost certainly dead by now, either by bullet or illness.
Karen had a vague recollection, through her own whiskey haze, back then as well as now, that Arthur had appeared to have already been on his last legs the last time she had seen him and that had been the night before the gang’s final robbery.
She remembered talking to the other girls and essentially all deciding to leave together but Karen had woken up, still drunk, the following morning and she had been one of the only women left in the camp. Grimshaw had still been there and fretful Abigail, but Tilly and Mary Beth had disappeared. She found a note Mary Beth had left her, stating that they tried to wake her to get her to come along but she had been so drunk they hadn’t been able to rouse her and had no choice but to go without her. Karen hadn’t really believed it, not back then at least.
She had filled Javier in on her own adventure after she had wandered off alone. He had mentioned that half the gang hadn’t noticed her having gone at all, while most of the rest assumed she will have been found and murdered by Murfree Brood. Karen wasn’t particularly surprised. Though a lack of interest from Arthur had pained her at the time. She had always liked the big lummox, she vaguely remembered him trying to talk to her a couple of times, complaining about her drinking. But Javier told her at the time he had become obsessed with ‘saving’ John Marston, even going against Dutch’s wishes and jumping the gun on a rescue plan. All to ensure John, Jack and Abigail were saved and free from Dutch’s “Bad influence”. He had spat it all out with venom. Apparently, that ‘betrayal’ had hit him hard. Of course, other than Micah Bell, everyone had respected Arthur.
Karen changed the subject by going back to the night of her own escape. How with only her winter coat, her carbine repeater with a handful of cartridges, half a bottle of booze and a piece of salted meat, she had pilfered, she had stomped off into the night. She had been angry drunk and upset about being left behind by those other two. And in that moment, she really wouldn’t have cared if she had been discovered and carried off by the Murfree gang.
However, she had found them. Two of them had discovered a campsite, a middle-aged couple enjoying a quiet evening camping in the wilderness. The Murfrees had killed them both and had been busy ransacking their camp. Karen had been able to sneak up on one of them and cave his skull in with a rock. As dark as it had been that night, the camp fire already down to embers, the other fella hadn’t seen it. She had taken the dead Murfree’s knife, a big wartime bowie and had slit the other’s throat with it.
Then she ransacked the camp herself. She found a full bottle of gin. Some fruit and bread, a second handful of cartridges for her carbine. She had even taken a spare dress the dead woman had packed, tossed away her soiled, stinking and now blood-soaked skirts and pulled the dress on. She kept the knife and its sheath as well as a pistol belt with an old worn revolver that she buckled around her hips beneath her coat. Between the four corpses she had managed to pull together around five dollars in coins.
She had followed the river south, found a little ramshackle village where she stole a horse. She continued onward until she found herself back in Lagras, where Sadie Adler had led them after the debacle in Rhodes. She had hidden herself in one of the many abandoned and by that time, bullet-ridden shacks for a few days, before continuing on southward. She kept to herself, hiding mostly by day and travelling by night.

Javier had been good to her, so she had shown him as good a time as she had been capable, inebriated and worn down as she had been. He had even asked her to come along with him, that he was heading back down to his native soil. She had just laughed, not taking him seriously. She knew all too well that, when lust had hold of them, men would say anything and everything that came into their heads. Javier had left at dawn the next morning.
The realisation of her being alone had really struck her afterwards, and she had thrown herself into the bottle. Partly wanting to escape the hopelessness of her life, the loneliness, partly wanting to slip into permanent oblivion. Arthur Morgan had had it lucky.
She vaguely remembered getting kicked out of hotels and towns. Times in jails, getting fucked by deputies. By then she had sold or lost all but the cloths on her back.
Sometimes, walking from town to town, she managed to talk her way onto the roof of a carriage. Once or twice inside a carriage. Though inside a carriage always led her to spending her time underneath the generous gentleman traveller or owner. She getting a free ride in his carriage, he getting a free ride of his own, often numerous.
Her body mostly paid her way, bought her booze and enough food to keep her craving more. Even though she would rather drink than eat, her body had its own demands and ways of making her listen. She might want to die but her body wouldn’t let her. As she thought about it, Karen found herself smiling, she might have swallowed enough cum to keep her stomach filled for those first couple of years.
At one point she remembered being offered a ride in a private coach. It resulted in her getting fucked by the nasty old gentleman type within. He revealed himself to have a cruel streak a mile wide and a penchant for inflicting pain. Though he got his own comeuppance by dying right there on top of her, while he was busy humping away. She assumed it had been a heart attack. Of course, no one else was going to believe that. So, with no other option she could think of, she had searched his body, found a loaded Derringer on his person and shot the coach driver dead. Then she had pulled the carriage off the road out of sight and ransacked it for as much as she could. She took the two horses, one to ride and one to sell. From that, she had enough goods for a little while to keep her in booze, and a bed to sleep on. The leftovers she gambled.
She won and lost often, going from enough to keep her alive to, at least what felt like, death’s door. And there she remained. Moving from town to town when she had outlived her welcome. Living on the perpetual wave of profit and loss, food and booze. Or nothing, other than the the feeling of the skeletal hand of death reaching for her.
That was her life now still, different town, yet everything was just the same. Her last lucky streak had been born and then died along with the Van der Linde gang.
Where had it all gone? Marrying Luke and their life at the ranch had been the pinnacle of her life. Yet, that was twenty-four years past, and it had been all over and done in less than a year. From something, happiness, a beloved, prospects, a future, talk of children. Then suddenly nothing. Right now, she was back to where she had been right after Luke Jones had left her. There had been that writer who had pulled her out of the gutter, given her a chance. She had come out of those few months with money and prospects again. Maybe even a little self-belief.
And then she had lost it all after a few short years. Robberies, bad fellas and her own foolishness.
She had bought herself a little place up in the grizzles, a few chickens, a cow, a line of crops sewed and growing well. But foxes had killed the chickens, a gang of brothers had butchered her cow and then imprisoned her in her own home. She had cooked and cleaned for them by day, and they had fucked her by night. After almost a fortnight, she had managed to get hold of one of their guns, shot one dead, wounded another and then ran out into the cold, wolf-ridden woods.
She had been back to nothing.
She had found another little homestead just like hers and treated the occupiers just like those brothers had treated her. Minus the gang rape and imprisonment. She had held them at gun point, tied them up at their own little dining table, while she ransacked their place and took everything she could carry. For all she knew they could have died there, tied to those chairs, unable to free themselves.
Not long after that, she had been discovered, desperate and skinny, sneaking into a gang camp and stealing food, clothing and ammunition. That had been her introduction to Hosea Matthews. And through him Dutch van der Linde. She had grown rich again, in a new way. She had found a family again, people she trusted, perhaps even loved. But that had imploded, as she supposed she always knew it would.
And now she was back to nothing again. And this time there would be no reprieve. Her saviours had always come to her because of her youth and her shapely beauty. She could hardly expect more of that now that she was forty years old.
She paid little attention to the poker game. It was only herself, Cuthbert and Charlie Cooper. Cuthbert was soft as a mouse and foolishly besotted with her. Charlie Cooper was drunk and often angry.
Over by the bar sat the doctor. He was probably the only good person in Van Horn, though washed out and a raving opiate addict. He was reading a fortnight-old newspaper aloud to Joan Foreman, the barkeep. The story was something about the out-break of some war over in Europe following a political assassination in a place she had never heard of. He might as well be reading about Mexico, it sounded just the same.
“Hey, tits! It’s your turn, you old whore! You gonna call or not?” Charlie Cooper snapped.
She had almost forgotten where she was, she certainly didn’t remember drawing the card from the sleeve of her filthy dress. Neither had she remembered to slide a card into her sleeve so that she only had five in her hand.
In the next second Charlie Cooper, had let out a roar, that raged around Karen’s already throbbing skull, he stood up, kicking his chair back from the table, a hand ripping a big bowie knife from his waist belt.
“Fucking cheat! The whore’s a fucking cheat! She’s got six cards in her hand! I’m gonna cut them big tits clean off her, then she won’t have fuck all to offer any man! Fucking cheater!”
Karen floundered, she didn’t know what was going on or what to do about it. Cuthbert was gawping like a drowning fish, sitting there weeping but not able or willing to get between Karen and Cooper’s big knife. There came a shout from the bar. Everyone turned to see Joan foreman brandishing a rusty old side-by-side. Karen felt a belated rush of relief.
“Hey, you know the rules!” Foreman shouted. “Any beefs get taken outside!”
The next thing Karen knew was that her filthy, dull blonde hair, now shot through with the occasional streak of grey, was gripped in Cooper’s hand and she was being dragged, howling and sobbing across the tavern’s taproom. Before she knew it, she was through the front door and onto the dried-mud-grey boards outside. Cooper shoved her to the floor on her back leaning over her with a handful of her loose dress in one fist and his big, wicked looking knife raised in the other. He slammed his fist into her face once and then leaned over and spat on her.
“I’m gonna cut your whore’s tits off, and then I’m gonna cut your dick-sucking lips away and then ram my bowie straight up your worthless fucking cunt! See how much whoring you get done then!”
<><><>
Jack Marston liked to carry a pair of revolvers. His father’s old Cattleman was on his right hip and for the usual self-defence purposes. The other, a double action with a hair trigger, was exclusively for when he was angry and wanted to really do some damage. The Packenbush was always loaded with powerful Express Cartridges, but he always provided additional stopping power to the hot loads by scouring an X shaped split across each bullet, so that they would spread apart into a big fat, misshapen lump on impact.
That was how the nineteen-year-old managed to blow the entire head off the knife-wielding lowlife, outside the Van Horn tavern; his bullet blasting the disgorged head through the window to splatter the drinking establishment’s interior with mangled pieces of skull, brain and bits of the lowlife’s ugly, gnarled features.
Without a word, he got down off the huge and frankly beautiful Tiger-stripe Bay Mustang. He knelt beside Karen, slid a gloved hand around the nape of her neck and lifted her up until they were face to face. Then he scooped a photograph out of his pocket. It was a few years old, folded, the silver nitrate cracked flaking here and there, but the resemblance was still evident. Satisfied, he pocketed the photograph. Then he hauled the dazed and blood-spattered Karen Jones up off the mud coated boards, pulled her to her feet and then up over his shoulder. He carried her, limp and moaning softly, over to his horse and threw her face down across the mare’s hind quarters.
If Karen hadn’t been so drunk and dazed, she should have been able to supply the names of the two enraged bandits who popped up out of the woodwork. They came at the young murderer with a sawn-off shotgun and an old carbine repeater, shouting and raging and cursing the stranger.
Jack Marston would not have been interested in Karen’s insights of course. He merely drew his Packenbush for a second time from the custom made cross-draw holster, held at the small of his back and employed another two of his split-point express rounds. The effects were of course devastating. One man, short and skinny as a Murfree, was hit in the stomach but he was so slender that the impact to all intents and purposes tore his body into two. The other man was hit in the chest and lost his heart, literally, through the palm sized hole in his back. He looked as though he had been hit by a small cannon ball.
Jack looked carefully around the town. No one else was visible. He holstered his double action, climbed into the saddle and headed out of Van Horn with Karen. He reached behind him and grabbed a fist full of her loose-fitting dress, as he started up the slope out of town. Kicking his horse into a trot once they were past the lighthouse, he took off on a trail to the southwest taking the town of them off into the surrounding thickness of the forest.
<><><>
Karen was awoken by a hand pressed tight across her nose and mouth and then a bitter icy cold engulfed her from head to toe. She shook and screamed against the hand, struggling in vain. She was far too weak and frail these days.
She was lifted up, the hand removed while she sputtered and gulped in air. Then the hand was replaced blocking her airway again, and for a second time she was shoved hard under what she now realised was icy cold water. It woke her up. It also cleaned her up, which had been deliberate on Jack’s part.
The stranger shifted his hand from over Karen’s mouth to around her throat and pressed in with his fingers, however Karen recognised the move as controlling, a motivator rather than an attempt to throttle. She knew the difference well enough. She lay still terrified, confused and shivering.
This stranger was wearing a long, dark coloured duster coat, an old flop hat with collar length, straggly dark hair coming out from under it and a goatee surrounding his thin slash of a mouth. It was a surly, angry mouth.
It was already twilight, though with the enclosing tree canopy hanging thick and low over the river, most of the residual sunset light was obstructed so it felt more like dusk. The young stranger began to busy himself with rubbing her all over, vigorously and firmly, with a huge, fist-sized bar of soap.
“You stink something terrible, woman.” He growled.
She noted that he was looking at her naked body rather than her face. Which had seemed to have been all Karen had ever experienced. Though this particular time he apparently had a job to do, which required him to pay attention to getting that soap rigorously into every imaginable nook and cranny she possessed.
There was something faintly familiar about his features but also his voice; the way he spoke but also the tone. Karen couldn’t place it. Of course, she wasn’t in her right mind yet. Not by a long way.
“Let me up mister, I’m gonna fucking freeze to death!” She said.
“Not till you smell like this soap, you ain’t getting up. And you ain’t freezing, you’re fine. It ain’t that cold.”
After soaping up her body, he did her hair, in fact he soaped and rinsed her hair four times before he was satisfied. He was rough with the soap, but his bare hands were gently working the lather up into her hair and over her scalp. It was actually pleasant.
However, intriguingly, he had also spent a lot of time and attention soaping up her breasts. And he ran the bar irrepressibly up and down between the tops of her thighs, over her vulva, purposefully spreading them with a rounded corner of the soap. Was he teasing her or just being thorough?
He also worked around and around her thick, matted pubic hair in not so gentle circles. If Karen hadn’t been so cold and foggy minded, she would have been moaning and shivering with more than just the cold.
He finally lifted her onto her knees and worked at the creases beneath and between her buttocks too, and again many more times that she felt should have been necessary for mere cleanliness.
Karen had lost a lot of weight over the last fifteen years, but in a blessing-and-curse way, her breasts had retained their size, and though they could no longer be described as youthful perky, they were still full and had somehow maintained the pertness of someone ten years her junior.
In fact, it was the same with the wrinkles, the grey and stretch marks. Even in the state she kept herself, with the bad habits of too much drink and too little food; compared to other women her age, she still looked like a woman of thirty rather than forty.
It had allowed her to continue to make money on her back even with younger competition all around her. However, that had also halted any sustained attempt to find the peace of oblivion, where she wouldn’t have been looked at twice. Not being able to make or have any reason for her begging to be listened to, she could have starved and simply wasted away. Or be seen as so worthless that it would provide more fun to simply kill her than allow her to carry on living, breathing other’s air, taking up someone else’s corner of a ruined mould-ridden house. She had seen that one too many times too with aging women, with no one to look after them, whores especially.

The familiar stranger, only a kid really. Finally tore himself away from his obvious pleasure and dragged Karen up out of the shallows of the Kamassa River. Her clothes were nowhere to be found. He told her he had tossed them and gave her a thick blanket and wrap around herself. Though he had saved her boots and returned them to her. The soles were holed, the laces rotten and snapped, but they would at least keep her feet and ankles warm. He hauled her back up onto the back of his horse and this time she sat up astride the animal instead of bent face down over it.
“You threw up over my horse’s leg.”
“I’m sorry… Hey, erm, are you going to kill me, mister?”
“Huh? No. No, I’m taking you to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“You’ll just have to wait and see.”
“And who are you?”
“Bounty hunter, at the moment.”
“Someone’s put a bounty on me?”
“Not in so many words.”
They travelled in silence for a while. The magnificent steed walking along at a leisurely pace. Weaving between trunks of broad, ageless trees and fresh young saplings. The trunks were now painted by moonlight and seemed to glow against the black of full night. It was a healthy forest around here, not yet ravaged by Annesburg and its logging company or the mine.
“You sure you got the right woman?”
“Pretty sure. You look like the photograph I was given. And you were in Van Horn, as I was told.”
“I ain’t nobody, mister. You must have the wrong person.”
“You’re somebody to somebody, if you know what I mean. Or you wouldn’t be here with me. Every body’s somebody to somebody, I guess.”
“Not me. Not for a long time.”
The young stranger didn’t say anything else. Karen could see the familiar shaped gleam of a revolver’s backstrap glinting up at her from in front of her crotch, in the small of the youngster’s back. She toyed with the idea of shooting this kid in the back and taking his horse. She could maybe get fifty, maybe even a hundred dollars for it. But that vague realisation that he had just that day saved her life, stayed her hand and she put the idea out of her mind.
“Do you think the guy who asked you to look for me… Do you think I’m in trouble?”
“No idea.”
“Should I see him? What if he wants to kill me?”
“I’m taking you to him, alive and well. As well as I can make you. That’s what I’m getting paid for. After that, once I get my money, I don’t really care.”
“But if you were in my shoes…?”
“Look at it this way, if he hadn’t paid me to find you, you would have died today, under that guy’s knife. And that was a big knife.”
“I guess so.”
“What have you got to lose, woman?”
They camped that night in the old fort just to the east of the river, almost on its bank. Karen had seen it before. It was black against the grey clouds of the night sky, skeletal. It was hard to tell with nothing but silhouettes to read, but it looked like creepers, vines and small trees had been taking back the ground that the fort had been built on.
On the inside of the fort’s half collapsed walls, the familiar stranger had found an old hitching post and tied his horse to it. Then he stripped off its saddle, gave it a good brushing down then took a collapsible leather bucket and filled it with water from the river down the hill. After watering the horse, he fed it and then exchanged the reins for a long length of rope so it could wander around the inside of the fort and lay down if it wanted to. He seemed to have a lot of love for the horse. As if reading her thoughts, he started talking about her.
“Her name’s Rachel, after my pop’s horse. But she was my mother’s, a gift from pop. It’s one of the only things of hers I got left.”
“She pass away?”
“Yeah, just this year.”
“Your pop too?”
“Three years ago, and my uncle. And my fucking dog. I loved that dog.”
“I’m sorry, son.”
Karen regretted using the term ‘son’ the moment it left her lips but the stranger didn’t react. Now that Rachel was fed, watered and settled, the stranger started work on their own camp. He didn’t light a fire out in the open. Instead, he took Karen, shivering, her teeth chattering and her hair still a tangled mess into a small supply shed on the western side of the fort, against its outer wall.
“There a hole there in the corner, behind those boxes with a ladder into a little cellar. We’ll camp down there. The hole can serve as a chimney. We might not get spotted.”
“What about your horse?”
“There’ll be enough holes in this floor to see right up through it, and enough holes in the shed’s walls. Plus, I’m a light sleeper.”
“You got any booze on you?”
“Not for you.”
“What? I can’t sleep without it.”
The stranger didn’t offer a reply as he followed her down the ladder. Karen was not only shocked by the desperation in her own voice, but also for the sudden realisation that she hadn’t drunk anything since before the poker game this morning. She’d been playing for enough to buy herself a bottle. The offer of her holes had served as big and small blinds. Fortunately, she’d won the first three hands and hadn’t had to pay anything back. And one more win would have been enough for her bottle.
Karen sat, now craving alcohol, wrapped up in her blanket shivering. She was sat on a mouldy old wooden crate. There was the residue of a nasty old smell in one corner. Maybe someone or some animal had used this place as a toilet.
The stranger had lit a small fire and then with a strip of cloth and a stick, he had made a torch and then checked the floor and the corners for snakes and such. Once satisfied, he had started to break up one of the few remaining shelves and built them a proper fire.
He planted it close to the ladder, just not so close that he might set it ablaze. There was plenty of dried wood down there along with old crates and boxes, there was an empty chest and more of the floor to ceiling shelves. Plus, the walls were reinforced floor to ceiling with planks too.
It looked a little like a mine in a way, but had probably been an ammunition store back when the place had been an active fort.
Karen shuffled as close to the dancing flames as she could get without setting herself alight. The stranger disappeared up the ladder for a couple of minutes. When he came back down, he was carrying his saddle and horse tack and his saddle bags. He had two pairs of saddle bags.
“You got anything to eat?”
“I’m gonna go out and hunt something in a minute or two.”
“You got anything for me to wear? I might well freeze tonight with just this blanket.”
“It’s summer, you ain’t gonna freeze.”
“Scared I’m gonna run?”
“I’ll let you have something of mine, but later. In the morning.”
He paused at the bottom of the ladder and looked back at Karen, stared at her in silence for a moment, illuminated by the young dancing flames. Then he spoke just as she was starting to feel uncomfortable.
“Just the one warning, woman. Keep away from my stuff. You touch anything of mine I’ll beat the holy hell outa you. It’s a two-week trip to get where we’re going and you’ll be all fresh and healed by the time we get there. But those two weeks, I’ll can make them pure fucking agony for you.”
“I got it.” She sighed.
He caught them a big fish, a steelhead she thought. It might have been the best trout she had ever tasted. And it wasn’t simply pieces of fish chewed off a twig, he presented it on a metal plate and with it came a ton of herbs, a sauce of crushed mint and water, and sliced carrots.
“For dessert” the stranger mixed some vile concoctions of numerous other herbs mixed and diluted. He forced her to gulp them down one after the other. He called it medicine.
It was a strange thing to watch him mixing them up in an old wooden pestle and mortar and the smell of a couple of the mixtures brought her suddenly and sharply back to a time she had been watching old Hosea Matthews doing exactly the same thing. What an odd memory to bring up, she thought, trying to ignore the unpleasant aftertaste as she stared into the fire. She felt warm and even a little sleepy after the meal and the medicine.
“They might taste bad, but the best medicines always taste the worst.” He said casually.
And again, Karen felt that same nostalgic familiarity. Hadn’t Hosea said exactly that same thing? Maybe with the same intonation? It was odd and disturbing, though somehow strangely pleasant at the same time.
“Looking at you in the fire light…”
His words, quiet and hesitant, came abruptly and unexpectedly, breaking the silence and snapping Karen out of her own reverie. He went silent, looking at her, a strange look on his harsh, youthful face. She saw confusion, familiarity, nostalgia perhaps. Or was she just reading in his face what she was feeling about him?
“…There’s something… familiar.” He added. “What’s your name?”
“What’s yours?”
“Jack.”
“I’m Karen… I don’t think I’ve ever been acquainted with a Jack. Well, there was that kid, but he was just a little boy… How old are you?”

It was as though he hadn’t heard her. He was staring at her as the flames lit her from below. As though the more he looked the more chance he had of remembering, whatever it was he might be able to remember.
“I feel like I’ve seen you before, but a long time ago, maybe in a dream. But it’s like just a moment. Someone like you, blonde hair, in curls. Beautiful. Lit up by a campfire just as you are now.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen. I think. I’m not sure.”
“What were your parent’s names?”
“John and Ab...”
“Abigail?”
“Yes.”
“Your John Marston’s boy? Little Jack Marston?”
“Not so little.”
He smiled. A sad, lonesome smile.
“Is this just a coincidence then?” Karen asked. “Did you know who I was when you went looking for me?”
“Not at all. I still don’t, not really. I have a memory of you, just one, I guess. I remember very little of that time. Fishing with Uncle Arthur, camps and tents. A lot of moving from place to place. A random image of a man tied to a tree. And I think I remember you, sitting on a log or something, the flames lighting you just like they are now. I remember staring at your tits.”
He didn’t even seem embarrassed as he said it. His eyes dipped to her chest. Karen involuntarily drew the blanket closer around her throat, but equally aware that the blanket had ridden up and her knees and even an inch or two of her thighs were now on display.
There was a light in Jack’s eyes. He looked at her hair. Thought for a moment.
“Best do something about that hair. It’ll only get worse. I got a brush.”
“There’s no need.”
“Sure there is.”
He slipped away into the gloom and she heard him rummaging around in his saddle bags. He returned with a brush, a slender oval of satinwood with a little mirror polished plaque on the rear and soft yellow bristles.
He knelt behind her, close up, the insides of his thighs against the swell of her hips. He started to brush her hair, gently, working at the tangles and lugs with patience. Almost immediately, Karen found it soothing. She let out a long sigh, felt herself relaxing, enjoyed the warmth and firmness of his body.
“You’re good at that. Most men yank and tug. They’re always too rough.”
“I can be rough.” He said.
Karen wondered if it was the boy’s half assed attempt at flirtation. She didn’t know how to respond. She didn’t want to encourage him.
“Mom, got me to help her sometimes while pop was away making money or working the farm.”
“You had a farm?”
She almost sputtered. Jack’s next brush was in the form of a little tug. Punishment or perhaps his “I can be rough” had been a literal statement after all.
“Still do. Out on Beechers Grove, a few miles west of Blackwater. It’s where everyone’s buried. I sold all the livestock, except Rachel. But the land’s still mine and the house is still there. Might go back one day.”
They fell silent again. Karen craved a good bottle of bourbon or gin or anything. It would go well with the fire and the sensual feel of the boy so carefully brushing her hair. Eventually he started to talk again, but it was in a hushed tone, intimate almost confessional. Karen started to feel a little uncomfortable. She had to remind herself that this was little Jack Marston and she should tolerate a little discomfort for his sake.
“I had dreams about you, sometimes. Not just you, but that night around the fire. I don’t even know if it was real, or just a dream. I think we were all singing. Happy. But I think it was the dream that got you stuck inside my head, more than anyone else. The women at least. The dream was always real vivid. And then I’d wake up and lay there, thinking about you. Just you. I’d think about you from that dream a lot. Even tried to sketch you from my memory of that dream. Could never catch it though. Your golden hair, your smile, the way the fire reflected in your eyes. Like it was dancing. You wet your lips with your tongue. You had this little gold choker around your neck. And then just underneath...”
Karen thought he had suddenly got embarrassed but she was wrong. As though his memory had become physical, she felt his fingertips suddenly caressing her throat, probably where he had dreamed the choker would have sat. His touch was as light as a kiss and it tickled, made her shiver. And then the fingertips travelled across her collar bone, then onto her chest. Karen automatically leaned forward, slipping out of range of his fingers, or at least trying to. His hand pressed insistently onto her upper chest.

“That was fifteen years ago, Jackie boy. Now I’m just a wrinkled old hag.”
She said it dismissively and let out a little giggle, trying to laugh off his obvious attention.
“Don’t call me that.” He snapped, then immediately softened his tone. “You’re still beautiful. I can still see that Karen in this one.”
As she knew he would, his hand slid downward again. He cupped her breast. She reached up and grabbed his hand, not quite trying to pull him away, just trying to halt his caress. She realised that getting him to back off might not be so easy. He might still be a mere boy, in her eyes but he lived inside the body of a man which no doubt contained all the desires of men.
“I’d get hard thinking about you. After those dreams. I came for the first time thinking about you, Miss Karen.”
“It’s just Karen. Penniless, forty-year-old whore.”
She whispered it. Feeling haunted, overwhelmed. She tried, gently, to pull his hand away. He resisted. He put down the brush and his other hand came to her throat, fingertips again, stroking up and down her smooth flesh.
“C’mere, Karen.”
“Jackie, I really don’t think… I used to bounce you on my knee, for Christ’s sake. I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“That ain’t too old.”
“Well thank you Jack, but I really don’t think…”
“Shut up. I’ve always wanted you, the golden-haired girl from my dreams...”
His tone darkened. He was suddenly commanding.
“You’re giving it. Now, kiss me.”
It was the danger in his voice that made her fold. She had heard it too many times over the years, learned well what generally came next when she tried to resist. And it made her realise that Jackie boy really was a man, not the boy she had once bounced on her knee. She released her confining grip on the hand that covered her breast. She allowed him to shove the blanket away from her shoulders, allowed him to turn her around. Gave herself over to his full control.
“Kiss me, Karen. Last time I’m asking.”
The anger was palpable, under the surface. From what she remembered John Marston had shown that same anger, always bubbling just under the surface. Jack Marston was truly is father’s son.
She leaned into him, tried to forget the boy she had known. He looked rugged and powerful, smelled rugged too, though not too bad. He had shrugged off his duster and tossed his old hat, but still wore a dark shirt and vest. Beneath, his body hinted at lean yet muscular. And yet he had the Marston scowl, and now she noticed the Marston eyes too.
Karen closed her eyes, pursed her lips and touched them to his. His whiskers tickled but she was used to that. He took over almost instantly, a caged animal set free. His thin lips parted against her full ones, he let out a husky groan and slid his tongue into her mouth. She might have enjoyed it more if he had tasted of booze, but at least he didn’t taste of tobacco.
She kissed him back, with at least the semblance of passion. Their parted lips mashed, mouthing, tongues dipping deep into each other’s mouths. She moaned through their passion-heavy French kissing. Though not authentic, she knew from experience the noises she was making would please him.
Jack was grunting and groaning as well, his inexperience showing as much as his passion, as he slobbered into her open mouth. He sucked at her hard-working tongue, nipping it between his teeth between playfully chasing, circling rolls of his tongue.
His hand caressed her breast. It was still much more than a handful and Jack had surprisingly small hands. It also surprised her that he was, at least for now, being gentle. Most weren’t, most men liked to crush her breasts in a fisting grip.
He cupped and squeezed almost soothingly, rolled the orbs around her chest, ran his fingertips all over, making Karen shiver. Then he went in for the puckered saucer of her areola, caressing and stroking, circling teasingly around her aching nipple. Then he took the stiff bud between his finger and thumb, pinching and rolling the flesh, though again with surprising gentleness. This time Karen’s moan was authentic as the sparking tingles danced through the stiff bud to echo as the first smoulders of sensual heat in her loins. He was actually stating to have an effect on her. She hadn’t actually found personal enjoyment in a sexual experience in quite a number of years.
Pressing more firmly against her, he slathered over her tongue, pushing deeper, then deeper still. Karen kissed him back just as fervently. Wholeheartedly, deliberately matching his youthful passion, and panting and moaning into his lust-hungry mouth.
Knowing this was going to go as far as Jack wanted, Karen didn’t see the point in hesitating or trying to slow him down, so reaching out blindly she felt out the buttons of his vest and started working down them one by one.
He finally withdrew is tongue, ending the kiss. While Jack’s attention moved south, Karen gasped for air, licking escaping saliva from around her lips. His mouth clamped onto a nipple while both hands cupped and hefted her breasts, pushing the firm orbs together and plying his tongue back and forth across the sensitive, puckered tips.
She unbuttoned the last of the boy’s vest fastenings. She had intended to slide her hands up under the front of his vest to the shoulders to begin to slip it off, wondering if he would take the hint and release his increasingly firm grip of her tits. However, as she freed the last vest button, the heel of one hand brushed against the crotch of his linen pants and she felt the unmistakable, warm ridge, tenting the crotch. The ridge snaked a couple of inches along the top of his thigh and she allowed her palm to follow that hot ridge.
She marvelled at the hardness there, it was like a warm bar of steel. In response, Jack let out a deep throaty groan and just for a second his teeth clamped down on a nipple, nipping the tender flesh and making Karen jump slightly and let out a gasp.
The feel of Jack’s erect cock was a stark reminder that no one got as hard as they could when they were young. It was the excitement, the freshness and inexperience and perhaps the fitness of youth offering the most effective blood flow.
They also had the stamina, not to last more than a couple of minutes, but to go again and again and again. If Jack was a normal nineteen-year-old, Karen might be in for a long night.
She gave his thick shaft a couple of seconds of idle caresses and then returned her hands to his clothes. Instead of stripping off each item, she went after more buttons, his shirt this time, once she had flicked aside his plain suspenders. She followed the same procedure, working through each of the buttons quickly, while Jack continued to suck her nipples and then giving his hard on a protracted and firm, though playful, caress as she got down to the shirt tails.
She parted the front of his shirt and ran her hands over his naked chest beneath. He was completely hairless, but she could feel the hardness of the pronounced pectorals, his own nipples stiff little buds, and the equally hard washboard of his abdominals, the indentation of his navel, where she, at last found a short line of fine body hair running straight down and vanishing behind the waist band of his trousers, and the pistol belt still hugging his waist.
The pressure from the suction of his mouth on her nipples was intense and sending more sparks to fuel the tremulous tingles that were now dancing merrily in her loins. A delightful precursor to the waves she fondly remembered that brought about orgasm, a joy of life that she had given up on long ago.
He was voracious, and attentive to her breasts. Even reverent. Moving back and forth in between her engorged nipples, shifting between sucking and plying her areolae with his flicking ranging tongue, even planting chaste kisses back and forth, and nuzzling the pushed together orbs with his face. She shivered at the pleasant tickles that came with his harried breath, the surprising softness of his whiskers and even the butterfly-wing flicker of his eyelashes.
He came to his senses finally and drew back, staring down at her drool gorged, fire-licked breasts. Karen was proud that they still had such an effect at forty. That they were still full and not as sagging or pendulous as most whores her age sported.
Though she couldn’t help but wonder if a pretty girl Jack’s own age showed off her perky, gravity defying pair, even if they were only tiny, would he still show hers quite the same devotion?
Jack leaned back, his eyes finding hers. He grinned. His mouth was wet. It was a wolfish grin and for a second the wetness was like blood, a fresh kill brought down and ravaged for pleasure and sustenance.
Karen’s hands continued to admire the lean muscles of his chest. It was a working man’s frame, a Rancher’s. Slender yet strong. It reminded her of Luke. Though Jack was already a year older than Luke had been. She shook that painful thought away vigorously.
Jack’s eyes gorged on her, her big lived-in eyes, the lines around then and marking the edges of her mouth, the hint of a double chin, the blue veins crisscrossing her full breasts with their flushed and puckered areolae, the fat hard nipples, even the stretch marks. And that he could see her ribs through her skin, the untrained pubic bush shadowing the crux of her thighs.
She had gone from slender and shapely, to robust, then to fat for a while, when the going had been a little too good, but her self-worth hadn’t kept up with her. Now she was closer to drawn and skinny but remained mostly slender, somehow having retained a shapely frame that at least resembled healthiness. She at least didn’t look the way she felt inside, haggard or ruined by too much life.
And from Jack’s attentions and expressions he seemed more than happy with her appearance. Karen allowed herself a little smile, but while reminding herself the warm glow of the firelight would be doing a lot for her. And she had best prepare herself for a different reaction come morning. When he would see her in the stark honesty of broad daylight.
The boy, grinning, shrugged off his shirt and vest and tossed them onto his discarded duster. Then he went to work on his holster rig, unfastening the leg thong and then the buckle. As he did so, Karen grabbed both their bedrolls, and her blanket and made them a little nest beside the fire.
When he returned to the fireside he was as naked as Karen, his legs were as muscular as the rest of him, lean but pronounced. He didn’t look half bad. In a way the biggest compliment was the way his erection jutted, up and outwards, practically at forty-five degrees. She flattered herself by thinking it had probably been that way since he instigated their kiss. It certainly didn’t look like it was going away anytime soon.
He appeared about to sit down beside her but she stopped him, putting her hands on his pale hips and then leaned forward. He got her intention only as her mouth started to open and let out a desperate groan of anticipation.
Something in Karen made her want to impress the boy and to show him the best time. She wanted him to remember the real Karen Jones as fondly as he did the dream-memory. So, when she slid her lips around his girth, she took him smoothly all the way in with a single gulp. Popping him into her throat and working her gullet back and forth over his swollen crown. The foreskin rolling back until it was trapped behind the wide flange of his thick head. He was also surprisingly clean and fresh tasting.
He must have skinny dipped which catching their supper and washed off the day’s trail grime. So, he knew he was going to fuck her even then? Had he always intended to fuck her? Or was it only once she had reminded him of dream-Karen?
His was quite a nice cock. A reasonable length and nice and thick. Though not too much either way. She would need both hands to contain his length but none of him would be jutting beyond the stacked fists. And while its girth made her jaw ache within only a few minutes, that was because she had been pushing herself from the off, rather than working up to her usual fast pace. And she judged that his meat would feel good in her pussy, snug with tightness to get good pleasurable friction, without stretching her too far or making it uncomfortable.
While she went to work on his member, he had bent over her and filled his hands with her big breasts again. His touch had remained soft, gentle caresses over the heavy flesh of her tits, stroking her flesh with his palms and fingertips and lightly teasing her sensitive nipples. It felt truly pleasant and immediately started up those sweet sparks again.
She was right about his stamina. Of course, her experienced sucking skill, was of an expert’s ability, quick and precise tongue work and rapid in her deep throating pace. It was also accompanied by her most sensually intense scrotum fondling.
Within only a couple of minutes he had reared back, thrusting himself balls deep. And with a straining bellow, he had let fly. There might have been as many as a dozen spurts though some of them unloaded directly down her throat, as she continued thrusting her mouth along his tense, pulsing length, while his own grip moved onto her head, grasping her tight but not controlling her. Her mouth soon filled up. Experience afforded her the timing to gulp down his viscous seed while her throat was clear of his cock. But it continued to spurt more and more while he groaned and quivered with increasing weakness, and she had to repeat her timed swallow twice more before the remainder of his load had diminished into a seeping flow across her fast flicking, washing tongue.
When he was done, he pulled out. He squeezed the final creamy dollops across her thrust-out tongue and then slumped down on the arrangement of blankets facing her, the fire to his left.
He leaned forward and for a moment Karen thought he was going to kiss her cum slick lips, but he didn’t he gently touched his forehead to hers, an arm across her shoulders. She leaned forward, her breasts swung forward and brushed his chest. He let out a low groan at the feel of her soft warmth against him.
“Fuck, Karen… So good.”
In reply Karen reached down between his thighs and took hold of his slimy shaft. He was still three quarters hard and following a second’s idle caress, had returned to full mast. The miracle of youth, she smiled to herself.
She worked the well lubed foreskin back and forth over the purple crown for another ten breaths then gently pushed his body back, so he sat upright, and then shifted herself into his lap. Holding his cock at the root, she rubbed the glistening head against her hot, damp vulva, found the spot, used the dull club of his erection to splay her outer and inner lips around his tip, and then smoothly sank herself down onto it.
“Ohh…!” He groaned. “…Karen!”
Their deep and breathy groans were mutual and complimentary. Karen immediately started to work herself up and down his cock, riding him, assessing the way he felt inside her and enjoying it.
Jack’s hands came around her and grasped her buttocks. Though he was merely gripping and squeezing, no interferences or urging for better. She leaned back onto her hands, braced out behind her on the makeshift bedding, while she gyrated and bounced her hips. Her breasts jutted naturally toward him and without thought, he leaned in and took a nipple between his lips yet again, licking and sucking in the achingly hard bud. Karen little out a little whimpering mewl of pleasure at the feel of the caress of his lips and tongue.
If Karen had been left in control, she could have mercilessly teased him, took him to the brink again and again, not allowing him to peak, teasing out his constantly ballooning orgasm until he begged her to let him come. And then she would have brought him over the edge, and it would be utter bliss for him the greatest and most draining of orgasms. Of course, he didn’t let her remain in control. He needed to fuck, to be in charge to be the dominant one. It was a foregone conclusion.
For a while he sat there in a fog of pleasure and mute amazement, while Karen roiled on his lap, bouncing, gyrating, rolling her hips. Using her inner muscles, squeezing him as she slid up off his length then relaxing as she took him cervix deep.
Sometimes he sucked on her breasts, gently chewing on her nipples while he moaned and groaned, matching her own vocal accompaniment which, for the first time in as long as she could remember, wasn’t put on. She really was experiencing the deep and intense pleasure she was voicing, and it was like a revelation, astounding for her. And it made her appreciate this moment with young Jack Marston in a whole different level. It was like he was giving her back something she had believed lost. Her humanity maybe or her femininity. She wasn’t able to put it into words. She tossed aside the thoughts and just enjoyed riding on this boy’s cock. She focussed on making him feel good, on giving him her best, she could see it in his young smooth face, the anger was gone, the slash of his mouth was softer, his eyes less slitted, in fact she could see Abigail in his eyes in that moment. Which was oddly alluring and discomforting at the same time.
He was relaxed at least emotionally so. Enraptured by the throes of pleasure he had perhaps rarely felt. Perhaps he was even falling in love, just a little.
It was through Jack that Karen started to find a deeper experience then, not just the physical pleasures of her sexuality in play. She felt her cheeks flushing, her heart racing and tears brimming in her eyes. Not wanting to confuse Jack, she squeezed her eyes shut and threw her head back, allowing her hair to fall partially across her face. And focussing on working more forcefully on his thick solid cock, revelling in the feel of it inside her body and the effect it was having on her libido, her building and blossoming physical joy.
Jack meanwhile had subtly changed position, shifting his feet beneath him into a squat and using his hips to propel him inside her. His hands slid down from her breasts and grabbed a firm hold of her taut buttocks, though he continued to suck and chew her breasts and nipples with abandon, his youth and strength allowing him to maintain the bent over position.
She could sense the change coming easily enough. He was growing more active, taking part rather than passively enjoying her fucking him. His groans were growing harsher, more animal like. His caresses and the attentions of his mouth were getting more passionate, more forceful. His fingers and thumbs were digging into her buttocks and he was using his powerful arms to aid her up and down motions on his cock, while his hips stabbed up into her, dropping her into his lap and increasing that lively slap as their flesh connected.
His mouth moved around her breasts, sometimes just plying his stuck-out tongue across the bouncing tits wherever they came together. Sometimes he would use his face, touching his cheek, or his nose or a closed eye to her flesh, until he had located one of her hot hard nipples then he would pounce on it like a playful predator, snag it between his teeth, give it a nip or chew and then release it to bounce away, and then go on the hunt again.
He was no longer quite so gentle or careful with his teeth and more than once Karen let out a yelp when he bit down. It was by no means the worst she had ever experienced, and she didn’t complain or try to interfere, but she noted that whenever she let out a yelp, his erection seemed to grow that little bit harder inside her and his hands clawed at her buttocks that little bit more fiercely. Pretty soon he was complaining under his breath, little grunts of “faster”, “ride that meat”, “c’mon you whore”.
She tried to comply but didn’t have the energy really, she had used most of what she had taken from their supper on sucking him. And had decided a long leisurely screw would be more than enough for the boy. Of course, the boy had other ideas. And before she knew it Karen was suddenly pushed from Jack’s lap.
“Let’s go!” He snapped.
Overwhelmed by his young lust, perhaps to a degree he had never experienced before, Jack hungrily grabbed Karen up, easily lifting her off her feet, whipped over in the air and then all but dropped back into the nest of blankets, manhandled onto her hands and knees. He squatted over her buttocks his hands gripped tight around her waist.
“Reach back and put my dick inside you. C’mon Karen!”
She did so. As soon as he was securely sheathed, he slapped her hand clear and rammed himself in all the way until he was in her to the balls, which slapped against her hot, puffy vulva and snatched a shocked, breathless gasp from Karen.
He started to rail her, slamming her ass hard, deep and fast, punching his crown against her cervix while his hands worked at her hips yanking her back onto his hammering cock. Karen couldn’t catch her breath, his speed and power kept her on edge, weakened and dizzy. The heat of the fire was making her sweat, and the fire in her loins was overwhelming her too. It was intense, not coming in waves but a raging wall of force that was suddenly intensifying, each of Jack’s brutal thrusts adding brick after brick.
Her heavy, pendulous breasts were swinging violently back and forth. Her hot, hard nipples cutting through the cool night air, though it was heated from the dancing flames the coolness of the air was like snow touching her flesh which caused those sparks to fly through her tits and send quivers of sexual bliss zipping down to her loins. With the worse possible timing, Jack suddenly halted his tenderising thrusts.
“I wanna see you take over, fuck your cunt on my dick.”
She did her best, but she was getting dizzy, the heat of the fire was making her sweat and it seemed to be sapping her remaining vitality, plus her knees no longer afforded her the ability to shift herself back and forth the way they used to.
Jack was far from satisfied. He grunted, growled, laid hands on her taut buttocks, first digging his fingers into her pliant flesh then then spanking her, harder and faster. She tried to accelerate to match his spanking, but couldn’t keep it up for more than a minute. Jack snarled his frustration.
“Work! You damned nag!” He shouted. “C’mon! Pick it up!”
“Fuck you, Jack. I ain’t no damn nag!”
“Well, I’m riding you like a fucking horse! You’re trotting and I need a good gallop.”
“I’m trying my best, damn you, boy!”
“Fuck your best, go faster!”
“I fucking can’t, you little fuck!”
“You gotta make my gun shoot, you whore!”
He took over again, but not before laying a palm across her buttock so hard that the crack of flesh on flesh reverberated around the cellar, accompanied by the sharp squeal and curse that Karen let out.
He pummelled her, slamming with the kind of machine-gun rapidity and strength only a teenager could manage.
Then, for whatever reason, he slowed and stopped. He withdrew, panting. Karen’s legs went out from under her and she lay forward flat on her face. Jack’s palms came down onto her ass again but he was gentle, caressing rather that spanking, kindly strokes that soothed the heat suffusing her buttocks.
“I apologise, Karen, for my outburst.”
“And calling me a nag?”
“That too, I guess. Will you roll over? I miss your tits.”
She rolled over, unable to keep the amused grin from her flushed, sweat streaked face. Jack’s eyes lit up either because she had been blocking the flames from his face, or because he saw her tits again. He wasn’t the first to be enamoured with Karen Jones’s tits. She just hoped he wouldn’t be the last.
“Don’t concern yourself, Jackie.” She laughed. “I’m just messing with you. I’ve been called everything under the sun, much worse than ‘nag’. Nothing ever means anything during the throes of passion. Something for you to remember. Nothing you say, and definitely nothing a girl might say.”
He smiled, gently easing her legs apart and settling himself between them. He leaned into her nudging her lips apart with the slick head of his still rock solid shaft and then lay fully on top of her, both hands grabbing and squeezing her breasts, while they looked into each other’s eyes.

“I’ll remember that.” He said.
His thumbs stroked at her nipples, causing Karen to let out a tiny whimper and squirm under him. He stretched down for her lips and as they kissed, lips parting and tongues rolling with mutual passion, he smoothly thrust inward again, bottoming out inside her. Her thighs gave an involuntary quiver and she hooked them over his own, pressing her heels into his sculpted buttocks while he started to drive himself in and out of her again.
It was still a deep and fast pace, but the power was more tempered, less aggressive. Almost immediately his body heat, his youthful passion, his blatant desire for her and the rhythm he instigated all added their own ingredients that bolstered Karen’s burgeoning pleasure, the tingles sparked and danced in her gyrating loins, it felt like a quickening that blossomed and spread inside her.
Jack was staring down at her, his eyes wide and intense, once again bringing Karen back to flashes of that same intensity she had seen in his mother’s face all those years ago. And, perhaps for the first time, the realisation of precisely who it was fucking her in this moment created the building blocks of another wall of pleasure; the tingles individual bricks, while the realisation of who lay upon her thrusting urgently and rapidly inside her restarted her own wall of orgasmic heat, building up again almost as though it had never dissipated.
That eye-to-eye realisation was cut short as Jack returned to the hungry, passionate tongue kissing. He maintained their oral quick and slobbery contact for a long time, and soon the two of them were moaning aloud together as they passed their mingled saliva back and forth with their pleasure-dance of animated tongues.
However, eventually he left the kiss behind and arched his back so he could bury his face into her breasts again. Karen took the aching orbs off him and hefted them, bringing her nipples to his hungry mouth. He moved his hands down to her buttocks, clamping down on the firm twins of tight muscle. All the while, frantically sucking and nibbling her nipples, he kept up the steady, deep cervical-pummelling thrusts.
He maintained that delirious pace as long as he could but, of course, the impatience of youth reared its head and before long his thrusts had intensified in speed and intensity.
Karen could feel his cock was bulging against her inner walls, the crown straining, he was going to climax very soon.
“If you wanna come inside, you should stick it up my ass.” She panted. “Cum in there, it’s good and tight up there too, so I’m told.”

But Jack was already leaning up onto his haunches, and by the way his face was creased into an almost pained expression, his climax apparently upon him.
Leaving her breasts behind, he straightened up fully and snatched his pulsing cock from her tight suctioning pussy. A second later, following a single tug on his slick, silken foreskin and his cum started erupting. He painted Karen liberally from lips to lips.

She had almost missed it, the vision of young Jackie Marston yanking his fine, nineteen-year-old cock out of her deliciously pulsating pussy, to erupt all over her and with such power, sent Karen right over the edge. Her body quaked in the throes of her own equally sudden climax. Jolts of pleasure making her twitch and writhe in ecstasy, even as he was spurting his viscous plenty all over her, from face to pubic hair.
The small part of her mind that was still aware, beyond her own pleasure, counted eight heady and steaming ribbons of his pearlescent seed. Each of them anointing her own flame-kissed, palpitating body.
She tasted him on her lips, the saltiness, slightly bitter, slightly sweet. It made her think inexplicably of coffee. He deliberately aimed a thick, pressurised gush of it, gripping his shaft like a cannon, aiming its spray left and right so that it spattered back and forth across her breasts. More of it pooled into the shadowed valley of her belly button, and she felt ticklish trickles running down her swollen, pulsing labia, coating her perineum and her for once unassailed anal mouth.
Jack’s climax had been accompanied by a surprising series of drawn out, exultant grunts one for each streamer of his seed and then a longer low groan as the remainder drooled out of his swollen crown. He allowed it to ooze down across her sweat-jewelled mostly blonde bush, to slide inexorably down between her buttocks.
“Oh fuck, oh Jesus fuck!” Jack panted breathlessly. “That sure was something… That was certainly something. I just fucked my old Auntie Karen.”
“Hey.” She grunted, swallowing a laugh. “Less of the old.”
Jack used his horse blanket to wipe the mess and sweat off Karen’s body as best he could, but they were both exhausted and all too soon were rolled up together bodies mashed up soft and snug, blankets wrapped up around them, before the flickering fire.
<><><>
The morning came with morning wood. And on request, Karen graciously dealt with his resurgence between her tits. Afterwards Jack dragged out some of his clothes for her to wear and she dressed in a shirt that was too big except across the bust where it was too tight, the suspenders pressing her bosom into one firm, loaflike block together. The trousers were too long so she had to turn them up three times over. They were also baggy around her waist but skimmed her hips snuggly. She felt strange and exposed in the sheer white shirt without underwear, and it proved a major distraction for Jack. It was especially the case while he was cooking a quick and simple, though delicious, rabbit stew for their breakfast cum luncheon.
The hearty morning meal was explained when Jack announced that he wasn’t planning to stop again until nightfall, ignoring toilet breaks and resting the Mustang.

They took turns in the saddle with the other across the mare’s hind quarters. But they got more done with Karen in the back, as Jack’s hands wandered all too often when she was in front of him and he kept wanting to stop to fuck. They never did though, just enjoyed a little mutual groping, Karen reciprocating by reached behind her to rub the seemingly always hard lump in the poor lad’s trousers. She knew at the very least that after supper she would be getting fucked again. And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she was actually looking forward to it.
The journey over all took close to three weeks. Throughout, Jack continued to force those herbal concoctions into her, however he knew how to make them, pamphlets apparently handed down from his father. She dutifully swallowed them down three times a day every day and always before they ate. And through his simple yet hearty meals, and whatever those collections of herbs were, Karen could honestly admit they were doing her a world of good. She put on weight, but it was lean healthy muscle rather than fat. Her previously sallow skin took on a fresher, healthier glow. Even her previously dull and hopeless eyes were now glimmering with a new vitality. While her wrinkles and stretchmarks might have even faded somewhat. If true, Karen assumed it was more than likely due to the weight she had put back on, and the increased tautness too her skin. Inside as well, she was even starting to feel like someone of thirty rather than forty.
They only fucked a dozen more times throughout those three weeks. And three of those came in the first two days. However, after the freshness had worn off and Jack realised it was distracting him, playing on his mind and slowing their journey, he deliberately toned down the attentions he poured on Karen.
A couple of those last few occasions, Karen instigated herself. It came upon her suddenly, a renewed drive of her own, a reawakening to the pleasure she could enjoy lying beneath this rampant, energised boy. And she handed herself over to her lust, following a number of days of feeling good about herself. And with that the desire for sexual pleasure increasing more and more, too often taking centre stage in her thoughts, that finally she simply grew too tired of trying to fight it.
The first of those final occasions had taken place in an abandoned shack a few miles north of Saint Denis, close enough to see the smoke stacks belching black into the thunderous clouds that had been creeping across the horizon. They had both know that a storm was coming on them quickly. Seeing the opportunity, they took shelter for the night inside what appeared to have been a boat house. It sat on the edge of the swamp water part of a tiny little village, or at least cluster of buildings, that he long since been abandoned.
The boat house appeared to have half collapsed so that one end of it was submerged, while the other half was dry at least for the time being. The majority of its roof tiles were still in place above the side that hadn’t slipped into the swampy lake, and the roof was high and the entryway wide enough to accommodate the horse too.
So, Rachel was brought in, unsaddled and brushed down. And then she was tied loosely to an upright wall strut. She was fed and watered and then allowed to settle down for the night, while Jack and Karen went about their own tasks.
There was an old tin bucket and an active water pump just outside so they both washed in the cold water. And then Jack went out to hunt them some food while Karen set about making a fire. It took her a while, as there was so much humidity it proved difficult to find dry wood. However, she had a good fire going by the time Jack returned with a small boar. They ate well and Karen swallowed her ginseng-based concoctions as usual.
They discovered an old bedframe in another abandoned shack which they carried over into their temporary home. It proved surprisingly comfortable once they had spread their bedrolls and blankets over it.
Feeling good, warmed, relaxed and safe, it wasn’t long before Karen started to look at Jack, lying naked beside her staring up at the blackness of the high ceiling. She gently reached out with a questing hand and found his cock, Jack gave a slight groan of pleasure, his lips upturned, but he didn’t take his eyes off the ceiling. Karen gave him a gentle squeeze and the shaft instantly started to stiffen and lengthen under her manipulations, quickly filling out her hand. Jack turned to look at her.
“What are you up to, Auntie Karen?”
She just smiled and then went down on him. He didn’t stay in her mouth for long, and all too soon, she found herself rolled onto her back, with Jack lying between her legs, pushing urgently into her primed pussy. Together, rocking and gyrating and grunting and moaning, they worked a fiery orgasm out of Karen. Immediately afterward Jack pulled out. This time Karen pushed him onto his back, then took him into her mouth again to finish him off. It was a quick but pleasurable conjoining, perhaps not his most explosive or plentiful orgasm, but enjoyable all the same. A few minutes later, wrapped up in their blankets and each other’s body heat, and both contented in the afterglow, they happily fell asleep.
They made it into Saint Denis after another five days and spent two days there. Jack had stolen a dress from some’s washing line on the outskirts the day before, so that Karen wouldn’t be riding into the town wearing Jack’s clothes. The dress, a worn thing that had once been white, was not a good fit, too short, snug around the waist, while it was so tight across her bust that she lost three buttons off her neckline and ended up showing off a lot of cleavage.
Saint Denis was a place Karen had vowed never to visit again. But she had to admit that the availability of a real bed, hot baths, and good food were lovely. However, it was the easy availability of alcohol that proved to be the sticking point for Karen. While out in the wilderness with no possibility of access to alcohol, the absence of her best vice hadn’t seemed to bother Karen. However, once the entered Saint Denis, it was everywhere, people supping in the park, in restaurants and the numerous taverns that seemed to occupy every street corner. And then there were the advertising billboards that felt as though were plastered over every wall, window pane, and the side panels of carriages and trolleys. This seemingly free availability was like temptation incarnate, and Karen was unable to put her mind to anything else. It felt like she had suddenly been possessed by a demon.
Almost at once it drove a wedge between herself and Jack. She had no money or possessions of her own and Jack was very closed with his own capital. At first unaware, he bought her a bottle of bourbon on request but was shocked when she downed the whole thing almost at once. She asked for another. He refused, perhaps belatedly realising the problem she had. Though how he hadn’t assumed as much was no doubt down to his youthful naivety.
So she had gone out and begged. And then whored herself. She managed to get enough to buy a bottle of gin, and had stolen another on the way out of the general store. She had been chased by a policeman but had managed to evade him. Jack had finally found her blind drunk in an alley near the hotel.
On their second day, once Karen had sobered up, Jack took her on a lavish full days-worth of intricate beauty treatments, and also bought her a pair of new dresses. One, though pretty and in a shade of green that complimented her was essentially plain, purchased for comfort, for the remainder of their journey. The other, a fancy maroon gown, opulent in fabrics and lavish in tailoring, was only to be worn during the introduction to Jack’s current employer. That was a man Jack would say nothing about.
He remained by her side throughout and kept a keen eye on her. Although she felt desperate for a drink, the day was busy and she was never left alone. A couple of times she degraded herself and embarrassed Jack with begging for something to drink and then throwing childlike tantrums when he refused. Or when a rather snooty dressmaker vaunted the benefits of temperance. He had to slap her to silence her. The second time he literally knocked her senseless and the, allegedly Paris trained, beauticians got on with her treatments and her hair while she was knocked out, the bruise coming up on her face.
By the end of the day, while a sullen and sore Karen sat sulking. The last of the head lice were gone and her hair was washed, cut and assembled into loose curls just as she had worn in Jack’s dreams. When she finally emerged, her hair was glossy and voluminous, gleaming like liquid gold and artfully arranged. It would have to be reworked one more time when they got where they were going, but as a practice to see how she would look in the present, it proved all but perfect.
She was also taken to the Doctor’s office where, after Jack had passed the doctor a sealed envelope, the contents of which Karen was not allowed to know, she was subjected to a full and humiliating physical examination. He revealed, to Jack, an almost ruined liver and advised the embrace of complete temperance from then on, much to Karen’s silent chagrin. However, the doctor reported that her heart was strong and her lungs more or less healthy. Finally, Jack was informed that, of course, the chance of Karen producing children at her age, would be all but out of the question.
It felt to her like these results had something to do with the letter Jack had passed to the doctor. And had little to do with Karen herself, who, after Luke had died, had never even considered the prospect of motherhood.
While she was styled and made up, Jack had taken her to the photographers down the street and had a portrait of her taken, standing by a potted plant prop before a painted backdrop of a balcony looking out over a Garden of Eden. He also used oil lanterns and mirrors to direct multiple light sources onto Karen’s person from artfully arranged positions.
And with the use of the latest refinements by George Eastman’s company, the photograph on a large sheaf of glossy card presented Karen as an ageless beauty almost the equal of the likes of famous beauties such as Isabelle Standish or Geraldine Emerson. After handing over payment and being present the photograph in a high stock card envelope, Jack took a quick detour to the post office and wrapping the presentation card in brown paper, mailed it away. Though to whom and for what purpose, he refused to reveal to Karen.

That evening, Jack had taken Karen out to dinner in a French style saloon that proclaimed a small and exclusive restaurant on the upper floor balcony. Karen felt low down, a third party suddenly finding herself on a train with no driver, not knowing where she was going and apparently that it was not her business in the first place. Jack allowed her a single glass of wine with their meal, and a single small glass of cognac afterwards. It was nowhere near enough and only made Karen feel the need for more.
On the carriage ride back to their hotel, she sat silently brooding. At first, she tried to convince herself that her alcoholism wasn’t a problem. Even that it had been a requirement, of her previous occupation, that it had dulled the pain of her life, allowed her the pleasure of forgetting her multitude of problems. But after a while she started to consider the implications of being without, as she had been throughout the trip south from Van Horn to Saint Denis.
Perhaps all of Jack’s ginseng concoctions had managed to dissuade the draw of alcohol and the cravings and their black temptation. Or perhaps having no access and no means of procuring alcohol during those weeks had put its demands and its side effects to the back of her mind, somehow. Perhaps the expected withdrawal had somehow been negated by Jack’s herbal elixirs. All that implied, at least, that without the temptation present she might possibly live without it.
Yet, the question wasn’t really could she, but did she want to? Karen hadn’t drunk very much as a rancher and neither had Luke. Yet it had become a crux and a friend during her hardships, a protector of sorts. Though admittedly a two faced one. Especially in the last number of years, her desire for its companionship had left her dire straits far too many times to count. And she had doubtless taken her life in her hands far too often simply in order to secure cash for booze, or just a bottle of this or that. Taking on the attentions of dangerous, violent men just to get the bottle that would allow her to forget that very singular horror, or ease the pain of that moment, just so she could obtain a bottle or a half bottle.
She had drawn no conclusions by the time they had returned to the hotel. However, she was angry with the world. With Jack, with whoever had written that latter to the doctor. With the doctor who had poked and prodded her, unnecessarily, and in ways she would normally charge men to do. With those flustering harpies who had fiddled with her, pulled her this way and that, yanked at her, pinched and prodded, spoke to her like she was nothing but a doll to be put right, made pretty. Pulled her hair, hurt her with metal combs and hard scrubbing brushes and abrasive soaps.
And at that moment she felt such distain for herself that she felt like pain might be a worthwhile pursuit.
She fought with Jack, slapped him, hurt him, teased him mercilessly, chastised him as a child, a dick-less wonder, half the man his father had been. Worthless and spineless. It had worked all too well and he had beaten her, then thrown her onto the bed and violently taken her.
She had questioned his manliness, and he had needed to reassert it in the way his surging loins had urged him to. Karen had known exactly how to get him into that caveman thinking and he gave it to her in spades. On the floor, against the wall, on the bed.
It had been just what she had wanted and he fell straight into her trap. She ridiculed him throughout and he became more enraged and more savage as a result. It was almost pitiful how easily she could put his head and heart where in that moment she wanted them. She had been agonised, brutalised and assaulted repeatedly but that had been exactly what she had wanted.
The following morning, she had felt terrible. For herself, the aches and pains, the bruising. But also, for Jack who was horrified by the appearance of her and ashamed of his behaviour, of losing control so completely. Had had apologised to her but that had just made Karen that much more annoyed. She had made him that way. She needed no apology from him. And would accept none. Instead, she remained silent, and deliberately subservient, as though he had beaten and raped her into submission. In a way enjoying his self-inflicted suffering at the behaviour that she had deliberately developed in him.
She had had to wear a veil and a long-sleeved dress that covered her from throat to boots to cover the welts and bruises.
Mid-morning, they boarded a train. Jack banned alcoholic drinks, only ordered sarsaparilla or water with meals. While in Saint Denis he had procured numerous bottles of ginseng elixir, which he told her was a commercially produced version of his own herbal concoction. He forced her to drink those three times a day, and though no substitute for a good bottle of gin or bourbon, they did offer their own little heady tingles which proved mildly distracting, and Karen drank five or six bottles during their train journey out west.
The train took them firstly through Rhodes, which hadn’t changed very much at all from what she saw. After Rhodes the train turned northwest. It passed Flatneck Station and passed over Bard’s Crossing bridge. At Riggs station they disembarked and rode Rachel over to Strawberry where they stayed the night at the hotel. While Karen bathed, Jack rode down to the stables south of the resort town to hire a second horse.
Karen lay in the hot water rubbing at herself with the hefty block of soap. It had been three days since Saint Denis and, partly due to the bottled ginseng elixirs she was still guzzling three times a day, the red marks of Jack’s assaults and the bruising had mostly faded. Even so, as she soaped herself and then washed her hair, she felt tender, sore, pretty much over the whole of her body. She wondered if it was due to alcohol withdrawal or just the pain of the back-to-back assaults that she had brought on herself. Sure, Jack was his own man. Maybe he could have walked away, but she had played him like a fiddle and got exactly what she had wanted from him.
He had hardly spoken to her since. Certainly, hadn’t touched her. There was a troubled brooding look in his eyes and that thin mouth was set in a permanent scowl. It was a look that reminded her of Jack’s father, it was strangely, and sadly nostalgic. Whether his mood was due to guilt over raping and beating her three times or because he had looked back on it and come to realise that she had orchestrated everything herself was anyone’s guess.
He was more than likely too young and naive to think she could have wanted him to attack her like that. But who knows how smart he might be?
She had enjoyed that night, not the pain of it, but the manipulation. How she had so perfectly controlled his actions and behaviour. She had read him so completely that it had been a cinch to make him do what they both knew he did not truly want to do. It had been exhilarating as well as empowering for her and had left her gratified and feeling kind of superior to the half-grown boy. The physical pain would subside, already was, but that feeling of power remained like the afterglow following a particularly good climax.
And she had even climaxed as Jack had assaulted her. Each time. She had little doubt that had been due to that same superiority, combined of course with her body’s natural reaction to the aggressive pistoning of his cock inside her.
That brutally fast thrusting while he had her pinned against the wall, an arm across her neck, hand gripping her shoulder, the other hand grasping her ass and supporting her weight. All the while he had been hammering into her, as though he would explode like a stick of dynamite if it took him more than five minutes to unload his seed. She had gleefully goaded him over his lack of stamina and he had gone harder still. She had orgasmed then and there, almost fainting and he had grown afraid he had choked the life out of her and had panicked. But she had come around laughing. His rage had intensified and with a caveman snarl he had thrown her onto the bed face down, beaten her savagely, then penetrated her again and emptied his balls inside her after less than ten seconds. She had laughed through her bloody mouth.
He had lost it all over again and this time had driven his still fully hard shaft up her ass and buggered her as viciously and sadistically as he could. It had barely lasted three or four minutes and Karen had forced herself to remain silent and docile throughout. Afterward, when she had heard his climactic bellow and felt the sudden hot bursts scalding her rectum, she had looked back over her shoulder at him, with a sympathetic look in her eyes and told him simply that he was just a pathetic child. And that she had barely felt a thing.
She almost felt sorry for him when, looking at the mess he had left her in, he actually started weeping. But she just called him pathetic instead. It had been enough for him to take her for the third time, then and there. She had been knocked unconscious that time. When she woke it was morning, and though she was bruised and battered he appeared to have bathed her and cleaned off the blood and cum.
The whole thing came back to her and her mind fought a battle of emotions as she dressed and ate the breakfast that she found on a tray outside the door. She regretted her behaviour, hated the boy, while at the same time sympathised with the guilt and confusion he must be feeling, but above and beyond she felt steeped in the elation of the power she had wielded, the ability to dictate to young Jack precisely how to think, how to feel, and what to do about it all. It had been worth every raw bit of pain, inside and out, every cut, scrape and abrasion.
However, that elation was rapidly wearing off and she was left with her own guilt, her own regret and her own pain. And all she wanted was something to take those things away.
Once the realisation leeched itself to her, she didn’t even think. She hurried over to the door, opened it, concealing her nakedness behind it just in case, and called out to the hotel’s manager.
“Hey down there? Can you give me a hand with something?”
“That you Mrs Marston?”
“Er, yeah? I’m… er, real thirsty, do you have a bottle of something? Whiskey or gin or rum, anything like that handy?”
“Would brandy do? I have a delightful fine aged Cognac, bottled way back in ‘57?”
“Great! Would you be able to bring it up for me?”
“Certainly, Mrs Marston. Right away.”
She heard the clinking of glass. She was shivering with anticipation, her stomach churning with her impatience. She listened carefully for footfalls on creaky floor boards, softened by a rug, then a thump, occasional creaking, as the manager hurried up the stairs.
She saw his shadow leading him to the top of the stairs. And with the shadow came magical dancing highlights, rainbow tinted polygons of light, of a fine bottle of brandy casting its oval shaped cut glass texture onto the stained boards of the hotel wall.
Karen darted back away from the room to stand before the bed, her hands behind her back. The shadow preceded the silhouette of a thin, reed like middle aged man with receding hair the colour and texture of a bullrush, dressed well in a worsted suit of iron grey and midnight ruby. He pushed the door open, the bottle and a shot glass in his hand. He stopped short as he looked into the room, his skin blanched, his eyes bulging at her overt nudity.
“I’m afraid I don’t have the means to pay, unless you see anything that might make up for the lack of coins on my person.”
She knew she had him, his crotch was already bulging with a turgid erection. But he still negotiated, Karen didn’t expect anything less.
“I don’t know. A bottle such as this is far from cheap, it would have to be something worth the contents of the bottle.”
“You have a suggestion?”
“Oh, yes… Mrs Marston, this may shock you but the ‘nether-orifice’ had ever been to my liking, but I have so few opportunities. So, I’m afraid that is the price for the ‘57.”

He could have asked for her hand in marriage in that moment, and she wouldn’t have refused him. She was salivating at the enchanting glisten of the blood-dark maroon liquid in its exquisite bottle, of which she had no care whatsoever.
“If that’s the price. Missionary or like dogs?”
“Oh, like dogs, I should think. No offense intended.”
Karen shrugged. Even as the manager was closing the door behind him, she got on the bed onto her hands and knees and started to relax her anal muscles in preparation. As he approached the bed, already removing his jacket, Karen decided she might as well press her luck.
“I realise this may be unorthodox, sir, but might I partake of the prize, prior to payment?”
“Oh, but of course, my dear. A little Dutch courage is sure to go a long way in culminating our happy endeavour.”
“You’re very kind, sir.”
Karen took the offered bottle, waving the glass away. She put herself onto her elbows to free her hands, as she felt the manager climb up onto the bed behind her. She worked the cork free and tipped the smooth rounded spout to her lips, leaning herself up onto one arm so she could tip the bottle back properly.
The manager must have seen the residual marks on her back and her breasts and stomach, but he hadn’t let on. By the time she had swallowed her third mouthful of that delicious fruity burn, the manager had slid easily into her rectum and was already pounding away. By the time she’d guzzled down a quarter of the bottle he was leaning over her back, still pounding away with pulverising rapidity, putting his weight onto her so he could fill his hands with her big pendulous breasts.
The thunderclaps of his flesh striking hers was so loud inside the bare wood boards that neither of them heard the return of Jack. They did hear him slamming the door shut on entry though.
Karen slowly reached across and put the brandy onto the night stand. The manager let out a kind of wailing moan and Karen could feel his erection softening very suddenly inside her sore, burning rectum.
She glanced over at Jack. His Cattleman was drawn from his hip holster. The manager was continually whimpering behind her. She felt him clamber frantically off the mattress.
“I’ll be expecting a full refund when we leave tomorrow.”
“Yes… yessir, M… Mr Marston. Of course.”
“You’d best be on your way now, fore my thumb decides to slip.”
“Y… Yes. Yes sir. Thank you, sir… I’m sorry sir… I…”
“Don’t let me see you again. And take that with you.”
The manager, holding his unbuttoned trousers up and his coat under one arm, came into Karen’s field of view long enough to confiscate her brandy, the snatch was violent and desperate. Jack opened the door for him and shut it behind him when he hurried out. Karen was surprised he hadn’t left a trail of piss in his wake. She remained there on her hands and knees and looked over at Jack.
“You gonna punish me some more?”
“You’ve been punished enough.” He sighed. “Get dressed, we’re going over to the restaurant for luncheon. Have some elixir if you’re still thirsty.”
<><><>
They took the horses south from Strawberry to Blackwater. It proved to be a week of uncomfortable silence. Jack unable or unwilling to even look at Karen. While spent every waking hour craving alcohol but unable to procure any. Jack’s dour expression kept fellow travellers at a distance and prohibited any possibility for Karen to procure a drink from anyone.
Blackwater was slowly turning into another industrial hub, like Saint Denis but without the French styling. It had definitely remained a western town. There still elements of what people were now calling the Old West here and there. A cattle market for one, where you could still see the cowboys of old. Jack would have fit in there perfectly.
They hitched their horses on the row of stores facing the docks and had a late breakfast. After they were full with bacon and beans, bread and coffee, they walked their horses into the old stables on the southwestern end of town, to be looked after.
Jack led Karen back through the crowded streets. There were more than a few horseless carriages now, coughing and grumbling alongside wagons and the old horse-drawn kind of carriage. The horseless variety constantly beeped their pathetic sounding little airhorns at anyone within ten feet of them.
They passed a bookstore. A lush, royal blue cover in the window caught Karen’s attention. Not only was the title and author displayed in gold leaf but so were the big iconic silhouettes of two of the most famous revolvers to grace the land filling the centre third of the cover.
Breathless, Karen darted abruptly into the store and picked up the book. The author was identified on the cover and the spine as Major (rtd) Dickens Bartholomew Gould. She opened the book. It was the sixteenth printing, from two years earlier.
There was a note about the author which offered a short summary of DB’s life and achievements, however, only a single fact on the page caught Karen’s attention: 1833 - 1910.
On the following page, just before the list of contents, there was a small acknowledgment. It read:
‘Dedicated to my lively and ever valuable research assistant.
Ever grateful and always my thoughts. Wherever you are.’
Tears uncomfortably filling her eyes, she quickly put the book back into the window display and hurried from the shop.
<><><>
“This is the end of the line, Auntie Karen. The ferry’ll take you across to Nuevo Paraiso at four this afternoon. You’ll meet the guy who hired me there on the other side.”
He paused and looked at her for a long moment. It was the first time, or at least felt like the first time, he had looked at her since they had arrived in Strawberry. She stared right back at him, her eyes still swimming with unshed tears. Part of her wanted to smile up at him, but she couldn’t bring herself to move her lips. She just felt numb inside. She could even understand why. She needed a drink.
“I’ll probably repeat myself later, but if you ever do get back this way and you want to find me, you might find me over at Beechers Grove. Just over that way. But I won’t hold to any promise.”
“Beechers Grove. West of Blackwater.” She said, nodding.
“C’mon, plenty to get done before the ferry.”
They didn’t stop for lunch. Jack took Karen on a complete repeat performance of that day in Saint Denis. Though Blackwater was smaller, they had comparable beauticians who gave her much the same hair and beauty treatment she had got back east. Minus the delousing, which was unnecessary. There was no need for a second doctor’s visit. And, though they visited a tailor, Karen only made use of his dressing room to change into the opulent maroon dress Jack had bought for her in Saint Denis. However, they did pick out a matching cap with black lace edging and a black lace edged umbrella to accessorise so that the proprietor was slightly less put out.
Just before four, Jack walked Karen to the pier where the ferry waited. They stood a couple of feet off to the side from the gangplank, standing close, aunt and nephew saying their whispered goodbyes. Over their shoulder, casting a golden sheet over the water of Flat Iron Lake, the afternoon sun crept toward the western horizon.
“This is where I leave you, Auntie Karen. I hope you can beat the drink. It’ll mess you up if you let it.”
Karen was feeling increasingly anxious. Who was this stranger? Jack’s employer. Could it be someone she had wronged somehow and he’s after revenge? Or she... Could be a vengeful wife? She’d fucked plenty of married men over the decades. In fact, the majority were probably married. She’d killed a few as well, both in Dutch’s gang and afterwards. And before.
“Am I in danger, Jack?”
“From my employer? Not in the slightest. Worse that will happen, is you getting dropped back here as you are now. Or left on a dock in Mexico, I guess.”
Jack stared down at her for a long moment. The chatter and bustle of the other boarders at their back, invisible to both of them. Karen couldn’t really read his expression. He seemed almost wistful.
“I think this might be a good chance for you, if I’m right. And realistically, it’s probably your last.”
Karen couldn’t think of anything to say. He knew more than she did. But she had a feeling about his last comment, that he would almost certainly be right. This was her third chance at making a good life for herself. After Luke. After DB Gould. The Van der Linde gang might have looked like a good life at the time but she was never in charge of anything, she was always beholden to others. Maybe if she’d done what Abigail Roberts had done and got herself knocked up and married to one of the gang. Maybe she could have made a life out of that.
And now there was this supposed chance, with whoever was waiting for her and for whatever reason. Either way it was better than nothing. She might be in a whole new location and looking and, for the most part, feeling better than she had in years, but she was still a drunk, forty year old whore with nothing but the clothes on her back.
“I’ve mostly enjoyed getting to know you again, Auntie.” Jack said at last.
He gave her a slightly sheepish look, Though the sheepish look quickly turned into an embarrassed grin. And he actually blushed.
“You brought my childhood… sexual… don’t know what to call it… bullshit… to life. When my balls dropped… and I got my ‘short and curlies’ and my dick started getting hard…”
“Yeah, I know what you’re getting at, Jack.”
“Anyway, I’ll always love you for that… no matter if it got tarnished since.”
“I’m glad the growing boy that was little Jackie boy, got horny over me, and spent many an hour jerking off over my big campfire-lit tits.” She said with a grin.
“Ha! That’s about the gist of it.”

In that moment, she wanted to suggest forgiving and forgetting that night in Saint Denis, and all that ‘tarnishing’. But she was afraid of how he would react. She decided to simply not speak of it would be for the best.
And then the whistle for the ferry blew and one of the porters called across from the gangplank, asking if one or both of them were boarding. Karen started to turn toward the gangplank.
However, Jack leaned in and kissed her. Hard. Karen felt hot tears on her cheeks. She didn’t know who they might belonged to but suspected it might have been both of theirs. She parted her lips and thrust her tongue into Jack’s mouth, tongue kissed him with a hot passion, pressing herself fiercely against him. Then she pulled away and boarded the ferry. She didn’t look back.
<><><>
The trip across the Lake took two hours. And they might have been the most anxious Karen had ever felt. For a split second her mind threw her backward twenty years and she found herself instinctively reaching for the lewd gripped cattleman via her skirts pocket. But she had lost that decades ago, left behind during her escape from her own cottage up in the Grizzles.
The feeling of loss, of the lack of something that could give her comfort, felt like a scorpion sting but she shook it off. Another past life she had left behind. Like all her belongings, all her memories, her friends and loved ones. She only had herself and her body. Even the clothes on her back weren’t her own. Neither earned or stolen. Gifted by a stranger she was travelling to meet.
A Mexican met her at the ferry terminal. He was a funny sort of gentleman. His dress and manner told her nothing. He wasn’t a peasant. But he wasn’t a rich man either, he carried a pistol at his hip and an Evans repeater on his back, but he didn’t seem like the rough and ready bandit type either. Didn’t seem like a bounty hunter or a law man. He was very polite and softly, even gently spoken, yet his mannerisms and his speech sounded rough and raw. He was a fistful of contradictions. Perhaps that was just how Karen herself appeared to people she spoke to?
He had a photograph of her on his person. The same one Jack had mailed from Saint Denis. Having used it to catch sight of her and then verbally confirm who she was, the Mexican led her to a carriage and from there they travelled southwest following the river road toward Diaz Coronas.
They stopped in a small village at a three-way crossroads, west, east and south. The man led her into a small cantina. It reminded Karen of the little cantina in Chuparosa, archways without doors, providing fresh air and airflow, tables both inside and outside the open plan tavern, an outdoor fire for when it grew cold at night and for cooking meals.
There was an older gentleman, seated at a table talking to a pretty young woman. He was smiling up at the girl, chatting amiably in rapid Spanish. Behind the bar was, Karen assumed, the owner. From the way he watched the man and the girl, he might also be her father. And Karen suddenly realised the girl was in fact taking an order from the older gentleman.
“Senor, Nightingale. We have arrived. She is here.” Karen’s Mexican minder said.
“Yes, I can see that.” The gentleman laughed.
He wore a wide brimmed white hat, along with a fetching tan suit and white shirt. There was a holster at his belt but it resembled a more modern flap holster, that didn’t appear suspended from a pistol rig. It peaked out from his left hip, half concealed by the flap of his coat.
“Miss, may I present Senor Thomas Nightingale.”
“Thank you, very much for your aid, Mr Castile. Please help yourself to something to eat. I’m sure you’re very tired, so I don’t want to see you again until tomorrow morning.”
The smile that graced Mr Castile’s face lit up the entire room and he practically skipped away out of the tavern. Karen couldn’t help but smile at his over-excitement.
“Karen Jones. It’s been far too long. And I can’t hardly believe it but you’re still a sight for sore eyes!”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m familiar with any Thomas Nightingale.”
“No, you wouldn’t be.” He removed his hat, finally revealing himself. “I changed my name.”
Karen felt like she might have met him before, in another life. There was definitely something faintly familiar about his face but he was an old man. His hair was grey, actually mostly white and receding. He was clean shaven and wore small round spectacles. Beneath the expensive tailored suit, he appeared to be slender. Perhaps once he had been stocky, and there might have been more belly than, Karen assumed, he would have liked but he seemed to keep himself relatively fit. The watch chain adorning his vest was definitely gold. And he wore a gold ring, on his right ring finger, though the left was bare. His deep brown eyes glimmered with both amusement and something else equally as warm. Excitement?
“I’m sorry, I can’t place you.”
“It’s no surprise. I shouldn’t expect you to. We only met on two occasions. And you were little more than a girl at the time. Well, young woman. You knew me as Thomas Klein. While you were under the employ of Mr Gould, researching his book?”
He drew a copy of a royal blue and gold leaf adorned hardback from another table behind him and showed her the cover. It was the second time she had been it in as many days.
“I guess I didn’t make much of an impression.” He laughed. “Would you care to sit down?”
Karen took the offered seat, facing the gentleman, who’s eyes flowed over her like honey. The girl, tavern wench or whoever she was, reappeared with a tray holding a jug and pair of cups all of terracotta, which she placed on the table. Then, after offering both the gentleman and Karen a disarming smile, she turned and strolled back to the bar.
The elderly man picked up the jug and filled the two cups. Throat dry after the long and dusty carriage ride, Karen picked up her mug and drank down the contents in one. She sulked when she tasted watered down red wine.
“I introduced you to Mr Emmet Granger. We first met on the train, you seduced me, pumped me for information so to speak, and then followed me to a meeting I was having with Granger. Almost got me shot. And then a few months later you came to Saint Denis and found me, employed me as a fence for some items you had procured. Plus, a certain amount of gold, if I remember correctly.”
“I remember the fence, and the name Klein does ring a bell. That was you?”
“Still is!” He smiled, a beaming smile full of warmth and invite.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Indeed, and yet I remain impressed by your appearance.”
“For a washed-up old whore and thief? Expected worse, did you?”
“To be frank, I wasn’t sure what to expect. All I knew was I have never stopped thinking about you in all these years. It occurred to me that with all my money, I might even be able to find out what became of you. It took a lot of time, and money but I traced you. Rumours, accounts and suspect files by retired law men, one or two old photographs. I can’t tell you how shocked I felt when I was informed that you were still alive, and living in Van Horn. But, if you’ll forgive me, fading.”
Karen shrugged. She refilled her terracotta cup.
“So… you find me, fading, in Van Horn. Wait, why did you pick that particular bounty hunter?”
“What? The young man? Entirely at random. He knew his way around West Elizabeth, New Austin, Lemoyne, most of the areas in question. And he was cheap and appeared to be dutiful.”
“So, you didn’t know he knew me when he was a kid? It was just coincidence?”
“Truly?! No, I had no idea!”
“He ran with the Van der Linde gang, while I was there. Well, his parents did. He was only a young child at the time. Remembered me, though.”
“Well, I’ll be.”
He slipped into a moment of silent contemplation. Karen drained her cup and immediately refilled it.
“I asked him to get you cleaned up down in Saint Denis and then have a photograph taken so I could see… forgive me, what state you were in.”
“Did I pass muster?”
“Again, if you’ll forgive me. I was made aware of your current lifestyle. And yet, yes, you are more than I could have hoped for.”
“So, what d’you plan on doing with me, now you’ve seen me and I pass muster?”
“Well, my dear if you’ll have me, I’m of a mind to make you my wife!”
“What? You want to marry me? Me? Why?”
“Like I said, I’ve never forgotten about you since we last met, you’ve been on my mind, off and on, ever since then. And since I’ve found you alive and healthier than perhaps you have any right to be, if you’ll forgive my saying. I see it as providence that we should wed and enjoy these last years together. Be honest, Miss Karen, do you have anything to lose?”
“No, I do not. But you have, plenty. If you’re as rich as you make out, you could take your pick of young and beautiful women, I don’t understand why you want me, I’m nothing. Just a flea ridden, diseased old whore. That girl you remember is long dead.”
“On the contrary, I see sitting before me, older certainly. A whore, until today. Fair. But the fleas are washed away, and I had a doctor check you over, remember. Other than a dire need to cut down on alcohol consumption. you’re surprisingly healthy. At least for a woman of your past and occupation. I’m not looking for children or adoration. Just companionship.”
Karen stared at him for a long moment. Trying to keep her face straight and her heart from beating right out of her chest. She drained her third cup of the watered-down wine. She finally offered Klein another shrug. Though this one came with a coy smile.
“Like you said… Thomas, is it? What do I have to lose?”
“Excellent. Still clever enough to see a good opportunity.”
“So, how rich are you really.”
“More than a little. Remembered Leviticus Cornwall?”
“Vaguely, another dead name from a dead past.”
“Indeed. Well, after his murder by your old friend Van Der Linde, many of his belongings went up for auction. I managed to pick up a deed to an old Indian reservation in the north of the Grizzles for next to nothing. I researched it and realised Cornwall’s interest. He had carefully researched it himself but all his papers had gone missing around the time of his death. There was oil beneath the ground. I hadn’t made a fortune in my previous occupations, the legal or illegal, but I had made a certain amount and a number of clients with skills of their own. We combined our resources and struck it rich. So now I own a stake in a well-known oil firm and also a shipping company in Annesburg. Ships at some east coast docks, import and export. All very interesting… or boring, depending on your own interests, of course.”
“Am I to be your wife or your whore, Thomas?”
“Outside the bedroom, my wife. Upstanding, kind and lovely, though a wicked flirt at parties. In the bedroom I’ll charge you to use all of your other skills to my best advantage. I’m an old man but an old man with vitality. I’d like nothing more than to enjoy a glorious demise between your spread thighs my dear. Though hopefully not for a few years yet. And then all of my wealth will become yours, as long as my death is natural, or at least not caused by you.”
“I have killed men in the past Thomas, but never for straight forward reasons of greed.”
Karen wasn’t sure if that was a true statement, in actual fact. But she didn’t see any reason to consider murdering her husband just to receive an inheritance early. Not so long as he didn’t intend to make her life a misery.
“Treat me fairly as my husband,” she said. “And I’ll give you all the pleasure I can.”
“That’s all I could ask. Shall we drink a toast?”
“You got anything better than this cheap shit?”
“I have a cognac, 1847.”
“Perfect…” Karen said, with a grin. “But just the one glass for me.”
<><><>
Epilogue to the epilogue.
Within the year, Mrs Karen Nightingale was shocked to find herself with child. It was an unbelievable occurrence, and truly a miracle baby.
There were complications during the birth which left Karen bedridden for three weeks. However, she did make a full recovery and she and Thomas brought a healthy baby girl into the world. Thomas naming her Sara, after his mother.
Thomas passed away a happy man eleven years after his marriage. Karen took over the running of his businesses, working alongside the ever-loyal Mr Castile, whom Karen had quickly discovered to be Thomas Nightingale’s righthand man, confidant and most trusted friend. He became the same thing to Karen and helped her when her inexperience of business matters got the better of her. He became as much her teacher as her friend, and an uncle to Sara.
When Sara Nightingale turned fifteen, Karen sold her controlling share of the company to the other members of the board, though not before she made Mr Castile the CEO.
Sara married at only sixteen, though to a bright young man with exemplary prospects carefully vetted by her mother and uncle Castile.
Once she had seen her daughter settled and happy, Karen retired to warmer climes, some said California, others Tahiti, to enjoy a rich, quiet and peaceful twilight in the sun.
The End.
- 5
- 6
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Karen Jones in A Red Dead Redemption 2 Prequel.