KNIGHT STORM

CHAPTER 1

DESTINY KNIGHT

I winced as I downed a third shot of rum. Then I stared at the lethal pills in my hand. I had enough of them to kill a horse, so it ought to be sufficient for my one hundred fifteen pounds. One or two more shots and maybe I would have the courage to ingest all of them.  

My booze buzzed brain puzzled over something after a fourth shot of rum. Did it take courage to die by my own hand or courage to find the will to live? I couldn’t figure it out, so I let the pills trickle between my fingers and fall to the table. The hangover would bring back my anxiety and depression with greater intensity. So maybe tomorrow.

I had spent almost a decade as an adult actress and exotic dancer. More realistically, I was a porn star and a stripper. I use the word “star” loosely, though. Out in public, I was rarely recognized. When I was noticed, it was usually by some creepy guy. But put me in a strip club or at an adult entertainment event, and I was a little bit like a rock star.

I grew up in in Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul. I’d like to tell you that I got into adult entertainment because of daddy issues, but that wasn’t the case. Yes, my dad left my mother for another woman and started another family. Yes, it messed me up to a large degree and added to the rebellion that already had been lurking in my soul. Other than expecting me to accept his new family, my father did not harm me comparatively speaking.

After nine years in the sex industry, I have met countless women, girls really, that had not only daddy issues but mommy issues as well. So many lives severely damaged by sexual, physical, verbal, and psychological abuse. In far too many cases, all of the above. I was actually way more stable than most of my former colleagues. So what was I doing with all of these deadly narcotics? I wasn’t even thirty years old yet. By the law of averages, I hadn’t even lived half my life. But my one bright spot in an otherwise dismal existence was gone.

It had been more than two months since Sophie, the love of my life, had left me. We had been together for more than four years. I sometimes thought she and I were soul mates and wondered if our love would last forever. But she claimed to have found God, or vice versa, and she declared lesbianism to be wrong or sinful or some such. Yet she tearfully kissed me goodbye before she walked out of my life, leaving me with her half of the bills.

Sophie was a former porn star and stripper like me. Most of the time that we were together we lived in southern California and Las Vegas. Three months earlier, she and I both had decided that it was time to get out of the sex industry, even though we were both making substantial money. We chose Iowa City, Iowa, as our place to settle. It was about halfway between both of our hometowns, St. Louis for her and St. Paul for me. We resided just a couple miles of the highways known as the Avenue of the Saints.

I shook off the memories of Sophie and went to bed. I had a dream that had been recurring since Sophie had left me. In the nightmare, I’m way up high on a mountain hiking trail. As I make my way along the trail, the path keeps getting narrower and more sloped. As I’m slipping and falling, a woman who seems like an older version of myself tries to take hold of me but always misses. Then I start to fall, jolting awake.

The night I dabbled with suicide, I had the same dream again, only with a different outcome. This time the woman grabbed hold of me, and we fell back a short distance onto a big, flat rock that had a lush, dark green carpet of grass that was more pristine than a putting green. We were safe!

I awoke with a start as I realized that the woman in my dream was not an older version of myself, but was my aunt Annabelle, my father’s sister. I had only met her a handful of times when I was just a kid. I remembered that my self-righteous, adulterous father had disowned her before I was born, because she had been a stripper.

But now she ran some type of ministry where she helped former strippers, adult entertainers, and prostitutes, so I guess he admired her now. My dad was a walking contradiction if ever there was one. I absolutely despised the man, yet I still had a sliver of love for the guy that had been my daddy when I was little.

I immediately went to my computer and looked my aunt up. She had a website about her ministry, and I was stunned to discover that she was based out of Cedar Rapids, a city only twenty miles north of where I lived! I would have guessed that she lived on one of the coasts or at least the St. Paul or Minneapolis area. Dare I contact her?

Three years previous, during a rare conversation with my father, he told me that I should contact his sister and talk to her about getting out of porn. When I refused, he taunted me by saying that it was just as well because Annabelle was embarrassed that her niece was in porn when she was involved in an anti-porn movement. My dad’s words struck me hard, even though I viewed him as a major hypocrite.

 My fingers froze on the keyboard. How would Annabelle Knight react to me? Would she judge me and scorn me? What if she knew that I was suicidal? I was afraid to call her, but I found out where she lived and decided to drive by her home, just to kind of snoop.

My hands shook a little as I slid on my favorite pair of old jeans and a light pink top. I guess it was fear of the unknown. Would she accept me or reject me? Would she be warm or cold? After all, my own father said I was an embarrassment to her. What did I really want from her anyway? I didn’t have a clue, and yet something in my brain pushed me to go. I dropped my car keys twice before I actually made it to my car. I wasn’t inebriated, just a bit hung over. Still, I wondered if I should drive, given my emotional state.

Aunt Annabelle lived in a brown ranch house in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood. The house was surrounded with colorful flower beds. A light green Ford Focus sat in her driveway. With my pulse quickening, I pulled my cherry red Dodge Viper in behind the Focus.

I got my courage up. I took several deep breaths, telling myself to remain relaxed and friendly. I went to her door. I rang the doorbell and waited anxiously. Nobody came, so my shaking finger went to the doorbell again as my heart pounded harder. I pushed it again, but then I turned and quickly walked back to my vehicle, feeling something like a panic attack coming on. I started my car and fled. I almost felt like I was playing ding dong ditch in my haste to leave.

About two blocks from Annabelle’s house, I saw an older woman jogging. Her gray-blonde hair was in a ponytail, which was pulled threw a Minnesota Twins baseball cap. As I slowly made my way past, I realized the woman was my aunt. She smiled brightly in my direction and waved. Her pleasant, neighborly gesture gave me the confidence to approach her.

I turned the Viper around and gave her time to get ahead of me. She stopped in her front yard and bent over, breathing hard from the exercise. I pulled behind her Ford Focus for a second time as Annabelle began to pace around her yard in a cool down walk. She eyed me curiously as I exited my car.

Her face was rather wrinkly, making her look every bit her age, which had to be around seventy. Despite the signs of age, she was very pretty. Her body was slender and toned. She filled out her dark purple stretch pants and matching top as well as most thirty-somethings. She eyed me warily as she approached my car. I got out of my car and stood. When she got a good look at me, shock and surprise filled her face as her jaw dropped. I thought about sliding back into my car and making a getaway.

“Are you Destiny Knight?” she asked with wide eyes before I could escape. I bit my lower lip and nodded meekly.

She half gasped and half laughed a couple of times as she put a hand to her chest. She made her way quickly around my car and stood in front of me, grabbing both of my hands in hers. Her smile was even brighter than before.

“Why, I haven’t seen you since you were sixteen or seventeen years old,” she told me. “I tried to get a hold of you a few years ago. Your dad gave me your number, but I never heard back.”

“I’m truly sorry, Aunt Annabelle,” I replied. “I had a lot going on. It was rude of me not to respond to your messages.”

“I understand,” she said, still beaming. “It’s so good to see you, honey, and please, just call me Belle. I’d give you a hug, but I’m all sweaty.”

“I don’t mind,” I said as I was overcome with emotion and feeling very lonely.

I practically threw myself into my aunt. She hugged me tightly. When we broke away, she kissed my cheek. The love that she showed me was overwhelming. When was the last time my own mother kissed my cheek? Maybe when I was five or six years old. Much to my embarrassment, I began to weep. Then I noticed my aunt’s cheeks were tear-streaked, too.

“I feel kind of like a prodigal daughter,” I told her.

“Is that why I have the pleasure of your visit, honey?” my aunt asked with such love in her voice and eyes that I felt myself opening up.

“I’ve been having a reoccurring dream about you,” I told Belle. Then I explained the dream about the mountain trail, and then how I had Googled her and discovered that she lived only twenty miles away.

“It was a dream nearly thirty years ago that saved me,” Belle said quietly.

“How?” I asked, intrigued.

“After I retired from the sex trade,” she began, “I felt completely void and empty. In a nutshell, I was regretting my past and dreading my future. Just like you. I was finding it unbearable to adjust to the real working world. So the day before my fortieth birthday, I had a syringe with enough heroin in it to overdose two sumo wrestlers.

“I was about to shoot the drugs into my veins when I began to wonder what would be next. I had always considered myself an atheist up to that point. But a young guy that I worked with at the time and really respected used to talk to me about God. I never thought that he was getting to me until I was about to end my life. So I pulled the needle out of my arm and went to bed. When I got out of bed late the following afternoon, I went for a walk in Green Square Park here in town. Who do you suppose I ran into?”

“The young guy that you worked with?” I surmised.

“Yes, him and his wife,” Belle replied. “Their names are Jake and Mary Gold Weston. It turned out that Mary Gold had dreamt about me, even though we had never met. They had been on their way to dinner at the Dragon, a popular Chinese restaurant in the 1980s. Mary Gold had had a strong urge to go for a walk in Green Square Park. It was she who recognized me from her dream and pointed me out to Jake. Jake was stunned when he told his wife that he knew who I was.

“In a nutshell, they could tell that I was in a very dark place, and they told me all about Mary Gold’s dream and her urge to come to the park. I ended up breaking down and telling them how close I was to ending my life. They insisted on taking me to dinner. Then we went back to their place, and Mary Gold and I stayed up all night talking, praying, and studying the Bible.”

I realized that my mouth hung open as my aunt finished her miraculous tale, and she swiped a couple of tears from her cheeks. I marveled as it occurred to me that I was experiencing something unbelievably similar to her right then and there. I too had been contemplating suicide. I also had a strange dream. I too had felt an urge to go to a certain destination.

“Do you know what’s really weird?” I said quietly. “I was considering ending my life last night. I decided to procrastinate another day, and then I dreamed about you again. More profoundly than before.”

“Oh, sweetie,” my aunt said as she took me in her arms again. “Let’s go inside. I shouldn’t be hugging you, though, when I’m a sweaty, smelly pig.”

“You’re fine,” I laughed, wiping tears from my cheeks.

Belle insisted on making us a spaghetti supper with a delicious tomato, garlic, and lentil sauce. She and I talked long into the night. I went to church with her that weekend. Everyone she introduced me to was super friendly, and I immediately felt at home.

I did have a blast from the past, however. There was a guy that I knew from almost a decade ago, and it couldn’t have been more unexpected, especially given how we knew each other. Talk about a major coincidence! He and I running into each other in a church of all places, and in the middle of Iowa!

Brock Storm had been a bouncer at a club I frequented in Minneapolis when I first began exotic dancing ten years earlier. I didn’t know him well, even though I shared a moment with him that I considered the most special encounter I had ever had with a man. It occurred moments after he had saved me from being raped and most likely murdered. What on earth was he doing at this church outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa? Was I glad to see him or mortified? I couldn’t tell at first.

Brock had acquired an additional scar on his face since I had seen him last, giving him a rather unique look. When I knew him nine or ten years ago, he’d had two significant scars on his face. The old scars were a two-inch line from the left side of his mouth that curved up, giving him the constant appearance of wearing a sideways, sinister smirk, and a jagged lightning bolt that ran from the left side of his eye and slanted just above his temple into his hair line. The new scar, at least new to me, started at his left cheek bone and ran over to his ear. From where I sat, it also looked like about half an inch of the top of his left ear was gone.

Brock’s appearance was interesting. If you looked at the left side of his face, he looked somewhat hideous due to the scars. If you looked at his right side, he looked like a male model. I absolutely freaked when I first saw him. Then when his warm, gentle, light brown eyes looked into mine, I knew that I definitely was glad to see him.