Estate
Billy had two flasks and a complete lack of mercy, which meant by nine-thirty my cup was heavy with liquor that tasted like a sweet, liquid lie.
It didn't burn; it simply slid down my throat and started dismantling my common sense from the inside out.
The string lights above the grass weren't just glowing anymore — they were pulsing, vibrating in time with the zydeco accordion that had found its way into my bones.
It was rum. Good rum — it hardly burned on the way down, which was the most dangerous kind because you forgot you were drinking it until you were already somewhere else entirely.
Preferably not on your face.
“You're smiling,” Billy observed.
“I smile.”
“Not like that.” He looked pleased with himself. “That's a different smile.”
“It's the same smile.”
“It’s fucking not, doll face.” He refilled my cup. “This is the smile of a woman on the loose.”
I looked across the field. Judah was where he'd been for the last hour — at the far table, talking to men whose names I didn't know, doing the thing he did at every gathering where he was technically present and actually somewhere else entirely.
Working. Always working, even here, even with the fireflies and the zydeco and the whole town loose and easy around him.
He hadn't looked at me in twenty minutes.
Which was fine. And absolutely was not.
“He's very good at that,” I said.
“Hmm?” Billy turned his ear toward me but didn’t look up from the drink he was spiking with the rum. It was something that tasted like Dr. Pepper but hadn’t come in the labeled can.
“Judah,” I said, suddenly feeling very honest. “He hasn’t looked at me. He’s good at that. At wanting me and not wanting me in the same breath.”
Billy’s eyes finally landed on me. He had a cocked eyebrow. “Mercy, now comes the hard question. How much of this have we poured down your whistle?”
“Enough,” I admitted, taking another sip. “But not enough to not understand what I'm saying.”
Billy laughed, but it didn't reach his eyes. He glanced over at Judah, then back at me. “You know what they say about men like him?”
“I suspect you're about to tell me.”
“They're like those big old gators in the bayou. Pretty to look at from a distance, but you don't want to get too close.” He leaned in, his voice dropping. “They’re like logs. They look like nothing at all until they’ve got their teeth in your thigh and they’re dragging you into the black.
That’s Judah. This type doesn’t stop feeding just because they’re full.
” As he said it, his eyes found Dice — smoking and laughing with the two men from the bar.
I couldn’t remember their names. Billy looked like he wanted to be there. With them.
With her.
“I feel like you’re not talking about Judah anymore.”
Billy's eyes snapped back to me. “Careful there, doll face. You’re implying things I’m not entirely sober enough to be thinking about.
” But — again — his glossy eyes drifted back to Dice.
She had thrown her head back in laughter.
The tip of her cigarette glowed orange in the dusk, a firefly caught in her fingers.
“Are you in love with her?” I asked, the rum making me bolder than I should’ve been.
Billy's smile went tight. “We don't use words like that around here, Mercy.”
“Why not?” I asked, turning to look at Dice again. She caught me staring and raised her cigarette in a small salute. I nodded back, feeling awkward.
“Because love complicates things,” Billy said, his voice suddenly stripped of its usual playfulness. “And things here are complicated enough.”
I looked down at my cup, swirling the amber liquid. The rum had loosened something in me, some knot of caution I usually kept pulled tight. “Everything in St. Francisville seems complicated.”
“It is. If you look too hard.” Billy's smile returned, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. “Most folks here don’t. They just float along. Don't ask questions they don't want answers to.”
That may’ve been true. And I should’ve been like the most. Docile. And easy. Like I had been with my father.
“No.” I shook my head, my dark hair spilling over my shoulders — the waves had loosened, the pins had come out, and I was just plain old Mercy, sitting in the grass with a man too in love to declare his love.
“No?” he asked, leaning back on his elbow; he was half lying on the ground by then, his white pants in places covered in grass stains.
“I will ask a goddamn question, Billy,” I said, getting up from the ground. “I will go up there, to him, and ask him why he’s not looking at me.”
Billy grinned. “That’s a bad idea, doll.”
“Yes. But it’s my idea.”
“No argument there.”
I was halfway across the field before I remembered I was still holding my plastic cup.
Too late to turn back now. My feet moved with surprising steadiness despite the rum, carrying me toward Judah and the circle of men around him.
They were all older, established men with weathered faces and expensive watches.
The kind who held the town's purse strings.
The conversation died as I approached, five pairs of eyes turning to assess me. Only Judah's stayed fixed on whoever was speaking, as if he hadn't noticed my approach.
But I knew he had.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” I said, the rum making me bolder than I had any right to be. “I need to borrow Pastor Beaumont for just a moment.”
An older man with silver hair and a navy blazer — Hargrove Whitfield, I realized — the same one who’d given me the cherry — gave me a slow smile that made my skin crawl. “Of course, my dear. We were just finishing up.”
Judah finally looked at me then, his expression unreadable. “Is something the matter?” he asked. He put a hand on the small of my back — a possessive, heavy weight — and guided me away before I could tell Hargrove what I thought of his smile.
“Why are you not looking at me?” I asked him, hands on my hips.
His eyes darkened, scanning my face before glancing over my shoulder at Billy, who remained sprawled on the grass watching us.
Billy saluted him.
“What has he been feeding you? What’s in that?” he took the cup from me and brought it to his nose and grimaced. “Jesus. Christ.”
“Pastor!” I gasped, feigning a shock I didn't feel. I snatched the cup back. “Blasphemy! In front of the help!”
He didn't find it funny. He steered me toward a massive oak, the Spanish moss hanging down like rotting lace. The air was thick here, smelling of damp earth and the cedarwood scent that always seemed to cling to him.
“I’m about to do a lot more than blaspheme if you don’t start behaving,” he said, his voice dropping into a low, vibrating register that made my blood hum.
I took that as a challenge.
“Prove it,” I said, taking a slow sip while looking him dead in the eye. “Let’s walk, Preacher.”
I led him toward the water. The bayou was a sheet of black ink against the darkening sky. Judah's hand was warm in mine, his pace measured as he allowed me to lead him away from the watchful eyes of St. Francisville's finest.
“You're drunk,” he observed, not unkindly.
“Mhm.” I didn’t even deny it, took another mouthful. “You should try it sometime. Would work wonders on that awful attitude.”
His laugh was unexpected — low and genuine, with none of the calculated control I'd grown used to. “You think I have an awful attitude?”
I stopped walking, turning to face him at the water's edge. The bayou stretched dark and endless behind him, cicadas singing their evening chorus. “I think you want to kiss me. And you won’t. That’s an awful attitude, Preacher.”
He lifted his eyes, but the smile didn’t vanish. He was looking somewhere beyond and seeing nothing.
I didn’t know how we got to it, but at one point, I was pressed against the big oak tree, and Judah’s hand was running up my leg, pushing the dress along.
His fingers traced a path of fire along my thigh, and I bit my lower lip to keep from making a sound that would carry back to the gathering.
The rum had dissolved my inhibitions, but some small part of me still remembered where we were — who he was to this town.
“Take me home,” I whispered when his mouth found my neck. “Your home…”
His teeth grazed my skin, sending shivers down my spine. “You don't know what you're asking for,” he murmured, his voice rough with restraint.
“I do,” I insisted, emboldened by the rum and the darkness. The Spanish moss swayed above us like silent witnesses.
Judah's hand stilled on my thigh, and he pulled back just enough to look at me, his eyes searching mine. In them, I saw conflict — desire warring with something darker, more complex.
“It’s a yes, Preacher.”
A ‘yes’ to everything.
The estate still carried that faint beeswax scent and something faintly floral — some arrangement somewhere I couldn't see in the dark. He didn't turn on the overhead lights. Just the lamp in the hall, which threw a low amber pool across the floor, and then the one at the top of the stairs.
I followed him up.
His bedroom was at the end of the hall — large and dark.
He turned on the night lamp by the bed, and the place lit up with a warm sheen that jumped off the damask wallpaper.
This was not a bedroom of a pastor — it was a room of a man in charge of more than just religion.
The furniture was antique, inherited with the manor itself.
The room had four tall windows. Two on the south-facing wall and two on the west. The daylight curtains were so long, they brushed the polished floor and pooled on it.
I saw a mirror as big as my living room, hung above a fireplace with a marble finish.
And a bed frame with posts thick as a man's thigh.
Judah came up behind me. His hands settled on my hips, steadying me as the room seemed to tilt slightly with the rum still coursing through my veins.
“Second thoughts?” he asked, his breath warm against my ear.
I shook my head, my hair brushing against his chest. “No. Just... taking it all in.”