Chapter 4 #2
Whatever was behind his eyes when he pulled away, it’s gone now.
What’s there instead is the look he had in the desert right before the gun came up, total, decided, fixed on me like nothing else in the room exists, and I don’t get the chance to do anything with that, because he crosses the room in three strides.
His mouth is back on mine. This time there’s no held breath, no circling, no careful.
This time it’s a decision he has already made, and he makes it with both hands.
“Changed your mind,” I get out, somewhere in it.
“Shut up,” he says, rough, against my mouth, already kissing me again. I laugh into it. Then his hands get serious and I stop laughing.
He takes his time now. That’s the devastating part.
After the interruption, after the cold, he comes back slow, like he’s decided that if he’s doing this he’s doing all of it.
He peels the rest of my clothes off me like he’s got the whole night to use, spreading my legs wide so he can look at my dripping wet pussy.
His mouth retraces every place it left, sucking my tits, tongue flicking my nipples, then lower, licking slow and filthy through my folds, tasting how wet I am for him.
His hands learn me, fingers circling my clit until I’m begging, until I stop tracking what I’m saying back, stop tracking anything but the heat building low, tight, unbearable.
When he finally gives me what I’ve been clawing toward, he notches the thick head of his cock against my entrance, pushes in slow and deep, stretching my pussy around his hard length.
I come apart so hard I see white at the edges, my nails raking down his back, my pussy clenching and fluttering around him, his name in my mouth, a name I shouldn’t know well enough to say like that.
He follows me with a sound torn out of his chest, his cock pulsing as he fills my pussy with his cum, his face dropping into my neck, the whole shaking weight of him coming down on me.
For a while neither of us moves.
The wall is down. I don’t know how else to say it. For one reckless hour the scariest man in Nevada is just a heartbeat against my skin, slick, spent, human, his hand moving slow up the curve of my side like he forgot to make it stop.
“Your ceiling has a water stain shaped like Texas,” he says, in the voice other men use for compliments.
“That’s Brenda. She came with the apartment.”
I feel the laugh before I hear it, a low underground thing beneath my ear, there and gone. The man himself, laughing at my water damage. Nobody would ever believe me. I barely believe me.
I should be afraid. I keep waiting to be afraid. Instead I’m boneless, warm, stupidly safe in the worst possible arms, and I let my eyes close.
I fall asleep on a stranger’s scarred chest. That’s the last thing I know.
I wake to gray light and cold sheets.
He’s gone. Of course he’s gone. The other side of the bed is empty, the dent of him already cooling. I lie there a second piecing together which parts were real. All of them, says the ache in my body. All of them, says the tender spot on my hip where the door dug in.
There’s something on the nightstand.
A brick of cash. Banded, fat, careless, sitting next to my dead alarm clock like it grew there overnight.
No note. Of course no note. What would it even say?
Thanks. Sorry. See you soon. He doesn’t need to write it down.
He told me in the desert, he told me in the club, now he’s told me in the worst plainest language there is, a stack of hundreds on a secondhand nightstand, the only kind of sentence this man writes.
I don’t touch it.
I want to, is the ugly truth. Not because I want his money, though God knows I need it, the rent, the knee that still needs a surgery I keep not scheduling, the long list of things money fixes.
I want to touch it because touching it would make last night a transaction, something clean with a price on it, a bad decision I could write off and move past.
That’s what the cash is for. It turns me into the thing he told the whole club I was, a kept girl, a man’s pretty habit, somebody who got paid. If I take it, I know exactly what I am this morning.
So I don’t take it. I leave it sitting there next to the clock, his cold flat answer to a question I never asked, and I let myself be something with no name on it instead.
I lie in my cold bed in the gray light with my whole life rearranged around me, one thought running on a loop, clean, useless, far too late.
What in God’s name did I just get into?
My phone buzzes on the floor where it fell out of my jeans.
Then again. Then a third time, fast, the specific rhythm of the group chat waking up.
The girls. The ordinary world. Crystal already typing a paragraph about something that doesn’t matter, the day starting like it’s any other day, like the woman reading the screen is the same one who got dressed for work yesterday.
She isn’t. I’m not sure who the woman reading the screen is now. Somebody with a man’s money on her nightstand, his marks on her hip, his name still warm in her mouth, pretending none of it happened so she can answer a text about brunch.
I look at the cash. I look at the phone. I look at the dent in the pillow next to mine.
Then I reach down and pick up the phone, because at least that I know how to answer.