Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
LENNOX
Wednesday night, I can't sleep. Neither can he, and we don't talk about why.
My father's coat is folded over the back of a kitchen chair eleven feet from this bed.
It has been there since four o'clock yesterday morning and neither of us has moved it, and there is a four-inch hole in the lining that I opened with a knife on the hood of my own car, and a sheet of ledger paper in a sandwich bag on the counter with a hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars written on it in my father's handwriting.
Settled. That's the word I keep landing on. I've been landing on it for about nineteen hours.
He's on his back with one arm over his eyes.
"Are you awake?"
"Yeah."
"How long?"
"Ain't been asleep," Havoc says.
The window unit cycles off and the frogs come up into the gap and then it kicks back on.
"I keep seeing his hands," I say.
"Whose?"
"His. Doing the stitching." I'm looking at the ceiling. "Quarter-inch stitches, crooked, heavy thread. My father could not sew. He put a button on a shirt once when I was nine. It came off in the wash, and my mother laughed at him for a week.
"And he sat down somewhere in September of two thousand four with a needle he had to have gone and found, and he opened his own coat and put a page in it and closed it back up, badly, by himself. Nobody helped him. You can tell nobody helped him.
"He was scared, Eli."
Havoc takes his arm off his eyes.
"I've been trying all day to get to any other version," I say, "and there isn't one. Men don't sew things into their own clothes because they're organized."
He doesn't say anything for a while.
Then he turns over onto his side, facing me, and puts his hand flat on my stomach and leaves it there. Not moving. Not anything. A hand.
"Come here," he says.
"Come here," Eli says.
I slide across the sheets. The humidity sticks my skin to the fabric.
I move into his space and let my legs wrap around his waist. He is heavy and solid.
The black thorns on his chest press against my breasts.
I want to disappear into the weight of him because the thought of my father's shaking hands is too loud. I need a different kind of noise.
I pull his head down. I kiss him with a lot of pressure.
He doesn’t push back. He stays still and lets me set the pace.
I reach down and unbutton his trousers. I pull his cock out.
It is thick and hot. I wrap my fingers around the shaft and move my hand up and down.
I look at his face. He has his jaw set. He is waiting for me to tell him the next step.
"I want you inside me," I say.
He moves. He shifts his weight and guides his cock to my opening. He enters me in one slow push, and I gasp. I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him closer. I want the friction to erase the image of that hole in the coat lining. I want the physical sensation to override the grief.
I start to move my hips. I grind my pelvis against his.
He holds my waist with his large hands. His rings are cold against my skin.
He does not speed up. He does not change the rhythm.
He stays exactly where I put him. I like the control.
I need to know that nothing is happening that I did not authorize.
"Faster," I tell him.
He increases the speed. The bed frame knocks against the wall.
The window unit clicks off. The sound of frogs fills the room from the basin outside.
The air is thick and smells of damp earth and salt.
I arch my back. The scar under my collarbone rubs against his chest. The yellow bruise on my hip presses into the mattress.
I want more. I want the sensation to be blunt. I want it to hurt a little bit.
"Harder, Eli. Fuck me like you mean it."
He lets go of my waist, plants his palms on the mattress on either side of my head, and drives into me with a sudden force.
The impact jars my spine. I grip his shoulders.
The muscles there are hard as stone. He hits my cervix with every thrust. The pain is a sharp line that cuts through the fog in my head.
It is a clean feeling. It is a factual feeling.
I’m not thinking about the ledger page. I am not thinking about the men in the room on Sunday. I am only thinking about the way his cock fills me. I am thinking about the way his beard scratches my neck. I am thinking about the specific pressure of his weight.
I move my legs higher. I lock my ankles behind his back to pull him deeper. He doesn't take over. He doesn't try to flip me or change the angle. He simply follows the lead of my body. He is a tool I am using to survive the night.
"More," I whisper. "Right there."
He adjusts his angle by an inch. He hits the spot that makes my toes curl. I feel the tension building in my lower stomach. It is a tight coil. I want it to snap. I want the release to be violent.
I start to move faster. I bounce my hips up to meet him.
The friction is intense. The sound of our bodies hitting is the only thing that matters.
I can feel the pulse of him inside me. He is breathing hard.
His chest heaves against mine. He says my name.
Not a sentence. He just says "Lennox" like it is a question.
I don't answer. I don't want to talk. I want the physical reality of him. I want the weight of his built frame to crush the air out of me. I push my pelvis harder against his. I want him to bottom out.
"Harder," I command. "Don’t you dare stop."
He obeys. He slams into me with everything he has. The bed slides a few inches across the floor. I feel the orgasm starting at the base of my spine. It spreads outward in waves. My vaginal muscles clamp down on his cock. I squeeze him tight and hold my breath.
The climax hits me with a force that makes my vision blur. I shake. My internal muscles pulse around him in rhythmic contractions. I bury my face in the crook of his neck. I smell soap and sweat.
Eli doesn't pull away. He keeps moving. He continues the hard thrusts even while I am peaking. He does it because I told him not to stop. He stays in the rhythm until I start to come down.
I feel him tense. His muscles lock. He groans into my shoulder.
He thrusts one last time and stays deep inside me.
I feel the hot jet of his cum hitting my cervix.
He fills me. The warmth spreads through my gut.
He stays there. He doesn't move. He doesn't try to cuddle or whisper something sweet. He just breathes.
I keep my eyes open. I look at the kitchen chair eleven feet away.
I see the coat. I see the hole. I know the fear that put it there.
I know the secret in the lining. But right now I am just a woman in a bed in Louisiana.
I am a woman who is full of another person.
I am a woman who decided exactly how this night would go.
Afterward I'm on my stomach with my face turned and my arm hanging off the mattress, and he's got one hand moving up and down my spine, slowly, all the way from my neck to the small of my back and up again, and neither of us says anything for a long time.
"That was for the coat," he says.
"Yes."
"Alright."
"You're not asking me to say it was something else."
"Nope."
"Most men would."
"Most men ain't layin' here," Havoc says, and his hand keeps going.
Around three I fall asleep like that, on my stomach, with a stranger's ceiling over me and my father's coat folded on a chair in the next room, and I don't dream about any of it.
* * *
Junie comes out to the house on Thursday in a Cutlass with no muffler.
"Get in."
"I don't—"
"I ain't askin' you a question, I'm openin' a door." She's got sunglasses on and one arm out the window. "You been sittin' in that man's house on the edge of a swamp for eleven days and you got about four hundred square feet of it that ain't hot. Get in."
So I get in.
"Where are we going?"
"To work," Junie says. "You can pour a beer, can't you?"
"I ran a bar for six years."
"Then you're overqualified and I'm underpaid and we're gonna get along fine."
The Fang sits back off the highway on a piece of dirt with a gravel lot and no sign except a piece of plywood with a snake painted on it by somebody who couldn't paint.
Inside it's dark at two in the afternoon and it smells like beer and bleach and old smoke, and there's a stage in the corner about a foot off the floor with three cables taped down on it and no band until Friday.
Gigi's already there, up on the cooler with her legs going, and she raises both arms when we come through the door.
"There she is."
"Get down off my cooler."
"It's the club's cooler."
"It's my cooler," Junie says, and ties her apron.
They put me on the well and I make about forty drinks in three hours and none of them are complicated, and it is the first time since April that I've had a thing to do with my hands that somebody was waiting on.
I'd forgotten what that does.
Around five, a man comes in wearing a Kings cut with a bottom rocker I don't know.
He's fifty, thick through the middle, and he stands at the far end and drinks two and looks at me for the whole of the second one.
Then he comes down the bar.
"You the one?" he growls.
"Depends."
"Walked in chapel."
The room doesn't go quiet, exactly. It goes about ten percent quieter, which in a roadhouse is the same as a scream. Junie stops with a rack of glasses halfway up.
"That's right," I say.
"Twenty-two years." He puts a finger on the wood.
"My ol’ lady's been comin' around that buildin' since two thousand nine.
She's had a patch on her back with my name on it since twenty-fourteen.
She has never one time put a foot in that hall past the ice machine, 'cause that's the rule, and she has never once complained about it neither. "
"Okay."
"So what makes you—"
"Nothing," I say.
He stops.