Hold My Envelope
Ortiz
I take her into Doc’s room because the stairs are too far.
Door. Bolt. Light already on over the bunk. I don’t look at the bunk. I look at her.
She’s wearing the face she gave me through the fence. Not scared. Hungry. My mouth is still bleeding. Hands still wrapped. I’m hard enough it hurts.
“Pluma.”
“Don’t talk.” She’s already on my belt. “I watched you. Now I want this.”
She pushes me back against the door and gets it open. No other speech. Button. Zipper. Her fist around my cock, slick already from how bad I wanted her in that cage, and then she’s on her knees on Doc’s floor with me in her mouth.
Fuck.
Hot. Wet. She takes me deeper than I thought she would and makes a sound around my cock that I feel in my spine. Wrapped hands go into her hair. I don’t shove. I hold on.
“That’s it. God. Look at you.”
She looks up. That’s what does it. Dark eyes. My cock stretching her mouth. The woman who just watched me put a man on the plywood sucking me off ten feet from the cage.
“You watched me hit him and you got wet.” It comes out wrecked. “I saw it. I finished him so I could get to this.”
She takes more. Too much. My head hits the door. The next fight starts under our feet, the whole room yelling, and none of it gets in here.
“Easy—fuck—your mouth—“
She doesn’t do easy. She pulls off long enough to lick the underside, base to head, then takes me again until her lips hit her fist. Spit down my shaft. Tears in her eyes. Wet sounds. Her nails in my hip. I am gone.
Cage-gone. I am going to come down her throat in a room that smells like antiseptic if she keeps that up.
“I’m gonna come. You want it, take it. You want it on your tongue, stay there.”
She stays. She sucks harder. I come with a sound I don’t recognize, both hands in her hair, pumping into her mouth while my knees try to drop. She takes it. Swallows. Licks the last of it off the head of my cock and looks up at me.
I haul her onto her feet. Kiss her. Taste myself and blood. She fists my wraps and kisses me back.
“You looked at me in the cage,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t do that if you don’t want this after.”
“I want this after. Every single time.”
The basement roars through the floor. I get my jeans up. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and doesn’t look sorry about any of it.
“Envelope’s with Steel.”
“I know.”
I open the door. The man himself is not looking at us. That’s how I know he saw it shut.
The basement empties out the way it always does, loud and then not. Nash locks the cash box. Rook hauls the last drunk up the stairs by his belt. By the time Doc’s done with me and Maribel’s done with Doc’s chair, the bar upstairs is chairs on tables and Mess wiping down.
She goes up ahead of me, stopping at the top of the stairs.
I know before I get there. I can see it in her back.
The bike is across the street. Same spot, facing us, lights off. Whoever’s on it tonight has his helmet on the tank and his arms folded, the way the first one did. They’ve been trading off. It’s never the same man, and it’s never an empty curb.
Everything Doc just cleaned up in me goes hot again. I was fine in the cage. I’m not fine looking at that bike. I want to walk out the front door, cross the strip, and put that man through his own headlight. I want it so bad my hands hurt.
I stay where I am. Torque said the stairs. Torque said inside. I’ve hated it every night since he said it. I’ve done it every night since he said it. I’m going to do it tonight with her standing next to me watching me do it.
“He’s still there,” she says.
“Yeah.”
Her hand finds mine. It’s not steady. She looks at the bike for a long time, and then she does something I don’t expect. She lets go of my hand, walks to the front window, and stands in it with the bar lights behind her so he can see her plain.
“Pluma.”
“He wants me to go upstairs,” she says, to the glass. “That’s what he’s for. I’m not going upstairs.”
She stands there. Across the street, the man doesn’t move. She doesn’t either. After a while she comes back and takes my hand again, and it’s steadier than it was.
Torque’s in the office door with his phone in his hand. He’s been watching her do it. He doesn’t say anything about it, which from Torque is a lot.
“Ortiz. A minute.”
The office has Rook’s notebook open on the desk. Plates, times in, times out, pages of them in Rook’s terrible handwriting. Torque puts his finger on a line.
“He’s rotating through the same handful of bikes. Same shifts, same order. Rook’s got the plates. Mess ran some of them through a guy at the county lot.” He turns the notebook so I can read it. “This one’s registered to a Cristo Vega.”
“Vega.”
“Santo’s little brother. He runs the men Santo doesn’t want to be seen running.” Torque closes the notebook. “So now I know who’s building his schedule, and I know what the schedule is. That’s worth more to me than that man’s teeth.”
“You’ve got a plan.”
“I’ve got a pattern. A plan comes after.” He looks at me over the desk. “You wanted to know what holding gets us. There it is. Now go put your hands somewhere that isn’t that window.”
I go back out. She’s on the stool at the end of the bar with Mess pretending not to keep an eye on her. The bike is still across the street. I look at it. I look at her. I sit down on the stool next to hers with my back to the window.
That’s the hardest thing I’ve done tonight, and I got hit in the mouth.
“You didn’t go,” she says.
“No.”
“You wanted to.”
“Yeah.”
She puts her hand on the back of my neck and leaves it there. Across the street a man starts his engine and lets it idle. Neither of us turns around.