Liquids

Chapter 1

DROWNING

“Ihear you like playing with liquids.”

His hand stops, the brown bottle halfway to his lips.

His arms are thick, corded. Nails cut short and squat, but a mess: chips, dirt, and hangnails marring his long fingers.

His eyes rest somewhere around my chin, and I duck down to try and meet them.

He shifts and swallows, cradling the bottle in his forearm.

“In a way.”

He’s a beautiful mess, slightly grubby at the edges, with scuffed boots, jeans a decade or more old, and a T-shirt so faded the logos have all but disappeared.

I gesture with my hand for him to say more, but he shakes his head and brings the bottle to his lips again, tipping it back as his throat contracts and the beer foams and fizzes. He’s a rigger: ocean-wide shoulders and smooth muscles that shift and pop.

I give up trying to make conversation, and my gaze wanders around the run-down bar, full of the usual misfits.

It’s as beat up as the rest of this town, a forgotten place hanging onto civilization by its fingertips.

My friend Marni has long since disappeared, and I slip into the voices and the music; a beer and some contemplation is a good night for me.

The wall of the booth is hard and unyielding against my back, so I move my legs and stretch along the seat.

My eyes drift closed, and I sink into the low hum of evening drinkers and the jukebox: my damp hand on a cold bottle.

The table shudders with a rustle of movement, and I tip my head forward to find him leaning over the table, long fingers wrapped around his beer, muscled arms resting on the battered wood.

He’s picking at the label, nails digging into the edge of the paper.

He raises his eyes, meeting mine before wandering down to my lips, scanning my body like he can’t decide who I am. I’m never sure about that myself.

“You interested?”

I shrug. There’s no spark in his gaze, no real appreciation.

He grins. Two dimples dent his cheeks, and crinkles appear at the corners his eyes. “You’re curious, though.”

My head falls back against the wall with a thunk. “You have a reputation.”

No response. My eyes slide shut, only to pop open when something wet lands on my hand.

He’s tipped the bottle and is dripping sour brown sweetness onto my fingers one drop at a time.

I stare at his bent head, his eyes narrowed on the beer so it flows at the speed he wants.

A long finger reaches out and rubs the liquid up the back of my hand to my wrist, catching on my knuckle.

The touch is rhythmic, like the ebb and flow of a tide.

More drips. More rubbing. I close my eyes again.

Contact. Comfort. Forgetting.

“Perfect,” he says, and I’m not sure whether he means me, the beer, or something else.

I lift my hand to my mouth, lick my wet finger, take the whole end in and suck on the nail, my saliva pooling around it. Slowly, I clean it—the side, the back—letting the taste and something indeterminate from my skin linger on my tongue.

When I open my eyes, his are dark on mine, and he stands, curling thick fingers in my direction.

I flatten his outstretched palm, examine the callouses, and trail my hand from his wrist to the tip of his index finger.

They’re rough all right, but as I wrap my fingers around his, he pulls me forward and out of the booth.

I let him lead me across the sticky floor and out the battered doors to a truck that looks like him: disheveled, dirty, at the end of a long road. He nods at the passenger door.

The inside of his truck is like him, too: the seats ripped and the front dash missing so you can see straight through to the engine. It roars to life when he turns the key, and he fishtails out of the lot, leaving me to scrabble for the door handle so I don’t slip into the footwell.

“Was that a test?” My voice sounds thin and weedy over the vibrations in the cab.

A half smile curves over his lips, but he makes no other response so I stare out of the dirty windows as the tires thrum over the black asphalt.

Drops of rain start to land on the windshield in thick, fat splatters.

We pull up to a set of red lights. They’re red all the way down the street, like rubies on a string, no other cars in sight.

“Long and drawn out,” he says as though his thoughts have just reached his mouth.

It’s not an answer: He’s telling me what I’d like. I lick my lips, staring at the unshaven jaw, the too-long lashes, and the dark hair. What he doesn’t realize is there’s nothing in my head; no idea of what I’d like, but I think I’ll like it with him.

Headlights bounce over the grit and stones of the road as we turn into a rough concealed track heading out of town, a strip of grass struggling down the middle.

“You live up here?” I say.

I can’t remember where or when I heard about his reputation, but he comes and goes for a month at a time.

Drinks quietly in the corner of the bar.

Takes the women that approach him home. Not sure why I decided that tonight that woman would be me.

Sometimes you stick your neck out and hope you aren’t decapitated by a passing train.

He glances over at me and then back at the road.

Nothing. Marni’ll kill me if I don’t find out more. Like his real name. Most people call him Rig because he works on the rigs. We’re an inspirational lot in this little town.

The dirt track stretches on into the darkness, headlights picking out stones and the shadow of a deep rut.

I lurch into the side window and forward as the gears grind and the truck bounces.

A rabbit’s tail flashes white and disappears into the grass at the side.

I’m just about adapting to all the bouncing when he pulls on the wheel, and we swing left into a field, the lights illuminating a beaten-up old trailer perched on concrete blocks.

The front door is hanging off its hinges.

I jump as he slams his hand on the steering column. “Fuckin’ assholes!” He tips his head back against the seat and closes his eyes.

I look at the trailer and then back at him. “Is there a problem?”

“Yeah, girl, there’s a problem.”

He rams the shift stick into reverse and fishtails backward over the grass and onto the dirt track again. I grab for the strap above my head so I don’t end up in the engine, but my hand slaps off the roof. When I look up, there’s a tear where it used to be.

“Fucking hold on,” he says, flooring the accelerator, and if I thought we were lurching before, it’s nothing to this, racing down the road at twice the speed we came up it. I clutch at his huge bicep: It’s the most stable thing in here. I think he’s grinding his teeth.

He swings to the left down another track that’s possibly a creek, water spraying mud up and out onto the windshield.

About half a mile down, low buildings loom out of the dark on our right, and he wrenches the wheel, swinging into the area in front of them, headlights sweeping over the stone walls in a wide arc.

The grass is long and untamed, the windows filthy, the front door of the main house so battered it’s no longer possible to tell what color it once was. Cars litter the yard.

“Fucking jackasses,” he says, as he leans into the back and pulls out a rifle and a long leather pole that could be … holy shit, it’s a whip! Jesus Christ. What the fuck?

He jumps down from the cab, cocks the gun, and slides two cartridges into it before locking it back into place. Then he points it at the door and fires, and my mouth drops open as the lock explodes.

“Come out, you fucking cowards! Had to wait until I went out, did you?”

Silence. The windows are all dark.

He lifts the rifle again and shoots out a window in an explosion of glass.

“You want me to come in there and fire at you?” he shouts. “I know you’re home, you assholes. No bar in town’d have you drinking at it.”

I was hoping for a warm bed and some interesting sex, not an episode of CSI.

Still nothing moves inside the house.

“You want me to shoot the shit out of your cars?”

He cocks the gun, takes another cartridge out of his pocket, and loads it up.

“Last warning!” he adds, then he points the rifle at the front tire of the nearest truck and fires.

I jump as the door slams open. “What are you fucking doing, you jerk? I can’t afford new tires.”

The guy in the doorway is vaguely familiar. Belligerent. A beer belly hanging over his pants with a check shirt stretched over it, buttons straining.

Jodi Carpenter.

School jock, chief asshole of all the school assholes.

He raped a girl in ninth grade. She was fourteen.

He was never charged for it because her family didn’t want their daughter to “go through all that.” He sways on the front step.

Looks like things have gone downhill for Jodi since he left school, but then that’s true of all of us.

“I can’t afford a new fucking trailer. You should have thought of that before you did it over.”

An oily grin creeps over Jodi’s face, and my skin crawls.

Back at high school, he used that smile when he leaned into girls in the hallways or at parties when no one was looking.

Trapping them with his hips against the wall.

I kneed him in the balls once. One of his buddies beat me up for that little show of defiance, picked his time when I was off guard and no one was watching, the asswipe.

When I got home afterward, my dad took one look at me and grunted, “What did you do?” I loved my dad, and he was my biggest champion, but he was a jerk a lot of the time, especially when he’d been drinking.

Rig puts the gun down on the grass. And before Jodi can do anything, even lurch back inside, the whip cracks out and I don’t see where it hits him, but he stumbles, clutching his leg.

“What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck is that? I never did nothing to your trailer. Fuck, man.”

The whip snakes out again and wraps around his calf, and his arms flail as he keels over backward.