CHAPTER NINE #2
My hips came up off the bench. My heels found the edge and braced there, and I came on his hand with the caged bulb swimming over his shoulder and my palms squeaking on the wood.
He did not stop afterward. That was the part I was not ready for.
“Don’t move. I’m nowhere near done with that.”
He hooked my knees over his shoulders, the right one taking all of me, and got his mouth on my pussy while I was still shuddering.
Two fingers into my cunt, curled, patient. His tongue flat over my clit and then not flat.
There was a number going in my head. It stopped in the middle and did not start again, and I could not have told you afterward what it had been for.
“That’s it,” he said into my pussy. “That’s the sound. Do it again for me.”
I did it again for him. He sucked my clit and held it there and worked his fingers in my cunt until words dropped out of me entirely, until there was nothing left but noise and my hand fisted in his hair, which was not flat on the bench, and which he let me have.
Then his voice came up out of his chest without a person in it.
Not a growl. Under a growl. Under the floor of anything a throat is supposed to do, and I felt it go through my thighs and up into my belly, and I felt him stop dead to get it back. Everything in him went rigid. A count of three, holding still, the whole enormous weight of him locked down over me.
I got my hands into his beard and I did not want him to bother.
He came back. I was sorry that he had.
“Belt,” I said.
“Say it again.”
“Your belt. Now.”
He gave me the belt. I got it open, and the button under it, and his cock came out into my hand hot and heavy and already wet at the head, and his breath went out of him in one long unsteady piece.
“Slow. Down at the base. Just like — yeah, like that.” His hand found the back of my skull. “Now take my cock in your mouth, trouble, and don’t you be polite about it.”
I took him in my mouth. He narrated the whole of it, low and unhurried and filthy, that right hand cradling my head and never once pushing. How deep I had him. How wet. What my tongue was doing under the head of his cock. What it was costing him to stand there and let me do it.
Then his fingers closed on the back of my neck and pulled me off his cock and held me an inch away from it, both of us breathing.
“Not like that. Not the first time today.”
He came up onto the bench between my knees, one hand spread wide across my sternum to hold me flat, and put his cock into me in a single long shove that shut the whole building off.
He stayed deep and started to work.
My nipples had gone hard in the cold before his mouth ever got to them. He took one nipple and then the other, and while he had one nipple between his teeth I understood that I was pinned, and understanding it was the thing that undid me.
I could not lift my shoulders off the wood. He had a hand the size of my whole chest and he was not even leaning on it.
“You’re so tight around my cock you’re shaking,” he said. “That’s the third one already coming up on you. That’s all that is.”
Then he stopped.
“Off the bench. It’s cutting you and I don’t like it.”
I had not noticed the edge cutting me. He had.
He got me down, walked me backward over the cold concrete, and put me on the tarp by the forge, where sparks had freckled the plastic and it gave off that sweet chemical burn.
He came down over me on his knees and his good arm, hooked my legs up over his right forearm, folded me the way he wanted me, and slid his cock back into my cunt.
Slow, this time. All the way out and all the way back. The coals ticked. The fog light lay flat and white across the floor and never reached us.
“There,” he said. “You feel that? All the way up in you.”
I could not answer him. He did not need one.
He got his right thumb down between us onto my clit and kept the same unhurried rhythm going in my pussy while he did it, and my whole body started climbing a wall it could not see the top of.
“Come on my cock, trouble. You’ve done it twice. You’ve got one more in you and I’m going to have it before I’m finished.”
I came the third time with my heels locked at the small of his back and my clit under his thumb and my body gone somewhere it had not consulted me about. The sound that came out of me was not one I knew.
His voice dropped again then, all the way out of human, right against my ear.
He froze. Three, again. Something bear-shaped and savage sitting still inside him with its jaw shut while he waited it out, my nipple dragging on his chest with every breath he was not taking, and I put my mouth on his throat because I wanted him to quit trying so hard.
Then he came in my cunt, deep, holding me down there with the flat of his hand, and he stayed in me a long time afterward.
Nobody explained any of it. Not then, and not after.
?
Forty minutes had gone off the clock when I could read it again.
Afterward he put his flannel shirt over me, which came down past my thighs, and he went and made food I had not asked for and set it on the bench next to my knee. Eggs and half a loaf of bread and the coffee I never drank, hot this time.
“Eat that. I’m not asking you, trouble, I’m telling you what’s happening.”
I ate it. His tape had gone dark at the shoulder and there was a wet line running down under it.
“Your shoulder’s bleeding again.”
“Then it’s bleeding.”
He said it with his mouth full, banking the coals with the rake, one-handed, like the shoulder was weather.
“Tape it.”
“After. Eat that while it’s hot.”
“There’s a whole pack of you out in that yard and not one of them can work a roll of tape.”
He laughed. It got out of him before he could do anything about it, one short sound off the back of his teeth, and he stood there looking like a man who had been robbed in his own shop.
“Eat.”
My hands were steady on the plate. Both of them, dead level, holding a fork like a fork. He looked at them and I looked at them and neither one of us said a word about it.
Then I went and got the phone off the long table and brought it back under the caged bulb, and I opened the second photograph, and for the first time all morning I looked at the whole frame instead of the writing.
Page six hundred four. The paper pressed open flat for the camera, held down at the corner by somebody the picture had not meant to include.
At the bottom corner of the second photograph, holding the page flat, was a woman’s hand, palm open to the camera, and straight across it ran a thin white line I had been looking at on my own hand since I was nine.