Chapter 12 What he thinks she is asking for
The coat was on the bench seat of the flatbed, still in the bag, and had been since Thursday.
Hitch had bought it at the farm store on the Ellery road with a recovery check in his pocket and a woman behind the counter who wanted to know what size, and he had stood there in the aisle and thought about the whole long line of her going up the stairs ahead of him and said, “Tall. Broad through the shoulders. Not skinny.” The woman had come back with a canvas work coat in a dark green, flannel through the body, cuffs that would go over a glove.
Nine days of Danny Rivera’s jacket on that girl and the nights coming down off the snowline earlier every week.
He had not given it to her yet. He kept not doing it. There was no sense in it that he could find, and he had turned the thing over in his hands twice at stoplights like a man reading a torque spec he did not trust.
He came off the grade at ten past eight with an empty deck and pulled in at the end of the shop yard and shut it down, and she came out of the office door before the air had finished going out of the brakes.
That was new. Nine days ago she had waited to be told where to stand.
“Hey,” Maeve said.
“Hey.”
She came across the gravel with her hair pulled back wet and her hands in the pockets of the wrong coat, and he reached over and pushed the bag down out of sight behind the seat, because whatever was coming across that gravel, it was not a night for handing a woman a present.
She got up on the running board and in through the passenger door, and pulled it shut, and sat there.
That was all. She did not say anything else the whole way up the pass, and it took twenty-five minutes, and by the second cattle guard Hitch had it worked out.
Because he knew what a bad day looked like from the inside of a cab.
He had hauled seventeen years of them off that road — people sitting in the passenger seat of his truck with their car on the deck behind them, going quiet in exactly that way, and the quiet was never about the car.
It was the part afterwards, when a person stops holding it and starts feeling it.
The shake comes late. It always comes late.
Thursday the sheriff had stood in that shop doorway with his hat in his hand and said her name off a sheet of county paper. Friday somebody in Ellery had filed the rest of it. Tuesday a man in a pressed shirt had told fifteen people in Ma’s bar that she was sick.
She was frightened. Nine days out of a life and a paper trail coming up the pass after her, and the girl was sitting in his truck in the dark scared out of her wits and too proud to put a word to it.
He knew what to do with that. It was, near enough, the only thing he had ever known what to do with.
He did not push it. He put his hand on her knee at the top of the switchbacks and left it there, heavy and flat, and felt her breathe out about an inch, and took the last four miles slow enough that the jake did not have to come on.
The porch light was burning when they came onto the bench.
It was always burning. The yard came up around them in the headlights — the winch drum on its stand, the two engine blocks on their pallets, the trailer with its tongue up on the block of wood, all of it holding the day’s heat and giving it off into the dark.
Inside he got the stove going and she stood by the table with her arms crossed, not sitting down in the one chair.
“Eat?”
“I ate at the counter.”
“Mm.” He shut the stove door on the kindling and stayed down on his heels a second, listening to it take. “There’s beer.”
“No.”
He stood up. She was looking at the window, which had nothing in it but the porch light and the black beyond the porch light, and her jaw was set the way it had been set in the bar the night she stood up, and he watched her open her mouth and not use it.
“Say it,” Hitch said.
“It’s nothing.”
“You’ve been chewing on nothing since the yard.”
She got as far as, “Today I —” and then it went out of her, the whole sentence, the way a fuel line goes.
She shut her eyes. When she opened them again something had changed in her face and he read it the way he had been reading gauges since he was nineteen, and what he read was: I do not want to talk about it, I want to not be in it for an hour.
He could do that. God knew he could do that.
He crossed the boards and took her face in his hands.
“Hey.”
“Hitch —”
“Nobody’s getting near you.” Low, right into her, his good side turned so he had the whole of her. “Not the sheriff, not that man in his shirt, not a soul in Ellery County with a sheet of paper. It’s handled. You hear me? It is handled.”
And she made a sound — half a breath, half a laugh with nothing in it — and put her forehead against his collarbone, and her hands came up and got two fistfuls of his shirt at the ribs and pulled.
He took that for his answer. He had been taking things like that for answers all his life, and he had never once been wrong about a load strap.
“Yes or no,” he said anyway.
“Yes.”
“Out loud, the whole thing. Same as up here.” He put his thumb on the point of her chin and tipped it up. “I’m not doing this to a woman who’s had a fright.”
“I want it.” Her eyes came up and they were perfectly clear and perfectly steady and she meant every word. “I want you. Now. Yes. Don’t be careful with me tonight.”
So he wasn’t.
There was none of Tuesday in it. Tuesday he had taken an hour to get her shirt off and made her say every step of it out loud, and tonight he got her back against the kitchen table with his hand fisted in her wet hair and did not ask her anything at all, and she came up off her heels to meet him.
The good light jumped on its bracket when her hip caught the leg.
Her jacket went on the boards. His shirt went somewhere.
She got one boot off and he did not wait for the other one.
He put his hand on her cunt and found her slick and open to his fingers, further along than he had any right to expect, and he heard the noise she made go up out of her throat and break.
“Still yes?”
“Yes.” Ragged. “Yes — go on.”
He turned her. She went, easily, and put her own hands flat on the table on either side of the good light, and he got his forearm braced across her front so the edge of that table did not cut into her.
He freed his cock, rolled the condom on one-handed, lined up, and drove into her cunt on one hard thrust, the wet heat of her gripping him tight, one boot still on the boards under him.
Then it stopped being anything with words in it.
That went on a long while — the two of them going at each other in a one-room house nine miles from the nearest light, the stove ticking as it came up, the table walking a half inch on the boards and walking back, her breath and his and nothing else in it.
He had spent Tuesday night asking permission for every inch of it, a step at a time.
He did not have to tonight — she had said the whole of it herself, standing up, before he laid a hand on her — and he took that for the same thing they had had on Tuesday, only easier, the way a man takes a bolt that goes in without fighting him for a bolt that is seated right.
He fucked her hard and fast over the table edge, deep as he could get and not careful about it, the wet sound of it under the stove’s tick, her hands flat and spread, his forearm holding her clear of the wood.
He got his mouth down to her ear — her right, the side she had promised him — and said it.
“Mine.”
Her hands slid out flat on the table. “Yes.”
“Again.”
“Yes.”
“Mine.” Slow, and drawled, and his mouth still at her ear. “This wet pussy of yours. Mine.”
Her hands shut on the table edge.
“Nobody reaches you.” He did not know the voice he said it in. “Not the sheriff, not the paper, not a man in this county. It all comes through me now. Every bit of it.”
“Yes —”
And there it was, and he had it in his two hands, and he went through the rest of it with something like triumph coming up his spine — because she had said it, out loud, in her own voice, the way she said everything now.
She had stood up in a bar and finished the sentence and this was the same woman saying the same kind of yes, and a man could build a life on that.
He kept fucking her through it, steady and hard, her body jolting under his forearm with every drive.
He stopped, and his cock slid free, and he turned her around and got her up onto the edge of the table, because he wanted her face for the last of it and had wanted it since the yard, and pushed back into her as he lifted her, settling deep again.
“Good?”
“Don’t stop. Don’t you stop.”
He didn’t. He got both arms under her and finished it like that, watching her, driving up into her while she clung to him, and when she went she took all her weight off the table and onto him and put her mouth into his shoulder to keep the sound in, cunt clenching around him, and it took him with her — his hand flat on the back of her head, holding her there, and every muscle in his back locked.
After, he carried her the six feet to the bed, because it was six feet and because he could. He put her down on the hard flat blanket and got in behind her and pulled the whole weight of it up over the both of them, and she turned into him without opening her eyes and put her cheek on his chest.
“You’re all right,” Hitch said, to the top of her head. “You’re all right.”
She did not say anything. He took that for asleep.
He lay on his back afterwards with his arm gone dead under her and the stove ticking down and did not sleep.
He was not used to being pleased with himself. It was not a thing he had any practice at, and it sat warm and unfamiliar in his chest at one in the morning, and he went over the week the way he went over a truck he had just put back on its wheels — start at the front, work back, touch every point.
The watch on Verlon: Breaker’s, set Saturday night and not queried since, two men on rotation, and nobody in that town would get a vehicle onto Highway 12 westbound after dark without it being known in Coldwater inside the hour.
The rest of it went by him the same way, each piece sound on its own: her phones, the counter at Ellery, a man on the bench by the roll-up every morning at six.
Her Tuesday close-out taken off her — he had heard about that at the Spoke and had thought, good, because a woman on Main Street at eleven at night with the street empty was the one hole in the whole arrangement, and Breaker had seen it and shut it without anybody having to ask.
The room over the shop: Vault had wanted her rent out of her wages and Hitch had said no, in front of him, in the yard, and told him to put it against the deck work Hitch owed him for and to say nothing to her about it, and Vault had looked at him for a second and nodded, because Vault never needed anything said twice.
Her boots. Somebody had cleaned her boots.
Hitch did not know who and it did not matter, and lying there in the dark he found that it pleased him about as much as anything had in twenty years — that a woman could come into this town with a knife and a ruined dress and by the ninth night there was not one thing left in the world for her to carry.
He turned his head on the pillow. The porch light came through the window in one long bar and laid itself across the blanket and the shape of her under it, and he thought: she came out of that office door before I’d got the brakes off.
She had come down the steps without being asked.
She had gotten up into his truck and sat there and let the mountain take the day off her, and she had said I want you out loud in her own words in his kitchen.
A week ago she had not been able to finish a sentence in a room. Look at her now.
She shifted against him, and for a second he thought she had said something — there was a sound, small, down against his ribs, a word maybe, in the dark, on his left side where he could hear anything in the world she wanted to say to him.
He waited.
Nothing came after it. Just her breathing going long and even, and the stove clicking as the iron let go of the last of its heat, and the dark outside the one window starting ten feet out and not stopping.
Asleep, then. He let the arm stay dead.
Tomorrow he would give her the coat. He had it worked out now — he would leave it on the seat and let her find it, because handing it over would make a thing of it, and there was no sense in making a thing of it.
Hitch shut his eyes with his hand spread flat and heavy on her back and went to sleep certain, for the first time in his adult life, that he had gotten out in front of something before it went off the road.