Chapter 18 Ask me for something #2
“Lie down,” Hitch said, and his voice had gone to gravel.
He did exactly what she had asked for and not one thing more.
He was unhurried about it in the way he was unhurried about everything that mattered, the way a man goes back over a fitting twice because twice is right, his tongue working slow and thorough between her spread thighs, tasting the wet he had not had to coax out of her, working her clit in flat steady passes until she opened for him, and somewhere in the middle of it he stopped long enough to say still yes?
against her, and she said yes in full words because that was the deal she had made with herself, and then she stopped being able to say anything at all and went off with both hands shut in his hair and her heel on his back, cunt pulsing slick around nothing.
When she could talk again she got her breath and said, “Good?”
And Hitch — forty-five years old, three counties deep, the man Deacon called at four in the morning — could not answer her.
That was the moment. Not the rest of it. That.
“Come here,” she said. “I want you in me. And I want to be the one doing it.”
He lay back and she heard him tear the foil and get the condom on in the dark, no fuss about it, and then she was up over him with her hands braced on his chest and the orange bars of the streetlight going across both of them, and she took his cock at exactly the pace she chose, which was slow, sinking down onto him inch by inch until her cunt was full of him, and stayed slow long past the point where his hands closed on her hips and opened again, deliberately, because he had promised her without saying so that he was not going to move her.
“Maeve.”
“I know.” She got her mouth down to his good ear. “Mine.”
He made a sound like something giving way.
“Ask me,” she said.
“Turn you over.” Ragged. “Let me —”
“Yes.”
He did, and after that neither of them was careful, and it was hard and it was face-to-face and he said her name over and over and she said things out loud in that room she would not have believed she had in her — harder, and like that, and deeper, right there — and got every inch of exactly what she asked for and not one thing she had not, and when it took her the second time she shook apart under him with her eyes open on his, clenched tight around him, and he went right after her with his forehead down on her collarbone and her name coming out of him in pieces.
After, he got his arm under her and left it there until it went dead and did not mention it. Her key sat on the windowsill where she could see it from the bed.
“Ask me for something,” she said, into his shoulder. “Now it’s your turn.”
A long breath went out of him.
“Stay up here,” Hitch said. “In this town. Where I am.”
“That’s not asking, that’s what I already decided.”
“I know.” She felt him almost laugh. “I wanted it out loud anyway.”
The radiator knocked twice, and came up warm, and neither of them moved for it.
By Sunday lunchtime the story had been around Verlon and Ellery twice and come back with the corners worn off it, which in a county this size takes about eighteen hours and one bar with a phone in it.
The shape of it was not complicated: a girl had stood up in a church hall in front of two hundred people and said where a stolen ring was, and it turned out to be in a dish on a dresser at Fourteen Kerr Street, and her mother had sat there in the fourth row and not got up.
That was all anybody needed. Ellery took the complaint off the system on the Monday and nobody at that counter made a single phone call to check, because the man who would have had to be rung was the one it was about, and in a place like this the whole machine runs on being willing to do a Bidwell a small favor, and by Sunday there was nobody left in either town with the appetite.
The rotation came back in November, off a form, with no reason on that one either.
Hitch put the letter on the kitchen table and said nothing about it at all, and Maeve read it twice and said she was glad, and that was the extent of the conversation, and neither of them ever found out whose hand it was.
The Broken Spoke on the Sunday evening had the chairs down and the neon on with its dead letter buzzing pink into a lot going blue, and the Kings were racking the balls under the swinging light, and Torch was arguing about a shot that had not been taken yet.
Maeve came in the front on her own. She had worked the counter at the Ember and she had her own money in her pocket and her hair pushed up off her neck.
Loretta Hale set a glass on the mahogany without being asked, and then one for herself. Then, after a moment, a third, next to the two already standing there, and slid that one along with one finger to the place at the bar where nobody had been sitting.
“He’s parking the truck,” Maeve said.
“I know where he is.” Ma did not look up from the crate she was counting down. “That place is yours. It’s been yours since about the second week.”
Across the room, Danny Rivera missed an easy shot and went dark red under the ears about it, and Vault said nine words, and Ridge laughed once, which from Ridge was an ovation.
“I’m staying,” Maeve said.
The bar did not go quiet. It was not that sort of room and she had not said it for the room.
“I’ve got the counter Monday through Friday and Saturday mornings and I pay fifty-five a week on Toole Street and I’m on my own lease. Nobody’s carrying me. I want that said in here, out loud, once, so it’s in the building.”
Loretta put the pen behind her ear and looked at her for a long moment, which was about as long as Pearl at the Lariat had looked at her on the Wednesday, and about as long as anybody in this valley ever needed.
“It’s in the building,” she said. “Sit down, Maeve Purnell. You’re blocking my door.”