2. The Rationing #2
I killed the last of the bourbon and let it burn its way down slow.
Made my decision right there, glass still tipped against my lips.
I was gon' give Madeline everything she came for.
Gon' have her speaking every language her body knew until the words ran out, until she forgot every man who ever came before me, until she was left in some kind of glow she wouldn't know how to explain to her girls come Monday morning.
She wanted my heart, sure. But she wanted this dick too, and she was gon' get that first. I could do that.
"Careful what you wish for, Miss DuBois." I slowly pulled my bottom lip through my teeth, as she watched me do it. "I’ll have to call my masseuse and have her come by so you can dedicate all of tomorrow to recovery. I’ll order you an IV, too, to replenish everything I’m gonna coax from you."
She smiled at me, so devious and dangerous, my dick twitched in my pants.
"Promise?" Her fingers found the stem of her glass, like she needed something to hold on to instead of jumping my bones right then and there.
I leaned in, close enough to feel her breathing change. "Be patient for me," I said against her ear. "You'll find out when I say you're ready, and not one second before."
Her eyes dropped to my mouth and stayed there a moment too long before she caught herself and dragged them back up.
"Cress!" she called out. "Two more, please."
"I'm really enjoying this time with you, Dillion." Madeline smiled up at me, chin on my shoulder, the French 75 held loose in her fingers, drink number three or four, as La Vie en rose by Grace Jones played in the background.
“I’m having a good time with you, too,” I said, meaning it.
It felt good to be free enough to admit it, to say it without overthinking what it meant or what came next.
"Do you have a nickname?"
Ducky. Dilly Duck.
"Nah," I quickly answered, taking a sip to drown out the voice in my head. "Dillion. Straight to the point."
"Such a good name.” She smiled at me with stars in her eyes, “Unusual too. Fits you."
"Ought to. It had two test runs before me to work all the kinks out.”
She laughed into her glass. "And they worked all the kinks out?"
"They worked out the kinks in the name." I took another sip. "Rest of the kinks are original to this model."
"Oh, is that right?" She pulled her chin off my shoulder to look at me properly, delighted, one eyebrow up. "Tell me about these kinks."
"There's quirks." I chuckled. Woman didn't miss a thing.
"Mm, no, you said kinks. I heard kinks. Cress heard kinks."
"Cress is a professional. Cress hears nothing."
Down the rail, Cress polished a glass with the studied deafness of a man who'd been paid in tips for years to hear nothing, though the corner of his mouth gave him away anyway.
"Well, whatever other kinks…" her finger circled the rim of her glass, "that you may need to work out, I'm open to that."
I smiled. "Madeline Dubois. Such a bad girl underneath all that etiquette schooling, huh?"
"A very kinky girl," she smirked.
I let that sit as my eyes roamed her, clocking all the ways I could make up for denying her.
She was still watching me with that eyebrow up, the breeze pulling loose that one strand and laying it across her cheek like even the wind was flirting with her tonight.
I reached over and tucked it back behind her ear, and this time I didn't pull my hand back on schedule.
Let my fingers stay along her jaw. Let her lean her cheek into them, one degree, like a plant finding a window of sunshine.
"Madeline fits you too," I said. "Takes its time getting said.
Three syllables, no shortcuts, lands soft at the end.
It's a name that makes people slow down in the middle of a sentence, and I'd bet money you've watched it happen your whole life.
Some man starting to talk fast and confident, and then he hits your name and it gentles him down whether he planned on it or not. "
She looked at me like I was the man of her dreams. I'd have reached for something better if something better existed, a more modern way to say it, but sitting inside that look I understood why people had been wearing the phrase out for a hundred years.
Because that's what it was. Dream-like. She was looking at me like something she'd been describing to girlfriends for years without knowing my name yet.
And some part of me, starved enough to take what was offered, started to believe I could be.
I'd been looked at plenty of ways. Hungry, curious, strategic.
This wasn't any of those. This was a woman starting to build something with my name on the deed, letting me watch her do it, and I stood in the light of that look and felt myself reaching for the man she was seeing.
Trying him on like a jacket in my size I'd walked past in a window a hundred times. He fit better than I expected.
"My grandmother named me," she said, real soft.
"Mine would've liked that," I said, and caught myself glancing down at the gardenia without having ordered my eyes anywhere.
When I looked back up she was closer. I hadn't seen her move, but now her eyes dropped to my mouth with no apology and I leaned in to meet her, right there on Harbor Street, in front of Cress and every soul on this island who knew my mother's phone number.
Suddenly, the sky went white, everything on the deck jumping out in silver like a photograph being taken of us, and the thunder roared down on top of it, no gap, no count the seconds.
There was just one low roll across the whole sky at once, end to end, close enough to feel in the rail shake under my hand.
Madeline froze less than an inch from my face, her eyes cut sideways at the sky.
"These summer storms," I said, watching it come. "They don't ask permission."
The clouds began to come in low and mean over the harbor, pulling a wall of gray-blue behind them like something dragging its own shadow.
The sunset was still trying to hold its ground, pink and orange, bleeding out across the water in a last stubborn stretch of light.
For a minute the whole harbor looked like it was on fire and drowning at the same time.
"Ugh, and it's been so nice all week." Madeline pouted at the sky.
Somewhere in the back of me, in the part raised by a woman who read weather and scripture with the same eye, a thought started forming about timing. About what kind of sky performs gold and rose for you all evening and then clears its throat in the one second it counts.
I didn't finish it. I looked out past the rail instead.
The clouds coming in from the southeast were the color of a cast iron skillet left on a high flame too long, dark and heavy, moving with purpose.
It had been nice all week, which was unusual for summertime in Florida. I'd been thinking of that as luck.
"Should we go?"
"Yeah." I finished what was left of the bourbon, set the glass down, and left Cress what he was owed plus what he deserved. He gathered the bills with a nod that managed to say good night, good luck, and I saw nothing all in one economical motion. "But I need to make a stop first."
"A stop?" She was already up. "The sky is about to open up on us."
"It'll keep." I put my hand at the small of her back and steered us toward the stairs, past the tables emptying out, everybody on the deck suddenly remembering somewhere else they needed to be. "Five minutes. You'll want what's in it more than you want to stay dry."
She laughed and let herself be steered, and we came down onto Harbor Street just as the wind arrived off the water, carrying that smell every kid raised in this county knows means run home, now.
We didn't run, because she had every confidence in the sky keeping its word the way I'd said it would. Her hand found mine, and I took my time down the middle of the strip like the sky and I had an understanding. It could wait. Whatever was coming could wait.
That's what I thought then, anyway.