Chapter 3 — The Engine Room Agreement
Ruiz found her midmorning with a rag already in his fist.
She was in the galley helping Nia pick weevils out of the flour, which was not a real job so much as Nia’s way of keeping her in sight.
The yellow dress had been rinsed in a bucket and hung and put back on still damp at the seams.
It clung. Nia had looked at that cling once, said “hm,” and handed her a sieve.
Ruiz filled the hatch. Engine grease on his forearms. A smear of it on his throat where he had wiped sweat with the wrong part of his wrist. He nodded at Nia like a man borrowing a socket.
“Valve’s being a bitch,” he said. “Need a second pair of hands. Hers’ll do.”
Nia did not look up from the flour. “Don’t get it in the meal.”
“Wouldn’t dream.”
Mara followed him down.
The engine room was a throat. Heat came off the block in sheets.
The air tasted like hot metal and old diesel and the particular sweetness of oil baked into paint.
The grate underfoot was warm enough to feel through her sandals.
Everything hummed at a pitch that lived in the teeth.
You could have screamed and the *Merrily* would have swallowed it and asked for a heading.
Ruiz shut the dog on the hatch. Not locked. Closed enough.
“Cole passed the word,” he said, cheerful as the wrench in his back pocket. He was already looking at her mouth. “Said you put his hand on it. Said you’re available. That still true, Mrs. Harlan, or am I about to make an ass of myself in front of a valve that works fine?”
“Mara.”
“Mara.” He grinned, and the grin had oil in it. “On your knees, Mara. Grate’s warm. Watch the edge.”
Cole’s rule, arriving in another man’s mouth.
She went down. The steel bit a grid into her shins and then the heat of it sank in and became part of the pulse.
Ruiz stood over her and unbuckled with the unceremonious speed of a man on a short break.
His cock was already thick, darker than the rest of him, a bead at the slit that she tasted before she thought about tasting it.
“That’s it.” He gathered her hair in the greasy hand. “Sloppy. I don’t want pretty. Pretty’s what he gets.”
She opened and took him.
He was salt and skin and a little soap that had lost the fight with the engine.
She worked him with her mouth and both hands the way she had never worked Elias, because Elias went still and grateful and finished like a man saying grace.
Ruiz fucked her throat on the second stroke and held her there while the block roared and her eyes ran and spit sheeted off her chin onto the grate in long clear strings.
When he let her have air it came in a raw gulp that the engine covered completely. Then he put her back on it.
“Look at you.” Fond, almost. “Captain’s courtesy dripping on my deck. Swallow when you can. Drool when you can’t. I like both.”
She drooled. It ran down her neck and into the yellow neckline and made a dark coin between her breasts.
He used her hair as a handle and set a pace that was all engine-room: short, hard, timed to nothing but how much she could take before she gagged, and then one more than that.
Her lipstick—what was left of yesterday—smeared his shaft.
She could feel her own spit cooling on her chest. The grid printed deeper into her knees.
A clang from forward. Boots on the ladder that was not this ladder. Ruiz did not stop. He glanced at the hatch, then back down at her, and smiled with all his teeth.
“If that’s him, you keep your mouth full and I talk about the valve,” he said. “If it’s Cole, he can watch. If it’s the boys, they can wait their turn like Christians.”
It was nobody. The boots receded. Ruiz let out a breath that was almost a laugh and pushed to the back of her throat and stayed, throbbing, while she made the helpless wet sounds the engine turned into more engine.
He pulled out long enough to slap the wet head against her tongue, her cheek, her other cheek. Spit connected her to him in a shining thread that broke and fell on her tits.
“Open. Tongue out. I want to see what I’m buying.”
She did it. He looked at that for a second with a focus Elias had only ever given to current, then fed himself back into her and used her in earnest.
Both hands in her hair now. Her nails on his thighs.
The yellow dress rucked off one shoulder.
She was a mess on purpose and the mess kept making itself: spit, mascara, the leak she could feel between her legs standing a small puddle on the grate that had nothing to do with his mouth and everything to do with his cock hitting the same raw place in her throat over and over.
“I’m going to come on your face,” he told her, conversational, like a man naming a tool. “You’re going to wear it up to him. He’ll think it’s the work. He thinks everything is the work or the weather. You ready?”
She tried to nod. He was too deep for nodding. He took it as yes.
He hauled out, fist tight, and came across her mouth first, a thick stripe she felt land hot on her tongue and her upper lip.
The second pulse hit her cheek and her eye and she flinched and he said “easy” and kept stroking, painting her forehead, the bridge of her nose, a last slow drip that he smeared onto her lips with the head of his cock like a signature.
She swallowed what had made it in. The rest sat on her skin in heavy white that the heat of the room would not let dry.
Ruiz looked at his work the way he looked at a finished weld.
“Hold still.”
He took the rag from his fist—the one he had brought up to the galley, already dark with something honest—and wiped her.
Not kind and not cruel. Maintenance. He dragged it over her eyelids, her mouth, down her throat, into the coin of spit between her breasts.
It spread more than it cleaned. When he was done she still shone in the places a rag does not bother with.
He folded the rag once and shoved it in his back pocket like any other used thing.
“Up.”
She stood on printed knees. The room tilted, or she did. He tucked himself away and became, in two motions, the engineer again: wrench, glance at a gauge that did not need glancing at, a tap on a pipe that rang true.
“Valve’s fine,” he said. “Always was. You can tell him I needed the extra hands if he asks, which he won’t.”
He reached out and thumbed a missed streak at the corner of her hairline, then pushed that thumb into her hair and left it.
“That’s for later. Don’t pick at it. I want the boys to see I was here.”
“Is that a rule too?”
“Cole can have rules. I just make a mess and clock back in.” He popped the dog on the hatch. Heat rolled out into the cooler passage. “You coming up, courtesy?”
She went up.
Daylight was a slap. The deck smelled like salt and Nia’s onions instead of oil. Mara walked into it with her mouth swollen and her hair stiff at the temple where Ruiz had put his claim, and the first face she found was her husband’s.
Elias had come down from the wheel with two mugs and the expression he wore when the sea had done something privately wonderful.
“There she is. You been below? You’re all pink. I keep telling you the air down there isn’t fit. Come here—no, look at you, you’ve got grease in your hair like a proper hand.”
He laughed, delighted, and tried to thumb it the way Ruiz had, except Elias’s thumb was clean and he only succeeded in working the smear further in.
“Nia’s going to murder whoever put you in the engine room. Was it Ruiz? I’ll speak to him. He’s a good man but he forgets not everybody was born next to a crankcase.”
“He needed hands,” Mara said.
“Of course he did. Always something. That’s a boat.”
Elias handed her the second mug, kissed the air beside the streak, and missed the smell of what was in her hair by a country mile.
“See, though? Color in your cheeks. I said the sea air would do it. You were peaked when we left the harbor. I worried. I did. A man worries when his girl looks like the land still has her.”
He clinked his mug against hers. “Not anymore. Look at you. Alive.”
“I’m alive.”
“That’s my girl.” He squinted past her at a change in the water that was, to him, a whole novel.
“I should get back. She’s doing a thing with the swell I don’t want to miss. You stay topside. Let that engine stink blow off you. Wear it out of your hair before supper or Lila will think I run a junker.”
He went up the ladder two at a time, humming.
Mara stood with the mug and the sun and Ruiz’s come drying to a crust she could feel when the wind lifted that piece of hair.
Ben crossed the deck with a hose, saw her, saw the hair, and performed the complicated face of a man filing information for later.
Tate did not look at her face at all. He looked at her knees, at the grid still faintly there, and then at the hose as if the hose had become very interesting.
Lila passed, stopped, leaned in as if to check a cleat near Mara’s hip.
“Engine room,” Lila said, not a question.
“Valve.”
“Mm.” Lila’s mouth did the almost-smile from yesterday.
“You’re going to want to rinse your lashes before he tries to be tender at supper. He won’t see it. I will, and I don’t need the picture.”
She flicked a glance at Mara’s throat, professional.
“Unless you want the picture on purpose. Then leave it.”
Mara left it.
The afternoon unspooled in ordinary work she was not needed for.
She peeled what Nia gave her. She stood her rail.
Twice she went to the head and locked herself in and pushed two fingers into the slick the engine room had left her with and came standing up, biting the meat of her own hand, Ruiz’s crust still in her hair like a secret the mirror kept trying to show her.
The second time, someone tried the door, waited, walked off. She did not ask who.
At supper Elias told the table about the swell.
He did the voices. He passed the bread to Ruiz and thanked him for keeping the old girl honest below, and Ruiz said “anytime, Cap,” with his eyes on Mara’s mouth, and Elias beamed like a man whose crew and whose wife and whose engine were all in love with him in the correct amounts.
Under the table, no boot this time. Cole’s knee found hers and stayed, a quiet ownership that did not trouble itself with romance. When she looked at him he looked back, unhurried, and dropped his gaze to her hairline, to the place the rag had missed, and nodded once as if a log had been updated.
After dishes Elias took the twilight watch because twilight was when she told him the truth. Mara went to their cabin alone.
She stood in the coin of the porthole and took the dress off and hung it on the same hook.
In the little mirror the engine room was still on her: swollen mouth, pink lids, a pale flake at the root of a curl that would be gone by morning if she washed and would not be gone if she didn’t.
She washed her face. She left the flake.
She lay down naked on top of the blanket again.
Then she got up and turned the lock on the cabin door until it clicked the other way.
Open. The small brass tongue pulled back into the plate.
Anyone who tried the handle would find a wife and a sleeping captain and a door that had decided to stop being a door.
She got back in the bunk.
Elias came smelling like the wheel and cold coffee and that particular happiness that had nothing to do with her body. He moved through the dark, found her, tucked up behind her, put his hand on her stomach in the same unused place.
“You left the door,” he murmured, already falling.
“Did I.”
“Mm. I’ll get it.”
“Leave it,” she said. “It’s a small boat. Nothing’s going to happen that hasn’t already.”
He laughed into her hair, a warm helpless sound, and kissed the back of her head. “That’s my girl. Trust the ship. I do. I trust every board.” His hand did not travel. His breath went long. Salt and satisfaction. “Beautiful run,” he told the dark, or the sea, or her. “I can feel it.”
Mara looked at the door.
It sat there in the gloom, unlatched, a black rectangle that might as well have been a mouth. Forward, the engine kept its note. A hatch opened and shut. Boots paused in the passage outside their cabin, long enough to test the handle without turning it, long enough to understand, and then went on.
She put her husband’s sleeping hand more firmly on her hip, over the bruise Cole had given her and Ruiz had not been told not to see, and she left it there like a courtesy of her own.
The *Merrily* carried them. The lock stayed off. The men, who now had a word and a flake of proof and a door that would not argue, went about the business of a night watch.
Mara closed her eyes and did not sleep, not for a long time, and when she did it was with a pulse between her legs that kept time with the engine, steady, available, waiting on whoever came through first.
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