Chapter 4 — Two at Watch
They came for her between watches, which was the only hour on a boat this size that belonged to nobody.
Mara had gone forward with a stack of Nia’s towels because Nia had put the stack in her arms and pointed with her chin and said, “Fo’c’sle. Don’t make a religion of it.”
The fo’c’sle was bunks and damp wool and the timer on the bulkhead that clicked every half hour so men who slept in shifts did not sleep through the next one.
The porthole in there was the size of a fist. Light came through it dirty.
Ben was already on the lower bunk with his boots off and his shirt open, smoking the cigarette he had worn behind his ear since harbor. Tate stood in the aisle that was not an aisle, filling it. They looked at the towels. They looked at her.
“Cole said,” Ben offered, as if that were a greeting.
“I know what Cole said.”
Tate’s mouth ticked. He was the quieter one, the one who had watched her ankles when the crate swung. “Timer’s got twenty minutes. Then Ruiz comes off the engine and wants his bunk. You staying or are the towels the whole show?”
Mara set the towels on the top bunk. She pulled the yellow dress over her head and dropped it on the towels.
Nothing under it. The bruise on her hip had gone from Cole’s fingerprint to a blotch the color of old wine.
Ruiz’s flake was gone from her hair; the memory of the grate was still on her knees.
Ben said, “Jesus.” Not reverent. Hungry and a little scared, which on a boy his age was the same thing.
Tate reached behind her and thumbed the timer to give them the full thirty, then hooked two fingers in the waist of his work pants.
“Mouth,” he said to Ben, mild. “I’ll start in her. We switch when it clicks. She gets loud, we deal with it. Cap’s on the wheel but sound carries forward if you’re stupid.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Then don’t be.”
They put her on the lower bunk on her back first, then thought better of the space and pulled her down so her head hung off the end and her hips were at the other.
Tate shoved her knees apart with the matter-of-factness of a man opening a crate he had already signed for.
He spat on his hand, found her wet enough that the spit was theater, and pushed into her in one long slide that punched the air out of her in a sound she did not mean to give them.
“There,” Tate said, and it was almost kind. “That’s the noise. Save it.”
Ben took her head in both hands and fed her his cock before she had the breath back.
He was slimmer than Ruiz, cleaner, shaking a little at the start, and then not shaking once she opened for him and he felt the back of her throat.
He swore, soft, and started using her mouth in short nervous strokes that got surer every time she didn’t bite.
The bunk was too small for three people and exactly the right size for what they were doing.
Tate held her hips off the ticking mattress and fucked her in a steady driving rhythm that made the frame knock the bulkhead.
Ben held her skull and watched her eyes water around him.
Spit ran from the corner of her mouth into her hair.
She was dripping onto the blanket already, a dark spreading map Tate kept pushing her down into.
The timer on the bulkhead ticked, indifferent.
Mara tried to be quiet and failed in little punched breaths every time Tate bottomed out. Ben pulled off her lips with a wet pop.
“She’s going to get us caught.”
Tate didn’t slow. “Sock. Mine. Right pocket.”
Ben found it, a wool thing that had been a watch-sock yesterday, and pushed it between her teeth.
The taste was foot and salt and laundry that had given up.
Mara bit down on it and the next sound Tate dragged out of her died in the wool.
Ben looked at that—his captain’s wife gagged on a deckhand’s sock, tits shaking, cunt stretched around his friend’s cock—and the last of the scared went out of his face.
He put himself back in her mouth beside the sock, which didn’t work, then yanked the sock down onto her tongue and used the wet hole he had made. “Fuck. Tate. Fuck.”
“I know.” Tate’s voice had gone thin. He hooked her knees higher and changed the angle and Mara’s whole body seized.
The bunk shrieked. He clapped a hand over the sock and her mouth together and fucked her through the clench while she soaked his stomach and the blanket and, when he pulled back to look, his wrists.
The timer clicked.
They switched without a meeting. Tate pulled out of her dripping and trailing; Ben scrambled down the bunk and shoved in while she was still pulsing, a sloppy easy slide into a cunt that had just come and had not closed.
Tate stood over her face, cock shining with her, and wiped the head across her lips, across the sock, then pulled the wool out and replaced it with himself.
“Clean it,” he said.
She did. She could taste herself on him, and the engine room still, and Ben’s soap.
Tate held her jaw and used her throat the way Ruiz had taught her yesterday she could be used, except Tate watched her do it like he was learning a hitch.
When she gagged he groaned and gave her a second and then put her back on it.
Footsteps in the passage.
All three of them froze the way she and Cole had frozen in the chart room, except this time she was full at both ends and the sock was in Tate’s fist and her own spit was a string from her lip to his cock. The footsteps stopped at the fo’c’sle curtain. A hand. The canvas moved an inch.
Nia’s face. Flour on her cheekbone. She took in the scene the way she took in a boiling pot: heat, timing, whether anything was about to ruin the linen.
Mara, impaled, stared at her over Ben’s hip.
Nia’s eyes flicked to the towels on the top bunk, to the yellow dress, to the spreading wet on the lower blanket.
“Don’t drip on the clean linens,” she said.
Then she reached past Tate’s shoulder, snagged a spare apron off the hook, and let the curtain fall. Her footsteps went aft, unhurried. A pan lid in the galley. Ordinary life, resuming.
Ben made a noise that was half laugh and half prayer and started fucking her again like the interruption had been an order. Tate pushed back into her mouth and held her there, throbbing, while he watched the curtain as if Nia might change her mind and come back for a better look.
“She’s going to tell Lila,” Ben panted.
“Lila already knows.” Tate’s hand fisted in Mara’s hair. “Everybody knows except the man driving the boat. That’s the joke. Now come or get off her, we’ve got eight minutes.”
Ben came first, sudden, buried, a wounded sound he bit off on her shoulder.
He stayed in her through it, twitching, then pulled out in a rush that spilled down her ass onto the blanket Nia had just named.
Tate hauled out of her mouth, dragged her upright by the hair so she was sitting on the edge of the bunk, and striped her tits in four thick ropes that landed hot and hung there, dripping off her nipples onto her belly.
He milked the last onto her collarbone with his thumb, breathing like he’d run a deck.
They looked at her.
Mara sat in the wreck of the lower bunk with come on her chest and Ben’s still leaking out of her and the sock in the sheets and her mouth a ruin. The timer clicked toward Ruiz. She could hear, faint through the hull, her husband laughing at weather.
Ben, gentler after, tried to thumb a streak off her nipple and only smeared it into a wider shine. “We should—she can’t go up like that.”
“She can go up however she wants,” Tate said. He found the sock, considered it, and tossed it in the corner. “Courtesy doesn’t get a wipe-down unless she asks. You asking, Mara?”
“No.”
“There.” He tucked himself away. Ben, after a second, did the same.
They left her on the bunk the way you leave a tool on a bench you are coming back to: obvious, used, not put away.
Tate twitched the curtain. “Ruiz’ll want his rack. You might want to be gone or you might want to be the first thing he sees. Your watch.”
They went out.
Mara sat for one more tick of the timer.
Then she stood. The come on her tits had started to cool and tighten.
She pulled the yellow dress over it anyway and felt the cotton glue itself to the mess in maps Cole would be able to read from across a deck.
She left the towels. She left the blanket.
She walked out into the passage on legs that had a new argument with the floor.
The light topside was the hard white of a clean morning that had kept going. Elias was in the wheelhouse window. He saw her, lit up, and cranked the glass down to shout across twenty feet of working deck as if they were the only two people alive.
“Mara! Look at that sky. You see the high stuff coming in? That’s a gift. That’s a gift and she knows it. Come up when you can. I want you to feel this heading.”
She lifted a hand. The dress stuck to her when the wind hit it.
From the wheelhouse he could not see the shine at her neckline or the way her mouth was swollen or the dark at the hem where Ben had run down her thigh.
He saw his wife on his beautiful boat under his beautiful sky, and he waved like a boy.
“A gift,” he shouted again, and laughed, and turned back to the sea before the laugh was done.
Mara crossed the deck. Lila, at the rail with a length of line, looked at the maps on the yellow cotton and then at Mara’s face and then went on whipping the line, which was Lila’s version of a blessing.
Nia, in the galley hatch, held out a mug and did not look at the dress.
“Linens are in the port locker if you decide to be civilized,” she said. “If you don’t, stay off my prep table until you’ve dripped out.”
“I’m going to the rail.”
“Of course you are.” Nia’s mouth twitched. “Ruiz is off in four minutes. He sleeps like a dead man unless there’s a woman in his bunk. You want him, you already know the way. You want air, take the air. I’m out of advice that isn’t about flour.”
Mara took the coffee and the air.
She stood at her rail and felt them cooling on her skin under the dress: Tate’s stripes, Ben’s leak, the bruise, the grid, the unlocked cabin waiting for night.
Forward, the fo’c’sle curtain breathed. The timer would click.
Ruiz would come off the engine and find the blanket and know the boys had been there first, and he would either be amused or he would come find her, and either way the word Cole had given him would still be true.
Above, Elias pointed at a change in the high cloud and explained it to no one, or to the boat, or to God.
Mara drank the coffee. Salt in it, or her own mouth. She did not rinse. She did not change. She let the yellow advertise what two men on a thirty-minute click had made of the captain’s luck, and she watched the water the way her husband did, except she was watching it for docks.
The *Merrily* ran on, gifted, and the next watch came due.