Chapter 6 — The Women Join
Lila caught her coming out of Ruiz’s berth with her mouth still shiny and her dress on backward.
It was the hour after the wheelhouse, when the boat smelled like hot metal and onions and the particular quiet of men who had already had their turn or were waiting on one.
Ruiz had taken her on his back in the dark fo’c’sle, a short unromantic fuck that ended on her tongue because he liked the look of it, and he had sent her out with a slap on the wet and the word *go* like she was a message.
Lila was in the companionway with a coil of line and the expression she wore when a knot had been tied by someone who should have known better.
She looked at the dress. She looked at Mara’s mouth. She did not scold.
She stepped in, pinned Mara to the bulkhead with the coil between them, and kissed the taste of Ruiz off her.
It was not a sweet kiss. Lila kissed like she whipped line: economy, pressure, a finish you felt in the wrists. Her mouth was dry where Mara’s was filthy. She made a small considering noise, as if she had just confirmed a heading, and bit Mara’s lower lip hard enough to restart the pulse there.
“That’s him,” Lila said against her teeth. “I can always tell which one. Cole tastes like pencil. Ruiz tastes like the room he works in. The boys taste like they just discovered they have dicks. Open.”
Mara opened. Lila’s hand went under the backward dress without permission she needed, two fingers straight into the mess Ruiz had left, and she fucked Mara with that hand against the companionway while the coil of line dug into Mara’s ribs and a pair of boots passed the top of the ladder and did
not come down.
Mara shook with her mouth in Lila’s mouth and came on the bosun’s fingers in a hard ugly clench that made her knees try to leave.
Lila held her up. She pulled her hand out, looked at it, and wiped it on the inside of Mara’s already-ruined hem.
“Not cargo,” Lila said. “You keep acting like something that got loaded by mistake. That ends tonight.”
“Tonight.”
“Galley. Lights-out. Nia’s table. You come when the last dish is racked and you don’t wear the yellow. I’m tired of that dress making the argument for you.”
She stepped back, slung the coil, and went forward like a woman who had just tightened a turnbuckle.
Mara stood in the companionway and put the dress on the right way around and did not go to the rail.
She went to the cabin and took the yellow off and lay in the bunk in a thin white slip that had been packed for sleep and was going to do other work.
Elias looked in at dusk with coffee on his breath and joy on his face and told her the twilight had been a hymn.
He kissed her forehead. He went back to it.
She listened to his boots fade and got up.
The galley after lights-out was a different country.
One red work-lamp over the board. The rest of the boat reduced to engine and hull-talk.
Nia had her sleeves rolled and her hair knotted up with a pencil and a wooden spoon in her fist like a scepter.
Lila shut the sliding door. The latch was a quiet fact.
“On the table,” Nia said. “On your back. Slip off. If you drip I will make you mop it with your hair, and I am not joking in the way people say they are not joking.”
Mara stripped the slip and boosted herself onto the prep table.
The steel was cold and then not. Her shoulder blades found the familiar dents where Nia boned fish.
Lila looked at her laid out under the red lamp—bruise, grid-ghost on the knees, shine already starting at the hinge of her thighs—and nodded once.
“Ask,” Lila said.
“For what.”
“For the crew. Out loud. I want it in the room so you can’t pretend tomorrow this was something that happened to you.”
Mara stared at the overhead. A pipe ran there that she had never noticed. “I want the crew.”
“Not want. Ask. Courtesy asks.”
The word sat in her mouth with Ruiz and Cole and the sock. “Please use me. All of you. I’m asking.”
Nia made a small pleased sound, the same one she made when dough proofed on time, and tapped Mara’s sternum with the flat of the spoon. “Better. Again. And say what you are.”
“I’m courtesy. Not cargo. Please use me.”
“Good girl.” Nia said it without heat, the way she said *salt*. Then she nodded at Lila. “Face. I’ll take the rest. If she gets loud the spoon does what a sock did for the boys.”
Lila climbed onto the table with the same bosun’s economy she brought to everything and knelt up over Mara’s mouth.
She had stripped her work pants off and nothing else; the shirt hung, the belt still in the loops.
She smelled like line-tar and soap and the clean sweat of a woman who had been on deck since four.
She took a fistful of Mara’s hair, not as handle yet, just to aim her, and sat down.
Mara had never done this. She found out in the first second that Lila would not be patient about her finding out. Lila rolled her hips once, corrected the angle with the fist, and said, “Tongue out. Flat. You’re not kissing a husband. You’re working.”
Mara worked.
Nia’s hand slid between her legs at the same time, two fingers, then three, crooked forward against the spot Cole had found on a chart table and Ben had accidentally hammered in a bunk.
The wooden spoon came to rest across Mara’s tits, not hitting, just present, a warm domestic threat.
Every time Mara made a sound into Lila that was more than breath, Nia lifted the spoon and let it fall.
Not cruel. Accurate. The wood made a small slapped note against wet skin that the engine covered, and Mara learned, fast, to keep the noise in her throat.
Lila rode her mouth with tiny ruthless adjustments. “That’s it. Sloppier. I want my thighs shining when I get off you. Nia—she’s getting shy with her hips. Fix it.”
Nia fixed it. She put her forearm across Mara’s belly and fucked her with her hand in a steady kitchen rhythm, wrist flexing, the wet sound of it obscene under the red lamp. Mara tried to lift to it and Nia pinned her and the spoon tapped a warning on a nipple that was already tight enough to ache.
“Ask again,” Nia said.
Mara’s “please” came out into Lila, muffled, filthy. Lila laughed under her breath and ground down harder.
“Again. The whole thing.”
“Please use me. I’m courtesy. I’m asking.” It was more spit than speech. Lila used the spit. She smeared it over Mara’s chin with her cunt and kept going.
They did not rush. That was the difference from the men.
Cole used a watch. Ruiz used a break. The boys used a timer.
Lila and Nia used the fact of the locked galley and the whole night and Mara’s body as a project.
Nia added her thumb to the mess and worked Mara’s clit like she was reducing a sauce, tiny mean circles, until Mara clenched around her fingers and Lila had to lift up an inch so Mara could drag air and not bite.
“She just went,” Nia reported.
“I felt it in my gut. Do it again. I want her stupid before I come.”
Nia did it again. The spoon fell twice. Mara shook hard enough that the table’s rubber feet chirped, the same little sound the wheelhouse stool had made under Cole, and the comparison almost made her laugh and then Nia crooked her fingers and there was no laugh left.
She came with Lila sitting on her tongue and Nia’s whole hand shining to the wrist and the slip of her own name gone somewhere under the plates.
Lila came a minute later, quiet, professional, a long tremor she rode out on Mara’s mouth with her head tipped back and her fist tight enough to hurt. She stayed there until it was done. Then she lifted off, looked down at Mara’s wrecked face, and nodded.
“Shining,” she said. “Good.”
She swung off the table. Nia pulled her hand out slowly, considered the string that followed, and wiped it on Mara’s stomach in one broad chef’s smear.
“Stay.” Nia washed her hands in the deep sink with the calm of a woman returning a board to service. “You can walk in five minutes. If you walk now you’ll go over.” She glanced at Lila. “She said it. You heard her.”
“I heard her.” Lila was putting her pants back on. “Pass it how you want. Cole already did the men. This was for her, so she doesn’t get to hide inside being taken. She asked. That’s the log.”
Mara lay on the steel and felt the red lamp on her wet skin and the cooling print of Lila on her mouth and Nia’s smear tightening on her belly. The pipe overhead was still there. She had asked. The words were in the room and would not leave when she did.
Nia tossed her the slip. “Off my table. Wipe the steel. Hair, if you’re out of towels.”
Mara wiped the steel with a bar towel, not her hair. She put the slip on over the smear. Lila unlocked the slider. The companionway was empty. Forward, a man snored like a motor with a bad mount. Aft, the wheelhouse held a low running commentary meant for stars.
“Go be slept-next-to,” Lila said. “Tomorrow you look like a woman who rested. That’s the other half of courtesy. He gets a wife who slept. We get the rest.”
Mara went.
Elias was already in the bunk, an island of clean heat.
He had left the door the way she had left it, unlatched, because she had told him to trust the ship.
He lifted the blanket without waking all the way and fitted himself behind her and put his hand on her stomach, over Nia’s smear, and did not know what the stickiness was.
Salt, he would have thought, if he had thought. Salt and a wife.
“You smell like the galley,” he murmured, pleased. “Like home. Nia’s going to fatten us all.”
“Go to sleep.”
“Mm.” He kissed her hair. He was hard for a second against the back of her thigh, the old accident of blood, and then he wasn’t. “Beautiful night. You should have seen the stars. Next time I’ll haul you up.”
“Next time,” Mara said.
She slept, finally, because her body had been emptied out by women who kept accounts.
In the morning the galley was daylight and bacon and the wooden spoon back in its jar like a citizen.
Nia slid eggs onto Elias’s plate with a face that gave nothing.
Mara sat in the yellow dress because the yellow dress was what he liked the boat to look like.
Under it she was sore in places the men had not thought to make sore. Her mouth still felt like Lila.
Elias ate. He made the noise he made when food was a miracle. He reached across and squeezed Mara’s wrist.
“Look at you. Well-rested. I told you the sea air would do it. You were a ghost leaving the harbor. Now look. Color. Sleep. My lucky girl.” He pointed his fork at Nia. “And these eggs. Nia, you’re a civilizing force.”
“Somebody has to be,” Nia said, and poured his coffee, and did not look at Mara’s mouth.
Lila came through for coffee, paused behind Mara’s chair, and set two fingers on the nape of Mara’s neck for the length of a swallow. Then she was gone, deckward, a woman with line to whip.
Cole, at the end of the bench, watched all of it over the rim of his mug. He did not ask. He logged it behind his eyes and reached for bread.
Elias wiped yolk with toast and started telling the table about the stars he had seen while his wife was on her back on the prep table asking to be used. He had names for three of them. He had a theory about the fourth. He was happy.
Mara ate an egg. It tasted like salt and steel and the inside of Lila’s thigh. She finished it. She said, when Elias asked if she wanted to come up for the morning heading, that she would be there in a minute.
She would. She would stand at the glass and feel the wheel hum and hear him name the wake. And when she came back down the ladder the boat would have the new rule in it, the one she had said under a red lamp with a spoon across her tits:
Courtesy. Not cargo. Asking.
The *Merrily* took the next swell like a woman who had been told the truth and agreed.