Chapter 9 — Tied and Drunk
The crossing had been filthy for six hours: green water over the bow, dishes in the air, Ruiz cursing a mount that had no business loosening.
When it eased, the *Merrily* lay in a long rolling calm that felt like a held breath, and Nia put a bottle on the mess table with the air of a woman authorizing medicine.
“Rum,” she said. “She earned a night that isn’t a hatch and a timer. Cap’s on the flying bridge with tea. He’ll be naming stars until his mug’s cold. Lila, the pipe.”
Mara was already pink from the first two slugs Nia had poured into a tin cup and stood over her to watch go down.
The rum was cheap and hot and tasted like the inside of a crate.
It found the ache in her jaw and turned it friendly.
By the third cup the yellow dress was a joke she was still wearing, and Ben was laughing with his whole mouth at something she had said that she could not remember saying.
“Ask,” Lila said, coil in her fist, not the line-coil, the short length they used for a sprung locker.
Mara licked rum off her lip. The room tilted in the good way. “Please use me. I’m courtesy. I’m asking.” She grinned, sloppy already. “I’m asking loud.”
“That’s the idea.”
They stripped her on the table. Hands everywhere, not in sequence: Tate pulling the dress over her head and getting it stuck on the braid, Ruiz helping and copping a greasy feel that made her kick him, Nia slapping her thigh to make her hold still for the last of it.
She was laughing when Lila boosted her to sit, laughing when the short line went around both wrists, laughing when they lifted her arms and Lila took a hitch on the overhead pipe the way Lila took every hitch, tested, final.
The geometry was perfect and stupid. She could stand on the deck plates on the balls of her feet. She could not lower her arms. She could twist, kick, sling her hips away from whoever was in front of her, and the pipe would hold, and someone would put her back where she had been.
“Flail if you want,” Lila said, close to her ear, almost kind. “That’s why you’re on a pipe and not a bunk. I want you moving. I want them working for it.”
Nia held the cup to her mouth. Mara drank. Rum ran from the corner of her lips down her throat onto her tits. Nia wiped it with her thumb and then didn’t.
Cole went first because Cole went first.
He stepped in between her knees, opened his pants, and pushed up into her while she was still swallowing.
She was wet from the asking and the rum and the crossing, and he still made her gasp.
She kicked, not away, just because her body had been given permission to be loud, and her heel caught the bench and the table barked and Cole grunted and held her hips and fucked her standing with her wrists high and her tits shaking in his face.
“Mouth,” he said, and Ben was already there, cock in his fist, and Mara turned her head and took him and immediately got too ambitious and gagged and laughed around it with spit shining on her chin.
Ben swore and held the braid and stayed in her throat while Cole used her in short hard lifts that made the line creak on the pipe.
She tried to talk. That was the rum.
“Courtesy,” she got out, when Ben slipped free for a second. “More. Please—Tate, don’t just watch, that’s rude, that’s—”
Tate took Ben’s place in her mouth. Cole pulled out and Ruiz took the slick empty place with a cheerful groan, gloves off for once, hands under her ass to stop the swing.
She flailed anyway. Her knees knocked Ruiz’s ribs.
He laughed, caught a thigh, opened her wider, and shoved back in to the hilt while she made a sound that was half swear and half hymn.
Nia stood at her shoulder with the cup. Between rounds she poured.
Mara drank because the cup was there and because Lila’s fingers were on her jaw, not forcing, guiding, keeping her sloppy enough to stay loud.
Rum and spit and the taste of whoever had just been on her tongue.
It ran down her. It found her belly, her bush, the place Ruiz was pounding, and made everything shinier.
“Christ, look at her,” Ben said, wrecked already, working himself while he waited his turn below. “She’s—Cap has no idea. He’s up there with tea.”
“He’s naming Vega,” Lila said, without looking up. She had gone to the companionway, listened, come back. “Then he’ll name the one he named after her. Keep the noise in the room. Pipe rings if you slam it.”
They slammed it anyway, a little. Mara’s wrists were going to wear a bracelet of rope.
She twisted when Cole came back to her mouth and painted her tongue and then, missing on purpose or not, her cheek and the braid.
Come in her hair, warm, heavy. She tried to shake it off and only flung a drop onto the table.
Nia made a noise of civilizational pain and did not stop them.
Ruiz finished in her, buried, a long grinding push, then pulled out and striped her tits while she kicked at him, laughing, calling him a pig, asking for it again in the next breath.
He smeared it with his palm like he was wiping a gauge and stepped aside for Tate, who lifted her whole weight onto his cock and held her there, feet off the deck, and used her like that until her laughter broke into the high helpless sounds the sock had been invented for.
No sock tonight. That was the point.
She swore. She asked. She slobbered on whoever was in her mouth and tried to say *please* around him and produced only wet.
Come landed on the table in a slap when Ben aimed wrong.
Come landed in the notch of her throat and ran.
She was a mess that kept making more mess: rum, spit, four men rotating like a watch bill, her own slick running down Tate’s wrists when he held her open for Cole to get back in.
Lila took the cup. “Again.”
Mara drank. Some of it went down. Some of it went onto Ruiz’s cock, which was at her lips for the second pass, and he said “that’s a waste of rum” and pushed in anyway, and she coughed and laughed and drooled rum-spit down his balls while he held the braid like a tiller.
Elias’s voice came down the ladderway, faint, delighted, a man alone with a sky.
“—and that one’s the lucky one, I told her I’d name it, she was sleeping, she works so hard at being on a boat, my girl, look at you up there—”
On the mess deck his girl was on her toes with her wrists to a pipe and her husband’s first mate in her cunt and his engineer in her throat and his deckhands shining with her, and she was trying to tell all of them thank you and more and courtesy and the words kept getting fucked into pieces.
Cole pulled out of her mouth, looked at her face—glazed, running, grinning, a string from her lip to his cock—and shook his head once, the closest he came to wonder.
“Hold her.”
Tate and Ben took a thigh each. Mara kicked, delighted, useless.
Cole stepped in and fucked her in a hard tight series of strokes aimed at making her come where she hung, and she did, loud, a raw broken shout Nia flinched at and Lila accepted,
and the clench pulled a curse out of Cole and he stayed in her through it and then pulled out and added himself to the glaze on her belly.
They were not done because she was still asking.
Nia held the cup. Mara drank what was left and it was not much and she was past the place where more rum was a quantity.
She was a temperature. She flailed when Ruiz took her mouth and Ben took her cunt and the two of them found an accidental rhythm that swung her on the line like laundry.
She loved it. She told them she loved it with her mouth full and nobody needed the translation.
Lila watched the ladder.
“He’s still up. Mug’s still going. You’ve got time to leave her filthy and get your own racks looking like racks.”
She glanced at Mara, at the rope, at the table that would need a rag Nia was already considering as a weapon.
“One more each. Then I cut her down. She sleeps in the cabin tonight. He gets the well-rested wife in the morning if it kills me.”
One more each.
Tate on her tongue, finishing in her mouth, making her show it, making her swallow, a drop escaping to join the rest.
Ben on her tits, striping what Ruiz had already striped.
Ruiz in her one last time because Ruiz did not believe in last times, coming on her face with a cheerful groan while she tried to aim her mouth at him and missed and got it in her eyebrow.
Cole last, because Cole ended watches. He stood in front of her hanging body and looked at the work and then pushed into her slow, almost careful, and used her until he was done,
and when he pulled out he put his palm on her wet cheek in something that was not a slap and not a blessing and might have been both.
“That’s climate,” he said.
Lila cut the hitch. Mara’s arms dropped like rope themselves.
Tate caught her. Nia threw a towel that was not a clean linen on the table and would never be again.
They wiped her enough to get a slip over her and not enough to undo the night.
The braid was a stiff wet rope of other men.
Her wrists wore the bracelet. She was still trying to talk.
“Asking,” she told Lila’s shoulder, slurring, pleased. “Still asking.”
“I heard you the first time.” Lila walked her, one arm around her waist, the length of the companionway. Elias’s voice drifted down, naming, naming. “Quiet now. Stairs. That’s it.”
In the cabin the door was unlatched. The bunk was a harbor. Lila put her in it, pulled the blanket to her shoulder, and looked at her the way she looked at a deck after a blow: whether it would hold till morning.
“Sleep. If you vomit, you vomit in the bucket, not on his pillow.”
“Aye,” Mara said, solemn, ridiculous, and was gone.
Lila shut nothing. She paused in the passage and listened to the flying bridge.
“—Cassiopeia, and the one I like that doesn’t have a proper name, I call it the green, she knows why—”
Tea. Stars. A man in love with a sky that would never once come down the ladder and see what his loyal family had done with the rum.
Lila went to help Nia with the table.
Mara slept in a crust that would be a smell by dawn, wrists humming, mouth open, the pipe still in her shoulders, and above her the captain of the *Merrily* pointed at the lucky star and told it, softly, that his wife was below, resting, earning the water the only way a person could: by being on it,
by being his.
The bottle on the mess deck was empty. The hitch on the overhead pipe was gone. The family, fine and loyal, turned into their bunks one by one, and the boat ran on through a calm they had all, in different ways, paid for.
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