Chapter 14 — Full Courtesy
Home port was a rumor on the chart by dusk. Cole tapped the paper once, as if that settled the run, and Nia put the bottle on the mess table without being asked.
“Last night,” she said. “Then he’s got docks and cousins and a bed that doesn’t move. She can be luck for a town tomorrow. Tonight she stays asked-for.”
Elias had taken the wheel at twilight and announced he would keep it. The front had blown through and left a long easy black and a sky he claimed was a hymn. He had kissed Mara’s hair in the companionway—the same companionway, the same plate, wiped, innocent—and told her not to wait up.
“I’ll sing her in,” he said, meaning the boat. “You sleep. You earned a year in a week. My trouper.”
He went up. He started singing before he was through the hatch. Off-key. Happy. A man and a wheel and a dark that loved him back.
They did not bother with rooms.
Mara drank standing. The rum found the place the swell had opened in her that afternoon, the long second, the laugh, the barometer, and turned it into heat. By the second cup she was grinning at Lila’s coil. By the third she was asking before anyone told her to ask.
“Please use me. I’m courtesy. Last night. I’m asking.”
“Louder,” Lila said.
She said it louder. Nia took the cup away, then gave it back, then took the yellow off her and slung it over the bench like a flag they were done saluting.
The braid got a test-pull. The short line went around her wrists looser than the pipe night—enough hitch to keep her on the table, enough slack to flail, to twist, to make them work.
They boosted her onto the wood.
“Ass up when there’s a cock, mouth open when there isn’t, and if both, both,” Cole said, climate, last standing order of the run. “You don’t close. You don’t wipe. You want off, you say my name and not a joke. Otherwise this goes until the bottle’s dead or she is.”
Mara laughed, already sloppy. “I’m not off.”
Cole went into her mouth first, a claim, and Ruiz pushed into her cunt at the same time, and the table barked, and she flailed because she could, heels kicking empty air, wrists sliding on the line, a wet happy sound falling off Cole’s cock onto the wood.
Ben took a tit in his mouth like he still needed permission.
Tate waited his turn with his hand on himself and his eyes on the ladder, which stayed empty, which would stay empty.
Two decks up a man sang about a heading.
They rotated without ceremony.
Mouth, cunt, ass, the three holes as a watch bill.
When Cole finished in her throat he pulled out and turned and put his ass in her face and Lila’s hand on the braid said *clean*, and Mara cleaned him while Ruiz was still fucking her, nose running, chin a mess,
the chore from the square of light brought to the table and made into the night’s grammar.
Ruiz groaned watching it and came in her and then he too stepped around and she rimmed him while she was still clenching, tasting come and rum-sweat and the engine room of him, and Nia held the cup to the corner of her mouth so she could drink around a man’s ass and stay loud.
“Christ,” Ben said.
“School’s over,” Lila said. “This is the exam. Sloppier.”
They layered her face.
Cole first, a stripe across the tongue Lila had trained her to show.
Ruiz over that, thicker, into the lashes, and Lila did not rub this one in; she left it to run.
Tate across the first two, a glaze starting.
Ben last of the first pass, shaking, painting her mouth so she had to blink through it to find the next cock.
She drooled on the wood. She laughed when she could breathe.
The laugh threw a drop onto Nia’s wrist and Nia looked at it, sighed, and put her cunt on Mara’s shining mouth anyway.
“Work,” Nia said. “I have been civilizing you for two weeks. Civilize me.”
Mara worked. Lila climbed onto the table from the other end and put Mara’s bound hands on her, two fingers worth of slack in the line, and used them, riding the clumsy tied motion until she was satisfied,
while Nia ground on Mara’s face and the men stood around the table like a rail and passed her lower half from one to the next.
Someone in her ass. Someone in her cunt.
A wet slapping overlap that made her kick and made whoever she kicked grunt and grab her thigh and shove back in.
The boat rocked, easy, a cradle. Two decks up, Elias found a note he liked and stayed on it.
They pissed when they needed to.
Tate first, on her back, a hot sheet she knew, and she stayed open under it with Nia still on her mouth, drinking what ran forward because her mouth was open and the rule had not lifted.
Ruiz on her tits, aiming for the glaze, laughing when she tried to lift her head for it and Lila shoved her back down into Nia.
Cole, later, into her mouth between cocks, a short stream she swallowed because he said *some* and she was past the place where *some* was a debate.
It all ran. The table became a scupper. Nia would have a religion about it at dawn and tonight Nia was coming on Mara’s tongue with her head tipped back and the spoon nowhere, not needed, the noise covered by a hull and a hymn.
Mara flailed through another pass.
Wrists sliding. Ass slapping back onto Tate.
Mouth empty for one breath so she could say, slurring, shining, “Still asking. Please. More—” and Cole filled the mouth and the rest of it died against him, and Ruiz said “that’s a yes” to nobody,
and Ben came on her belly and smeared it down to where Tate was pounding her so the next stroke sounded filthier.
Lila pulled off Mara’s hands and sat on them instead, pinning, and leaned down into the glaze until her forehead almost touched Mara’s.
“Look at me.”
Mara looked. One eye gummed shut. The other full of Lila.
“You still proud of your face?”
Mara tried to shake her head and only smeared herself on the wood. “No.”
“Good. Open.”
Lila spat into her mouth. Not much. A point. Then she moved aside and the next man used the point as a target.
They did not count rounds after that.
The bottle went down. The table shone. Mara was a centerpiece in the original sense: a thing the room arranged itself around, glazed, blinking, dripping from everywhere a body could drip, laughing in the seams, asking in the seams,
rimming whoever had just pulled out because Lila’s hand on the braid kept arriving there, kept making the chore the treat.
Ass, mouth, ass, mouth. Piss when a man stood over her with that look.
Come on the first coat, on the second, on the braid, on the rope bracelet, on the wood.
She took two at once and then three when Nia got off her face and Cole stepped in and the geometry of the table finally made sense as a piece of furniture invented for this.
Two decks up, the song wandered and came home.
“—easy, girl, that’s my beauty, that’s my heading, I could do this until I died, I could do this after—”
On the mess deck his beauty was drooling on oak with her wrists tied and her ass in the air and Ruiz’s thumb opening her for Tate and her tongue out for Ben and Lila’s fingers in her dripping cunt counting something that was not numbers.
Mara came like that, noisy, helpless, a clench that pulled Tate over with her and left her shaking on the line, and they did not stop, because stopping was for mornings, and morning was a home port with cousins and a bed that didn’t move.
Cole ended it because Cole ended watches.
He pulled out of her mouth, looked at the work—glaze, puddle, braid stiff as tarred line, wife unrecognizable as luck except in the way that luck was always a mess if you got close—and put his palm on her cheek the way he had after the pipe.
“That’s the run,” he said.
Lila cut the hitch. Mara’s arms dropped. She tried to stand and the boat, easy as it was, slid her into Nia, who caught her with a towel that was already a lost cause and did not pretend otherwise.
“Bucket if you need it,” Nia said. “Cabin if you can walk. I am not carrying you past his ladder. I have done enough religion for one night.”
They wiped her enough to get the slip on.
They did not wipe her enough to make a lie of the last six hours.
The glaze was a mask. The slip went transparent in three places before she reached the companionway.
Lila walked her. The singing got louder as they passed under the hatch, a man explaining love to a wheel.
In the cabin the door was unlatched. The locker note from some earlier dawn was still there, LOVE in block print. Lila put Mara in the bunk, on her side, braid out of her mouth, bucket on the deck.
“He’ll come down when the hymn’s over,” Lila said. “You smell like the whole crew. He’ll call it weather. Don’t you correct a religion the night before a dock.”
“Still asking,” Mara whispered, almost gone.
“I know. Sleep anyway.”
Lila left the door.
Two decks up, Elias sang the *Merrily* toward a home port that thought it was going to receive a captain and a wife and a fine loyal family.
Below him the family turned into their racks one by one, wrecked, fed, quiet.
On the mess table the wood dried in maps Nia would find at first light and treat as a final insult and a final compliment at once.
Mara slept open-mouthed in a crust, wrists humming, the loose hitch still in the bones of her hands, and the sea took the last of the run in a long black easy that required nothing of anyone except that the man at the wheel keep singing, and he did.
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