Aftertime (20 page)

“Get under,” he commanded and she wriggled into the warmth under the covers and pressed against him. For a moment it felt sweet and right, a relief, a balm, an exhalation of a breath caught in anxiety. Smoke’s chest was bare. He was wearing only boxers. And even through the cotton she could feel his heat and, undeniably, his desire.

“You traded away everything we had today,” Cass chided, trying to keep her tone light. “Now we’ve got no aces up our sleeves. Nothing to get us out of the next jam we get into.”

“Didn’t give away anything we can’t get more of,” Smoke murmured as he put his arms around her, his hands careful and tender on her back as they sought to touch only the unhurt places. For a moment Cass let herself luxuriate in his arms, in the promise of safety there. But there was whiskey on his breath, and the smell worked away at the thin wall she’d put up over her promises to herself.

Cass had once loved to kiss a man who’d been drinking whiskey, the way it tasted like a clue to something hard to find, like earth after a rain and like a fire still burning. She never drank it herself, but there had been a dozen nights that had started with its promise.

Not a promise actually, but a trick.

It was Cass’s best trick and also her only trick. The way it worked:

She would have two shots, back to back, when she got to the bar. Vodka was easiest. Sometimes tequila. It helped hone her instincts, her senses, and when she found the right one—bent over a pool table, laughing with his friends, alone at the bar, it didn’t matter, she always knew—the trick was that for a moment right before one of them spoke, everything was possible. Because he could be the one who turned out to be different. He could be the one to see her for who she was, to understand that all her toughness wasn’t anything but pain, to know that she threw herself on the fire over and over again not to satisfy herself but to punish herself—who would see and know all that and still want her
and
be strong enough to keep her from hurting herself long enough that she wouldn’t have to hurt him just to make herself forget, to make herself believe that it meant nothing.

Because that was her dirtiest little secret of all—it never really meant nothing. She could walk away and walk away and walk away and walk away, fuck a thousand men and forget all their names and pretend she didn’t remember what they looked like or how their hands felt on her, and get up the next day and do it again and again, and yet it meant something every single time, it meant another failure and another time she wasn’t good enough and she wasn’t wanted enough.

But that moment. That moment when he first spoke, when she caught the whiskey on his breath, when he looked her up and down and really took his time, when he touched her hand or brushed against her thigh, when he told her that her eyes reminded him of someone or that she was the prettiest thing to ever walk into that particular bar, she played her one trick and played it well. She never lost her taste for the con, she worked it every time, because
this
might be the man who would truly know her—and want her anyway.

And she felt it now, felt it as she never had before, when Smoke settled his hand into the curve of her waist and drew her closer against him, so she could feel him pressing against her, making her hot and liquid and confused. He was here with her again, just like he was two nights ago. He had taken great risks with her, brought her gifts, lain down with her…and she longed to wonder if maybe, just maybe, this might be the time things would be different.

But tomorrow she would be going to find Gloria, and Gloria would tell her what she needed to get inside the Convent, to get to Ruthie. And whatever she had to do, Cass would do, and she would find Ruthie and she would take Ruthie back. And she needed to save all her energy, all her determination, for that. She could not afford to give up even one bit of her concentration for a man, for the game she always played, for the way she always punished herself. She could not afford to hurt herself or revile herself. Not now. She had to be strong.

So Cass put her hand on Smoke’s chest and with tears stinging her eyes, she pushed him away, and if she thought his hesitation and his longing might be for who she really was this time, she also knew it was only a trick of her damned and fevered mind.

CASS WAS IN THE FAR CORNER OF THE DIRT
lot behind the High Timer.

This was familiar ground, and if she wasn’t proud, exactly, to be there, backed up against the side of a pickup parked under a sycamore next to the dried-up creek, she wasn’t sorry, either. No one could make her sorry, because she owned this corner of the lot, had driven dozens of men to begging and pleading and even crying hot salty tears here, the first when she was barely seventeen years old.

Only this one was different.

She wasn’t sure how she got here. Couldn’t conjure up a memory of the drinks he bought her or the songs he picked on the jukebox. Had he challenged her to pool? So many of them did that, thinking she’d be impressed with their hard-crack breaks or their wily double-bank shots, when Cass had learned pool from the master himself, Silver Dollar Haverford, her own daddy who could beat any man from Portland down to Tijuana. Or maybe he had danced with her, the sly dip and glide of a farm boy with town manners.

Why couldn’t she remember?

She was pressed up against the cold hard door of the pickup and maybe they’d be better off inside, the truck’s bench seat would be good enough on a night turning cold fast like this one was, when chilly air found its way up her skirt and inside her denim jacket. She ran her fingers through his hair as he nuzzled her neck, found it greasy and lank, wondered what she’d seen in him.

But his mouth on the sensitive dip between her collarbones: insistent and hungry, his beard scraping against her soft flesh. Only tonight the man’s touch wasn’t doing what it usually did. It wasn’t lighting tinder up and down her body, setting the scene for a brush fire that would burn out of control until it pushed her into forgetting territory.

It felt wrong, all wrong.

Cass slid her hands between her body and his and shoved, and he left off his sucking and biting with a growl of irritation, and then she was staring into his face in the sickly light of the streetlamps mounted on galvanized steel poles.

And what stared back wasn’t human. Its flesh was pocked and torn. Its lips were chewed to crusts. Its eyes were unfocused and confused and when it saw the look of fear on her face it crowed with excitement, a sound that paralyzed her with unspeakable terror, and as it lowered its face to her neck again she knew that this time it meant to tear her skin from the bone, to rip it and chew it and swallow it even while she screamed.

And screamed.

And screamed, except that it clapped a hand over her mouth and she was left gasping for breath and flailing and struggling to get away but the next second the thing became Smoke and she realized she was in a tent, in a tent in the Box on a leaking air mattress with crazy thoughts crowding the dreams from her mind and replacing them with a nightmare made of every fear born in Aftertime.

She stopped screaming and whimpered instead and Smoke lifted his hand from her mouth slowly, tentatively, ready to clamp it back down if she didn’t stay quiet.

She stayed quiet.

“You had another nightmare,” he murmured.

She nodded, testing the inside of her mouth with her tongue, finding it metallic.

“Was it a bad one?” he asked, and Cass opened her eyes and found that she could see nothing at all in the dark tent and she suddenly wished she could. Wished she could see Smoke’s face, his eyes, his mouth. A mouth that was a bit too generous, but without it his face might have been hard, unapproachable. Instead she realized she had memorized the shape of that mouth, and in the dark she reached for him and found his chin, rough with stubble; his eyelashes against her fingertips; and finally, his lips. She brushed against them gently, and he was very still, so still she couldn’t even feel him breathe.

“They’re all bad,” she said softly.

“Cass.” If she had expected sympathy she was mistaken: his voice was steel. He clamped his hand over hers, squeezed her fingers together until they hurt. “I can’t—I don’t—”

He didn’t want her. Cass had only been looking for comfort but the knowledge cleaved her anyway. He held her hand away from his face as though it was a blade poised to slice through him, and Cass felt shame flood her like poison rushing through her veins.

She had wanted comfort. But he didn’t want her.

She knew that if she explained, if she could find the words to describe the emptiness that could never be filled, the chasm edged with cliffs of fear and longing, that he would provide comfort after a fashion. Because he was a good man. And only a good man would have come this far with her, taken the risks they had taken.

A good man. A prince, in fact. A damn Boy Scout. In the killing emptiness her last, best defense stirred. A wrecked and battle-hardened thing, it had been born long ago when she first discovered what her need demanded, when she first recognized her body for what it was.

That innocent, frightened girl had become a temptress, a serpentine thing, all enticing, all willing, all temptation and can’t-say-no. Years ago she had been clumsy, uncertain of her power, but realizing she had nothing to lose gave her strength, and she learned to twist and beckon and lure and ride until the men she found were all used up, until she had sapped them of everything they had to give her. Which wasn’t much, after you discounted the terrible convulsions of their bodies and the momentary vulnerability in their glazed eyes: other than that small gift they didn’t even realize they gave, there was nothing but release.

But she’d have it now. The angry girl had pushed off the bottom of her heart, hurtled through the wavery place where Cass had consigned her, and crested the surface with a momentous burst of need. And Cass let her take over.

Smoke had offered her kindness when kindness could kill her.

He deserved this
.

Cass didn’t really believe that last conscious thought, but she pushed the phrase through her mind nonetheless, pushed it through and bit down on it and held it as the need took over. He deserved this because he didn’t want her after he’d let her want him.

She yanked her hand back and she heard him take in his breath. She crawled across the makeshift bed, the hard ground through the limp air mattress hurting her knees, and shoved the cheap blanket and sheets aside as she straddled his body.

“Cass…” His voice was alarmed. But she had set this in motion now, and it would not be stopped.

She bent over him and let the t-shirt slide up over her thighs, her hips, leaving almost nothing between them. She pressed herself against him and found him hard, fiercely hard, and he shuddered involuntarily and seized her wrists.

“Cass.” He said it again, through gritted teeth. He held her wrists so hard she felt her bones pressed together, and sucked in her breath in pain, but she didn’t fight him. He was stronger. But she had other ways.

She let him hold her wrists. She gave control of her arms over to him, his for the moment. But she had the rest of her body and she used it.

She rubbed herself slowly, lightly—to Smoke her touch must have felt tentative, but it was the farthest thing from tentative—over him, feeling the outline of his hard cock through the layers of cotton that might as well have not been there at all. She closed her eyes and concentrated on letting everything else fall away, because the more she gave herself over to the rush the less of her that was left behind. It was a battle for control, and the only way for her to control herself, to control the chasm with its jagged cliff edges, was to control him. The man below her, the man who she was trying to make into not-Smoke, to make into a stranger, to make into no one, because the old equation required a man who was nothing to her.

But he kept saying her name and that would wreck it.

“God, Cass,” he choked out, as though she was strangling him with the languid caress of her body against his.

“Shut up,” she commanded, and pressed into him harder. The shock of the contact between them, hard meeting soft, sent sensation through her, a riveting jolt that emanated through her body but burned itself out long before it could reach her mind, her legs, her arms. “Shut up, please just shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up…”

She ground out the words in time to her movement against him. Through her anger she felt her need grow and bloom. He found her rhythm and moved with her, this man beneath her, this man who in the dark could be a stranger; if she just tried hard enough he could be a stranger. She felt his grip on her wrists weaken and she twisted her hands savagely and he let go, his reflexes were slow, too late he realized she’d freed herself and tried to catch her again but she was quicker.

Cass grabbed his hands before he could find her first. She held his strong fingers in her hands and pressed them up under her shirt, against her, and when his fingers spasmed against her she knew it was instinct that guided him and that he would still work against it and so she leaned into his touch, arching her back and moving so that her breasts fit themselves to his cupped hands and he had no choice. That’s what it felt like to her and she knew it must be the same for him, that he had no choice as his fingers found her nipples and circled and seized.

From there, there was no thought. She plunged her fingers into his hair and lifted him to her so that his face was pressed against her and his mouth and lips and tongue were eager now. He didn’t fight. He was hungry and he gave up any attempts to restrain her and held her to him, his hands under her arms. She felt his fingers splayed against the bones of her rib cage, imagined it expanding with the breaths she sucked in, noisy ragged breaths that were not graceful.

The things he did with his mouth made her writhe harder against him and the ride was no longer orchestrated by her, it was a course they both followed because there was no other. Their hands went to their clothes in the same instant and twined together as they pulled and yanked and tossed aside. He let go of her to pull his boxers down over his legs and the loss of his attention—even for a second—enraged the need in her and she took him in her hand and rubbed him against her hottest, wettest folds so that when he gasped and returned his hands to her sides he rocked into her just as she drove herself down on him and there was no hesitation, no halfway, nothing but trying to make him more inside and him trying to plunge farther.

She bucked extravagantly, knowing it was coming, the thunderous crest that could not be stopped now, it was as sure as the sun blazing in the morning or thunder after lightning rips the sky. She leaned back and put her hands on his legs so that her body tilted away from him. If there was any light at all in the tent she knew that he would see her body, long and strong and bent back as she rode him hard, and that seeing her that way would send him past the point where he had any control at all, and knowing that—even in the dark, even where they saw nothing, where the loss of one sense only heightened the others so it was their sharp breaths on the silent night, the slap of sweat-slicked flesh, the grunting and syllables that were only parts of words—all of this spiraled tighter and tighter and she squeezed her eyes shut and ground her teeth together and threw herself into the chasm, past the treacherous cliffs and over the pain-dusted edges and into the nothing.

It was a long and spectacular fall and partway down he met her there and it was like they seized each other midair so that when the final crest splintered into blinding sensation, she was aware of him there with her and it was new.

It was new, it was like nothing she’d ever felt before, a feeling of being out of herself and part of him just for those seconds, her energy stretching and flickering and it seemed incredibly dangerous, like she might snap and not return to herself, but she let it happen anyway, and afterward she lay on top of him and waited for the part that had left her to come back, and the part that was him to leave her, and when it didn’t happen right away she began to panic but even her panic wasn’t enough to make her lift her body away from his, because she lay in a state of such exhaustion and spent and total dissipation that moving was impossible.

Much, much later she felt his hands in her hair, fingers gentle against her scalp, working the strands into tangles, and he said, “They’re applauding,” and while she tried to make sense of his words she marveled at the feel of his voice, the way it formed in his chest and rumbled against her cheek.

And then she realized that he meant the sounds outside the tent, which only now entered her conscious mind: a smattering of clapping and laughter and one distinct voice saying, “That’s how it’s done, brother,” and another saying, “Could everyone shut the fuck up and let the rest of us sleep.”

Cass burned with mortification. She didn’t remember making any sound—in those final seconds her hearing seemed to have gone the way of her vision, as though the darkness had stolen it, too—but she must have cried out. She didn’t do that, ordinarily, but she remembered the cry building in her throat right before everything splintered and it must have been loud enough to wake up the people sleeping nearby.

Her greater worry—the fact that the man beneath her was slowly turning back into Smoke—was too much to think about now. She pushed her face into the hollow of his shoulder and willed herself not to think about it.

When he said, very softly, “Sweet dreams, Cass,” she said over and over in her mind, “I do not hear you. I do not hear you.”

I do not hear you, because you aren’t really there.