Aftertime

Ruthie had been conceived on such a night. Only, Cass had no idea which one. There had been too many.

Now, the old swirl was hot within her, the rushing, dizzying bloom of need and fury that felt like molten iron and burning acid all at once, a killing thirst that demanded to be slaked. But something was wrong. Instead of anger, it had been stoked by fear. Fear…and loneliness. And these emotions could never be powerful enough. They could never force her to do what anger could do-because she was a creature of rage, she burned white-hot when she drank and fucked and ran miles through the foothills, when she pushed her muscles her lungs her legs so hard they screamed out for release. Without her rage she was nothing but emptiness, a shell of a person.

And yet the swirling need was there, threatening to overtake her if she didn’t satisfy it. How long had it been since- Cass’s mind raced as she realized she hadn’t touched herself, hadn’t had even that pale substitute, since she woke in her matted bed of dead weeds. How was that possible? All these long days on the road, and Cass had never once missed the touch of a man…or even the satisfaction of her own hands…until now, with Smoke next to her, Smoke whose eyes glinted even in the dark.

“I can’t-I need-” she started to say, but she didn’t know what came next.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Smoke said, his voice little more than a low vibration that traveled from his body through the soft clean sheets and blankets and mattress and pillows and into her body, spreading out from the middle, sounds and sensations that broke apart and reformed as more than just words.

“I’m not ashamed,” she whispered back. But it was a lie. Her shame was so great, so powerful, it was a tiger in a cage; it was hungry; it wanted to devour her as it had devoured her on so many nights before. Its teeth were sharp. The only way to keep the tiger in its cage was to fight back with the rage inside her and she only knew one way if she couldn’t drink her shame into submission, she had to let it out through her body, until the sensations overtook her, emptied her, cleansed her.

“I’m not afraid,” Smoke said, and he reached out a hand and closed it over hers, but he didn’t come any closer, he kept the distance between them-a gulf he wouldn’t cross, a moat he would let her stay behind. “I’m not afraid of you and I don’t believe you have anything evil inside of you. I could kiss you now and I wouldn’t be afraid. I want to kiss you-I’m not afraid.”

“No,” Cass protested. She couldn’t stand to look at him. She turned her face to the pillow, trembling. “No, no, no…”

But she held on to his hand, and it was her-it was all her-who pulled hard, who took his hand and pressed it to her body, over her shirt, ground his palm against her nipple as she found the corner of the pillowcase and bit down hard.

Smoke waited, his body tense and still next to her and only when she whispered please, eyes squeezed tight against everything she couldn’t bear to admit to herself, only then did he trace the softest path across her collarbone with his lips while he pushed her scrabbling fingers away and locked them tight in his own.

“Don’t kiss me,” Cass whispered fiercely.

If she could, she’d seal her mouth, cover it over with skin so the disease, if it was harboring inside her, insidious and undetected, could only boil its toxins within her. She would not risk Smoke-she’d swallow the disease whole if she had to. She would be its host; she would give it her body, but she would not let it claim him, too. “Don’t you ever kiss me.”

Cass let him pin her in place because she wanted to be pinned and somehow he knew. She did not want to be able to fight against this. She knew herself too well, knew how savagely her body would fight if it had a chance, so she lay with one arm trapped under her hip, her other pressed to the mattress in Smoke’s fist, as he unbuttoned her shirt one excruciatingly slow button at a time. He slid his fingers along the edge of the bra the women had brought her. It was a serviceable thing, nothing like the black and lacy ones she used to wear, a stretch of beige with businesslike stitching and sturdy straps, but it was a simple matter for him to unhook the front and ease it out of the way while her treacherous body slid closer to him, as close as it could while he held her in place.

She was strong but she was compact, legs and arms whittled down to muscle and sinew and not much else. Smoke was broad and dense and unstoppable, and she shivered with anticipation as he covered her body with his own and held her motionless and watched her. The window was open; Cass had not thought to worry about it, and there was no time to be afraid now-any Beaters wandering around out side could fuck themselves because she had to be here for this moment, had to be all here, body and mind and whatever shreds were left of her soul. Sheer curtains fluttered in the window, gossamer panels of white that waved and floated on the breeze. A woman chose those curtains. The breeze was cool and delicious and it blew gently across her body, across her nipples, exposed and hard and aching. The breeze was indifferent to the Siege. It was the breeze of Before, and as Smoke lowered his mouth to her, slow and unstoppable, it occurred to her that the breeze had defied the Beaters, the famine, the routed, cracked and poisoned earth. It waited for night and then it came as it ever had and Cass welcomed it and drank it in.

Smoke’s mouth: it was hot. It was soft but then…oh, God, then it wasn’t. He closed his lips around her and stroked with his tongue and even then he was strong, he was insistent, had she known he would be like this the moment she saw him in the little room that was once a school office? As he looked her up and down, Cass with her wrecked flesh and stinking body and misshapen clothes, her hair in knots, no better than a rabid dog…there had been something even then, hadn’t there? But Cass had steeled herself against it, she had thought her body no longer carried that taint.

The things she’d suffered, in some way she’d thought they had sucked all the life from her. Not just hope and faith but this, this most elemental longing of the body for recognition. For slaking. For surfeit. This was, somehow, different from the desperate coupling she’d done a thousand times in the back room of her trailer, in backseats in roadhouse parking lots, in cheap motel rooms and alleys and up against cars. This was a bid for life.

Smoke grazed her nipple with his teeth and she cried out and bucked against him. She wrapped her strong thighs around his waist and forced him harder against her. He slid his hand into what was left of her hair. He tugged and she arched her back, and then he released her hair so that he could undo her pants, could jam the zipper down and slide the rough fabric over her hips, taking the plain white cotton panties with them. She made the sounds that meant no, that meant this is not a good idea, but the sounds somehow didn’t turn into words, were just sounds, just wailing needful sounds.

He kissed her neck, traced a path around her jaw, down across her throat as his hand found its way between her legs, her legs that fell open for him in greedy betrayal. He pressed his palm gently against her and hesitated, as though he might stop there. His touch was not tentative, she knew he meant to be reassuring, and that was not enough, no, that would not be enough, it would never be enough.

Cass lifted her hips off the bed and ground against his hand and he entered her with his fingers. He was not gentle. He did not take his time. He did not coax out her moisture to ease his way. He jammed them hard inside her and she broke her own rule, she had kept her mouth clamped shut but now she cried out, a hungry desperate sound that was nearly mad with need.

Smoke plunged into her as far as he was able, but then his thumb slid against her in the mere suggestion of a caress. He barely touched her-there-and Cass threw herself into the rocketing sensation and kicked him, hard, on the backs of his calves. He answered with a growl that was deep and dangerous, and pushed her back against the bed with a hand splayed at her throat. She was pinned again, helpless against him and that may have been the only thing that allowed her to open her eyes and look at him. A lock of her hair had fallen into her mouth and she seized it with her tongue, chewed it.

Their eyes met and it was some trick of the moonlight or of her own fevered need that she could see into him, through what was real into what was before, into his Before self, into his days of rote striving, his complacency, his success, and Cass knew in that instant that Smoke had never been a man she could want, Before, and it was only the Siege that had forged and molded him into this.

Smoke lowered his face close to hers and she saw the look in his eyes. He wanted her to see it. He wanted it to be unmistakable as he spread her wetness all over her, found it with his insistent fingers and sluiced it into her folds and crevices, stroking her all the while, making her watch, and when her breathing grew hard and loud and ragged he plunged into her again but this time it was all of his fingers and he took his other hand and slid his thumb into her mouth and she clamped her lips around it and sucked it hard and writhed and bucked against him like she could take his entire being inside her and when she shattered she was sure she was dying because every part of her splintered and went flying into the sky in different directions and she didn’t