Aftertime

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.

28

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