He doesn’t hear her moaning but he feels the tension in her thighs slackening. He licks upward on the natural channel of the groove toward her clitoris. The tip of his tongue barely reads the edge of the hood before it rasps the bump and she screams, she bucks and twists and the whiplash collision of the chains flail his nose and mouth.
He jackknifes onto the floor, hand clapped to his face. Chains clicking and chattering, the Mutant scrambles after him and crouches over him anxiously.
He opens an eye and stares up into her snatch and the vengeful chains dangling on either side and clamps the lid down again. With tentative tongue, he locates the taste of blood in his mouth; he’s bitten the inside of his lower lip. The distracted worm is in retreat. “Why me?” he croaks.
Listing on one elbow, he squints at her. His lips are bruised and beginning to swell but the skin isn’t broken. Touching the ridge of his nose, he determines he’s lost a little bit of skin there. Inside it’s feeling pinched but there’s no more than a smear of blood from the abrasions and just a little pufflness.
From the mattress where she has gone to ground, she won’t look at him. Her cheekbones are a dull red.
“What happened? What’d I do?”
“I hated it!” she blurts. “It was gross! Then it felt like you stuck my finger in a live socket, only it wasn’t my finger.”
He apologizes. “Guess I’m trying too hard.”
She hides her face in her hands. Huddled under the old blanket, she looks cold. He finds her sweatshirt for her, turns up the space heater and fetches the sleeping bag from where he has left it near the door. Tucking the blanket around her, he zips her into the bag like a papoose and she giggles.
“I want some ice,” he tells her, reaching for his clothes, “and I’m hungry. I’m going to get some take-out.”
26
In the middle of his bare face, his nose looks like a cat went skiing down it. He leans into the mirror in the men’s room of the Chinese restaurant and touches his swelling upper lip. By tomorrow, he thinks, his mouth won’t be particularly noticeable but there’s nothing he can do about his nose.
When he returns to the Mill, she’s moved the boombox into the cubby and is scanning the radio. Anticipating that the Surf Punks on an endless loop would wear out even the Mutant, Sam has stuffed his jacket pockets with cassettes from the truck; he spills them onto the cot. While she shuffles through them, he unbags the white cartons of Chinese. He’s been salivating for it since he walked into the smell in the restaurant foyer and now his stomach growls audibly.
“I don’t like Chinese food,” she says. “And I can’t eat with fucking chopsticks.”
“So eat with your fingers. Fill up on rice. And the fortune cookies. Guy gave me extras. I’ll eat the rest of the stuff.”
But the first bite of the Szechwan chicken zings his wounded mouth and he winces. He’s too hungry to let that stop him. Sitting on the mattress while he sits on the floor, she sulks awhile before she pokes around in the cartons with her chopsticks and takes tentative licks on them. She hesitates and then digs in with her fingers.
“Hot,” she grunts once.
“No shit,” he gasps.
No tea to wash the hot away but he’s foreseen the problem and bought a couple of cans of Coke from a vending machine outside the pharmacy. As he watches her dive into the cartons, he suspects she has never in fact eaten Chinese food in her life. No wonder she doesn’t know what to do with her chopsticks.
Filling the endless pit improves his mood drastically. He yanks a dub of the Meatmen and plugs Fishbone’s epic “Bonin’ in the Boneyard” into the loop. She’s never heard it before and its unrelenting horniness breaks her up. Abandoning the take-out cartons, he crawls onto the cot and her.
“Recovered?” she asks with eyebrow cocked.
Tracing the sharp elegant angle of the mocking brow with his fingertips, he grins. “Can’t win if you don’t play.”
“Can’t lose, either.”
He frowns. “Yes you can.”
And she blinks, startled by the proposition. “Maybe it’s just not my game,” she ventures.
Contact with her body and the sensual drive of the music arouses Sam past answering. Moving her hand to his groin, he brushes his bruised lips over hers and even the discomfort is exciting. The ginger and hot pepper undertones of the Chinese food they have eaten add another tingle. He dives under the sweatshirt.
“Oh no, not again,” she cries.
He makes a mouthfart—hurts like hell to do it too but it’s fun—on her navel while she shrieks and pummels him. He retreats, pulls down her shirt. Cupping her sex with his left hand, he palms the curve of her pubis, pressing it gently. She shivers but she doesn’t jump. Intrigued, he begins to rock his hand. She begins to perspire at her temples and between her breasts.
“All right,” he murmurs.
Skinnying out of his jeans again, he kneels between her legs, lifting her ass for an easier angle. Then he remembers the rubbers in his jacket pocket.
“What are you doing?” she demands when he sits back and hooks the jacket off the floor.
“You gotta be free. I gotta be safe.”
He braces himself for her to be angry but she merely rolls her eyes and looks away. And he’s shocked by his own disappointment. He wants her to be offended, hurt, the way he was over her and Chapin. Is still. Only now he also feels cheesy and mean. The thing on his prick is weird and constricting. Looks stupid too. Safe. It won’t keep him safe from being a jerk. He deserves it if it spoils the pleasure.
Trying to make up
