“Fuck!” she gasps in his ear.
He does not hear the grinding of gears in his own throat, the rending crash of his own cry.
Then they are on the floor, on the mattress still, with the wreckage of the cot’s frame around them.
For a long moment they pant heavily in the quiet of the abandoned Mill. Her fingers twist anxiously in his hair. It hurts.
“Jesus,” she gasps.
He tips her chin to look in her eyes. Her face is damp, pupils wide and depthless. Dark eyes cores to the center of the earth. Mouth swollen. The loop of her chains across her cheek is damp to his touch.
“You okay?”
She blinks. Clears her throat. “I feel like I fell off the edge of the fucking earth.”
There is a visible pulse in her carotid artery. He licks salty damp from the hollow of her throat.
“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you.”
She laughs, still a little breathlessly. It is an unexpected thrill, feeling her laughter from the inside. He is still half-hard and the slick of heat rippling around him is a new excitement.
“You didn’t get hurt by the cot collapsing?”
“Not the cot,” she says, “you landing on me. Knocked the wind out of me. That was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me having sex.”
“I’m sorry if I hurt you. And about not being able to hold back too. You didn’t make it, did you?”
A slight roll of her head confirms his guess.
He wets his lower lip. “Something I can do to help you?”
This time her laugh is disbelieving.
He sucks the lobe of her ear, enjoying the shiver of her body against him.
“No big deal,” she says and draws his mouth to hers. A small kiss, like one taken at the kitchen door on the way to work. She wriggles under him, eases him out of her. “I’d kill for a butt.”
He watches her twitching through her clothes, poking around the cubby, finding nothing. In the pallid light of the unshaded lightbulb hanging above her, her skin is mottled with bruise and scab and tattoo. The startling sculptural hairlessness of her skull makes her ears seem naked despite her earrings. The nipples of her small breasts are contracted with the cold. Her pubic hair and the black tufts of her armpit hair so conspicuous against her ivory skin, her eyebrows, her dark eyes emphasized with heavy dark eyeliner, her small face so fiercely chained—a comely cannibal, he thinks, remembering a phrase he has read.
She knows he is looking but she ignores hm. His cock lies semitumescent and wet on his leg.
“Were you close?”
“I never come.” Defensively, dismissively, “Lots of girls don’t.”
“Never? Not even on your own?”
She’s scandalized. “You mean play with myself? I don’t need to do that. That’s for people who can’t get laid.”
Sam hoists an eyebrow. “Jesus,” he mutters. He’s supposed to be the one who doesn’t know jackshit.
“I told you it’s no big deal.”
Like a soap bubble bursting, the momentary euphoria is gone. It’s just a claustrophobic dirty little room in a desolate place. The fractured cot frame staggers at the corners like a busted orange crate. He can feel the cold coming up through the thin layers of the mattress from the floor. The only reason the mattress isn’t crawling with crabs or some other bug is it’s too cold for vermin this time of year. Except maybe for rats. There are rat turds in corners here and there.
He finds his shorts, his jeans, and legs clumsily into them. “If this isn’t a big deal, Deanie, what is?”
“Very goddamn little. Winning a state title, that’s a big deal. Doing up a little beer and weed, that’s no big deal. Training contract, no fucking big deal.”
Sam closes his eyes. She’s smarter than he is but about this she’s screwed up. Why play the game if you’re not going to do it by the rules? What does winning mean if you’ve cheated?
The decayed smell of the Mill is suddenly strong in his nose. In this chickenshit new world, a rule is a curiosity like this Mill. Obsolete. Relic. Let the sweet old machines seize up and rust; they take too much energy. They’re too powerful, too scary. Make the world cheaper with microchips and nonunion labor somewhere in Asia or South America. So what if it falls apart, if it doesn’t work. So what if it’s cheesy. That’s what dumps are for. This place has his name signed to it in brass; he wonders if he might as well have sprayed it on the wall.
“What about Lexie?”
“What? Jesus, are you still ragging about that?”
“It was wrong. She was loaded, she’s just a kid. How could they do it? I can’t close my eyes and pretend it never happened. That would make me one of them.”
Her face tightens into a mask. “Oh grow up.”
She finishes buttoning her jeans and kneels next to him. Bare-breasted. He can feel her body heat, smell her chemicals, hold her tits in his hands—she’s that close to him. A few minutes before, their bodies were locked together. At this instant, their very proximity, their partial nudity, is a mockery. It only seems to emphasize what strangers they really are to each other.
Everything has gone sour. The way it always does with her. Stricken into silence, he gropes for his sneakers. She hugs her knees, watching him. With the heater putting out warmth, her nipples have relaxed and she seems unselfconscious about sitting there half-dressed. He sits down again, necks of his high-tops pinched between the fingers of his right hand. Dropping them, he reaches for her, drawing her close to him again. She resists for a little bit and then sags against him.
“I thought”—he struggles with the words and she interrupts him.
“Big mistake.”
He slogs on. “I thought you wanted us to make luh—luh—” Her fingers fly to the trembling of his lips.
“I did. It was nice, what you did. Putting up the hoop.”
He doesn’t know what to say.
