“Dunno. I guess they don’t want to win quite so bad as they want to screw up.”
“Must cheese you off.”
“Hell yes,” he admits. “Nevermind. It’s just a game. I’m all done with it in another six weeks anyway. I still want you girls to get your title but I’m starting to give shit one whether we take another one. It might be better if I did quit.”
“Right, genius. That’s so dumb you had to have thunk it up yourself.”
“You know it’s around school about New Year’s Eve?” he asks.
“So? You think any of the suits who run the show will do anything? It’s a dead rat in a baggie to them. They don’t want the stink.”
She makes cartoons in the condensate on the window; he keeps his eyes on the road.
They are closing on the village before he speaks again, huskily. “Let’s go to the Mill.”
He glances away from the road at her. She pokes playfully at the basketball on the floor with her toe. Then worms herself into a straighter posture, her eyes gone darker, and sly as the night sky.
“Okay.”
The constriction in his chest lets go and he breathes again, and the air is warm and Mutant-smelling.
Instead of the parking lot at the Playground, he approaches the Mill from the opposite direction and finds an access road to the park near the end of Mill Street, where a strip of woods backs the abandoned structure. Outside the reach of streetlight, once he kills the truck’s lights, it blends into the darkness. Of course she knows the quickest way through the woods to the Mill. At the door, he takes the key from her.
“Stay behind me,” he tells her with a grin and she laughs.
As he opens it, she stays his reach for the light switch.
“Don’t. Somebody might see the lights leaking from those broken windows way up. Candles are safer.”
She stoops just inside the door to dig a stone from the wall. Behind it is a battered tin cookie box presently housing candle stubs, a box of kitchen matches and some E-Z Wider rolling papers.
“My old ladies never throw shit out. They had a shoebox full of candle stubs out in their shed, been there since nineteen-ought-who-gives-a-fuck. I kifed it. They’ll never miss’m.” As she lights one, she smiles with pleasure. The uncertain flicker over her face is unearthly and melting, as if she herself is an illusion of the flame. “I like the way they smell. Real beeswax. Sometimes I boost one of those fancy scented candles but these are the ones I mostly use.”
Handing him the burning stub, she closes the box and rises. For a moment, they look at each other and then she turns toward the cubby. Hesitantly, he follows the flicker of the candle into the vast darkness of the Mill.
Her eyes mirror the flame as she applies a match to the first stub, as if there were, deep inside her, a pair of tiny fires. Impassive as her face is, the effect is to make her less human than ever. If her eyes suddenly glowed fluorescent green, she could not look more unearthly to him.
While the coils of the space heater redden, she lights the candles and sets them around the closet-sized room. She unlaces and yanks off her high-tops. He goes so far himself and then they furl themselves on the mattress, waiting for the cubby to warm up. The smell of the melting beeswax is clean and churchy, with a tinge of burning wick. The tremulous candleflame gilds her skin and ripples on her chains like the setting sun on the wrinkled skin of the lake in summer. It throws tiger stripes of liquid honey and shadows dancing onto the walls.
“Good it’s cold,” he murmurs as much to himself as to her.
Waiting for the heater to bring the chill to something bearable, they have to go slow. He wants to go real slow, make it last. She hides her face in his jacket, her hands slipping under his layers of shirts, fingertips whispering over his nipples. They drift into a flurry of clumsy kisses. He forgets about going slow and makes a sudden assault, his tongue feeling enormous to him ramming past hers, making her gasp. Undoing the buttons of her coat, he cups her breasts inside her T-shirt and rocks against her thigh. For too many long moments, they are tangled in their clothing. By the time his jeans are around his ankles and she is wearing only chains, they are sweating with exertion. Her strong fingers close around his cock and draw him down between her legs again. He pushes the head of it against her and meets a maddening resistant heat. A second shove makes her cry out and yank his hair.
Impatiently she rolls up and goes down on him, mouthing his cock. She doesn’t suck him, just wets him thoroughly and flops back again. He grasps, with embarrassment, that she is still dry and this will take care of it. When she lies back, he uses his fingers first to make sure of his route. There is still resistance but it is less and he can’t stop anyway, is on the verge of emission, and the hard edge of her chains between them is exquisite. This is worth any amount of awkwardness and blushing. What a sweet machine, sweet machine is all he can think as he spurts what feels like his brains into her. And then her fingers are burrowed in his hair, lightly stroking the base of his skull. “It’s all right. No big deal.”
The words that irritated him before bring him an unexpected relief. Suckered to her with sweat, he shivers. He doesn’t need to ask if she made it, not after that performance. When he tries to apologize, she stops his mouth with quick fingertips.
“I’ll get better,” he promises. “We’ll get better.”
She pays no attention. “You know how long it’s been since I had a cigarette?”
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