Page 103 of The Widow and the Wanted

Okee lifts his glass, watching me over the rim. “And you wanted me to hear.”

I swallow. “Hell.” My mouth has gone dry in spite of the whiskey, and I scrub a hand over my face. “Ain’t like I set out to but…once we started howlin’, lord have mercy.”

Okee’s girl glances once at him in the mirror, then goes back to her work like she has heard stranger things, which I expect she has.

Then he says, “That so.”

“That’s so,” I snap, because if he is going to make me drag it out of my own guts, he can have it bloody.

His eyes stay on me. “What made you so certain it wouldn’t wound me?”

I push out a breath through my mouth.

“Suppose I rolled the dice on that,” I say. “Was I wrong?”

The room goes so quiet I can hear the oil being worked into my skin.

“No.” He rubs a thumb once over the side of his glass, then sets it down on the floor beside the tub.

“Good,” I say to him. “Must have left an impression if you brought it up.”

“It did.”

“A mean one?”

His gaze don’t move.

“I permitted it, did I not?”

I laugh and gasp at the same time. “Permitted?”

“Yes.”

“And suppose I had done something you didn’t permit?”

“You wouldn’t have.”

The answer comes too quick. The bastard. “That’s an awful lot of faith to put in me.”

“No,” he says, careful. “It’s knowing what’s mine.”

That gets under my skin, which I reckon is the point. Heat crawls up my chest, and I love that he can put it there with his voice without a hand laid on me.

After that we go quiet.

The girls finish with us. Hands slicking over shoulders, thumbs finding sore places, cloths wrung out into bowls, scalps scrubbed clean. One girl says something about us being soft as boiled rope, and the other laughs coyly behind her hand before offering, “Handjob’s fifty cents, tits pressed together’s seventy-five, blowjob’s eighty, straight fuck’s a dollar, ass fuck’s a dollar fifty.”

She says it so sweet I can’t help but grin. “We’re all set in that department, thanks.”

They nod and shuffle out. By the time they leave, my head is loose on my neck and my blood is loose everywhere else.

Okee gets out first.

I look because I am weak and because he means me to. There ain’t no other reason for the way he takes the towel. Slow. Unbothered. Water running off him, lamplight caught on his ribs and shoulder and the long line of his stomach. His cock hangs heavy and soft between his thighs, thick even at rest, swaying gently with each unhurried step out of the tub.

He lets it all show. Lets me look. The soft, generous weight of him is somehow more devastating than if he were hard.

I gulp like a boy caught stealing.