Page 67 of Havoc

He settles between my thighs. The breadth of his shoulders makes a shadow. He lifts one of my knees and drapes it over his shoulder. He looks at my cunt as if it is a map, a route he intends to memorize. His first lick is flat and long, from the perineum to the clit. My body jerks. He does it again, slower. His tongue circles the clit and I say his name, a hard gasp. His fingers find my entrance and push in. One, then two. They are thick, and the stretch is a slow fullness. He crooks them upward, the pressure against my front wall makes my eyes roll back.

The tears start somewhere in that. I don’t know the moment. A drop runs down my temple. Another follows the line of my jaw. He sees it. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t ask. His fingers curl and his tongue laps and he keeps his gaze fixed on my face, open and unafraid. He doesn’t even say a clumsy word, pause to ask if I’m all right. He accepts the water and keeps going.

He doesn’t stop. He works me with his fingers and mouth, and the tears keep coming. They’re not a cry, no sobbing. They’re more a slow leak, a rainy season. Grief has been stored in me for four months and it has found this one gap, a drain. The name of a man and his tongue on my clit. It’s strange, but it’s not enough to stop me. It’s release.

He pulls his fingers out and crawls up my body. His mouth is wet, slick with me. He kisses me and I taste myself on him. The tears in my eyes smear between our cheeks. He doesn’t wipe them away. He lets them be. He takes his cock in one hand and guides it to my entrance. The head nudges me, a wet pressure. I say his name again, my lips forming the two syllables against his mouth. "Elias."

He pushes in. By degrees. A heavy, thick intrusion. His jaw’s tight, his forehead pressed to the rug beside my ear. He sinks deeper with each small shift of his hips. The fullness is complete when his pelvis meets mine. He stays there, breathing into the rug. His shoulders shake. The name is still on my lips, a whisper. He moves.

Each stroke is a long pull and a slower push. He gives me the rhythm like a hand on a back, steady and patient. The frog chorus outside swells. The candle flames, a liquid dance. There is a ringing in my ears, but it might be my own heart. I say his name at the apex of each thrust. "Elias." He answers with a pressure, a slight deepening of the angle. He’s learning to respond to his own name, a language that belongs to us.

The crying is in me still. It’s become part of the rhythm. My tears soak the rug edge under my hair. He slides his hand beneath my head and cradles it, lifting me into the curve of his arm. I’m not alone. The grief is not a wall between us; it’s a current that he swims beside.

He moves faster, a little, not much. A longer push, a held position, a friction that catches on every nerve. The orgasm arrives as a swell, not a sudden crash. It begins deep in my belly and fills me outward, down my thighs and up my spine. My cunt clenches around him and I say his name with a cry. "Elias."

He buries his face in my neck. He shudders. His hips press hard and still. The heat of his release pours into me, a wet pulse, a second heartbeat. His whole body tightens and then goes slack. The moment ends there.

"I got you," he says.

Nobody has said that to me since I was eleven years old.

Afterward we don't move.

He's on his back on a floor with a rug that doesn't go all the way to the walls, and I'm half on him with my ear over his sternum listening to it go, and the candle's down to about an inch and the heat is unbelievable and I have never been anywhere better.

"They're gonna throw me out," he says to the ceiling.

"I know."

"I don't much care."

"You do."

"Yeah." His hand moves in my hair. "I do."

I lie there in the dark on the floor of a house with nothing in it and listen to a man's heart go under my ear, and outside the frogs are hollering and somewhere down that road the power company is doing something about a line.

The candle goes out on its own around one.

Neither of us gets up to do anything about it.

And when I finally fall asleep, on the floor, in ninety degrees, with my hand flat on his chest, the last thing that goes through my head is not Havoc.

It hasn't been for about three hours.

Eli.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

HAVOC

Four in the mornin' behind a bait shop and there ain't a light on for two miles.

She counts the trees off the fence post out loud. One. Two. Three. Then she paces it off from the post the same way she did in the dark three weeks back with a nineteen-dollar shovel, and she gets down on her knees in the wet and puts both hands flat on the ground like she's checkin' whether it's warm.

"Here."

I dig.