Aftertime

by Littlefield, Sophie

  “They’re all bad,” she said softly.

  “Cass.” If she had expected sympathy she was mistaken: his voice was steel. He clamped his hand over hers, squeezed her fingers together until they hurt. “I can’t—I don’t—”

  He didn’t want her. Cass had only been looking for comfort but the knowledge cleaved her anyway. He held her hand away from his face as though it was a blade poised to slice through him, and Cass felt shame flood her like poison rushing through her veins.

  She had wanted comfort. But he didn’t want her.

  She knew that if she explained, if she could find the words to describe the emptiness that could never be filled, the chasm edged with cliffs of fear and longing, that he would provide comfort after a fashion. Because he was a good man. And only a good man would have come this far with her, taken the risks they had taken.

  A good man. A prince, in fact. A damn Boy Scout. In the killing emptiness her last, best defense stirred. A wrecked and battle-hardened thing, it had been born long ago when she first discovered what her need demanded, when she first recognized her body for what it was.

  That innocent, frightened girl had become a temptress, a serpentine thing, all enticing, all willing, all temptation and can’t-say-no. Years ago she had been clumsy, uncertain of her power, but realizing she had nothing to lose gave her strength, and she learned to twist and beckon and lure and ride until the men she found were all used up, until she had sapped them of everything they had to give her. Which wasn’t much, after you discounted the terrible convulsions of their bodies and the momentary vulnerability in their glazed eyes: other than that small gift they didn’t even realize they gave, there was nothing but release.

  But she’d have it now. The angry girl had pushed off the bottom of her heart, hurtled through the wavery place where Cass had consigned her, and crested the surface with a momentous burst of need. And Cass let her take over.

  Smoke had offered her kindness when kindness could kill her.

  He deserved this.

  Cass didn’t really believe that last conscious thought, but she pushed the phrase through her mind nonetheless, pushed it through and bit down on it and held it as the need took over. He deserved this because he didn’t want her after he’d let her want him.

  She yanked her hand back and she heard him take in his breath. She crawled across the makeshift bed, the hard ground through the limp air mattress hurting her knees, and shoved the cheap blanket and sheets aside as she straddled his body.

  “Cass…” His voice was alarmed. But she had set this in motion now, and it would not be stopped.

  She bent over him and let the t-shirt slide up over her thighs, her hips, leaving almost nothing between them. She pressed herself against him and found him hard, fiercely hard, and he shuddered involuntarily and seized her wrists.

  “Cass.” He said it again, through gritted teeth. He held her wrists so hard she felt her bones pressed together, and sucked in her breath in pain, but she didn’t fight him. He was stronger. But she had other ways.

  She let him hold her wrists. She gave control of her arms over to him, his for the moment. But she had the rest of her body and she used it.

  She rubbed herself slowly, lightly—to Smoke her touch must have felt tentative, but it was the farthest thing from tentative—over him, feeling the outline of his hard cock through the layers of cotton that might as well have not been there at all. She closed her eyes and concentrated on letting everything else fall away, because the more she gave herself over to the rush the less of her that was left behind. It was a battle for control, and the only way for her to control herself, to control the chasm with its jagged cliff edges, was to control him. The man below her, the man who she was trying to make into not-Smoke, to make into a stranger, to make into no one, because the old equation required a man who was nothing to her.

  But he kept saying her name and that would wreck it.

  “God, Cass,” he choked out, as though she was strangling him with the languid caress of her body against his.

  “Shut up,” she commanded, and pressed into him harder. The shock of the contact between them, hard meeting soft, sent sensation through her, a riveting jolt that emanated through her body but burned itself out long before it could reach her mind, her legs, her arms. “Shut up, please just shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up…”

  She ground out the words in time to her movement against him. Through her anger she felt her need grow and bloom. He found her rhythm and moved with her, this man beneath her, this man who in the dark could be a stranger; if she just tried hard enough he could be a stranger. She felt his grip on her wrists weaken and she twisted her hands savagely and he let go, his reflexes were slow, too late he realized she’d freed herself and tried to catch her again but she was quicker.

  Cass grabbed his hands before he could find her first. She held his strong fingers in her hands and pressed them up under her shirt, against her, and when his fingers spasmed against her she knew it was instinct that guided him and that he would still work against it and so she leaned into his touch, arching her back and moving so that her breasts fit themselves to his cupped hands and he had no choice. That’s what it felt like to her and she knew it must be the same for him, that he had no choice as his fingers found her nipples and circled and seized.

  From there, there was no thought. She plunged her fingers into his hair and lifted him to her so that his face was pressed against her and his mouth and lips and tongue were eager now. He didn’t fight. He was hungry and he gave up any attempts to restrain her and held her to him, his hands under her arms. She felt his fingers splayed against the bones of her rib cage, imagined it expanding with the breaths she sucked in, noisy ragged breaths that were not graceful.

  The things he did with his mouth made her writhe harder against him and the ride was no longer orchestrated by her, it was a course they both followed because there was no other. Their hands went to their clothes in the same instant and twined together as they pulled and yanked and tossed aside. He let go of her to pull his boxers down over his legs and the loss of his attention—even for a second—enraged the need in her and she took him in her hand and rubbed him against her hottest, wettest folds so that when he gasped and returned his hands to her sides he rocked into her just as she drove herself down on him and there was no hesitation, no halfway, nothing but trying to make him more inside and him trying to plunge farther.

  She bucked extravagantly, knowing it was coming, the thunderous crest that could not be stopped now, it was as sure as the sun blazing in the morning or thunder after lightning rips the sky. She leaned back and put her hands on his legs so that her body tilted away from him. If there was any light at all in the tent she knew that he would see her body, long and strong and bent back as she rode him hard, and that seeing her that way would send him past the point where he had any control at all, and knowing that—even in the dark, even where they saw nothing, where the loss of one sense only heightened the others so it was their sharp breaths on the silent night, the slap of sweat-slicked flesh, the grunting and syllables that were only parts of words—all of this spiraled tighter and tighter and she squeezed her eyes shut and ground her teeth together and threw herself into the chasm, past the treacherous cliffs and over the pain-dusted edges and into the nothing.

  It was a long and spectacular fall and partway down he met her there and it was like they seized each other midair so that when the final crest splintered into blinding sensation, she was aware of him there with her and it was new.

  It was new, it was like nothing she’d ever felt before, a feeling of being out of herself and part of him just for those seconds, her energy stretching and flickering and it seemed incredibly dangerous, like she might snap and not return to herself, but she let it happen anyway, and afterward she lay on top of him and waited for the part that had left her to come back, and the part that was him to leave her, and when it didn’t happen right away she began to panic but even her panic w
asn’t enough to make her lift her body away from his, because she lay in a state of such exhaustion and spent and total dissipation that moving was impossible.

  Much, much later she felt his hands in her hair, fingers gentle against her scalp, working the strands into tangles, and he said, “They’re applauding,” and while she tried to make sense of his words she marveled at the feel of his voice, the way it formed in his chest and rumbled against her cheek.

  And then she realized that he meant the sounds outside the tent, which only now entered her conscious mind: a smattering of clapping and laughter and one distinct voice saying, “That’s how it’s done, brother,” and another saying, “Could everyone shut the fuck up and let the rest of us sleep.”

  Cass burned with mortification. She didn’t remember making any sound—in those final seconds her hearing seemed to have gone the way of her vision, as though the darkness had stolen it, too—but she must have cried out. She didn’t do that, ordinarily, but she remembered the cry building in her throat right before everything splintered and it must have been loud enough to wake up the people sleeping nearby.

  Her greater worry—the fact that the man beneath her was slowly turning back into Smoke—was too much to think about now. She pushed her face into the hollow of his shoulder and willed herself not to think about it.

  When he said, very softly, “Sweet dreams, Cass,” she said over and over in her mind, “I do not hear you. I do not hear you.”

  I do not hear you, because you aren’t really there.

  29

  IN THE MORNING SHE WAS ALONE IN THE TENT and she thought: Smoke is a man who comes and goes quietly.

  And then she thought—Ruthie. Today was the day she would find out how to get inside the Convent, and she would search for her Ruthie.

  Do the next right thing, Pat’s voice—Hello, my name is Pat and I’m an alcoholic—said in her head, all reasonable insistence, the voice of a hundred meetings in the church basement. Pat listened; Pat never judged. Pat was bald except for a silver fringe on the back of his head and looked like he ought to be a grandfather, and Pat just kept listening. What if I don’t know the next right thing, Cass had demanded—had whined really, if she were to be honest—and Pat had said, It’s only one little next right thing, Cass, don’t think so hard, and the guy with the red hair—she couldn’t remember his name now because he didn’t last more than a few months—had muttered, Man plans and God laughs, which had struck Cass as funny and kind of clever, in context, a lot more clever than any of the stupid A.A. phrases…but by summer that guy was gone and Cass was still there so who was right, in the end?

  So she would do the next right thing, and that thing was: Find Gloria.

  She took the little bucket of personal supplies to the bathroom and was relieved to find that there was no further charge to use it, because Smoke had done all their trading and she didn’t know how it was done and she didn’t feel like letting her ignorance show. There was no sign of Smoke and Cass only saw a few other people trudging between the tents, shivering in hoodies and flannel shirts, and she realized that it was earlier than she’d first thought, maybe six or six-thirty on a late-summer morning.

  When she returned to their tent she saw that Faye was standing in front of it, holding a steaming mug.

  “There you are,” she said with a sly smile.

  “Sorry, I was just at the, uh, ladies’ room.”

  “Word is you two put on a bit of a show last night,” Faye said conversationally, and Cass felt her face redden. “Hey, you provided everyone some entertainment around here. And you got something that did you good. So chill. You ready to go meet Gloria?”

  “Yeah, just let me get—something,” she said, and poked her head into the tent. Really, she only wanted to see if Smoke had returned, but nothing looked disturbed. The covers were still tangled. Her pack was where she left it.

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  Faye led her through the camp. They passed the merchant stands, where people were stacking and arranging their wares—their toothbrushes and playing cards and packets of aspirin and Theraflu, their paper plates and toilet paper and candles and cans of beans and condensed milk and Chef Boyardee—and righting overturned camp chairs and cleaning up litter from the night before. A fire burned in a grate near where the remains of the bonfire smoldered, and coffee boiled in a pot on top, and Cass felt her stomach growl. Well, maybe later she could ask Smoke to buy her a meal. And coffee—a cup of hot, thick coffee. But for now she would concentrate on Gloria.

  “Here,” Faye said abruptly, veering off to the left, past the fenced-off area where the bike Smoke had traded was parked next to other motorcycles and a few bicycles and skateboards. “The cheap seats.”

  Cass hadn’t noticed them the night before—a row of canvas cots lined up next to the fence. In nearly all of them, motionless forms slept under drab, rough blankets, a few possessions piled under the ends of the beds.

  Cass followed Faye to the end of the row, trying not to stare. At the very end a woman with long gray hair escaping its braid sat with her back to them at the edge of her cot, bent over her knees; too late Cass realized she was throwing up.

  “Aw, shit, Gloria,” Faye exclaimed. “Here?”

  “I’ll clean it up, I’ll clean it up,” the woman said hastily, her voice reedy and frail, a girl’s voice in a middle-aged woman’s body. “I’m sorry, I think I must have eaten something—”

  “You mean, like a fifth of cheap gin,” Faye growled. “I’ll send someone. You didn’t get it on the bed, did you?”

  “No, no, I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Okay, well, I brought you someone who wants to talk to you. Take a walk with her. We’ll have this taken care of when you get back.”

  “Yes. Yes, thank you,” Gloria said. She stood and started to walk down the path along the fence, not even looking at Cass, who hurried to catch up.

  “You’re the girl wants to get in the Convent,” she said when Cass fell into step with her, stealing a sideways glance as though she was afraid of being found out. “They told me you’d come.”

  Cass saw pale green eyes in a weathered face, lashes bleached by the sun, cheekbones that were still regal. Gloria had once been a beauty, but Cass saw something else, something that was as familiar to her as the chipped, heavy mugs at the meetings: more regrets than a human being could keep hidden, so that they found their way to the surface, traced in the faint lines and creases of her skin.

  “I do want to get in,” she said carefully. “I need your help.”

  The corner of Gloria’s mouth twitched, a tic that only underscored her anxiety, and darted a glance at Cass. “How do I know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That you’re who you say you are. That you’re not one of theirs.”

  “One of…whose?”

  Gloria’s tic intensified and she pressed a fist against her mouth, pushing hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “They could have sent you. Mother Cora and the rest. To spy on me.”

  “Gloria…I don’t know who that is,” Cass said, trying to contain her impatience. “I just got here. I’ve never been in there. I need your help…please.”

  “They’re not supposed to come in here,” Gloria whispered, walking with her shoulders hunched. “It’s Dor’s rule. It’s his rule.”

  “The people…from the Convent, they aren’t allowed in here? In the Box?”

  “They can’t come in here.”

  “But I’m here. They let me in here. So, I can’t be from there, right?”

  Cass felt a little silly trying to reason with Gloria, but she could tell that the woman’s fear was real. Very gently, Cass touched her thin shoulder. Gloria startled at the touch, but after a moment she sighed and gave Cass another sidelong glance, pushing at the long gray hair that had come loose and tumbled around her shoulders.

  “I wish I had an elastic,” she said. “For my hair. Do you have an elastic?”

  “No, I’m s
orry,” Cass said.

  “Okay. That’s how it is—anytime you think of something that would actually be useful, you can never find it.”

  “You mean…”

  “In my house, I lived on the first floor of a nice old house. You should have seen it…I had a collection of tea tins. The ones with the pretty designs on them. Some of them were my mother’s. Oh, some of them were very old. And I don’t know, they may have been valuable, to someone, but I didn’t even care about them. They were just…always there, you know?”

  She sketched a shelf in the air with her fingers, and Cass knew she was seeing the tins in her mind, the way they looked in her kitchen. Cass had done the same thing a thousand times; nearly everyone had—remembering the things that were lost.

  But then Gloria chopped the air with the hand that had been tracing a memory, a harsh gesture followed by a sharper exhalation. “I never used them. They were empty, all of them, and they sat there and I looked at them all the time and I never took them off the shelf and put anything in them. And then—one day, in the Convent, I was on washing. Me and a woman named…something. Maybe it was Alice. We were pinning the clothes on the line. We had the cheap clothespins, a pack of a thousand someone got from the Wal-Mart, but, you know, Before. And they were in this plastic bag and they kept spilling out and we tried to twist the top closed but it just kept opening, all those clothespins lying on the ground, and I thought, my tins—it would have been perfect. The clothespins in the tins, and I wished right then that I had one of them, even one, just one. I would put the clothespins in the tin and there would be that one perfect thing. The one thing that was the way it ought to be. You know?”