Aftertime

by Sophie Littlefield

  “He could have been making it up, he could have been crazy, he-”

  “Yes,” Smoke interrupted. “Yes, he could have been lying. But I choose to believe him. That’s all we can do anymore…is to choose what we’re going to believe and what not to believe.”

  This time when he traced his thumb gently along her cheek, Cass stayed still. When he grazed the tender skin below her eyes, her tears spilled over and splashed hot on his skin, but he did not flinch.

  “What happened to him?” Cass whispered. “The scientist.”

  “He moved on. He felt it was only a matter of time before the Beaters spread east, he figured within a year they’d have reached the Midwest and South. But he went north… He thought the Beaters might not be able to handle colder climates.”

  “You believe that?”

  Smoke said nothing, but his fingertips traced her hairline, over her ears, settled under her chin. “Yeah, maybe,” he finally said. “I mean they’re still human. Kind of. They’d die of exposure when the temperatures go below freezing, so I think there’s a good chance they’ll naturally keep moving south with the weather. Look, let’s not talk about all this anymore now. Come with me, Cass. Let’s lie down. I’ll stay awake with you until you fall asleep. Let me help-you don’t need to feel so alone.”

  Cass ducked her chin. The moment was broken; she was done crying for now. She followed Smoke out of the bathroom and into the guest room, and as he closed the door silently behind them she turned the bedcovers down and slid between the sheets. They were marvelously cool and silky against her skin. They smelled like fabric softener, and Cass realized that they hadn’t been slept in since the last time they were washed.

  Smoke unbuttoned his shirt, taking his time and watching her watching him in the moonlight. He slid it off and folded it and laid it on a chair. Then he took off his belt and boots and socks and dropped them to the floor. He got in the bed next to her, slowly, carefully, leaving an expanse of white sheet between them. He propped himself up on an elbow and gazed at her and she couldn’t help it, she sucked in her breath and felt her skin grow hot.

  Being watched like this…Cass felt the old stirring, the need that had always made itself known to her without subtlety. Whenever she felt her solitude too acutely, the weight of all her terrible decisions, there was only one way to block it out, and that was to smother it with something stronger.

  She had started using sex to obliterate the pain when she was a senior in high school. A few years later she’d evolved it into a high art, learning to attract and control and barter, and for a while that was enough. But over time it took greater and greater risks, sheer heights and breathless drops, to satisfy her need for release.

  Drinking helped. But drinking only masked the need. It never took it away. And there had been plenty of nights when she didn’t manage to pass out before she had to satisfy the hunger that wouldn’t be quieted. Plenty of nights when she’d done things that skated a very thin line between pleasure and pain, when she didn’t recognize her own cries, couldn’t tell if they were anguish or satisfaction.

  Ruthie had been conceived on such a night. Only, Cass had no idea which one. There had been too many.

  Now, the old swirl was hot within her, the rushing, dizzying bloom of need and fury that felt like molten iron and burning acid all at once, a killing thirst that demanded to be slaked. But something was wrong. Instead of anger, it had been stoked by fear. Fear…and loneliness. And these emotions could never be powerful enough. They could never force her to do what anger could do-because she was a creature of rage, she burned white-hot when she drank and fucked and ran miles through the foothills, when she pushed her muscles her lungs her legs so hard they screamed out for release. Without her rage she was nothing but emptiness, a shell of a person.

  And yet the swirling need was there, threatening to overtake her if she didn’t satisfy it. How long had it been since- Cass’s mind raced as she realized she hadn’t touched herself, hadn’t had even that pale substitute, since she woke in her matted bed of dead weeds. How was that possible? All these long days on the road, and Cass had never once missed the touch of a man…or even the satisfaction of her own hands…until now, with Smoke next to her, Smoke whose eyes glinted even in the dark.

  “I can’t-I need-” she started to say, but she didn’t know what came next.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Smoke said, his voice little more than a low vibration that traveled from his body through the soft clean sheets and blankets and mattress and pillows and into her body, spreading out from the middle, sounds and sensations that broke apart and reformed as more than just words.

  “I’m not ashamed,” she whispered back. But it was a lie. Her shame was so great, so powerful, it was a tiger in a cage; it was hungry; it wanted to devour her as it had devoured her on so many nights before. Its teeth were sharp. The only way to keep the tiger in its cage was to fight back with the rage inside her and she only knew one way if she couldn’t drink her shame into submission, she had to let it out through her body, until the sensations overtook her, emptied her, cleansed her.

  “I’m not afraid,” Smoke said, and he reached out a hand and closed it over hers, but he didn’t come any closer, he kept the distance between them-a gulf he wouldn’t cross, a moat he would let her stay behind. “I’m not afraid of you and I don’t believe you have anything evil inside of you. I could kiss you now and I wouldn’t be afraid. I want to kiss you-I’m not afraid.”

  “No,” Cass protested. She couldn’t stand to look at him. She turned her face to the pillow, trembling. “No, no, no…”

  But she held on to his hand, and it was her-it was all her-who pulled hard, who took his hand and pressed it to her body, over her shirt, ground his palm against her nipple as she found the corner of the pillowcase and bit down hard.

  Smoke waited, his body tense and still next to her and only when she whispered please, eyes squeezed tight against everything she couldn’t bear to admit to herself, only then did he trace the softest path across her collarbone with his lips while he pushed her scrabbling fingers away and locked them tight in his own.

  “Don’t kiss me,” Cass whispered fiercely.

  If she could, she’d seal her mouth, cover it over with skin so the disease, if it was harboring inside her, insidious and undetected, could only boil its toxins within her. She would not risk Smoke-she’d swallow the disease whole if she had to. She would be its host; she would give it her body, but she would not let it claim him, too. “Don’t you ever kiss me.”

  Cass let him pin her in place because she wanted to be pinned and somehow he knew. She did not want to be able to fight against this. She knew herself too well, knew how savagely her body would fight if it had a chance, so she lay with one arm trapped under her hip, her other pressed to the mattress in Smoke’s fist, as he unbuttoned her shirt one excruciatingly slow button at a time. He slid his fingers along the edge of the bra the women had brought her. It was a serviceable thing, nothing like the black and lacy ones she used to wear, a stretch of beige with businesslike stitching and sturdy straps, but it was a simple matter for him to unhook the front and ease it out of the way while her treacherous body slid closer to him, as close as it could while he held her in place.

  She was strong but she was compact, legs and arms whittled down to muscle and sinew and not much else. Smoke was broad and dense and unstoppable, and she shivered with anticipation as he covered her body with his own and held her motionless and watched her. The window was open; Cass had not thought to worry about it, and there was no time to be afraid now-any Beaters wandering around out side could fuck themselves because she had to be here for this moment, had to be all here, body and mind and whatever shreds were left of her soul. Sheer curtains fluttered in the window, gossamer panels of white that waved and floated on the breeze. A woman chose those curtains. The breeze was cool and delicious and it blew gently across her body, across her nipples, exposed and hard and aching. The breeze was
indifferent to the Siege. It was the breeze of Before, and as Smoke lowered his mouth to her, slow and unstoppable, it occurred to her that the breeze had defied the Beaters, the famine, the routed, cracked and poisoned earth. It waited for night and then it came as it ever had and Cass welcomed it and drank it in.

  Smoke’s mouth: it was hot. It was soft but then…oh, God, then it wasn’t. He closed his lips around her and stroked with his tongue and even then he was strong, he was insistent, had she known he would be like this the moment she saw him in the little room that was once a school office? As he looked her up and down, Cass with her wrecked flesh and stinking body and misshapen clothes, her hair in knots, no better than a rabid dog…there had been something even then, hadn’t there? But Cass had steeled herself against it, she had thought her body no longer carried that taint.

  The things she’d suffered, in some way she’d thought they had sucked all the life from her. Not just hope and faith but this, this most elemental longing of the body for recognition. For slaking. For surfeit. This was, somehow, different from the desperate coupling she’d done a thousand times in the back room of her trailer, in backseats in roadhouse parking lots, in cheap motel rooms and alleys and up against cars. This was a bid for life.

  Smoke grazed her nipple with his teeth and she cried out and bucked against him. She wrapped her strong thighs around his waist and forced him harder against her. He slid his hand into what was left of her hair. He tugged and she arched her back, and then he released her hair so that he could undo her pants, could jam the zipper down and slide the rough fabric over her hips, taking the plain white cotton panties with them. She made the sounds that meant no, that meant this is not a good idea, but the sounds somehow didn’t turn into words, were just sounds, just wailing needful sounds.

  He kissed her neck, traced a path around her jaw, down across her throat as his hand found its way between her legs, her legs that fell open for him in greedy betrayal. He pressed his palm gently against her and hesitated, as though he might stop there. His touch was not tentative, she knew he meant to be reassuring, and that was not enough, no, that would not be enough, it would never be enough.

  Cass lifted her hips off the bed and ground against his hand and he entered her with his fingers. He was not gentle. He did not take his time. He did not coax out her moisture to ease his way. He jammed them hard inside her and she broke her own rule, she had kept her mouth clamped shut but now she cried out, a hungry desperate sound that was nearly mad with need.

  Smoke plunged into her as far as he was able, but then his thumb slid against her in the mere suggestion of a caress. He barely touched her-there-and Cass threw herself into the rocketing sensation and kicked him, hard, on the backs of his calves. He answered with a growl that was deep and dangerous, and pushed her back against the bed with a hand splayed at her throat. She was pinned again, helpless against him and that may have been the only thing that allowed her to open her eyes and look at him. A lock of her hair had fallen into her mouth and she seized it with her tongue, chewed it.

  Their eyes met and it was some trick of the moonlight or of her own fevered need that she could see into him, through what was real into what was before, into his Before self, into his days of rote striving, his complacency, his success, and Cass knew in that instant that Smoke had never been a man she could want, Before, and it was only the Siege that had forged and molded him into this.

  Smoke lowered his face close to hers and she saw the look in his eyes. He wanted her to see it. He wanted it to be unmistakable as he spread her wetness all over her, found it with his insistent fingers and sluiced it into her folds and crevices, stroking her all the while, making her watch, and when her breathing grew hard and loud and ragged he plunged into her again but this time it was all of his fingers and he took his other hand and slid his thumb into her mouth and she clamped her lips around it and sucked it hard and writhed and bucked against him like she could take his entire being inside her and when she shattered she was sure she was dying because every part of her splintered and went flying into the sky in different directions and she didn’t even care.

  And then time passed and the breeze kept up its gentle journey and the tears-because yes, she’d sobbed when she came, probably she had been crying the entire time-the tears dried to salty tracks on her cheeks. Smoke held her, and when his hands found the wounds on her back he explored them with his fingers, so gently that it only tickled a little, and he murmured that he was sorry, so sorry, and she let him touch the entire expanse of what was ravaged and hurt. When she shivered from the night chill, he pulled the covers up over her body.

  Then he stroked her cheek and she could smell her own scent on his fingers and she turned her face away and the shame was back, just like that.

  “You shouldn’t…you put your fingers in my mouth.”

  “You wanted them there,” Smoke answered, without any trace of regret.

  “But I could be-”

  “We could both be dead tomorrow,” Smoke said sharply. And then, relenting: “Besides, I didn’t kiss you.”

  Cass considered that. Technically, it was true. He hadn’t kissed her on the mouth. But all it would take was the tiniest cut or scratch-oh, God, had she bitten him? She couldn’t remember; it wouldn’t surprise her-

  But she had needed him in her mouth, only it wasn’t his fingers she longed for, and as images flashed across her mind she felt herself blush and then she pushed his hand off her hip and wrapped the bed linens more tightly around herself.

  “What,” Smoke said, allowing himself to be pushed away.

  “You didn’t…you know. I was…that was all about me.”

  Smoke shrugged and settled himself on his back, making do with the short end of the blankets that Cass had left him. “You’re keeping score?”

  Confusion and uncertainty roiled and surged. “You say that like you think there will be a next time.”

  “I have no expectations,” Smoke said wearily. “For what it’s worth…I enjoyed every minute of that. You’re an exceptional woman, Cass.”

  I’m not, Cass screamed, but without words and without sound. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. Long after Smoke’s breathing went steady and even, long after her own body went leaden with fatigue and only her racing mind prevented it from falling into a deep sleep, the voice inside her raged against its walls.

  You aren’t exceptional. You aren’t anything. You were nothing. Now you’re diseased. You are the disease. You are the vessel and you are wrecked and poisoned and evil.

  Calmed by the voice that was vile but at least familiar, Cass finally let go of the sheet she had bunched tight in her hand. She stopped scraping her nails savagely at the skin of her thumb as the voice lulled her to sleep with its familiar lullaby of self-hatred. This was a landscape she knew well. This was home.

  But as she finally drifted off to sleep, the stretch of white sheet between them so inviolable it might as well have been a brick wall, Cass was unsettled to realize that there was a tiny tendril of hope twining up the walls around her heart.

  15

  RUTHIE WAS REACHING UP FOR HER, STAMPING her foot, stamping in frustration, her sweet little rosebud lips wobbling toward a wail. She was dressed, improbably, in the pink terry cloth onesie Cass had brought her home from the hospital in, a gift from Meddlin, who had been beside him self trying to keep the QikGo staffed while she was on her brief maternity leave.

  Ruthie was a big girl now and the pink onesie had morphed into a bell-sleeved dress with a full skirt that swung around her chubby knees as she stamped and pouted. She was trying to tell Cass something but Cass couldn’t hear-it was as though there were a thousand layers of sound in her ears and she could hear none of them. Tears welled in Cass’s eyes and she tried with all her might to bend down and pick up her baby, or at least kiss her frown away, but she couldn’t move. And then the outlines of Ruthie’s dress started to break up and scatter and Ruthie began to fade, her cries turning to frantic screaming.
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  “Cass-Cass!” Cass felt a strong hand close on her shoulder and she fought her way awake, the horror of the dream falling away in shards. She blinked hard a few times and sat up, looking frantically around the unfamiliar room until she remembered where she was.

  In daylight, the room was smaller than it had seemed last night, with a beadboard ceiling sloping toward the window, and rose-patterned wallpaper. The curtains that had drifted on last night’s breeze lay limp in the window, barely stirring. There was a white-painted dresser with a porcelain lamp and a basket of pinecones. A faint scent of dried eucalyptus tinged the air.

  Cass rubbed her eyes and forced herself to look at Smoke. The stubble on his face gave him a raffish air, and his eyebrows knit in concern only underscored the effect of a pirate. His t-shirt had twisted during the night, and she caught a glimpse of his stomach, flat and hard with a line of black hair below his navel, trailing down. She felt the stirring inside her, a response that last night had sealed indelibly in her mind, and she fought it hard.

  “You all right?” Smoke asked, voice sleep-rough but gentle.

  Instead of answering Cass rolled away from him and un-tangled herself from the blankets. She stood, hastily pulling up her pants, and slipped out of the room.

  She retreated to the bathroom and pulled the door tight behind her. Inside, on the closed toilet seat, lay a bowl of water and an unopened toothbrush and a fresh tube of toothpaste. On the floor was a second bucket; the waste bucket had been emptied. Lyle had been up before them, and the extent of his hospitality stopped Cass in her tracks and halted the panic that was threatening to careen out of control, dragging her behind it.