Page 37 of Havoc

He does.

And it's not gentle, and I don't want it to be. He gets me up off the floor, and my back goes flat against the wall between the kitchen and the hall, and my legs get around him and the whole house moves with it, the same way that man's house moved this afternoon, and I think about that for exactly as long as it takes to stop thinking about anything.

His beard's rough on my throat. His hands are rougher. The rings drag, and one of them leaves something on my shirt, and neither of us stops.

I get his shirt over his head, and my nails go down his back, and he makes that sound again, deeper this time, into the side of my neck. Sweat on both of us, and it's still ninety degrees in this house at ten at night and the air conditioner is a joke somebody told in 1991.

"Look at me," I say.

He does. He gets his forehead against mine, and his eyes are open, and there's not one single thing hidden in them, not one, and that's worse than anything else that happens.

It's fast, and it's ugly, and both of us are furious the entire time, and none of it is aimed at each other. Mine's aimed at a woman who buried her mother and then buried her father twice and walked four miles into a swamp because she couldn't sit still. His is aimed at whatever's in there that he can't put a name to.

We take it out on each other because neither one of us can reach the actual thing.

At the end, he's got one hand flat on the wall by my head and his whole arm's shaking and he says my name once, and it comes out of him ruined.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

HAVOC

Floor's cold in the hall and I'm sittin' on it with my back to the wall.

She's gone down the hallway. Bathroom door, water runnin'. I got my knees up and my hands hangin' off 'em and I'm lookin' at the kitchen doorframe from four feet away like it's gonna tell me somethin'.

Ain't a mark on it. Ought to be.

Here's what I know about myself, and I've known it a long time and I've never had cause to look at it straight.

Every single thing I have ever had in this life, I took. The bike. The patch. The chair at that table. My name's a thing I got handed for what I do to people and I have been grateful for it since I was twenty-one years old.

Nobody has ever given me anything.

You put your hand on a man's throat and he gives you what you came for, and that ain't giving. A woman comes up the stairs at the clubhouse because you're the VP and she's been in that buildin' eight years and it's a Tuesday, and that ain't giving either, and Junie'd be the first to say so.

She stood on my porch and she put her hand in my shirt and she said say no.

She gave me an out. She built it herself and she handed it to me and she meant it, and if I'd used it she'd have let go of my shirt and gone in the house, and I would have laid in that bed all night knowin' she meant it.

That's the part I can't get around.

Twenty-two years the Arceneaux have owned this club and I found out today the man doin' the ownin' is doin' it without his own uncle's say-so, and I gave him the one piece of information that keeps her alive.

Sixty hours.

I get up off the floor.

There's a plate in the drying rack and one cup and one fork and there's a woman in my bathroom runnin' water, and I stand in the middle of my own kitchen and I understand about four things at once and every one of 'em is worse than the last.

I ain't handin' her over.

I was never goin' to hand her over. Not from the parkin' lot. Not from the second she quit walkin' and looked at my chest instead of my face and said well, that was fast, and every hour since has been me buildin' reasons on top of a thing I'd already decided before I had a reason at all.

Storm asked me a straight question on my own back steps and I lied into his ear.

And on Monday, one way or the other, ten men are gonna find out.

The water shuts off down the hall.