Page 73 of Havoc

Eli doesn't pull away. He keeps moving. He continues the hard thrusts even while I am peaking. He does it because I told him not to stop. He stays in the rhythm until I start to come down.

I feel him tense. His muscles lock. He groans into my shoulder. He thrusts one last time and stays deep inside me. I feel the hot jet of his cum hitting my cervix. He fills me. The warmth spreads through my gut. He stays there. He doesn't move. He doesn't try to cuddle or whisper something sweet. He just breathes.

I keep my eyes open. I look at the kitchen chair eleven feet away. I see the coat. I see the hole. I know the fear that put it there. I know the secret in the lining. But right now I am just a woman in a bed in Louisiana. I am a woman who is full of another person. I am a woman who decided exactly how this night would go.

Afterward I'm on my stomach with my face turned and my arm hanging off the mattress, and he's got one hand moving up and down my spine, slowly, all the way from my neck to the small of my back and up again, and neither of us says anything for a long time.

"That was for the coat," he says.

"Yes."

"Alright."

"You're not asking me to say it was something else."

"Nope."

"Most men would."

"Most men ain't layin' here," Havoc says, and his hand keeps going.

Around three I fall asleep like that, on my stomach, with a stranger's ceiling over me and my father's coat folded on a chair in the next room, and I don't dream about any of it.

* * *

Junie comes out to the house on Thursday in a Cutlass with no muffler.

"Get in."

"I don't⁠—"

"I ain't askin' you a question, I'm openin' a door." She's got sunglasses on and one arm out the window. "You been sittin' in that man's house on the edge of a swamp for eleven days and you got about four hundred square feet of it that ain't hot. Get in."

So I get in.

"Where are we going?"

"To work," Junie says. "You can pour a beer, can't you?"

"I ran a bar for six years."

"Then you're overqualified and I'm underpaid and we're gonna get along fine."

The Fang sits back off the highway on a piece of dirt with a gravel lot and no sign except a piece of plywood with a snake painted on it by somebody who couldn't paint.

Inside it's dark at two in the afternoon and it smells like beer and bleach and old smoke, and there's a stage in the corner about a foot off the floor with three cables taped down on it and no band until Friday.

Gigi's already there, up on the cooler with her legs going, and she raises both arms when we come through the door.

"There she is."

"Get down off my cooler."

"It's the club's cooler."

"It's my cooler," Junie says, and ties her apron.

They put me on the well and I make about forty drinks in three hours and none of them are complicated, and it is the first time since April that I've had a thing to do with my hands that somebody was waiting on.