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She shudders, the water bottle falling out of her loose grip. It hits the edge of the narrow, stained bed, then lands on the flattened carpet with a thud.
“More,” Billie mutters to herself, her voice thick with the sobs she carried through the night and a desperate need for water she ignores.
Watered down moonshine is hydration, right?
Moonshine she needs more than anything this morning. She needs to be numb. Preston has torn her heart out so many times since they first met. So many times that she couldn’t count them on her fingers and toes.
But this time—it’s different.
He doesn’t know that. But she does. So, she has an old friend visit her—a hollowed out pit in her writhing gut, one that makes her nauseas, fights off any appetite she should have, stirs an unease that has her thinking of a toilet STAT.
But moonshine first.
Numb me.
She kicks off the sweaty sheet that’s tangled around her legs. The carpet is course and scratchy against the soles of her feet as she pads her way out of the brown-wallpapered room. It’s a tight squeeze into the small corridor, so narrow that only one can pass through at a time.
But there’s only one here.
Her mom hasn’t been home for weeks.
Probably at her new fling’s place, ‘Call Me Dad Number Twelve’.
Billie would have heard her mom stagger in if she’d come home last night, since she didn’t get a wink of sleep—a fact that shows on her face as she finds her way into the tiny bathroom and looks herself in the mirror.
One blink, and she looks away. Her gaze moves to the jug she left in the shower—a quarter full.
Clambering into the shower, her arms are as clumsy in lethargy as her legs. Before she switches on the water, she’s already got the jug in hand and uncorking it.
When the water hits, the other sensation is quick to cling to her. And it isn’t the booze.
Sighing, she looks down her pale, slim body—and sees the underwear stuck to her skin by the water. Balancing the jug in hand, she clumsily climbs out of her underwear, falling into the tiled wall for a beat.
For a while, a long while, she just stays there. Leaning against the cold tiles, blank eyes on the mirror just beyond the parted plastic curtain, and she watches the sunrise start to shed dusty light into the bathroom.Shelights up—illumination of the tired dark circles around her glass-blue eyes, the cracked texture of her full lips, light-brown roots growing out into the bleached blonde of her hair, and a dusting of faded freckles over her chest.
Not unpretty. Not unattractive.
But a face she fucking hates.
She yanks the shower curtain to hide the mirror, then washes herself.
By the time she’s out, dry and changed into a plain black dress, the sun is up, not just early rising, and the buzz of the trailer park lifts. Heavy, unintelligible voices too gravelly to understand pierce through the thin walls of the trailer.
A constant buzz of chatter she’s used to, so it falls into the background like white noise as she tops up her water bottle, then hides the moonshine jug under her bed (away from her mom if she comes looking).
It’s when she’s tugging on her ankle boots that the door rattles.
Only one rapid knock—
She looks up from the edge of the cigarette-marked sofa as the knob turns and, with a practiced jerk to the side, the door shoves open.
Carmine lets herself in.
Billie feels her small welcoming smile twist the scar at the corner of her mouth uncomfortably so. The smile slips away and she fastens up the zip of her boot. “Care,” she drawls. “I’m on my way out—gotta shift at the Joint.”
Jim’s Joint—back some centuries when the town was a fishing haven—used to be something of a money-maker. An old tavern with rooms upstairs and life within the walls.
Now, it’s the bar for the Southside, just on the edge of the town’s center, and an absolute breeding ground for fights. Few of the wasps come down to the Joint.
