Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

“This kind of feels like the Wild West. Like you could get away with a lot, as long as you don’t disturb the peace.”

Smoke shrugged. “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, as long as you don’t hurt other people…I mean, who really cares? It’s not like a thousand little rules are really going to turn this into some sort of model society.”

Cass didn’t answer. At first, as the rule of law gave way to the rules of self-preservation, there had been an unfamiliar sense of freedom, an untethering from the obligations and habits of Before. But that freedom was only an illusion, at least here, where a man who might or might not be Sammi’s father ruled with one hand while he offered temptation with the other. Maybe it was inevitable this sort of order would impose itself, even Aftertime.

Cass remembered the helpless anger everyone felt at the government as the Siege wore on, as one by one the threads connecting communities were broken and people were catapulted into chaos. At the time, everyone had wished for someone or something new to take charge, to make things right and tell them what to do.

Now, a few months later, someone had. Several someones. Only the choices didn’t look good. There were the Rebuilders. The Box, with its promises of numbness and pleasure. Hundreds of smaller communities with God-knows-what going on behind closed walls. And then whatever the Convent offered.

Cass wasn’t optimistic about finding anything more than a different brand of crazy inside the stadium, but if Ruthie was there, that’s where she was going.

Later, in the tent, Cass busied herself with unrolling the flaps that served as a door and snapping them shut. Only a slim band of lantern light entered at the bottom, though not enough to cast any light on the interior of the tent, so Cass undressed in the dark. Her skin was soft and warm from the showers-an outdoor affair that ran from a heated reservoir and felt better than almost anything she’d experienced in recent memory.

Anything, that is, except for the night in Lyle’s guest room. Only Cass wasn’t sure if that was even in the same realm. The sensations of that night were enmeshed so completely with emotion that it was impossible to know how much of what she felt came from Smoke’s touch and how much was the momentum of her own needs and fears, tumbled together in a firestorm of ecstasy.

And now she was about to lie down with him for the second time. Cass knelt on the air mattress, felt it shift beneath her weight. She ran her hands along the blankets and sheets, which were not nearly as finely made or as clean as Lyle’s, and when her hands found Smoke’s he took them and wrapped them firmly in his own and pulled her toward him without hesitation.

“Get under,” he commanded and she wriggled into the warmth under the covers and pressed against him. For a moment it felt sweet and right, a relief, a balm, an exhalation of a breath caught in anxiety. Smoke’s chest was bare. He was wearing only boxers. And even through the cotton she could feel his heat and, undeniably, his desire.

“You traded away everything we had today,” Cass chided, trying to keep her tone light. “Now we’ve got no aces up our sleeves. Nothing to get us out of the next jam we get into.”

“Didn’t give away anything we can’t get more of,” Smoke murmured as he put his arms around her, his hands careful and tender on her back as they sought to touch only the unhurt places. For a moment Cass let herself luxuriate in his arms, in the promise of safety there. But there was whiskey on his breath, and the smell worked away at the thin wall she’d put up over her promises to herself.

Cass had once loved to kiss a man who’d been drinking whiskey, the way it tasted like a clue to something hard to find, like earth after a rain and like a fire still burning. She never drank it herself, but there had been a dozen nights that had started with its promise.

Not a promise actually, but a trick.

It was Cass’s best trick and also her only trick. The way it worked:

She would have two shots, back to back, when she got to the bar. Vodka was easiest. Sometimes tequila. It helped hone her instincts, her senses, and when she found the right one-bent over a pool table, laughing with his friends, alone at the bar, it didn’t matter, she always knew-the trick was that for a moment right before one of them spoke, everything was possible. Because he could be the one who turned out to be different. He could be the one to see her for who she was, to understand that all her toughness wasn’t anything but pain, to know that she threw herself on the fire over and over again not to satisfy herself but to punish herself-who would see and know all that and still want her and be strong enough to keep her from hurting herself long enough that she wouldn’t have to hurt him just to make herself forget, to make herself believe that it meant nothing.

Because that was her dirtiest little secret of all-it never really meant nothing. She could walk away and walk away and walk away and walk away, fuck a thousand men and forget all their names and pretend she didn’t remember what they looked like or how their hands felt on her, and get up the next day and do it again and again, and yet it meant something every single time, it meant another failure and another time she wasn’t good enough and she wasn’t wanted enough.

But that moment. That moment when he first spoke, when she caught the whiskey on his breath, when he looked her up and down and really took his time, when he touched her hand or brushed against her thigh, when he told her that her eyes reminded him of someone or that she was the prettiest thing to ever walk into that particular bar, she played her one trick and played it well. She never lost her taste for the con, she worked it every time, because this might be the man who would truly know her-and want her anyway.

And she felt it now, felt it as she never had before, when Smoke settled his hand into the curve of her waist and drew her closer against him, so she could feel him pressing against her, making her hot and liquid and confused. He was here with her again, just like he was two nights ago. He had taken great risks with her, brought her gifts, lain down with her…and she longed to wonder if maybe, just maybe, this might be the time things would be different.

But tomorrow she would be going to find Gloria, and Gloria would tell her what she needed to get inside the Convent, to get to Ruthie. And whatever she had to do, Cass would do, and she would find Ruthie and she would take Ruthie back. And she needed to save all her energy, all her determination, for that. She could not afford to give up even one bit of her concentration for a man, for the game she always played, for the way she always punished herself. She could not afford to hurt herself or revile herself. Not now. She had to be strong.

So Cass put her hand on Smoke’s chest and with tears stinging her eyes, she pushed him away, and if she thought his hesitation and his longing might be for who she really was this time, she also knew it was only a trick of her damned and fevered mind.

CASS WAS IN THE FAR CORNER OF THE DIRT lot behind the High Timer.

This was familiar ground, and if she wasn’t proud, exactly, to be there, backed up against the side of a pickup parked under a sycamore next to the dried-up creek, she wasn’t sorry, either. No one could make her sorry, because she owned this corner of the lot, had driven dozens of men to begging and pleading and even crying hot salty tears here, the first when she was barely seventeen years old.

Only this one was different.

She wasn’t sure how she got here. Couldn’t conjure up a memory of the drinks he bought her or the songs he picked on the jukebox. Had he challenged her to pool? So many of them did that, thinking she’d be impressed with their hard-crack breaks or their wily double-bank shots, when Cass had learned pool from the master himself, Silver Dollar Haverford, her own daddy who could beat any man from Portland down to Tijuana. Or maybe he had danced with her, the sly dip and glide of a farm boy with town manners.