Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

Smoke had been that sun and she’d lain under his shine, turned her face to it and drunk it in greedily even as his heat and light beat down on the last of her defenses, the ones that guarded her very soul, leaving them withered and sere. She’d made love to him a hundred times and every time she’d given him everything, from the very first time to their last morning together, the morning of the day he betrayed her. She’d opened every cell of her being and sealed herself to him with her body, with her cries and her garbled love words, made him part of her, and now she had to shed him and it was going to be hard, hard, hard.

But she would start now.

She spat out the strands of her hair and drove her body against Dor, feeling him grow stiff underneath her. His fingers weakened around her wrists and she yanked them away, too fast for him, too devious. She put her hands on his shoulders and dug in with her fingers, knowing she was hurting him and not caring.

He cursed and swore low in his throat, the sound of an animal, ferocious in its need, insatiable, reverberating through her body into her spine.

His hands closed on her ass and pulled her hard against him, pushing himself up against her. He dug his fingers into her waistband and yanked, the tight-woven fabric unyielding, the zipper scratching against the tender skin of her belly. “Get these off,” he ordered her. “Do it now.”

The anger in his voice was a spark to the tinder of her crazed greed for him. She rolled off, clumsy, knees knocking, not caring. Zipper down with fingers slick with sweat. Panties already sodden as she peeled them away. Dor kicking off his pants, pulling his T-shirt over his head, throwing it to the floor. In the flicker of the candle Cass saw his body reflected in burnished night-glow and for a half a second the sight almost stopped her-he was that beautiful, his chest muscular and smooth and dark, his sternum rent from chest to navel by a pair of scars, pebbled pocked fissures in his smooth skin, and her fingers fluttered with the need to touch him there, and then the flicker-thought was gone as he leaned naked and uncaring and grabbed her wrists again, pulling her back to him. He seized the placket of her shirt and yanked and the buttons spun through the air and the fabric tore and his hands on her back were rough as rocks, hot as embers.

He pulled her against him and his mouth on her neck was hard and his teeth grazed her skin as he lifted her like she was nothing. He found her nipple and bit. She cried out in pain even as sensation rocked her, from his hot wet mouth along her nerves to her core and out to the edges of her, the place where she ended and the rest of the universe began, that place that was lost because she was just the spiral of fury and hurt and need that Smoke had made of her when he left.

Dor lifted her hips, his hands holding her and moving her against him. She felt his cock brush against her, slick and sliding against her furrow and she threw her head back and grabbed his shoulders again and thrust against him but he held her away. God, he was just so strong, he held her as though she was a sack of feathers, a sack of dried and crumbling leaves. As though she were nothing at all. “This is wrong, ” he said through gritted teeth, the quivering head of him hot against her, and she dug her fingers in to brace herself and struggled against him, bucking and begging with her body, and still he held her off, his fingers bruising-hard in the soft flesh of her ass. Cass’s breath turned into a cry, a wail, a pleading keening and finally, finally oh God finally he relented and jammed her down on him with a cutoff cry of his own.

She was ready, so ready, liquid in her need and still he split her as an adze splits bark already taken from a felled tree. She felt herself cleave clean around him, he was so hard so demanding and still she wanted more of him, she wrenched and englutted and he grunted and forced his way ever deeper until there was nowhere else to go. Her keening wail turned into something else, an excited, hungry clamor that matched him thrust for thrust, urging him on, making him go faster, harder.

Dor’s eyes were shut tight and he grimaced as though he were in excruciating pain, sweat beading along his brow, slicking his chest hot even as the night grew deeper and the room grew ever colder, this abandoned remote place of death and devastation, forgotten by everyone.

Cass saw how he fought himself and it excited her and she kissed him with her mouth open and tasted bitter, knew she would hate herself for it later but she drank the bitter deep, slammed herself against him and seized the energy that ebbed from him. The bitter taste was triumph, and she couldn’t get enough, could never get enough.

“I didn’t-want-this,” he managed to get out with difficulty. Cass found his nipples with her fingers and twisted; she grazed her teeth along his jaw, nipped his flesh and laved him with her tongue. “I don’t-want you .”

Her hair had fallen between them again and she mashed her face against it, the strands gritty against her skin. And she laughed. It started deep inside her, a rumbling, unstoppable reaction to the bitterness she’d swallowed, and Dor pushed her off of him only to prop her ungently with her face against the back of the couch, her hands finding purchase on the scratchy synthetic fabric, as he took her that way, his hands on her thighs as though he would hold on through a storm, a hurricane, the wrath of God Himself-and her laughter grew and rang through the room until it finally turned into something else and there was no way to know whose cries burned the cursed and frigid air.

IN THE MORNING HIS EYES FELT LIKE THEY WERE full of fine grit, and he lay on the hard carpeted floor under the twisted blankets and thought of the shale cliffs along the Iowa riverbanks of the summers of his youth. He spent them with his Neary cousins from his father’s side of the family-the Irish side-skinny redheaded farm boys reckless and restless, throwing themselves off the cliffs in banshee-screaming cannonballs into the brackish pools below. Afterward they lay on the sandbars steaming in the sun, good-naturedly insulting each other and speculating about every girl within thirty miles. Dor, younger by three years than the youngest Neary, listened while he baked deep brown, having inherited his Afghani mother’s complexion. Dor couldn’t keep up with any of them and so of course hadn’t yet realized that in time he would be able to beat the shit out of any of them without breaking a sweat. They raced each other through the fields late in the afternoons, kicking up dust, getting it in their eyes.

Dor didn’t know what had happened to any of his cousins, his good-natured doughy aunts, or his portly stoic uncles. A couple of them had sent Christmas cards last year. Dor kept them in a file folder, pushed far back in a cabinet at the office he would never return to.

Of course, they were on the other side of the Rockies. Maybe they had a chance.

Dor rubbed at his eyes, pushed himself up and leaned back against the sofa. The same sofa where, deep in the night, he’d…Jesus. No. The memories came back sharp and whole, and he gave up struggling against them. How the hell had it happened? She’d fought him hard, all lean strong limbs and teeth and that hair of hers, wild like a pale discordant halo around her face.

He remembered the way Cass looked when she first came to the Box. She’d been timid then, beat-down. He hadn’t known about Ruthie at first, hadn’t known what drove her, what haunted her, but they were all like that, every traveler who found their way to the Box. Loss and hunger, a mix he’d come to know well, a calculation he had a particular genius for; he could take its measure and instantly know what a person needed, and what it was worth to them. But not with Cass. Even then, there had been something elusive about her. She was scared and she was a thin line away from frantic, but you could also see her checking around for escape routes, even if she didn’t know she was doing it-she was a hedger of bets, a hoarder of backup plans pinched in her fingers like a cornered fox.