Chapter 27: The Break
The door of Duke's Billiard Hall swung shut behind her and ate the last of the streetlight. Smoke hung in ropes under the low lamps, blue-grey and thick, and the smell hit her first: stale beer, old tobacco, chalk dust. Cherry Valentine stood in the doorway and let her eyes adjust. Nine tables glowed green in the dark, each one a little island of light. Somewhere at the back, a jukebox played something slow and mean.
The click of balls stopped.
Not all at once. It came in pieces, like a record winding down. One table, then another. A man in a leather vest looked up from his shot and left his cue resting against the rail. A bald man behind the bar set down the glass he was drying. Cherry counted seven, maybe eight, and every set of eyes walked the same path down her body and back up again.
She wore a plaid skirt the size of a napkin, red and black, and underneath it nothing at all. The tails of a knotted white shirt sat on her ribs. Boots to the knee, laces loose. Her hair was down and she'd left the gold chain on, because she liked the way it caught the lamplight when she moved.
"Evening," she said.
Nobody answered. The jukebox kept going, some sad song about a woman leaving Memphis.
She walked to the bar. The bald man watched her come and did not pretend otherwise. Up close he was older, thick through the chest, with a scar through one eyebrow that had healed badly and a rag tucked in his belt.
"You got tables free?" Cherry asked.
"All of them are free now."
"Good."
She pulled a twenty from her skirt pocket, which took a moment and a little hip work, and laid it on the bar. "Rack of balls. Cue. I'll take the corner table."
The bald man didn't take the money. He looked past her, at the room, at the men in it. "You know what kind of place this is?"
"I read the sign."
"That sign don't say much."
"Then I'll find out."
She left the twenty and walked to the corner table. The felt was worn thin at the rack spot and the lamp above it had a dead moth inside the shade. She picked up the triangle, set the balls, and slid it off. The clack of them settling was the only sound in the hall.
Then she leaned over the rail to set the cue ball on the spot.
Her skirt rode up. It was never going to do anything else, not cut like that, not with nothing under it. She let her weight settle onto the table edge and reached across the felt, and the hem climbed her thighs, her ass, and stopped somewhere around her lower back. Cool air moved across her bare cunt. She heard a man exhale hard through his nose, somewhere off to her left. She heard a cue knock against the floor and stay there.
Cherry lined up the break, took her time, and drove the cue ball into the rack. Balls scattered and rolled and two of them dropped. She straightened up slow, and the skirt stayed where it was until she tugged it down with one finger.
The bearded man from the nearest table was already standing at her rail. He was six-three if he was an inch, with grey in his beard and a faded tattoo of a swallow on his forearm. His cue lay abandoned on the felt behind him.
"That was a hell of a break," he said.
"I haven't shot yet."
"I know what I saw."
Cherry chalked the cue. "You want to play?"
"Depends what we're playing for."
"Money's boring."
The bearded man laughed, low and short. Behind him the others were drifting in, four, five of them, boots and denim and the smell of the road. One was young with a shaved head and a prison tattoo on his neck. One was wiry and grey-haired and chewing on a toothpick. One had hands like shovels and a gold ring on every finger. They formed a loose half-circle at the edge of the lamp light, and none of them touched their drinks.
"You got a name?" the bearded man asked.
"Cherry."
"That your real name?"
"It's the one I answer to."
"That so." He set his cue across the rail, deliberate, like he was calling a bet. "I'm gonna ask you plain. That skirt, under it. Anything?"
She looked him in the eye and shook her head once.
The wiry one made a sound that was almost a laugh. The young one with the neck tattoo looked away, then looked back, like he couldn't decide which was worse. Cherry racked again, slower this time, bending so her tits rested on the felt and her ass pushed back toward the lamp, and let them all get a long look while she slid the triangle free.
"Your break," she said, standing.
The bearded man missed.
He missed the second shot too, rattling the eight in the jaws and stepping back with both hands on the rail. The wiry man took his turn and sank two, then scratched on the third and swore into his beer. Cherry walked her own racks like she'd done it a thousand times, which she had, and every time she stretched across the table for a shot she let the skirt ride and didn't bother pulling it down. By the fourth game the toothpick was gone and the wiry one was standing close enough that she could smell the whisky on him.
"You're hustling us," he said.
"I'm just playing."
"You're playing something."
"I'll tell you what I'm playing." She straightened and laid the cue flat across the rails. "But you boys have to decide something first, and I want you all to hear it."
The room had gone still. Even the bald man had come around the bar and stood at the edge of the light with his rag in his fist. Cherry looked at each of them in turn, taking her time, and felt the old heat start low in her belly and spread.
"I came in here to shoot pool," she said. "I can do that all night. Or."
"Or," the bearded man said.
"Or you put the cues down and we play a different game. All of you. Right here on the felt."
The young one with the neck tattoo said, "All of us?" like he'd been struck.
"All of you." She put her hand on the rail and leaned, and this time she didn't tug the skirt down at all. The lamp light sat on her thighs and the crease of her cunt and the bare lips of it, and she watched five pairs of eyes find it. "One condition. Nobody says a word about it after. Not in here, not outside."
"You're serious," the wiry one said.
"I'm always serious."
The bearded man moved first. He stepped in close, boots heavy on the boards, and put one big hand flat on the small of her back. His palm was rough as brick. He looked down at her like he was checking a bet he couldn't quite believe he'd won.
"Anybody touches you I don't like," he said, "you say the word."
"Nobody in here I don't like."
He kissed her then, hard, with a mouth that tasted like beer and smoke, and his beard scraped her chin. Cherry got a hand into his hair and pulled, and he grunted and shoved her back against the rail of the table. The skirt went up over her hips when his knee pressed between her legs. She felt his cock through his jeans, thick and hot and already hard, and she ground down on it because she could and because she wanted to.
"Get on the table," he said.
"Do it yourself."
He picked her up by the waist like she weighed nothing and set her on the felt, right on the rack spot, and the balls went rolling off and thudding to the floor. Cherry lay back on her elbows with her knees apart and the lamp glaring down on her. The smoke and the light and the smell of chalk, and five men closing in around the table with their shadows crossing her body.
"Holy shit," the young one said.
The bearded man was already unlacing his belt. His jeans went down around his thighs and his cock came out heavy and thick, the head flushed dark, and Cherry reached for it before he could do anything else. She wrapped her fingers around it and pulled him by it, and he stepped up between her knees with a grunt.
"You want it?"
"Put it in my mouth first," she said. "I want to taste the whole thing before you fuck me with it."
He fed it to her and she took it, slow, all the way to her fist, her tongue flat and dragging on the underside. He tasted like sweat and hops. Cherry worked him with her lips and her hand and looked up the length of him at the rest of them, and they were all pulling at their belts now, nobody pretending anymore.
The wiry one got his cock out first and stepped up beside the table. Cherry shifted onto her side, kept the bearded man's cock in her mouth, and reached back with her free hand to curl her fingers around the wiry one's shaft. He was thinner than the first and cut, and he hissed when she squeezed.
"You're gonna want a turn," she said, pulling off the bearded man for a breath. Spit hung off her lip. "Line up. All of you. I'll get to every one."
The young one with the neck tattoo came forward and she took him next, both hands on the two she already had, three cocks in the lamplight and her mouth going from one to the next. Somebody knelt at the end of the table. Hands spread her thighs and a mouth landed on her cunt, wide and wet, tongue working up through her slit and settling on her clit. Cherry moaned around the shaft in her mouth and pushed her hips up into it.
"That's it," the bearded man said. "Eat her out, Bobby. Get her ready."
The tongue worked her until her thighs shook and she was dripping down her own ass onto the felt. A thumb pushed into her and curled, and she came like that with three cocks in her hands and a stranger's tongue on her clit, jerking and swearing into the shaft between her lips.
Then the bearded man pulled her off the young one's cock and turned her by the hips.
"Face down," he said.
She went willingly, cheek on the felt, knees under her on the table, and the skirt fell around her waist. The whole room could see her cunt spread open under the lamp, red and shining. The bearded man dragged his cockhead through her slick and pushed in. She was wet enough that he sank the whole way in one slow shove, and Cherry's hands scrabbled at the felt and found nothing to hold.
"Fuck," she said.
He fucked her hard and steady, one hand on her hip and the other gripping the back of her neck. The table creaked and the balls on the floor rolled a little further with every stroke. The men around them were jerking themselves, watching, and the wiry one crouched at the far end of the table to look at where they joined.
"That's a beautiful thing," he said.
"Get up here," Cherry said. "Put it in my mouth."
He climbed onto the table in front of her, knees straddling her head, and Cherry opened her mouth and took him while the bearded man hammered into her from behind. The angle was brutal and good. Every thrust shoved her forward onto the wiry man's cock, and she had to breathe through her nose and take it. The felt was wet under her face. Somebody had a hand under her, thumbing her clit in time with the strokes, and the pressure built back up fast, a second wave rolling in behind the first.
"You close?" the bearded man asked. "You gonna come on my cock?"
"Yes," she said, muffled around the shaft. "Don't stop."
He didn't. He fucked her through it, and Cherry came again with her mouth full and her cunt clenching around him, and the wiry man groaned and pulled out and shot across her cheek and the felt, hot and thick. She worked the rest out of him with her hand and licked it off her knuckles.
Behind her the bearded man pulled out, breathing hard, and held himself. "Turn over. I want to look at you when I finish."
Cherry rolled onto her back. Her shirt was soaked through with sweat and her hair was stuck to her face. The bearded man climbed onto her and pushed back in, and she hooked her legs around his hips and took him deep. His face was right over hers, close enough that his beard brushed her chin. He fucked her like that, slow and grinding, until his jaw went tight and he pulled out and came across her tits and her throat in long ropes.
"Fuck," he said. "Fuck, look at that."
The others didn't wait for an invitation. The two with rings on their fingers and the bald man from the bar and two more she hadn't even seen come out of the back room, six in all now, and the pool hall was a ring of shadows and hard cocks around the table. Cherry sat up in the wet and the mess of it and reached for the nearest one.
"Nobody's leaving until I've had all of you," she said. "But get me on a table that doesn't roll."
The bald man pointed. "Back table, up against the wall. Heavier."
They moved her there. Somebody's hands under her arms, somebody else's on her thighs, and she ended up flat on her back on the back table with her legs over the rails. It was good and steady and didn't rock, and the lamp over it was brighter, and Cherry lay there spread out and let the room do what it wanted. The bald man went first, thick and short, kneeling on the table with her ankles on his shoulders. He fucked her with short, hard strokes that hit something that made her heels drum on the felt. Then the young one with the neck tattoo, who went slow and shaking and had to stop twice so he wouldn't finish too soon. Then the squint-eyed one with the rings, who turned her onto her side and took her like that, one leg up on the rail, and fingered her ass while he fucked her cunt.
"You want it back there?" he asked.
"Not you," she said. "Him."
She pointed at the bearded man, who was standing back with a beer he'd taken off somebody's table. He set it down and came around to the head of the table.
"You sure," he said. It wasn't really a question.
"I'm sure. Spit."
He spat into his palm and worked it into her asshole with two thick fingers while the squint-eyed one kept fucking her cunt underneath. The double pressure made her gasp and push back, and by the time the rings came off him and he pulled out with a curse, she was loose and slick and ready. The bearded man knelt behind her, cockhead against her, and pushed.
"Slow," she said. "I mean it, slow."
He went slow. She felt every inch of it and breathed through her mouth, and then he was all the way in and full, and Cherry reached back and grabbed his hip to keep him there a moment. Around her the men had gone quiet, watching. Somebody said, "Jesus."
"Move," she said. "But slow."
He moved slow, and it was the best thing all night. Then the young one stepped up in front of her and Cherry took him in her mouth while the bearded one fucked her ass, and they found a rhythm between them, one in and one back, and Cherry moaned around the shaft and took it. The felt under her knees was slick with everything. The lamp beat down. Somewhere far off the jukebox ran out and nobody fed it, and the only sounds left were skin and breath and the creak of the heavy table.
The young one finished first, pulling back too late, and came across her mouth and chin with his whole body shuddering. Then the bald man wanted her cunt again, but the bearded man wasn't done. He pushed her down flat on the felt, weight on her back, and fucked her ass harder until he stiffened and came inside her with a long, breaking groan.
When he pulled out, Cherry rolled onto her back and lay there in the glare, legs hanging over the rail, cunt and ass both open and sore and good. Four cocks were still up around the table, wet hands of them, waiting.
Cherry lifted her head and looked down the line of them.
"Okay," she said. "Who's next?"
The front door of the hall swung open onto the street. A woman stood in the frame with a paper sack under her arm and the yellow light behind her, and every cock in the room disappeared behind a hand or a hip. The regulars turned away in one quick shuffle, boots scuffing the floor.
"Emmy," the bald man said. "You're early."
"Table twelve called in their order." The woman took one look at the back table, at Cherry laid out soaked and shining under the lamp, and then looked at the bald man. She did not look surprised.
She set the sack on the bar and went back out. The door clicked shut.
The man with the neck tattoo exhaled. "She didn't see."
"She saw," Cherry said. She sat up and swung her legs down, and she found her skirt on the floor and stepped back into it without bothering to clean up first. She picked up her cue and laid it flat across the rail.
"Rack them again," she said. "And get me a beer."