Chapter 11: The Feast Before the Flight
The Copper Creek Inn gave them four walls and a window with a crack in the corner of the glass, and that was all either of them needed. By the fourth night the room smelled of copper and cheap soap. The sheets had been changed once.
Three kills in six days. Two of them slept rough under the overpass by the feed store, and neither woke up. The third was a wiry man with a box cutter who thought he had picked a soft couple stumbling back from a bar, right up until Joaquin had his elbow locked behind his spine. They buried that one under the gravel shoulder east of the motel, and Marnie took his wallet because it looked cleaner than leaving it.
They had started calling it the feast. The word came out of Joaquin's mouth first, somewhere around the second body, and Marnie had laughed with her hands still wet, and after that it stuck.
Every time, the sex afterward was the same. Starving. Blood under their fingernails, still tacky, drying in the creases of their knuckles while Joaquin fucked her against a wall or a tree or the tailgate of the sedan. Neither of them washed first. That was the point.
Tonight was different. Tonight there was nothing left to hunt. Joaquin's flight left at nine in the morning, and Marnie's wasn't until two days after that. They had staggered it on purpose, because two neighbors flying home from the same city on the same day was a story nobody needed to tell.
Marnie was in the shower. The water ran through the thin wall and under the bathroom door, and the steam carried the pine soap she'd bought at the gas station, mixed with the other smell underneath it, which was the cologne she had bought him because his own was running out.
Joaquin lay on the bed with the remote on his chest and the TV murmuring. He'd just hung up with the Peking house two blocks over. Two orders of dumplings, the garlic eggplant, extra chili oil, because Marnie ate heat like it was nothing.
He set the phone on the nightstand and noticed he was hard.
It wasn't the show. It wasn't anything he could point to at first. Then the memory slid in sideways, the way they always did, and it was the shack. The first one. The old man's wrists opening lengthwise, Marnie's paring knife steady as a metronome, her voice low and level while she told the man about judgment and luck. Joaquin's own hand had been shaking then, and hers hadn't.
He looked at the bathroom door. Steam curling under it. The water cut off.
His hand was already under the covers by the time he noticed he'd moved it. He spat in his palm and took himself in a loose fist and stroked, slow at first, thumb dragging over the head on every pass. His breath came out through his nose. The lamp on the nightstand flickered once, amber, and the shadows on the wall leaned.
"Baby girl," he called.
The door opened. Marnie came out with a towel wrapped under her arms and her hair dripping down her back, dark auburn gone almost brown with water, and the freckles across her chest flushed pink from the heat.
She didn't say anything at first. She crossed to the dresser and pulled the towel loose to dry her hair, and her eyes went to the covers, to the shape of his hand moving under them. Her mouth tilted.
"Need help?"
"Please," he said.
She crossed the carpet with the towel still in one hand and dropped it at the foot of the bed. Wet footprints drying behind her. She climbed up on the mattress on her knees, and she held his eyes the whole way, and Joaquin did not move an inch. He just watched her come with that flat, patient hunger she had seen in the shack and in the alley and everywhere else, and he kept his hand working himself with her gaze on him like a hand on his throat as well.
She pushed the covers down. She took his wrist and moved his hand aside and put her mouth on him.
Joaquin's head went back into the pillow. Her tongue flattened and dragged up the underside, and then she took him in, deep, until her nose was in the hair at the base of him, and held. Her throat worked. She came up slow, lips dragging, and did it again.
Her hand went between his legs. She found his balls and squeezed, hard, fingers digging in, the way that made his hips jerk off the mattress and his breath tear out of him. She knew exactly where the line was. She always did. She squeezed until his eyes watered, let go, squeezed again, and worked her mouth in a steady rhythm the whole time, wet and obscene, spit running down her chin and over her knuckles.
"Fuck," he said. "Fuck, keep, I'm gonna."
His hand shot into her wet hair, and he pulled her up off him by the roots.
She came up with her lips slick and her scalp stinging and her eyes narrow and amused.
"Feed me first," he said.
"As you wish," she said.
She swung a leg over him and straddled his chest, facing his feet, and lowered herself onto his face with everything she weighed. Her thighs went tight against his ears and her cunt came down over his mouth, still hot and wet from the shower, and Joaquin got his tongue in her without a second of hesitation.
She ground down. Full weight. Her hips rolled forward and back and she used his mouth like it was hers, one hand braced on his thigh behind her, the other fisted in the sheet beside his head. Above him the lamp flickered again, and he could feel her thighs starting to tremble.
He got his tongue flat and wide on her clit and let her do the work. He could breathe in short sips through his nose between her legs and that was enough. She tasted of soap and salt and the day. His own cock lay hard on his stomach, untouched now, leaking, and he didn't care.
"You gonna come on my face?" he asked, lips moving against her, muffled.
She answered by shoving harder, and her hand came off his thigh and found the back of his head and held him there.
"Ask me nicer," she said.
"Please," he said into her.
She came with a long, low sound through her teeth, grinding down through it, hips stuttering, and Joaquin didn't stop until her hand went slack in his hair. She climbed off and turned around above him, legs on either side of his hips, and looked down at him with her hair dripping onto his chest, and then she reached back and guided him in and sank down.
She rode him hard, no warm-up, one hand planted on his sternum and the other pulling at her own breast, and Joaquin held her by the hips with his fingers digging in, and neither of them was quiet. The bed frame knocked the wall twice. The TV burbled underneath it. She leaned forward over him and kissed him with her mouth open and she could taste herself on him, and she bit his lower lip until it split.
He came with his teeth locked in her shoulder, hips bucking up off the mattress, and she stayed on him through it, working her hips down slow until he hissed.
Then she rolled off and lay beside him, both of them breathing hard at the ceiling.
Somebody knocked on the door. Three raps, then a voice, young, calling out the name Daniel Hollis and something about dumplings.
Neither of them moved. The knock came again. Joaquin didn't so much as lift his head.
They let him knock himself out. Footsteps crunched across the gravel lot and faded. Marnie started to laugh, and Joaquin laughed too, low and rough, and eventually one of them got up to fetch the bag off the step, and they ate it sitting cross-legged on the ruined sheets with the containers between them and the smell of chili oil drowning out everything else.
They ate cross-legged on the ruined sheets, passing the eggplant back and forth, and Marnie licked chili oil off her thumb and watched him eat like it was the last food on earth. Somewhere past midnight the containers went on the nightstand and the lamp clicked off.
They didn't talk about the flight. They didn't talk about anything.
Joaquin pulled her in against his chest and she went, her back to him, his arm heavy over her ribs and his breath going slow in her wet hair. Her hand found his and held it there. Neither of them moved after that. The window with the crack in it glowed faintly from the lot light, and the room settled down around them, and they slept the way people sleep who have used up everything they had.
The alarm went off at six. Cheap phone, cheap ringtone, shrieking off the nightstand like a smoke detector.
They both groaned. Marnie rolled onto her back with her arm over her eyes and Joaquin fumbled the phone off the table and killed it, and then the quiet came back, and into the quiet came the thing neither of them said.
The feast was over.
The three bodies were in the ground. The tires were scrubbed. Nine o'clock was nine o'clock, and two days after that was Marnie's own flight, and on the far end of both of those flights were a wife with a surgery scar and a husband with a collar he'd bought himself. Real life. The whole painted set, waiting.
Marnie turned her head on the pillow.
Joaquin was already looking at her.
Nobody said a word. There wasn't one that fit. His eyes were the same dark, restless eyes she'd first seen in a vanity mirror at two in the morning with a butcher's knife in his fist, and there was nothing restless in them now. He reached over and put his palm flat on her stomach, low, fingers spread, and she felt the heat of it go through her.
She pulled him over.
This time there was no hurry in it. He kissed her slow, mouth closed at first, then open, then her jaw, then the soft skin under her ear, and she got her arms around his back and held on with both hands like she was holding a rail. He came down between her legs and pushed in without ceremony, and she was still wet enough from the night that he slid to the root on the first stroke, and they both breathed out.
He fucked her like that for a long time. Slow. Deep. Every stroke finished all the way down against her and pulled back almost all the way out before the next one, and his forehead stayed pressed to hers, and neither of them closed their eyes.
She wrapped her legs around his hips and crossed her ankles behind him and dug her heels into his ass to pull him in harder, and he gave her what she asked for. His hands went under her shoulders and cradled the back of her skull off the pillow, thumbs at the hinge of her jaw, holding her face in place so she had to look at him.
"Don't," she said, quiet, meaning don't stop, and he didn't.
She came first. It rolled up slow from her gut, nothing like the clawing thing from the night before, just a warm long pull that made her arch and grab his hair and say his name once, low, against his mouth. He worked her through it and kept going, and the look on his face while he did it was something she'd never seen on a man.
When he came he did it with his mouth against her shoulder and his whole body going rigid, and he stayed inside her while it happened, buried, hips grinding down, emptying himself into her with his weight on her and her name in pieces on his breath.
They lay there after. Sweat cooling. Her hand moving through the back of his hair, over and over, the way you'd settle an animal. He kissed her mouth, then her cheek, then the hollow under her eye where the freckles ran.
She was his baby girl in that room.
He was her everything, and she would never say it out loud, and that was fine. He knew the way she knew him. Two people who had spent years being anything but real, and this was the one place the mask came off, and it was ending in three hours in a gravel lot.
Marnie slid her hand down her own belly and touched where they were still joined, felt how stretched and slick she was. He watched her do it and got hard again against nothing, and she laughed, soft.
"Careful," she said. "You'll miss your flight."
"I know," he said. He did not get up.
He stayed until the last possible second. She watched him shower with the door open. She watched him pull on the jeans and the grey henley, watched him sit on the edge of the bed in one boot and just sit there, head down, twisting the silver band on his index finger the way he did when he was deciding something, and the deciding took a while.
She didn't help him. She lay on her side in the wrecked sheets with her hair tangled on the pillow and one knee drawn up and let him take his time.
At ten to eight he stood up and put the second boot on. He zipped the bag. He checked the room twice, because Daniel Hollis was not going to leave anything behind for a clerk to find.
Then he came back to the bed and sat beside her, and she sat up, and she could feel it coming out of her, running warm down the inside of her thigh. She didn't wipe it. She wasn't going to. She wanted to carry it out of the room and to the airport and onto the plane.
He kissed her. Long. Both hands in her hair.
"Go," she said.
He went.
The door shut, and she heard his boots on the gravel, and the sedan turning over, and the sound of it pulling out onto the highway going south toward the airport. She sat on the edge of the bed with the sheet pooled around her waist and the smell of him on her skin and her fingers, and she did not move for a while.
The room was very quiet. The lamp was off. Amber didn't come through the crack in the window anymore; it was full daylight out there, hard and flat, the kind that shows you every stain.
She got up eventually and showered the second time and stood in the water until it ran cold. She dressed in the clothes she had come in, packed the rest, wiped the sink and the doorknob and the remote with a towel and left the towel on the floor. She made the bed. Nobody was going to inspect the bed, and she made it anyway.
Check-out was eleven. She sat on the made bed with her feet on the carpet and waited for the clock to get there.