Chapter 3: Through the Door
The phone was still warm against her ear when the door handle turned.
Mia could not move. Her thighs were slick and cooling, the sheet twisted under her hips, and the whole room, the room with no windows, had gone so still that she could hear the second breath. It came through the phone a half beat late and through the wall a half beat early, and her mind refused to join those two sounds into one person until the door swung inward and the stripes of Sunday light fell across the floor in gold bars.
RJ filled the doorway. Tall, sun-brown, shoulders broader than the frame seemed able to hold, her dark hair tapered short and standing upright from sleep. She wore a plain white undershirt and the heavy denim she had worn the whole way to campus, and the thick silver ring on her thumb caught the light as she pushed the door closed behind her, quietly, with the flat of her hand, so the latch made almost no sound at all.
Neither of them spoke. The phone stayed pressed to Mia's ear. She could hear her own breath going down the line and coming back, and she knew, with a slow collapsing certainty, that the breathing in the doorway and the breathing in her ear were the same, and that her daughter had been standing there long enough to hear everything.
RJ crossed the room without hurry. She lifted the phone out of Mia's hand, thumbed it dark, and set it face down on the nightstand beside Michael's empty water glass. Then she knelt.
The mattress dipped. Mia's whole body tightened like a fist. RJ's hands landed on the edge of the sheet and pulled it down slowly, uncovering her inch by inch, the wet cotton peeling away from her belly and her thighs, and Mia lay there with her knees apart and her sundress bunched at her ribs and her cunt still gleaming from the work of her own fingers, and she felt nothing at all like a woman of forty-four. She felt opened. She felt like something set out on a table.
RJ looked at her for a long moment. Then she bent forward and put her mouth there.
Mia's heels dug into the mattress and a sound came out of her that had no shape, just air. RJ's tongue dragged flat and slow from her hole all the way up to her clit, gathering everything, tasting the juice she had promised to taste, and then she did it again, and again, taking her time, like she was cleaning a plate. She licked the inside of Mia's thighs first, the wet sticky runs that had reached down toward the sheets, chasing them back up to the source. Her hands slid under Mia's ass and lifted her, tilting her open, and Mia's silver ring scraped against the headboard as she grabbed for something to hold.
That is it, Mia thought, and the thought dissolved before it finished. That is the thing I have been saving.
RJ ate her with the same patience she brought to everything, unhurried, methodical, and filthy. She sealed her lips around Mia's clit and sucked, hard, then soft, then hard again, working it with the flat of her tongue while two fingers spread Mia wide and kept her spread. Mia's hips started to move on their own, rocking up into her daughter's mouth, and RJ let her, took it, swallowed it, her whole face buried, her breath hot and wet against the folds, her nose pressed into Mia's pubic hair.
It did not take long. It never took long, these past weeks, but this was different, this was the thing itself, not a picture on a phone, not a voice down a line, not a hand on a pillow. Mia came with her mouth open and no sound in it, her thighs clamping around RJ's head, her stomach folding, her nails digging into the sheets, and RJ did not stop. She held her through it, lapping, slow now, drawing it out until the spasms turned into shudders and the shudders into a long blurred hum.
And then RJ did not stop at all.
She pushed her tongue inside, deep, curling, and Mia heard a wet sound that made her face burn. RJ pulled back and looked at it, at the juice that had come flooding out of her, and she made a low sound in her chest that was almost a laugh. Then she put her mouth back down and drank it, all of it, licking her mother's hole like she was trying to get to the bottom of something, her tongue working in and out, her jaw moving, until Mia's hand came down on the back of her head and held her there.
Say it, RJ said against her, mouth never leaving her. Her voice was a vibration in Mia's bones. Say what you want.
Mia's throat was dry. Her legs were shaking. She stared up at the dark ceiling of the room with no windows, the room that had been burning for weeks, and she heard herself say, in a voice she did not recognise, more. Get more out. Lick it up.
RJ took a breath and went back to work.
She sucked on Mia's clit until Mia's whole pelvis lifted off the bed, then pulled away, then came back and licked the slick from her hole and smeared it upward, then drove her tongue down again. She worked her thumb into the wet and pressed on the swollen knot above, rubbing it in slow circles while her tongue filled her, and Mia came again, this time with a noise that she only just managed to bury in the crook of her elbow. The juice came with it, a fresh rush, and RJ drank that too, mouth sealed, throat working, not spilling a drop.
There came a moment, somewhere after the third time, when Mia stopped being able to follow the sequence. Her fingers were in RJ's short hair. Her heels were on RJ's shoulders. The room had gone white at the edges and the light through the blinds had moved across the wall and she had no idea how much time had passed. She floated somewhere above the bed and watched a small pale woman in a floral sundress come apart under the mouth of a large sun-brown girl in a white undershirt, and she thought, with a strange clear calm, that this was the truest thing her body had ever been asked to do.
RJ slowed. She kissed Mia's cunt the way you kiss a mouth, softly, once, twice, then laid her cheek on Mia's thigh and let out a long breath that cooled the wet skin.
Neither of them spoke for a while.
Mia lay spread and open on the ruined sheet, her sundress up at her collarbones, her ring clicking faintly as her hand slid down to rest on RJ's head. Her voice, when it finally came, was a rasp.
You said you would come back.
I came back, RJ said into her thigh. Her fingers were still stroking, lazy, through the mess of wet hair.
Mia closed her eyes. Out in the house, the grandfather clock in the hall struck eleven, and somewhere far off beyond the blinds a car door shut, and the small ordinary sounds of a Sunday morning went on around them as if nothing whatsoever had changed.
The clock in the hall finished its eleventh note and the house folded back down into quiet.
Mia opened her eyes. RJ was standing at the foot of the bed with her hands at her waist, working the button of her denim open, and the silver ring on her thumb flashed once in the light through the blinds as she dragged the trousers down her thighs and stepped out of them. She had nothing on under them. Mia looked at her daughter's legs, long and sun-dark and heavy with muscle, and at the thing between them, dark and bare and already wet, and she felt her whole body go tight and stupid with want.
RJ climbed onto the mattress, one knee between Mia's thighs, then the other, and settled her weight down slow. When it landed, cunt met cunt. Mouth to mouth. Hot, slick, both of them open.
Mia's breath went out of her in a rush. She had not known this was a thing people did. She had spent forty-four years not knowing it, and now her daughter's hips rolled down against hers and the wet clicked between them and her whole pelvis lit up like a struck match. RJ got a hand under Mia's ass, tilted her, found the angle where their clits kissed, and started to move, long grinding strokes, her thighs braced wide over Mia's slight body, her breath starting to come hard through her nose. She did not hurry. She ground, and ground, slick and sure, and every pass dragged Mia up the bed an inch and then her hips followed, chasing.
That is what she meant. All those weeks on the phone, all those quiet filthy descriptions of other girls, and this was what Mia had been saving.
Mia grabbed RJ's forearms and hung on. Her sundress was rucked to her collar, her tits small and pale and shaking with the rhythm, and RJ's gaze came down on them and stayed. RJ bent lower, pressed her forehead to Mia's, and sped up, both of them slick enough now that the glide was almost frictionless, almost silent, just the small wet noise of it and the squeak of the mattress and the two of them breathing into each other's mouths.
When it came, it came to both of them at once. RJ's jaw locked and her hips slammed down and she ground out one long grinding orgasm with a grunt that she bit off at the end, and Mia came under her a half second later, back arching, heels digging in, cunt pulsing up against her daughter's cunt like it was trying to swallow it.
They stayed locked there, heaving, until RJ finally rolled off onto her back and stared at the ceiling, and Mia lay spread and ruined with her own juice drying on her thighs.
RJ dressed while Mia watched. Undershirt, denim, the belt. She looked in the mirror over the dresser, ran a hand through her short hair, and then she walked out of the bedroom and down the stairs without a word.
Mia heard the front door open twenty minutes later. Michael's voice came up the stairwell, cheerful, church-warm. He had brought pastries. RJ's voice answered him, low and flat, and the two of them talked in the kitchen about the drive, about the TV being too big for the dorm shelf, about classes starting Monday and whether she had found the laundry room yet and whether she wanted the rest of the danishes, and Mia lay upstairs with her legs still open and listened to the ordinary sound of her husband catching up with her daughter as if she were dreaming the whole thing.
Then RJ said she was going out to meet some friends.
Mia heard the stairs, and then RJ was in the doorway, and Michael was still clattering plates in the kitchen. RJ crossed the room, bent down close, and put her mouth near Mia's ear.
I need to go please another aching pussy, she whispered. She can't fuck her boyfriend, he wants to wait for marriage, and she is so horny it's eating her alive. And it's for me.
She straightened. Then, quieter, a hand on Mia's knee: go down and get in the back of the truck. Under the sheet. Don't move until I tell you.
Mia should not have done it. She got up, pulled her sundress straight, padded down the back stairs with her shoes in her hand, and climbed into the bed of the pickup parked behind the garage, and pulled the canvas sheet over herself. The truck smelled of old gasoline and cut grass. The sun came through the canvas and made the whole world gold and airless. She lay curled in the hot dark and listened to the driver's door open and shut, and the engine turn over, and the gravel crunch under the tires.
They drove fifteen minutes. Mia knew the way by the turns. Past the feed store, past the two long fields, then the slow left onto the dirt track.
The truck stopped. A car door opened, and a girl's voice, bright and exasperated, said something Mia could not hear, and then the passenger door of the pickup opened and shut and the weight of the truck shifted. Mia inched one eye up to the sliding rear window of the cab, and through the glass she saw Sloane, the blonde, the ponytail, the football captain's girlfriend, climb straight across the console before the engine was even off and put one denim knee on either side of RJ's hips.
She did not undress. She lowered herself down onto RJ's lap in her shorts and her little top with her hair loose and her face flushed, and she started to grind. Slow at first, working herself against RJ's thigh, and then faster, her hands braced on RJ's shoulders, and Mia could hear every second of it through the glass. The creak of the bench seat. The catch in the girl's breathing. And then no catching at all, just noise, loud, the shameless high panting of someone who had not been touched in a long time and could not care less who heard it.
Mia did not look away. Sloane rocked and rode and ground herself down on RJ's lap through their clothes until her face went slack and her mouth opened and she came with a bright, ragged little cry against RJ's neck.
Then she was off the lap and her shorts were down her legs and RJ's trousers were around her knees and they were on each other properly, mouths and hands, and the cab filled with the wet sound of it. And then Sloane fell back across the seat, and RJ got up over her, braced on the dash, and put her cunt down on Sloane's and rode her.
That was the part Mia could not stop watching. Her daughter's back, brown and broad and shining, the slow hard roll of her hips, the straps of the seat creaking, the girl's heels drumming the passenger window. Sloane came again, and then again, noisy and helpless, and RJ kept going until Sloane's voice broke into nothing and her hands went slack on RJ's arms.
Under the sheet, in the heat, Mia put her own hand between her legs and lay still as stone.
Under the sheet, in the heat, Mia put her own hand between her legs and lay still as stone.
She did not come. She was too far outside herself for that, too aware of the canvas pressing down on her face and the gold light going red against her closed lids and the small sounds from the cab, the wet click of mouths, the breath, the creak. She listened to Sloane come a third time, a broken, high, helpless sound, and then to the long quiet after, the two of them breathing hard and saying nothing.
The doors opened. Clothes rustled. Mia heard Sloane laugh, soft and ruined, and then the wet unmistakable sound of a kiss, long and deep, the kind of kiss that refuses to end. Sloane said something Mia could not make out, and RJ said something back, low, and Sloane made a small disappointed noise, and then the passenger door shut and the truck rocked as she climbed out into the grass, and the sedan started up and idled for a while as if Sloane were sitting in it deciding not to drive away. Then the sound of the sedan receded down the dirt track toward the road.
The truck did not move for a long time.
Then the engine started, and they drove. Not the fifteen minutes back. Longer. Mia knew the turns had stopped matching the way home after the first mile, and when the truck finally rolled to a stop and the engine cut out, she could hear nothing but wind in long grass and the ticking of the cooling motor, and no house, no road, no dog, no other car. Just a field.
The driver's door opened and shut. Footsteps in the grass, and then the tailgate dropped, and the canvas sheet was lifted off her, and daylight poured in.
RJ looked down at her. Her short hair was flattened on one side and there was a red mark at the base of her throat where Sloane had bitten her, and she did not look apologetic. She looked like a person who had just finished a job.
Back seat, she said. Get in.
Mia did not ask why. She climbed over the side and down into the grass, her bare legs prickling in the dry seed heads, and opened the rear door of the cab and got in and shut it behind her, and sat on the wide bench seat in her crumpled floral sundress with her hands in her lap. The cab smelled of Sloane. Perfume and sweat and the salt of another woman's skin.
RJ came around and got in beside her. The whole truck settled on its springs.
She sat there for a moment, looking out the windshield at the empty field, the long grass moving in one slow bronze wave toward the tree line. Then she turned and put her hand flat on Mia's thigh, high up, right at the hem of the dress, and slid it upward, unhurried, until her fingers found the wet at the crease of her leg. She held them there a moment, feeling.
You are soaked, she said.
Mia said nothing. Her hands stayed where they were in her lap.
RJ took her hand away and wiped her fingers on her own knee, and then she leaned back against the door and put one boot up on the seat between them, elbow on the window ledge, and looked at Mia the way she looked at people in diners.
Did you eat breakfast, she asked.
No, Mia said.
You should. There is a loaf in the house and the jam is still there, the good one, the one Dad hates. It will bread by Thursday if you two don't eat it. And the dryer is making that noise again, the one like a shoe in the drum. He will not notice it until it stops working and then he will act like it started that week. If you get someone out, tell them Tuesday, it is the man with the van on the high street, not the other one, the other one overcharges.
Mia stared at her.
RJ went on. Her voice was level and ordinary and unhurried, the same voice from the phone, the same voice that had described Cass and the rower and the roommate pair while Mia ground against a pillow in the dark. She talked about the orientation fair and the girl in her economics seminar who wore the same jacket as her and did not say hello, and about the laundry room in the basement of her dorm that flooded every time it rained, and about a professor whose left eye drifted while he lectured, and about whether Mia had remembered to put the new insurance cards in the glovebox, because Michael would never check.
And Mia sat beside her in the heat of the closed cab, with the wet still cooling between her legs and the red mark on her daughter's throat right there at eye level, and listened.
She waited for a hand on her knee. She waited for RJ to turn her face and put that mouth on her again. She waited for the strap, the thing she had been dreaming about for weeks, the thing reserved for a special person. Nothing came. RJ just talked, and looked at her, straight at her, and did not once look away.
So Mia started to touch herself.
She did it the way she did it on the phone, which was the only way she knew how to do it anymore. She lifted her hips, worked the damp sundress up to her waist, settled back against the bench seat, and put her hand between her legs, and she did not hide it, did not turn away, did not pretend it was anything other than what it was. Two fingers on either side of her clit, slow circles. Slick and warm and already sore from the morning.
RJ did not stop talking. She did not look away. She said something about the rower and a broken oar and a bet the crew team had with the lacrosse team, and her eyes came down to Mia's hand and stayed there while she said it, and her voice did not change at all, not by a single note.
Mia's breath went short. The circles got tighter and faster. Her knees fell a little wider and she felt the wet run down onto the seat beneath her.
She is watching me. My daughter is watching me do this and telling me about the laundry room.
RJ talked about the laundry room. She talked about a boy in her building who had set off the fire alarm three times. She talked about the drive back to campus on Sunday nights and the deer on the road past the feed store. And she watched, the whole time, without blinking, and Mia worked herself with her own fingers under that flat unhurried gaze, and came with her head pressed back against the window glass, mouth open, no sound, her whole body curling and letting go while RJ said, in the same steady voice, that the jam would go to waste if nobody ate it.
Mia came down shaking. Her hand stayed where it was. She was so wet now that her fingers had gone quiet on her own skin, slipping, useless.
RJ finally stopped talking. She reached over and took Mia's wrist and gently drew her hand up out of her lap, and held it in the air between them for a moment, Mia's fingers glistening, and looked at it the way she had looked at the plate earlier. Then she let it go.
Good, she said.
She started the truck.
Put your dress right, she said, eyes on the field. I am taking you home.
They drove home with the windows down and Mia arranged her dress and said nothing, and RJ turned the radio to a station that played old country and hummed along badly, off key, so that Mia almost laughed, and didn't.
Michael was on the back porch staining a shelf bracket when they pulled in, and he straightened up and waved with the brush still dripping, and RJ got out and went straight to him and took the brush out of his hand and told him he was doing it wrong, that you go with the grain, Dad, Jesus, and the two of them laughed, and Mia walked past them into the house with her shoes still in her hand and went upstairs and shut the bathroom door and washed Sloane off her.
That was the last time RJ touched her that day, and it was as if a switch had been thrown.
The rest of the afternoon, RJ belonged to Michael. She helped him drag the workbench out of the garage and sort the socket set by size and argue about whether the gutters needed doing before fall. She ate a sandwich standing at the counter with her hip against the drawer the way she had since she was twelve. She did not look at Mia. Once, when Mia came through with the laundry basket, RJ stepped aside to let her pass and looked at the wall.
Mia's cunt ached. It ached the way a tooth ached, dull and alive and impossible to ignore. She stood at the sink at four o'clock with her hands in cold water and felt the throb of it all the way up into her belly, and she thought about the truck and the long grass and the red mark on her daughter's throat, and she thought, I am being taught something, and she did not know yet what.
They ate an early supper because Michael had ideas about a movie. RJ sat across from Mia and passed her the salt without looking up. She talked to Michael about the football roster and the new quarterback's elbow and whether the team would be any good this year, and Michael was delighted, Michael could have talked about that elbow until midnight, and neither of them looked at Mia once.
Michael went up at nine to shower and shave and change out of his work clothes, and RJ did not go up. She went out to the garage and did something with tools for a while, and then she came back in through the mudroom and Mia heard the tap run and stop.
Mia stood at the counter with the roast pan in the sink and her hands in the suds and she did not turn around when the mudroom door clicked shut behind her, because she had learned something today, and she knew what turning around was for.
The floorboards took the weight. Six steps, unhurried, and then a wall of heat at her back, close, closer, and RJ's arms came around her from behind, one across her waist and one up high across her chest, and pulled her straight back into her, and Mia let out a small helpless shriek that she strangled in her own throat and dropped the pan back into the water with a clatter.
Shh, RJ said against her ear. Keep working.
There was sweat on her. Mia could smell it, real and raw, the salt and the heat of a body that had been working in a garage all evening so it would not touch her before it was time. It was the smell of the truck bed under the canvas, of the cab, of Sloane at the base of her daughter's throat, and it went straight into Mia's head like a drug into the crook of an arm. She put her hands back in the water and she picked up the pan and she started to scrub.
RJ's palm came down flat on her lower belly and slid down slow, under the waistband of her skirt, through the cotton of her knickers, and found the whole wet ruin of her with a single plain touch. Mia's knees gave a half inch and she caught the edge of the counter with her elbows and stayed upright.
There it is, RJ said, low, right at her ear, almost fond. All day.
You didn't. All day, you didn't even look.
I looked, said RJ. Her fingers started to move, slow drags, from her hole to her clit and back, slick to slick, gathering and spreading. You just weren't watching what I was looking at.
The other hand came up and found Mia's breast over the sundress, and closed on it, and squeezed, and this was not a delicate touch, this was the grip of a big hand that had spent an afternoon on a wrench, and Mia made a noise and pressed back into it and felt her daughter's cunt against her ass through two layers of denim, hot and already rocking.
Keep scrubbing, RJ said. Wash the pan.
Mia scrubbed the pan. Her hands worked the steel wool in circles under the water and her whole body jumped and flinched and rolled with what RJ was doing behind her, and she could not turn, could not see her face, could not do anything but stand there with her elbows braced and her mouth open like a fish on a slab and take it. If Michael came down the stairs right now, if anybody came through that door from the front, all they would see was a woman laid out on her own daughter's hands, her arm jerking in a sink of cold water, her chest crushed in one fist, her eyes closed, her whole face gone blind with it.
She was not complaining.
The mouth came down on her ear. RJ took the lobe between her lips and sucked on it, slow, and then bit it, and then licked it, over and over, warm and wet and filthy, and Mia heard herself sob out a tiny high sound and arched her whole spine back into it, offering her ear, wanting it eaten, wanting the mouth to keep going until there was nothing left of her ear at all.
I love your hands, she whispered, and did not know she had said it out loud, and RJ heard and answered by tightening the grip on her tit and rolling the nipple through the dress until it was a hard sore point under the palm and Mia's hips bucked into the fingers at her cunt hard enough to rattle the plates on the rack.
You are loud, RJ murmured into her ear, and went on licking it. Somebody is going to hear you being a slut in your own kitchen.
The water went warm under Mia's hands and she did not know whether it was the faucet or her own heat. The fingers between her legs changed, two of them tucked in a little now, the thumb up on her clit, rubbing fast and flat, and the other hand abandoned her tit and went down and grabbed her whole ass, hauled her back onto RJ's hips, held her there, pinned, splitting her on the hand.
She was crushed between the counter and her daughter's body and she loved every inch of it, every hard brown inch, and she stood up on her toes into the grip and let it happen.
There was a sound from upstairs. The shower stopped. Water in pipes, a door, Michael's voice calling something ordinary down the stairwell about where he had left his towel.
RJ went still. Not away. Still. Her mouth stayed on Mia's ear and her fingers stayed buried and pressing, and Mia could feel the breath go out of her slowly against the side of her head.
Cum now, RJ whispered. Right now. While he is coming down.
And then both hands moved at once. The one at her ass came around and joined the other and they worked together, two palms, four fingers, vigorous and merciless, one rubbing high on her clit and one shoved low and pressing up inside the wet, and it was too much and it was the exact right amount and Mia's whole body seized up against the sink, her heels lifting off the tile, her mouth crushed into her own shoulder to keep the noise in, and she came, hard, jerking, wave after wave of it running down her thighs while the pipes groaned upstairs and the stair treads creaked.
By the time the third creak came, the hands were gone. The heat at her back was gone. Mia heard the mudroom door open and shut, soft, and the floorboards in the hall took new weight, going up, unhurried, and RJ's voice called up the stairs, easy and flat, that she was going to jump in quick before dinner.
Michael's voice came down, cheerful, telling her to leave him some hot water this time.
Mia stood at the sink with the roast pan in her hands and the faucet still running cold and her thighs wet and shaking and her ear still burning from her daughter's mouth, and she scrubbed the pan, and she smiled down into the water, and she set two more plates on the table.
They ate at the kitchen table with the plates Mia had set, and Michael carried his into the living room halfway through to catch the regional news, which meant Mia had the table almost to herself. Almost. RJ sat across from her with her sleeves rolled and her forearms on the wood and a plate of roast chicken and potatoes in front of her, and she ate the way she did everything, slow and thorough, cutting everything into the same size before she started, chewing with her jaw working under the sun-brown skin.
Mia had told herself, standing at the sink ten minutes earlier with the water running cold over her wrists, that it would pass. That the ache between her legs was a physical thing, a leftover, a fever that would break if she just sat quietly and ate her supper like a woman of forty-four. She had told herself that, and she had believed it for the length of one staircase.
It did not pass. It got worse.
RJ lifted a fork of potato to her mouth and swallowed, and Mia watched the muscle in her throat move and felt her own cunt clench around nothing at all. RJ licked a smear of butter off the corner of her lip and Mia's hand went to the table edge and gripped it. RJ drank her water, long, the glass tipping up, her throat working, and something in the pit of Mia's belly twisted hard enough to make her shift her weight on the chair. She could feel the wet collecting between her thighs and soaking into the cotton of her knickers, warm as a held hand, and there was nothing to be done about any of it, nothing, and she sat there and cut her food into pieces she did not eat and watched her daughter's mouth.
She was sweating. It was a cool evening and the kitchen window was open and the fan over the stove was ticking and she was sweating along her hairline and down the small of her back and into the crease under her breasts. She could feel the shine of it on her upper lip and she lifted her napkin and dabbed at it and RJ's eyes came up off the plate and found her and stayed.
You're red, RJ said.
It's warm.
It's not warm.
Mia put the napkin down and did not answer. Beyond them, in the living room, the news anchor said something about a bridge and Michael grunted his agreement, and the television light flickered blue across the floorboards.
RJ set down her fork. She picked up her plate with one hand, stood, and walked around the table with the plate still in her grip, and set it down at Mia's place, and dragged the chair out on Mia's left and sat down in it, close, closer than the table really allowed, so her knee pressed Mia's knee under the wood and her shoulder blocked the doorway to the living room. She reached for Mia's plate, speared a piece of chicken, and ate it off Mia's fork. Then her left hand went down under the table and landed flat and heavy on Mia's thigh.
Mia went very still.
The hand did not move. It just sat there, palm down, hot through the cotton of her skirt, the ring on the thumb pressing into her. Mia looked at RJ's face. RJ was looking at the wall, chewing. She was chewing Mia's dinner.
Michael's chair creaked in the other room. The television audience laughed at something.
Mia took RJ's hand off her thigh, turned it over, and pushed it up under her skirt.
RJ stopped chewing.
Mia moved the hand herself, wrist and palm, pressed it flat against the wet cotton of her knickers, and dragged it up and down there, once, twice, until RJ's fingertips were riding the seam over her clit and she could feel the fabric going slick under them. She did not look away from her daughter's face. She was shaking with it, her jaw tight, her breath coming short through her nose, and she ground herself up against RJ's own hand like a woman on a pillow, because it was the only motion left in her, because she had been empty and aching for six hours and she could not hold her body still for one more minute.
RJ's hand went loose.
She took it back. She put it on the table. She wiped her fingers on the side of her thigh with two brisk strokes and picked up her fork again and ate another piece of Mia's chicken, and her face was flat as slate.
Mia sat there with her skirt rucked up under the table and her knees weak and her cunt throbbing hard enough that she could count the beats of it in her ear, and she wanted to take that fork out of RJ's hand and push those fingers back between her legs herself. She would have. She nearly did. She reached for RJ's arm and RJ moved the arm out of reach and set the fork down and stood up.
She looked toward the living room.
Dad.
Michael's head came round over the back of the couch, remote still aimed at the screen. Yeah, bug.
Mom's back is hurting her. You can see it in how she's sitting. I'm going to give her a massage up in my room so you don't have to hear it.
Michael's eyebrows went up. He looked at Mia and Mia looked back at him and neither of them said anything, and the television threw its blue light over the two of them.
It might take a while and it might get rough, RJ said. If she doesn't let me work the knot she's going to be laid up all week. She'll probably scream. I'd rather she screamed in my room than in yours.
Right, said Michael. He nodded slowly, the way he did when a thing had been explained to him completely. Yeah, all right. Sorry, honey. Do you want me to get the good liniment?
I've got oil, RJ said, and picked up her water glass and finished it, and then she walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs without looking back.
Mia sat at the table for the length of three heartbeats. Then she got up and followed her.
She heard Michael settle back into the cushions, and the television went on talking to itself, and she climbed the stairs with her hand on the rail and her knees still not entirely her own.
RJ's door was open. RJ was already inside, at the dresser, unscrewing the cap off a small brown bottle of the oil she used on her shoulders after games, and she looked up when Mia crossed the threshold and did not say anything at all.
Mia came in. The door shut behind her. RJ's hand had pushed it and RJ's arm was already coming around, and Mia had one half a second to see the room in front of her, the stripped bed, the bare walls now that the posters were at the dorm, the empty hooks, and then she was off her feet and against the wall.
Her back hit the plaster with a flat slap and the breath left her and RJ was on her, one forearm across her collarbones holding her up on her toes, the other hand braced on the wall beside the door. Her face was right in front of Mia's, close enough to blur.
You are a slut, RJ said. Her voice was low and even and utterly without heat, which made it worse. Do you understand that? My father was on the other side of a wall and you had my hand in your cunt like a bitch in season. You could not wait. You could not hold it for one hour while he ate his dinner.
Mia tried to say something and it came out as a small broken noise and RJ's forearm pressed up under her chin and cut it off.
You were sweating for me at the table. In front of him. You wanted him to look at the television so you could get my fingers in you right there.
Yes, Mia whispered.
RJ made a low sound and dropped her face into Mia's throat and bit her.
The bite was not gentle. It was full-jawed and it landed at the side of Mia's neck below the ear, and Mia's head went back against the wall and her mouth opened and the sound she made was the smallest thing in the house. RJ sucked the skin up between her teeth and worried at it, and Mia could feel her own blood rising to the surface under that mouth, tender, marked, claimed, and she sagged into the weight of the arm across her chest and let herself be held there and bitten.
RJ's free hand came up and took the neckline of her sundress in a fist and pulled.
The fabric tore straight down the front with a long ripping sound that went through the whole quiet of the house, buttons pattering to the floorboards, and Mia was standing there in nothing but the ruined halves of her dress and her knickers and her sandals. RJ looked down at her, at the small pale breasts jumping with her breath, and pushed the torn cloth off her shoulders, and it fell in two pieces around her waist.
Then she bent and took a nipple in her mouth.
Mia cried out and caught the back of her daughter's head with both hands. RJ was biting now, little hard scrapes of teeth around the areola, then a long pull that dragged the whole breast out from her chest, then her tongue, then teeth again, and Mia's hands fisted in the short dark hair and pulled and RJ did it harder. She moved to the other breast and gave it the same treatment, sucking the nipple in and biting down on the crease under it, and Mia's heels came off the floor along the wall and her hips ground forward into RJ's hip and she could feel the wet running down the inside of her own leg.
RJ pulled her mouth off her with a wet pop and looked at her.
You want this.
Since you were fourteen years old, Mia said, and did not know where the words had come from.
RJ's jaw tightened. And then, without warning, her whole weight came off Mia and her mouth found the breast again, and this time there was nothing hard in it. She pulled the nipple back in and latched, sealed, and began to suck.
Slow. Deep. Rhythmic.
Mia's knees gave and RJ caught her and lowered them both down the wall to the floor, and RJ lay against her, huge and warm, her face buried in Mia's chest, her mouth working and her throat swallowing, and she sucked the way an infant sucks, steady and patient and utterly absorbed, and every pull sent a long sweet line of current straight down through Mia's belly into her cunt.
Mia held her. She cradled her daughter's head in the crook of her arm and stroked the short hair back from her damp temple and looked up at the ceiling of the room that smelled of her, of oil and denim and grass, and something in her chest came loose and floated, and the ache between her legs did not go away but it changed, it went quiet and warm and enormous, it went everywhere, and she felt herself settle under the mouth like a woman who had finally been put where she belonged.
There was no milk. There had not been milk in eighteen years. That did not matter.
Suck, she whispered, and RJ sucked.
She sucked, and she did not stop.
Mia lay back against the base of the wall with her torn dress open around her waist and her daughter's mouth sealed to her left nipple, and RJ pulled on her slow and deep, one long tug after another, her eyes up, looking straight into Mia's face the whole time. That was the thing Mia could not get used to. The mouth took her breast like a mouth taking a breast, but the eyes stayed open, stayed on her, black and steady, and every swallow that moved in RJ's throat was a swallow Mia felt all the way down in her own cunt.
Her hand came up and cupped the back of RJ's skull. She stroked, and RJ sucked, and the room went soft and slow around them.
There was no milk in her. There had not been milk in her in eighteen years, since RJ was a baby with a toothless mouth and Mia was twenty-six and tired and standing in a kitchen at three in the morning with a towel over her shoulder. But her body did not seem to remember the arithmetic. Her nipples stiffened and ached and the ache ran back into the ducts and the ducts pulled tight and deep, and every time RJ swallowed, Mia's whole chest drew down toward the mouth, wanting, giving, empty and full at once.
It did not take long for the first one to break over her.
It came up out of nowhere. RJ dragged hard on her, three long pulls, and Mia's hips kicked off the floorboards and her heels drummed and she came with a sound she buried in her own fist, her cunt clenching on nothing, wet enough that she could feel it smear under her hips on the bare wood. RJ swallowed right through it, never missing a beat, and then she pulled off with a soft wet sound and shifted her head and took the other breast.
Left. Then right. Then left again.
Each time she switched she looked up first, and each time Mia looked down, and they held it, mother and daughter, while the clock in the hall downstairs and the faint blue flicker of Michael's television ran on beneath them like another country. Mia's hand moved from skull to jaw to throat, feeling the swallow under her palm. RJ's hand came up between them and worked Mia's cunt while she fed, unhurried, fingers sliding, thumb pressing, and by the third switch Mia had come twice more, once with her teeth in the meat of her own forearm.
An hour. It went on for an hour.
Mia lost the thread of it somewhere past the second. She floated, holding her daughter's head, feeding her, being fed on, one long slow ocean of it, her hand in the short damp hair and RJ's mouth pulling and the swallow and the swallow and the swallow. She was crying at some point, she was not sure when; the tears ran back into her ears and RJ lifted a thumb and wiped one off her cheek without ever letting go of the breast.
Then RJ pulled off, slow, letting the nipple slide out from between her lips, and laid her cheek on Mia's sternum and breathed.
Mia's hand kept stroking. Both of them were slick with sweat and juice and spit and the floor was sticky under them and neither of them cared.
What do you want next, RJ said into her breastbone. Her voice had gone rough at the edges.
Mia thought about it. She thought about the strap, hidden somewhere in RJ's bag, and she thought about the passenger seat of the van through the campus gate, and she wanted none of it. She wanted the thing from the truck bed and the bench seat and the long grass, the thing that had no equipment in it at all.
What you did with me the first day back, she said. Cunt on cunt. Like in the truck. Only let me be underneath. Let me lie there and take it.
RJ raised her head. She looked at Mia for a moment with something that was almost a smile, and then she was on her feet, and then Mia was off the floor.
One arm under her knees, one behind her back, and RJ picked her up as though she were lifting a coat off a chair. Mia's ruined dress fell away entirely and she hung there in the air with her arms around her daughter's neck and her bare feet dangling, light as nothing, and RJ carried her the three steps to the stripped bed and dropped her on it.
Mia landed on her back, bounced once, and RJ was already climbing on.
RJ got a knee between her thighs and drove both of them wide. She came down on top of her, chest to chest, thigh to thigh, and slid until the wet met the wet. Both of them gasped at the same moment, the same small catch, and then RJ began.
She ground. Slow at first, long rolls of the hips, up and back, up and back, the whole slick length of her dragging over Mia's clit and then down to the hole and then up again, and Mia's hands flew out and grabbed the edge of the mattress and she arched her back and took it. The bedframe knocked once against the wall. RJ put a hand flat on the headboard to hold it and put the other under Mia's ass and tilted her up, angled her, and the grinding turned hard and short and fast.
She fucked her all over the bed. Mia lost track of where she was on it. At some point her head was off the pillow and in the corner where the two walls met. At some point she was sideways across it with her legs in the air over RJ's shoulders, RJ on her knees, working her hips, cunt to cunt, and Mia looking up past her daughter's chin at the ceiling with her mouth open. At some point RJ got behind her and pulled her back onto her, one arm across her chest, mouth on her ear, and rode her from behind, slow, deep, grinding her clit down onto the slick of Mia's ass and between her thighs.
At some point RJ rolled to her back and pulled Mia on top, and Mia rode her daughter for the last stretch with her hands on RJ's chest and her knees spread wide, and RJ lay back looking at her with her eyes half shut and her mouth open and her whole face a thing Mia had never seen on it before, young and ruined and hers.
They came over and over, in ones and twos, mostly silent, once or twice loud enough that Mia bit into RJ's shoulder to shut them both up. When it finally ended they lay tangled sideways on the bare mattress, and RJ's hand was still between Mia's legs, and outside, far off down the road, a car went by.
Neither of them looked at the window.
Which was a mistake, because the window of RJ's room, the small high one at the gable end, looked straight across the side yard at the narrow lit rectangle of the chapel next door where Sister Margaret sat every evening with her Bible and her reading lamp, and the curtain on the bed side had been drawn back since the last time RJ changed the sheets, and the light in the chapel had been on for two hours.
They never knew.
In the morning, at ten past nine, after Michael had gone off to work with his thermos and his lunch pail, the front doorbell rang.
Mia answered it in a cardigan and a long skirt with her hair still damp from the shower, and Sister Margaret stood on the porch with her hands folded inside the sleeves of her cardigan and a face so calm and so pale that it told Mia everything she needed to know before a word was spoken. She was about fifty. She had a small mouth and grey eyes and she looked at Mia for a long moment without any expression at all on her face.
Good morning, Mrs. Halloran.
Sister.
The sister looked past her into the hall, and then back at her face.
Is your daughter at home?
She is.
Send her to the church this afternoon, alone. The door on the side, by the sacristy. Three o'clock.
Mia's mouth had gone dry. Sister, she said, and had nothing to put after it.
Sister Margaret turned and went down the steps and out along the front walk with her cardigan pulled tight, and Mia stood in the doorway holding the edge of it and watched her go.
At three o'clock, RJ put on the button-down and walked down the path and across the road and in through the side door of the church by the sacristy, and she had no idea what she was walking into. She had been quiet all lunch. She had looked at Mia across the table once and raised an eyebrow and Mia had looked away, and that was all.
The church was cold and dark and smelled of old wax. The confessional stood at the side aisle, the old wooden one, two doors and a grille between.
Sit down, said a voice from the other side.
RJ sat down in the dark box. The kneeler creaked, the partition slid open a hand's width, and RJ saw the pale edge of a face and the glint of the little cross hanging at the grille.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, she said, and got the words wrong on purpose.
Sister Margaret did not correct her.
Tell me everything, she said.
And RJ, because it was dark, and because there was a silence on the other side of the grille that felt like a hand held out, told her.
She told her about the van and the television box and her mother's sundress riding up, and about the truck stop bathroom and her knees on the tile, and about the campus gate and the strap she had hidden in her trousers. She told her about the photograph, and the phone calls, and the rower, and Cass, and the two roommates, and every filthy thing down the line to a woman lying in the dark against a pillow. She told her about the truck bed and the field and Sloane, and about the kitchen sink, and about the wall, and the torn dress, and her mouth on her mother's breast for an hour, and the bed, and what she had done to her on it, and she did not leave anything out, and she did not soften one word of it, because the woman on the other side of the grille had not once told her to stop.
She could hear her breathing now, small and fast, close to the wood.
Then she heard the shift of a body on the stool and the creak of it, and the breathing got louder, and then it stopped altogether, held, and did not come back out for a long beat, and when it did, the voice that came with it was not the voice of a nun.
Go on, Sister Margaret said.