God, this woman might ruin me, and I don’t fucking care. I fuck her ass with abandon, knowing how much she loves it. Our bodies slam together, the smacks echoing on the walls. Bliss. Fucking bliss.
She comes again, this time squealing and whimpering while we fuck her hard. Her breaths are choked, and her nails dig into Houston’s shoulder enough to leave bright red trails.
Houston mutters, “She’s squirting on me! Oh fuck, she’s squirting on me!”
“That’s it, baby. Let yourself go.”
Suddenly her spine goes stick straight, and I have to catch her to stop her from whacking her head against my collarbone. She screams, coming, erupting, something wild. She’s leaning back on me now, so I pluck her nipples while I fuck her ass. My balls scream for release.
Houston reaches down for her clit, and she keeps screaming between breaths. “Oh, fuck! Now!” he roars out while he shoots deep inside of her.
I ruthlessly rut up her ass as she’s coming, full of his cum, mindless and animalistic until I lose myself there.
15
HOUSTON
Sagebrush isquiet enough to hear the AC tick. I unlock the front, flip on the lights, and take the back hallway to the office. Lou needs references for the deck, and I said I’d pull anything that looks like craft and family. I like this work. Boxes, labels, order. There is no noise I can’t use.
Metal shelves run along the wall. Banker boxes. Old reel cases. A cracked plastic crate full of cassettes nobody wanted to throw away. I stack three boxes and start with the session logs. Marker thick, dates everywhere. My mother’s handwriting shows up like a warm voice. I pull those cue sheets with grease pencil smudges and set them in a pile for Lou.
I open the next box. Flyers. Polaroids. A bag of picks. A strip of gaffer tape with SALEM DO NOT TOUCH written across it. I put that on top of the pile because she’ll laugh.
The crate is last. Cassettes without cases, handwriting on spine labels that solved a problem thirty years ago and caused four this morning. I line them up, labels toward me. “Demos—open call.” “Untitled, singer from Reno.” “R. Navarro—2 takes.”
I stop on the last one and lean closer.
R. Navarro. Like Lou. Navarro is not rare. But spending time with Lou has made me wonder about fate and family more than I want to admit. The handwriting is my mother’s. I can see the way she looped the R. No date on the spine. Someone scribbled a phone number and scratched it out.
I look for a deck and find the old Tascam on the shelf under the window. The heads are dusty. I plug it in and let it warm for a minute, then slide the tape in until it clicks. I push play and keep my hand near the stop in case it chews.
Hiss. The room in the recording is small and dry. A count-off, soft. Guitar. Then a voice.
I know smoke when I hear it. Not the fake kind people put on for effect. A rasp at the edge of a chest tone. She sings like she’s not afraid of low notes, like the song sits in her ribs. It is not Lou’s voice. It is a shape that rhymes with hers.
The melody is quick and simple, two bars up and back, the kind a person finds when they stop trying to impress the walls. Words are plain. The chorus lands on a single vowel and holds. The pitch sags and corrects in a way that says raw, not trained.
I rewind and listen again. Same rush at the first line, the little slide into the second. Theson “house” disappears like she thought it was ugly. I catch myself comparing. It’s automatic.
R. Navarro. Lou’s locket says Navarro on the back. There are a thousand Navarros in this city, in this state, probably more. The voice has a color that makes me think of her anyway. I push back from the table and sit on the edge of the desk, so I stop pacing.
Could there be a connection? Maybe. Probably not. The studio did open calls. People came from all over. The tape could be from anyone.
I stop the deck and stare at the counter. The case is blank inside. No date. No song title. Just my mother’s note: “good ear, no breath.”
I hit play again and let the chorus roll. I think about the way Lou hums when she forgets she’s doing it. Not a show. Her guide track from yesterday is still on my phone. I hear it in my head the way you hear a faucet after you’ve turned it off.
I should tell her. I should hold up the tape like a kid with a bug in a jar and sayLook. But what if it’s nothing? What if it’s a stranger who just happens to share a name with the only thing she has from before?
Hope is hard to handle. Some days it’s heavier than grief. I know the feel of it when it drops.
I eject the tape and put it in a Ziploc with a paper label, R Navarro. I put the Ziploc in a banker’s box and the banker’s box on a shelf where I can find it. I take a photo of the label on my phone and name the photo the same way. I make a note to ask my mother later if she remembers a Navarro. Or if the R could be a misread A. Or if the tape came with a number that belonged to a dead pager.
I don’t text any of that to Lou.
I go back to the live room. The piano lid is down. The guitar leans on the stand. The stool is where I left it, half turned. I sit at the piano and play a C just to set the room. Then I play the melody I’ve been sitting on since the day she showed me thelocket. Three notes, then five, then a turn that returns without apologizing. It feels right.
I hear words whether I want to or not. “Silver on a chain, names I never knew.” “Found on a step.” I test them. Too on the nose. I keep the feel and lose the noun. Better.
