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I start to move. Long, slow strokes, all the way out and all the way back in. She wraps her legs around the backs of my thighs and matches me, rolling her hips up to meet each one. I lace my fingers through hers on the pillow beside her head. I kiss her mouth and her jaw and the soft place under her ear. The cot creaks under us in a slow rhythm, and her breath comes shorter and shorter against my cheek.
"Don't stop," she whispers. "Don't stop. Don't let go of me."
"I won't."
I don't. I keep the same pace even when my body wants to go faster, even when she tightens around me and I have to grit my teeth to hold on. I shift my weight to one elbow and get my other hand between us and circle her clit with my thumb in time with my strokes, slow and steady, and she starts to come apart again under me. It builds in her longer this time and deeper. When it finally breaks, she doesn't cry out. She goes completely silent, eyes wide open on mine, mouth open, her whole body clenching around my cock in long, slow pulses, and a tear runs out of the corner of her eye into her hair.
I follow her down with my forehead against hers and her name coming out of me in a whisper I don't recognize as my own voice. I come deep inside her, and it goes on and on, and I hold her hand so tight against the pillow that I feel her knuckles grind together.
Afterward, I don't move off her. I can't. I lie there with my weight on my elbows and my face in her neck, and she holds my head with both hands, and we breathe.
Neither of us says anything for a long time.
I'm afraid. I figure that out lying there in the ash with her fingers in my hair. I haven't been afraid since I was fourteen years old holding Earl Cheramie under the water. I wasn't afraid in the big house with nine men coming at me. I wasn't afraid when I walked into the swamp. I'm afraid now, of this woman under me, of what I'd do if they took her down under that jail, of how much I want to keep her.
She's afraid too. I feel it in the way her hands won't let go of my hair.
"That wasn't supposed to happen," she whispers finally.
"Which part?"
She's quiet a moment. Her thumb moves against the back of my neck.
"The slow part."
CHAPTER 9
EVIE
Silas tapes the phone under my left breast at seven in the morning while the coffee boils.
It's a prepaid flip phone from a gas station in Bunkie. He's pried the back off and done something to the microphone with a soldering iron and a sliver of foam, and he fixes it to my ribs with three strips of medical tape. His hands are steadier than they have any right to be for a man who's spent the last hour arguing against this.
"She'll feel it if she hugs you."
"She'll grab my neck. Charlotte's grabbed my neck my whole life. She's never once put a hand on my back."
"Then she'll hear it."
"It's a phone, not a cowbell."
He doesn't smile. He dials the burner from his own phone, it connects without ringing, and he holds his to his ear while I hum under my breath. He listens with his eyes shut. When I go quiet, he opens them.
"I'll be at the Esso on Pecan and 9. Six hundred yards. Say the word, and I'm through her door in forty seconds."
"Understood."
"If she offers you anything, don't drink it."
"Silas." I pull my sweater down over the tape. "She watched them kill my mother. She sat in our kitchen that same night and sent two little girls to bed. She phoned in my sister's depressive episodes. I'm going to sit on her couch and hear her explain it with my own ears. You got your ledger. This is mine."
For a moment he says nothing, only studies me over the stove. Then he nods once and hands me the keys to his truck.
Charlotte's cottage on Pecan Street is as yellow as it ever was, white gingerbread trim, a concrete goose on the porch that she dresses for every holiday. This week it wears a witch's hat and a little orange cape. Rust and gold mums bloom in pots along the steps. Somebody has raked her yard, and a wreath of dried corn husks hangs on the door.
I sit at the curb for two full minutes with my fingers locked around the wheel.
"Going in," I murmur toward the tape.
