Chapter 9: What the Others See

After that morning there wasn’t much left of the trip but this. The company sessions had finished up a couple of days back — the meetings, the panels, the dinners I’d had to turn up for, all of it done. The last ports were behind us too. What was left was two sea days and the two nights around them, open water the whole way home, and nothing either of us had to be anywhere for.

So we stayed in the cabin — bar the one afternoon I sent her up to Alexis. I never locked the door; never had to. It sat unlocked the whole time, a whole ship on the other side of it, and by the second day she’d quit even looking at it. She didn’t leave because leaving got her nowhere, and somewhere in there she stopped believing it might. That was the first thing to go in her, before the fight even — the idea that the door was any use to her.

She gave up a little more every time — and there were a lot of times, packed into those last few days. Not willing; the fight just got shorter. The first time I reached for her after that morning she came at me like the first night, and it got her the same nowhere and left her the same sore. Next time, less. The time after, she’d quit throwing what she had at the parts that never worked — the pushing, the twisting, the please, don’t — and spent it all on the one thing she still figured was hers to keep: staying quiet. Face in the pillow. Sounds locked behind her teeth.

She lost that one too, and it was her own body that took it off her, not me. It had started going wet before I’d hardly got a hand on her, clenching down around me on its own, dragging the noises up out of her throat that she was fighting so hard to swallow. That was the part she couldn’t stand. Me she could survive. Her own body arching up to meet me, going off around my cock while her mouth was still telling me no — that she couldn’t. She’d come hating it, red all up her chest, sick with herself before she’d even stopped shaking. By the last of it she couldn’t lie there and pretend it wasn’t happening anymore. Her body just quit taking her side.

And I finished in her every single time, because there was no reason left not to — no window to miss, nothing to save it for. Just filling her up, letting it sit, doing it again a couple hours later on top of what was already in there. The cabin went thick with it inside a day: sweat and sex and the sweet-sour musk of everything I kept leaving inside her, hanging in a room that small with the door shut and the AC losing the fight. The DO NOT DISTURB card stayed out and never came down. No stewardess got through that door again the rest of the trip — the room would’ve told her the whole story in two steps, and there’s no version of cleaning it that reads as innocent, so nobody cleaned it. We lived in the smell of what we were doing and left the reeking mess of it for disembarkation, when a stripped bed and an open balcony could pass for any cabin on the ship. Room service got left outside the door and I carried the trays in myself.

That was the whole shape of those last two days. This one started no different from the rest.

The pillow was already going damp under her cheek when I felt it start — a hard involuntary clench around me, quick and blind, her body deciding something before her mouth had caught up to it. I had her from behind, a pillow shoved up under her hips to tilt her the way I liked, one hand flat between her shoulder blades holding her down while the other kept a slow, deep drag that found the same spot on every stroke, the spot I’d been hunting since last night and finally had the map of.

“No — Dad, don’t, I don’t want — “ Broken, half into the pillow, her hands fisting in the sheet instead of pushing back at me. But her hips had started doing something on their own by then, small helpless rolls back into me that had nothing to do with the no still coming out of her mouth, and I felt her open further around me instead of closing, hot and slicker by the second, and I knew exactly what was coming because I’d built the road to it myself, night after night, teaching her body a route it had never asked to learn.

“There it is.” I didn’t slow down. “Feel that, baby? Your body already said yes. Doesn’t matter what your mouth’s still arguing about.”

She came apart around me with a sound that started as a sob and didn’t finish as one — her back bowing up off the mattress, her cunt clamping down so hard and so many times in a row that I had to stop and just hold there and take it, buried to the root while she shook through the whole ugly length of it, some raw noise tearing out of her that she cut off hard the second she heard herself making it. Her face went back into the pillow, hiding, and her whole body went rigid with something that wasn’t pleasure anymore, or wasn’t only that — the shame landing in the same half-second as the last of the aftershocks, her thighs still trembling against my hips.

“I didn’t — that wasn’t — “ She couldn’t finish it. She didn’t have to. I felt her, still twitching faintly around me, still wet enough down both thighs to leave no argument on the sheet later, and I took the two or three strokes I had left and finished deep, telling her exactly what I was doing while I did it, and she lay under me after, not moving, not talking, breathing like she’d been running.

My phone lit up face-down on the nightstand somewhere in the middle of it, buzzing once against the wood. I didn’t reach for it until after.

Come up to mine tonight instead of the bar. Bring her. Alexis is already asking where you two got to.

Charles didn’t do exclamation points any more than he did small talk. Nothing in the words should have put a chill up my spine. It did anyway — the good kind, the kind that had been building since a bar stool five nights back, beside a man who already knew exactly where this was headed.

I told Val to put on something that wasn’t pajamas. She perked up the second I said Alexis’s name — she’d been shut in the cabin for days, and Alexis was about the only good thing left of the whole trip as far as she was concerned — and pulled on a sundress with a bikini under it, because Alexis was always in the water somewhere, and did something quick with her hair in the mirror I pretended not to watch.

The hallway hit like clean water after the cabin — cold, recycled, smelling of nothing — and I watched Val pull a lungful of it in like she’d surfaced from somewhere deep. Whatever the room had done to her she left most of it at the door. By the time the elevator came she had the ordinary face back on, the one that belonged to a girl on a nice trip with her dad.

The ship at that hour was all gold light and nobody much — the shows let out, the older crowd gone to bed, the rest gone to the tables. A retired couple rode the glass elevator up with us a couple of floors, the wife smiling at Val the way old women smile at pretty girls, no idea she was standing a foot off one who still had her own father sliding out of her under the sundress. Val smiled back, easy and practiced, and leaned into my side. I kept a hand at the small of her back and felt the careful way she was moving when we stepped off — a little slow, a little wide, that new thing already worked into her hips that Charles was going to name for me inside the hour. Nobody looked at us twice the whole way up. A man could walk his own daughter down a quiet hallway toward another man’s room — freshly fucked, leaking, dressed for a hot tub — and be nothing at all to anybody. Two more faces in a floating town of strangers who’d forget them both by breakfast.

Charles’s door was at the far quiet end of the top deck, where the money slept. Val slowed the last few steps without seeming to know she’d done it. I didn’t slow with her. I knocked.

Inside, it looked like it belonged to a different ship — a real sitting area instead of a strip of carpet between the bed and the wall, a bottle sweating in a bucket nobody on my salary ever got handed for free, glass doors folded all the way back onto a private stretch of balcony with its own small hot tub built into the corner, steam coming up off the water into the night air. Two low deck chairs sat pulled right up against the tub’s rim, close enough that a knee would touch the tile. Alexis was already in the water, arms spread along the edge, hair slicked back wet.