Chapter 6: Crowd Favorite

Twenty feet to the back, and every one of them a step, and every step the same roll of the hips that had just finished me. So I made that walk raw and oversensitive and still half-hard, grinding into my own sister with the last of me leaking down the inside of her thigh, while a chain I couldn’t see pulled us toward a door I couldn’t see through a crowd that would not let us go.

Because they loved us. Jo had the leash and a straight line to the back and no authority on earth over four hundred people who had just watched the best thing in the hall and wanted it to stop and take a picture. Every two steps something blocked us — a phone held up, a kid planting itself in our path, a grown man in a half-built Gipsy Danger going dude, DUDE, can I get one — and every time we stopped, I had to hold the counterweight, which meant seating myself back up into her and keeping still, and every time we started again the grind started again, and there was no clean stretch of floor long enough to just be a person walking.

“Theo.” Barely a breath, routed back through her ribs, under a voice that was still out the vent going thank you, thank you so much, yeah, lean in to someone with a camera. “Theo, I didn’t — I never — you finished, I didn’t, I’m still —”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t, because you’re done and I’m not, I’ve been not for an hour, and if this walk doesn’t end I’m going to — right here, I’m going to —”

“I know.” I did know. I’d known it the whole hour the way I knew it now, through the one honest channel I had left — her slick and swollen and clenching in little catches around nothing every third step, her whole body a bowstring somebody kept drawing and never loosing. She’d carried us the entire time. She’d held the face and the voice and taken my weight and let me come against the mouth of her in front of a child, and she had not been allowed to have one thing back, and now her body was going to take it whether the floor was ready or not.