Work Text:
The secret is to swallow
without expecting hunger to disappear.
ADRIANA CLOUD; BENTO BODY.
2018
He finds the club hidden behind the crux of a junction. The traffic-lights blinking irregularly and no moon to balm the dark sky. One car in the lot, a tangle of weeds keeping guard round its chain-link edges. He pulls up between the faded white lines and sits looking out over the sleek expanse of black bonnet, dimming headlights as he turns them down, then off.
In his pocket the address on a scrap of paper that he pulls out now, considers in the heavy dark. Sizes up the scrawl as if to compare its shape to the real thing. The club sitting squat on its haunches, the spires rising up from its roof. (Someone else might smile—a strip club pretending at being some kind of cathedral—but then he’s never found much in life to smile about.) He folds his knuckles together tightly, cracks them. Settles back in his seat.
On cue, his phone chimes from its cradle on the dash-board.
“You there, Snow?”
He takes a breath that needles out through his teeth. “I’m here,” he says. “Here—and seriously questioning your tastes.” He swoops another look at the spires, the spangled mess of gone-out lights that used to be a sign. “This is a regular fucking crack den, Robb.”
“It’s clean,” says Robb in a slip of static that crackles, smacks. “And she’s inside it, so.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“She’s in there, Jon.”
He cuts his cousin’s voice into pieces with the clank of the glovebox opening, shutting. Black metal in his hand, the catch of a bullet between his teeth. The motion of it is smooth, guileless as ever—the gun loaded and put into the back of his belt—blink, and it would be missed.
(Sansa always said it was too at home inside his hands, too much a part of him: the violence, all the ways he could wield it.)
2010
They met again at Christmas, the eve of it to be exact. A week prior Ned had hauled his wife and children up to the lake house, a performance enacted every year according to the tradition set out and lived through by a hundred generations of the same ice-wicked family. (The Starks—and the little bastard Snows that always seemed to blow in as cobwebs to linger at the darkest corners of the family tree.)
In the pub she bit his lip until he opened his mouth for her. There was mistletoe hanging from a rafter above the bar and people pressing them in anonymous against the sticky slant of beermats, half-drained pint glasses. The taste of blood, salty and hot.
“Be nice,” he said—and there was a darkness to it, the tone he used and the way he lay his hand on the spoke of her throat.
He didn’t have to push her away; but he tested the weight it might take to make her fall back. Felt the hitch of her breath at the threat of his touch, and smiled. That violence she said she hated was convenient for her sometimes. Useful. The way it roughened the skin of his palms. The way it made him keep his distance. That penny the two of them tread, spun on its head as it ever was between them.
2008
“Who is it this time?”
Sansa didn’t like that—the tone he used, or the direction of the question. Jon could see as much in her eyes; the lean, narrow bite of blue that picked at his cheekbone till the skin felt flayed. He affected not to notice (as usual, as always) and adjusted the watch-face strapped to his wrist.
The silence between them grew stony, and he smiled.
She didn’t like that either. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” he said.
“That.”
“Who the fuck is he?”
She smiled then because he had bitten—a thin, stinging smile that he felt in his chest like a knife. “I’m happy,” she said. “That’s all you need to know.”
“Happy,” he said—like it was unnatural, an insult.
Her lips left a print on the wine glass, a mulberry-shaped enunciation: “Happy.”
2018
From outside a thin, dull beat.
Jon shuts the phone off and puts it in his pocket as he bends an ear to the drift of music through the narrow set of the club doors. The air inside is acrid, a string of dry ice smoking out into the starless night. More plumes free when he puts his palm to the heft of the door, pushes.
Red light, a halo of neon. Men on sofas with their chins in their chests and tumblers in their hands, whiskey-streaked and empty. Flat screens, anonymous groans. A girl behind the bar, dark-haired and toothy (missing one, her tongue serpent-like probing at an edge where there should be a root), looking up now to see him there with a frown on her face.
“No man on the door,” he says. “Your boss should do something about that.” He looks around at the drunks, the drinks, the drug-haze etched across the girl’s wide eyes. “The man himself. Baelish—where is he?”
She shakes her head slowly. “There was a man.”
“What?”
“At the door,” she says—and she’s looking at Jon’s hand now, the scars on his knuckles braced like a hackle on the bar. “What did you do to him, so?”
Jon stretches the slow, dim ache from his fingers. “Baelish,” he says again. “Where is he?”
In the red light her skin is washed to muscle and bone. Her tongue finds that gap in her teeth again. A chain around her throat, and her fingers now rising to twist into the cheap silver links of it. She does not move; but she lifts her eyes to the ceiling, then drops them back again. A two-fold motion that she repeats before she steps back into the shadows of the bar.
2008
He asked her if she was happy when he pulled up the car in her street. Her hair was knocked out of its sleek, low bun and there was lipstick on her chin. (A smear of it on his cheek, too, and his throat—clotted like the blood she ached to draw from him, to claw from him.)
“Fuck you, Jon.”
The door clipped shut behind her and he stayed there in the street. Idled. Inside the car the air still smelled like sex and the scratches on the nape of his neck began to sting. He put his hand to them, pressed down hard, but his fingers came away clean.
2010
Back at the lake house they didn’t kiss again. (The pub was the third time that ever happened, and held the possibility it might be the last.) When they fucked he made her look at him instead; he knew she felt that more. Knew she found that harder.
The house was full, and they had to be quiet; but they were practised at that. (At seeking each other’s shadows, at putting out the light and finding the dark.) She told him his hands were too hard. She told him she wanted him to leave bruises. She told him she wanted it to hurt.
His hips went still and he let her linger there, the raw expanse of her wanting spread bare. Around him she fluttered; a muscle-pull to match the wingbeat of her blackened eyelashes. He put his lips to her ear and whispered—
“I won’t leave a single fucking mark.”
—and then he drew back to look at her. At the bright, brutal blue of her eyes and the agony on her face that he should see her so open. (That he should see her at all. That she let him look.)
2011
Ned died and Robb carried on the tradition. The dressing of the lake house in all the tapestries of advent. A tree trussed in the same colours. Cellophane and false smiles; men at the door and black cars in the driveway. The granite counter in the kitchen cool in the blue moonlight. Sansa bent across it, her teeth sharp and bared.
She bit down on Jon’s fingers when she came, and he looked at the small bones shifting beneath the skin of her back. The scalloped lines of her shoulder-blades, the notches of her spine. (More prominent, like a beach rock washed half-clean of sand.) He ran his fingers down the ladder of her ribs gently. So gently that she hissed.
“Sansa,” he said, half-hitched and dark.
Her teeth only came down harder on his hand.
2018
The office above the bar is empty. Jon paces the dark tiles toward the desk at its centre: a heavy, ugly thing littered with papers, a few crumpled banknotes.
There is the sense that something hasty happened here. A rug turned-up beneath the foot of the desk chair. The painting on the far wall gone askew. (Jon does not need to look to know there is a safe behind it—empty, an echo.) Through the floor, the thin thread of music fading.
He takes a seat in the pushed-back chair. Roll-top arms, the claw-feet carved of the same ugly wood as the desk. Leather slips against the hem of his jacket. He pushes his hand beneath it, spools his fingers round the black metal pinned between his belt and the hollow of his back.
Waits.
The gun is raised when she walks into the room.
2013
Robb wore the Ned’s ring and Sansa ran away.
(That was what was said at the family meetings. Robb in his father’s old seat and Jon at his right hand. Jory and the men wreathed in a habitual blue haze, the tips of their noses lit amber by the glowing beads of cigarettes chain-smoked and held in the hand till there was no flame left to put out.)
Sansa ran away and Robb did not know where.
(That was what was said as the smoke rose and the whiskey dripped honey-like into half a hundred glasses. Robb clueless in his new-old chair and Jon at his right hand. Jory and the men thick-lunged, gold jewellery winking on their thumbs. A list of her old haunts drawn up, lovers caught and spurned. Two names near the bottom; all the worst of a woman’s taste.)
Robb sent Jon after the first one and he only called his cousin once he’d caught the Bolton boy. The one with pale eyes and a penchant for bone-tipped knives. (The one that babbled Jon’s name like a madman as he sank into the cool, dark glass of the depths that rose to greet him. The one the gardai found sometime later, river-bloated in a summer swell.)
2018
Sansa stares at him, unblinking. “How did you find me?”
“Robb told me you were here,” he says. “Though I wonder what the fuck it is you’re doing in a place like this.”
“Did you ask my brother the same question?”
He tilts his head, the barrel. “Fair point.”
“Will I sit?”
He tilts his head the other way, and watches her cross the room toward him. He holds up a hand and smiles (slowly, viciously) when she stops. “Why don’t you dance for me instead?”
“Fuck you, Jon.”
“Was it fives or fifties?” he asks, and uses his free hand to pat at his pocket.
Her fingers find the back of the chair braced in front of the desk, bed in deep. “Maybe I gave it out for free.”
“Cheap talk.” Jon stops the show of looking for his wallet and clicks the safety back on. “Nothing is ever free now, is it?” He glances at the banknotes on the desk, then meets Sansa’s cool gaze. “Where is Baelish? Your brother’s set me looking for him, so.”
An airy shrug. “Gone.”
“Gone,” he repeats. “Where to?”
“Does it matter?”
His hand is still up; but she sits down all the same. (Not in the chair opposite, no. In his lap. Spread across his thighs.) The weight of her spilt like wine, and he soaking in every drop of it.
2011
He met Petyr Baelish only once that year (and never again, so it would transpire). It was at a different kind of club entire. There was champagne to drink and little else by way of getting the skin all good and soaked. Jon found his way into a wine-cellar, a cabinet with a single scrap of whiskey that he drank in one, quick measure after another.
There was fire still in his throat when the man himself found the thief inside his cellar. Jon with the glass half-cracked inside his fist; wishing it was the man himself’s skull trapped there instead. (A tender thing, a skull—a prism of bone and light; watch it crush down to dust and powder all the same.)
“Sláinte,” he said, and felt something like dust stick to his teeth.
Baelish watched him drain the last of the whiskey. “You left before the speeches. Sansa spoke.”
“Well now,” said Jon. “For me there’s nothing new to it. I’ve heard her voice most days of all the ones I’ve lived. You might get to know it half as well, so.” He let the glass drop and shatter against the hard stone floor. “Evening to you.”
The polished leather of his boot scattered the glass shards as he took a step toward the cellar door. Baelish found his arm with a limp, pale hand and Jon paused. (Now it was not the strength to the hold that bade Jon stop in his tracks. There was no strength to it. Just the leaded audacity of the action. The hackles it pricked at the nape of his neck as if the cogs of a war machine might be turning beneath his skin.)
“I love her,” said Baelish. “I will look after her.”
Jon swallowed so hard the sound clicked like a gunshot. “Sure enough.”
(Later, Sansa asked Jon if he was the one to leave the marks on her fiancé’s throat. A claw-grip picked out in blue; a bruise blooming at the base of the man himself’s skull. He only picked up her left hand, turned the diamond ring there on her finger with the blunt tip of his thumb as he told her to get on her knees.)
2018
He puts her on the ugly desk and parts her legs with his tongue. Impatient and hungry, he’s in no mood for the hand she braces against his brow. It is not to stop him (her hips tell him that, ridden up and off the dead man’s desk as they are) so much as it is to goad him. To make the shape of his mouth slant a little sharper. His jaw go slack.
“I didn’t run to Ramsay,” she says.
Jon closes his eyes beneath the press of her palm. “I had that figured.”
“Too late, though, wasn’t it?” she whispers. “I saw the papers.”
He feels the thrum that vibrates inside her body. (How could he not? The bow of his mouth pressed to the hot, wet heart of her.) “Nobody’ll miss that prick.”
“Maybe so,” she says, the voice that clings to her throat ragged-edged and thick. “But he was someone’s boyo once, was he not?”
“Not yours.” His tongue takes the width of her, his fingers bitten deep into her hips to hold her still. “Not anymore.”
From her throat, that thick wave of sound, that music of her moan. “Not ever, Jon.”
“And Baelish?”
“I told you,” she breathes. “Gone—gone.”
2008
At lunch the next day her hair was pressed back into that same sleek bun he’d held in the ruin of his hands the night before. (The marks on her neck powdered; a pity he could not paint the ones she’d left on his own.)
Her brothers there. Her mammy, too. (Dull lipstick and pearls at her throat; the shimmer of them when Catelyn swallowed and cast a look at the ruin of her husband’s sister.) Sure, Jon knew to mind his manners around the Ned’s good lady, and he kept a lean smile on his face whilst his hand sought her daughter’s skirt beneath the table.
“The bures been clawing to get at you again, lad?”
Jon turned the smile across to Ned. “Just one.”
“Still the same?” This from Robb, the eyes on him hungry. “You’ve never even said her name.”
Jon gave a low, dark chuckle. “Oh, I’ve said it plenty. It’s you yourself not ever listening.”
“You’ll have more wine, Sansa,” said her mammy—and spun the bottle round and away. “Will you?”
In the glass the wine gathered like blood. Jon watched Sansa lift it to her lips, the clink of it against her teeth when he turned his hand in time with the smile he moved back to her good, vicious little mother.
2009
She came to him when she could lie no longer that she was happy. On the slab of slate that made his doorstep, the bruise on her face turned the same greyish shade. (Later he would put his hand to it and swear the boy who’d done it would flounder before he sank.)
Lit blue by the moon turning its cheek against the window, all the ink of the sky, the spread of her limbs like bits of bone on the bed. Soft, though, and held whole in his hands. He didn’t kiss her lips that night (as always, as usual) but laid his mouth to the hollow of her throat. The slim valley between her breasts, the heat of her cunt.
“They’ve never had it right about you.”
From the pillows, a thread of sound raw as the red of her hair. “Who?”
“Ned and his lady,” said Jon into her thigh. “Your brothers.”
“What did they get wrong?”
“Always thinking you’d be the one to need the saving,” he whispered. “That you’d break if they weren’t there.”
Rucked to her elbows, her fingers finding the damp grain of his chin. “You’re there, though,” she said. “You’re always there, Jon.”
“Not to save you,” he said. “You do that well enough yourself, so.”
In the blue moonlight the bruise washed to nothing on her cheek. (Between them the promise to wreck the one who’d done it risen still like a blood-blister on a hand hard-worked in the tide of summer.) He swore it again and put his mouth back on her before she could draw out any other declaration from him. (Any other oath, red-shaded, diamond-tipped; taut and tender as a heart.)
2018
They leave the club and the man lapsed like some legend of death at its doors. Her mouth finds his cock as he backs the car out of the chain-link lot, and he lets her have it—this moment that she knows will make him blue. (Later, when he remembers it. Later, when he sits in this same seat with his hands on this same wheel and tries his best not to remember it.)
She’s good at it. She has always been good at it. It takes turns with the pretence of her that she puts out into the world. The pressed skirts and dimpled looks, the blue-eyed image of innocence. Those same eyes turned up to slip as water through her lashes now, and he some lost little sailor-boy in the siren of them.
Her teeth tease a gentle threat; even so he bristles.
“Be nice,” he says—and there is a darkness to it, the tone he uses and the way he lays his hand on the curve of her skull.
The shape of him flaring out her cheek as she shakes her head slowly, and the catch of her tongue there. (He tries not to think it. Tries not to think about how she probes at him like that dark-haired girl from behind the bar—his vein the missing tooth.) He lifts his palm from her skull, lays it to the curve of the steering-wheel instead. Spins it like a penny; all its proverbial bad luck.
2016
On the counter a cake, and her sat radiant behind it. Her hair caught red-gold in the wick of the candleflame; twenty-five little stubs of them, pink as her cheeks. The cheeks pursed and the lips shaped like a letter. One by one, the little flames snuffed out.
Gifts given, and the diamond ring gone from her finger. The fella what had slipped it there (the man himself, the little lord of put-out lights and chain-link lots), now he’d never got to lifting a hand near her face. Nowhere near it. Still, there were bruises left on her of a sort. The kind that sit deeper than bone, deeper even than the narrow marrow that makes their middle.
Carefully she plucked the candles from the cake and beckoned for a knife to cut it with. Jon watched the slender spiderweb of blue veins at the inside of her wrist, the pale workings of her hands. (Oh, but he’d put them to his lips later. The webs, the workings. Put them there and hold them there and curse the man himself till the curse itself might kill him.)
In the hallway later she met him heading for the door. That look in his eye that she knew too well. His hands held like hackles raised, the scars on the backs of them gone tight. She said nothing; just turned him round with a look. Away from the door, from the beckon of violence that shone blood-red beyond it. (Blood-red, and home.)
When the bone in his jaw turned ridged and hard, she arched her feet to whisper in his ear, “It’s my birthday, Jon. You’ll do what I want.”
“Don’t I always?” he said, and he did, the cake she passed him already midway to his mouth. “Tell me, princess—is this all you’d want me to eat?”
A flare of colour in her cheek, and the cake crushed inside her fist before it ever could reach his mouth. She leaned close and bit his lip until he opened his mouth for her. The taste of blood, salty and hot. (Mirrored on their tongues like two sides of the same tarnished penny.)
He didn’t have to push her back into the wall; but he did. Felt the hitch of her breath at the threat of his touch, and smiled. That violence she said she hated was convenient for her sometimes. Useful. The way it roughened the skin of his palms. The way it made him keep his distance only for her to close it. (That penny the two of them tread, spun on its head as it ever was between them—then slammed flat by a fist.)
2018
Sansa doesn’t ask him where it is they are driving to. It’s enough for her that it’s not the tree-lined route that leads to the lake house. Nor the spokes of the streets that the Stark name swallows up. It’s a narrow road Jon turns down now, and one he would not willingly turn back from.
In the cottage he keeps midway between the coast and the mountains, she unfolds. The clasp gone from her hair, the shoes from her feet. He lowers her into the water he has run for her, his knee notched against the tub’s claw-foot, and laves the brownish dye from her hair. She closes her eyes and he kisses the lids.
Robb rings when she is sleeping, and Jon answers with an easy lie.
“She wasn’t there,” he says. “I looked.”
“And Baelish?”
Jon leans his brow to his forearm where it’s crooked against the window-ledge. “Gone,” he says in a billow of grey smoke. “He’s gone.” Between his fingers, filter-paper curls down to ashes. He stubs the cigarette out. “I’ll go again in the morning. Just to be sure.”
“Aye,” says Robb. “To be sure.”
When Jon clicks from the call he hears her shift in the bed behind him. Turns to find her on one elbow, her face like some pale flower gathering all the light in the stone-built gloom. He follows the beckon of her fingers, the fall of her hair blood-red beyond it. (Blood-red, and home.)
It smells like cherries gone to cinders when he puts his face against it and whispers, “Will you go home to them?”
“It’s not home,” she says. “But I will go.”
He looks at her and he does not blink. “Where is home, Sansa?”
“Fuck you, Jon.”
But he does not look away and it is hard and awful what he is doing to her. (What she is letting him do. What she is letting him look at: her eyes, her heart—the flit of it blood-red in the blue.)
“Where’s home, Sansa?” he says again.
“I’m happy here,” she whispers—and it’s a gutted, tangled thing that soon his kiss will soothe. “That’s all you need to know.”
He looks away and lets her close the distance. The pale flower of her face, the pillow she makes of his body. (Hands that hurt can hold, too. He remembers that. She helps him to remember that.)