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Her heart had been pounding when she saw him on the train platform.
Oh, she’d known it was him.
She’d pretended otherwise. Called him Smoke just for the pleasure of seeing his face twist, asked him which twin he was, gone through the whole rigmarole like it made a difference in the end when she knew, in her heart of hearts, just which sumbitch she’d been looking at. Her heart knew. Her pussy knew.
“Cause you told me you loved me,” she’d burst out with, sounding remarkably composed considering her heart was in her throat. Mary was almost proud of herself for that, for refusing to scream in public. It was more than he deserved for not showing up at her mother’s funeral. That bastard, she thinks again. That fucking bastard.
“Well, I told you to stay the fuck away from me, too, but I guess you didn’t hear that part,” Stack replied, voice low.
Sammie's eyes went wide. He must not have known that Stack could be so mean to his woman, but Mary knew. She’d always known what shade of bastard she’d fallen in love with.
“Oh, I heard you,” Mary answers, casting her smile on the ground, sweet as the smile she gives her husband on a Sunday afternoon. “I heard you loud and clear. But then you stuck your tongue in my cooz and fucked me so hard, I figured you’d changed your mind,” she says at full volume.
Stack chokes on his own spit. Gone was the girl he’d married off to a rich white man in Meridian. Mary wasn’t a girl anymore. She was a wife. A weathered woman. A mourner, now that her mother is gone and her only living family left is staring at her in derision. It’s a tough pill to swallow for a girl who has never belonged anywhere, not to anyone. Not even to Stack, not least because he won’t allow it.
Mary’s chest constricts. She knows loneliness, but Lord, does it sting for Stack to twist the knife now. She should have known better than to show her wounds. Stack has never, not in his whole life long, seen a bruise he hasn’t dug his paws into harder. It’s not his way to show mercy. Not in his nature to let sleeping dogs lie.
She walks away.
***
She comes back.
It aches beneath her ribs when Sammie questions her presence that night, but she’s used to it. She’s been explaining her presence in places she’s been unwanted her whole life. Even the pretty words Stack feeds her about love only soothe the ache momentarily. It isn’t enough to keep her in the juke. It isn’t enough to spare her from the fate awaiting her outside.
Her heart doesn’t pound when she approaches Cornbread with a smile like Sunday night.
“Cornbread?” she asks, silk dress sticking to the inside of her thighs.
She’s sweating. The fabric beneath her underarms is soaked, clinging to the sides of her breasts, and she isn’t oblivious to his eyes and how they find her most obvious parts. It distracts Cornbread enough that he pauses a beat too long for a happily married man to be entirely polite before responding.
“Mary, what you doing out there?” he breathes.
“Are you gonna let me in?” she asks. “Or just sit there blocking the door?”
“...No,” he says, voice high. “Come on in.”
He steps aside to let her pass, and Mary glides through, as sure on her feet as a mare in season. Her skin prickles, something tugging in her stomach that urges her to turn, and—there. Behind the curtain. Mary’s mouth waters, but she hardly notices because on the other side of the dance floor is him. Hers. She knows it, can practically smell him. Leather and ozone, like a graveyard in autumn.
Stack.
Mary finds herself in front of him between one blink and the next, and his eyes widen like he’s seeing her for the first time. Maybe he is.
“Elias,” she says, pushing aside the curtain.
His cards flutter to the table, hand forgotten. It’s the only time in her entire life she’s seen Stack leave money on the table, but he stands up, ignoring the protests of the others to come to her.
They cross the dance floor together, stopping in the middle of the crowd, and Stack is talking to her, he’s saying something, but all she can think about is how he fucked her that final time. When he swore it would be the last. She can’t imagine the expression that must be on her face as she peers up at him through her lashes, but Stack’s giving her a look of warning, chewing on his toothpick with those sharp fucking teeth, and she decides she doesn’t give a damn. He smells like he wants her. She knows that, now. She can tell.
Mary takes the toothpick out of his mouth and tosses it aside to kiss him.
For all that Stack claims he doesn’t care for her, couldn’t give a shit about her welfare, he groans into her mouth like her breath is his air. It turns sweaty fast, inevitable in this heat, but Stack just licks it up, licks her mouth, sucks on her jaw. Presses his teeth against her neck.
She pulls him to the storage room.
It’s easy, then, to push him to the ground. He’s confused for only as long as it takes her to straddle him, and then his face collapses with relief. He likes to be on top, to pin her, but even more than that, he likes to—
“Yes,” he breathes. “Sit on my face, baby.”
Mary shakes her head. Stack's brow furrows, nearly offended, mouth already open in protest, so she bends down to fill it with her tongue. She kisses him hard, sighing into him. Kissing him like this is the second-best thing she’s ever felt.
But it’s so hot. And she’s so wet. The summer night is shivering up her spine, collecting in the small of her back and burning hotter and hotter the longer the night lingers on, and she has to soothe it. Only Stack can soothe it.
Fucking him will soothe it, Mary assures herself.
She presses down, grinding her hips into his. Stack’s hands land on her waist, settling her, but she only drives harder. Her sighs turn into sobs, and Stack groans into her neck.
“Fuck, Mary,” he says. “They not using you right in Meridian if you this needy.”
Mary shakes her head no, because they’re not, her useless husband is useless, and she must say as much out loud because Stack snickers, low and cruel. His hand slides up her spine to the nape of her neck.
“I’d make sure we took care of you,” he says into her ear. “You know I would, baby.”
Mary makes a noise that isn’t altogether familiar to her—something too high, too desperate—but Stack's hips buck up involuntarily, and he starts fumbling with his belt.
“Fuck, I got you, girl. I got you.”
It takes some maneuvering, but eventually, his pants are shoved down to his thighs. When her undergarments prove too hard to remove, Stack rips through the seam, tearing the lace apart just enough that he can slide his fingers against her bare skin.
“Jesus, Mary,” he hisses. “You this wet for me?”
Mary isn’t sure. She’s not sure she’s ever been this turned on in her entire life, and there was a time when she used to fuck Stack almost every day after the work was done and her body grew used to expecting it. For some reason, she’s dripping, actual droplets of slick escaping down her inner thighs.
“What the fuck?” Stack mutters, bringing his fingers up to the light. His fingertips are glimmering. “It don’t smell like cunt.”
Mary should be embarrassed, but she laughs. “What do I smell like, then?”
Stack's eyes dilate, pupils blooming like spilled ink as he stares at her. “Melted ice cream. You smell like ice cream meltin’ on a summer day. Like sugar, sweetheart. You gonna taste as sweet?”
For the first time all night, Mary loses her breath. She watches with wide eyes as Stack lifts his fingers to his lips and makes a show of licking his fingertips.
Then the taste seems to actually register, he makes a noise low in his throat, and he sucks his fingers in earnest, tongue sliding all the way down to the knuckle to get every drop.
“Stack,” Mary whispers.
He looks up at her. “Don’t worry. I always fuck you good, don’t I? Gonna take care of you.”
Mary meets his eyes. “You shouldn’t come in me,” she warns him, lips parting when she feels him rock against her. “It’s my time.”
“Don’t care,” Stack replies. “I’ll eat you out after. Clean you up good.”
Mary whines out loud. “Hurry the fuck up, then.”
He scowls, but reaches down and grabs hold of himself. “Fine. Greedy thing, ain’t you?”
Mary nods, mouth open as she sinks down onto him.
He fills her as well as he always has, always will, except this time, the heat roiling deep in her hips spreads to her stomach and coalesces beneath her ribs. It climbs steadily up her throat until it’s burning in her jaw. Until it’s all she can think about. She rides Stack fast, harder and harder, and her teeth ache like she needs to bite down on her hand or she’ll scream.
“Baby, you’re drooling,” Stack tells her, reaching up to touch her jaw.
“Oh, you want some?” Mary asks sarcastically, except it comes out breathless.
Stack's eyes widen, but he nods, leaning back and opening wide.
Mary leans down, spitting into his mouth, and the pain in her jaw becomes unbearable when she catches sight of his bare neck. It’s the moment before jumping over the edge of a cliff, burning and complete, and she hardly notices the rush of fresh air as the door opens behind her and Sammie's scent briefly enters and exits, hardly registers the voices coming closer as she bends over Stack and kisses him hard. Kissing Stack is the second-best thing she has ever felt, Mary thinks nonsensically, her mouth finding his cheek, then his jaw, then his neck.
Kissing Stack was the second-best thing she’d ever felt because being bitten by Remmick had been the first.
Being bitten by Remmick was immediate kinship. It was built in family, a rush of belonging, of understanding the world and her place in it. It was momentous for a girl who had never belonged anywhere, not to anyone, except for brief moments in motel rooms when she’d sometimes belonged to Stack’s hands, or his mouth. Never to his heart. Not in any way that mattered in the end.
She’d thought nothing could ever top that feeling.
Nothing, until she bites Stack.
She comes the moment his blood fills her mouth, squeezing his cock as his blood pulses in her throat, and this—this is the best a person can ever feel, bar none. Even Smoke unloading a mag in her stomach moments later can’t temper the high. She laughs herself silly all the way out of the building. Hell, Stack is still coming inside her as he kicks it, bleeding out in her arms with his artery in her teeth, and she’s dancing through the crowd in her euphoria when she flees.
“Do you love me?” Mary will later ask, decades later, centuries later.
“I always loved you,” Stack will tell her. He tells her every time. He always means it.
Sometimes, even most times, it’s enough.