In the locker room, Maureen hung her head. She kneaded her belly with her hands, trying to massage away the billowing disgust in her gut. Trading sex for pills. That wasn’t what she was doing, right? Couldn’t be. She didn’t do that kind of thing. On the other hand, she’d never given him any money for them, and that shit wasn’t free. Nothing was free. Nothing. He had never asked for payment. The pills were part of their friends-with-benefits thing, right? They both understood that. Which was why the deal was unspoken. That’s what Patrick would say if she asked him. She knew she never would ask. They didn’t talk much when they got together.
She’d considered that one day in the future he’d call in a favor from her, take his payment for the pills that way. Whether she’d indulge him would depend on the favor. She’d also considered that he might use the pills against her under the right circumstances, like if he got in trouble with another cop. The wrong cop. She knew firsthand what moral firmaments the bite of handcuffs and a flashlight in the eyes could shake loose in a man. Patrick didn’t seem likely to get in trouble with the law, or to rat on a friend; but one never really knew. His drug use was casual, recreational. Actually, Maureen realized, she’d never seen him take anything. She didn’t know him that well at all. He was a hell of a cook and a good lay. He liked Harp lager and American Spirit cigarettes. Sometimes when he stopped over his clothes bore the barest hint of marijuana or another woman. He knew next to nothing about her, but Maureen knew he was smart enough to understand one essential thing. He knew better than to cross her.
She could be that wrong cop if she needed to be.
*
That night, Patrick hadn’t been seated on her couch for five minutes, hadn’t been in the house for ten, hadn’t drunk a third of his beer before she’d had his pants open, cupping him in one hand and stroking him with the other, him groaning, his teeth digging into her bare shoulder, his pills dissolving into her bloodstream. Calming her ankle. Melting the muscles in her back and her legs. She was already feeling distant, separate, by the time Patrick came in her hands, as if she were watching the two of them from across the room through a veil of gauze.
She’d let him finish his beer as she cleaned her hands in the bathroom before leading him into the bedroom, where, lights out, she let him go down on her.
Her orgasm was slow to arrive, booze and narcotics and exhaustion and noise in her head running interference, making it tough for her to reconnect with her body, but she got there, finally, and when she came the feeling hit her hard and sudden as a car crash, her belly tensing, her fists twisting the sheets. She nearly burst into laughter at the relief, her thighs quivering. It was almost too much. Almost. She pushed his head away, squirming free of his mouth.
Once she’d mostly caught her breath she pulled his face up to hers by his ears. Grabbing his shoulders, her hands traced the muscles of his chest as he climbed on top of her. As her fingertips glided over Patrick’s ribs, Maureen thought of the man she had left groaning in the ginger stalks. She wondered which exactly of those precious bones now under her fingers she had she broken in him. Patrick’s rib cage expanded and contracted in her hands as he breathed. She thought of that other man’s punctured, bubbling, bleeding lung.
Someone nearly killed him, Preacher had said.
She thought of what that man would’ve done to that little bird of a girl.
Someone nearly killed him.
Good, Maureen thought.
She opened up her legs and lay back, settling her lower back into the crook of Patrick’s arm, biting the tip of his tongue as he entered her.
Half-stoned and exhausted, knowing she wouldn’t have another orgasm, she relaxed and melted, enjoying his steady rhythm, soothed by the motion inside her. When his breathing quickened again, she gripped the back of his skull, her fingers digging through his hair. She released him when he was done.
She was half-asleep by the time she heard him flush the condom. She was three-quarters asleep when she heard him close the front door behind him. By the time he had unlocked his bike from her fence, she was dead to the world. She slept deeper than she had in weeks, oblivious to the world. She’d woken with a start not long after sunrise, hungover, relieved and terrified at how well she had slept.
*