“But I thought you and Carl—”
A faint smile spreads her lips. “Are you that blind, boy?”
Holy shit. “I guess I am.”
She closes the distance between us, then rises up on tiptoe and presses her mouth against mine. Gently at first, then harder. Her hands slip around my waist, her fingers digging into my back, and then her mouth opens.
I hear an almost feline sound deep in her throat.
My fingers slide into the damp hair at the base of her neck, and my right hand flattens against the small of her back, pulling her against me. As we kiss, I feel a flexed thigh and calf mold themselves around my left leg. In seconds she’s panting against my mouth.
We break apart suddenly, as though prompted by the same impulse, still holding each other at the waist but looking feverishly into each other’s eyes.
“What’s the matter?” she asks.
“Nothing. I just—”
“I know.”
“I guess it’s everything we’ve been through?”
“Doesn’t matter what it is.”
She laughs, a sharp sound of release. But then her eyes darken. “Oh, wow,” she breathes. “Oh shit. Do you believe this? Do you see who we are?”
It takes me about three seconds. “My father?”
She nods twice, then shakes her head. “And my mother. Or Viola. Same difference. Christ, you see how easily it must have happened for them? With the strain they were under back then?”
For the first time I have some inkling of how powerfully my father must have been pulled into Viola Turner’s arms. As Serenity and I process this realization, our hands fall away from each other. Self-consciousness is anathema to spontaneous sex.
She raises her right hand and runs it through her hair where I was holding her. “I really want you,” she says. “I mean, I want to sit on you right now.”
I swallow hard. Maybe the only thing keeping me separated from her is my acute awareness of Mia and Annie one floor below. “But . . . ?”
“But I feel like I’m acting out some weird Jungian script. You know?”
“Yes.”
Tee laughs again. “Why aren’t we welders and not writers?”
“I’m not sure that would make much difference.”
“You know what?” she says, her tone that of a professor analyzing an obscure Greek play. “We’re not like your father or my mother. And I’m not like Viola, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re free agents. They weren’t. If you and I want to hook up, there’s nothing stopping us. If we want to go down to the courthouse tomorrow and get fucking married, there’s nothing stopping us.”
“You might be rushing things a little.”
Serenity flips me off. “What I’m saying is, when you’re like our parents were—when you’re tasting the forbidden—at some level you know there’s no real future. You’re like married people having an affair. Unless you’re caught, you pretty much know the relationship is stillborn.”
She’s right. “Even if you kid yourself about it,” I think aloud, “and fantasize about a future together, you know there really isn’t one.”
“Exactly. But for you and me, the future is out there. It’s real. If we make love right now, then tomorrow we’ll be forced to confront the reality of it. Your daughter, my job in Atlanta. This act would have consequences. Whereas if this were 1964—”
“We’d do it in a bubble of secrecy, and it would stay in the bubble.”
Serenity smiles. “Exactly. We’d have no choice.”
She walks to my dresser and lays her hands on it, breathing with conscious rhythm. There is a woman in the throes of sexual heat and emotional confusion. Despite her thin frame, Tee’s taut haunches fill out her jeans in a profoundly erotic way. The powerful curve of her thighs below the buttocks sends my blood pumping southward.
“So, now that we’ve analyzed ourselves,” I say. “What do we do?”
Tee straightens up and looks back at me, clearly undecided. “You tell me.”
“Dad, are you finished yet?”
My daughter’s voice, right on cue . . . “I guess I am,” I say softly. “Right?”
Serenity puckers her lips in thought, but after a few seconds, she nods. “We have some thinking to do. And thinking usually stops this kind of foolishness.”
I take a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I’m sure you have somebody in Atlanta. Right?”
She sighs. “I’m not a nun, Mr. Mayor.”
“Okay. I haven’t been with anyone since my fiancée was killed.”
Tee looks back at me in silence for several seconds. “Not even the cheerleader?”
“No joke. It’s only been three months.”
“I’m sorry.”
I can’t blame Serenity for her suspicion. After all, I’m up here kissing her. “I’m going to head back down.”
“Hey, I said I was sorry.”
“It’s okay. I just don’t want Annie running up here and feeling weird.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She raises her hand in a wave of regret. “It sucks doing the right thing, doesn’t it?”
“Almost always.”
Snake Knox rolled over in the dark of his room at the sod farm in Sulphur. His burner phone was vibrating. He shook himself awake and checked the text, which read: Call this number: 601-304-0095.
Snake felt under his pillow for his pistol, slid it to within easy reach. Then he dialed the number.
“You answered quick, Grandpa,” said Toons Teufel. “You nervous?”
“Did they get the bitch?”
“No.” Toons hawked and spat. “They were too late.”
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody got her out.”
Snake rubbed his eyes and sat up. “Who did?”
“Don’t know. Only person my guys saw was a woman. Young. Black. Armed.”
“A black woman made fools out of your boys? I shoulda sent Wilma.”
“Fuck you, Knox. I’m just lettin’ you know. Had to be FBI, a black chick who knew how to use a gun like that? She played it like an undercover.”
Snake thought about this. “Penn Cage is tight with some FBI. If he got what I think he got from this Cat Lady, he might have brought the Bureau in.”
“Hey, I don’t know what you wanted with that woman. She lived in a goddamn palace, I heard. Rode out Katrina like Marie Antoinette. But they didn’t even have time to empty the mansion. Somebody called in a home invasion across the street, and the NOPD showed up for once.”
“No idea where she is now?”
“Nope.”
“Thanks for nothin’, Toons. Jesus.”
Snake clicked off, but he didn’t lie down again. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking in the dark, his mind spinning outward like a hawk flying over dark trees, till the oak and hickory and pecan that covered the hills gave way to cypress and black water. He saw boats in the dark, arrowing through the night, lanterns in their bows. And he saw taut skin that looked golden in the flickering light. He closed his eyes, and the vision grew clearer. With it came sounds: laughter and screams and grunts in the humid dark. And then he heard it, the strangest claim he’d ever heard a human being make: I’m a nigger, too . . . I’m a nigger, too!
Snake wondered if the throat that screamed those words still really drew breath on the earth. If so, the woman who owned it had more power over him than almost anyone alive.
And she had vanished.