Smoke in a Rainstorm

All characters are above the age of 18. Thank you to Mr. Cricket's Violin for her work editing this story. Quote credits can be found on the final page.

Rain pounded the outside of the small vehicle. They had parked just outside of the city, tucked away on a small dirt road between where they had come from and where they had meant to go. They hadn't planned on stopping, not until they arrived at the motel. The rain had forced them off of the Trans Canada Highway and she had forced him out of the front seat and into the back of the car. Now they moved against one another - one of her hands pressed against the window, pale with fog. Her fingers were tense, clawing down the glass and catching at the edge of the hardened leather of the interior. She switched her hand to the back of his neck, sinking her nails into the skin where his collarbone met his shoulder, creating crescent-moon shaped marks when she lifted them away. He was above her, his breathing a sharp rasp - counterpointing the steady surge of sound as sheets of rain threw themselves over the roof of the car.

One of his hands clutched at her waist, the tips of his fingers pressing into the soft skin above her hipbone. It was just hard enough to be uncomfortable. His other had caught around the back of her neck, drawing her up as he leaned down, tracing the curve of her jaw with his lips, pressing them down just below her ear. She gasped, matching the rhythm of his body with her own. Her dress was pulled up around her waist, one bare leg hooked over his hips, the other arched over the headrest of the front seat. Outside, lightning cracked the sky, the shining black mirror breaking open in bright lines. It lit up the windows, blindingly bright and then gone again. In the darkness that followed, it seemed that the sound of the rain had disappeared.

The only sound was his open-mouthed gasp of pleasure as he came, his whole body going rigid for a moment. She could feel him trembling slightly—his arms, his legs, his lips for the brief time it took for them to lift them away from her neck. Tightening her legs around his waist, she pulled him down and kissed him—hard, on the lips. She could feel the beginning of a beard around his mouth, feel the sharp bristle of hair as she traced the edge of her thumb down his cheek, pinching his chin and then releasing him.

They stayed that way for a few long moments before he pulled out of her, adjusting his weight so that he was sitting in the seat between her legs. There was a far-off streetlight, just enough of the watered-down golden light coming through the windows that she could see him staring at her. His cum leaked slowly from inside of her, into the narrow rivulets of the leather seat between her legs. The smell of it filled the car. She couldn't make out his expression—the darkness cutting two deep triangles of shadow across his bearded cheeks, deepening the indents of his eyes, catching in the soft pink of his petalled lips. She could only make out the sandpaper of his skin, the way the corners of his mouth picked up in a small, knowing smile.

"How did we get here?" His voice was almost a chuckle.

She shifted more upright, letting her leg fall back down from the top of the seat as she worked her dress back down around her hips. She pulled the soft fabric toward her knees. She was aware of the man watching her as he refastened his belt buckle and worked at the buttons of his shirt with his fingers.

"You happened to me," she replied softly, without any hint of laughter, "I was happened to."

"Marilyn Hacker." The man laughed, "Are you trying to make me feel old?"

"You are old," she set one bare foot against his shoulder and pushed him back into the door as she righted herself, "Besides, I think it suits us."

"Oh yeah?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe you should go and find somebody your own age," he made the statement gentle, almost teasing, but she picked up on something in the words. It was strange, that language could sometimes give things away like that. The way that somebody said something, more than what they said. Where their voice softened, and where it didn't.

"Nah. Don't need one." Reaching forward into the middle glove compartment, she fumbled around until she found her pack of cigarettes. Pulling one out and setting it between her lips, she lit it.

"Uh—no. You can't smoke in my car," the man's voice held the same tone as before, so she simply inhaled and blew a stream of smoke in his direction. He sighed in quiet disapproval, "My wife uses this thing, you know."

"I know."

"So you can't smoke in here."

"It's raining outside."

"So?"

"So I can't smoke out there. Where are we, anyways?"

"You can't go ten minutes without a smoke?"

He countered her question with his own, a habit that she hated and which came from thirty years of teaching. Then he reached out and snagged the cigarette from between her fingers. He stared at it disapprovingly for a moment, and then lifted it to his own lips. He breathed in, face lit from beneath by glowing amber light, the tip of the cigarette making a small halo around his chin and the tip of his nose. Coughing, he handed the cigarette back to her, waving the smoke away from his face.

"God," he cleared his throat and coughed again, "How do you do that? Those things will kill you, you know."

"Don't say you know so much," she replied, letting the smoke escape from her mouth and inhaling it back through her nose, "It makes you sound..." she trailed off.

"Alright, alright. They will kill you though."

"He wants to say... I love you, nothing can hurt you. But he thinks, this is a lie, so he says in the end... you're dead, nothing can hurt you."

"Louis Glück. That's another one from the 40s. I'm not that old, you know."

"Whatever."

Hooking her fingers into the handle of the door, she pushed it open and flicked the half-smoked cigarette out into the rain. Closing the door, she climbed over the man into the passenger seat of the vehicle. He joined her a moment later, easing himself between the seats and tucking his legs into the space beneath the steering wheel before rearranging the shirt around his waist. He was limber, for a man nearing seventy. He turned the keys, and the car spluttered for a moment, like a man returning to breathing after having been drowned, then roared to life. The high beams flickered on, the white light cutting two troughs through the rain-stricken darkness. He glanced at her.

"Where are we going?"

"Hmm?"

"Motel or... your place? You want to stay the night?"

"Your car already reeks of smoke," she pressed her tongue into her bottom lip for a moment. She hadn't even noticed that it was bleeding, but she could taste it now - like liquid iron against her tongue. She wasn't sure which one of them had bit it, "You really want to spend the night in a motel? Do you want her to know?" She stared at him for a moment, and when he didn't reply, let out a long breath, "There are places like this everywhere. Places you enter as a young girl, from which you never return."

"I don't know that one."

"It's Glück again. Take me to the motel."

He stepped down on the gas, guiding the car away from the side of the ditch and onto the road. A combination of mud and water sprayed up across the window beside her. Resting the side of her forehead against the glass, she studied the man as he drove. His eyes never moved from the road in front of him. His face was illuminated by the light from the car dashboard and the headlights that shone back through the glass, coming in and out of focus as they passed underneath lamp poles. He was an older man—much older than she was—with a pair of once-dark brows that nearly met in the middle of his forehead; olive skin, a strong nose, and a jaw that looked as though it had been sculpted from clay. Old Italian. It came out to a squared point, a dimple pressing deeply into the center of his chin. He seemed like a ghost from the Byzantine empire; an emperor who had awoken from his grave and dressed in mismatched clothing. Jean and tweed. His hair had gone grey a decade earlier. Deep, iron grey. His brown eyes, the color of unfired pottery clay, seemed to glow behind the headlights. Rachel looked at him, and she felt nothing.

They were going too fast, she knew. She also knew that he didn't drive like this often. That something about her made him do it. She'd seen this before. It didn't scare her—she was used to it. The wet roadway seemed to suit them; his back straight, one hand balanced completely steadily on the top of the steering wheel, his leg rising slightly as he switched to the brakes and sent them around a corner. Mud sprayed from beneath the tires. Water that had been clinging to the windshield slid sideways, tracking long wet lines along the glass. Closing her eyes, Rachel allowed the hum of the engine and the roll of rain over the roof quiet her thoughts.

They arrived at the motel fifteen minutes later. She opened her eyes as she felt the car stop. They had pulled right up to the far end of the building. It was a small structure—ten rooms, the doors painted blue, the sideboards whitewashed and slightly faded even in the darkness. A large glowing sign with two letters burnt out stood guard over the building, MO—L throwing disjointed, slightly flickering incandescent white light over the black shingles of the roof. They sat in silence for a moment. Then, without speaking, they left the car. It was only a few steps from the car door to the small outcropping of roof in front of the motel room door. Still, by the time that they made it there, both of them were soaked to the skin. They stumbled underneath the roof together. She lit up another cigarette as he fumbled through his pockets searching for the keys. He'd picked them up earlier, she knew. He had a Saturday/Sunday booking for this motel every weekend; Room 09. He found the key a moment later, fitting it into the door handle and turning it with a soft click.

She flicked away the cigarette and followed him into the dark room. She knew the room by memory, and the light didn't come on as they undressed. He kicked the door closed. If not for the slight breaks in the sideways blinds pulled down over the front window, the entire room would have been black. As it was, the shadows were heavy, and what shapes could be made out behind them by the sign-light were static grey. There was a television sitting on a dresser across from the bed, an open doorway into a small dark bathroom, and a stuffed fish hanging on a plaque above the bed. A pike, she thought. The motel had started as a fishing lodge, and it still held onto some of the mementos. She liked that fish. Sometimes, when she woke in the morning and he was gone, she spent a couple of minutes staring into the glassy black eyes of it.

The story of the motel went that some of the wood had been salvaged from shipwrecks. The way that it groaned, like a living thing, under the relentless wash of the storm outside, she could almost believe it. It was bullshit, she knew, but that didn't stop her from liking the story. It was almost as though the wood was aching to return to the sea. It was a place you came looking for ghosts.

Stepping close, she pushed the man back against the door. He could have stood firm, but he let himself be pushed back. This was what he wanted her for. They undressed each other—his hands going around her waist, pulling her hips into his, her fingers working at the buttons of his shirt. It took her a moment, but once she had it unbuttoned he pulled it off his arms and dropped it onto the carpet at their feet. She felt him lean down, turning her face up as he kissed her. They kicked off their shoes on the way to the bed, him guiding her back with the hands around her waist. She felt the edge of the mattress meet the back of her knees and fell onto it, breaking away from their kiss.

She could hear the clink of metal as he undid his belt, pulling off his pants and kicking them away. Her dress was damp between her and the comforter, and she sat up to pull it off. She felt his hands "helping", moving up the sides of her body, pulling the wet fabric up above her arms. She heard it fall somewhere across the room as he tossed it away. She inhaled, slightly surprised, as he picked her up and set her down further up the bed. Her head lay against the pillows. Her mouth hung open, letting out a long breath in the way that she knew he liked as he worked his mouth slowly down the side of her neck and onto her breast. She arched slightly as he kissed the side of her stomach, just above her hips, breathing over her skin. After the chill of the rain, his mouth felt like a furnace. She tried not to feel like she was being branded, the hot circles that his mouth left on her skin saying—mine, mine, mine. She reached down, playing her fingers through his hair as he set his shoulders beneath her thighs.

They fucked in the hotel room for nearly an hour—on and off; sometimes suddenly, like a light switch being flicked and sometimes slowly, like waves being dragged back and forth by the tide. Outside the room, the rain was going stir-crazy across the gravel of the parking lot. Their bodies, beneath the heavy blankets of the bed, did their best to match it. The wind was a witches' voice, shrieking as it tried to find its way under the rickety door. Sometimes, when the man used his fingers in rhythm with his hips, she couldn't tell her own voice from the wind. At some point, she kicked him off of her and onto his back. Pinning her hands straight-armed to his shoulders, she held him against the mattress. Clawing her hair back with one hand, tossing her head to move it over her shoulders, she bent over the man's body to press her lips to the bottom of his chin.

Through the man's clouded thoughts, he pictured her as a racehorse—darkly beautiful, fine-muscled, tireless. Every movement seemed to be driving toward something. A new horse breaking itself on an old track, he thought. His mind shoved the thought away roughly. Grabbing her by the waist, he tried to turn her over and take control of the situation. Instead, she grabbed his wrists and slammed them against his stomach hard enough to knock the breath out of him for a moment. Her teeth grabbed his neck, pulling the skin. Moving her lips to his ear, she whispered:

"Your body hurts me as the world hurts God."

"Plath," he gasped.

Her teeth trailed down her ear, nipped at his earlobe sharply enough to make him flinch. He felt himself still slightly; he wasn't afraid - but he knew enough to know what he shouldn't move when she was like this.

"I say sex because I don't know how else to say—afraid of dying."

"I don't know that one. Try another."

She turned her head so that they were eye to eye, their faces no more than a finger width apart. Their breathing mixed, becoming a slightly warm pressure against the bottom of their faces. Their bodies rested together, both slick; whether it was what remained of the rainwater or sweat, neither knew. At some point, she had stopped moving as well. She leaned in and grabbed his bottom lip with her teeth for a moment before speaking again.

"This is how a girl gets wanted. Pull me through your teeth like smoke."

"Don't know that one either." His lips twitched upward in a slightly nervous smile.

She moved suddenly, surprising the man. Spinning around on top of him, she pulled her legs up and trapped his arms underneath her shins. She felt the muscles in his arms tense, his legs moving up slightly. He might have been able to throw her off of him, had he tried in that first moment, but he didn't. Bending down, she let her hair fall around both of their heads like dark curtains. She was so close that the end of her nose was touching his. She looked him straight in the eyes, unblinking; one of her hands had ended up around his neck, her fingers tense on the sides but not tight around the front. Her other hand stroked the side of his forehead, feeling the dampness of sweat in his soft hair. It was a tender gesture. It put the two hands at odds with one another. She lowered her face even further, so that their noses were beside one another, and spoke carefully, letting her words fall into his open mouth.

"My silence carries the hunger of a dozen hounds. That is why you should not offer yourself to me so willingly. I will take you as food and leave you as famine."

"That one either."

"I'm sorry if you thought you were buying my body... You are not God, and you are not buying. I am trading for your silence."

She pushed herself off of him without waiting for an answer. Standing, she stretched at the side of the bed. The man turned over onto his side, admiring her. The way the slightly iridescent outside light played in bars across her dark-skinned body—how her waist pushed outward at the hips, slanting into a pair of long legs. The slight stretch marks across her hips and thighs, the skin in those broken lines slightly paler than that around it. How her muscles moved, obvious under her skin, as she bent down and pulled up her dress. How gracefully she moved as she circled her hips to bring the fabric up passed them. Grabbing her pack of cigarettes off of the floor, she tucked one behind her ear. He watched her figure move away from him, growing dimmer as she entered the shadows at the other side of the room, then suddenly brighter again as she became silhouetted against the kaleidoscope of falling rain as she pulled open the door. How her hair fell like twine-brown ribbons over the slight slopes of her shoulders.

"Wait!" He called after her disappearing figure, "I liked that one. Who was that?"

"That one's mine," she spoke without turning. She stepped through the doorway and disappeared, "It's always been mine. See you in class tomorrow, Professor."

Smoke in a Rainstorm —— THE END.

"You happened to me / I was happened to." Nearly a Valedictorian by Marilyn Hacker.

"He wants to say / I love you, nothing can hurt you. / But he thinks, this is a lie / so he says in the end / you're dead, nothing can hurt you." A Myth of Devotion by Louis Glück.

"There are places like this everywhere. / Places you enter as a young girl, / from which you can never return." Averno by Louis Glück.

"Your body hurts me as the world hurts god." Fever 103 by Sylvia Plath.

"I say sex because I don't know how else to say / afraid of dying." Unknown, by Unknown Author

"This is how a girl gets wanted. / Pull me through your teeth / like smoke." & When the canary stops singing by Emily O'Neill.

"My silence carries the hunger of a dozen hounds. / That is why you should not offer yourself to me so willingly / I will take you as food and leave you / as famine." Unknown by Scherezade Siobhan

"I'm sorry if you thought you were buying my body. / You are not God, and you are not buying. / I am trading for your silence." This, Love, Your Votive by Isaac Frank