The woman ran her hand along the side of his neck. “You haven’t been around here before, have you?” She smiled at him. Really smiled, not like she was laughing at him.
“No—” He shook his head. Her hand felt cool against the heat that had come rushing up under his skin. He pointed back over his shoulder. “I came with my dad, and his friends.”
Her gaze moved past his eyes, up to where her fingers tangled around in his hair. “Uh-huh,” she said. “I know your daddy.”
She got up from the bed. He sat there watching her as she stood at a little shelf nailed to the wall. The shelf had a plastic-framed mirror propped up on it, and a towel and a bar of soap. She watched herself taking off her dangly earrings, gold ones, drawing the curved hooks out. She laid them down in front of the little mirror.
“Well, you don’t have to worry none.” She spoke to the mirror. “There’s always a first time. Then it’s easy after that.” She rubbed a smudge away from the corner of her eye. “You’ll see.”
When he’d pulled aside the curtain and stepped into the dark—away from the bar’s light, its noise of laughing and talking falling behind him—he hadn’t even been able to see where he was, until he’d felt the woman take his hand and lead him a little farther along, back to where the doors to a lot of little rooms were lit up by a bulb hanging from the hallway’s ceiling. One of the doors had opened and a man had come out and shoved past him in the narrow space, and he’d caught a whiff of the smell off the man, the same as had been on his uncle Tommy when he’d come back out to the booth.
When the woman had closed the door and come over to the bed to sit close by him, he’d held his breath for a moment, because he thought the scent would be on her too, that raw smell, like sweat, only sharper. But she smelled sweet, like something splashed on from a bottle, the kind women always had on their dressers. That made him realize that she was the first woman, the first female thing, he’d been near, for what seemed like days. All the way down here—in the car with his father and his uncle and their buddies, packed up tight with them as they’d gone barreling along in the night, and then crowded around the table in the booth, the same night rolling through the street outside, until their sweat was all he could smell, right down into his throat.
“Here—you don’t want to get that all mussed up.” The woman had on a white slip—it shone in the dim light as she came back toward the bed. “Let’s take it off.” She bent down, her dark hair brushing against his face, and started unbuttoning his shirt.
He felt cold, the sweat across his arms and shoulders chilling in the room’s air. The woman sat down and leaned back against the bed’s pillow, dropping his shirt to the floor. “Come a little closer.” She stretched out her arms toward him.
“You see… there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Her voice went down to a whisper, yet somehow it filled the little room; it ate up all the space, until there was just the bed and her on it.
“We’ll go real slow, so you won’t get scared.” She smiled at him, her hand tracing down his rib cage. She was a lot older than him; this close to her, he could see the tiny wrinkles around her eyes, the skin that had gone soft and tissuey around the bone, dark underneath it. The sweet smell covered up something else; when he breathed her breath, it slid down his throat and stuck there.
“Look…” She took his hand and turned his arm around, the pale skin underneath showing. She drew a fingernail along the blue vein that ran down to the pulse ticking away in his wrist.
She dropped his hand and held out her own arm. For just a second—then she seemed to remember something. She lifted her hips to pull the slip up, then shimmied the rest of the way out of it like a quick snakeskin. She threw it on the floor with his shirt.
“Now look…” She traced the vein in her arm. Her fingernail left a long thin mark along it. She did it again, the mark going deeper. Then a dot of red welled up around her nail, in the middle of her forearm. She dug the nail in deeper, then peeled back the white skin, the line pulling open from the inside of her elbow to her wrist.
“Look,” she whispered again. She held the arm up to his face. The room was so small now, the ceiling pressing against his neck, that he couldn’t back away. “Look.” She held the long slit open, her fingers pulling the skin and flesh back. The red made a net over her hand, collecting in thicker lines that coursed to the point of her elbow and trickled off. A red pool had formed between her knee and his, where their weight pressed the mattress down low.
The blue line inside her arm was brighter now, revealed. “Go on,” she said. “Touch it.” She leaned forward, bringing her mouth close to his ear. “You have to.”
