ONLY LAST NIGHT?

Rupert has thought of Dove every night and every day and every time of day in between, outside, what have you. When she moved here permanently, he felt something shift. Something that lives in his chest—something that affects the air breathed by everyone else, too.

He's got no business being in the kitchen, but people got used to this when he'd show up at the O'Hara's or various other dinner parties where Taggie'd been hired to help out behind the scenes.

Let's be clear, though: Rupert thrives in a shadowy corner with a woman leaning languidly against the wall perpendicular to him, or at a table of about eleven other guests where everyone's laughing at the way he's just told an otherwise unremarkable story—because it was him, and he matters, and he's good at this.

All the lights are on. Dove's husband (Rupert's friend from his polo days) hired a company with a small staff to handle the cooking and cleaning and serving—the things Dove might have once been familiar with, or thought she'd become familiar with, once upon a time, but can now afford to delegate.

There is no reason for her to be in the kitchen, either. The staff are taking out the garbage. Rupert is peering into Dove's cupboards and only her cupboards. He finds a container of oats older than Dove's marriage.

it makes for cold winters and, as dove is learning, far more unbearable summers.

she stands near the large single fan that blows in the room, moved into the kitchen at her behest to keep the hired staff from melting in the heat. despite the proximity she's careful not to overlap with the fan any more than necessary. it's a matter of manners, to her. even with the innumerous codes of gentility and etiquette that she has taken such care to memorize, this is what she would consider gauche. to monopolize something that could benefit another. to make him uncomfortable.

and still, the air is stale and flat now as it was yesterday. as it was last night. this heat which, like a particular thought of rupert, gave no quarter. following her as she paced from room to room, listless. she'd gone sleepless because the only relief to be found was in constant motion: in the breeze cause by her own movement, in forceful distraction.

he answers her, but doesn't turn. she continues to watch the exposed line of his neck, the nape dark with sun and slick with sweat. she has the urge to start walking again.

“no,”

she’s upset with him for having an answer that’s smooth and graceful, and by nature of those things, distant. for finding something to look at that isn't her. which is to say she’s upset with rupert for being rupert. and isn't that what this is all about? why it's so hard?

that he is, at the end of it all, him?

“miserable and ceaseless, actually.”

she says it because it's the clever thing. because the heat is unending and it makes her irritable, sensitive, and that turns her contrarian. it comes out on such impulse and with so little thought that dove doesn't realize she's inadvertently spoken something true until hearing it herself. there's a strange relief for a moment. in saying a thing that needs to be aired out, knowing one is still safe behind the shuttered doors of plausible deniability.

that satisfaction doesn't last long.

"would you look for more ice?" the fan buzzes behind her like an overlarge insect. suddenly the sound, the very nearness of it, is unbearable. "there has to be more. we can't have used it all already."

dove turns and begins to rummage through the nearest cabinet, opening and shutting small wooden drawers. dispensing her body to a useless task.

They were two liars sat at memory's edge panning for half-truths.

White arms unfurl against the tabletop, palms outstretched as if to take communion. The eye that sits ensconced in its socket emits a quiet whirring he hears against the bone of his skull; it refocuses, recalibrates, pupil narrowing in upon that clandestine plane of supple flesh that silently begs for its stoic attention. She leans, listless, somehow lustful, the pale tops of her breasts swelling endlessly against poorly-lacquered wood.

There is no rescinding his coyote grin, crooked and malignant, wide and white— not before a manicured hand has him by the hat brim and they are forced to marry eyes in the lavish dark of its shadow. Something intangible gleams from the simmering gold; his grizzled jaw momentarily helps itself against her palm. And then she's gone.

The front legs of his rickety chair hit the old shag with a force that ought to have split them. He follows her scent across the table like a bloodhound, liquor buzzing at his temple. Or was that his eye?

dove thinks about it. how the size, the width, of his body is so great it would turn her thighs out into a plié just to put them around him, stretching the muscle into pliancy. the very sinew of her body taxed into giving up any remaining stiffness; a submission so deep its somatic.

the room rattles with thunder. it's no louder than the blood rushing in her ears.

"you wanna take care of me," there's a shift in her. almost imperceptible. a ripple of expression that rolls, fluid, like a feline shoulder beneath loose skin. something that in its passing renders her just-slightly dewy. wet and coy. the dark hook of her eyes sit amongst it like a kitten claw. "s'that it?" it comes through the gloss of her lips like they’re coated in honey. you’d have to slip a finger into her mouth to scoop out all the rest of whatever is in there, turning her voice that sticky.

there's one arm left on the table, and her chin rolls over the curved backside of its suspended knuckles. nudging down the line of her little fingers until her mouth opens distractedly near the cuticles. showing him the slightest fawn of consideration before, like a thing caught⸺

"but a girl does have to trust him,"

she stands up and turns, an act that is a careful balance of addressing both the man on the other side of the table and the coyote on her scent: the first gets to watch her walk away, the second is presented with something to hunt. dove ambles toward the window, the slow walk of a woman performing pensiveness. near the window, she curls her rocks glass into her chest like a cross.

𝗛𝗔𝗩𝗘 𝗠𝗘𝗠𝗘 𝗪𝗜𝗟𝗟 𝗧𝗥𝗔𝗩𝗘𝗟 ↳ 𝘛𝘏𝘌 𝘐𝘕𝘝𝘐𝘚𝘐𝘉𝘓𝘌 𝘓𝘐𝘍𝘌 𝘖𝘍 𝘈𝘋𝘋𝘐𝘌 𝘓𝘈𝘙𝘜𝘌 ✧ 𝘈𝘊𝘊𝘌𝘗𝘛𝘐𝘕𝘎

Anything. Everything. The world on a string and Rupert's head on a silver fucking platter, served to him like the head of John the Baptist.

Tony hesitates.

"This is a trick question," He says instead. It's not like him to hesitate. Cameron certainly didn't hesitate to leave him lying in a pool of his own blood, caught between equal parts admiration and emasculation every time his stitches began to bleed, as if the thought alone was enough to irritate the wound. He didn't get to where he is now by being a nervous Nellie, but he also didn't get there by throwing caution to the wind entirely, either. Television is a blood sport (in more ways than one) and right now, Tony can't afford to be anything other than meticulously and painstakingly hypervigilant.

she uses we as deliberately as his formal title, her finger running along the rounded underbelly of the word that joins them in a pair. we, the two who married up, who everyone keeps looking to for signs of elevation sickness.

dove isn’t stupid. she knows she’s allowed concessions that he isn’t — her tie to the aristocracy afforded more legitimacy by virtue of being a woman; her lot lighter, more easily affixed to something that already stands old and true. tony, conversely, is scrutinized for not having grown to such heights on the merit of his own family name. for having to acquire that of another's. she also isn’t ignorant. dove knows tony has the weight and import to do things they will never allow her to. they being the peerage, the british isles, the world.

“you like things in writing." contract, writ, deed. "i prefer them spoken aloud for everyone to hear. it’s the showgirl in me, i suppose. i'm partial to an announcement.”

to acquire the head of john the baptist, salome slowly discards seven veils. the only layer dove has taken off is her coat. it's over there, far from the lounge bar they've collided at by happenstance, near the maitre'd. her eyes lift. fix on him from below the shroud of her dark lashes.

That's where daddy lives, right? She asked if she'd guessed correctly without waiting for the suggestion to settle among the thunder. The ghastly imitation of biology and blood twitches where great veins should have been; perhaps the wires within had a miraculous and momentary crossing. The skin where metal met flesh ached terribly — a trivial though bothersome consequence of the weather. He'd lost his arm there once.

The cowboy laughed, amusement low and brusque, slurred like he'd a mouth full of water. "Yer guess is as good s'mine, honey..! Always figured he'd end up south of the border. If there's any such thing s' justice in this world, sonuvabitch is dead n' buried somewhere cold."

Old red-eye ——— hard t'love but harder to kill. The man would've toasted to that himself.

"Nah, I didn't much know 'im. Coal miner in Black Mesa, died when I was a boy. Lung disease. Whussat look for..? He was meaner 'an a rattle-snake."

"oh..." dove tilts her head further, as if to be sure. "⸺ i'm just trying to see if you mean it."

she leans across the table and reaches for him. the pale limb of her arm laid on the table like a set of china; filling the empty space with a languid grace. the delicacy of her movements is a necessary counterweight to what they expose: cleavage. centered by the bending of her waist and framed by the desktop.

this, professionally speaking, is what she does. what burlesque is. an absolute awareness of the body from all angles.

fingers closing on the lip of the man's hat so as to tilt it upward and better expose the face underneath. it's a conservative touch. very nearly the kind of orthodox you find in the outskirt communities of this desert, where contact is administered only by proxy: through sheets, veils, the gauze of loopholes. the only thing that glances his skin is the hide of his own cap, the rim of which she finds in the lifting has left a slight indent in his brow. pink-to-red, the colour of all secrets.

"my daddy," she muses, tracing over the ridgeline of his features with the attention of a cartographer — tracking the slant of cheek, the peak of a masculine nose. his skin is the colour of her own if she were to sun to excess, somewhere between gold and the dirt you pan in order to find it. spanish waters in the back of her mouth. a pool of something she swallows as dove considers what he means, her eyes still ticking along the sculpt of the cowboy's face. a daddy can be a lot of things. most usually, he's the last man responsible for you.

"i've had a few."

dove hums a pretty sound, the throaty exhale of amusement. she taps the top of hat's edge and pauses, then recedes by half-measures: first returning her palm to the table, then fitting it around the bottleneck. it comes with her to the other side of the table.

True to her nature, or what coquettish sliver of it he'd unwittingly become privy to that evening, she flashed him the underside of her pretty sloped nose before casting the lavish, velveteen or French-satin shadow of her elongated feline eyes. She airily mocked him with his own churlish pronunciation and where the seeds of ire ought to have sprouted, amusement emerged instead twisted and pungent, sweet yet sour; titillating like a punch of rum. "Nothin' yer pretty tongue can't clean-up real nice."

THUNDER, RAIN, WANTING. CALLUSED PALMS TOOK TO THE BOTTLE'S SLENDER NECK WITH AN AVARICIOUS CLASP, BASE FEATHERLIGHT IN HIS BIG, BRAWNY HAND. IT FELT AN AWFUL LOT LIKE THE INCIPIENT WEIGHT OF FLEDGLING REGRET.

The vaquero chose to steal his first sip from the bottle's ledge, diamond droplets becoming ensnared by the unruly hairs of his mustache, furred upper-lip wincing therein with neither perceptible pleasure nor ostensible disdain. His tongue momentarily twists in his mouth. "D'unno. Haven't decided yet. Figured I ain't darkened Arizona's doorstep in a minute, see if I couldn't find my happy ass down south. Mexico, maybe. Speakin' in the general, sugar, I do what I feel like."

THERE'S NO WAY AROUND THE EXCHANGE OF THEIR MOUTHS NOW. she keeps herself from frowning only because something about the size of him settles her like a paperweight — solid, heavy. dove can still feel her edges stir every time a clap of thunder erupts through the room, but his presence keeps her midsection — core and all the vital things within it; heart; gut — secure. it's a little like the sensation of a palm flattened and pressing below her navel.

a little. enough.

"mm." she hums, noncommittal, the sound sticky and thin. a trickle of honey down the side of their conversation. as slow as that drip: "you don't say." dove takes another sip of whisky, sitting gracefully through the burn in order to feel the warmth. she slips lower into the seat. her whole body moving imperceptibly with the gust of an exhale. "i bet ⸺" one half of her mouth curls, just enough, into a smile. a curve like a little wager, like a single coin. "that's where that daddy of yours lives. am i right?"

rain continues to thud on the exterior of the motel. god's great set of fingers, drumming against the walls. waiting for something to happen.

“How many times have I told you? No business during business hours!”