Page 22 of The Order of Disorder
“Is she on something?”
It loops in my head.
We stop at Billy’s door at the end of the gangway and Rox knocks once. No answer. She waits a minute and then opens it anyway.
Inside, Peach is on top of Billy, naked and riding him, back arched, hands in her hair, moaning loudly.
“Oh!” she squeaks, covering her chest with one arm and scrambling off him the second she sees us. “Shit!”
Billy groans and sits up, looking supremely annoyed but unashamed. He does nothing to hide his now-exposed erection. “What the fuck?” he snarls.
“Sorry,” Rox says quickly. “She’s having a bad trip. Thought we’d better call it a night.”
Peach picks her clothes up from the floor and presses them in front of her body, hiding her nudity.
Rich, I think, considering that I’m wearing nearly nothing except a leather vest.
Billy rubs his hand down his face and exhales heavily. “Christ’s sake. Jesus. Fine. Leave her on the mattress.”
“Come on,” says Rox quietly, taking my hand and pulling me toward the futon. “Come lie down.”
I’m vaguely aware of Peach trying to step into her shorts while still holding her top in front of her breasts.
“No, baby,” Billy is saying, plaintive. “What the fuck? It doesn’t matter, she’s fucked up anyway.”
“I can’t,” Peach is saying. “It’s weird.”
“C’mon.”
Rox ignores them, kneels down, and tugs off my shoes. “Bet you’ve been dying to get these off,” she says with a smile.
The relief when my toes can expand again is so pleasurable that, just for a moment, I forget all my troubles.
But Billy is up and standing now, blocking Peach at the door.
“Just give me five minutes,” he’s saying, edgy and irritable. Peach purses her lips, crosses her arms, but doesn’t move.
“Rox,” Billy says over Peach’s shoulder. “I need you to take Max tonight, okay? Can you take her to your room please? Just don’t let her leave, okay? I’ll send Silas for her in the morning.”
Rox glances at me, then back at him. “Yeah?”
“Please,” he says, pissed and testy. A horny man used to being obeyed.
“Sure.” She nods. “Of course. C’mon.” She takes my hand and I let her pull me to my feet. “Little sleepover tonight, okay? Plenty of room with us.”
I’m not even a person in this place. I’m just…property. Passed off and reassigned when I’m inconvenient.
I let Rox lead me out the door. She stops and squeezes Peach’s arm. “Have fun.”
Peach says nothing.
We walk down the gangway again, down the rickety steps, back to the first floor. Before I can think too long about Wyatt, she turns me to the left, past a couple of cheap plywood doors and opens one up.
The room smells faintly of old sweat and Axe body spray, like someone once tried to mask the funk and gave up halfway through. There’s a bed shoved against the far wall. No frame, no headboard, just a sagging mattress draped in a faded gray fitted sheet, its elastic corners half-escaped.
There’s a warped poster of a bikini model curling off the plywood wall above it, and the dresser is littered with debris. Half-burnt candles, scrunched-up clothing, empty packaging, and a couple of empty bottles. A short, beat-up locker sits on an overturned milk crate in the corner, with a padlock on its door.
Rox flips on the bedside lamp and pulls back the blanket, indicating I should sit. She toes off her boots, then crouches in front of me.
