Chapter One
Refugees weren't easy to keep up with at the best of times. The best of times was a concept that rarely appeared in natural disaster areas or war zones. Jacyn Boaz knew from firsthand experience that the difficulty of meeting the needs of refugees and the displaced was only increased when many people shared full names, didn't know their social security numbers, had no identification, and were generally traumatized due to the very circumstances that lead to them becoming refugees in the first place. If you added to that free mobility and a lack of communication, then you had the recipe for the sort of unmitigated disaster that was her daily life. After Hurricane Katrina, people came and went all along the Gulf Coast with no permanent home-base or address, fluid, displaced, slipping from aid agency to church to family. People with the duplicate names applied for aid and were turned down because there were too many Willie Jacksons for aid groups to know if they were being bilked by conmen. People, all too often, slipped through the cracks of the aid services. This was the second, peripheral, disaster after Hurricane Katrina.
Jacyn had come home after the hurricane with all the best intentions of the diaspora, but several months into her stay in Biloxi, Mississippi she was worn out and worn down, mentally and physically exhausted from looking personal tragedy in the face day after day without being able to offer much more than "we'll try" or a "I'm sorry".
In the converted office space given to Oxfam for "reduced" rent, Jacyn looked over the paperwork submitted by one Jacqueline Jackson. Ms. Jackson had been separated from her grandchildren during the evacuation from the Ninth Ward in New Orleans.
"Ms. Jackson, your grandchildren are Pedro Martinez, aged nine, Blessing Martinez, aged seven, and Misty Jackson, aged five?" Jacyn went over the specifics with Ms. Jackson one by one. Sometimes, in their agitation and rush, people misremembered facts or spelled names wrong or wrote in old, wrong addresses.
"Yes, like I wrote there. I think they were goin' to Utah. No one really said." Ms. Jackson had the pinched look of someone who'd forgotten how to cry. She sat across from Jacyn in an uncomfortable metal folding chair, a twin to Jacyn's own, in a pair of men's shorts, flip-flips, and an Alabama State t-shirt—the uniform for those too harried to pack when rescued from roofs or disallowed from bringing their belongings when evacuated by the military.
Jacyn went over the form line by line with Ms. Jackson like she did with all the other, similar people who she'd tried to help retrieve lost children. Person by person, case by case, Jacyn felt like her soul was being eaten one personalized nightmare at a time.
Ms. Jacqueline Jackson left, and Jacyn went over paperwork for a six month old child, Barry, with his hysterical mother, Juanita. Fifteen cases back to back before Jacyn was relieved by another volunteer. She rubbed her eyes and smoothed hands over her two braids—she'd given up on doing anything with her hair besides wearing it in varying braids and buns. She had no one to look good for, no reason to cut or style her hair or wear make-up. As a matter of fact, she'd come to think of looking too put-together as something of an insult to all the broke-down, harried folks she attempted to help everyday. They related to her better if she wore old, ratty clothes, no make-up, and her hair all a-mess.
When she stepped out into the oppressive humidity of the Biloxi spring, Jacyn breathed lungful after lungful of semi-solid air and rolled her head back and forth trying to relieve some of the tension that had been accumulating since her first tear-filled interview with a parent severed from her child almost a six months before. The ritual breathing and stretching only worked when Jacyn believed in it, and lately she'd been believing in it less and less. She was starting to have a hard time remembering Mississippi before the storm. She was starting to have a hard time remembering how to live a structured, work-home-television sort of life free from lows lower than anything Jacyn had ever associated with America—all that sort of thing was supposed to be Over There—and rollicking highs that left her hungover and wiped out.
Her cousin, Amber, pulled up with her radio blaring Toby Keith, tires popping rocks across the cracked cement of the parking lot, and honked her horn in enthusiasm when Jacyn took the five steps to hop in the car. Jacyn's car was being serviced by one of her cousins, and Amber was her temporary roommate and therefore personal taxi service.
"You look like shit," Amber put the car into first and hauled ass, almost burning the tires. Her crayon red hair was fading to dark pink with light brown roots snugged up tight against her scalp. She popped her gum and smiled with deep dimples. "What you need is a drink. Or five."
Unaltered, they looked enough alike to be taken for sisters—hair so light brown it went blonde in the sun, light brown eyes with up-turned noses and dimples—but Amber kept her hair Crayolaized, and she had let her put purple streaks in Jacyn's hair recently. Their hair, combined with the fifteen pounds Jacyn had put on since coming home from stress and reapplication of home cooking served to differentiate them, lessened the family resemblance when Jacyn looked in the mirror.
Jacyn smiled at her cousin's exuberance and flipped the radio station to the news. "Why do you leave the radio on that crap?" The car was her aunt's—Amber's mother's—and every time Amber returned it, her mama put the radio right back to New Country, something Amber and Jacyn both loathed.
Amber shrugged. "Who cares? I had a lot on my mind." Amber always had a lot on her mind. She had just graduated from college the previous spring with a degree in theoretical math and was planning on grad school. Would have started graduate school at Tulane if not for the storm. She was also volunteering in Biloxi, her hometown, but for Habitat for Humanity instead of Oxfam.
Jacyn listened to some plastic, random song bleating out of the speakers compete with the high whine of the air conditioning. Instead of inland, towards the house, they drove towards the beach.
"Oh, hell no. You're not dragging me to the boats." Jacyn glared at Amber, trying to intimidate her into submission. She didn't really hold out a lot of hope for that, but there was a first time for everything.
Amber laughed huge and wide with her head hitting the headrest. "Naw, Buddy's."
Which, really, was worse. Jacyn groaned and wished she could just get home and get a shower.
*
Buddy's was a roadhouse cum blues shack that had once been an Insurance Office before Katrina. The only part of the building that had withstood the storm was the pockmarked cement floor. Some high school friends of Amber's had squatted on the property and rebuilt it piece by piece. One of their relatives had owned the land and previous building and raised an eyebrow but not much else when construction and relief workers started frequenting the place. BYOB to start with, but little by little, Buddy's became an unlicensed speakeasy known in the right circles as the best place to get decent crawfish or to hear the best local music.
It was also as close to a meat market as you were going to find amongst the relief worker crowd. Jacyn tended to avoid it after drinking way too much scotch one night and ending up having sex with a Red Cross worker in the bathroom. Amber had no respect for anyone else's grand declarations, though.
They pulled into the broken oyster shell parking lot around seven, and they could barely find an empty spot. People up at dawn started drinking early. Jacyn lifted an eyebrow when Amber pulled up the safety break winking. "Oysters?"
Jacyn couldn't help but smile back. "Yeah." She climbed out of the car laughing. In a lot of ways, it was good to be back home again, back with her people who knew her and might have judged, but it was judgment with love. The sounds of their flip-flops slapping the bottoms of their feet were loud until the hum of the voices and music from inside filtered out into the humidity of the on-coming dusk. Jacyn knocked her hip against Amber's and laughed when she staggered. She ran the back of her hand across her forehead to remove the sweat which just walking across the parking lot drew out and wiped her hand on the cotton of her A-line, red and white skirt.
"Wonder who's playing tonight?" Amber kicked open the door and swaggered inside.
A chorus of shouts and curses arose when they entered the bar. Jacyn's eyes took a few seconds to dilate in the lava-lamp and novelty-light dimness of the bar. Across the single room, she could see several of Amber's high school friends sitting with people she knew from FEMA and Catholic Social Services. Actually, Jacyn knew pretty much everyone there from work or relatives. She'd grown up in Gautier, but most of her extended family were in Biloxi and environs.
"Danny's not here, chill," Amber grabbed Jacyn's arm and tugged her across the room. Jacyn rolled her eyes and let her cousin manhandle her. Somewhere in the past couple months she'd become her cousin's project, even if Jacyn still wasn't sure what the aim of the campaign was.
The room was strewn with picnic tables and benches in haphazard angles. On one end of the room was a make-shift bar built out of plywood and Armstrong flooring tiles. What color the tiles were was anyone's guess since the light by the bar came mainly from fiber optic palm trees that threw red and green light over that end of the room in such a way that nothing you saw made a whole lot of sense. On the other end of the room was a six by four raised platform that worked as a stage. The acts could be anything from emo cover band to improvised burlesque shows, with regular side orders of ear-shattering karaoke.
Currently, the radio was being piped into the room. Pearl Jam or someone who sounded a lot like them to Jacyn. People shouted over the music, drunk already or getting there. Jacyn smiled at John Anderson from FEMA—the guy had a shit job, he was the face to denied claims that other people besides him actually rejected. He slid over a shot of something unidentifiable in the wacky light. Jacyn shrugged and tossed it back. She knew she was already defeated by Amber and her plans for the evening, so she was going to enjoy it was much as possible.
"Thanks!" Jacyn smiled at John from across the table. He smiled back, and it felt easy, camaraderie in the face of chaos because he wasn't a threat--gayer than Liberace.
Some friend of Amber's busted up on them with a round of shots. Everyone screamed unintelligibly to Jacyn, tossing back their shots and laughing. She did the same, minus the screaming. She was more of a five drink screamer. Amber rocked against her shoulder hard, smiling and opening her eyes super wide. Jacyn smiled in response.
"OYSTERS!" Amber hollered. She stood up and climbed over the bench to fetch a tray of oysters from one side of the bar where a couple guys sat shucking most of the night. "They don't have oysters where Jacyn's from, you know!" Amber stomped off with Jacyn rolling her eyes at her back.
"I thought you were local." John sipped his beer and looked honestly interested. Looking honestly interested was part of their trade. He was probably bored out of his mind.
"I live in Austin now." Jacyn didn't elaborate on that, didn't go into her sabbatical from the University of Texas' anthropology department or how she wasn't at all sure it was so much a sabbatical anymore and not just the wind up to quitting.
"Texas is a shithole." John said in his broad, MidAverytern accent, and Jacyn felt the laughter spill out before she even realized she was amused. He smiled back at her, some joke of his own in his head, because he sure as hell wasn't sharing her joke that she hadn't met a single person in Mississippi who hadn't said similar. What everyone had against Texas, she had no clue. The antipathy seemed almost universal, though.
Jacyn thought about South by Southwest and her colleagues who grew up in cities off the land who still had to live with people assuming they were ranchers and roughnecks. She thought about the crisp smell of rain coming on in the distance and the taste of brisket cooked for twelve hours outdoors. Jacyn had her issues with Texas, but they weren't based on the bullshit stereotypes that people got from "Don't Mess with Texas" bumper stickers and people on television with big hair or belt buckles. Her issues revolved around her ex-husband and the sense of listlessness that she just couldn't seem to shake.
"Uh huh," Jacyn replied to John with a smile firmly on her face. Amber thumped back down next to her a second later with two trays of oysters—open-faced, sitting on the half-shell nestled in cracked iced flanked by little plastic cups of horseradish and ketchup with a tiny plastic fork tossed on the tray with a couple handfuls of saltines. Jacyn's smile turned genuine at the prospect of the food. The rhythm and ritual of doctoring up the oysters feels like home in a way that's inexplicable and ineffable. Oyster on cracker followed by horseradish and ketchup them all shoved into the mouth to be chomped together. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Amber chittered away to someone Jacyn didn't know. Jacyn ate her oysters and sipped at a tequila, settling into the smell of the ocean overlaid with recycled air from the air conditioning and yeasty spilled beer and cigarettes. She dropped horseradish into her cleavage and didn't feel a single bit self-conscious reaching into her tank top to retrieve it. She didn't even notice when the hippy-rock from the radio faded out into the soft sound of a country-tuned acoustic guitar and a rumbly, gravel under butter-soft voice.
Up on the tiny stage sat a guy in a straw cowboy hat with one foot up on the rail of the wooden stool sometimes used as a fruit cutting board. His face was mostly averted, tilted down towards his guitar. He wore a ratty old Willie Nelson t-shirt and holey jeans and boots.
Playin' my guitar, singin' country music
Ain't never thought I'd want to let it go
Standing there, too many things remind me
Of all the little things that made me care
Nearly cried when a spotlight picked out some girl standin'
Who had the exact color of your hair
Chorus:
Being with you a'ways felt like home-comin'
Southern boy, I guess you knew the score
But now the music's all I got without you
And country roads don't take me home no more.
Jacyn hadn't ever had much of taste for country music, too inundated by it her whole life. It had always carried some kind of stigma that she had mainly managed to shake after many years of self-analysis as an anthropologist. She sometimes deviated from her country-music-hating pattern at Texas dance halls on isolated nights when her friends drug her out. Jacyn could admit that honkytonks were made for elongated vowels and songs about cheatin' and heartbreak.
When the guy looked up, Jacyn paused mid-chew and stared. He had a wide, full mouth stretched around his lonesome voice. His long eyelashes were visible even from two tables back from the stage. He slipped into a smile easily, making his already attractive face nearly shocking in its attractiveness—all slightly cleft chin dipping down to his chest and eyelashes brushing his cheek and white flash of teeth. He was a man who knew what he did to women and didn't much care to be fake about that. Jacyn had known a man or two like him, and she's never had much use for them. Especially one as young as this kid, probably not over twenty-five. All the same, his voice could melt Barbara Bush's panties off. He was also extremely familiar—sharp cheekbones and crease in the middle of his full bottom lip. She knew him from somewhere, but she knew almost everyone in these parts from somewhere.
At the end of the song, several yahoos leaped around, tossing their hats and whooping it up. The singer laughed, and his laughter was even more affecting than his singing voice—coal dark and thick like the air after a thunderstorm.
"Ok, here's one 'bout my mama," the guy said. East Texas. Probably near the coast in the south. Jacyn could pinpoint accents like nobody's business—mainly because it was her business. She studied immigration and settlement patterns and how that affected current culture. Or she had, before Katrina came along right at the perfect time for her to get a little change in her life. Now she tried to match displaced children with their families during the day and drank by night.
The cowboy picked up singing a slow ballad accompanied by complex picking on his guitar. He sang just loud enough to project his voice into the crappy mic and low enough to make his performance seem intimate. Jacyn watched while she finished her oysters, Amber leaning on her back watching just as intently.
When the cowboy gave his guitar a hard thrum and said "I'm Jimmy Wayne, y'all're welcome to buy me a beer." to hoots and hollering and looked up at Jacyn and Amber with a wink, Amber let out a snort.
"Cute, but cocky. Totally your type." Amber turned back to her conversation, thoughts of Jimmy Wayne probably banished from her mine by the complexities of beams fitted to floorboards and whimsies about pressurized wood.
"Too young for me," Jacyn answered the back of Amber's head with a lifted eyebrow.
When Jacyn turned back towards the stage, John and Jimmy Wayne were standing next to the picnic table. Jimmy Wayne had his hat in his hand and was wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist with a long, slow pull. He was watching intently, smiling a little crooked smirk that twisted one side of his mouth into a dimple. The perfect line of his nose, the way his face was absolutely symmetrical with the furrow between his eyebrows, nose, indention above his top lip, and the cleft of his chin formed a straight line was even more familiar when she didn't have to strain her eyes through cigarette smoke and darkness.
"Hey," he said around his smirk as it stretched out into a full on grin. "John says you're from Texas. Katrina relief?"
He sat down, brazen as you please, propping his guitar case against the end of the table and straddling the bench. Up close he, was even better looking—muscled biceps, freckles across the bridge of his nose and high on his sharp cheeks, winged eyebrows and a flirty tilt to his head that promised shit-kicking or free-range sex acts.
"Nah, I'm from Gautier. I live in Austin." Jacyn tipped back her tequila and watched him over the brim of her glass as she drank. He watched right back with an unreadable expression. He ducked his head and tipped his hat back on his head.
"This is gonna sound tore up and six kinds of lame, but have we met before?" He said it with a smile that Jacyn could read immediately as a cover for straight shooting. She was just drunk enough to be flattered and intrigued in equal measure, because this was the sort of guy who didn't need lines, who didn't need to even speak to pull, more than likely. The cigarettes and oil derrick voice was just icing for the rest of the package.
"I doubt it, but anything's possible." She wasn't drunk enough to say if we'd've met, baby boy, I'd remember it, sure as shit. Mainly because she figured they probably had, more than likely when he was in a high school—which hadn't been so very long before.
"Maybe in Houston a few years ago, at the Marriot off the Galleria? You were wearing a pink cowboy hat and drinking scotch." He leaned in closer as he said it, voice dropping to a whisper. Jacyn's face shocked hot and her fingers and toes went dead cold. Oh, yeah, she remembered that night. Most of it. The part up until the two-stepping at the honky-tonk. His face stilled, the smile slipping away into the darkness. He watched her for a couple of ticks. "Don't get like that. It's all good. No harm no foul. Buy me a beer to assuage my ego and we're golden."
Jacyn blinked at him a couple of times, way more embarrassed than a thirty-two year old really had a right to be over a one night stand that she couldn't really remember. It happened to lots of people. However, she felt extremely gypped that this was the one night stand she didn't remember. This boy with his dark blond hair spiked and flattened from sweating under his hat making him all the more attractive for being almost human and long, thick, scarred fingers and eyes full of invitation that promised more than someone as young as him should be able to pull off.
One beer turned into tequila shots, and Amber drove everyone to the Imperial Palace for some cards with Jacyn and Jimmy Wayne laughing and discussing horses. She remembered him then, remembered that he rode rodeo.
*
Jimmy Wayne Broadus sat in the rebuilt Imperial Palace Casino and Resort in Biloxi sipping a Johnny Walker Red-label and watching a clutch of old ladies feeding quarters into whirling and beeping slot machines. Biloxi was still more debris and chaos than remade, but the lure of easy money was always too strong for a lot of people to resist. Even for people who had to cash their FEMA checks to make rent or their Red Cross checks to put a new roof on the house. Displaced people and locals with too much time on their hands were paying the mortgage on the new casinos. Before Hurricane Katrina, casinos in Mississippi had to be built "off-shore". Usually that meant they floated right up against the dock one foot off the beach. It was a technical law instituted as a nod to the Old South sensibilities that held no truck in the modern era of petrodollars and Yankee retirees. Gambling was a sin, but one that pulled Mississippi out of the gutter of last ranked U.S. state in every category except poverty.
He'd switched from tequila to scotch, which was about where his mood was, Jacyn notwithstanding. His focus shifted from the old biddies to Jacyn and her cousin—a matched set that he would have pegged as sisters, upturned noses and bowed mouths, deep, round hips and cleavage that could make a man stupider than he was born—playing split high low at the card table he was propped against.
"You did not just play that nine low!" Jacyn threw her head back laughing, the thick, matching braids of her hair flying back and shaking. She was tan, from being outside, with the standard scattering of sun freckles on her exposed shoulders. Jimmy Wayne hadn't been all that shocked to run into a random woman from some random rodeo event years ago. His life was full of shit like that. He didn't believe in random much. The whys and wherefores might not be clear yet, might never be, but Jimmy Wayne believed in the bigger picture—just because you see the surface of a lake doesn't mean you can assume all that's below the reflected sky is fish and plants. Assumptions of mundanity got people killed and worse.
He was drunk enough to think playing cards was a good idea but not drunk enough to fall off the stool and prevent himself from losing money he didn't have to lose. Plunking himself down on the other side of Jacyn from Amber he the tapped the baize to get dealt in. Jacyn turned and looked at him with her unreadable smile. She was smart; he remembered that. A doctor or a lawyer, something professional. He didn't know how she could be, so young, but there you have it—some people didn't waste their lives ranching and rodeoing and doing things people didn't appreciate or believe in.
"Ready to run with the big dogs?" Jacyn's smile lifted her eyelids so that her eyes seemed slightly up-turned, exotic in a way he figured wasn't her background, being from Mississippi. She had a good little stack of chips in front of her. He would never have pegged her as a gambler, much less a card sharp.
"I don't talk trash about ladies, so I'm gonna pretend like you didn't say nothin'," he lifted up the edges of his cards and almost groaned at his crap luck. A two of diamonds and a four of spades. Shit luck.
Amber cashed out after two more hands. Jacyn pulled a run that Jimmy Wayne's mood interpreted as superhuman. Too much luck there, hand after hand. He was surprised that the dealer hadn't called the damned security people.
He lost two hundred bucks and all of what was left of his pride. There wasn't much of that. Definitely not two hundred dollars' worth.
Jacyn finally polished off a last swallow of Patron and slapped the table, nodding to him. "Ready to blow this popsicle stand?" Her face was flushed bright pink from the alcohol and the thrill of victory. Her once-tight braids were coming undone, hair flying every-which-way, like Willie Nelson on a ten day bender. She was loose-limbed and the left strap of her tank top wouldn't stay up no matter how many times she shoved it back into place.
Even if she didn't remember him first off, he sure as hell remembered her. She'd reminded him of the back injury he'd gotten at seventeen being thrown off a bronc and the knee injury he'd gotten from La Llorona when he was nineteen for a week afterwards. She smiled at him in the way he'd recognized since before he'd really understood what was really being offered, and he smiled back.
*
Jacyn couldn't find Amber after she cashed out. She didn't really look too hard, honestly. Jimmy Wayne kept up a low drone about how her luck, how he couldn't reckon it, how she was blessed or cursed one or the other. His voice kept stealing her responses about how she'd pay for her night of cards with some really bad, unlooked for something, about how her life always played out that way. She was karmatic balance wrapped up in one person—never happy when something good happened because something horrible always followed. Always. So tonight she'd won over three grand at cards, and next week she'd get hit by a car. That's the way her life worked. She opened her mouth to tell him that over and over, but every time she looked over at him her eyes would light on his freckles or the silver hoops in his ears and it slipped away from her.
She was old enough to know exactly where this was going. Even as she flipped her phone open to call Amber, Jimmy Wayne's hand came against the small of her back. They exited the casino right into the wall of suffocating humidity rolling off the Gulf. Sweat immediately popped out all over her skin, coating her in a bubble of slick salt. She didn't really even notice with Jimmy Wayne singing softly under his breath to himself, his hand coming off her back to wrap around her side and pull her flush to his side. They walked through the parking lot, towards where she had no idea, gravel under her flip flips skittering away, as she dialed Amber's cell and Jimmy Wayne's lips brushed the side of her neck. Jacyn stopped to leave a slurred message for Amber as Jimmy Wayne's hat tipped off; her hand flew out to catch it and he matched the movement. They looked each other in the eyes with her hand holding his against the worn straw.
"Good reflexes," he pulled her against him, damp cotton over muscle against her everywhere.
"Uh huh," was all she managed, watching his mouth with her brain function pretty much shut down.
His bracelets made soft clicking noises as they shifted against each other with his movements
The night was bright, with moonlight reflecting off the ocean, white and grey straining against the riot of pink neon from the casino. He leaned down, kissing with the smoky slide of a whiskey tongue against her mouth, into her mouth and against the front of her parted teeth. His hat felt heavy in her hand, denser than it really was, straw seeming to turn to brick or stone. Music blared out of a car passing near-by, and Jimmy Wayne danced them around in a slow circle with one of his legs coming between hers, pulling the cotton of her dress tight with his thick thigh. Around and around, slowly, him crumpling down lower with each spin until her back hit warm metal as his hand reached under her skirt in the back pushing the material up. She dropped his hat on the ground and ran both hands up the deep furrow of his spine.
"Reach in my right pocket for my keys," his lips bumped her ear, words riding his breath and bringing up all the hair on her body. His thigh rode harder, pressing against her crotch, moving slightly, just enough to make her reach her right hand into his left pocket to feel his erection through the thin cotton. His fingers slid under the leg band of her underwear, palming her ass. "Or keep that up, that's ok, too." He laughed right into her ear, broken glass and the sort of sin that never lives up to expectation.
She managed, barely, to find enough motor control to get her other hand into his right pocket as he rocked against her fingers, lips moving behind her ear in a slip-slip and hum. His keys jangled loudly in the liquid dark when she pulled them out of his pocket. Jimmy Wayne wrapped his hand around hers, thumb rubbed the veins on the back of her hand, and looped a finger through the keychain. He managed to slide the key into the lock without disengaging, but had to pull away to swing the door open.
Holding the door wide, he bent to retrieve his hat. "Go on and walk away now, if you want. I won't hold it against you," he said with his face towards the ground. If he was being gentlemanly or just weird, Jacyn had no idea.
"Get in. You gotta be on bottom," she shoved at him at little, laughing and getting a chuckle out of him in return. He climbed into the passenger seat and yanked her along with him so that she sprawled over his lap. His hand on her ass was startling and loud, three quick smacks followed by his bruised laughter.
"Bitch, let me up," Jacyn wiggled until she could get her legs in the truck, one leg coming down on the bench seat of the old pickup, the other being grasped by Jimmy Wayne who held on to her as he slammed the door of the truck. She straddled him and smacked him almost hard on the face. His smile brightened, turning huge and dimpled on both sides of his mouth.
"It's like that, huh?" He gripped both of her thighs and yanked her against his hips as he slid so he could rock up against her as he leaned around her to slide the key in the ignition and turn the radio on.
"Mood music," she smiled against his mouth as Garth Brooks warbled out of the radio and Jimmy Wayne pushed the straps of her tank top off her shoulders. She fell down into his mouth, kept falling as she got his jeans open without breaking the kiss and he lifted up on one hip to pull his wallet out of his back pocket. She leaned back with her shoulders resting on the dashboard with her ass on his knees as he unfolded her legs and pushed them together to pull her panties off. She teetered, and he laughed, causing her to start laughing again, too. Her eyes snapped shut when he kissed the back of her knee so she missed the show when he shoved his jeans out of the way and slid the condom on.
"Baby," he whispered against the side of her face as she settled down on him. Her sigh of satisfaction as he met her halfway, rocking up and hitting all the highlights on the way with the first stroke, made her blush, feeling like tiny strokes under her skin.
She pulled his bottom lip into her mouth, and they hit an immediate rhythm of tongue against tongue and hips locking together and pulling apart. Jacyn lost track of everything besides Jimmy Wayne's sharp tobacco and spicy sweat smell and the taste of bourbon and the way her neck couldn't hold up her head when Jimmy Wayne angled her body back with a hand against her lumbar so he could wedge his fingers between them.
*
Jacyn was something of a specialist in working hungover. She was hardly the only one. Sometimes she wondered how construction workers managed to roof and frame and exert themselves after drinking an entire bottle of Jack the night before. It was one of the mysteries of the universe.
Sitting at her desk in the cranked-up air conditioning of the Oxfam office, she curled her toes down under themselves to prevent frostbite and stared back at one Misty Rodgers.
"Okay, so what you're saying is that your son was supposed to be staying with you aunt and when you got over here from Houston he wasn't there?" Jacyn needed to eat about eight pounds of greasy food and to keep on pretending she hadn't gotten up to the ridiculous antics she had the night before, and Misty was not helping her here.
Misty was twenty. Her son, Dylan, was four, and Jacyn's pickled brain was not coping well with her confusing story. It was so garbled that Jacyn's mind kept tossing out snapshots of Jimmy Wayne to entertain her—the curve of his huge bicep the amber freckles high on his cheeks, his easy laughter and moonlight making his teeth bright against the shadows covering his face.
"Uh uh. No. Not supposed to been. He was with my aunt Mary. I know he was because I talked to him on the phone almost every day. But my aunt says he wasn't ever there! How could that happen? Don't y'all keep records or something?" Misty's pale face was spotted with blotchy red from crying and losing her temper. She'd altered sobbing and screaming ever since she and her aunt had come into the office.
"Sure, we keep records, but if your son's gone missing—after being placed with a family member, that's a law thing, not something we can help with. No matter how much we'd want to." Jacyn sometimes wondered what went through people's heads. She knew that the stress of being displaced combined with the stress of missing children could make people just lose their entire minds, but kidnapping wasn't really under the purview of aid organizations. "You need to go to the police and file a missing person's report and they will issue and an Amber Alert. I can help you, if you need me to." She couldn't help adding the offer of help. Lord knows this girl looked like she needed it something fierce.
"You aren't fucking listening to me!" Misty shot out of her chair, tears running down her face and her eyes puffing up even more. "Aunt Mary says Dylan wasn't ever here! I talked to him on the phone! How is that possible? HOW?"
Jacyn had no answer for that. Aside from cynical assumptions about Misty's sanity.
"Do you want me to go to the sheriff's office with you?" Jacyn stood up and rounded her desk, pulling on Misty's elbow and patting her on the back in a half hug. She sighed internally and resigned herself to getting no work done that day while she went through round after round of social services interviews and paperwork with Misty. This wasn't the first time she'd gone through this sort of thing. Stress did weird things to people sometimes. Invented children and created catastrophes were common enough among the mentally ill.
She was glad she'd gotten her car back bright and early that morning, even if at the time she'd been cursing ever being born.
Copyright © 2008 by Kassandra Sims. All rights reserved.
