Wrong Side of the Tracks

She panted and took his hair by damp fistfuls. He growled and ducked back, out of the way long enough to catch her up by a bent knee and roll her onto her belly. To dive down again and lap at her snatch, to draw at that sticky pink nub that stood swollen out from her lips. Mason wormed fingers into her cunt, an index from both sides to spread her wide and have her humping the bedspread, desperate.

Slick with fluid, he shifted attention to the pucker that bobbed in his face. Pressed his touch there, prying her cheeks apart when she squeaked and pushed past the knot of muscle.

Warm inside. That's how she felt. Both her holes, and Mason was in up to his knuckles, rhythmic in alternation, juicing her secret places until he was satisfied she couldn't think, and then he poured his tongue back into the mix and stirred the poor woman to a froth.

May bucked for him and made reckless noises his neighbors would hear. She tried to push him off with her feet, sensations too intense, but her knees were off the edge of the bed, and he was too close.

And how close are you, sweet?

He sealed his mouth down around her and sucked. Squished a second finger into first one entrance and then the other, to pack her full, to plumb in and out.

She warbled nonsense into the mattress and struggled toward her limit. Mason drove her, relentless, until her body clamped at the stuffing fingers, milking. Until fluid seeped into the crevices of his palm and her thighs shook.

And when May floated down, Mason rose up, that same violence taking him as it had in the elevator. He kicked the towel out from around his ankles and clambered back up on the bed, the limp woman dipping from right to left as he mounted the backs of her legs. As he angled his cock low and led his hips down to meet her cheeks. To glide through the mess he'd made and get himself slick.

Every time.

He rooted for the place he could slip inside, up on one arm while May angled her hips, spent but willing.

Every time you're inside her the dream is over. In minutes.

Was it a dream? Or had Mason Locke lost his mind?

The woman twisted her neck to look back at him, cheek still pressed to the linens. It could be. Dreams were a sudden blowjob in a darkened office. A fast girl who took her panties down in an elevator and then walked away with a kiss.

It was too available. Too easy. Dreams always said 'yes.'

Mason held her gaze. Shifted his aim.

Dreams didn't hurt.

Her mouth came open. Brows came down.

He pushed where his fingers had gone, where her body didn't know how to take him. Forgot her pussy and stretched that little ring, instead.

The pain on her face was real. She clutched at the bedspread and whined, and Mason didn't stop.

Not a dream when he opened her up. Not a dream when she pushed, but the hard organ wouldn't back out of her bowels. He felt her knees try to bend and scrabble, but Mason sank down, draping his weight on her back, and fitted his groin to the cleft of her ass.

"Does it hurt, May?"

His breath landed on her ear, and her face knit into lines against what was stiff and inside her.

"Y-yes!" It was nearly a hiccough, but it was raw. Real.

He drew back his hips and bored into her again. Slurred at her like a drunk and smeared the hair back from her forehead with his fingers. "Do you want me to stop?"

The eye looking up at him shimmered, wet. "No."

Dreams always said 'yes'. Mason didn't stop.

She whimpered under him, and he made her hurt. He abused her rectum as a hot, sucking sleeve, a place to sheath his angry prick, over and over, as long as it pleased.

And oh, it pleased. Housecoat bunched at the small of her back, hips pinned to the bed and that helpless little bottom unable to shut him out. His spine curled, hunching his back so he could wedge down deep, so his balls could squash against her empty cunt each time he hilted.

Mason gathered her wrists, one at a time, and planted them above her head. Clamped them to the bed in his grip while he fucked her prone and she stretched taut under his use.

Tears were making a pool in the sideways socket of her eye, trailing a line over the bridge of her nose. Narrow, brass bedposts grated the plaster of the wall. Springs squeaked in a pattern, and Mason grunted in time, snapping his hips into the perversion.

"May."

He'd showered, but now he was sweating. Snarling.

"Yes, Mason." Her voice broke. She was sobbing out loud, taking his cock. "YES!"

He roared and jetted those black dreams down into her body. Kept pumping while she mewled, her eyes rolling back. Newsprint and photos and teeth and hair, he fed them all to the woman, as though she might fill up and choke. Might relent and give up answers.

The riot in his veins, between his ears, drained out with the purge into flesh. His heart staggered under his ribs, and shame rushed in to fill the void of aggression.

Mason let go her hands. Slid from her body, sticky and falling fast.

"May."

She sniffled and let him put her back together. Let him drag the housecoat around her, the bedspread and sheets down so he could persuade her head onto a pillow.

Heavy, lavender eyelids blinked back at him as Mason slipped into the bed at her side. There was no office door. No elevator to walk out of this time, fully clothed and onto the street. She wouldn't be going anywhere.

He switched off the lamp and gathered May's soft frame in his arms. Pressed his lips to her hairline, and she curled into the warmth. Her fingertips nudged among the hair on his chest.

"Mason." His name was a breath, her limbs going slack. "Come with me."

He stroked damp hair away from her ear. "Where, honey?"

She was already asleep.

*

When she wasn't there in the morning, Mason had lost all ability to be surprised. The only consolation to his sanity was the scent of her on his hands, a memento he discovered while inhaling as he rubbed at bleary eyes.

There was no housecoat, no rumpling of the linens from another body. But his discarded towel was still on the floor beside the bed, and the smell of her on him was unmistakable. May had been there. A person did not wake up hallucinating the same things as before they'd gone to sleep. At least as far as he knew.

Mason stretched his arms in bed and his eyes fell unfocused in the direction of the drawn curtains over the window.

Just what sort of reality could a man accept? A woman who came and went with no warning whatsoever? A life that swung between the tedium of geometric tables, grey days and nights of radio static stretching on toward some horizon at one extreme, and at the other: atomic, unpredictable episodes, the sort that came brown-paper-wrapped, from beneath the counter of the one shady newsstand on the block all the fellas knew.

Mason spent every working day staring at pieces of paper that told him when other people were most likely to die. And then he took their money, a bet against those odds, like some backward Charon ferrying against the current on a River Styx of annuities.

Some poor bastard had to do the dirty work. Had to guide those souls on their way. But who did the living get? Mason had been ship and rudder and helm, all unto himself for as long as he could recall, but there had been no wind. No North Star.

And now here was May, a tempest.

He had to make decisions. There was no controlling other people, but he could damn well take control of himself. It would be the only way out of some narrow existence where he waited for things to happen.

Today was Saturday. Mason pushed back the sheets and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Inhaled.

He wasn't hearing more rain outside, at least nothing intense. He could go out and pick up a newspaper. Maybe get his hair cut, if the barbershop wasn't too crowded.

Showering again was a debate, but he gave in to his own, lewd stink and had one anyway. The problematic twist of hair he'd flung onto the tiles the night before was gone, and Mason refused to see in the disappearance any new, weird portent, but accepted it as a comfort instead.

He scrubbed himself pink and found clean clothes to wear. Shoved open all the curtains to dissolve the gloom. He was a hat and umbrella away from ready to head out, when a flat clack! sounded from near his front door.

Mason came around the corner to the entry, but there was nothing. No one. He even stuck his head into the kitchen, expecting to find what, he didn't know.

With a frown, he moved for the door again, and something gritted under his shoe. A quick step back revealed a familiar rectangle on the floor, and Mason Locke thought he might be the first man to choke to death on his own heartbeat.

Even bending to pick the thing up, he knew. The tips of his fingers prickled, pins and needles, and his stomach flopped like a fish as he turned it over.

Smiling May. Smiling Mason. Arm in arm, where he didn't remember.

And the glass was broken, now. The noise he'd heard, no doubt, but where had it fallen from?

He shuffled, distracted, to the kitchen, to dump the shards in the trash. To pluck the photo from its frame and bring it right in front of his face to really squint.

No lights came on, other than reminders of the previous night, but he flipped the image over, hoping.

There was no inscription there, no scrawled date or names. He frowned and made to toss the entire empty frame again, when a flash of yellow warned him otherwise.

A printed card waited, wedged into a corner between frame edge and press-paper backing, behind where the photo had been.

'The Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Good for one passage, in either direction within one year in addition to date of sale stamped on back.'

Mason plucked the train ticket out and turned it in his fingers. The thing had expired a year ago, unused.

Gold for the ferryman.

He snorted, and this time he did dump the frame. Tucked the photograph and the ticket in his coat pocket so they wouldn't disappear on him.

Maybe he should disappear.

Mason picked up his hat and stepped out of the apartment. Locked the door and moved off down the hallway, anything to avoid the sucking pull of questions he couldn't answer.

Wet pavement met him outside, that tang of clay and metal in his nostrils, but the clouds were light enough not to oppress. He could breathe out here. He could walk, and he did, a left turn to go see about that newspaper.

Cars drove past on the street, tires hissing through puddles like the breaking of waves on a shore. He should take a vacation. When was the last time? Florida. California, maybe. Somewhere with palm trees, just to be away from all this for a week. Hell, two weeks, even. Mason never asked for time off. They would give it to him.

He coughed a little into a fist and stepped around an older man out walking some kind of mutt terrier in the opposite direction.

Maybe see a doctor. 'Excuse me, Doc, can you tell me why I'd be coughing up other people's teeth?'

The only thing not a 'maybe' was what would happen the next time May appeared. He was not going to let her out of his sight. None of this running off, slipping away in his sleep.

"Come with me, Mason."

He would. Anywhere she wanted to go.

And somehow, he would have answers.

*

That damn haircut had been the high point of Mason's weekend. Aside from the obvious, though May had brought with her a blind spot of chaos to run alongside the sweetness and acceptance.

Sunday was humdrum, Monday had been a slog, and now here he was on a Tuesday morning, nearly as deteriorated as he'd been on Friday night, right before he'd discovered a woman perched on the side of his bed.

And the trains were relentless, today.

Mason rubbed at his face with his palms. When he was deep in his work, all those sounds from outside the building merged into one blurry, atmospheric hum. He could look up from the task at hand to see hours had passed without his notice.

Today there were times he was certain his clock had gone dead. Trains—god, there were so many of them—a constant clatter, a constant tremor beneath his soles. Someone along his row of offices was doing something percussive. Repetitive. Not hanging a picture, it wasn't that kind of banging, but enough to have him twitching, either way.

He wasn't writing policies that day. Mason was trying to make his way through a report from Vital Statistics that Wynn had dropped off. The words swam on the page. He couldn't absorb information the same way he'd done in college. An analysis of the means by which infant mortality rates were adjusted for error had become a tightly-columned collage of words, and he kept reading the same lines over, hoping they'd fall together and make sense.

He flipped a page, just to see if there was more of the same to come, and a series of formulae gnarled their way through the text, inset and baroque. Mason sighed.

Coughed.

Choked.

It came violent, an ambush, and Mason clawed at his throat. Pounded his sternum with a fist. His eyes watered and stung, and lips made a hard, round rim, like the edge of a bowl while he hacked.

Inside him. Again. Coming up.

He gripped the edge of his desk, sending blotter and statistics report askew, the flesh under his fingernails going white. His tongue tried to curl, and black specks swarmed the limits of his vision.

None of his reflexes were with him to grab the wastebasket. Mason heaved and a stream of blood-ribboned saliva shot out over his desk.

His gut lurched two, three more times, and weak coughing pulled him down, a balm by comparison. At the near end of the mess: geometry, sticky and flat.

No.

He went for it with a limp hand.

No no no.

Newsprint. Another shred.

I can't.

Mason slid it off the edge of the desk, a macabre swatch of ticker tape. Black print ran parallel to the ripped edge. A date.

... within one year in addition to date of sale stamped ...

A date from last year. A date stamped on a yellow ticket in the breast pocket of his coat.

And the trains were so loud.

He rolled the chair away from his desk and stood on untrustworthy knees. Wiped his chin with his hand, doing more to smear than clean, but the answers were coming. He could hear them.

The fifth-floor hallway was a cannon barrel, propelling Mason along. Elevators were for people with patience, with sense. He went the opposite way, to the stairs. To the lobby. The street.

In a block were the tracks, row upon row, converging toward the station. A line of passenger cars roared by now, drowning his heartbeat, square windows strobing past, hypnotic, so that Mason swayed on his feet.

Rain stuck hair to his scalp, his shirt to his back. It pattered, cold on his shoulders, hot on his cheeks.

Answers.

Mason knuckled the tears from his face and saw red when his hand came away. Blood on his fist like a bar fight.

When the last of the wheels clattered past, there was red on the other side of the tracks.

Lipstick and dress and coat. All of it, today livid against gravel and concrete and steel.

"May?"

She had a smile for him but shook her head. Took a backward step.

Not yet. Not time.

Mason stood with her, a world apart, wavering. She kept her hands folded at her waist, those lips red and sweet and alive.

The pavement hummed with the next arrival, that bright engine light distant, but getting bigger. May's dress hung pristine, dry. Her hair untouched by wind.

His toes were just this side of the wooden ties, and thousands of tons of steel screamed forward, unstoppable.

May glanced at the train and then returned her eyes to his.

She put out her hand and Mason remembered.

"Come with me."

The whole world was made of color. Bright reds and yellows.

Now. Now is the time.

He put his foot out over the rail. He followed her home.