Re: Second Class; Theater - Smoking Room
He laughed at that, unrepentant as a sinner in church on a Sunday, a laugh that held itself in his throat like a swallow of good whiskey. It was unexpected, a reaction that sent her shuddering like a woman having a good time or an act for the expensive places on the edges of towns where the air was full of perfume and sex. It could have been cat and it could have been woman but she curled toward him and that gap squeezed closer until there was nothing between the breadth of worn shirt and shoulder and the milky skin of her. His fingers caught up in the loose silk of her hair at the base of her neck, soft as water as it slid over thickened palms, and he didn’t much mind the hat tipping up although he lowered his head as she did. There wasn’t a deal to see, he wasn’t a painting for somebody’s wall and he wasn’t handsome like men who worked in white collars and went home to their wives at the end of the day. Maybe he’d been handsome once but his skin was weather-marked and dark with the sun and the stubble that lined his jaw was nothing but a shadow yet. His eyes were light when he looked at her, the light too low to make much color from them but there was a look to them any woman might recognize.
“Does that make you different now or the same?” Her hand fitted over the back of his neck like a demand, and he pulled her now with a nudge of his palm at the small of her back that tugged her into his lap across the worked denim and hell to the soaked-through cushion. “You were saying something about hiding,” he advised her, now the sprawl of her legs were comfortably slung across his, and there was a smile that pulled at the mouth. She’d lost her thought and he picked it up for her but he had a hand ready at the nape of her neck to travel her spine once again so she could lose it once more. He wasn’t gentle. The gunslinger wasn’t made for gentleness, the hand was rough and he was better with guns than he was with women if you weren’t leaving something on the nightstand when the dawn came. Maybe he was better with them when he didn’t have guns on his hip but he didn’t reckon much of it. “Go on.” The hat was losing a war with the back of the couch as he slumped comfortably into it, taking her weight.