The heat here was wet. Sticky. It funneled into her lungs each time she took a breath and it soaked through the cotton of her t-shirt until even when she sat, knees spread and her hands on the cement of the step between them like she could soak up some of its solid lack of feeling. Her feet inside her boots squeaked on the leather, toes curling in damp, musty heat. The blond from the bunk didn't talk a hell of a lot at night but Maggie didn't sleep with someone rustling around in her space. The dark didn't take the heat. It brought fever-warm dreams and thrashing around on a bunk that smelled of somebody long gone and dead and left her sweat-soaked and sodden, spread out across the pallet of her bunk, reaching for cool. When she slept she dreamed of air-conditioning and ice, of beer fresh from the fridge.
The glasses were opaque, they hid pale blue eyes and the circles beneath them; Maggie craned her neck and looked up to see who it was. Manners' brother, the nearly-silent one. He spoke more than the mute kid, but not a lot. Now he was handing out orders like the junior secretary of the clubhouse, Shane and Graham off out in the green and the dust beneath the brutal sunshine.
"I miss the washer/dryer on my tour?" she locked her wrists around her knees, and eyed that pile of dirt that sat on the step a ways from her. He'd tried that, before they'd slammed the bars home on him. Way back, when the posies she'd had hanging limp from her hand when they stood in the courthouse (posies he'd handed her grinning like it was some kind of joke) were still half-way to dying in the jug on the kitchen counter. Pointed her at the washer-dryer, at the stove like having tits meant she knew what to do with them.
She flicked the glasses down her nose, eyed him over them, all dirt and blond eyebrows. "I'm better with the bikes. Trust me."