ST2.8 | "Ice Hit Trinity"

PROMPT: It's the hottest time of the year, and things are getting sweaty. This month, we’re looking for steam and sweat and, yes, sex. Send us your best story where sex, desire, or lust lead to the undressing and undoing of those involved.

ICE HIT TRINITY

by Vincent Marshall

Drip.

Drip.

Her sweat dropped onto him. Droplets skimmed across the heat of his skin like ripples during the Solstice on a lake in Arkansas humidity.

Thrusts forced more drips, more ripples. Their breath pulsed together in unison. The headboard smacked the wall, rattling the floor of the trailer, as if the tectonic plates themselves were rubbing together, pleasure for the town to feel.

Alanna flung her blonde hair back. Looked into the sweet brown honey of Colt’s eyes as he stared up at her. She felt herself match his smile– a mirror of lust matching equally missing teeth. It reminded her of black keys on a piano.

Colt smacked Alanna on her ass as if to tell the horse to pick up the pace. Alanna followed the order. She bucked and bucked as the sweet heat of the room rose to the temperature of the sun.

Colt smacked her ass again. She pressed one hand on his stomach and one on his leg behind her to steady herself. Her pace increased and for the first time she heard him let out a moan. It excited her more. The sound and the friction and the deep angle of his position sent shockwaves into her groin, up her spine to the top of her neck. As she screamed, he screamed back. The pace became rapid as they finished in an animalistic shriek of ecstasy together.

Alanna fell off her bronco and nuzzled next to him, out of breath. A crinkle of crisp paper crackled under their backs. Their chests rose and fell in rapid succession. Colt lifted his arm to move Alanna’s hair off his chest. A couple of one-hundred-dollar bills stuck under his forearm and elbow causing Alanna to giggle.

“I never fucked anyone on ten thousand dollars before,” Alanna said, plucking the bills off Colt. She flung them upward and the two watched as they descended like green leaves coming to the summer ground after a windstorm.

“Would hope not, babe,” Colt said. He slapped his hand down on the mattress and fresh new bills stuck again. He shook his hand and bills fell onto Alanna sticking to her cheek.

“You sure we did right?” Alanna asked him.

Colt took a beat. He let the words hang in the fever of the bedroom. Alanna felt his chest rumble under her ear as if they’d went another round.

“My uncles,” he finally said, “getting away from them is the best thing anyone can do.”

Alanna found a chill hidden in the heat. She’d met one of the uncles inside the trailer months back. She sat on the loveseat behind a coffee table missing one leg, making it look like a redneck chiropractic table. A jar of potpourri used as the table centerpiece laid sideways on the ripped and brown-stained carpet where the leg finally gave way. Colt called him “Unc.” She couldn’t recall his name, or, looking back on the interaction, any of the others’ names either. Her impressions of him were that this was a man to be feared and needed. He held all the keys, literally and figuratively. His age and creepiness amplified her concerns when Colt accepted another delivery job. She felt his eyes all over her. She wore a skinny thin purple skirt and crossed her legs in front of her. He pulled on his scruffy chin and licked his chapped lips. She dared not dream of getting inside his head. She knew she wouldn’t like what she saw of herself. When he left, she’d felt the urge to shower.

Colt told her how, in the beginning, he made small runs to Little Rock and Jonesboro, and a year later took on deliveries across the southern part of the country. Six months later he made a small drop at a house party down in Heber Springs and it's there where they met.

She wasn’t like other tweakers. Her beauty remained intact despite the meth mouth beginning to show its ugly side. She recognized his look immediately. The lust they shared turned into more than either of them could ask for. She was smitten and so was he. She moved in with him a couple months later.

Dawn to dusk in those early days were filled with nonstop fornication. But then Colt dipped his toe in his own supply. It’d been a suggestion she made to him when she was in a deep three-day bender and her body refused to rest. He told her he wanted to feel what she felt. A rip off the new coffee table he had bought at an antique store, and a new love made its way into their lives. An unholy alliance. Alanna, Colt, and Crystal were inseparable.

Colt broke off pieces for himself and Alanna here and there. He made sure those misdeeds stuck to out of state drops. Ones where no one would see him again unless they meant to. Despite the addiction and his loins clouding his judgment, he kept to that code until one tweaked out idea led them to where they were now.

“Well, what you thinkin?” Alanna asked him. She made swirls with her fingertip around his chest hair and over his malnourished ribcage.

Colt exhaled. “I’m thinkin’ I’m gonna take a piss and then I’m coming back in here and we doin’ that again.”

Alanna pulled away from him with a laugh. She watched her no-ass-having Colt get off the bed, then let out another cackle as she noticed the Hundreds pasted to his backside, including one hanging near his taint. She howled, tickling under his balls making a “ling-a-ling-a-ling” sound as she grabbed the bill.

Colt swiped away her hand in embarrassment. “The hell you doin’, woman?”

“It’s like it turned into a thong along your ass.” Alanna rolled onto her back laughing, until tears fell from her eyes and down into her hair, mixing into the sweat of the sex.

She eyed Colt as he flung the rest of the bills off his body and retreated to the bathroom. He kept the door open and she observed the stream hit the toilet between his legs. All she could do was shake her head. She loved that son of a bitch. She dreamed of their life on the road. Plastic bags of cash sitting in the back of the truck cab as they headed out west towards a new life. A life away from his uncles. From Crystal. From the humidity that enveloped the trailer because the window AC unit stopped. From the johns who knew her real name. From all the pain the Ozarks put her through.

Colt had taken her out behind the trailer the day he told her the idea of a better future. He lined up vodka bottles on the barbed wire fence post of the adjacent farmland. He handed Alanna a .22 rifle and showed her how to aim, or so he thought. In rapid succession she knocked down all four bottles. Four shots, four hits.

She told him how when she was young, her father used to take her down to the creek and set up whiskey and vodka bottles to show his little girl how to shoot. First with a .22 rifle he inherited from her grandfather. Next came pistols and revolvers. Alanna knew her way around the handle of all types of weaponry. Colt later told her he had never been more turned on than when she fired off more rounds, taking out more bottles. His plan A had a plan B and the perfect partner to execute it with.

Alanna marveled at the fantasy as the man of her dreams, her White Knight, finished up in the bathroom. She cocked her head and spread her legs. The fever of the room seemed to target between her thighs. She was ready.

A crash struck the bathroom window. All Alanna saw was the splash. The splash of blood that exploded as if a balloon filled with crimson paint popped where Colt had a head. The bathroom went from rusted gold and copper to red as a stop sign. His body jerked to the right as he slammed down on the toilet. His feet were all she could see. Her fantasy of running away turned into a nightmare.

Before Alanna could sit up, the gates of Hell seemed to open and engulf her, a Hell of broken glass, splintered wood, and a symphony of bullets.

Alanna rolled off the bed and army-crawled her way to the living room. Her breasts and knees and elbows gathered rug burns as she moved through the trailer. Abruptly, the shooting stopped turning the bedroom into Swiss cheese.

Against the door stood two AR-15s and a 12-gauge shotgun. Alanna grabbed one of the ARs first and chambered a round. She didn’t have time to get dressed. Not right now. She pulled up and pointed out the large window frame of the living room and scouted the outside. Three pickup trucks were parked in front of the trailer next to Colt’s.

No movement.

She guessed the shooters were at the back of the trailer.

The silence meant reloading.

She crept back into the bedroom and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Seeing Colt, she choked back tears. He’d want her to fight. Cry later, babe, his voice rang in her ears. We talked about this, too.

Dressed now, she chambered the other AR and cocked the shotgun. She cocked her head and gritted her teeth. Her eyes tightened as she waited to hear the outsiders. A beat or so went by until she realized she needed Colt’s keys. Hearing nothing happening outside, she crept back into the bedroom again and did a quick scan.

She spotted the keys under the bed, the gold ring glistening in the sun that shone through one of the bullet holes. She crawled her way to the bed and the trailer erupted in hellfire again.

Alanna scrambled her way into the living room and waited. She knew when the shooting stopped, she could make her run. She pulled one AR sling around her back. She kept the shotgun at home. She needed the succession hits the ARs brought. No time for one-and-done shots from the shotgun.

Alanna put the key ring in her teeth. Her bite cracked a tooth. The adrenaline obliterated the pain.

The silence fell upon her, urging her to make her move. She opened the door and peeked. Seeing no one, she ran. She heaved the driver-side door to Colt’s truck open and threw herself in, lying down behind the dash where she waited for a response. The nothingness went on for eternity. She pulled herself up and peered over the dash. No one. She grabbed the keys from her teeth and put them in the ignition. She stopped. Her life for the past year and a half flashed before her eyes. Colt’s smile. Colt’s rail-thin naked body. The road head on a delivery, the late nights in the back of the truck at Lake Chippewa. The masked robbery of his uncles. The last time she saw the lust in his eyes looking up at her. The future they planned together.

Fuck Colt’s uncle.

Alanna bit down on her tongue and swung the truck door open. She grabbed both guns and stomped her way towards the back of the trailer. She put her back to the trailer and slid her way along the side as a shield. She crept up the opening of the back field when a gun barrel came around the edge of the trailer. Without missing a beat, Alanna batted aside the barrel, stepped around the corner, then pulled the trigger. Quick shots. Three, center mass. The body fell. Behind the falling body, she saw a sea of men in jeans and buttoned-down shirts, like an armed rodeo let out. She recognized one of the men as Colt’s “Unc.” The others were likely cooks or dealers or both. The more the merrier. She didn’t care.

Alanna unloaded. Bodies flew back and off to the sides. Some went for cover that wasn’t there. She felt the gun give out empty and she pulled the other AR around her to begin again. By the time the second AR emptied, the rodeo was over, the ground behind the trailer as red as the dirt under a family of deer gutted in December.

Alanna fled back to the truck and got in. She thought about going back in for shoes and the money and setting everything on fire as she stuck to the plan to head west, but she couldn’t stomach seeing Colt that way again. She wanted to keep the good memories intact. She turned the ignition key and heard a click. The truck didn’t fire up. She turned the key one more time. Nothing.

Alanna panicked. She pulled the door handle to get out and check under the hood when the driver-side door slammed shut against her shoulder. She forgot Colt had two uncles. The dealer. And the one who ran a body shop.

The man said something to her through the glass, but she didn’t hear him. Instead, the last thing she heard was the window crash and she felt the heat against her temple as the sweating sun went dark.

Vincent Marshall (on Threads as @vincentmmarshall) is an award-winning journalist living in Arkansas with his wife Shauna and their five children. When he is not writing he’s either reading, fishing or out on the hiking trail and never passes up the opportunity to wear a hoodie.