The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [17]
But Ellis saw the look on her face, now glowing with sweat, and rather than take the weapon, he instructed her on how to hold it down by her hip, the butt tucked against her, so that she could spray the field in a cross burst, keeping the barrel steady with her left arm extended down forty-five degrees. As he gently positioned her hands, his back to Mel, he admired the tank top clinging to her body, took in the smell of her, and couldn’t help but notice how her nipples reflected her excitement. It took all he had to merely step back and give her a nod rather than put his hands where his eyes had just been.
Again, she began, a few shots at a time, getting a feel for the recoil and the new stance. But then she settled in, becoming one with the gun’s staccato rhythm, enjoying how it vibrated against her ribs and spread across her hips. Her husband’s lovemaking this morning, even though desired, had been brutal and perfunctory, as usual. And, as usual, it had served mostly only to whet her appetite for more. She had no idea what effect shooting guns had on men—glancing over at Mel, she saw nothing like what she was experiencing—but she now knew its appeal for her, at least in this one instance.
They continued shooting for several hours, taking turns with the M–16s and firing a couple of pistols as well, until the beer and the ammunition were spent, the guns almost too hot to handle, and their ears numb and throbbing with the abuse. When silence finally fell, none of them had any appreciation of it. They lay on the rocks, soaked through, their hands tired and darkened with gunpowder, and themselves as dazed and glistening as fish brought to the surface by a grenade.
Mel was the worst off. He’d fired the most and consumed the most alcohol, ending the session by chasing the beer with whiskey. He’d acted out the day as he typically did, at full bore, without restraint, talking nonstop, laughing and swearing, his body language balanced on a perpetual knife edge between camaraderie and hostility. Even in this place of his own choosing, his humor always approached anger, his jabs and pokes falling just shy of punches. But now he was unconscious, deeply asleep in the sun, his mouth open and his eyes closed. For Ellis and Nancy, this was the moment they’d come to anticipate—when Mel’s self-indulgence would once more do its near daily job of reducing him to a genuine nonthreat.
As slowly as dogs left too long in the sun, the two of them finally stirred, peeling themselves off the rocks and staggering toward the pickup parked under the trees. There, their backs against the relative coolness of its metal side, they shared a bottle of lukewarm water from the toolbox behind the cab. Then Ellis, still holding the bottle and with a careful glance at the distant, audibly snoring Mel, said softly to Nancy, “Put your head back.”
She, too, followed his gaze, intrigued, and smiled up at him, oddly stirred by how his tone of voice fed into the sensual mood that had been percolating within her all day. “What’re you going to do?”
“You want to find out?”
In response she tilted her face up, her shoulder blades flat against the side of the truck’s bed, her damp hair hanging loose over its edge. Her breasts rose and fell under the thin fabric of her tank top.
Slowly, Ellis upended the bottle, letting the water dribble onto her forehead. She shut her eyes and laughed softly as the liquid began trickling down her face and neck. Ellis increased the flow slightly, and the water spread to her upper chest and slipped under the tank top. Nancy blew some air through her mouth, causing a line of small bubbles to form at her lips.
Without a word, he stopped pouring the water and brushed those lips with his own, barely touching her. She smiled. They