On Robbins’s Cot in the Cold Stacks

He shoves back in and the frame kicks the cinderblock, and that’s when I read the tape under the rail. ROBBINS. Block letters, yellowed. The sheets under my spine are the dead archivist’s, and the fitted corner has worked loose so the cotton drags under my shoulder blades every time he bottoms out, rucking up, pilled and thin where another body wore it down for years before mine.

The cot is too narrow for this. My left shoulder hangs off the edge. His knee is planted between the wall and my right hip, grinding the mattress down until the springs sing. Cold air off the archive floor climbs my calf. His cock is thick and hot and already slick from the first round, dragging on the way in, catching at the rim, then seating so deep my breath leaves in a grunt I hate. Robbins’s pillow smells like mothballs and old scalp. He died in February and nobody washed it. I am lying in a dead man’s sweat-stain. I turn my face and get a mouthful of it.

“Don’t look away,” Griffin says. He gets a hand in my hair and turns me back. The lamp on the filing cabinet throws his face half in shadow. He’s smiling. Not the smile he uses in meetings. The other one. “You know whose bed this is.”

He doesn’t have a pace yet. The first few strokes are uneven, his knee skidding on the loose sheet, his weight tipping toward my off-side shoulder so the rail bites in under my scapula, a hard bar of metal that will leave a bruise shaped like a ruler. He grunts, resets the knee, finds the seam of the mattress with it and digs in. The springs change pitch, from a complaint to a ring. Under my tailbone the mattress has no more give; it bottoms out on the plywood with a flat thud every time he drives, and I feel the thud in my teeth.

Then it steadies. I count without meaning to. Four strokes where his hips snap short and mean, the head of him knocking something that makes my thighs jump. Six, and the wet starts to sound, a clap every time he lands. Eight, and his knee stops skidding because the sheet is pinned under my hip now and has nowhere to go. Ten, and my clit drags across the base of him on the grind at the bottom of each one. I hook a heel behind his thigh and pull. More. The pressure starts behind my pubic bone, low and dull, the muscles there beginning to grip him on their own. The climb is real. The cot fights me, every thrust shoving me an inch toward the wall until the crown of my head is almost on cinderblock, and I chase it anyway, hips lifting to meet him, calves cramping with it, the springs now a steady ringing that fills the small room and makes the lamp shake.

He stops.

Pulls all the way out. The sudden empty ache is so sharp I make a sound I will not name. Cold hits the wet between my legs. He kneels up, cock shining, and laughs once, short, like he just won a hand. Somewhere past him the door is dead on its county timer and the truck is under two feet of snow, and I think about it exactly once, the way you think about a tooth.

“Look at you,” he says. “Dripping on Robbins’s sheet. County’s golden girl, cunt open, waiting for it back. You gonna ask?”

I don’t ask. Asking is the same as saying I need it. I set my jaw and reach for him. He catches my wrist and pins it to the pillow above my head. The other hand shoves my knee up toward my chest until the muscle in my hip protests. He looks down at me like he’s inventorying damage.

“Nobody’s unlocking that door till morning,” he says. His voice is low and pleased. “So take your time refusing.”

He lets go of my knee long enough to spit in his palm and stroke himself once, slow, letting me watch. Then he lines up and pushes in again, one long mean slide, and my back bows off the cot. The springs complain. He doesn’t give me the pace. He holds deep and grinds, pubic bone on my clit, not thrusting, just pressure. His free hand drops to my hip and pins it to the plywood through the mattress. One hand on my wrist, one on my hip, his full weight behind both. He grinds down and speaks against my cheekbone.

“Red pen,” he says, and rolls his hips so I feel the drag of him against the front wall of me. “On my Haskell draft. You wrote ‘see me’ in the margin. Two words.” Another grind, slower, and my legs start to shake. “Like I was a fucking undergrad.”

I try to fuck myself on him. He takes that away with the hand on my hip, holding me flat while he keeps up the pressure and nothing else.

“Needy little thing,” he says, voice dropped to a flat murmur, almost no air behind it, which is worse. “All that mouth in the reading room. And here you are, clenching like you’ll die if I pull out. Say it. Say you’re desperate.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. Copper. I will not say it. He feels the refusal and laughs into my neck, breath hot, stubble scraping. Then he pulls out again.

The second empty is worse. My cunt flutters on nothing. A string of wet stretches and breaks against my thigh. He lets go of my wrist and gets both hands on me, one on my shoulder, one hooked under my knee, and hauls. The cot is thirty inches wide. There is no room to roll. My hip catches on the rail halfway and the metal gouges across the bone, and I grunt and he shoves anyway, and my knee scrapes cinderblock as it comes around, the block rough enough to take skin. My foot was braced on the frame. It isn’t now. It kicks at air over the edge, and for one second I have no purchase at all, nothing under my foot, nothing under my hip, just his hands and the wall in front of my face, and the narrowness closes on me like a hand at the throat. My left hand finds the rail. It’s cold and it’s all I have.

He gets behind me. There’s barely room for him; his back is against the open air, mine is against his chest, and my front is six inches from the wall. My right arm is trapped under me, dead weight against the mattress. He slides his lower arm under my neck and hooks it across my collarbones, hauling my back flat against him. His upper arm comes across my ribs, forearm barred under my breasts, and squeezes. My breath goes shallow. I can’t get a full one. His cock slides along the cleft of my ass, not in, just hot and heavy, smearing me. I push back and there’s nothing to push against; the mattress ends where he begins. I let go of the rail to brace my free hand on the wall and he tightens the bar across my ribs until I stop and take the rail again.

“You brought him coffee,” he says against my ear, and notches at my entrance and gives me the first inch. “Right here.” Another inch, and the angle from behind puts the head of him against a place that makes my spine try to straighten. “Acted like you gave a shit.” A third inch, slow, the stretch different lying on my side, tighter, the inside of my thighs pressed together so he has to work for it. “Now he gets to listen to you whine.”

“Fuck you,” I get out. It comes thin, because I can’t fill my lungs.

“That’s the idea.” He sinks the rest of the way in one push, and the depth is brutal; there’s no give in me on this side, my hip jammed into the mattress, and he bottoms out so hard my forehead hits the cinderblock. I feel my own pulse against the block. He starts to move in short grinding strokes that never quite become a rhythm. Two, and I start to meet him. He stops. One, and holds. Three, fast, and I feel the climb try to start again and he stalls it with a long slow drag out that leaves me clenching on the head. Sweat runs down my spine into the crack of my ass. The arm across my collarbones holds me; the forearm across my ribs loosens and that hand slides down over my stomach and finds my clit. Rough pads. No mercy. He circles until my stomach locks and the muscles along the inside of my thighs start to jump.

The climb comes back harder. I can hear myself, wet and open, the cot ticking against the wall in broken time. My fingers cramp on the rail. The pressure behind my pubic bone is a fist now, closing. If he keeps that hand there ten more seconds I will come whether I want the audience or not. I chase it. I hate that I chase it. I press my face into Robbins’s pillow, mothballs and scalp, and take what he gives and try not to beg with my body, and fail. My hips are working on their own, small, humiliating pushes back into him that go nowhere because there is nowhere.

He feels it. Of course he feels it. The flutter, the way I go tight around him. He yanks his hand off my clit and pulls out in the same motion, and the almost-orgasm snaps. I cry out into the pillow, furious, empty, thighs shaking so hard the frame rattles against the block.

Griffin laughs. Really laughs. It bounces off the stacks outside the door.

“There she is,” he says. “Alana Voss, reduced to a twitching hole on a dead man’s cot. You should see your face. You look stupid with it. You look like you’d let me do anything if I just put it back in.”

He gets a hand on my shoulder to roll me back. I fight him. Not because I think I’ll win. Because I need there to have been a fight. I let go of the rail and my left elbow comes around and catches him under the jaw, hard enough that his teeth click. He grunts and grabs for my arm and misses, and I get my top knee up between us and shove at his hip, and for one second there’s space. Then the cot tips. His weight is on the outer edge now and the legs on that side lift off the floor, and the whole frame tilts toward the open room, and my heel goes off. There’s nothing under it. I’m sliding, the sheet sliding with me, the archive floor two feet down and the lamp going sideways in my vision, and my stomach drops the way it does on a missed step. I grab for anything. I get his arm. He uses it. He comes down on top of me with everything he has, the frame slamming back onto all four legs with a crack that sounds like it broke, and my shoulders hit the mattress flat and his chest hits mine and the air goes out of me. One arm is pinned under his ribs. The other is caught between us. My heel finds the rail and that’s all I get back. He’s on me, the whole weight of him, and the fight is over, and I lost it, and I knew I would.

He catches my thigh and hikes it high, opening me, and looks down between us like he wants me to look too. I do. His cock is flushed dark, shiny with me, the head nudging my cunt and not going in. I am swollen. I can feel how open I am, how the air hurts a little. A drop of sweat falls from his chin onto my stomach.

“Ask,” he says.

I shake my head. My throat is raw. If I ask, the years mean nothing. If I don’t, he will keep doing this until I break anyway, and we both know which one I’m choosing by staying open under him.

“Stubborn cunt,” he says, hoarse, flat, no inflection on it at all. “Fine. I’ll give it to you. I’ll give it to you and take it away until you cry for it. You already look halfway there. Eyes wet. Mouth slack. County’s best mind, and all she can do is lie in Robbins’s bed and drip.”

He pushes in. All the way. I make a broken sound and he starts to move for real this time, hard, the pace I needed ten minutes ago, hips slamming, the head of the frame knocking the cinderblock on every stroke so the whole wall seems to tick. The friction burns and I want more of it. His balls slap wet against me. I get my arms free and around his back and lock my ankles behind him and take it, take the depth, take the ugly sound of us. He shifts his weight onto his left elbow beside my head and the right hand comes down between us and finds my clit and rubs in tight mean circles that match the thrust. Everything below my navel starts to close. My pelvic floor locks around him in a grip I can’t loosen. The muscles down the front of my thighs cramp solid. The pressure behind my pubic bone goes from fist to stone. My vision narrows to the lamp, his shoulder, the tape that says ROBBINS just past his wrist.

He stops again.

Not all the way out. Worse. Buried to the hilt, perfectly still, the hand lifted off me, while I clench and shake and try to grind and get nothing because he has my hips flattened to the mattress with his weight. I can feel my own pulse around him. I can feel how close I am, right on the edge, held there like something pinned to a board.

“Griffin.” It slips out. Not a plea. Just his name, cracked.

“Yeah,” he says, breathing hard, sweat dripping onto my collarbone. He’s shaking too. I can feel it in his arms, a fine tremor through the elbow by my head. It doesn’t stop the smile. “Say you’re desperate. Say the great Alana needs to come on a dead man’s sheets more than she needs her pride. Say it and I’ll let you.”

I stare at him. My eyes burn. I will not give him the sentence. I roll my hips once, a small pathetic grind, and he groans and holds me down harder, and the denial is so complete I think I might scream.

“Pathetic,” he whispers, and he sounds almost wrecked by it. “Look at you working for an inch. Years of beating me and this is what you are when nobody from the board can see. A desperate little slut who won’t even beg out loud because begging would make it true.”

He pulls back and slams in. Once. Twice. Then he gives me the rhythm and the hand at once, the thrust and the thumb, no more games, or maybe the game is that he decided. And I don’t trust it. That’s the thing. My body has learned the shape of him now, three times, and it braces. Every stroke that lands I wait for the next one not to. My hips meet him and then flinch, meet him and flinch, because the last three times this exact pace got stolen the second I leaned into it. He fucks me and I fight the climb. I feel it starting and I clamp down on it, thighs trying to close, breath held, because if I let it build and he stops again I don’t know what I’ll do, and I would rather not come than be denied a fourth time with him watching. He feels me holding. He laughs, low, short of breath, and doesn’t stop. Ten strokes. Fifteen. His thumb never leaves. Twenty, and the pressure behind my pubic bone is past stone, past anything I can hold, and still I wait for it. Still the stop doesn’t come. The rhythm keeps landing, the frame keeps ticking the wall, his thumb keeps circling, and somewhere around the point where my calves lock so hard I can’t feel my feet, the suspicion is what breaks. Not the pleasure. The waiting. I come through the flinch, mid-brace, body still expecting the punishment while it happens.

It starts in my stomach. The muscle wall seizes and bends me up under him. My cunt grips him in pulses I can’t control, hard rhythmic clamps that I feel all the way into my lower back, and the sound that comes out of me is a bark, one, sharp, into his shoulder, and then a gag as the next wave hits because my throat closes on it. My heels drum the mattress. Sweat stings my eyes. It doesn’t stop when it should. It keeps cresting because he doesn’t let up, thumb still on my clit, cock still driving, and something in my chest gives.

The tears come without a sound. They just spill. Hot tracks into my hair and onto Robbins’s pillow, and the mothball smell goes wet and sour where they land. I can’t stop them. I can’t stop coming either. My face twists and my breath hitches and I turn into his neck so he won’t see, but he feels the wet, he has to. I am silent. My body is still pulling him in.

He comes a few strokes later. His hips stutter first, the rhythm going ragged, two half-strokes and a lurch, and he bites off a “fuck” against my shoulder so it comes out as a grunt with the consonant on it. His thighs lock against the backs of mine, hard as cable. He gets heavier. All at once, dead weight, like someone cut a line, and he grinds through it, emptying, and every pulse shoves another tear out of me. I don’t sob. I don’t give him the noise. I just leak, eyes open and useless, staring at the cinderblock an inch from my temple while my cunt flutters around him in aftershocks that feel like punishment.

He stays inside until he softens. The cot is a swamp. Sweat, spit, his come already sliding out around him onto the dead man’s sheet. My thigh cramps. I can’t unlock my fingers from his back. The room is locked from the outside by the county timer and buried by snow, and there is nowhere else to put a body.

He eases out. The mess follows. He doesn’t go far. There is no far. He rolls off me to the left, onto the open edge of the mattress, the only space there is, shoulder to my shoulder on a bed built for one, and his right arm comes down across my ribs as he lands, heavy, dropped there like he didn’t decide where to put it. He’s breathing like he ran here. The laugh is gone. I can feel him looking at my face. I don’t wipe the tears. Wiping them would admit they happened. They cool on my temples anyway.

Neither of us speaks. The archive ticks as the heat fails another degree. His come leaks onto Robbins’s sheet between my legs, warm then cold. My pride is a wet ruin in my chest, and he has to lie in it. I feel him shift, once, like he might get up, and then he remembers the door, the snow, the single cot. The arm across my ribs doesn’t lift. Not kind. Just stuck.

Outside, the wind hits the high windows. I keep my eyes on the cinderblock. I can feel his chest against my shoulder, and the breathing in it won’t slow down; it should have by now and it hasn’t. The arm across my ribs doesn’t move, doesn’t tighten, doesn’t let go. He doesn’t say anything. He had plenty to say ten minutes ago. Whatever he got off me is lying here on the sheet with the rest of it, cooling, and he has to breathe it in all night, same as me. It isn’t even morning and it’s already starting to stink.