Chapter Text
The heat that summer had been hot enough to kill.
The Ellis trailer had stood empty for a weekend before they'd cut the power; no one was sure if the old man had gone looking for rent money or packed off in the night. It’d taken another two days for the lot owner to snap the chain on the rusting door in search of some kind of payment.
The dog had smelt by then. A cloying smell, like rotting meat, that'd made its way across the path to your door once the trailer was opened to air. You’d watched from your window as the balding man had taken three steps back towards his Silverado and emptied his stomach on the gravel. He’d come back that evening with a trash bag and shovel by which point his vomit had been picked over by the wasps in the eaves.
Sentiment on the lot was that old man Ellis ought to have had the decency to shoot the dog. It was Texas after all. You were hardly short of bullets.
The trailer stood empty for a fortnight, airing in the stagnant heat before it found itself an occupant. You were sucking on ice in the shade around the back of your pitch when a black Tundra cut down the gravel path, bearing within it two passengers and the accumulation of a life in boxes and crates. That was the first you saw of Joel Miller: a weather-beaten man reaching into the cab of his truck to lift a frail child into a creaking trailer.
People were kinder than you might’ve supposed. There wasn't a shortage of terrible hands scattered across the lot, nobody made their home in a trailer park in East Texas if they had anywhere else to go, but a kid with cancer was such a stereotypically awful draw of the deck that in some lights it felt almost cinematic. You watched your neighbours push themselves into the background of the scene, their smiles and baked goods masking a morbid desire to brush against a tragedy that was so clear-cut when held against the addiction, abuse, and entrenched poverty that coloured their own stories.
You might’ve been among their number had your brother not swung into town a month after the pair's appearance, a habitual stop on the journey between the penitentiary and better company that he’d been making since you were a freshman in high school. Before his arrival, you'd seen pieces of the dying girl, Sarah, almost daily as she’d smiled at you through the window or waved in farewell as you backed your truck out of the lot. She was a sweet-looking thing, whose bright eyes seemed inhumanly wide without the addition of eyelashes to keep them in check. However, even an apathetic father would keep his kid from your door when a man like your brother was in residence and Joel’s brand of parenting was so patently entrenched in care that it was no surprise when Sarah disappeared from your orbit as quickly as she’d arrived.
Joel remained though, framed by your windows like a leading man behind the glass of a television set, and as the dregs of your last school summer bled into the ocean of time that sat ahead, you found your eyes following his broad-shouldered figure through the motions of the day.
There was a quiet concentration to the man; every task he undertook seemed to gain the full weight of his attention, whether it was righting the sagging screen door, or rolling himself under the trailer’s rusted undercarriage to patch a leak. It took you a while to realise how forced this attention was. It wasn't until your brother brought back some strangers whose wandering eyes made your skin crawl and you spent the evening managing to fix a month-old rattle in your truck, that you understood what Joel’s single-minded focus really was: a desperate attempt to look away.
Sarah lived another year or so. Your brother only stuck around for half of this time, and so towards the end, the girl re-entered the edges of your life, thinner and paler but no less bright. She started smiling at you again through the window and chirping out a greeting if your paths crossed on site. Joel was never that far behind, but it appeared you'd been removed from whatever no-fly list your brother’s presence had put you on, and now he simply stood silently by when Sarah stopped to chat.
Some evenings, as you heaved trash bags out of your poorly air-conditioned unit into the thick heat, you'd catch the pair of them on the steps opposite, casting a haunting shadow in the low light: a waining girl falling asleep against her father’s shoulder as he strummed out a tune on a well-loved guitar. That sense of cinema would return as the sound of the cicadas joined the low hum of a box fan to form a backing track to Joel’s gentle humming and you'd know in those moments what kind of tale you were watching: the prelude to a ghost story.
For the first year after Sarah’s death, nobody in the park saw much of Joel Miller and those who did wished they hadn't. Something about his daughter’s presence had given the appearance of softness to the rough-hewn man, perhaps it had been genuine, perhaps not, but, whatever it had been, it was gone now and without the flattering warmth of Sarah’s light it quickly became clear exactly the type of man you’d let creep into your damaged community.
You worked shifts down at the diner on the 290 and occasionally, when you were putting yourself to bed in the early hours, you’d see Joel pull into the lot after a week away. He’d keep his headlights off, but your porch light worked on sensors and when he pulled out of his truck to stumble into his trailer the blood on his hands and face would ignite like flashpaper under the fluorescence.
Nobody ever asked questions, even when he’d emerge a few days later looking like he’d been in a brawl. You imagined if he was pushed to an answer, that he’d probably attribute the damage to a bar fight, but nobody left for a week in search of a bar fight, and nobody picked bar fights with men that looked like Joel.
Another year passed. His beard grew longer. His hair began to pepper with the first few pieces of grey. The man hardly mellowed, but the sight of bloody knuckles grew less frequent and you began to breathe a little easier, thankful that no cop had shown up at your door asking questions you’d have to lie to answer. From your spot on the neighbouring pitch, you watched the change, no less intrigued by the man outside your window than you had been at eighteen, even if this intrigue was now entwined with a healthy dose of fear that sparked in your blood on the occasions when his dark eyes caught your stares.
You knew your neighbour was bad news. You knew every cliché under the sun about angry men in houses and gum-popping, fatherless daughters. You’d made a study of them in your youth, determined to strike out against the net of circumstance that had kept your brother in this park and your Mama before him, but you were old enough to drink now and somehow you were still here. Your adherence to the rules had done nothing to lift you out of your situation. You hadn't been smart enough for college, or rather you hadn't been rich enough in money or time to put in the effort required to close the gap between natural ability and good grades. The job you'd taken to fund your escape now barely covered basic maintenance with your mother and brother out of the picture, and three years from your high school diploma, you’d somehow slipped into the paycheque-to-paycheque existence you’d thought awareness alone would save you from.
Joel Miller was bad news, but he was to something stare at, and, as dangerous as your interest in him surely was, you felt an unoccupied mind might just be worse.
The summer that marked the beginning of Joel’s fourth year in the trailer park was as hot as the summer he’d pulled in and you'd spent the weeks sweating through the itchy polyester of your garish diner uniform at such a rate that you were running a laundry cycle every few days.
Frankie didn't much mind what state you turned up to work in. You’d stumbled through the door beary-eyed, sleep-mused, mascara running, almost every iteration of unpresentable since you’d picked up the job at sixteen, but no one wanted to fuck a girl that smelt like stale sweat, and considering the diner was a glorified truck stop, stinking like yesterday’s uniform had a way of eating into your tips.
In theory, the trailer park’s small laundromat consisted of six machines, three washers and three dryers, but old man Ellis had put his foot through the door of one of the washers before making his exit three years back and it hadn't been fixed since. Residents had been managing the limited resources by getting regular with their laundry days, operating a weird dance for the first few months before people settled into their silently allotted time slots. You took the machines late on weeknights when your shifts at the diner meant you were about the only one up. Mrs Briscoe, who occupied the trailer nearest the block, had griped at you for the first month of this until you'd spent a fortnight doing your laundry in her preferred slot instead and she’d come to the decision that waiting for a machine was much more irritating than a little late night thudding.
It was an ill-made system, with a thousand faults, but just like everything in the creaking park it just about held on to the distinction of being workable, until, a few days shy of the hottest week of the year, a second washer gave up the ghost.
You figured the change wouldn't affect you much, no one else had the time or inclination to begin doing their laundry at two am no matter the temptation that an empty laundromat might pose, which was why, a week into laundry-gate, the sound of the block door closing at a little past half two had you jumping out of your skin.
The machine that had packed up was on the bottom row which had made it easy to access. Its working counterpart was much less conveniently placed and you were straining on your tiptoes to slip your quarters into the slot when the click of the door closing had you darting around to find the solid figure of Joel Miller standing in the small room, a bag of clothes clutched tightly in his right hand.
For all your staring, you were very rarely in the same space as your neighbour and the sight of him, broad, imposing, and ever so close in the dimly lit laundry room, made something sharp jolt within your chest. The handful of coins in your palm tumbled to the floor and you froze like a deer in a hunter’s scope.
Joel wasn't burdened with the same immobility. He watched the quarters hit the ground, his gaze flicking down with a bored, slightly disdainful expression, before moving back up to your frozen form.
You gonna to pick those up?
His silent eyes seemed to ask, as a few seconds of quiet slipped into five, then ten.
You could feel your cheeks burning, aware but helpless in the face of your dumb silence, before at last, you regained enough mastery over your arms and legs to duck your head and drop to your hands and knees, scrabbling for the quarters you'd discarded.
Joel didn't move an inch to help. Instead, he simply stared as you dropped to the floor and your large t-shirt fell forward to gape around your stomach, exposing the jean shorts that'd been hiding beneath.
Hands patting for the coins, you shifted forward, moving along the ground. The motion brought the stiff cotton of your bottoms higher on your hips until the cold air hit your inner thighs and you realised, quite suddenly, the compromising position you were occupying.
You froze in place a second time, only now, rather than standing collectedly on the ground, you were on your hands and knees a few steps from Joel’s feet, with your shirt gaping to reveal your midriff and your denim shorts doing little but framing the skin of your arse.
The flush of embarrassment in your cheeks flourished into an all-out blaze and every rational thought told you to stand, but this self-conscious flush wasn't alone. You could feel the weight of Joel’s gaze against your skin and, under this scrutiny, a different kind of heat began to trickle into your stomach.
You wanted desperately to turn and see exactly how those dark eyes were looking at you but your flash of arousal had mingled with your embarrassment so thoroughly it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began; so you held your position and kept your eyes fixed on the ground lest the shape of your gaze told the older man exactly how your body was betraying you.
After a few more seconds of forced concentration, you gave up your quarters as a lost cause and pushed yourself back until you were sat on your heels. Darting your eyes up, you found Joel unmoved from his position. The same bored, slightly disdainful look twisted his face but the heaviness in his dark gaze had grown and, as you watched, the laundry bag in his right hand spasmed once in his grip, as though flinching away from a hand that held it too tightly.
The rational part of your mind wanted to make a sarcastic comment about gentlemanly behaviour but, even if you hadn't been slightly terrified of your neighbour, there was a base code in your blood that wanted to hold this position until you were told to do otherwise. So you sat on your knees and stared up at the imposing man waiting to see if he would act.
Something seemed to ripple through Joel when he clocked that you weren't moving. He stood silently for a beat, then two, whilst the laundry bag jerked again in his grip. Then, just as your embarrassment began to tip towards a level that would force you to your feet, something in your neighbour’s heavy eyes uncoiled. He shifted slightly, adjusting his weight, and then dragged his gaze slowly from your face down to his feet where, lying an inch from the leather of his work boots, sat an unclaimed quarter.
You registered the coin with a hitch of breath that seemed to pull an almost cruel smile out of the older man. His dark eyes returned to yours, the same bored disdain in his expression as before, but this time there was no question in his silent command.
Pick it up.
Within the space of a moment you found you’d slipped into a dynamic that was entirely foreign and yet seemed to call to you like the final step in a movement progression; muscle memory for an act you were yet to perform.
You glanced up at the rough-cut man above you. He was all handsome angles carved harshly and the result was a fearsome face that your body couldn't quite decide whether to flee or placate.
As you toyed with this indecision you sucked your lower lip into your mouth. Joel’s eyes followed the motion and, for a moment, the dark in his gaze, which until this point had been an indiscernible force, flashed into the recognisable shape of desire and before your mind could register a decision, your hands were back on the ground, crawling one, then two steps forwards until you were kneeling at the older man’s feet.
You reached out a hand to pluck the coin from the concrete but, as you moved towards it, Joel’s foot shifted, knocking lightly against your fingers and kicking them away with the hard leather of his boot.
Your gaze flicked back up to him, the flutter of your eyelids registering your surprise, and he pinned you with a look that would perhaps have been mockery if it had held more depth.
You thought he meant for you to reach again, but you weren't quite certain and so, following the impulse of the heat between your legs, you sunk your way back down to the floor and lowered your head, reaching out with your teeth and tongue to lift the quarter into your mouth.
A sharp inhale of breath interrupted your performance and you raised your eyes to find Joel’s dark gaze burning into your skull with an intensity that seemed to teeter on disbelief.
You hadn't the familiarity to understand what his look was saying, but its weight felt like a squeeze at your throat, cutting off the blood flow to your head and leaving you in a state of dizzying deprivation.
The heat between your legs pulsed and, driven by that foreign urge that whispered it knew you, you opened your mouth and stuck out your tongue to reveal the shiny quarter sitting against its pink centre.
The older man’s hips almost bucked at the sight, before every muscle in his body appeared to tighten into one unmoving strip of control and his dark eyes shuttered back to their hard, unreadable mass.
At the retreat of Joel’s desire another flush of shame rose to your cheeks as it dawned on you that you'd gone further with your performance than even a man like your neighbour would've supposed. Reality came crashing back and on shaking legs, you pushed yourself to rise, careful not to graze the figure who towered like a patriarch before your quietly trembling form.
You stood before him for a moment, waiting to see if he'd touch you. When he did nothing but stare with the same controlled expression, you dug your toes into the ground to stop your knees from knocking and turned from his silent figure to walk towards your loaded machine.
Slipping the final quarter out of your mouth and into the slot, you lifted a shaking hand to the start button and held it down violently until the door clicked shut. Then, reaching for your basket, you brought it against your stomach like a shield and ducked your head, making yourself as unobtrusive as possible as you made your way towards the exit.
Joel watched you as you moved, but made no effort to continue to stare once you'd stepped past his eye-line, and so his back was to you as you slipped out the door.
As the night air hit your skin you shuddered, picking up your pace and stumbling back towards your trailer in a half-drunk dash. With every step you took you grew a little more frantic and as you approached the porch you snatched open the door, threw your laundry basket to the ground, and dove onto the bed, wrestling your jean shorts down your thighs. The zipper caught against your skin as you fought to free yourself and you hissed, the pain falling back into the weight of your desire before you dove your hand into your cotton panties and ground your fingers down against your throbbing clit.
The heat of embarrassment hadn't gone anywhere, but as you drew closer to the edge, your mind sharpened in on the flashes of desire that your behaviour had pulled from Joel’s typically immovable countenance and, as your orgasm finally crested, it was the image of his half-hard cock straining against the fabric of his jeans that painted the back of your eyelids as you came.
After the incident in the laundry room, your behaviour towards Joel didn't much change; your eyes had already spent three years following him around with the fascination of a schoolgirl crush even if your perception had grown significantly less rose-tinted as the years had progressed. His presence elicited no more flushes than it had before, but the nature of these blood rushes had deepened. What had once been a pinkening of the cheeks when he’d caught you staring, was now a deep set, heavy sort of heat that hung with humiliation and yet seemed directly connected to the heartbeat below your waist.
If Joel registered the shift he didn't show it. He continued to treat you with the same abrasive apathy that he'd displayed to the rest of the world in the two years since his daughter’s death, which suited the sensible part of your brain just fine. In contrast, the baser part of you that was predisposed to be less satisfied by distance, learnt to feed itself on shameful fantasies, replaying the sound of Joel’s sharp inhale and the twitch of his hips in a variety of different scenarios that had you waking empty and clenching before your mind cleared and you flushed in shame.
Despite the guilt your fantasies elicited, you returned to the wash-block each night with a desperate urgency. After a few days without sight of your neighbour, you even took to sitting in the room with a paperback as your laundry cycled through, hoping to widen your window of exposure. Yet, despite your desperate efforts, your dark-eyed neighbour never made a reappearance and every clean load of washing you carried from the laundrette came ladened with disappointment.
A week passed and this disappointment bled into frustration at such an alarming rate that, by the end of the fortnight, you were operating at a level of emotional and sexual exacerbation that you hadn’t suffered through since your early teens.
The kicker was that Joel had to know what you were doing. Your trailers were a stone’s throw apart and the hours he kept were as irregular as yours. A glance out of his window at the right time of night and he would’ve seen you make for the laundry and not return, so either he enjoyed denying you- which was frustrating but manageable because he might yet find himself with an urge he wanted to sate and come hunting- or he didn't care. The former scenario was pathetic, but in a way that made your legs quiver, the latter was simply pitiable, so as the days passed and Joel’s lack of attention began to feel more like apathy than a power play, you decided to reclaim what little was left of your self-respect and push him from your mind.
You had one school friend still in town, Tara, who was incapable of holding down a job for more than three months and as a result, had a lot of free time. Every few weeks she'd issue an invite to a bar that you'd decline for the sake of picking up a shift or saving your cash, but in an attempt at distraction, you accepted a Friday night offer to join her at Old Saul’s.
Old Saul’s was a shit-hole, but the drinks were dirt cheap and Saul would often give them out free to girls who pleased the eyes of his many skeezy patrons, so it made sense why Tara had picked the venue for your evening excursion. Nevertheless, shuffling across the sticky floor at a little past ten under the leering eyes of the joint’s inhabitants felt like an exercise in exhibitionism. You’d arrived thirty minutes late in expectation of Tara’s habitual tardiness but your friend had still managed to defeat even your best efforts and so you found yourself ambling up to the bar alone.
You offered Saul a pretty smile as you took a seat on one of the stools and he shuffled forward to pour you a glass of what looked like a vodka soda but tasted like carbonated lemon drain cleaner. Still, you were grateful for anything that might help you forget the weight of Joel’s gaze as you'd drawn that quarter into your mouth and drank it down without complaint. Saul poured you another and for five minutes you sipped your drink quietly, making an effort to meet no one’s eye, even so it didn't take long for the first patron to shuffle down the bar to greet you.
You’d hesitate to call the ability to deflect unwanted advances a skill, because it was something you'd never want to hone, but after five years working a late-night diner job you’d developed a knack for it. The man on the bar stool across from you wasn't a face you recognised, but unkempt, watery-eyed, and pushing fifty, he could've been one of a hundred men you’d encountered on a shift in the last month alone. You cut off his conversation as well as you could for a good few minutes, but when you found yourself manoeuvring your way out of three separate attempts to touch your skin, your patience hit its limit.
As you were sizing up your escape plan, giving Tara up as a lost cause, the woman herself strolled through the door, all yelped apologies about menacing managers and terrible shifts. Your unwanted admirer cut his losses and retreated to the other end of the bar and you found you’d never been so grateful for the blackhole of attention your school friend seemed to embody.
A familiar grin in Saul’s direction and Tara too was soon drinking her way through several vodka sodas whilst she monologued in great detail about the highs and lows of her working life. You tried to pay attention and contribute meaningful comments to your friend’s recount, but when a confused question revealed that the job you were using as your frame of reference for the rant was about two roles out of date, you gave up trying to follow the story and sat back to sip your drink in silence.
Nearly thirty minutes and three sudden topic changes later, Tara said something that pulled you out of your quiet ravine.
“Ain't that your park’s sexy serial killer in the corner?” She hummed, nodding in the direction of one of the peeling booths that sat along the right-hand side of the backroom. “You know my daddy gets his smokes from a guy he seems to know. Says he brings 'em up from Progreso once a month.”
Tara continued to ramble, but her words fell into the background of your hearing because you'd turned in your chair to follow her gaze and found the familiar profile of Joel Miller coiled around a glass in the corner of the joint.
His head was facing forward to the far wall as though he wasn't paying the pair of you a scrap of attention, but you’d spent enough of your life staring at the man to know with absolute certainty that he'd clocked you and was now watching you clock him.
You swallowed roughly around the fresh glass of drain cleaner in your mouth and suppressed the urge to cough whilst Tara continued to ramble about her father’s taste for stamp-free smokes with a looser lip that you were sure her old man would've cared for.
As you watched, your neighbour downed his drink and got up to leave, his flannel-clad figure cutting through the dingy bar towards the back exit. With every step he took towards the door, something in your gut tightened, as though there was a tether between his hands and your chest that intended to pull you along like a dog on a leash.
Tara, despite her indiscretion, was perhaps less absorbed in the sound of her own voice than you’d given her credit for, because she seemed to notice the change that had come over your face and trailed off from her description of local black market trades to shoot you a look of mild concern.
“You okay?” She asked before slurping aggressively at the dregs of her fourth drink.
You shook your head and tried to clear your face of whatever dazed expression had given you away.
“M’fine,” you replied, but it a wasn’t truthful response and as you spoke you realised that you’d made to rise without being conscious of your actions.
“Need a smoke,” you coughed out, grabbing at an excuse that would legitimise your body’s unsolicited movements.
Fortunately, Tara simply hummed in understanding and slipped from her own stool.
“Well, I need the little girl’s room. That soda’s stacking up. Meet you back here?”
You nodded absently at the suggestion before leaving her at the bar and cutting towards the exit.
The back door led out onto a half-empty parking lot and you pushed onto the tarmac with as much nonchalance as you could muster. It didn’t take more than a handful of seconds to spot the man you were looking for. Joel was leaning against the back wall, a half-smoked Marlboro between his teeth. He made no move to acknowledge your arrival, only lifting a hand to take a drag from his cigarette before tapping it against the brick wall. His dark green flannel was rolled up to his forearms to showcase strong hands, and when his tanned skin caught the streetlight you could see they were peppered with the pale scars of a hundred nicks and callouses, accumulated by a lifetime of labour.
The picture he presented had something pooling in your lower gut and you dropped your eyes to the ground, kicking lightly at the tarmac in an attempt to dispel your racing thoughts.
You reached for a cigarette only to find your jacket was still on the barstool inside. The oversight left you without a pretence to cling to, so you gave it up and returned your eyes to Joel, leaning into the admission that you'd followed him out of the joint.
Joel took another drag of his cigarette and didn't acknowledge your obvious attention. Something in his posture told you he meant to though, he simply liked making you wait.
“This place ain't your regular evenin’ haunt,” he drawled after another few moments.
For all the focus he threw your way, he might've been saying the words to anyone in the lot, but their meaning was pointed and you were the only one present.
You felt yourself flush with embarrassment as his reference to your evenings in the laundromat hit home.
He knew what you’d been doing then. He’d watched you wait for him.
The humiliation you’d expected this recognition to strike floated quickly to the surface, but with it came something else, buoyed by his mocking tone.
“Want me to try usin’ your loyalty card at the register?” You snapped, taking a cheap shot at his own habits and the liquor bottles that you’d seen litter his trash cans at intermittent periods over the past two years.
Despite following him outside, you were angry that Joel was here. Your last interaction with the man had pulled forward feelings that you were ashamed to acknowledge. It was hard enough to accept them in the solitude of your trailer or the quiet laundry block, being forced to confront them here, when your school friend was on the other side of the brick wall, was too much.
Your cheap shot landed, at least insofar as it pulled the full weight of Joel’s attention in your direction. Even in the low light, you could see his face darken as he pushed himself off the wall to close the gap between your bodies. Two strides and he was there, staring down with the same silent control he’d embodied in the laundry room as his eyes had flicked down to the quarter by his boots.
Your breaths came quickly in your chest, rattling against your rib cage, as your anger was engulfed by the same sense of heady expectation that’d driven you to the laundry block each night for two weeks. Your transparent desperation for something you couldn't put words to earned you a mocking smile from the older man, who seemed to enjoy how quickly a shift in his expression had stolen your capacity for back-talk.
Then, in a move you didn't understand, Joel reached out a hand and slowly brought it to your bare shoulder, squeezing a fistful of skin roughly between his fingers and palm. Your arm twitched where he touched it, shivering in the sticky night air before his hand skimmed down to your wrist which he drew into the tight circle of his calloused grip.
There was no caress in these actions, but there was no force either. As you stood taking the older man’s touch it struck you that there didn't need to be; Joel could spread your legs and bring his hand to your cunt in the middle of a parking lot without pulling so much as a protest from your lips. The satisfaction that coloured his hard gaze told you he knew this too and knowledge of how thinly your self-respect sat on your skin bled the heavy flush in your cheeks down into the rest of your body.
Embarrassed, you moved to drop your face, but the moment your gaze dipped Joel’s other hand was under your chin, pressing it up until you were compelled to meet his eyes again. The cigarette between his fingers remained lit as he did this and so the action dropped a fluttering of hot ash against your collarbone which floated down onto the sensitive skin of your chest.
With your eyes back on him, Joel lifted the cigarette to his lips and continued to inhale lazy drags. The movement, coupled with the ash on your skin, added an air of dismissal to the scene and your arousal tightened around the implication that these non-specific touches, which had your breath stuttering in your throat, were worth only half of the older man’s attention.
Then, just as you were adjusting to his grip on your wrist, Joel’s hand dropped to grab at your hip, pulling a throb from between your legs as his touch drew near to the place where your body seemed to need it. You rubbed your thighs together on instinct, desperate for some friction, only for a hard leather boot to push between your feet and kick them apart, as the grip on your hip tightened in clear warning.
Don't you dare.
Your stomach swooped, but you did as you were bid, abandoning thoughts of your own relief and allowing yourself to be manoeuvred into the position the older man desired. After a moment, when he seemed certain of your compliance, Joel dropped his gaze to take in the sight of his hand lying splayed against your jean-clad hip; the tips of his fingers brushing the crease of your thigh and the curve of your arse.
It took a moment without the intensity of direct eye contact for your thoughts to gather themselves but, once they had, you recognised the pattern that connected your neighbour’s rough, seemingly disparate grasps.
Within an inch of accuracy, Joel was touching you in every place the man at the bar had tried to touch you only thirty minutes before.
You let out a sharp gasp of surprise as the realisation struck, thighs squeezing a second time, and when Joel’s gaze darted back up to caution your movement, he seemed to read this new knowledge in your eyes.
The heavy, unreadable look that had coloured his face as he'd taken in the sight of his hand on your hip, sharpened into a sneer and the grip that had been merely assertive grew almost painful. It was a different kind of victory to the look of disbelief you'd draw from him on the floor of the laundry room, but a part of you felt the success of it all the same.
A beat later Joel’s eyes had returned to their appearance of hard control, but the grip on your hip didn't loosen. You didn't say anything to challenge him, you weren't that stupid, even under the stupefying influence of his touch, instead, you simply held his gaze until his cigarette burnt low and he flicked it from his fingers to crush the butt beneath the toe of his boot.
His hand didn't move from your hip, but as his cigarette ground underfoot Joel dragged his grip to the waistband of your jeans, where he allowed his fingers to ghost the seam of bared skin between your bottoms and camisole until you were shivering against his hand. The foot between your legs disappeared, giving you leave to squeeze your thighs together again and, after a moment of pause that was almost a check for permission, you did, chasing a dirty moment of friction in the open air of the parking lot.
Joel’s eyes flicked down to watch the show, gaze drifting lazily over your quivering thighs before it darted up to pin you with a look that read as ridicule, but seemed to contain a weight of heavy satisfaction. It occurred to you then that Joel had steered you back into a situation where it was your desire, not his, on embarrassing display, and you wondered if this was his sole reason for letting you chase your own pleasure.
You forced yourself to stop squirming where you stood, your embarrassment, for once, acting as a leash to your desperation rather than an accelerant, but this act of self-denial only had the effect of drawing a small whimper from your lips.
As the sound hit the air, the hand on your hips spasmed, then dropped like a stone, and without so much as a dismissal Joel was halfway across the parking lot, disappearing into the heat of the night.
Four days later found you back in the park’s laundrette, although this time your motivations lay entirely with your laundry. After Joel’s call-out at the bar, even your tattered pride couldn't stand up to the idea of waiting for your neighbour in the washroom anymore and you'd returned to satisfying yourself with your hand and your increasingly depraved imagination.
The second washing machine remained unfixed and the awkwardly placed third washer seemed to suggest it was heading the same way. You'd already filled the temperamental machine with a handful of quarters but only half of them had registered in the counter and the frayed edges of your temper had you a second from smashing your fist against the coin-slot.
It had been a long day, the alternator in your truck had finally packed in and you didn't have the money for a replacement. You’d had to charge the battery before heading to work and then again in the parking lot at the end of your shift which had brought you home late. A new part would be out of your price range for months unless you quickly evolved past the need to eat and, whilst a quick ring to the junkyard on your break had secured you a defunct piece for thirty bucks, your faith in its longevity was non-existent. Moreover, you now owed the man at the yard a favour for handing it off so cheap, and you did not know how he intended to cash this favour in. Best case scenario you'd be sneaking him diner coffee for the next few months, but with the luck of the day behind you, the best case scenario felt like a pipe dream. So, as you stood straining on your tiptoes and your final quarter rolled right out of the slot for the third time in a row, you let a sharp cry of frustration escape through your gritted teeth.
The cry wasn't as loud as it could've been, you were too self-conscious for that, but it was loud enough that you didn't hear the washroom’s door click shut behind you until there was a heat at your back and you’d turned find your nose hitting a strong, plaid-clad arm as it reached over your head to stick a fresh quarter in the unruly machine.
A button was pressed and the washer kicked to life as you stood shivering at Joel’s close contact. It was the first you'd seen of your neighbour since the bar and his proximity felt as close to relief as something so forceful could ever be, like the cresting of a wave four days in the rising.
“Am I to take this as a kindness,” you began, the words drifting on the cautious side of a tease as you addressed the man before you. “Or is this you bullyin’ me outta the only workin’ machine?”
Your neighbour said nothing to this, he only huffed with the affectation of a man who in the past might've rolled his eyes. Then his hand was dropping back down and he pulled away from the washer, setting a foot or two of distance between your bodies.
With space now between you, Joel’s expression grew cold again. His eyes dropped down your body for a moment but didn't linger and before you could grow accustomed to the feeling of his presence he was turning and making his way back out of the block.
In total, the interaction couldn't have lasted more than twenty seconds. For some reason the brevity of his attention made you feel cheaper than when he was ignoring you, and before you knew it your mouth was opening of its own accord.
“Is that all I get?” You asked.
The question might’ve almost been brattish if it hadn't been rendered so breathless by your disbelief.
Joel turned on his heel, his hard eyes expressing how little he cared for your change in tone, and a spark of that familiar taunt, that was almost cruel, re-entered his gaze.
“You seem the kind of girl plenty satisfied by a quarter,” he ridiculed, hand against the half-open door.
You felt your answering blush in the roots of your hair as the memory of your first meeting rushed to mind. Your eyes dropped to the floor where you'd knelt nearly three weeks before and displayed a silver quarter on your tongue like a cumshot. It was humiliating enough to know that you'd done it. It was worse to have it thrown in your face without the evidence of Joel’s desire to soften the blow.
“Oh don't go blushin’ on me now like you have some shame,” he mocked, clearly deriving a mean-spirited entertainment from your reddened cheeks.
Yet there was something else in the words too, an anger of sorts, as though it was your lack of shame that had got you both into this mess. It didn't feel like a fair portrayal.
“I have shame,” you stammered.
The assertion was not much louder than a whisper, but you'd never felt the truth of any sentence more. You were nothing but shame. It was an emotion that, for the last three weeks, had come to permeate every cell in your body. The only thing more powerful than your want was the shame you felt for wanting. Your want was taking you from everything you strived to be: decent, hard-working, better than your circumstances. It was seizing you by the neck and dragging your face into one of those fairground caricatures: a short sundress over lithe legs; a cherry-cola lolly in hand. The fatherless daughter of the trailer park, who opened her legs to mean men twice her age with the enthusiasm of a well-paid hooker.
You felt the tell-tale sting of tears amass behind your eyes as your mind put words to the feelings that had tortured you since you'd knelt on the floor of this very laundry room and discovered the nature of your degeneracy.
Something in Joel’s gaze shifted like he was seeing you for the first time. Then the large, tanned hand that rested on the open door was pushing it closed.
“Come here,” he ordered, and your mind went quiet as your legs obeyed him, moving forward until you stood a foot away from his chest.
The same cold restraint was in his eyes, but the cruelty was gone.
“Get on your knees.”
The second command was as monotonous as the first, but its calm control was everything your body was crying for and you lowered yourself to the ground until you were sat on your heels.
You could see the outline of Joel’s cock beginning to strain against the fabric of his worn, blue jeans as you dropped into this stance. Your compliance did something for him, whether he'd admit it or not.
“Take me out of my pants.”
With less hesitation than was perhaps decent, you lifted a hand to unclasp the belt and button that were holding up Joel’s trousers. Enveloped in the calm of his instructions you didn't have to think, only act, and within moments you were unzipping his jeans. Then your hand was against the waistband of his boxers and you were pulling them down to expose the hard length of him.
Joel’s cock bounced up the moment it was free of its confines, but you continued pulling the fabric lower until his heavy balls were hanging over the waistband too, framed by a patch of dark hair. He was half-hard and growing as you stared, but already the picture of his thick length had you clenching around the air between your thighs.
Unable to wait for instruction, your twitching hand moved to grab the base of him. His girth was such that you were unable to close your fingers around the shaft and yet with each pulse of blood his cock seemed to grow larger, thick veins working overtime to feed an increasingly purple head.
Before you could begin to wonder how to tackle such an undertaking, Joel’s grip was on your wrist, pulling you away until his cock bobbed down and your hand sat in the air between your damp lips and his flexing stomach.
He reached forward and uncurled your fingers until your palm lay flat.
“Spit in your hand,” he ordered, with a push towards your mouth.
It was a filthy image that clenched the muscles in your own stomach, but the roll of shame that might've once accompanied its presence was absent because it wasn't a suggestion from your head but an order from his, which made compliance a matter of good behaviour, not degeneracy.
You bent forward, allowing the saliva that had gathered in your mouth at the appearance of Joel’s cock to pool on your tongue, then you spat it onto the centre of your palm. It sat there for a moment dripping into the creases before Joel brought your hand back to the base of his length and closed your fingers around the weight of him.
His dark eyes drilled into yours, providing all the silent instruction you needed for the next part of the show. You began to twist your hand around his cock, moving up and down as you went until your spit covered the length of him. As you moved towards the head of his cock you found a bead of pre-come sitting there and circled it with your thumb in a motion that had Joel jerking into your hand.
“Do that again,” he grunted, returning one hand to your shoulder and flexing the other at his side.
The specificity of his instruction left no room for you to think of anything except doing as you were told and your mind dulled into a hazy hum as you worked your fingers around his head again, gently rolling back the foreskin to twist your grip around the sensitive glans beneath.
Joel bucked into your hand a second time and he began to breathe heavily through his nose. Curious, you darted your gaze up to take in his expression and found his eyes had closed and his head was tilting backwards. The sight sent a wave of satisfaction rolling through your stomach and you picked up your pace, paying attention to the catches in his breath and repeating the twists that elicited the strongest response. It was a satisfying game at first, but after a minute of this spectacle you found that the hitches in his breath weren't enough to sate; you wanted more instruction, lest the encompassing quiet of your arousal might give way to louder thoughts.
Taking Joel’s cock in your mouth seemed too far a variation from the silent order you'd been given, but your increasingly cock-drunk brain couldn't help but sound out a middle ground and, tilting your neck to keep an eye on his reaction, you ducked your head until your lips were in line with Joel’s ballsack and then extended your tongue to lather it in your spit.
The dark eyes flew open the moment you made contact.
“Jesus. Fuck,” he grunted, thrusting wildly into your hand, once, twice, before regaining control of his hips.
His gaze dropped down to take in your cocked head and for a moment his eyes fluttered closed, as though swallowing around another curse. When he spoke again his voice was scratchy, despite the attempt at restraint.
“You like playin’ with balls do you?” he rasped, the words almost slurred.
The filthy question aroused you to no end and you swirled your tongue against his sensitive skin by way of reply.
Joel swallowed harshly, another almost shuttered action, and the hand that had been resting on your shoulder dug its fingers into your skin.
“Take it in your mouth then,” he snapped, forcing the reigns over his composure by bridling it with his temper.
Despite his tone, the command mirrored your own desires and you eagerly complied, sucking the skin you’d been lavishing into your mouth until one of Joel's balls rested against your tongue and the hair at the base of his cock tickled your nose. He thrust deeply into your hand with a groan, but his capacity for movement was hampered by the loving attention you were bestowing beneath his cock.
Rather than pulling you from your task, he brought the hand that had been flexing against your shoulder up to envelope your fingers where they lay on his cock. From there he curled them further around his skin before sliding them up and down against his length in the twisting motion you’d learnt he enjoyed. Within a few strokes, he’d gathered pace and was using your hand to fuck his cock whilst your tongue remained buried in his balls.
You couldn't see his face from your deeper position between his legs, but the spew of filth that began to drip from his mouth as he used your hand to chase his orgasm had you imagining his desire well enough.
“Fuck you like suckin’ on my balls, filthy girl?” he growled, twisting your joined hands around the head of his cock as your mouth prepared to switch sides. “You do, don't you. You like takin’ them into your pretty, pink mouth.”
The words were an assertion, not a question, and so dirty that your face flushed berry-red as he spoke them. Yet you couldn't deny their effect; your cunt clenched in arousal with each new syllable he uttered.
You released the ball you’d been messily worshipping with a wet pop before nosing eagerly after the other.
“Y’want the other one, don't cha’?” Joel hummed as you made your switch, pushing deeper into the heady space beneath his cock. “That’s it, take the other one.”
His words were almost slurred now, but the undercurrent of command that remained, even when he was a moment from climax, made you heavy with desire.
“You can take ‘m both,” he grunted, squeezing down against the base of his cock as though to draw himself out. “I’ve seen that pretty mouth. Know what it can take. Open wide.”
You nodded against his clothed thighs, jeans scuffing your cheek as you opened your mouth to draw all of him inside, flicking your tongue around his sack and then up to the sensitive skin at its base, before enveloping everything in your heat.
You felt his thighs quiver against your face.
“Look at tha’ mouth, just stuffed full,” he mumbled, beginning to piston now into your conjoined fingers despite the way the movement forced you to move your lips to chase him.
His cock began to throb in earnest against your hand.
“Fuck you need more ‘o me don't cha?” He groaned, spitting out the words with an almost incoherent rapidity. “You wanna taste my come, ain't that right, greedy girl?”
The question almost finished you off and you moaned wantonly around the contents of your mouth, sending up a wave of vibration that must've struck right at the base of Joel’s cock. His balls drew up and you felt his length swell in your grip. Suddenly he was coming, dashing a rope of white into your fist. Then his other hand was at your chin, pulling your lips from that thatch of hair and bringing it round to the head of his cock.
“Open your mouth,” he ordered as he continued to fuck your hand through the waves of his climax.
You obeyed but were too slow for the second spurt of cum that landed against your cheek. The third had better luck and hit home on the centre of your proffered tongue. As it pooled in your mouth, Joel extended his thumb from beneath your chin to swipe against the dribble of ejaculate that had splashed against your face and began to rub it into your skin as a fourth spurt of come joined the third in your open mouth.
Sensing that was the last of it, you moved your eyes up to meet his gaze and found his typically dark eyes had blown out beyond recognition. Satisfied with the pleasure you'd pulled from the stoic man you went to close your mouth and swallow down what you could, but Joel wasn't quite finished with you yet. His thumb had moved from smearing circles against your cheek to your bottom lip, and as you made to close your mouth he resisted, placing pressure against your jaw.
“Show me,” he ordered.
Understanding the ask, you spread your lips and rolled out your tongue to display the dollop of come that had gathered against its pink centre.
For a moment you mirrored the stance of your former self, three weeks gone, extending your tongue to showcase a quarter as you knelt on the laundrette floor, but the crippling shame that had hit you then wasn't present now. Your desires were the same. Your feelings were the same. But here, at this moment, you could distance yourself from the morality of what you'd done. Here you weren't acting of your own volition, you were acting under instruction, and for some reason it made all the difference.
Joel nudged your chin up and you closed your lips, swallowing around the load in your mouth. Something in his gaze seemed to flash as your throat bobbed, as though there were words on the tip of his tongue just waiting to fall loose, but then the blank look of control was back on the older man’s face and he was tucking his softening cock into his pants. As you watched him zip up his jeans and buckle his belt, your quiet haze slowly retreated and the magnitude of what had just happened began to creep in the corners of your head.
After a moment it felt wrong to still be knelt on the hard floor and so, despite your quivering legs, you pushed yourself to your feet and stood before Joel, shaking like a racehorse before a race. His eyes darted down your body once, with the perfunctory appraisal of a battlefield doctor merely checking his patient’s limbs were still attached. Then he was gone, marching out of the laundry room without a backwards glance, leaving you trembling where you stood, satisfied yet aching, whilst his come dried against your cheek.
Your laundry wasn't finished, your escapade with Joel had taken less than the twenty-minute cycle, but you couldn't stay in the room and wait for the wash to end; not with come on your cheeks and a river between your legs. So instead you dashed out the door and crossed the lot into the safety of your trailer, where you thrust your hand between your legs and allowed your fingers to drown in the sticky mess that your seemingly indifferent neighbour had left there.