Hunter's Moon by Chuck Logan (the false prince series txt) 📗

Except for the kid snoring in the living room. He ducked across the hall into the bathroom, cupping his groin.

Clearing up outside. Moonlight hit the snow cover and bounced through the bathroom window. He reached for the toilet paper.

“Oops, sorry,” drawled the amused husky voice behind him. Besides her smile, Jesse wore nothing except a soft sparkle of sweat, shadows and scallops of moonshine. She watched him flush the soiled tissue.

Boldly, she entered the room and he inhaled Bud’s raw HUNTER’S MOON / 51

booze-marbled sweat and her clean salt and the damp business of her thighs—Bud’s jiz and her barn-musk—rioted among the porcelain and tile. Harry’s bare butt backed into the chilly sink and her hand glided out and touched him on the left hip.

“You missed some,” she said, with one eye cocked. Her profile, in a cascade of mussed hair, looked as cool as Liberty on a dime.

“Get out of the way,” Harry said tersely.

She moved left, a feint because as he stepped around her, she shifted back and her erect nipples grazed his chest and her sweaty hair teased along his bare shoulder.

He pushed her away and crossed the hall to his room. Her voice chased him. “Bud fell asleep on me. But you don’t look like you’re going to sleep at all.”

9

Harry woke up with a bad case of nerves hammering dirty copper nails into the roof of his mouth and somebody was shaking him and shouting, “Daylight in the swamp.” He batted a hand away.

Bud. With sidelight from the hall molding the grin on his fat cuckold’s face. As he turned and lumbered from the room, his grape-colored polypro long undies rode down his chubby hips and showed the hairy crack of his ass. On his way out, he yanked the light cord and the dangling Iron Cross swung back and forth.

The glare of the naked bulb punched up the debris of Chris’s discarded cigarette packs, ashes, socks, and underpants. A Kmart boombox sat on the desk in a clutter of tapes and its overbuilt plastic case was redundant with ledges that were designed to collect dust.

An executed schoolbook lay facedown on the floor.

Jesse’s chanteuse voice lilted down the hall, singing in the kitchen.

She was good, with a throaty Linda Ronstadt edge, but this morning it sounded like mockery.

52 / CHUCK LOGAN

You missed some. A wave of folly stood Harry up. He had to go out there and see the look on her face.

Towel wrapped around his waist, shaving kit in hand, Harry went into the hall ready to see how Jesse would put the day in play. Instead he saw a drowsy Chris, leaning his long mop of hair against the wall next to the bathroom with his raccoon eyes grainy and red, glued half shut. He wore a T-shirt and droopy Jockey shorts and tried to hide his withered left leg behind his good one. Harry got in line for the bathroom and avoided looking at the leg.

“Shake it up, you guys, if you want to eat before it gets light!”

yelled Jesse as utensils tinkled over cast iron and the sound of frying bacon, eggs, sausage, hash browns, and onions crackled behind her voice.

Becky came out of the bathroom wearing a shapeless nightie, with her hair all askew around a face pink and puffy as chewed bubble gum. She plodded by Harry with downcast eyes. Chris went in.

“Set the table,” ordered Jesse in the kitchen.

“Leave me alone!” The half whine, half snarl of the teenaged op-pressed.

“Hurry it up. Hubba hubba.” Bud. Making a busy clatter in the main room, moving around rifles and snowshoes. “Fucking beautiful out, no wind, thirty degrees…” Dropped cartridges clinked on the oak planks.

Harry’s turn in the bathroom. Where Jesse had stood last night like a pillar of fire was just chilly tile under his bare feet. Fast shower.

Quick shave. A mouthful of Listerine to chase the corrupt taste. He returned to his room and pulled on long underwear under the mad gaze of Goya’s cannibal giant.

He tossed aside the fancy Gore-Tex trousers—Bud’s gift—and put on his own heavy wool trousers. Resentment welled in his throat.

“Get me up here in this.”

Jesse waited in the kitchen with her Gypsy braids in black ranks, twisted tight to her skull. Proper as starch in an ironed blouse, she placed a cup of coffee in his hand. “You don’t HUNTER’S MOON / 53

look so high and mighty this morning, Harry,” she said with lowered eyes.

They both looked up at the same time and saw Bud, entering the den, caught in midstride, staring at them. “Eat. Eat,” ordered Bud, averting his eyes, flapping out his arms as a sleepy Becky loaded plates of food on the table.

Harry needed a minute to get organized so he opened the French doors and took his coffee out on the frigid porch. Turning, he caught Jesse’s quick glance as she pushed off the kitchen counter with a restive thrust of her hips. He thought of a dirty book, the well-thumbed pages opening right to the good parts.

He turned to the windows. The wind and snow had left behind a vast Tiaga stillness and a horned moon that wedged in a canyon of clouds and scattered silver dollars on Glacier Lake.

Jesse moved beside him and their shoulders touched. “You have anything this pretty down in your Cities?” she asked.

“What is it with you?” he said and their voices were clandestine, thick in their throats.

“People can’t help when they meet,” said Jesse, matter-of-factly.

“He’s my friend, Jesse.”

“Your friend is the greatest show on earth,” she said and before he could respond, she walked back into the lodge.

He stared into the darkness. Below a cape of clouds, the glittering points of Orion the Hunter hung low in the east and he picked out the icy diamond of Rigel and above it, the three studs in the constel-lation’s belt. A crack appeared above the crooked hump of Nanabozho Ridge and a sliver of purple and