Written in the Scars (28 page)

“You know,” I say, smiling at her, “I don’t think there was a time I didn’t love you.”

She beams, rolling me on my back and lying on my chest. I love the way she feels against me, her weight reinforcing her presence in my life.

“It’s true,” I say, cupping her ass cheeks in my hands. “I think I loved you from the minute I saw you. I know I was obsessed with you since then, but it just morphed into love as I grew older and could understand it.”

“Do you remember the time you got in a fight with the boy at my softball game in high school?” she laughs. “I was mortified!”

I shrug, watching her relive the memory. “He was flirting with you from the sidelines. And then he had his buddy come up to me and tell me he was going to fuck you that weekend. I made sure to get the point across.”

“You did,” she says, shaking her head. “You were insane.”

“No, I was marking my territory. Besides, he shouldn’t have talked about you like that. I should’ve hit him harder.”

Her head tosses back as she laughs. I wait for her to settle, my hand falling off the side of the bed and beneath the mattress. Pulling out an envelope, I lay it on my chest.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“It’s something for you.”

She struggles to sit up and, with a heavy dose of anticipation, she takes the envelope and opens it. After reading the short letter from Mrs. Kruger, she looks inside the envelope again.

Her breath catches in her throat as she sees the check. “What is this?”

“It’s two thousand dollars.”

With wide, beautiful eyes, she looks at me. “Ty . . .”

“That’s why Nila called. She wanted to make sure I got it because they lost the tracking and sent it a week ago.”

Elin’s eyes light up, the stress of the situation evaporated.

“You can apologize now,” I chuckle.

“Two thousand dollars?” she asks, looking at the check again in disbelief.

“What can I say? I’m a hell of a worker, especially when I’m working for something specific.”

She eyes me curiously. I pick her up and sit her on top of me, so she’s straddling me.

“This will catch up on our bills,” she says. “It’s a godsend.”

“No.”

“No?” she laughs.

“No.” I look as deeply as I can into her eyes. “My paychecks from Blackwater Coal will catch up on our bills. This money is for
you
.”

Her throat moves as she forces as swallow. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t want to wait to move on with our lives. We’ve wasted enough time stressing, saving money, waiting until the time is right.”

“You mean . . .”

“If you still think we need to see a fertility doctor, make the appointment. Use that money for the co-pays and whatever.”

“Really?” she gasps. “Are you sure? I don’t know if it’s logical, Ty. We could use it on other things right now.”

“It makes perfect sense if this is what you want.”

I rise up and palm the back of her head and bring her mouth to mine. She moans against my lips as I flip her to her back and hover above her.

“I want to put a baby inside you,” I whisper into her mouth. She shivers, arching her hips so her bare pussy brushes my cock.

“Do it,” she moans, reaching down and stroking my length.

I bite my lip as she squeezes my dick. “I’m so fucking hard,” I say through gritted teeth.

Releasing me, I feel her hand beneath me. Looking down, I see her fingers gliding through her wetness.

Her eyes on me, she smiles devilishly as she brings her fingers to my lips. “I’m so wet for you it’s ridiculous,” she breathes, swiping the moisture over my bottom lip.

I suck her fingertips into my mouth and watch her eyes grow wide. My cock pulses against her opening so hard it hurts.

“How do you want it?” I ask, taking a nipple into my mouth. I suck it, rolling it with my tongue, as my other hand cups her other breast.

She moans at the contact, raising her hips to meet mine again. “Just give it to me,” she begs, arching her back further.

I flip her onto her belly and flatten my palm right above her pussy, raising her ass up in the air. She looks at me over her shoulder, a glimmer in her eye that goes straight to my cock.

“Hold on, baby,” I say, touching the tip of my dick against the opening of her pussy. “This is gonna be one helluva ride.”

TY

Pulling up to the Bath House, the little building miners use to change from street clothes to work clothes, I flip off the lights to the truck and sit in the spot marked “Second Shift Boss” without getting out.

My breath billows in front of me, hitting the quickly chilling windows and causing them to fog up.

There’s a sense of familiarity in the routine of doing this, my first day back to work. I’ve done it for years, after all. But the last time I saw this place I was being carted out in an ambulance. Even though I know it’ll be fine and I really do believe everything I said to Elin, it still has my stomach a little twisted.

I watch as a car pulls up a few spots down and Pettis climbs out. He walks in front of my truck, never looking up at me, and enters the House. The light streams out the door, cutting a slice of halogen-induced sunshine over the mine mud that saturates the ground.

“How’d I get so fucking lucky?” I mutter to myself, grabbing my lunchbox off the passenger’s seat. I get out and lock up and head inside the Bath House. The atmosphere is somber as I enter, my twelve-man crew, counting me, all present.

The walls are a dingy yellow color that looks like piss. The floor is cement, chipped and stained and probably grey when it was poured decades ago. With the years of coal mud being trekked over it, it’s now the color of tobacco spit.

Cord looks up and smiles, fastening the last snap of his bibs. The mine tape that lays horizontally across the material reflects the lights above. “About time you showed up,” he jokes. “Someone’s gonna have to play nice with Pettis. They don’t pay me enough for that.”

“Fuck off,” I say, swallowing hard. I stick my lunch in my locker and start going through my gear.

“The Pre-Shift Report is in your inbox,” Jiggs says, testing the batteries on his flashlight and helmet. They last one ten-hour shift, maybe a little more. We learned the hard way to make sure they’re good and bright before you head to the shaft, otherwise you’re fighting a shitty light for ten hours in a place that’s as dark and damp as your worst childhood nightmare.

I nod, acknowledging the existence of the report, and step into my bibs. The guys chatter around me, easing into a role we’ve played most of our adult lives, good naturedly ribbing each other, and I say a little prayer that it holds. Pettis isn’t usually on our crew and I’m not sure why he is this time. He’s a poison to every team he’s on, and nearly every Foreman, myself included, has demanded he be removed at one point or another.

“How long is he gonna make it?” Jiggs mumbles as he walks by. I shrug, knowing he means Pettis, but I don’t know. I wonder the same thing. After this shit at Thoroughbreds, there’s no way I’m keeping him with me.

The crackle of my radio breaks my concentration. It brings a bolt of realism to the moment.

“Whitt, this is Percora. You get the report?”

“Yeah,” I say into the radio. I swipe it out of my box and scan it quickly. “I see the equipment locations. Ceilings are bolted for the first half mile. We’re mining the top and south ends.”

“Yup,” Percora confirms. “Good to have ya back, Whitt. Try not to get crushed tonight, will ya?”

“Go to hell, Percora,” I say, shaking my head.

The radio falls silent and I grab my flashlight. “You boys ready?”

A chorus of mumbles rings out and we all make our way to the door. The wind picks up, a cold undertone to the breeze shearing across the parking lot as we head to the opening of the slope.

Cord takes a big breath of air. “Ah, there’s nothing like the smell of shit in the evening.”

Jiggs laughs. “The smell of that direct deposit next Friday is gonna be worth it.”

“The things we do for money,” Pettis chimes in.

“Pettis,” Cord says, looking at me and waiting for some indication that he should be quiet. I don’t give it to him. “The next ten hours are gonna go a whole lot fuckin’ easier if you shut the fuck up.”

“I didn’t say anything to you, McCurry,” Pettis fires back.

“See, that’s the thing,” Cord says, standing tall over Pettis. “It doesn’t matter if you speak to me. Just hearing your voice is enough to make me want to break you in half. So until Ty figures out how to get you off this crew, let’s operate under the understanding that I have no problem busting you in the face. Again. And you won’t do shit back.”

Pettis straightens his shoulders, but wobbles. “What the fuck did I do to you?”

“Think about it,” Cord winks. “I’m sure somewhere inside that dense head of yours, you’ll figure it out.”

The air around us sizzles, the mood changing. The mine does that to you. Something about staring down a black abyss that leads you hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the earth in a slot just big enough to stand in will sober up the goofiest of men. Doesn’t matter how many times you do it. Repetition does not help. It’s an unnatural motion, a trip to hell every damn time.

“You okay?” I ask Cord. His outburst was a little over-the-top, even being that it was directed at Pettis.

“Yeah. Just a lot of shit I’m thinking about. You know how it goes.”

“What about you?” I ask Jiggs. “Your head on straight?”

“I haven’t slept in two nights. I’ve fought with my wife for about fifty-two hours straight. Yeah, I’m great.”

“Is she still talking about moving?”

“Fuck, she’s on the phone with realtors, her mom, going through ads trying to find me a job down there. I just can’t get through to her.”

“Her heart is in the right place,” I say.

“I know,” he mutters, his head hanging. “I just feel like everything is falling apart.”

The rails of the buggy scream as it hits the top. We greet the first four men to make it out before we look at each other. As foreman, I go first. Cord, Jiggs, and Grunt, a guy that doesn’t speak in words, just grunts, join me in the buggy.

No one says a word, not that we could hear it anyway. With every foot we fall below the surface of the ground, my chest tightens a little more. The air gets a little damper. The darkness more suffocating. The sound of the equipment below louder.

The shaft is narrow and low, just big enough for equipment to get in and out. It feels like it shrinks as we sink farther into the Earth.

I close my eyes and picture Elin, wondering what she’s doing. In my mind, she’s curled up on our bed, her reading glasses covering her eyes, a stack of papers on her lap. She looks up at me and smiles, her hair falling over her shoulders.

The equipment is still running, barking and howling, a hellish sound that makes perfect sense for the setting, once we hit bottom. Reluctantly, I part my eyes and let them adjust to the absence of light.

Climbing out of the cart, I nod to the next four to leave from the first shift, my boots sinking in the mud. It squishes around my weight, sliding up the bottom of my bibs.

“Fuck,” I hiss, looking up to the Yoder, the foreman just getting off. “It’s wetter than fuck down here.”

“Yeah,” he says, his face so black from the soot and mud that I can only see the whites of his eyes. “It’s really fuckin’ damp. I called up a few hours ago because I’ve not seen a hole this damn wet in my whole life.”

I pick up a boot and the mud falls off in globs. “This is gonna be fun.”

“But hey,” Yoder says, smacking me on the back, “we’re back to work.”

“Yeah,” I say, letting out a half-laugh, “we’re back to fuckin’ work.”

Yoder goes off to wait for the buggy to come back down to pick up him and the last three guys. I find the Dinner Shack—a picnic table on a sled—and lay out my report. Ignoring the shrill of the machines and the dim light and the putrid smell of coal, I study our objective.

“It’s gonna be hell,” Jiggs says, clasping my shoulder with his hand. “You ready for this, Bossman?”

I just nod. Because there’s no other way to put it: four-hundred feet below ground is a hell all of its own.