The Sensory Inheritance

By late afternoon Susan had stopped trying to keep the mud off her legs. It had dried once already in pale streaks along her calves, then the rain came back and turned everything soft again. The field gave under every step. People moved through it barefoot, in boots, in sandals that had long since become useless, carrying blankets, bottles, damp paper bags and pieces of themselves they had stopped worrying about protecting. David was three paces ahead of her when his left shoe stayed behind. He took one more step before he noticed, turned, and stared at the black shape half buried in the mud. Susan laughed so hard she had to put both hands on her thighs.

“Don’t you dare.” He looked at her. “I’m not doing anything.” “You’re enjoying this.” She straightened and wiped rain from her mouth with the back of her wrist. “A little.” He went back for the shoe, planted one bare foot beside it and pulled. Mud released the leather with a wet sucking sound loud enough to hear between the waves of music coming across the field. Someone nearby cheered as if he had accomplished something heroic. David bowed without looking at them, one sock already ruined, and Susan laughed again.

The music had been everywhere since they arrived. Even when she could no longer make out the song, she could feel the bass in the ground and the rougher edge of amplified guitar moving through the damp air. It came softened by distance, then sharpened again by thousands of voices rising and falling around it. At times the crowd swallowed the stage entirely and left only rhythm behind.

They had been awake too long. Susan knew that because ordinary inconveniences had begun to feel funny. Rain ran under the collar of her blouse. Wet denim smelled sour and heavy. Hunger came and went without warning. David’s hair lay flat against his forehead, while her bra straps dug into skin that had been damp for hours. None of it seemed important enough to fix.

David caught up and hooked two fingers through hers. His hand was cold around the edges and warm in the center of his palm. Susan looked down at their joined hands and became aware of the difference before she had words for why it interested her. He did things like that without thinking. A hand found hers in a crowd. His shoulder appeared when she was tired. He noticed when she was hungry before she admitted it. Susan had always understood that as the way David paid attention.

They had touched constantly since arriving. They had slept pressed together under a blanket the night before because the temperature dropped and there was nowhere else to go. She had leaned against him through songs, kissed him with strangers standing inches away, let him put an arm around her waist whenever the crowd tightened. David knew the places she liked because he had learned them by repetition. His hand went to her waist, the back of her neck, the inside of her knee with the easy confidence of somebody returning to familiar ground. Susan had never thought there was anything missing from that. She liked being known by him. Familiar touch had become part of navigating the place. His thumb moved once across the side of her finger. “Where are we going?” she asked. “Somewhere drier.” “You’ve been saying that for an hour.” “I still believe in it.”

They moved away from the thickest part of the crowd and toward a ragged line of tents, tarps and cars where people had made shelter from whatever they could find. Privacy existed in fragments. A blanket tied between two vehicles. A canvas flap. The rear door of a van left open while someone changed clothes behind it. People slept with their faces turned into jackets while strangers stepped around their feet. Susan had expected the lack of privacy to make everyone guarded. Once nobody could pretend they were unseen, being seen seemed to matter less.

A woman sat under a blue tarp with her back against the wheel of a station wagon. She was perhaps ten years older than Susan, maybe less. Rain and bad light made age difficult to judge. Her dark hair hung almost to her waist, and a man’s shirt covered her to mid-thigh. Beside her, a broad-shouldered man was slicing an apple with a pocketknife onto a paper plate. The woman raised the bottle in her hand when Susan looked over. “Water?”

Susan hesitated because she had learned by then that every offered drink had to be considered for a second. The woman seemed to read it on her face. “Just water.” David glanced at Susan and left the answer with her. “Yes, please.”

They ducked under the tarp. It sagged low enough that David had to bend his head. The air beneath it was warmer and smelled of wet canvas, apple skin, cigarette smoke and bodies that had been rained on for most of the day. The woman handed Susan the bottle. “I’m Ruth. That’s Michael.” Michael lifted the knife in greeting, then went back to the apple. Susan gave her name, then David gave his.

The water tasted faintly metallic from the bottle. Susan drank too quickly anyway. When she passed it to David, Ruth watched the movement of her hand with an attention that felt unusually direct and did not glance away when their eyes met.

“Cold?” Ruth asked. Fine bumps had risen along Susan’s arms. “A little.” Ruth reached out, then stopped before touching her. “May I?” The question was so simple that Susan almost laughed. People had bumped into her, leaned across her, grabbed her hand to steady themselves and put arms around her all weekend. Nobody had asked permission to touch her forearm. “Sure.”

Ruth laid two fingers against the inside of Susan’s wrist. The contact was warm and dry. Her fingers simply rested where Susan’s pulse moved beneath the skin, and Susan became aware of her own heartbeat, then of Ruth’s fingertips, then of David sitting close enough that his knee touched hers. Michael kept cutting the apple while the music rolled across the field again, lower now, a distant roar breaking into applause.

Ruth lifted her fingers. Susan’s wrist felt colder where they had been. “Most people touch like they already know what they’re going to find,” Ruth said. She took a piece of apple from Michael’s plate and bit into it, juice shining briefly on her lower lip. “Sometimes it’s worth finding out first.” David shifted beside Susan, his knee staying against hers. She expected him to make a joke because he usually did when a conversation wandered somewhere neither of them understood, but he stayed quiet. Ruth looked between them with enough patience to let the silence hold. Susan rubbed her thumb over the place on her wrist where Ruth had touched her. The skin felt exactly the same. She wanted Ruth to do it again.

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Susan turned her wrist in her lap so the pale inside of it showed again. She did not look at Ruth when she did it. She looked at the two faint marks her own thumbnail had left. Ruth saw. “Again?” Susan nodded, and Ruth’s fingers came back to the same place and stayed there longer. The pulse had quickened. Susan felt it against Ruth’s skin before she felt it in her own chest. David’s knee pressed harder into hers. Under the tarp the air held the day’s rain and the sweet edge of cut apple. Outside, a cheer went up and died without becoming a song she could name.

Ruth’s fingers moved a fraction toward the crease of Susan’s elbow and stopped. “Yes.” The path up her forearm was nothing. A line of warmth. Then Ruth found a place just below the inner elbow that made Susan’s breath catch, small and involuntary. Ruth held the pressure there until the catch passed and the skin under her fingers settled, then repeated it once more, lighter.

Susan’s mouth opened. She shut it again. Michael offered the plate without looking up from the knife. “Apple.”

Susan took a slice because her hands needed an occupation. Juice ran to her wrist and met Ruth’s fingers. Ruth smiled at that as if the fruit had done her work for her. She lifted Susan’s wrist and put her mouth where the juice had gone. The kiss was not on the mouth. It was on the pulse. Warm. Wet. Finished almost at once.

David made a sound that might have been a laugh if he had let it become one. Susan looked at him. His eyes were on her wrist, then on her face. He was flushed under the dirt on his cheek. His hand found the wet denim at her knee and stayed there, warm through the soaked cloth.

Ruth sat back on her heels. The man’s shirt she wore had fallen open another button. Rain thickened on the canvas and made the space underneath feel smaller, warmer, closer to their skin. Michael set the knife down and wiped the blade on his jeans. When he looked up, he was looking at Ruth’s mouth first. Susan saw it. So did David. Whatever this was, it was already happening between the two of them.

Susan took Michael’s wrist and put it where Ruth’s fingers had been. His hand was larger and cooler. He found the pulse and stayed on it long enough that she felt her own heartbeat climb into his palm. She laughed once, helpless, and pulled his hand higher herself, over the wet sleeve, onto the skin above it.

David’s mouth found her temple. He kissed her there with his eyes open, watching Michael’s hand move on her. Ruth had already reached for him. She got a sound out of his throat that Susan had only ever heard in the dark. Hearing it in daylight, under someone else’s mouth, dropped a sudden heat through Susan’s stomach.

Ruth kissed David properly then, with enough hunger to make him startle before he kissed her back. His hand stayed on Susan’s knee the whole time, gripping hard enough to leave a print in the wet denim.

Susan unbuttoned her own blouse because the cloth was cold and because she wanted Michael’s mouth on the heat under it. The fabric peeled from her collarbone with a sound like wet paper. A drip from the tarp hit her sternum and ran between her breasts. She jumped, then laughed, and Michael laughed too, low, before he put his mouth on the water and followed it down.

His hair smelled of smoke and damp wool. Susan held his head there and looked at David. David was watching her with his mouth still shiny from Ruth. He looked wrecked and pleased and younger than he had ten minutes ago. He reached across the cramped dark and put his hand over Susan’s breast, over Michael’s mouth, as if he needed to feel both of them at once. Michael made room for him. Ruth made a small approving sound.

“Christ,” David said, almost to himself. Susan kissed him. Apple and rain and Ruth’s mouth were all on his tongue. She bit his lower lip because she wanted to know if he would let her. He did. He pulled her closer and knocked his shoulder into the station wagon wheel. The tarp shuddered. Water sheeted off one edge and landed on Ruth’s bare thigh. Ruth swore, laughing, and stripped the last of the shirt off as if the wet had decided it for her.

She was beautiful in the ordinary way of a body that had been rained on all day. Soft belly. Dark nipples drawn tight by cold. A smear of mud at one knee. Michael looked at her like a man who still got caught by the sight. He reached behind himself without leaving Susan and found Ruth’s hip, thumb pressing in. Ruth covered his hand with hers and moved it where she wanted it. Susan watched that private correction and felt her own want sharpen. The look Michael gave Ruth changed as her hand moved his, and Susan felt the answer to it in her own body.

David’s belt fought him. Susan helped, laughing when the wet leather slipped. She got her hand inside his jeans because she wanted the heat of him, the proof. He was hard enough that the contact made his breath punch out. Ruth’s hand joined Susan’s, overlapping, both of them on him at once. David dropped his forehead against Susan’s. “Sue.” “I know.” She did know. She could feel how much he liked being seen. It made her reckless. She shoved his jeans down as far as the cramped space allowed. Mud from her knee transferred to his thigh. Ruth bent and took him into her mouth without ceremony, and the sound David made then was new. Susan had never heard that one. She stared at the place where Ruth’s lips stretched around him and felt a corresponding pull low in her own body, vicious and bright.

Michael had her jeans open. The wet denim clung and twisted. She had to lift, wriggle, kick one leg free while her other calf stayed trapped. Her underwear came with the jeans, inside out, and landed somewhere near the apple plate. She was bare from the waist down under a tarp that hid nothing from three other adults, rain ticking on canvas, a whole field of strangers twenty feet away. The embarrassment lasted long enough to make her wetter.

Michael put his mouth on the inside of her thigh and found her before she had a word ready, licking through the slick already there. Susan’s hand flew to David’s hair and made a fist. David kissed her open-mouthed while Ruth worked him and Michael’s tongue made a slow, filthy path that had nothing careful left in it. Susan pushed into Michael’s face. He made a noise against her that she felt more than heard.

Ruth came off David with her mouth wet and looked at Susan as if offering him back. Susan took him. Rain and skin and Ruth. She knew this part of him and did not know it like this, with another woman’s spit still on him and David’s hand shaking in her hair. She took him deeper than she usually did. He cursed into Ruth’s mouth.

Michael’s hands gripped her hips, firmer now, his earlier restraint gone. A drip landed on her stomach and he smeared it with his thumb without lifting his mouth. Susan reached down blindly and found him through his jeans, thick, already leaking through the cloth. She wanted that. She dragged the zipper and got her hand around him, hot and wet at the head, and stroked him the way she wanted to be touched, firm and a little too fast. Michael groaned against her. Ruth heard it and pulled Michael’s face up by the hair so she could kiss her own taste off his mouth, then pushed him back down onto Susan as if she liked lending him.

David saw that. His hips jerked. “Fuck. Sue, look.” She looked. Ruth was kissing Michael like she meant to keep him. Then Ruth swung a knee over David’s thighs, awkward under the low canvas, and put his mouth on her breast. David took it as if he had been waiting. He sucked like he was starving. Susan had seen him do that to her. Seeing him do it to Ruth, greedy, unselfconscious, his hand sliding up the back of Ruth’s muddy thigh, made Susan so hungry she had to take him out of her mouth and put her forehead to his hipbone just to breathe.

“Don’t stop,” she told him, meaning the hand on her and his mouth on Ruth. He didn’t. He reached for Susan at the same time, fingers finding her where Michael’s mouth had been, clumsy with want, and Michael simply made room again, two mouths and a hand in too small a space, Susan laughing once because someone’s elbow hit the wagon and the whole tarp jumped. The laugh broke into a sound she did not recognize as hers.

Ruth’s head fell back. David had his mouth lower now, between her legs, and Ruth’s hand was in his wet hair holding him there. Susan could see his jaw working. She could see Ruth’s stomach tighten. She had never watched David do that to anyone. The fact of it made him look like a stranger she wanted. She stroked Michael faster and put her mouth back on David because she needed him in two places at once and this was the only way to have it.

Michael’s tongue settled where she needed it and stayed. She came first, sudden, with David’s name in her mouth and Michael’s shoulders under her thighs and rain hitting the canvas like applause that belonged to somebody else. She kept shaking through it. Nobody stopped. The oversensitivity made her twist, and Michael eased only enough for her to bear it, then came back because she pulled him back herself.

David broke from Ruth with his mouth shining. He looked at Susan as if he had been caught doing something holy and filthy at the same time. She grabbed his face and kissed that shine off him. He came while she did it, against Ruth’s fist and Susan’s hip, heat striping her skin, the smell of it immediate, salt and rain and the inside of the tarp. Ruth worked him through it until he caught her wrist, gasping.

Ruth was still unfinished. Michael knew. He reached for her, two fingers along the outside of her, and she caught his hand and used it, riding the pressure with her eyes on him. Susan watched Ruth’s face change and understood with sudden clarity that this woman was getting off on all of it. On Michael. On David. On being watched. Ruth came with her teeth in her own lip and Michael’s forehead against her shoulder, a raw sound swallowed by a sudden swell of music from the field.

They stayed piled and breathing. The tarp leaked in the same corner. Semen cooled on Susan’s hip and mixed with rainwater running down from her ribs. David’s jeans were around one ankle. Susan’s blouse was open and twisted under her arm. Somebody’s shirt was in the mud. Michael found the water bottle by touch and drank, then passed it. Susan’s hand trembled on the plastic.

“Hi,” David said, still dazed.

Susan started laughing and could not immediately stop. Ruth dropped back against the wagon tire, naked to the rain-damp air, and closed her eyes as if she might sleep through the next song. Michael picked the last slice of apple off the plate, looked at it as if surprised it still existed, and ate it. A drip from the canvas landed on his wrist. He licked that too.

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They dressed in the cramped economy of people who had shared a blanket with strangers all weekend. Buttons in the wrong holes. Wet denim fighting its way back up muddy thighs. Michael held the tarp edge down when a gust tried to lift it. When Susan’s blouse was closed again she sat with her shoulder against David’s and felt the heat leaving her face by degrees. His mouth still tasted like Ruth when she checked.

Outside, someone laughed too loudly and kept walking. Susan rubbed her thumb over her own wrist, the first place, and felt only her pulse. David saw her do it. He took that wrist and kissed the inside of it, ordinary as handing her a shoe, and left his mouth there for a moment.

“You two headed anywhere particular?” Michael asked.

David glanced at Susan. His hair was a disaster. There was mud on his collarbone that had not been there when they crawled in.

“Drier,” he said.

Susan smiled at the ground. “He still believes in it.”

Michael’s mouth tilted. “Good luck with that.”

They sat a little longer anyway, four people under wet canvas, until the music changed again and the rain thinned to a mist that made leaving possible. When they crawled out, the field was the same field. Mud took Susan’s heel on the first step. David caught her elbow. His hand stayed there after she had her balance, thumb moving once across the same skin Ruth had asked to touch.

They walked without deciding where. The crowd thickened again as they moved toward the music, people appearing out of the gray with blankets over their heads and mud to their knees. Susan kept expecting the last half hour to become impossible in the open air. Instead David bumped her shoulder with his and nearly lost the same shoe again. She caught his arm before he could go back for it and laughed into his wet shirt.

“You okay?” he asked.

Susan considered the question. Her thighs still felt loose. Her mouth tasted faintly of apple, rain, and him. Somewhere behind them Ruth and Michael had become two strangers beneath a blue tarp again. “Yeah.” She looked at David. “You?”

He rubbed a hand over his face and left another streak of mud there. “Ask me when my legs work.”

She laughed, then reached for his hand. Instead of lacing their fingers, she turned his palm upward and put his thumb against the inside of her forearm where Ruth had first found the change in her. David watched what she was doing. He pressed once, tentative now that he knew tentativeness could matter.

“A little lighter,” Susan said.

He changed the pressure.

“There.”

The music swelled across the field, indistinct and enormous. Susan let his thumb remain where she had placed it while they started walking again.