you're too young & eager to love

Notes: This gets a little vulgar. Tastefully vulgar? If that’s possible. How about – slightly vulgar but with a point. I’m trying to create Clementine into a woman that is, understandably, lackadaisical with sex due to her profession. Yet - I want her to appreciate the more dignified clients, like Peter, and come to value those types of clients for various reasons. However, Clementine’s past is full of skeletons and difficulties, most of them centering around her father in deep-dark ways, so she’s better suited for the rough men. I also don’t think it’s much of a stretch for her to enjoy that type, as much as she hates them, because it’s more of what she’s used to. Or, in the most basic of ways, it’s what her body is used to.

So, this piece is mostly sex. With character insight, but still.

It’s potentially not even a piece, but a few random moments.




-

The squaw is cold, and she finds that a blessing in this town of heat and dust. His hand on the back of her neck, pinning her to the mattress, and the pivoting of his hips is as steady as a metronome. He smells like tin and wolves; she moans anyway, but her eyes are on the wall, watching the designs on the maroon paper flick in and out of focus. If it’s a busy day, she loses her concentration, thinks she might fall asleep between each grope. Her body is sore, skin stretched and flushed, lips swollen and throat dry. She has a bruise beneath her left ear from where some cowboy marked her with his mouth, mistaking Clementine for a one-man woman and not a whore rented by the half-hour.

-

Peter catches her by the back of the head, his calloused hand buried thick into her blood curls. He kisses her a little fuller and a little deeper than Clementine thinks he means to. “Hey now, stud.” She murmurs against his mouth, smiling with surprise. “You ain’t paid for that pleasure.”

This is them. Their peculiar arrangement of limbs, hers softer and less colored by the sun. His silence more of a blessing than a burden, but his free hand dips down and strokes her bare stomach. Like petting a feline. He keeps his gaze on the ceiling and his thoughts elsewhere. So, she talks, propped up against his sturdy build, teasing his hipbone with her fingertips. “You know I done hate taking off the corset.”

“I don’t want to lay with a dress, I want a woman.”

“So I’ve reckoned, sugar.” She pats his arm affectionately before untangling herself. With the sun lowering, the room turns to sepia and gold. Quickly, she twists her hair into a loose braid, letting it coil down her shoulder like rope. She is delicate but warm, a round face and clever eyes, plump thighs but a little thin around the waist. Still, Peter seems satisfied by her, sitting up only to pull her back down.

She laughs low in the throat, and it runs into a sparrow sigh when he presses his mouth to her breasts. Peter is tender and hard, like shaping fresh gunmetal, and he works her smoothly. Clementine forgets, sometimes, of the room and the saloon below. Of the wedding band around his finger and the weight of her disreputable profession. Lets him fancy her as some other woman, or one kind of wife, while she arches to reach him halfway.

When they finish, she has to braid her hair again. She checks the horizon for the time of day, and Peter dresses with his back turned. “Say, it’s Easter Sunday tomorrow.”

Sitting on the edge of the mattress, Peter works the laces of his boots, and she slides her skirts up.

“The preacher has himself a nice new church, I hear. You ought to take your wife for the social after the sermon. Have her dance some of ‘at stiffness away.”

He glances at her, and she sees weariness briefly distort an otherwise handsome face. “Well, now, I didn’t mean nothing by it. I’m sorry, s’not my place.” Wrapping the pleated corset around her frame, she feels tightened and tidied but her fingers stumble over the hooks and laces. She’s almost surprised when he helps her, steadily pulling and knotting, the concentration of his eyes burning a stamp against her back.

-

“Don’t you look pretty like that?”

Sitting on the top of the stairs, her dress pulled so high over her knees, Clementine takes a drink of whiskey. It stains her tongue and colors her spirit. Her hair falls in pagan curls, crowded around her face like a tangle of thorns, but she wags her finger back and forth tauntingly. He’s a soldier, that man there, standing in his uniform that smells of battlefields and ghosts. She dislikes soldiers, almost beyond the cowboys, but she dislikes this one even more now that she’s been drinking.

He approaches her anyway, so swift or her limbs are too heavy to react. He wants to play like she’s the sweetheart he left behind in Kansas, but she bites his thumb when he presses it to her mouth. Cursing, he calls her a filly and threatens to use her there on the stairs, tear her another hole - thinking himself original with his rank words.

She sways a little from the whiskey, peering up at him, mouth curled smug. “And you’d be having the equipment for that, sug?”

He backhands her across the jaw, loud as a bullet, and Clementine keeps her face turned from the impact. Something churns in her chest, even though the alcohol has made her numb, whipping up childhood memories as quick as a cyclone. The soldier bends low, murmurs more foulness into her ear, so she takes a quick drink from the bottle and spits it back onto his face. The sound of his laughter quenches her.

When he hauls her to her feet, he keeps an arm around her waist, though she bites his ear and digs her dirty nails into his shoulder. He’s a lean man but sinewy with muscle, the rage of war making him uncaring about a girl worth a few copper coins. But Clementine finds this as familiar as playing faro, her blood flushed beneath her clothes, her fingers curling loosely about the neck of the whiskey bottle. She could hit him with it, hard over his head, or against the wall and use the serrated edge to press against his neck. She doesn’t; she can’t find the motivation.

“C’mon, sergeant.” She urges, a slur of a voice against the hot pulse of his neck.

He claims a room that isn’t hers, and he doesn’t close the door - just moves her against the wall, her eyes on his polished boots and the way his fingers tear her dress. The buttons are loud when they clatter on the floor. Clementine makes a noise. “Why would a whore want privacy?” She doesn’t, but she wants to protest at his heedlessness – buttons are expensive, and they cost about as much as she does. She drops the whiskey, and it shatters by their feet, stains the bottom of her skirts.

A hand over her eyes, and the soldier turns her face to the wall – a man who doesn’t like to be watched. She helps him when he lifts her up with a strong arm, hooks her dirtied ankle boots around his waist. Her hand drifts, gripping the edge of the nearby cabinet for balance, an arm circling his neck when he pushes up into her in one hard stroke. She grits her teeth at the invasion, closes her eyes beneath his palm. “Slick as sin, aren’t you?” He growls against her collarbone, laughing at the spread of color that starts down her neck, coloring the tops of her breasts. Says she’s a gash for him to rip but that she likes it doesn’t she?

Clementine thinks she does - then thinks she doesn’t. Thinks she does again because she realizes she’s making noises now, breathing heavy enough to blow the roof off a house, and she shoves her hips down to meet him. The fucking is rough, and her head hurts from being turned against the wall, her back sore from hitting painted wood and mortar. When he comes, it’s with a forcefulness that leaves her feeling violent. The warmth seeping down the insides of her thighs when he all but drops her to her feet.

In the morning, the Madame lectures her for indecency. Clementine, her cheek a little bruised, laughs at the preposterousness. She has to pay for using another girl’s room – for the inconvenience – and she tosses the coins, begrudgingly, with a gesture of her hand.


-


She gets a virgin on a lackluster Thursday night. A boy with money stolen from his father and a lanky underdeveloped build. A body he will have to grow into. But his hands are calloused, like most of the town’s male population, and he has the barest scratch of a beard on his chin.

“What’s your name, honey?” Clementine asks, leading him up from the saloon slowly, the way a skittish colt needs to be reigned in. She keeps her hand in the crook of his elbow, her smile catering to his youth.

“Billy, miss.”

The young ones are easy, polite. They’re excited by every flash of skin and wet mouth. This one is like the rest of the boys - slow to start and quick to finish. He shakes and trembles, and she calms him with her reassuring hands, lets him take his time to discovery the dip and curve of her body. Guides him down the more complicated paths and fakes a crashing crescendo.

She always lets the virgins stay longer than they should, liking their novice poetic attempts of admiring her hair, her eyes, her small chin.

Billy thanks her for the lesson before leaving, planting a kiss on her unscarred cheek. It makes her laugh, and she wonders if he’s ever once thanked Hannah.

-