He wasn’t going to fight with his head. If he didn’t, I hadn’t a chance against him. But the alternative to this pointless battering was to sit quietly and wait for him to kill me. That seemed wasteful.

I staggered upright and went for his throat with both hands. Tom grabbed my wrists and forced me back to the wall again, pinned me there. His eyes, so close to mine, suddenly widened and cut sideways, toward the door.

“Jesus Christ, Frances, what’s holding you back? I thought for sure — But if you were ridin’ this, it would fight better. What does it take, Franny?”

I wondered if she’d heard that. If he was right, she and I would both be better off if she’d ditch her principles and ride.

I could see the pores in his face in the lightning flashes; I could smell the sharp reek of his sweat and feel the moist heat of him. I twisted, felt torn things in my shoulder pull farther apart, and bit off a cry.

“Now I remember,” he said, his voice mild and cheerful. “You don’t like to be touched.” And he leaned forward and forced his mouth down hard on mine.

My teeth were already clenched; it was too late to clamp my lips between them. The hierarchy, from weakest muscles to strongest, is: lips, tongue, jaws. At least he couldn’t get past my teeth. He pulled his head back and laughed softly; his breath fanned my cheek, as warm and damp as the air. “Your head is sayin’ no, but — hell, your body’s sayin’ no, too. Guess I’ll have to change your mind.”

Somewhere in my brain, I probably had the equivalent of jaw muscles, that I could have closed and kept closed. I didn’t know where they were. Tom Worecski had ridden me once before; but the circumstances had been such that I didn’t remember what it had been like. I expected something like the blinding shock of Frances’s assault, a forced mental entry like a mortar shell. I didn’t expect Mick’s easy falling in and out, like blinking, like a switch toggled. All my expectations were worthless.

Tom was a gelid, poisonous presence inserting itself through the soft places in my personality, trickling in like dirty water through a crack. He was a flavor of decay in the back of my throat, a rotting-vegetable slickness under my fingers, the rustling sound of beetles scurrying. And it was all done slowly, slowly, so that I had time to understand what was happening to me. So I knew exactly what sort of tenant would occupy the rooms of my body once I was forced out.

I struggled. I did it physically, flat against the wall, unable to so much as get a knee up between us; and mentally with even less effect.

Suddenly I was alone again. Tom still pinned me in place, but he’d jerked back a little. He was glaring. “What the fuck you got on you?” he said. “What is it?”