Billy remembers:

Her name was Minerva, but everyone called her Minnie.

She was such a sweet young thing. Playing a waitress at a ramshackle restaurant, her charms and smiles were stunning behind limpid eyes. Plain clothes and a smattered apron did little to hide the fact that her body was all bones and knobs and points at the joints. Lank black hair framed her pale face, cropped unevenly as though it had been cut with a butcher knife.

Barely twenty, she held a grungy kind of beauty. She was nothing like Claire.

When Billy first entered the little place, he kept his face hidden, ignored the gaggle of other chattering patrons, and sat down at the end of the bar. Flush with the wall at his right, he folded his arms against the rough wood of the counter and began to brood. It was Minnie that saw him first.

"Hello," she said, her voice an amiable song. "I'm Minnie, and I'll be taking care of you tonight. What would you like, dearie?" She drew up to his left side, a pad in one hand with the half of a snapped pencil in the other.

"Alcohol," he said. "I don't care what it is as long as it'll do its job."

She seemed taken aback by the curt reply. He noted the clear blue of her eyes as she jotted down his request. "Um, anything else?"

"Nope. Not a thing." He grunted and stared at the splintering wood under his elbows, a Neanderthal in the flesh.

She edged away with cautious steps, as if she were unsure what to make of him. He pretended not to care.

It was a few moments later when a bottle of whiskey was placed at his arm. "I'm sorry it's not better," she said, touching his shoulder. "It's all we have. A bit old and watered, but it should still be good."

Billy popped off the cap and drank, shrugging off her tentative touch. He wrinkled his nose when the bitter aftertaste burned his tongue. It wasn't ideal, but he wasn't about to tell her that. "It'll do, I guess. Thanks, doll."

"Want anything else?" She was looking at him strangely, as though she had never seen a man before. He didn't like it.

"I'm fine," he replied, and waved her off.

She complied with one last glance over her shoulder.

Night spooled out across the windows in spectrums of cool cobalt and gunmetal clouds. The bottle drained quickly and the warmth spread down across his nerves, loosening the tension in his chest and shoulders. It was a pleasant sensation. He hadn't felt this way in days. The heat and the harsh conditions in the wastes wore away at his sanity, and this was a replenishment like no other.

When the bottle reached the bottom, Billy decided that he had had his fill. He pulled a handful of caps from his jacket's pockets and left them on the counter, coupled with the brown body of the empty whiskey bottle. Content with his pick of poison, he skulked out of the bar, his mind floating in a pleasurable haze.

What he hadn't expected was another body following in his footsteps.

Billy glanced behind him. "What are you doing here?"

Minnie stepped out of the shadows, dropping all pleasant pretense. "You're one of those people that roam the wastes, aren't you?" The way she said people made it sound accusing.

"Yeah, I might be," he said, rolling out the cracks in his shoulders. "What of it?"

Her fists were clenched at her sides, whitening at the knuckles. The crescents of her eyes were damp; a shimmer in the dark. "Take me with you."

Billy opened his mouth to reply, but paused when he realized that he didn't know what to say. He had never been asked that before. How was he supposed to respond? Drawing in a deep breath, he kept his back to her. "You don't know what you're asking."

"Please," she said, moving closer. "Take me with you. You're the first new person I've seen in weeks. I'm… I'm so sick of it here. You don't know what it's like. Please, take me somewhere else, somewhere nice."

"And what makes you think I'll be going somewhere nice?"

"Your kind all do."

He wanted to tell her that she knew nothing of him. She knew nothing of him or his kind, of who he was and what he set out to do and what he faced every day, and that a lightheaded town waitress shouldn't expect a damn thing from someone like him, but he didn't.

Instead, Billy bit his tongue and sighed. "That ain't the truth, little lady. Some of us are going places we don't ever want to see, but we go anyway because we have to. Some of us have no choice. Some of us do this because it's the only way we know." He turned and faced her, determined to show her what he meant.

"Oh my god," she breathed, taking a sudden step back. "My god, your eye."

He had looked into a mirror enough times to know exactly what she saw: the face of a young man of twenty-three with a fresh, jagged scar tearing up the flesh across his right eye. A milky white orb of glass kept the socket from collapsing, and it stared back with an eerie emptiness.

Minnie's expression was a bizarre clash between fascination and horror. "Are… are those stitches?" Her fingers hovered toward the reddened skin, trembling.

"Don't." He flinched away. Even though she hadn't even touched him, he didn't want her to try. He was balancing on the line, precariously on the edge, and it was taking all of his concentration to keep himself from accepting the plunge.

"Are you okay?" Her voice was rife with concern. It was something he hadn't heard from another person in a long while, and it crept under his skin and into his veins, pushing through toward his heart.

"I'm fine." It was harsh and abrupt, punctuating his disinterest. He wished he could believe himself. Pivoting on his heel, he began to walk away.

The strength of her hand enclosing around his wrist made him stop. "Please," she said. "I… if I can't go with you, then help me."

He shouldn't ask, he knew, but the hook had pierced through his tongue and it was drawing him in, blood and flesh and all. "How?"

Minnie squeezed. The warmth from her palm snaked along the length of his arm. "I need money. Just a little. I mean, I wouldn't just ask you to just give it to me. I could do something for it, anything, I really could—"

Billy gritted his teeth and pulled his wrist away. "I don't think so."

"Are you sure?" He felt her breasts press against his shoulder blades and her fingers roam up his sides. They were thin, strong; working hands.

He set his jaw to ignore the stoking fire. "Why do you do this to yourself?"

"Caps don't grow on trees." Her voice was bitter.

Billy forced a halfhearted chuckle from his throat. "Sorry, lady. I'm not fucking you for caps."

"I promise, I'll make it worth your while." Her insistent fingers unbuckled his belt, snaking under the leather of his armor. "Just let me try."

He fought the urge pooling inside of him, but it proved useless, and he sucked in a sharp breath of air when her hand curled around him and began with slow, long strokes. "Not here," he found himself saying, but it sounded so distant and muffled to his ears, an entire world away. His head was spinning as her mouth met his collarbone, wet and warm and wrong.

Billy knew he shouldn't be doing this. Andy was expecting him at the other side of town. They had to leave, move on, get away from this place to drift off to the next, and yet here he was, completely enthralled with ignited lust, following Minnie as she pulled him down an alleyway and into the back of the restaurant. He could taste the alcohol on her lips as she yanked him down for a kiss. She had been drinking, too, without a doubt. Considering the state of this town, she had plenty of reason. He didn't blame her. Not even when it took her twenty seconds to fumble with the door.

The bed was rickety and the mattress had seen better days, but it was more than enough. Billy held her hips and saw her bones as they stretched under her skin, highlights and shadows curling around her with every piece of clothing shed. Her ribcage was a ladder across her lungs, and his hands drummed along them and brushed her breasts while his mouth sketched lines along the slender tendons of her pale neck.

When he thrust inside her, her palms were flat upon the stubble on his cheeks, her fingertips close to the scar that marred his eye. The sounds she made were saccharine, and he savored them with the heat coiling in his loins. Soft bruises appeared beneath his teeth as the moon loomed across the sky, and the warmth of her hands against his back and shoulders urged him into shuddering release.

Billy collected his clothes just as the sun began to chase away the darkness. The woman that lay in the bed slept soundly, the blankets strewn across her body. His scars hurt and his mind was nothing but fog, but he knew what he had done.

Handfuls of caps were resting on the nightstand when Minnie opened her eyes.