November is National Novel Writing Month. The one I’m working on is full of sex and violence:

Amy slid off the driftwood and spread the quilt out around her. She sat cross-legged near the middle and offered Tooey the position alongside. “Is it nice to live here?” she asked after he took his place. “It looks like heaven.”

“It could be,” he said. “I don’t know. I go from my grandparent’s house, to the boat, to the bar. Most the time, that’s my life – home, work, drink beer, go back home.”

“If you’re not happy,” she said, “if you don’t like things, change them.”

“I think I already have.”

Amy straddled him and pulled his shirt off over his head. She pressed into him. He felt her against his chest, her loose blouse between her skin and his. Their kisses were wet. Whenever he grew too zealous, Amy backed off a bit, slowed him down. 

Tooey nibbled Amy’s ear lobe, buried into her neck. The muscles there tensed. She arched her back. Goosebumps rose on her arms and wispy hairs stood electrified and straight. She put her hand in his hair, brought him to her lips again. He grasped her waist, her hips, and his hands traveled, under her top, brushing the undersides of her breasts with his palms and her nipples with his fingertips. He pulled away and looked at Amy. Her face was flush and sporting a thin but impish smile. She opened her eyes to catch him staring and her cheeks blushed deeper.

“Are you happy?” Amy asked.

“I am right now,” Tooey answered.

Clacker pulled the trigger on his pistol.

Nothing happened.

He pulled again without results.

Salt stumbled on the stairway in a clumsy thrust forward. Tooey, Dee, and Clacker turned and raced back to the third floor, Dee leading the retreat.

Clacker stopped at the top of the stairs, swept a lamp and a stack of books from the lid of an ornate butler’s console, and tipped the heavy cabinet down the steps. Salt squawked but there was no crash. The hindrance would be temporary.

Frantic moments passed in slow motion.

A memory popped into Tooey’s head. When his father was alive, one of their favorite things to do together was explore the scads of abandoned Eastern Shore farm and manor houses. Wesley Walter the first called this trespassing “hunting for treasure.” Whether they found any or not depended on how a person defined treasure.

Many of those forsaken but once dignified structures featured a back staircase for access to servants’ quarters. A boxy alcove stood at the end of the doctor’s hallway. Tooey pointed. Dee’s eyes lit with recognition and she flew.

Tooey and Clacker almost crashed into her when she had to throw on the brakes.

The stairwell to the levels below had been sealed off long ago.

Salt was on the third floor now too, barreling at them, foaming at the mouth.

There were steps going up. Dee seized them in leaps. The boys followed.

At the front of the long, narrow attic corridor was a wall partition, a door, a room. Salt bounded up the steps behind them. Dee darted to the room and she was in. Clacker pushed Tooey through. He himself cleared the threshold by a hair before Dee slammed the substantial oak door shut and flung the deadbolt into place.

The room was hot and empty except for one grimy parlor chair near a dormered bay window with a stained glass setting sun. Moldy wallpaper hung from the ceiling in long strips that brushed Tooey’s ears and collar. A parched, stagnant odor got in his nose.

Soon it was all he could taste.