17. Cole
Cole
Thursday, Dante has film review with Addison until nine. Maya comes downstairs at seven in bare feet, my basketball shorts, and the gray sweatshirt I left on the back of the couch three days ago.
She has been wearing it since Tuesday.
I keep my mouth shut because mentioning it would give her a reason to stop, and I like seeing her in my clothes too much to give her one.
"Smells good," she says.
"Cacio e pepe. Dante's recipe."
She sits on the left side of the counter near the window, facing the door in the spot she claimed without asking any of us for permission. Her laptop is upstairs. Her phone is upstairs.
She came down without either.
I keep stirring because looking too long would tell her exactly what I know. Her knee rests against the cabinet with no phone beside it. No screen to light up. No 413 to pull her out of the kitchen.
"Where's Dante?"
"Film with Addison. Back by nine."
"So it's us."
"Us."
She pulls her knees up, and the sweatshirt stretches over them. She looks smaller inside my clothes than she does in her own, and my grip tightens around the wooden spoon hard enough to bite into my palm.
I plate the pasta into two bowls. She takes hers with both hands the way she takes the tea, wrapping her palms around the warmth.
We eat at the counter, me standing beside her with her shoulder against my arm. The contact is hers. She initiated it by sitting close enough that the gap collapsed. I let it happen. Moving away would be the right thing to do, so I stay exactly where I am.
Richard filed the parole violation report yesterday before we left his office. The protection order covers Maya, Suzanne, and the household. I twist another bite of pasta around my fork and swallow the thought with it.
"The Eastbrook series piece," she says. "I'm restructuring the post-mortem angle."
"From what to what?"
"From defensive matchups to coaching philosophy. Addison's mid-series adjustments weren't tactical. They were philosophical. He rebuilt the system around adaptability between games two and three."
"That's a bigger piece."
"It's a better piece."
"You'd need locker room access for the post-game quotes."
"I know."
"Dante could get you in."
Her eyes narrow over the rim of her bowl.
"Or I could get myself in," she says. "Through the press office. Like a journalist."
"Like a journalist who happens to live in Dante's house."
"Stepbrother's house. You live here. I'm a guest."
"You've been here for a week, Maya. Guests don't have their own mug."
"Guests leave."
"Do they?"
The sentence sits between us. She goes back to the pasta, her shoulder still against my arm. Leave is the word she gave me. Stay is the one still sitting in her throat.
I wash the dishes while she dries beside me, the towel hooked over her shoulder as she stacks the bowls in the cabinet she has memorized in seven days. Steam clouds the window above the sink until the glass blurs and the kitchen pulls in close around us.
Her hand brushes mine in the dish rack.
She leaves it there for one extra second. So do I.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
"Thank you. For this." Her hand lifts, then falls against her thigh before the gesture can carry everything she means.
"You don't have to thank me."
"I know I don't have to. I'm choosing to."
She looks straight at me, direct enough that my hand stills on the cabinet door. Usually, Maya looks at the room before she looks at me. Tonight, she stays on my face long enough for my grip to tighten on the cabinet door.
I put the last bowl in the cabinet and turn to face her. She is backed against the counter, the towel over her shoulder, my sweatshirt on her body, her bare feet on the kitchen floor.
"Maya."
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't do the thing where you check on me. Where you read my face and ask the careful question and wait for the answer you already know."
"What do you want me to do instead?"
Her chin lifts.
"Stay here," she says. "Stay in the room."
"I'm in the room."
"I know."
She reaches for me and traces the ink on my forearm, her fingertip finding the compass rose on the inside of my wrist without searching. The cardinal points sit below the cuff of my shirt, and my pulse kicks hard under her touch.
When we were sixteen, she used to trace the same lines while I studied on my bed and pretended not to notice she was there instead of in her own room. Same compass. Same finger. My pulse giving me away.
"We can't," I say.
The words are automatic.
"We already did," she says. "Once."
Once. Summer. Her bedroom. The door locked.
My mouth between her legs, the sounds she made, the way her hand gripped the sheets.
I pulled back after. Two sentences shut it away: We can't do that again.
And her, quiet: I know. Then the door, the hall, my room.
We never mentioned it after that. We piled five years of distance on top of a foundation that was already cracked.
Her finger is on my wrist, on the compass, on the pulse point underneath. Her fingertip rests on the exact place where the needle meets the cardinal north, and I feel the pressure of it all the way up my arm.
"That was five years ago," I say.
"I know how long it's been."
"Maya—"
"Don't say step. Don't say complicated. Don't say any of the words you've been saying for five years to keep this in the drawer."
Her hand moves from my wrist to my chest, flat over my sternum. My heartbeat knocks hard against her palm.
"You've been taking care of me for a week," she says. "The pasta. The spare room. The key. The way you walk past my door at night loud enough that I can track you."
"I'm not asking you to take care of me right now."
"What are you asking?"
"I'm asking you to stop pretending you don't want this."
I kiss her slowly, carefully, with my hand on the side of her neck and my thumb along her jaw. I keep the pressure light enough for her to pull back.
She comes closer instead.
Her hands slide into my hair, the towel slipping from her shoulder to the floor between us, and the sound she makes is so quiet I feel it more than hear it.
I remember that sound from a locked bedroom five years ago.
I lift her onto the counter. Her legs wrap around me. The sweatshirt rides up, and her skin is warm underneath, at her waist, the curve of her hip, the ridge of her ribs where I can feel her breathing change.
"Cole." My name in her mouth.
"I've got you," I say.
The words are out before I can stop them.
She tenses. Barely. A micro-contraction in her thighs.
"Sorry. I didn't—"
"Don't apologize." Her hands tighten in my hair. "Don't stop."
I take her off the counter and carry her to the living room couch.
I could take her upstairs. My room is fifteen feet away.
But my room has Dante in the sheets, the headboard dent, the walls that held the sounds Maya heard through plaster.
I will not take her upstairs. The blanket is on the arm of the couch, folded by her hands, the thank-you note long since pocketed.
I want her here, beside the place where he covered her feet and closed her laptop, and that hunger is fucked up enough that I stop trying to understand it.
I lay her down and leave the gray wool blanket folded on the arm.
I pull my sweatshirt over her head. Her body is bare in the lamplight, and the sight of her hits me the way it hit me at seventeen, the physical reality of a body I have been imagining through plaster and years.
Her breath catches when the air touches her skin.
She reaches for my waistband, but I catch her hand, bring it to my mouth, and press my lips to her knuckles.
"Let me," I say.
"Cole, I want to—"
"Let me. This is mine to give."
She holds my eyes. The argument forms behind them before her fingers twitch against mine, already reaching for the reciprocal, the exchange.
They stay tense against mine, searching for a way to give something back, but my mouth is on her knuckles and my eyes are on hers.
After a beat that lasts too long, she lets her hand relax in mine.
I start at her throat, my lips on the pulse point, the same measurement she takes with her fingers when she is cataloging someone. Her heart rate beats under me, elevated and climbing.
I move down to her collarbone, her sternum, the soft skin between her breasts. She arches into it, and I hold her hip with one hand, steady. I knew how to do this at seventeen. I take my time because rushing would waste five years of wanting.
"Please," she says.
I reach her waist, the ridge of her hip, the soft skin below her navel. She is wearing my basketball shorts, the ones she stole from the laundry, and I slide them down while she lifts her hips to help.
I put my mouth on her. The taste of her floods my tongue, salt and heat and the slick that tells me her body has been ready since the counter. Her thighs tense against my shoulders. Her warmth is against my lips, her scent filling my lungs with every breath.
The sound she makes is the sound from the locked bedroom.
Exactly. The same break in it, the same involuntary surrender that has lived under my skin for five years.
Her hand finds my hair. Her fingers grip.
When her hips lift against my mouth, I hold them down with both hands, firm, the same pressure I used at seventeen when her body was new to me and I learned in real time what made her shake.
She shakes now the same way. Five years, and the arch is the same, the grip, the breath that stutters and catches and holds before it breaks.
I slow when her thighs start to tremble, then press harder when her fingers tighten in my hair.
I was seventeen when I put my mouth on her and learned the order of her coming undone, and the pride of that burns through me hot enough to make my hands tighten on her hips.
The thought hits while my tongue is on her, while her hand is in my hair and her thighs are shaking against my shoulders.
Dante's mouth was here.
The hate sex. Her body over his mouth. A different set of sounds.