24. Cole
Cole
Dante leaves at six in a black suit and no tie, dressed like a man walking into a dinner he didn’t choose with a person he can’t refuse.
He stands at the edge of the hallway adjusting his cuffs, his jaw tight, his eyes flat, his hands too precise on the fabric.
We won the regional semifinal Saturday. He scored twice.
On the ice, nothing about the last two weeks shows.
"Don't wait up," he says.
"We'll wait up," Maya says from the counter. Her spot.
"It could go late."
"We'll wait up."
He looks at her first, then at me, holding long enough for my hand to go still on the table.
He’s leaving the house, and we’re staying inside it.
For days, the three of us have moved around the same rooms, slept in the same bed, reached for the same warmth since the night she walked into the kitchen and said make me stop thinking and everything after that detonated.
Tonight, Dante is the one walking out to sit across from the man who made him.
"If Marco calls—" he starts.
"I'm not answering Marco's calls," I say. "Go. Handle your father. Come home."
Crossing the kitchen, he kisses Maya first, brief and firm, his hand on her jaw.
Then me. The same. Brief. Firm. His mouth on mine in front of her, the same way it's been since the lights came on.
My breath catches before I can make it behave.
Six years of the dark, and now he kisses me goodbye in a lit kitchen while the woman we share watches from the counter.
Then he leaves. The door closes. The lock turns.
Maya is on the counter, bare feet tucked beneath her, wearing my gray Briarcliff sweatshirt—the one she knows I left for her.
The one I confessed to placing. She pulled it on this morning the same way she's pulled it on every morning since the confession, and my fingers curl against my thigh every damn time.
She knows it was engineered. Wears it anyway.
Leggings. Hair up, held by a pen. The Chronicle piece about the athletic department's Title IX compliance is open on her laptop, and it's going to make the administration furious.
I'm at the table with my Stats textbook open and no ability to give a shit about the page in front of me.
Her pen is slipping from the knot in her hair—the left side, the side that always loosens first. The tendon in her neck shifts when she swallows her tea.
Her bare foot taps the cabinet below the counter in a rhythm that matches her reading speed, faster when the paragraph is dense, slower when she's pulling quotes.
We've been together, the three of us, since the night in Dante's bedroom.
Since then, we've learned where to put elbows, knees, hands, heat, and sleep.
Practice Monday was the strangest—Dante and I on the same line running the neutral zone breakout, bodies in perfect sync, the passes connecting the way they always connect, while the coaching staff mapped the Frozen Four bracket on the whiteboard and Addison told us the regional final is Friday.
On the ice, the kitchen disappears. The ice works.
But when it's the three of us, Dante is the first body I clock anywhere. He sets the pace, the temperature, the first move.
Without him, the room has different edges.
Now it's me and Maya on opposite sides of a kitchen in a house where we both live, and the six feet between the table and the counter hold a want the threesome didn't touch.
A want older than Dante's rules. Started in a house in Connecticut when I was thirteen and Richard said, be kind, Cole, she's going to be scared of everything for a while and I looked at the girl with the dark hair and the wary eyes and my chest locked into place.
"You're staring," she says without looking up.
"I'm studying."
"Your textbook's been on the same page for twenty minutes."
"It's a complex page."
She closes the laptop and looks at me with the journalist's assessment, the eyes that miss nothing. Her mouth softens at one corner. She knows exactly why I’m not studying, and she lets me have the lie for one more breath.
"It's different without him," she says.
"Yeah."
"Like a room where the furniture's been rearranged and you have to relearn where everything is."
"Dante's the furniture in this metaphor?"
"Dante's the load-bearing wall. We're the furniture." Her mouth curves. "When it's the three of us, he runs the room. And I let him. Because his control makes the space feel safe. Structured."
"But?"
"But you and I have never been alone together without his structure. Not since this started." She sets her hands on the counter, fingers pressing flat. "And I keep thinking about what happens next. With the letter. With Richard. With my father in this city."
My hand tightens on the edge of the table. Her father. The man who broke her ribs. The man who wrote three calm paragraphs and signed them like a Christmas card.
"What did Richard say when you called this morning?" I ask.
"The filing is in process. The no-contact order is enforceable. The calls alone are grounds for revocation." Her voice is steady. Each sentence lands clean. "But the system takes time. Weeks. Maybe months. And in the meantime, David Ashford is in Briarcliff writing letters to sealed addresses."
"The system will work."
"The system let him out, Cole."
The sentence is the same one Dante said in the tunnel when I told him to use the legal route. The same argument. Her fingers press harder into the counter.
"What if he comes to a game?" Her voice cracks on the word.
"The regional final is Friday. It's public.
If we make the Frozen Four, it's national.
What if he buys a ticket and sits in the stands and watches me in the press box?
There's nothing illegal about attending a hockey game.
He could sit fifty feet from me and the law would call it coincidence. "
Her hands are shaking. The tremor from the 413 calls, the one she couldn't hide from Dante, is visible now in the kitchen where she's been safe for weeks.
I close the textbook and cross the kitchen. She's on the counter, legs dangling, and when I reach her, I stand between her knees. My hands settle on her thighs, warm through the leggings.
"He's not getting near you," I say.
"You can't promise that."
"I'm promising it anyway."
"That's what Dante said. And Dante's version of promising involves people whose business cards don't list their actual profession."
"My version involves Richard and the parole board and me standing between you and every door he tries to walk through."
Her eyes go wet, and she blinks the tears back before they can fall. Maya doesn't cry in kitchens. She cries on the other side of walls where she thinks nobody can hear.
"I'm so tired of being scared of him," she says.
Quiet, scraped thin. "I changed my name.
I moved states. I built locks into every door I've ever lived behind.
And he writes three paragraphs and suddenly I'm thirteen again and the locks don't mean anything because the person they were built against knows where they are. "
I put my hands on her face. Both hands. My thumbs on her cheekbones.
"Look at me," I say.
She looks at me, eyes wet, jaw tight, hands gripping the counter edge beside her hips.
"You are Maya Maddox. You chose that name. You built that name. And no letter from a man in block print gets to take it back."
Her breath hitches. Her hands come up from the counter to my wrists. Holding on.
"Say it again," she says.
"You are Maya Maddox."
"Again."
"Maya Maddox. The woman who walked into Dante Voss's kitchen and told him to make her stop thinking."
Her mouth curves. Barely. A faint curve through the wet eyes.
She pulls me closer by the wrists until her forehead rests against mine. Her breath is warm on my face. The tears haven't fallen. Her hands are on my wrists, and every breath brings her mouth closer to mine.
"It's different without him," she says again, quieter.
"Yeah."
"Right now—" Her hands move from my wrists to my chest. Palm flat over my heart. "Right now I want no structure. No one running the room. I want to be in a room with you and feel what that feels like."
"What does it feel like?"
"Like the wall is gone and I'm standing in the space it left."
I kiss her.
The kiss is private. No third breath in the room. Her mouth and mine. The taste I've known since the couch, since the Thursday that cracked everything open, comes back warm and specific.
She makes a small, low sound against my mouth, the one she makes at the start, before everything gets louder, the one that says yes, this, keep going.
I lift her off the counter. Her legs wrap around my waist. I carry her down the hallway.
At the bedroom doors, I pause. Dante's room, the shared bed. My room, the one I had before the three of us. The one I haven't slept in since she moved in.
"Yours," she says, reading the pause. "Take me to yours."
Dante's room is the threesome's territory. My room is before that. My room is the other side of a wall that existed in a house in Connecticut. The boy's bedroom. The room I wasn’t supposed to cross into hers.
I carry her through the door and set her on my bed. She looks around. The room is spare. A bed, a nightstand, a team photograph on the desk.
"This is the room on the other side of the wall," she says.
"Yeah. It is."
"I want to tell you something I've never said out loud." She pulls her legs up and sits cross-legged. Her fingers tighten around her ankles, and her voice drops. "When we were at Richard's. Your room was next to mine. The walls were thin."
"I know."
"I used to hear you at night. When you thought I was asleep."
My mouth goes dry. I know what she heard. The sixteen-year-old on the other side of the plaster with his hand on himself and her name in his head and the guilt that made him bite the pillow. Except she heard.