Chapter 10
Cole
I'd been waiting two days for it to bother me.
It hadn't bothered me. That was the thing I could not make sense of.
Two days ago, Tessa had walked into my apartment with a duffel bag and her son and hadn't walked back out.
By every measure I had used to organize my life since I was eighteen years old, the thing should have been costing me.
There was a shampoo on my pillow that I hadn't bought.
There were small shoes by my front door.
I hadn't slept in my own bed in two nights.
I was a few hours from signing a lease on a place that would have my name and her name on the same line.
The cost had not arrived. The bracing was still there. There was nothing for the bracing to do.
I'd walked the bay twice this morning. I'd checked the rig once, and then checked it again. I'd been turning the same piece of nothing over, and the morning was running out of things to give me to do.
The kid was the part I hadn't braced for at all.
He hadn't asked to touch the model on the shelf the first night. He'd stood with his hands at his sides and looked. He'd taken his plate to the sink the next morning without checking. He was a kid who carried rules from somewhere.
I'd been a kid who carried rules from somewhere.
"You only started dating, and she's already moved into your apartment, Lieutenant?"
Martinez was at the bay door. I hadn't heard him come up.
"Please show me your ways."
"I have no ways."
I'd told Tessa we would go look at apartments together after my shift. The lawyer needed Noah to have a room of his own. The lawyer was right.
We hadn't heard from Nicholas since the letter. That was the part the lawyer had said to watch.
"Bullshit." Davis was behind him with the newspaper. He didn't look up from it. "The man is a Lieutenant. He has his own house. He has the face. Now he has a fiancée."
Martinez stared at him. "If a fiancée came with the rank, I would have been studying for the lieutenant's exam in middle school."
I shook my head. I caught myself smiling.
I got home a little after eight. The apartment was empty. Tessa must have taken Noah to school.
I set my bag down and went to take a shower.
I thought about the apartments while the water ran. Tessa had shown me the listings the night before. Four addresses. Two close to the bakery, two a drive. I didn't have a favorite. I would have one when I saw them.
I came out twenty minutes later, put on my gray sweatpants, and went to the kitchen to get coffee.
"Cole—oh."
I turned. I hadn't heard her come in.
She was looking at me like she'd walked into a room she wasn't invited into.
"Can you please put on a shirt?"
"Right."
For ten years, I had walked from the shower to the kitchen in a towel, in boxers, or in nothing at all on the mornings nobody had been waiting for me to be anywhere. Nobody had ever minded.
There was somebody now.
I had not yet learned to think about her before I did it.
Just another adjustment.
Great.
I went to the bedroom. I pulled on the T-shirt I had thrown on the back of the chair this morning and came back to the kitchen.
We had been to four apartments, and none of them had been good enough for me.
I'd been checking the same things at each one. Locks. Smoke detectors. The drive time from the front door to Engine 33. Two of them had old locks. One had no smoke detector in the back bedroom at all. Three were farther than ten minutes from the station.
Tessa had been looking for something else.
She started in the kitchen at every one. She put her hand on the counter. She checked which way the morning light came in. She walked into the bedroom that would be Noah's and stood by the window. She was looking for the room Noah would wake up in.
By the second apartment, I had stopped asking her about the front door.
By the third, she had stopped asking me about the kitchen.
The kitchen and Noah's room were hers to decide on.
The locks, the doors, and the streetlights were mine.
We had sorted out which questions belonged to whom inside the first apartment of the morning.
Between the kitchen and the front door, I had been trying to be conscious about how Tessa and I looked together.
I knew I was supposed to act like her fiancé.
I didn't know how. I'd been holding doors, saying we, and trying not to stand more than a step away from her.
Whether any of it read as a fiancé's behavior or a man following instructions, I could not have told you from inside it.
She'd been standing too close to me all morning. Sometimes, because the apartments were small. Sometimes, because she'd stopped tracking it. I'd been trying to concentrate on the work.
And from time to time, I let myself notice things.
The scent of her hair. The way it fell on her shoulders. The skin where her neck went into her shirt collar.
Then I would catch myself and stop.
We were at the fourth apartment, in the doorway of the room that would be Noah's, when she put her hand on my arm to point at the closet.
"Look at the closet."
It was a small thing. Her hand on my arm because that was where her hand had ended up.
I stiffened.
My body went rigid for half a second. I didn't move my arm. I didn't shake her hand off. I didn't do anything visible at all. But I had stiffened.
She felt it.
She didn't say anything about it. She didn't have to. She took her hand back a half-second later than she should have. She walked into the room and stood by the window.
"It's a good room," she said.
"It's a good room."
The agent was making a note on her clipboard.
I thought about her hand on my arm once or twice, driving home. I decided she'd let it go.
Apparently, she had not let it go.
"Am I really that repulsive to you?"
My chest got tight.
I looked up. Tessa was leaning against the kitchen counter with both hands behind her, holding the edge. Her eyes were steady on me.
"No. It's not that."
I looked at her. She hadn't let go of the counter.
I was going to have to say it.
"It's just." I stopped. I hadn't had to put it in the air before. "I've never been with a woman."
I watched it land on her. I watched her understand.
"Oh."
She moved away from the counter. She came across the kitchen to where I was standing. She took my right hand. She put it on her waist. She put my arm around her so that it sat where it would have sat if I had put it there myself.
"See?" she said. "Is that so bad?"
Her waist was warm under my hand. The fabric of her shirt was thin. I could feel her ribcage moving under it.
She fit.
I hadn't been ready for how well.
I'd been looking at her face. I hadn't known how long I had been doing it.
Her hand was still on top of mine.
Natalie.
The fact that she had turned out to be the girl who hurt me when we were sixteen hadn't changed the fact that she was beautiful. She'd stopped wearing the contacts a few days ago. Her eyes were green again. Her lips were right there.
Her cheeks went a little pink.
"I'm just saying," she said. "I trust you."
"Right."
I took my arm back. I didn't know what to do with my hands. I went to the sink and rinsed a cup that didn't need to be rinsed.