Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Cole
Istop in the doorway and the world stops with me.
Trevor at the counter. Shirtless. Yesterday's jeans low on his hips, belt loose, button undone.
His back to the room, one hand braced on the counter's edge, the other pouring coffee from the half-full pot into a mug I recognize as mine but he's using anyway, because that's what Trevor does — takes things that aren't his and uses them like they always were.
The morning light comes in flat and yellow through the screen over the sink, and it hits his shoulders at exactly the wrong angle, because the wrong angle is the one that shows the bruises.
My fingerprints. My handprints. Five dark smudges on each shoulder blade where my fingers dug in hard enough to mark, the skin gone purple-brown like overripe fruit.
I clock them the way you clock a road sign you weren't expecting — fast, involuntary, the information landing somewhere below the brain and above the gut, in the region of the body that doesn't care about words or consequences or the fact that the man at the counter is my stepbrother and we fucked against a workbench twelve hours ago and now we're in a kitchen with morning light and coffee and the silence of two people who crossed a line and can't figure out how to uncross it.
I feel him. That's the worst part. Not a memory — a sensation.
Trevor inside me, the stretch and burn of it, the way my body took him and wanted more and is still, twelve hours later, holding the ghost of him like a bruise you press just to feel something.
The pain's faded to a dull, almost pleasant ache that sits low in my hips and flares when I shift my weight, which is every time I move, which is constantly, because standing still in this kitchen with Trevor's bare back six feet away is its own kind of torture.
I want to touch him again. The want arrives fully formed, vicious and specific, and I hate myself for it the way you hate a dog that won't stop begging after you've stopped feeding it.
My jaw sets. My teeth find the inside of my cheek and hold.
The taste of blood is almost welcome — something sharp to focus on besides the fact that Trevor Hollander's shoulders are marked up like a crime scene and I'm the one who did it.
I go to the cabinet. Pull down my mug — the blue ceramic, not the one he's using — without a word.
The cabinet door swings on its hinge, complaining softly, and Trevor doesn't turn.
He knows I'm here. Knew the second my boot hit the bottom step, the way people who've lived in the same house too long develop a sense for each other even when they're trying not to.
We work the kitchen like two men sharing a cell.
Deliberate about distance. Careful about trajectory.
I pour at the far end of the counter from him.
He shifts left when I pass behind him for the fridge.
I step right when he reaches for a napkin.
A stiff, over-careful choreography — something in this room catches fire, and neither of us is equipped to put it out.
Even so, I look at him. When he's not looking at me, which is most of the time, because Trevor has mastered not-looking to a degree that borders on supernatural.
His torso is a map I've been studying since I was a teenager, pretending to sleep while my heart tried to beat its way out of my chest. The chest, the cut of his stomach, the trail of dark hair disappearing into his jeans — all of it exactly as I remember and somehow worse now, because now I know what his skin tastes like, and knowing is its own hell.
He drinks his coffee standing up, one elbow on the Formica, his eyes on the window where the screen is bowed inward from years of weather. He's watching nothing. Or everything. With Trevor the difference is academic.
I drop into a chair at the table. The wood creaks.
The top is sticky near my elbow — a ring from last night's beer bottles dried to a tacky sheen that my forearm finds because of course it does.
I pull my notebooks over. Rubber-banded, dog-eared, the covers gone soft from two years of handling.
Blue, red, green — the color system that only makes sense to me because I built it, and even I lose the thread sometimes.
I flip the top one open to a random page and stare at the handwriting like it holds the answer to a question I haven't worked out how to ask.
The pages rustle, too loud in the quiet.
I turn them harder than I need to, my fingers leaving damp prints on the margins because my palms are sweating and I can't make them stop.
The focused aggression of a man who needs something to do with his hands besides reach for the one six feet away who fucked him against a workbench and hasn't said a word about it and probably never will.
Trevor drinks his coffee. Leans. Watches the window.
I can feel his eyes on me without looking up — Trevor Hollander's attention is something you feel in your spine, like a draft through a cracked door — and I know he's watching me work with that careful, measured assessment that makes me want to throw something every time I catch it.
The kitchen's a disaster. Dishes in the rack from a meal I don't remember either of us eating.
A plate with toast crusts pushed to one side.
The pill organizer in its spot by the toaster, Eileen's morning dose already gone because someone — Trevor, probably — handled it before I came down.
Heat that doesn't break so much as settle, becoming something you wear, pressing through my shirt and into the places his hands were twelve hours ago.
I keep flipping. Names. Dates. License plates. Witness statements that trail off mid-sentence. The case lives in these notebooks the way I live in this kitchen — cramped, obsessive, surrounded by evidence of things that happened and things that didn't and the weight of carrying both at once.
Trevor sets his mug in the sink. The ceramic clinks against stainless steel, a sound so ordinary it almost hurts.
He doesn't refill it. Doesn't move. Just stands with his palms flat on the counter's edge, his shoulders carrying more weight than the architecture can support, and the marks I left are right there, dark and undeniable, and neither of us is going to say a word about them, because saying a word means acknowledging last night, and acknowledging last night means acknowledging everything that led to it, and everything that led to it is twenty years of want compressed into one collision against a workbench, and neither of us is built for that conversation at seven in the morning with coffee going cold and a case to work.
So we don't talk. The silence fills the kitchen — thick, charged, loaded with everything we're not saying — and the fan turns, and the refrigerator hums, and down the hall Eileen's concentrator keeps up its steady breath, and outside a car passes on Cembrook, fading toward town, and the world goes on exactly the way it's supposed to, which is the problem, because nothing about this morning is supposed to be happening, and here we are: Trevor shirtless at the counter with my handprints on his shoulders, me at the table with my notebooks and the ghost of him still sitting low in my hips.
I turn another page. The paper crackles. His mug sits empty in the sink. We're not going to mention it. That's the deal neither of us made out loud, and somehow we both already signed it.
The page is where I left it, which is nowhere useful — folded twice along creases gone soft from handling, tucked between two others in the blue notebook.
I pull it free and smooth it flat with the heel of my hand.
My handwriting stares back, block print, cramped, pressed hard enough to emboss the back.
Brenda Coyle. 112 Dellard Street. Annette's sister.
Older. Slammed the door on me. Called me a troublemaker. Won't open again.
I stare at it. The words don't change. Brenda Coyle lives at 112 Dellard and two years ago she looked me in the eye through a gap in her door and told me I was a delusional piece of shit stirring up grief for attention, then shut it, and the sound — that solid, final thud of wood meeting frame — has lived in my chest ever since, alongside Annette's name and Judy's name and Hannah's card and every other door that's closed in my face, because in this town asking questions is its own kind of crime.
Trevor moves. The mug hits the counter, boots scrape linoleum as he crosses to the pot.
The pour. The soft click of the pot back on the burner.
Then he's at the edge of the table, standing, not sitting, one hand around the refilled mug, his eyes on the page like he's reading it from six feet off, which he probably is, because Trevor has always been able to read things he shouldn't.
"Brenda Coyle," I say. The name sits heavier in the air than it has any right to.
"Annette's sister. Annette went missing four years ago — first in the pattern.
Brenda filed the report. Pushed back when Calloway closed it.
Called the station every day for a month.
Then she stopped." I tap the page. "I tried her two years ago.
Door didn't open more than a few inches.
One look at me and she called me a troublemaker stirring up grief for attention.
Said Annette left for Seattle and I needed to let it go.
" The muscle in my jaw jumps and I press my thumb to it.
"That bridge is ash. She won't open to me again. "
Trevor sets his mug down. Not careful — it lands with a thud that ripples the coffee near the rim. His eyes are on the address. 112 Dellard Street. I watch him read it with that focused, measured attention that makes my chest do something I refuse to name.