Chapter 10
Saturday after campus they did not wait at the wall.
They waited at the bus stop a block off, in the car with the peppermint gum, and Cole pushed the back door open like a ride she had already accepted.
“Get in, nun.”
Lina looked at the street. A woman with groceries. A bus two minutes away on her timetable.
She got in because the coordinator’s wonderful was still in her sent folder and a scene on the curb was a story with witnesses.
Ryan drove. He did not go home.
A parking garage under a building she did not know. Concrete. Cold. The car in a dark slot. Cole was already half over the seat.
“Dad’s at the office. Mom’s shopping. Twenty minutes.”
“Please—”
Cole’s hand was in her hair, gathering, pulling her mouth to his.
Not basement-slow. Twin-fast. She squealed when he bit her lip.
Ryan killed the engine and got out, opened her door, pulled her onto the back seat with Cole.
Skirt up. Panties shoved aside. Ryan’s fingers found her already wet and he laughed, mean and pleased.
“Library girl.”
Cole held her hair and put her mouth on him. She gagged. He held her there a second longer than kind, then let her breathe. Ryan pushed into her from behind in one seat-cramped thrust. Lina squealed into Cole’s hip. The sound slapped around the garage.
They were rough the way last Sunday night had been rough: spank on her ass when she muffled a cry, hair in Cole’s fist, Ryan’s hand on the back of her neck pressing her into the upholstery.
She came fast and angry, clenching, and Ryan swore and fucked her through it.
Cole pulled out of her mouth and came on her tongue.
“Swallow.”
She swallowed.
Ryan finished in her, deep, and wiped her with her own cardigan hem.
“Sit up. You look like class.”
They drove her to the corner of her street, not the driveway.
“Walk the last bit,” Cole said. “Independence.”
Lina walked.
Store soap in the closet. Chair in the corner. Come cooling between her legs under the skirt.
Mark’s car pulled in ten minutes later.
She was in the guest room with the desk lamp on and a book she was not reading when his footsteps stopped in the hall.
The twins’ door opened. Mark’s voice, low, sending them out for ice, for nothing, for gone.
Then her door.
No knock this time.
He looked at her mouth.
He looked at her hair.
He knew.
“They don’t get to leave you like that,” he said, still soft. “Not in my house.”
He shut the door.
Lina’s hands were on the desk.
The book slid.
Saturday had two temperatures, and the second one was walking toward her with his belt already in his fingers.
He did not ask if she wanted the desk.
He crossed the room, looked at the chair she had not had time to set, and lifted her by the waist onto the wood.
The notebook slid. The dictionary hit the floor and opened to a page she would later find bent.
Mark kissed her temples first—left, right—the hallway hairline kiss stretched into something that had minutes.
Sweetheart, under his breath, against her skin.
His hands went to the cardigan buttons one by one, slow, Sunday-slow, as if okay still governed the room and the parking garage had been a mess a host father was obligated to wipe up.
“They treat you like a party,” he said. “That’s not what this is.”
Lina’s mouth tasted like Cole, salt and skin. She turned her face toward the window. Mark followed and kissed the corner of her lip, then her mouth when she breathed, deep and unhurried, the washer kiss, coffee and patience. She made a sound that was not a squeal yet.
Then she was crying.
She did not decide to. Salt ran into the kiss. Mark thumbed her cheek and did not stop kissing her. He made a low noise that might have been sorry and might have been ownership.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
He pulled her panties down her legs, over the socks, and looked.
Ryan’s mess was still there, slick on her inner thighs, the shaved-not-hers peach—no: she still had her hair; the twins had only shoved cloth aside.
Wet. Swollen. Used. Mark exhaled through his nose, a man smelling another man on a girl whose visa sat in his desk.
He did not stop.
Two fingers, gentle, spreading her, rubbing the peak until her hips twitched against the desk edge and her head tipped back.
The cry went thin. He opened his pants, took out the thick cock she had sucked on Sunday, and pushed into her slow.
She was sore from Ryan and still open enough that he slid to the hip in one long press.
Lina squealed and the squeal cracked into a sob.
He held her hips and fucked her in long strokes.
The desk bumped the wall softer than the guest bed had, a polite knock.
He kissed her forehead, her wet eyelashes, her mouth when she opened it to breathe.
Her small breasts filled his hands; he thumbed the puffy nipples until they stood, then bent and suckled one while his hips kept that careful deep rhythm.
“That’s it. Easy. You’re all right.”
She was not all right.
Her hands were in his weekend shirt. She came anyway, helpless, clenching around him, crying into the collar, the orgasm dragged out of a body that had already given one to Ryan on cold upholstery. Mark groaned and held her through it, still moving, still kissing her hair.
A minute later he buried himself and finished, heat flooding the sore place, his mouth open on her temple. He stayed inside her while her legs shook off the edge of the desk and the dictionary lay splayed on the carpet.
He pulled out slow. A slick sound. He tucked her hair behind her ear like she had been crying over a grade.
“Shower. New clothes. Diane’s twenty minutes out. Tacos.”
He zipped. He picked up the dictionary, closed it, set it on the desk beside the notebook. Homework.
At the door he paused.
“I sent them for ice. They’ll come back loud. You don’t have to look at them.”
He left.
Lina sat on the desk with his come mixing with Ryan’s, cardigan open, tank shoved up, glasses crooked, face wet. The window showed the street, a car, a neighbor’s bin. Ordinary Saturday.
Two temperatures. One hour.
She got down. Her thighs were a mess. The guest-room air felt cold on her nipples. She pulled the cardigan shut and held it shut all the way to the bathroom.
The shower was hot enough to hurt. She washed her mouth, her chest, between her legs, the place Mark had kissed on her temples as if soap could take pride off skin. Both men ran down the drain. Neither left.
She dressed. Clean skirt. New shirt. Cardigan to the throat. Glasses wiped.
Downstairs the front door opened on Diane and paper bags and cumin.
“Tacos!” Diane called. “Lina, can you do plates?”
Lina did plates.
Mark stood at the cutting board chopping lettuce into fine shreds, a husband. He smiled when she passed. Proud. The same mouth.
Her eyes were still red.
Diane glanced at her. “Allergies? The trees are awful this week.”
“The air,” Lina said.
Mark did not look up from the lettuce.
The twins’ car hit the driveway. Ice. A bag that clinked. Cole’s laugh.
Saturday was not finished.
It had only changed hands, and Lina was still the desk, and the back seat, and the simple story the coordinator would never read.
The twins came in loud with ice nobody needed.
Cole rattled the bag like a trophy. Cubes shifted, a cheap applause. Ryan’s eyes went to Lina’s face first—puffy, pink—then to Mark at the cutting board, lettuce in neat ribbons, and the joke died in Ryan’s mouth before it got teeth. He put the ice in the freezer and stood there too long.
Diane asked who wanted spicy.
“No thank you,” Lina said.
She built a taco with too much lettuce and sat in front of it. The shell sagged. She ate a corner so the plate would not look like a scene.
Cole talked about the party, a name, a DJ. Mark asked whether anyone had a paper due. Diane said the trees this week were brutal, pollen like powder, and Lina should take an allergy pill from the upstairs bath. Ryan’s foot stayed on his side of the table. Cole’s mouth stayed full of taco.
No one said garage.
No one said desk.
The words sat under the cumin anyway.
Lina offered to wash. Diane said bless you. Mark picked up the towel. The twins took the leftover ice downstairs without being asked, a sudden helpfulness that sounded like exile. The basement door clicked. Lina’s shoulders jumped. Mark dried a plate and did not comment.
Their hands did not meet on the ceramic.
Diane touched Lina’s elbow at the sink, high and proper.
“You look wrung out. Early night. I’ll tell the boys to keep it down.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
The lid.
Upstairs Lina set the chair at the knob first, then the laptop at the far edge of the desk so the camera would get wall, lamp, cardigan, and not the place where the dictionary had fallen. She sat back until her face was small.
Tomas appeared in a better shirt. Wedding eve.
“Your eyes,” he said. “Puffy. Are you sick?”
“Allergies. Diane said the trees. I will take a pill.”
He nodded, relieved to have a noun. American trees.
He talked about the ceremony, an uncle who would speak too long, the suit still wrong.
Lina wished him joy. She kept her mouth still so the camera would not catch a shake.
When he asked if the family was kinder this week she said they cooked tacos and the mother bought soap. True pieces. Small.
“I miss you,” he said.
“I miss you.”
She did not say a parking garage. She did not say a host father had wiped her face and called her sweetheart while he was still inside her. She did not say two temperatures. She said I love you because that sentence still fit through the lens.
Thumb. Dark.
The twins’ music started, then dropped when Diane’s voice hit the stairs. Mark’s door shut. Water in pipes.
Lina opened the notebook. The pen dragged.
*They waited at the stop. Cole said swallow. Ryan laughed.*
*Independence: they dropped me at the corner.*
*Mark knew from my mouth. He sent them for ice.*
*Desk. Buttons. Temples. I cried and came anyway.*
*Tacos. Allergies. Diane knows the word fine.*
*Tomas has a wedding. I have a chair.*
*I am still here. That is the whole report.*
She put on socks. Doubled. Cardigan to the throat in bed, buttons pressing her collarbones.
Sleep came in scraps, like ice melting in a bag.
In one scrap she was only in the window chair and the trees had no pollen and the coordinator never wrote.
In another she opened her mouth for a check-in survey and the garage and the desk fell out in English she had not studied.
She woke at three and checked the chair. Still angled. Still a liar.
She woke at six and packed the bag for the bus as if ink and a recorded voice could still manufacture a girl with a museum list.
Sunday would be Diane’s church or Diane’s kitchen.
Sunday would be Mark hearing whatever he wanted to hear through plaster.
The week of two temperatures was not a week.
It was the climate of the house: rough air, then soft air, then tacos, then a laptop far from the edge of a desk.
Lina washed her face.
The puffy eyes stayed.
She wrote *allergy pill* on a scrap so she would remember to swallow something Diane would recognize, and left the guest room with her throat buttoned, her hips sore, and wonderful still sitting in an email folder like a stamp that would not come off.