CHAPTER 8
Theo
I was coiling the last extension cord when I heard the door.
The market building was empty—locked vendor stalls, fluorescent lights on their after-hours drone, the air still holding the day's heat and the faint ghost of kettle corn smoke.
I'd come inside to store the cord and the stack of table clips Mae had left on the counter, and I was doing it slowly, because slow meant I was still here, and still here meant I hadn't driven home yet.
My truck had been ready for twenty minutes.
Keys in my pocket, camera bag on the seat.
I could have left after the chairs. I could have left after the bunting stakes.
Instead I was wrapping twelve-gauge extension cord around my forearm in a building that smelled like old banners and zip ties, and the reason was three parking spaces from my truck, sitting in a sedan she hadn't started.
I could still feel her. The tent was struck and the green was dark and my hands were doing maintenance, and underneath all of it my body was running the last half hour on a loop—her back against the center pole, her fingers in my hair, the weight of her hips when she pulled me closer by a belt loop.
Not here, she'd said. Quiet and certain.
Since then I'd been wrapping extension cord and pretending I was deciding whether to leave.
I was not deciding whether to leave.
The exterior door opened and closed. Footsteps—deliberate, unhurried, the pace of someone who had already made her decision before she got out of the car.
I set the cord on the counter.
She had the key in her hand before I reached the hallway.
Not held up, not offered—just there, between her second and third fingers, the way someone carries a thing they've already decided to use.
The supply room door was ten feet ahead.
Mae didn't look at me when she walked toward it.
She didn't slow down. The fluorescent overhead buzzed the way it always did after hours, when the building settled into its own mechanical noise, and I watched her fit the key into the lock and turn it with the kind of precision that made my chest tight.
She opened the door. Stepped inside. Left it open behind her.
I stood in the hallway for two seconds. Long enough to understand that this was not an invitation that would be repeated. Long enough to feel the weight of what she was doing—not pulling me forward, not asking, just making the choice and leaving the door for me to walk through or not.
I walked through.
The supply room was small enough that closing the door put us within arm's reach.
Metal shelving on two walls, boxes of event signage stacked against the third, the smell of cardboard and the faint sweetness of dried lavender someone stored for vendor displays.
Mae turned the lock from the inside. The click was louder than it should have been.
She turned around, and I couldn't find the right thing to say.
In the tent, she'd kissed me against the center pole and I'd said tell me where to stop and she'd said I haven't decided yet.
Then she'd decided: not here. I'd understood what she meant—not never, not a retraction, but something that required a door and a lock and a choice she could make without canvas walls and a volunteer parking lot on the other side.
I had understood it completely. But understanding it then, with my hands still shaking and her mouth still on my skin, and standing in the room she'd chosen with the deadbolt turned and her eyes on mine were different things entirely.
My pulse was in my throat. My hands were at my sides and I did not trust them.
"You're thinking too hard," Mae said.
Her voice was steady but her breathing wasn't. I could see it—the rise beneath her collarbone, the way her shoulders sat a half inch higher than usual. She wasn't nervous. Mae didn't do nervous. But she was running on something that wasn't pure control, and that visible crack was what undid me.
I stepped forward and kissed her.
Not carefully. Not the way I'd kissed her in the tent, where I'd let her set the speed and followed her lead.
This time I put my hand on the back of her neck and my mouth on hers and didn't hold anything in reserve, and Mae made a sound against my lips—short, sharp, almost frustrated, like she'd been waiting for me to stop being so goddamn considerate.
Her hands came up to my chest. Not to push—to grip.
She gathered the front of my shirt in both fists and pulled, and my hips hit hers, and we were against the shelving unit before I registered moving.
Something shifted on the shelf behind her—a box, a bundle of rolled signage—and neither of us checked what it was.
Her mouth opened under mine and I tasted her for the first time without restraint, and my hand slid from her neck to her jaw and tilted her head back and I kissed her deeper because I could.
Because she had chosen a room with a lock and I was done pretending I had the discipline to deserve a slower version of this.
I broke the kiss long enough to look at her. Her mouth was swollen. Her eyes sharp and dark and completely present.
"Mae."
"Don't ask me if I'm sure."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good."
She pulled my shirt free of my waistband. Her hands were on my skin—my stomach, my ribs, the flat of her palms pressing heat into me—and my brain whited out. Just static. Just her hands and the fact that I wanted her so badly my fingers were shaking when I reached for the buttons on her blouse.
I got the first three. She got the rest. Practical, efficient, Mae—even now, even with her pulse hammering where my thumb rested against her throat.
She shrugged the blouse off one shoulder and I put my mouth there—the curve where her neck met her shoulder—and felt her inhale catch like something snagging.
Her hand came up to the back of my head.
Not gentle. She held me there, fingers tight in my hair, and I kissed her throat and her collarbone and the warm skin below her collarbone, and she let her head fall back against the shelf behind her.
"Theo." My name in her mouth was rough. Unfinished. A sound she hadn't planned to make.
I lifted my head. She kissed me again—harder, her teeth catching my lower lip the way they had in the south tent, and the memory of that first time layered over this one and made it denser—and her hands went to my belt.
She didn't fumble. She didn't hesitate. She opened the buckle with the same steady competence she brought to every task I'd ever watched her perform, and something about that—Mae's specific precision applied to undressing me in a supply room—made me groan against her mouth.
I got her pants undone. She pushed them down.
I pushed mine down. We were graceless about it in a way that felt honest—clothing catching on shoes, her hip knocking the edge of a shelf, a box of banner vinyl sliding somewhere behind us.
Her skin was warm everywhere I touched it.
The fluorescent light was flat and unflattering and I did not care about light.
"Wait," I said.
She went still. Not pulling away—holding.
"Wallet." I managed. "Back pocket."
She laughed. Short, low, and the closest thing to surprised I'd heard from her all day. I dug the condom out with hands that were not steady, and she took it from me before I could fumble it open.
"I've got it," she said. And she did. And I watched her do it, and the fact that she handled even this with that same direct certainty made me want her past the point where wanting had a name.
I lifted her. She wrapped her legs around me, her back against the shelving, the metal frame biting into my palms where I braced us. She took my face in both hands. Thumbs on my cheekbones. Her eyes on mine—open, dark, unwavering.
"Now," she said.
I listened.
The first moment was slow. Intentional. Mae's breath stuttered and her grip tightened on my jaw and I pressed my forehead against hers and held still until she shifted—hips tilting, heels pulling me closer at the small of my back.
Then it wasn't slow. Her hands moved to my shoulders and my mouth found her neck and the shelf rattled behind us, and I couldn't hear the fluorescent anymore, couldn't hear anything except her breathing and the sound she made when I changed the angle—not performative, not polished, just Mae with her control cracking open in real time and not trying to stop it.
Her nails bit into my shoulders. Her hips matched mine and then broke the rhythm and set a faster one, and I followed it, done leading, done measuring, done with anything except the tight hot pressure between us and the way her mouth had fallen open and her breathing had gone sharp and shallow.
My arms were burning. The shelf rattled harder and something fell behind her and neither of us flinched.
Her hand slid up the back of my neck and gripped, and the roughness of it—Mae holding me like she wanted to leave marks—sent a jolt through me that I felt in my teeth.
She didn't close her eyes. That was the thing that wrecked me.
Even with her breath ragged, even with her thighs shaking against my ribs, she kept her eyes on mine, and I could not look away, and the intimacy of that—being seen, completely, by a woman who never looked away from anything—was more devastating than anything our bodies were doing.
I felt her come apart. In her legs tightening, her hands going rigid on my shoulders, the way her mouth opened and no sound came out for a beat before she exhaled something that might have been my name.
I followed her over. Buried my face in her neck and shuddered and held on and stopped thinking for the first time all day.
For a long moment neither of us moved. The shelf was still.
The building was quiet except for the fluorescent buzz and our breathing, ragged and mismatched, gradually pulling toward something that resembled normal.
Her hand found the back of my neck and her thumb moved once across the top of my spine—slow, almost absent, the only unhurried thing either of us had done since I walked through that door.
My arms were trembling. Her legs loosened around me but didn't drop. I could feel her heartbeat against my chest—fast, slowing, still faster than rest.
She put her hand flat on my sternum and pushed gently.
I let her down. Her feet found the floor.
She stood there, in the space between my arms, and I watched her reassemble.
Breath evening out. Spine straightening.
One hand reaching up to push her hair back from her face with the efficiency of a woman resetting a workspace.
She didn't become a different person. She didn't go soft or suddenly tender or newly fragile.
She looked at me with the same clear, direct gaze she always had, and I realized this was worse than I'd expected—not worse as in bad, worse as in more.
She hadn't given me some hidden version of herself.
She'd been Mae all the way through it, and now I knew what that looked like with nothing between us, and I was never going to unknow it.
She bent and picked up her blouse. Shook it out once. Put it on.
"The recycling bins," she said. "For the vendor area. I still need to sort the count for the morning pickup."
I stared at her.
The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "You can help. If you want."
I pulled my pants up. Buckled my belt. My hands had stopped shaking but something behind my ribs had not settled, and I understood with a clarity I didn't want that it was not going to settle.
Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not until I figured out what to do with the fact that Mae had chosen me the way she chose everything—deliberately, with the lock turned and her eyes open—and was already moving on to morning logistics as if choosing me hadn't wrecked anything she couldn't reorganize by sunrise.
It had wrecked me. I was standing in a supply room buckled and buttoned and nowhere close to reassembled, watching her reach for the deadbolt, and the problem was not that the sex had been what it was.
The problem was that she could walk out of it first. She could put the blouse on and talk about recycling bins and look at me with that clear, steady gaze while I was still trying to remember how sentences worked.
She could choose me with her whole body and then move on with her whole brain, and I could not tell whether the gap between those two things was armor or architecture, and I was not going to figure it out tonight, and that was going to keep me awake until I did.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
She unlocked the door and opened it. The hallway fluorescent was still buzzing. The building was still empty. Nothing out here had changed.
Mae walked ahead of me toward the vendor area.
Her blouse was buttoned wrong—one off, the second button in the third hole—and she hadn't noticed or didn't care, and I didn't know which gutted me more: that she could be that unguarded, or that she'd already moved past the moment that was still taking me apart with every step I took behind her.
I didn't tell her. I just followed, and every step out of that room made it harder to pretend leaving it had ended anything.