17. Cole #2
She did not make these sounds for him. She made different ones, sounds I can piece together from the evidence on Dante's jaw, from Maya's broken eye contact, from what I know his piercings do to a body from the inside.
Whatever she sounded like underneath him, those are sounds the boy at seventeen never could have reached.
But this is mine.
This is slow and deliberate and given freely, the mouth that was here first returning to the place it mapped at seventeen and memorized through five years of distance. I am hard against the couch, the ache pressed into the cushion while my hands stay locked on her hips.
I drag my attention back to the tremor in her thighs, the heat of her against my mouth, the sound breaking in her throat.
She comes hard, her back arching off the couch, her hand pulling my hair, the sound raw and open. I hold her through it with my mouth on her and my hands on her hips, the weight of her against my palms.
After, she is breathing hard, eyes closed, her hand still in my hair but loose now, the fingers uncurling.
I press my forehead to her hip and breathe against her skin.
"Cole." Quiet. Almost gone.
"Yeah."
"Five years."
"Five years."
She opens her eyes and looks down at me. I am between her thighs with my chin on her hip, and her body is open and trembling while she looks at me and does not look away.
I am lying between her legs with the Richard meeting still locked behind my teeth, the filed parole violation sitting beside Dante's blanket two feet from her head.
"Don't tell me this was a mistake," she says.
"It wasn't."
"Don't tell me it can't happen again."
"I'm not seventeen anymore, Maya."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I'm done leaving this untouched."
She sits up, pulls me up with her, and kisses me with my mouth still tasting like her. Her bare body presses against my clothed one.
"Dante comes home at nine," she says.
"I know."
"Are we going to tell him?"
"Not tonight."
"Cole—"
"Not tonight. Let me figure out how."
The words leave my mouth, and my chest tightens before the last one lands.
Not tonight. There it is again.
A different voice. A different kitchen. My hand making the same damn choice.
Dante said it to me, and I filed it as betrayal. Now I am saying it to Maya and calling it management. I am not ready to open this in the living room at eight o'clock on a Thursday, and my sternum aches where her palm was.
She watches me. Her eyes narrow a fraction at the hesitation, at the not tonight. Then her gaze drops to my chest and comes back to my face.
"Okay," she says. "Not tonight."
She picks up the sweatshirt, pulls it over her head, finds the shorts on the floor, and dresses in front of me without turning away.
"I'm going to shower," she says. "Before he gets back."
Before he gets back. So he will not smell me on her. She is running the concealment herself now. Shower before Dante. Clothes back on. Door locked. The same house taught us both where to put the evidence.
She goes upstairs, and the water starts. The pipes in this house are loud enough to track her position by the pressure shifts, the way I used to track her through the wall in Richard's house.
I sit on the couch with Dante's blanket beside me. The wool still holds the shape of being folded by her hands, neat and precise, corners aligned. The thank-you note is in Dante's pocket now.
I wipe the counter, then straighten the blanket on the arm of the couch, aligning corners that are already aligned.
My palms run along the folds again and again.
If my hands stop moving, they will reach for the phone.
They will text Dante. Or they will try to figure out how to tell the man I have been sleeping beside for six years that I put my mouth on the woman he is falling for while his blanket sat two feet from her head.
The water stops upstairs. Her footsteps cross the hall. Her door closes. The lock turns.
The house is quiet. The counter is clean. Every visible thing is in order.
Dante comes home at 9:14. His bag lands by the door. He walks into the kitchen, drops his keys on the counter, and looks at me, and I look at him.
"How was film?" I ask.
"Productive. Addison wants to adjust the neutral zone entries."
"Maya's recommendation."
"Maya's recommendation." He opens the fridge, takes out the water, and drinks standing up, efficient and functional the way he always does. "Where is she?"
"Spare room. She went up early."
He nods, puts the water back, and walks past me toward the stairs. His hand brushes my shoulder as he passes, the brief contact, the nightly ritual, two fingers against the same spot they always find.
His footsteps go up the stairs, heavy and announcing.
Past the spare room, the pause is there, the half-second where his stride breaks outside her door as he listens for the breathing count.
The blanket, the jersey, the sticky note, and now the nightly pause stack up in the hallway.
His breathing goes shallow. His weight settles.
He stays there long enough that the floorboard creaks twice under the same foot. Then his door closes.
Three people. Three doors. My mouth still tastes like her.
Maya's breathing count starts at the end of the hall. Four in, four hold, four out. I count with her through the wall, in the dark.
Three cycles. Then quiet.