6. Cole #2
Maybe it's that she's the first person to say it who didn't seem to need me to agree so they could feel better.
She'd let me sit in it.
She told me she would and she meant it. And somehow that's the thing. She's not reaching for me to be okay. She's just telling me the truth as she sees it, and leaving it with me to do what I want with.
And some bolt that's been driven through the middle of me for nineteen days gives.
Just slightly. Just a quarter turn.
It wasn't my fault.
I don't believe it the way you believe the sun's coming up. I'm not there.
I may never be all the way there.
But for the first time since I put my foot down on that floor, I hear those words and some buried part of me, way down under all of it, thinks what if that's true?
What if I went into a burning house for a child I'd never met and did everything a man can do and the house still won.
What if I'm not a murderer. What if I'm just a man who couldn't save everyone and has to live in the same body that couldn't.
I've never let myself stand near that thought. It's been too dangerous. It felt like letting myself off.
She's the one who gets me near it.
My face is wet under her hand and I'm barely breathing and I look at her in the peach-colored light coming sideways through the windshield.
This woman who drove me out here and watched me eat and then opened me up like I was a door that had been painted shut.
And I don't have a single word left in me.
So I don't use one.
She leans across the gap between the seats and she kisses me.
It's not a move. There's nothing in it she wants from me. She kisses me the way you'd press your hand flat to a wall to find out if there's a fire on the other side. Gentle and certain and checking.
And there is.
God help me, there is.
I've been a cold house for nineteen days and she puts her mouth on mine and every window in me lights up at once.
It's the best kiss of my life and I've barely moved.
So, then I move and none of it is smooth.
I get a hand into her hair. The way I've wanted to since the first time she put hers on my shoulder. And even now I'm careful, like she's the thing in this car most likely to break.
But, she isn't.
I am, and we both know it.
She kisses me like she knows it.
It's been a long time since I touched anyone because I wanted to. Longer since I let anyone touch me.
I've kept myself out in the cold on purpose. The cold is what I've got coming. Warmth is for men who didn't put their foot wrong.
And here she is anyway. Warm under my hand. Her mouth on mine. Undoing the whole arithmetic one second at a time.
She's the one who moves it forward.
Her hand goes flat on my chest, right over the place where everything hurts, and then lower.
I catch it on reflex.
"You don't have to," I say against her mouth. "I'm not… you don't owe me anything."
She pulls back. Just far enough to look at me.
She doesn't say a word. She just holds me there with those dark, steady eyes until the noble thing I was building falls apart in my mouth.
Because she's not doing this out of pity and we both know it.
And the most honest part of me has wanted her since the day I met her.
So I let go of her wrist.
That's the whole thing, right there.
That's the hardest thing I've done in nineteen days.
Not the fire, not the floor, not any of it. Letting go of her wrist. Letting her give me something I haven't earned. And I know it, all the way down to my boots.
The car's too small for a man my size. The console's in the way. My bad shoulder finds the door and complains about it and I don't care even slightly.
She shifts toward me, turning in her seat, and folds down across the console into my lap. There's no room for a man my size and a woman at all.
She makes room anyway.
I feel the warmth of her breath before anything else. That alone nearly ends it.
Then her mouth.
The heat of her closes slow around me. The whole locked-down length of me comes loose. The console's digging into her. My bad shoulder's jammed against the door. But none of it reaches me.
There's a sound in the car I don't know.
It's mine.
I keep one hand in her hair. Not guiding. Just holding. Just needing to have a hand on her, to know she's real and here and choosing this.
Everything in me has been clenched shut for nineteen days. Jaw, fists, chest, the whole of me locked down around the one thing I won't put down.
And it's all coming loose at once.
I can't stop it. And for the first time in what seems like a long time, I don't want to.
"Look at me," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine. "I need you to look at me."
And she does.
She lifts those dark eyes to mine and doesn't stop.
And that undoes me more than anything her mouth is doing. Being looked at. Being seen, all the way to the bottom. The floor and the girl and the whole black weight of it. And she doesn't look away.
It goes white behind my eyes.
Not the white of the fire. Not the ringing, blood-in-the-mouth, church-bells white of the floor giving way.
The other kind.
The kind I forgot there was.