7. Maya
MAYA
I have just gone down on a man in the front seat of my own car.
In a parking lot. Outside a barbecue restaurant. Called Dale's.
I want that on the record. I want it noted that I know exactly what I've done. In case anybody comes asking later.
A licensing board, my mother, the version of me who has to get in the shower tomorrow and look at the tiles.
I was there. I have notes.
And Cole is wrecked.
That's the only word for it. This enormous, contained, locked-down man is sprawled back against the passenger seat, head tipped to the rest, chest going like he's run somewhere.
His eyes are half open and fixed on me. Like I'm the last thing left in the world that makes sense.
Nobody has ever looked at me like that. I'd remember.
"Hi," I say.
It's not what I meant to say. There wasn't a lot of competition, because my brain is mostly static right now, but hi still feels like it came in under budget.
The corner of his mouth goes. The rusty one. The smile that takes ten years off him.
"Hi," he says back, rough as gravel. He reaches up and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear with a hand the size of a dinner plate.
Careful. Like I'm the breakable one here.
And that's when I feel him move.
He shifts toward me, turning, getting an arm around me to pull me up the seat. And I hear it before I feel it. The small flat sound he makes in the back of his throat.
Not pleasure. The other thing.
I have his shoulder under my hand before I've decided to.
"Stop." Physio voice. It comes out of me automatically, the one that's gotten a hundred stubborn men to put a weight down. "Cole. Your shoulder. Don't take the weight on that side."
He stops.
"I'm fine," he says.
"You are not fine, I've had my hands inside that joint for two weeks.
" I push him back into the seat, gentle but real, my palm flat on his chest. "And your back.
Don't think I didn't read your file. You're being held together with tape and stubbornness, and I am not explaining to the ER why a firefighter put his shoulder out in a Honda. "
He looks at me.
For a second I think I've done it. Said the thing that breaks the spell and dragged the clipboard back into a moment that had finally gotten rid of it.
Then he laughs.
It's not much. It's barely a sound. But his chest moves under my hand.
His eyes crease.
It's the first real laugh I've ever gotten out of him, and I'd do almost anything to hear it again.
"There she is," he says. "The bossy one."
"I prefer clinically assertive."
"Course you do."
And then he just watches me with that small smile sitting there. He doesn't move, because I told him not to. And somehow that's the thing that undoes me.
This man could pick me up with one arm but he’s letting me run it.
He's sitting there with his bad shoulder and his bad back and his hands open on his thighs, waiting. Leaving it to me.
So I climb over.
Which is not a graceful thing. Let me be honest about it, because I'm trying to be honest about all of it.
There's a console. There's a gearshift that catches me right in the worst place.
I yelp.
He steadies me with both hands at my waist, and we both pretend the gearshift didn't happen.
The roof's too low.
My knee finds the door and his head finds the ceiling.
For a second we're just two people who don't fit. Laughing, foreheads together, his breath warm on my mouth.
Then I get settled over him. Knees either side. Careful of the shoulder.
And then I stop laughing, because I can feel how much he wants me, and the whole car goes quiet.
This isn't me.
I should say that too, while I'm keeping the record straight. I am not the woman who climbs into a man's lap in a parking lot.
I'm the woman who's had two relationships in her life and waited a respectable, frankly boring amount of time for each.
The woman who hasn't been touched by anyone in longer than I'm going to admit even in my own head.
I don't do this.
I'm the one who reads the bodies. I'm not supposed to be the body coming apart.
He must see it cross my face, because his hands go still at my hips.
"Hey,” he says. "We don't have to."
"I know."
"I mean it. We can sit here. I'll drive you—" He stops. Remembers. "You'll drive us home and I won't say a word about it and nothing has to?—"
"Cole."
"What."
"Shut up," I say, and I kiss him.
Because the panic is real, but it's standing outside the car. And in here there's this huge gentle wrecked man, holding my hips like I'm something he can't believe he's allowed to hold.
And for the first time in longer than I want to count, I don't want to be careful.
He kisses me like he's starving and trying to be polite about it. One hand comes up into my hair. The other stays at my hip.
And I notice.
Of course I notice. It's how my brain is built.
It's his good arm doing the work and the bad one resting easy. Even now. Even like this, he's protecting the joint without being told, and the fact of it pulls something tight in my chest.
I get his shirt open. He gets a hand under mine, warm and rough against my spine, and when I press closer the breath goes out of him.
Skin to skin.
The heat of him everywhere the cold has been.
And I take over.
It's easier on him and we both know it.
I rise up, and reach between us, and take him in. Slow. Sinking down until there's nowhere left to go.
The sound he makes then is one I'm going to keep. His head goes back against the seat. His good hand spreads wide on my hip like he needs something to hold, and I'm it.
I keep my hands flat on his chest, for my balance and his sake, and I set the pace.
He lets me.
This man who decides everything. Who carries everything. Who walks out of every room first. He leans his head back against the seat and lets me have it.
"Look at me," I say. Because he said it to me earlier, in the dark, when it was him coming apart. And because I want his eyes now the way he wanted mine then.
He looks at me.
And at some point it stops being a thing I'm doing carefully. It becomes a thing that's just happening.
To both of us.
The windows go soft and pale. His hand tightens at my hip. My name comes out of him once, low and broken, like it surprised him on the way up.
After, I don't move.
I stay right where I am. Folded down against him, my face in his neck.
His heart goes hard under my ear, then slows.
His good arm comes around my back and holds me there. Neither of us says anything for a long time.
Then the panic gets back in the car.
It always does. It just waits for the quiet.
Oh my God.
I keep my face hidden in his neck so he can't see it land.
I slept with a patient.
Not slept. There was no sleeping, there wasn't even a bed.
There was a gearshift.
I had relations with a patient in a parking lot. Eleven days into a probationary contract that took me four years and a mountain of debt to be allowed to sign.
"I can hear you thinking," he says.
"I'm not thinking."
"You're thinking so loud it's coming through your skull into mine."
I pull back enough to look at him.
It's a mistake, because his face is open and soft and worried about me, and that's so much worse than if he'd looked smug.
"I could lose my job," I say. It comes out smaller than I want it to. "Cole. I could actually lose my license. This is… I don't do this. I have never once done this. I'm the careful one. I'm the one who sees everybody else doing the reckless thing and goes well that was always going to end badly."
"Maya."
"And the worst part." I'm building speed now, the way I do.
"The genuinely insane part. Is that I thought you hated me.
Two days ago I was writing a careful note to bring up with Brenda about your attitude.
You wouldn't give me four words. You walked off mid-sentence.
I went home convinced the most attractive man I'd ever put my hands on thought I was an idiot with a clipboard, and now I'm sitting in his lap in a — "
"Do you think," he says, "I'm going to complain?"
That stops me.
"What?"
"You keep talking like I'm going to wake up tomorrow and regret it.
" He says it slow, the way he says everything.
Like each word costs a quarter he's counting out.
"I've wanted to kiss you since the first day.
Since the moment I walked that room with your bad jokes and your warm hands.
You wouldn't let me hide. I wanted to kiss you so bad I had to be rude to you to keep my head straight. So no. I'm not going to complain."
I stare at him.
"I thought you hated me," I say again, because apparently it's the only sentence I have left.
"No." His thumb moves on my back, slow. "I hate myself. That's different. Big difference, actually. You just got caught standing next to it."
And there it is. The thing about him.
He hands you the worst truth he's got like he's passing the salt.
"You said hated," I say.
He goes still.
"You said it in the past tense." I sit up a little. My physio brain again, except this time it's not reading his shoulder, it's reading the one word he didn't mean to give me. "A minute ago. I hate myself. But just now you said — "
"I know what I said."
"Cole."
He's quiet a long moment. Out the windshield, the last of the light's going off the fields. His face is half gold and half dark. And I watch him decide whether to give me the thing or walk out of the room without moving his feet, the way he does.
He gives me the thing.
"It's a work in progress," he says. "The hating part. Turns out it's hard to keep up."
He looks at me, and his voice drops, and it's the most unguarded I've ever heard him.
"Around you it's hard,” he says. “You smile at me like I'm a person. You've got this kindness. You don't even know you're doing it. You did it to Dale. You did it to the kid at the gas station. And every time, I think about something I haven't let myself think about in nineteen days."
"What," I whisper.
"After," he says. "I think about after. Like there's going to be one. Like I get one." His jaw works. "I sat in that booth tonight and watched you eat a rib and I was happy. First time in nineteen days. I didn't have a word for it and then I did and it was that. Happy. You did that."
I don't have anything. For the first time in my life I have actually run out of words.
All of them.
I just look at this enormous, grief-soaked man telling me I made him happy, and my eyes are doing something I'd be embarrassed about if I had any room left for it.
"That was amazing, by the way," I manage. "I feel like, professionally, given the injury list, I should note that we accomplished that with no further damage to the shoulder."
"Something to tell the grandkids," he says.
"Grandkids." I sit all the way up. "Grandkids. Cole. We've known each other eleven days, you don't even talk, aren't you getting a little ahead of yourself?"
He looks at me. And there's nothing rusty about it now.
No flat patience.
No wall.
Just the whole of him, level and certain. The man who walked back into a burning house because he was the one standing closest to the door.
"No," he says. "I know what I want."
And the parking lot, and the license, and Brenda, and the careful note, and four years of being the sensible one. All of it stays standing right where it is.
Outside the car.
In the cold.
I lean down and put my forehead against his. He closes his eyes. And we stay like that while the light goes.
Two people who don't fit, in a car that's too small, on the edge of a town that's about to belong to both of us.