Chapter 43 Cody
She fits against me the same way she always has.
That's the thing about two years. The body remembers. Her weight against my chest, the specific way her shoulder tucks under my arm, the way she exhales when she settles — all of it exactly the same. Like, no time has passed.
The movie plays, but I'm not watching it. I'm watching her.
Not obviously — I've never been obvious about it.
She thinks I'm looking at the screen. She's been thinking that for two years, that I look at other things when I'm looking at her, that my attention is somewhere else when it has never once been anywhere else.
Adela has always been the thing in the room I'm most aware of.
And she's aware of it tonight.
That's new.
She's monitoring herself in a way she never used to because she never used to need to.
Something happened to her while I was asleep.
I've known it since the hospital. I know it more now, sitting here in my room in the amber light with her body against mine and her attention split between the screen and something she won't show me.
She thinks she's hiding it.
She's not hiding a thing from me.
But I want to understand its shape before I do anything about it. I want to know exactly what I'm working with. So I hold her, and I watch the movie I'm not watching, and I wait.
I'm good at waiting.
I slide my fingers across her stomach. Just over her shirt, nothing dramatic or pressing, just my hand moving across the fabric the way it has a hundred times in this bed. She inhales — sharp, small, quickly. I feel it more than hear it.
I keep my voice soft as I say, "Did you touch yourself while I was in the coma?"
She goes very still.
I press my hand flat against her stomach and slide down to between her legs. My hand is above her jeans now. I add pressure, but not too much. "Like this?"
Her hand finds my wrist.
She doesn't move it.
That tells me everything about where she actually is versus where she's pretending to be. If she wanted to stop me, she would stop me. She has always had that power, and she has always known it. The hand on my wrist is performance. The fact that she's not moving it is the truth.
"Adela."
"I stopped taking birth control."
I go still.
And look at the side of her face. At the quality of a lie delivered quickly, the words came out before she finished deciding to say them. She's looking at the screen with her jaw set and her hand still on my wrist. I can feel her pulse against my fingers.
I press harder.
"We can do other things then."
"Stop." She grabs my hand fully now. "I want to watch the movie."
I put my lips to her ear and whisper, "You can watch the movie."
I feel the shiver move through her.
She sits up, retreating into the version of herself she’s been displaying all evening. She starts to move, and I catch her wrist before she can stand.
"Where are you going?"
She's flushed — I can see it even in the amber light, the color high in her cheeks, her breathing not quite normal. She's performing composure over a body that isn't cooperating with the performance.
"Where's my laptop?" I ask.
The flush changes.
"I don't know."
"But you had it."
"For a day." She meets my eyes. She's decided on a version, and she's committing to it. "I didn't know the password, so I left it in your car."
"It's not in my car."
"I left it on your seat with your books. Just like I found it."
"You found it?"
She nods. "Your dad saw I hadn't left your side for some time. He told me to go home, and I wouldn’t, so when you went into surgery the first time, he sent me to get your car." She pauses. "I found it in the lot near the rink."
The world goes very quiet.
The rink.
I didn't drive to the rink that night. I went to Nob Hill, and I never made it back to my car, and the rink was not part of anything that happened that night in any version of events.
She's still talking. I hear her from a distance, the words coming through, but I’m not processing it.
She finds my face.
"What is it?" she asks.
Fuck.
I feel it in my face. The tell, the crack in the surface, the thing I let show for half a second before I pulled it back.
She saw it, and she called it out. This is Adela, who has been studying me for two years, the same way I've been studying her, and I just handed her something without meaning to.
"What?" I say.
She shakes her head slowly. Her eyes move across my face. It’s unsettling and completely, devastatingly attractive the way she’s looking at me. "Did you not drive to the rink that night?"
I say nothing.
"Whose house is on Nob Hill?"
I stay quiet.
"Tell me."
I murmur, "Don't worry about it."
She steps closer to me.
The flush is gone. What replaces it is something I have not seen on her face before — not the composed Adela, not the performing Adela, not even the afraid Adela.
Something with edges. Something that has been growing while I was unconscious and is now standing in my bedroom looking at me like I owe her an answer.
"You were in a coma for weeks, Cody."
"Not even two—"
"And I transferred to UW." She keeps going right through my interruption like it didn't happen.
"I've been left with no answers, and then I realized that I have no idea what your life was like at UW because whenever we did have time for each other, we only talked about me. I’m dying for answers –– for anything.
And your face just gave you away when I told you where I found your car. "
I look at her beautiful, furious face. Those eyes that have always told me too much. Those lips that hesitated under mine downstairs, and I haven't stopped thinking about them since.
This is her. The real her is underneath the performance. She's been in there this whole evening, and I've been watching for her, and here she is — blazing and certain she deserves an answer.
She does deserve an answer.
But she's not getting one.
"Take off your clothes," I command.
Her eyes flare. "No."
I stand.
She holds her ground, looking up at me. Her chin lifted.
I look at her lips. The ones I want are tightly wrapped around my cock right now. "Then get out."
She exhales, narrowing her eyes slightly. "I'm not the same girl I was at Puget Sound."
I reach out and take her hair in my hand. The way I've always touched her — like she's mine because she is. "No?"
She shakes her head slowly.
"Who are you then?" I ask quietly. "What did I wake up to?"
She holds her breath and takes one step back.
My hand drops.
"I won't listen to your every demand anymore," she says.
I look at her. "So you grew a backbone then."
Her nostrils flare.
And then she's moving — past me, to the door, her bag already on her shoulder, the decision made somewhere in the last thirty seconds and fully committed to now. I let her go. I watch her cross the room and reach the door, and she's almost through it when I say, "Whatever you know, Adela––"
She stops.
"Whatever you found out." I keep my voice even. “It's not what you think."
She looks at me over her shoulder.
I meet her eyes. "And you need to understand something before you leave."
"What?" she asks when I don’t say it right away.
I hold her gaze. "You're mine."
Her face twists into something confused, and then she's through the door, and it closes behind her. Then I'm standing in the middle of my room while the movie still plays.
I stand there for a moment and breathe.
I pull my phone from my pocket and open it.
The photograph of her note is still there. I've looked at it enough times that I could write it from memory.
You took the book.
I know it was you.
Bring it back.
A book. She's meeting someone over a book. A tall, dark, serious man who isn't on the team, and she's leaving him notes. He's taking things that belong to her, and she's going to him in libraries. And she hesitated when I kissed her. Her pulse was racing under my hand, and it wasn't because of me.
The front door closes downstairs, so I walk to the window.
Her Range Rover is in the driveway right where she left it. She doesn't look up at my window. She never looks back — that's always been one of her things, the forward momentum of her, the way she moves toward the next thing without checking what she's leaving.
She doesn't know I'm watching.
She pulls down the drive.
Through the gate.
And she’s gone for the night.
I stand at the window for a moment after the taillights disappear, and I think about the hesitation. About the backbone that wasn't there a month ago and is very much there now.
Someone built that in her while I was gone.
I pick up my phone.
It rings once.
Twice.
The line opens.
“Cody?”
"Hello, Silas."