Staying Is What I Do
Maribel
Mess has my couch on the porch and he’s arguing with Torque about which way it goes through the door. Neither of them has asked me. It’s my couch.
“Long side first,” I tell them.
“See,” Mess says.
“She didn’t say your way. She said long side.”
“That’s my way.”
The yellow house is full of Black Flag. Nash is on his back under the kitchen sink with a wrench, because the drip offended him.
Rook has carried every box in the truck by himself and is pretending it’s nothing even though his shirt is soaked through.
Hendrix is on a kitchen chair in the middle of the yard with his leg up on a cooler, directing everyone, because Doc said he could come if he didn’t lift.
Sharknado is on the mailbox. Somebody put him there. Nobody will say who.
Steel isn’t carrying anything. He’s been through the house twice already, front to back, and now he’s on the porch with his thumb on the lock of the screen door, working it, watching how far it gives.
“This one’s a joke,” he says to Mateo. “Deadbolt on the inside door tonight, not tomorrow. Back window in the little room doesn’t lock. I’ll bring the bar.”
“Okay.”
“Mango tree’s too close to the bedroom side. Somebody could come up under it.”
“I’m not cutting down the tree.”
Steel looks at the tree for a while. “Then I’m putting a solar motion light on it.”
“Santo’s in Georgia,” Torque says from the yard.
Mateo turns.
“A club outside Savannah put eyes on him three nights ago. Three men left with him. The rest scattered. Los Muertos’ house is empty.”
“For now,” Mateo says.
“Yeah. For now. Every club along I-95 has his plate. If he turns south, we know before he crosses the state line.”
Steel takes his thumb off the screen-door lock. “Deadbolt still goes in tonight.”
“I didn’t tell you it didn’t,” Torque says.
Santo is alive. He buried his brother, gathered what was left, and ran far enough to build himself another plan. That isn’t gone forever.
It is gone today.
Today, he doesn’t know this house. Today, Black Flag is watching the road between him and us. Today, I can stand in my own doorway without waiting for a motorcycle.
Steel checks all the windows, and Mateo lets him. I don’t mind. I know the difference between a man looking at me and a man looking at my door.
“Maribel.” Steel doesn’t look up from the lock. “Mat Room’s a garage now. Tuesday.”
“You’re coming here?”
“You’ve got a garage.”
That’s the whole conversation, and it’s enough. Nobody in this yard is here because I need protecting. They’re here because I’m theirs. It took me a long time to know the difference. I stand in my own doorway with my hands on the frame and let it be true.
By late afternoon the truck’s empty, the beer’s gone, and Torque is putting them on their bikes. Hendrix gets carried to the truck bed and hates it. Rook takes Sharknado off the mailbox, brushes the grit off his good side, and hands him to me without a word.
Then it’s quiet. Just the water, close enough to hear from the porch, the way he promised.
Mateo’s behind me. His hands come around my waist and his mouth finds the side of my neck, and he says against it, “Go look at the bedroom.”
“You put the bed together?”
“Go look.”
I go down the little hall with Sharknado under my arm. The door’s shut, so I open it.
The bed is made, and I can’t see the covers.
Feathers. All of it, headboard to foot, brown and gray and white and one blue. More than I can count. Old ones, dry and broken-edged, nothing you’d buy in a store. Some of them are longer than my hand. Some are the size of my fingernail. They’ve got dust on them. They’ve got years on them.
He didn’t buy these.
He’s had them.
I put the shark on the dresser. I can’t hold him and this. My chest feels swollen.
I pick up one of the small ones. Brown. Brittle at the edge. The same kind I used to hide in a tin. I set it back where it was.
“Mateo.”
He’s in the doorway. He looks at the bed, then at me. He doesn’t explain any of it.
“You collected these.”
“Yeah.”
“How long.”
“Since I could.” His voice is rough. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to give them to you.”
I go to him. I kiss him in the doorway of a bedroom that is ours, and he makes a sound into my mouth.
His hands find my waist. I get his shirt over his head and put my mouth on the crooked shark because it’s mine to put my mouth on.
He backs me toward the bed. When my legs hit the mattress we go down into the feathers he kept for me never knowing if this day would come.
They lift and settle over my arms, his shoulders, the pillow.
I laugh once. Then I don’t, because he’s over me and hard against my hip and I am done looking.
“Off,” I tell him, and I mean everything left.
He gets my clothes off without being careful about the feathers. They stick to my skin. They stick to his. He kisses my throat, my breasts, the place under my ribs that makes my hips kick. Then his mouth is between my legs, and I fist the sheet under all that brown and gray as I let him have me.
He’s filthy about it. He always is when I let him take. Tongue flat, then two fingers, then he sucks my clit and looks up the length of me like the house, the club, the water outside the window can wait.
“Mateo—“
“I know. Give it to me.”
I come on his mouth with feathers in my hair and his name in my throat. He stays through it, licking me down. When I pull him up by the arms, he comes easy, mouth wet, eyes gone.
I start for the nightstand. He catches my wrist and shakes his head. “No. Nothing on it. I want to come in you. Nothing between us ever again, Pluma.” I leave the drawer shut.
I stare at him. “Really?”
He grins and says, “You’re Catholic, remember?”
I reach between us and put him where I want him. He holds still for one second, the same second he always gives me, and I nod.
He pushes in.
Slow. Deep. The stretch I know now and still want. Feathers slide under my shoulders. His forehead drops to mine and he stays buried, breathing.
“Look at you,” he says. “In your house. Taking my cock.”
“Move.”
He thrusts in long strokes that drag every inch of him through me. I wrap my legs around him and pull. He goes harder. The headboard knocks the wall and a handful of feathers drift off the edge of the mattress.
“Fuck, Pluma. So wet.” His hand finds my clit, thumb working while he fucks me. “Come on my cock. I want it in our room.”
When I crossed the border, I never thought anything good would be mine. Not him. Not this place.
Our room. That does it as much as the thumb. I come again, tighter, shaking, and he swears and drives into me through it until his rhythm breaks.
“Maribel—“
“Yes.”
“I love you. I loved you before I knew what love was.”
I hook my legs around him. “I love you too, Mateo. I would have gone anywhere to find you again.”
He comes with his face in my throat, his whole weight on me, and a sound I feel in my chest. I hold him there. Feathers stuck to the sweat on his back. One on the bad shark, white against the ink. I leave it.
For a while we just breathe.
Then he kisses the side of my head and pulls out. He drops beside me, one arm still over my stomach. The water keeps doing what the water does. A feather is on my mouth. I spit it off and he laughs quietly.
“We’re going to have to pick these up,” I say.
“Tomorrow.”
He turns his head on the pillow. Looks at me. Looks at the mess we made of nineteen years of collecting. “I’m glad you stayed.”
“It’s my bed.”
“Yeah.” His mouth finds my shoulder. “It is.”
I close my eyes in a yellow house with the water close enough to hear, feathers in my hair, his heart slamming under my palm, and I do not go anywhere.
From now on, staying is what I do.
MATEO AND MARIBEL HAVE ONE MORE STOP TO MAKE…
Before they begin their life in the yellow house, Mateo takes Maribel to see the father who still remembers the little girl his son never stopped looking for.
Then he shows her the place where his life in America began—and shares something he’s never told anyone.