12. Chapter 12
Mara
He's gone forty-seven minutes.
I know because I count them. Not on purpose. It starts as something to do with my brain while the rest of me holds still. Owen is out cold on the mattress, his breathing slow and even, one arm thrown above his head.
I count because counting is better than listening too hard to the dark outside.
The generator hums, the one Cole got running within minutes of the lights dying. Rain hits the windows in sheets and then nothing and then sheets again, like the storm can't make up its mind.
I tell myself, he will be back in two minutes. Two minutes is a lie. It's been two minutes seventeen times now.
I stare at the back door and wait.
Cole comes back soaked.
The door opens and he steps in from the dark, water running off his jacket in ropes, jaw locked so tight I can see the muscle jump at the hinge. He strips the coat without a word and hangs it on the hook like the hook personally wronged him.
His t-shirt under it is soaked through at the shoulders. The cotton has gone transparent across his chest where the rain got under the collar. I notice. I look away. I notice that I noticed.
"What did you see?"
"Nothing."
"Cole."
"I said nothing." He moves past me toward the kitchen. "How's Owen?"
I follow. "Out cold. What did you see?"
He doesn't answer. He's at the sink, water running over his hands. Every muscle in his shoulders is locked tight.
I keep my voice low so Owen won't wake. "If there's something out there, I need to know."
"You need to stay inside."
"That's not what I asked."
He turns off the tap. Both hands flat on the edge of the sink. He doesn't turn around.
The silence stretches long enough that I start to fill it myself. Then he speaks.
"There was a light. In the treeline."
My stomach drops. Hard. Not surprise. Confirmation.
"Gone as in they left," I say carefully. "Or gone as in they turned it off."
He doesn't answer.
His hands press harder into the sink.
Which is an answer.
Someone is out there in the dark, watching this house. Cole has been carrying that alone for forty-seven minutes because that's what he does. Takes the terrible thing and puts it behind his ribs where no one can see it.
I breathe. In, out.
"Okay," I say. "Okay."
I do something with my hands because if I don't I'll start running worst-case scenarios out loud, and that won't help anyone.
The candles are already lit. I straighten what doesn't need straightening.
He stands at the sink with his back to me and lets me move around the kitchen, and neither of us says the thing sitting in the middle of the room.
"You should have told me about the light," I say.
"I'm handling it."
"I live here right now too."
"Temporarily."
I set down the cloth. Turn to look at him.
"You do that on purpose," I say.
"Do what."
"Remind me I'm temporary. Right when I get too close to something that matters to you."
"You're my employee, Mara."
"I know what I am."
"Then act like it."
He looks away. Not fast. But he looks away first.
He's not cruel. He's scared.
"Cole." My voice drops. "I'm not going to tell anyone what you saw. I just want to know what we're dealing with so I can help keep Owen safe."
The muscle in his jaw works.
"Someone was out there. Could be nothing. Could be Mercer running a check. Could be worse."
"Dev?"
"Notified. Working it remotely. Roads are out."
"Okay. So, we stay sharp."
He looks at me like he built himself up for an argument and I took it off the table.
"You're not scared," he says.
"I'm terrified. I'm just not going to be terrified at you."
A beat.
He straightens up off the sink. The wall of him eases by a degree. Whatever the perimeter took out of him, it's still in his shoulders, and the kitchen is suddenly two feet wide.
We don't look at each other. We don't speak. We both pretend the thing isn't there and the silence after is louder than the rain.
The candle on the counter is burning low, wax pooling unevenly, and neither of us has moved more than a foot.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
"You're still standing there."
"I know."
I should check on Owen again. Instead he's looking at me across two feet of kitchen with the storm doing something furious to the windows, and Owen is asleep thirty feet away, and I can't stop thinking about that.
"I'm not going to do anything," he says. Low. Like he's reassuring himself as much as me.
"I didn't ask you not to."
That lands somewhere in his jaw. I watch it land.
He crosses the two feet. Not fast. He has time to change his mind the whole way and doesn't take it.
His hand comes up to my jaw and his mouth is on mine before I've finished deciding to let it happen, and there's nothing careful in it.
We're past careful. The mudroom burned careful off both of us days ago.
This is a man who already knows what my mouth does and has spent every hour since making himself not have it again, and the not-having is gone now, all at once, the storm and the dark and whatever he saw in those trees pushing it out of him.
I grab the front of his shirt and he makes a sound against my mouth that I feel in my knees.
"We can't," I say, even as my hands are pulling him closer. "Owen could—"
"He's out. Completely out. I checked twice." His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, sure of the path now, finding the place under my ear he found before. "I'm not taking this anywhere we can't hear him."
"Okay." I tip my head back to give him more room. "Okay."
His mouth works down the side of my throat and finds the dip of my collarbone and stays there. Teeth, then the soft press after, and I feel the small sting of it and don't care. My hand fists in his hair and holds him to the spot. He's marking me. I let him.
His hand finds the hem of my sweater. He doesn't ask this time. He's past asking. His palm flattens against my stomach, warm, and slides up under the wool, and I shiver in a way that has nothing to do with the storm.
His mouth comes back to mine. His other hand braces flat on the counter behind me, boxing me in without pinning me, except this time there's no panel to drop, nothing to hold, just him.
I bite down on the inside of my own cheek to keep quiet. He notices. Of course, he notices, he notices everything. His mouth swallows the sound before it can carry down the hall.
"Quiet," he murmurs against my lips. Not an order. A thing we already know how to do together. "Quiet for me."
I nod. I don't trust my voice.
His hand starts lower.
And down the hall, a sound.
The creak of the mattress. A shift of weight. A small, sleep-thick voice, not awake, not quite words.
"Dad?"
Cole goes still against me. The hand at my waist stops. Every line of him reroutes in the space of a breath, the man who was kissing me gone and the one who checks the mud under Owen's window in his place.
We come apart.
He's across the kitchen and at the mouth of the hall before I've got my breath back, silent on his feet for a big man, and I stand there with my sweater pushed half up and my pulse going everywhere and listen.
Nothing. The creak of Owen turning over. A mumble that dissolves into even breathing.
Cole stands in the dark of the doorway a moment longer, watching, making sure. Then he comes back.
He stops an arm's length away. Not closer.
His chest is still moving wrong. So is mine. The charge is still in the room, all of it, every degree of what we just walked up to, and nowhere for it to go.
"He's out," he says. Rough. "Turned over. That's all."
"I know."
"Mara."
"I know." I pull the sweater down. My hand isn't steady. "Don't."
He doesn't. He just stands there with the thing we didn't finish sitting between us, and I make myself turn back to the counter because if I keep looking at him I'm going to close the distance myself, and a sound just told us exactly why we can't.
"That wasn't nothing," I say. To the counter. Unsteady.
"No." Quiet. "It wasn't."
There's a mark coming up on my collarbone where his mouth was. I can feel it. I don't cover it. He looks at it once, and I watch him decide not to apologize for it, and I'm glad.
A beat.
He moves to the cabinet. Pulls down a glass. Fills it at the tap. Crosses back and sets it on the counter at my hip.
Doesn't hand it over. Just sets it there. The water settles in the glass.
"Drink it," he says. Quiet.
I look at it. I look at him.
I don't reach for it.
His eyes drop to the glass. To my hand on the counter next to it. To the inch of space between my fingers and the water he just brought me.
He understands.
The first time he brought me a glass I drank it without thinking. He counted that. He's counting this too.
His shoulders drop, slow.
Then he steps toward me.
He doesn't pin me to anything. There's nothing behind me but open kitchen. He just stops close, closer than the counter, closer than the glass, until I have to tip my chin up to keep his eyes.
He's not touching me. My whole body has chosen that he is.
His hand lifts. Doesn't land. It hovers a hair off my jaw, the heat of his palm as real as contact, his thumb a breath from the corner of my mouth. My lips part on nothing.
"This is the part where I'm supposed to step back," he says. Low. Wrecked.
"You're not stepping back."
"No."
His forehead comes down. Stops a fraction short of mine. His breath is on my mouth. His other hand finds the curve of my waist, light, just resting, the heat of it burning through the wool, and I make a sound I didn't authorize, small and unsteady.
His eyes close, like the sound undid something he'd been holding shut.
"You're the only thing I haven't been able to put behind my ribs," he says.
I go still.
His thumb traces my collarbone once, over the mark his mouth left, and rests there, over my pulse.
Then he takes one step back. Slow.
The cold air of the kitchen rushes in where his body was and I almost reach for him to put it back.
The glass is still there. Still untouched. The water inside has gone perfectly still.
"Go check on Owen," he says. Quiet. "Please."
I do.
I walk down the hall on legs that aren't entirely mine and check on a boy who's already fast asleep. I stand in the doorway of the living room for a full minute before I trust myself to go back to the kitchen.
When I do, Cole is at the table.
The glass of water is still on the counter where he set it. Still full. He hasn't moved it.
His phone is buzzing against the wood.
He looks at the screen. Whatever's there changes his face. The careful blank of someone receiving information they were hoping not to receive.
He sets it down. Face down.
The lights flicker. Once, twice. The generator coughs and catches. Outside, the wind shifts gears and starts in low, building, a sound the house hasn't made yet tonight.
He picks the phone back up. And then, so quiet I almost don't catch it, with his back half to me and his eyes already on the screen:
"I love you."
I don't move.
I'm not even sure he meant me to hear it. It isn't aimed at me. It's aimed at the dark window and the phone in his hand, said low, the way you say a thing to find out whether you can stand the sound of it out loud.
I stand in the flickering light and let the words be in the air between us, unanswered, because he didn't ask me to answer and I don't think he could survive it if I tried.
He sets the phone to his ear. Whatever Dev says changes the line of his jaw. The operating voice comes back.
He walks out of the kitchen without looking at me.
I stand there with the untouched glass of water beside my hand and listen to his footsteps go down the hall.
He doesn't look back.
The phone call lasts four minutes.
Then Cole appears in the kitchen doorway.
His face is the boardroom face. Controlled and already moving.
"Elise's lawyer filed a motion this afternoon," he says. "Nothing urgent yet. A procedural thing. Marcus is handling it."
He doesn't say more than that. I don't ask.
The glass of water sits on the counter between us, perfectly still, waiting to be picked up.
I pick it up.