13. Chapter 13
Cole
We don't sleep.
The living room won't let us. Owen's down hard on the mattress by the fire, but the couch and the armchair are six feet apart with the whole unfinished night sitting in the space between them, and I lie there listening to her not-sleep the way she's listening to me, and around one in the morning she gives up first.
"I'm getting a glass of water," she whispers. Not because she's thirsty. Because the room is too small for what's in it.
I follow her because I'm done pretending I'm the kind of man who stays in the chair.
The kitchen is dark except for the one candle still going on the counter and the storm working at the boarded glass.
She gets the bread out, the good cheese, makes the thing she makes when her hands need a job, and I stand in the doorway and watch her do it and neither of us says the obvious thing, which is that nobody came down here to eat.
She sets the knife down.
She doesn't turn around. "You're standing there again."
"I know."
"You did this last night too. Stood in a doorway and counted instead of coming in."
"I'm not counting now."
She turns around.
That's all it takes. The unfinished thing from an hour ago is still live in both of us, and it doesn't need a runway this time.
I cross the kitchen and she meets me and my hands are in her hair and her mouth is already open under mine, and there's nothing careful left in either of us to burn off.
We did the careful version against this counter an hour ago and got interrupted.
This isn't that. This is what was underneath it.
"Owen," she breathes against my mouth.
"Out cold. I'll hear the mattress." I get my mouth on her throat, the spot under her ear I already know does it. "Not here. The den."
"The den."
We don't make it gracefully. I pull the door half shut behind us and stop caring about the gap because my hands are under the sweater, flat on her ribs, and she's warm the whole way up.
"Tell me to stop and I stop."
"Don't you dare."
I almost laugh against her collarbone, and then my mouth is there instead, and I let my teeth find her, the same place I marked, and she arches into it before she decides to. I stay there longer than I need to. She'll find it in the morning. I want her to.
I get the sweater off. She gets my shirt open and puts her mouth over my heart, and I feel it kick against her lips, trying to get to her.
Then her teeth find the muscle at the top of my shoulder and bite down, not gentle, and the sound that comes out of me is one I'll be thinking about later.
She does it the way I marked her a minute ago.
Even now. Even giving in, she's keeping the ledger level.
"Mara."
She doesn't answer. Her hand finds my jaw.
I lay her back on the couch. I take my time, because I've wanted to take my time with her since the morning at the gate, and tonight there's no panel to hold and no small voice down the hall and no reason to rush the one thing I've spent every clash deciding against.
I go down the length of her slow. She loses the thread of whatever careful thing she still had, and I feel her lose it. Her stomach. Her hipbone. Lower. I look up once, asking. Her fingers go into my hair and answer.
After that I stop keeping track of anything but her.
I learn what the mudroom didn't get to. The place that tightens her grip. The pressure that takes her thighs apart.
The sound she makes when I work two fingers into her and curl them up, the one she tries to bite back and can't. I keep my free hand splayed flat across her stomach, holding her down while the rest of her tries to leave the ground.
"Cole—"
"I've got you. Quiet."
She gets a fist in my hair and the storm covers most of it, and when it breaks it breaks all the way through her, my name somewhere in her throat and the boarded windows the only reason the sound stays in this room.
I come back up the length of her. Kiss her shoulder. Her jaw. The corner of her mouth.
She reaches for me.
I catch her wrist. Gentle. Stop it.
"Mara." I put my forehead to hers. "I've wanted to give you one thing in this house that wasn't a trade. Let me have it."
She lets me. I feel her decide to, feel her go quiet under my hand, the want still in her and banked on purpose. Something is still owed and we both know it. That's all right. I can carry owed.
I pull the throw over us. She doesn't ask what we are. I'm grateful, because right now I don't have the answer in words. I have it in my hands and that's all I trust.
She goes under. Her breathing evens out against my chest.
I lie there in the den of a house I've avoided since Diane, and I make myself think it through, because I'm still me and I still run the angles even now.
Owen wakes at six-forty. He walks the house barefoot before he's awake enough to knock. I am not going to hand him a thing he isn't ready for, not the morning after the first night of it.
So I get up.
I lift her. An arm under her knees, one at her back. She stirs and doesn't wake, just turns her face into my neck, trusting it, and that nearly undoes the plan right there.
I carry her down the dark hall to the east room and put her in her own bed and pull the cover to her shoulder the way I do for Owen.
She half-surfaces. I see her clock it: the bed, the room, the fact that I moved her.
I want to explain it. That it's for Owen.
That it isn't a retreat. That I'd have stayed wrapped around her till the sun came up if there weren't an eight-year-old in this house with the door-opening habits of a search warrant.
I don't say any of it. She's already going back under, and the words can wait for a morning when I've got my hands free and a better chance of getting them right.
I stand in her doorway one second. One. Then I go check on my son, because that's the other thing I never stop doing, and tonight, for once, it costs me nothing to feel both at the same time.
The storm blows itself out before dawn.
By the time the light comes up grey at the edges of the boarded windows I'm in the kitchen with coffee, and the yard looks like an argument.
Branches down. The oak at the fence line missing a limb the size of my arm.
Puddles in the gravel that will take two days to drain.
I take inventory the way I always do after a threat passes.
What it left. What it took.
The house is quiet in the way it gets before Owen wakes up. Different from nighttime quiet. More fragile. Like the morning hasn't committed to anything yet.
I hear him before he reaches the bottom stair. The weight of his feet, the way he takes the last two steps together because he has done that since he was four and I have never corrected it.
He appears in the kitchen doorway.
Pajama pants with the small dinosaurs on them. The grey shirt he's had since first grade that I have been meaning to retire for a year. His hair is worse than usual, which is an achievement. He has the stuffed stegosaurus under one arm, which means he woke up afraid and is pretending he didn't.
He looks at me. At the window. At my coffee.
"You're awake early," he says.
"So are you."
He climbs onto the stool at the island and puts the dinosaur on the counter between us. Sets it carefully, like placement matters. Then he folds his arms on the island surface and looks at me.
The look is the one I know.
The one that means he has been thinking about something in the dark and has decided this morning is when he asks about it.
"You hungry?" I ask.
"Not yet."
"Okay."
I turn back to the window. Give him a minute. Owen never rushes into the thing he wants to say. He circles it first. I have learned not to rush him.
The puddles in the gravel are catching the early light. Pink and flat. A cardinal lands on the fence post, looks at the yard, decides against it, leaves.
"Dad."
"Yeah."
"Do you like Mara?"
I don't move.
I keep my eyes on the puddle. The cardinal is gone. The fence post is empty.
"Why are you asking?"
"Because I want to know."
I turn around.
He is watching me with the patience of a kid who has already run through several versions of this conversation in his head and knows which one I'm going to try to give him.
I set my mug down.
I sit on the stool across the island from him and think about how much truth an eight-year-old gets.
The answer, I decide, is more than I've been giving him.
"Yeah," I say. "I like her."
"How much."
"Owen."
"I'm asking."
"I know you're asking."
He waits. He is very good at waiting. Better than most adults I know.
"A lot," I say. "I like her a lot."
He nods. Slow. Like he's putting it somewhere safe.
"Since when."
"Since the beginning."
"Since the gate?"
I look at him.
"You noticed that."
"You were looking at her funny at the gate."
"I was not looking at her funny."
"Dad. You were." He says it the way he says things that are simply true. No argument in it. "You had your face that you get when you're trying not to have a face."
I pick up my coffee.
"Is that a face I have."
"You have it a lot. You had it when I wanted to keep the frog from the creek. You had it when Dev brought the big black car instead of the regular one." He tilts his head. "You had it when Mara walked in for the first couple of days."
I say nothing.
"Then you stopped having it," he says. "So, I figured you stopped trying."
"Stopped trying to what."
"To not like her."
The kitchen is quiet.
Outside a branch drops somewhere in the yard. Just the weight of the wet finally letting go.
"You're eight," I say.
"I know I'm eight."
"When did you get this smart."
"I dunno. I just am." He picks up the stegosaurus and turns it over in his hands. "You just don't always ask me stuff."
I look at my son. His hair and his dinosaur pajamas and the careful way he is holding this conversation, like he's been saving it.
"What made you ask today?" I say.
He sets the dinosaur down. Lines it up with the edge of the counter.
"I heard you guys last night. In the kitchen. After you thought I was asleep."
I go still.
"Not the words," he says quickly. "Just the voices. The way they sounded."
"How did they sound."
He thinks about it. Seriously, the way he thinks about everything.
"Like when you read to me," he says. "The good nights. When you're not tired and you do all the voices and you forget to stop at the end of the chapter." He pauses. "Not like you were being quiet because you were worried. Quiet the other way. Like you wanted to keep talking."
I put both hands around my mug.
"Owen."
"I miss Mom too." He says it fast, like getting it out before it gets heavy. "Every day. It's like." He stops. Looks at the stegosaurus. "You know when you lose a tooth? And there's the hole?"
"Yeah."
"And your tongue goes in it. You don't even tell it to. It just goes." He pokes his tongue against the inside of his cheek, then stops, like he didn't mean to show me. "And you can't make it stop. It just keeps going back to check."
"Yeah."
"That's how Mom is. There's a spot. And you can't not check it."
I press my mouth together.
He's eight. He doesn't know what he just handed me. He doesn't know he just told me I run my tongue over the same hole forty times a day, that I've been checking it like it's still open, like it could still bleed if I stopped paying attention.
"But Dad." He looks right at me. "You check yours too much."
The cardinal is back on the fence post.
I watch it and don't say anything.
"I think Mom would be a little mad at you," he says. "Not yelling mad. The other kind."
"What's the other kind."
He frowns. Works on it. "Like." He can't get it. His mouth pulls to the side. "You know the kind."
"I think I do."
I close my eyes for one second.
One.
"You're eight," I say again.
"You keep saying that."
"Because I keep needing it to be true."
He almost smiles. The corner of his mouth does a thing that is entirely his mother's.
"So, what are you going to do," he says.
"About what."
"About liking Mara a lot."
"Owen."
"Dad. I'm just asking."
"I know what you're asking."
"So?"
I look at him across the island. My kid. Eight years old and more certain about some things than I have been in three years.
"I don't know yet," I say. It comes out honest, which is the only way he'd accept it.
He considers this.
"Okay," he says. Like it's a reasonable place to leave it. "But you should figure it out. Because what if she figures it out first and gets tired of waiting?"
"Is that right."
"People don't wait forever. You told me that. About the library books." He shrugs. "If you don't return them somebody else puts a hold on them."
I look at him.
"Did you just compare Mara to a library book."
"Kind of." He shrugs again. "You can't just keep something because you might want it later. Somebody else reads it."
"You're eight," I say.
"Stop saying that." But he grins. Wide and open and unguarded, the way he grins when he forgets to protect himself, and it goes straight through me with no warning.
He hops off the stool. Tucks the dinosaur under his arm. "I'm going to go get my comics."
"You said you weren't hungry."
"I'm not hungry yet. I can still get my comics."
"Owen."
He stops.
"Thank you," I say. "For telling me."
He shrugs the way kids shrug when they have done something good and don't want to make it a thing. "You would've figured it out."
"Maybe."
"You would've. You're just slow." He pats the counter once, the way I pat his shoulder, and walks out of the kitchen.
I sit there.
His footsteps go up the stairs, the last two taken together, and then nothing.