20. Chapter 20 #2
"How are you."
Not how are you doing. Just how are you. The version that doesn't want a managed answer.
I look at the yard.
"I don't know yet," I say.
She nods. Like that's a complete answer. Like not knowing yet is a thing she has full respect for.
Then she turns toward me.
I feel her turn before I see it. Her hand comes up and finds my jaw. Just rests there. Her thumb traces once along the line of it, slow, the way you touch something you've been wanting to touch a long time and have finally decided to stop not touching.
My eyes close.
Her thumb moves again. Along my jaw, to my chin, back. She's not kissing me. She's just touching my face in the dark. Learning it with her hands the way she learns rooms with her eyes.
The locked place in my chest gives way.
Not collapses. Moves. A door opening an inch that has been shut a long time.
I turn toward her.
My hand finds her waist. Her hip. I pull her in and her free hand goes to my chest and she tips her face up and I find her mouth.
It starts slow. Slower than the den. Slower than the counter. There's no time pressing on it, no storm, no Dev's headlights coming up the drive.
And then it isn't slow.
I don't decide for it to change. It just changes.
Her hand fists in my shirt and pulls, and the kiss tips over into something with teeth in it, and I stop being careful about the three years of grief Dev pried open on the porch and put all of it here instead, into her mouth, into the hand I've got fisted at the small of her back.
She makes a sound against me. Low. I feel it more than hear it.
My hand goes under the hem of the shirt.
Flat on bare skin, up the line of her spine, and she arches into it, and I walk her back a step until the edge of the desk stops her.
She doesn't stop me. She pulls me with her.
Her hands are at my collar, my jaw, dragging me down, and I get a knee between hers and she opens for it and the sound she makes that time isn't low at all.
"Cole." Not a stop. The opposite of a stop.
I get a hand under her thigh and lift it to my hip. The shirt rides up. My mouth is at her throat, the soft place under her ear that takes her knees out, and I feel her pulse going hard against my lips, and I want her with a force that has nowhere left to go but forward.
Her hands drop to the hem of my shirt. Start pulling it up.
I let her.
Three years I've stood at this window not feeling anything all the way. Tonight I'm feeling all of it at once, grief and want braided so tight I can't tell which one has my hands. I don't care. I'd take either one as long as it's her.
That's the thing she catches.
Her hands go still on my shirt.
Then they flatten. Press. Not pulling up anymore. Pushing, soft, against my chest.
"Hey." Against my mouth. "Hey. Cole."
I lift my head.
Her eyes are wide and dark and her chest is going as hard as mine and she does not look like a woman who wants to stop. That's what makes it land. She wants this. She's stopping it anyway.
"What."
"You said you don't know yet." Her voice is wrecked and steady at the same time. "How you are. You said it twenty minutes ago." Her thumb moves on my chest, over my heart, slow. "I'm not going to be the thing you reach for so you don't have to find out."
It goes through me clean.
She read it. The braid. She felt me using her to not-feel and she will not let me, and the refusal is the most naked want I have ever stood inside, because she's holding herself off me with both hands and shaking with it.
"Mara."
"I know." Her forehead drops to my collarbone. Her breath is ragged against my shirt. "Believe me. I know."
My hand is still under her thigh. Her leg is still hooked at my hip. Neither of us moves to fix it for a long moment, both of us just breathing in the dark with the want standing in the room between us, denied, loud as the generator behind the house.
Then she lets her foot down. Slow. Her hands stay flat on my chest, holding the distance she just made, like she doesn't trust either of us to keep it without help.
I put my forehead to hers.
"You're right," I say. It comes out rough.
"I hate that I'm right."
"I know."
"For the record." She lifts her head. Her mouth is swollen and her eyes are still black and there's a half-smile in there fighting the rest of her face. "When you do know how you are. When it isn't a place to hide." Her thumb drags once more over my heart. "I'm going to be extremely available."
A sound comes out of me that's almost a laugh. The first one in hours.
"Noted," I say.
"Write it down."
She steps back. The cold rushes into every place she was. She fixes the hem of her shirt with both hands, a small ordinary gesture that does nothing to put the room back the way it was, and we both know it.
"I came in here to say one thing," she says. "And then I forgot it."
"What was it."
She's quiet a second.
"That I heard the whole briefing," she says. "The photos. What Prescott's going to do with my name. All of it." She lifts her chin. "And the answer's the same as it was this morning. I wanted you to hear me say it, not hear it from Dev on a porch."
I look at her.
She heard him. Through the wall. The thing he saved for the steps, she heard, and she came in here to answer it directly.
"You weren't supposed to hear that part," I say.
"I hear everything in this house. You hired a person who builds records for a living." The corner of her mouth curls, slow and certain. "I'm staying, Cole. Write it down."
"That's two things you've told me to write down."
"Then it's a long list." She's at the door now. She stops there, one hand on the frame, and looks back at me across the dark study, and the want is still in her face, banked on purpose, the same as mine. "Goodnight, Cole."
"Goodnight."
She goes. Her footsteps soft down the hall. Her door, the shift in the air more than the sound.
I stand at the window after she's gone.
Two things in one night. Dev said Diane's name and the floor held. And a woman I want past sense held me off with both hands because she wouldn't let me hide in her, and I'm standing here aching and grateful in the same breath, which is a combination I don't have a name for yet.
I'll find out how I am.
She's made it worth the finding out.
I stay at the window a while longer.
But not for long.
And not the way I used to.