28. Chapter 28
Cole
Iwake before her.
The sun is just coming over the ridge. The room is gold at the edges. Mara is asleep on her side with one hand under her cheek and the other tucked against my chest, where she put it sometime in the night and has not moved it since.
I do not move either.
I lie there and watch her sleep in my bed in my house in the soft early light. The shape of a morning I had stopped expecting to have.
Not just tonight. Today. Tomorrow. The week after this one.
Her fingers move once against my chest, then settle.
Her hair is on my pillow. The pillow smells like her now, the lemon from Junie’s apartment, and under it my soap from the shower she took at one in the morning when we finally got up for water. The two smells together are the smell of this room from now on.
She makes a small sound in her sleep. Half a word. Then she settles, and her hand opens flat over my heart and stays.
I do not breathe for a second. Then I do.
It is six-eighteen. I have about forty minutes before Owen’s feet hit the floor.
I press my mouth to the crown of her head.
“Mara.”
“Mm.”
“Mara.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“It’s six-twenty in the morning.”
“Same thing.”
She burrows further into my chest. I feel her smile against my skin.
I let her have another minute. I can’t let her have more than that, because I’ve been awake four minutes and I’m already a man with priorities, and the priorities have to do with the fact that she’s in my bed and Owen is not yet awake and I have a window.
I slide my hand down her back. Slow. Under the duvet. Down the curve of her spine to the small of her back, where she’s warm from sleep, then lower. My palm finds her hip. I leave it there.
She’s awake now. I can tell because her breathing has changed.
She does not open her eyes. She smiles into my chest.
“Cole.”
“Mm.”
“What are you doing.”
“Saying good morning.”
“That is not how you say good morning.”
“It’s the new way.”
“Cole. Owen.”
“Owen is asleep until seven-oh-five. He has been asleep until seven-oh-five every day for two years. We have maybe fifteen minutes.”
“You have timed this.”
“I have lived with him for eight years. I know when he wakes up.”
“You are a terrible man.”
“You knew that.”
She lifts her head finally and looks at me. Her hair is everywhere. There’s a crease on her cheek from the pillow. Her eyes are sleepy and soft and the corner of her mouth is tugging up at one side, slow, the way it goes when she’s decided to let me get away with something.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
“It’s morning.”
“It’s morning.”
“I’m in your bed.”
“Our bed.”
“Our bed.”
She lets the word sit between us a second. Then she leans down and kisses me, slow, morning-mouthed, and I do not care, and neither does she.
We are quiet.
That is the thing the morning requires. Mara pulls the sheets away just enough and I get my mouth on her before either of us says a word about it, my hands sliding up the backs of her thighs, lifting her against the headboard.
“Cole.” Barely a whisper. “We don’t have time for...”
“We have eleven minutes.”
“You timed it.”
“I told you I time everything.”
She laughs, no sound, her whole body shaking with it, and then I push two fingers into her and the laugh breaks into something else entirely. Her hips roll up to meet my hand. Her free hand finds my hair and holds on, not guiding, just holding, the way she does when she’s stopped deciding anything.
I want inside her before either of us runs out of time.
I get my pants down. She’s already pulling me toward her, both hands at my hips, and when I push in she arches up off the mattress and presses her own forearm against her mouth.
It is nothing like last night.
Last night was the slow proper thing, a man taking his time in the dark, both of us with all night to spend.
This is fast and small and urgent, my hand over hers over her mouth, her legs locked around my waist under the duvet, the headboard not making the sound it should because I’ve got one palm flat against the wall to stop it.
“Look at me,” I say. Low.
She looks at me. Her eyes are wet at the corners, the way they go when she’s close, and I watch it build in her face before I feel it happen, her whole body drawing tight around me.
“Cole...”
“I know. Let go.”
She comes with my hand still over her mouth and her teeth pressed into the side of my palm, her whole body shaking under me, silent and total. I follow her a few seconds later, my face buried in her neck, biting down on the curve of her shoulder to keep from making a sound myself.
We don’t move. Her legs are still around me. My heart is going hard enough that she has to feel it through both our ribs.
“Eleven minutes,” she says, into my hair. Breathless. “You said eleven.”
“I rounded down.”
“Liar.”
“Generously.”
She’s laughing again. No sound. Just her shoulders shaking. I press my mouth to her temple and stay there until both our pulses come down.
After, we lie there gasping quietly at each other.
“Cole.”
“What.”
“You bit me.”
“You bit me first.”
“That was self-defense.”
“Mara.”
“What.”
“It’s six-forty-one.”
She looks at the clock. Then back at me. Her face does a calculation.
“How long does he take in the bathroom.”
“Eight minutes.”
“You sure.”
“Mara. I have been timing this child’s bathroom routine for eight years.”
“So, we have.”
“Twenty-two minutes from the moment his feet hit the floor.”
“Cole.”
“Yeah.”
“Get me my robe.”
I get her her robe.
She ties it on the way down the hall and I follow in pajama pants and nothing else, and we are in the kitchen at six-forty-eight with the coffee maker running and Mara sitting on the counter, wrapped in the robe, swinging her bare feet, looking at me like a woman who has just had two extremely good things in a row and is in the mood to gloat.
I get the mugs.
I open the cabinet without thinking. I reach for the blue mug.
I stop.
The blue mug is on the top shelf, where it has lived for three years.
The blue mug was Diane’s.
I have not used it since the morning of the funeral, when I made coffee at six a.m. and held a mug that was hers and did not drink any of it.
I look at it.
Mara’s bare feet have gone still against the cabinet door, her swinging stopped mid-arc.
I take it down.
I pour Mara’s coffee into the blue mug. Black. The way she takes it.
I cross the kitchen and hand it to her.
She wraps both hands around it before she says a word, like she needs to feel the weight of it first.
“Cole.”
“Yeah.”
“Is this...”
“It was hers.”
“Cole.”
“I want you to have it.”
Her eyes are wet. She does not let them spill. She just holds the mug.
“Drink your coffee,” I say. Quietly.
She drinks her coffee.
My phone buzzes on the counter behind me. A news alert. Varick referral advances to formal investigation. The thing I handed Jackson two weeks before the hearing, finally on paper somewhere it can’t be pulled back.
I turn the phone face-down.
Mara has seen me read it. She knows what it is. She knows what it cost, because I told her in the truck with Owen asleep in the back, and she watched the rest of it land in that courtroom.
I pick the phone back up. I hold it out to her.
She reads it. Hands it back.
“It’s real now,” she says.
“It’s real now. Reese still hasn’t called. He won’t.” I keep my voice level. “Doesn’t make it square. But it’s the part of me you get now too.”
“I know.” She holds my eyes. “There’s nothing in that alert I’m hearing for the first time.”
“No.”
“Three years is three years,” I say. “The capital that ran on a deal that wasn’t square, that’s still true. Me reporting it now doesn’t undo what I didn’t do then.”
“No,” she says. “It doesn’t.”
I look at her.
“But you did it. You found the thing that makes it square, and you did it, knowing what it would take from you. That counts. Not for everything. But it counts.” She sets the blue mug down on the counter beside her and leaves her hand on it.
“I spoke up on time and lost everything. You spoke up late and you’re paying for the gap on purpose. We came at it from different ends. We ended up in the same kitchen.”
I set my own mug down, untouched, and let the words sit in the room between us.
She crosses the kitchen. She picks up the blue mug. She stands beside me at the counter and leans her shoulder into mine, and we look out the window at the yard together the way we have been looking out this window for weeks now.
The oak branch is still on the grass where it fell.
“I’ll move that today,” I say.
“I’ll help.”
We drink our coffee.
I pour my own into the grey mug. We lean against the counter in the early gold light, and the only sound is the coffee maker finishing its last gurgle behind us.
She breaks first.
“Cole.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
“Mara.”
“I know what it means. I just want it on the record between us that I know.”
“Okay.”
I cross to her. I take the mug out of her hand. I set it on the counter beside her. I put my hands on either side of her face and I kiss her, slow, in the morning sun in the kitchen of our house.
When I pull back her eyes are wet.
"Hey," she says, quiet.
"Hey."
A small thump from upstairs.
Feet hitting the floor.
We both go very still.
I lean my forehead against hers. “Sixteen minutes early.”
“Cole.”
“He has never been sixteen minutes early in eight years.”
“Cole.”
“Today, apparently, is the day.”
She’s laughing again. No sound. Her shoulders shaking against my chest.
I press one more kiss to her forehead and step back, and she tightens the belt of her robe and picks her mug back up like a woman who has been having a perfectly ordinary cup of coffee.
I go up the stairs to head him off.
Owen does not need heading off.
He’s in his pajamas with the dinosaur under one arm and his hair sticking up in three directions, and he’s on the second-from-the-top stair when I reach the top, and he looks up at me with a face doing several things at once.
“Dad.”
“Bug.”
“Is Mara still here.”
“She’s downstairs.”
“Are you sure.”
“I’m very sure.”