42. Tessa & Cal
TESSA & CAL
TESSA
We leave his own patch party without saying goodbye to anybody, which is going to cost us both a week of Dot, and neither of us cares even slightly.
The ride to the house—the house, ours, the one with two hooks by the door—is ten minutes, and I spend every one of them plastered to his back with my hands flat on his chest and his heart slamming under both palms, hard enough that I can feel it over the engine.
The cold pours over us and I don’t feel any of it.
Every stop sign he covers my hands with one of his, just for the three seconds, like he’s checking I’m still real.
A truck coming the other way flips its brights and lays on the horn—somebody from the party who clocked the bike, no doubt, the whole town will have us reconciled by breakfast—and I feel Cal laugh, feel it through his back and up through my palms, all the way down.
By the time the bike’s in the driveway neither of us is pretending this is a nightcap.
He kills the engine. Silence rings. Neither of us moves for one second, two—Then we’re both moving at once.
Helmet, gloves, me half tripping off the pegs, him catching my elbow without looking, and we hit the front door laughing and starving at the same time, his keys chattering against the lock because his hands—his steady, precision, engine-building hands—are shaking too hard to seat a house key.
“You’re shaking.”
“Yep.” He gets it on the third try. “Whole summer. Get in the house.”
Inside is dark and smells like home. Like us, still, after everything—eleven weeks of me gone and the house held our smell like it was keeping it for evidence—and the door’s barely shut before his jacket comes off my shoulders and hits the floor and my coat lands on top of it and we’re kissing like the gravel lot was a down payment.
Walking each other backward through the dark with two years of muscle memory and no caution left anywhere.
My shirt goes over my head. His follows, and his skin is furnace-hot under my cold hands and his whole body flinches gorgeously at the cold of them and he doesn’t pull away, pushes into it, groans into my mouth like the cold is the best thing that’s happened to him all year.
We’re clumsy. We are genuinely bad at this right now—desperate and laughing, he walks me into the doorframe, I step on his boot, my bra hits a lampshade, neither of us will stop kissing long enough to steer—and his mouth drops to my throat, teeth and heat, and I get a hand between us and palm him through his jeans, hard as hell and jumping against my hand, and the sound he makes into my neck is filthy and helpless at once.
“Fuck—Tess—” His hips push into my palm. My knees go loose.
We come off the entryway wall, stumble left, and my bare back hits something cool and vertical, and I know it blind. The cabinets.
The kitchen.
His mouth is on my collarbone and his hand’s already popping the button of my jeans, and I slide down the cabinet face until we’re both on the floor—him over me, tile cold as a lake under my shoulder blades, his knee pushing between mine, his hand sliding into my open jeans, over the front of my underwear, and I’m soaked, I can feel how soaked through the cotton and so can he, and he groans against my throat, “Christ, baby,” and presses two fingers against me through the fabric and my hips come up off the tile chasing it.
My hands are in his hair, on his belt, back in his hair. His fingers hook the waistband, knuckles hot against my belly—And my eyes come open over his shoulder.
And there’s the room.
Dark. Familiar. The stove where the pasta died a happy death a lifetime ago. The counter where the rice bowl sat going cold. The doorway where he stood with his keys in his hand not coming further in.
And the floor—this floor, these exact square feet of tile—where a gym bag hit his chest and I screamed things I meant and he grabbed my wrist and I left.
Eleven weeks, and we’re on it. On the scene of it.
Fast and desperate and half-dressed, his hand in my jeans and my heart going like a rabbit’s, and it’s not want driving the speed—I feel it now, underneath, cold and clear—it’s fear.
We’re doing it scared. Like it could get taken away if we don’t hurry.
Not like this.
“Cal—stop. Stop.”
CAL
I stop.
Everything in me that can stop, stops—hands first, they’ve had the most training, my hand’s out of her jeans and flat on the tile before the second stop finishes leaving her mouth—and the rest of me hangs there over her, chest heaving, blood roaring, one knee on cold tile, and I get my eyes on her face in the dark and hold them there and wait.
Ten weeks of learning what stop is. It holds. It’ll always hold.
But God, the machinery of me is still doing a hundred down a road that just ended, cock aching, hands buzzing, and I have to actually breathe through it, one, two, three, while her hands come up—Not pushing me off. Fisting against my bare chest, gripping. Keeping me.
“Not like this,” she gasps. Her forehead comes up off the tile and presses against my sternum, right over the slamming.
“Not fast. Not on this floor. Not like we’re scared it’s the last time we get to.
Because that’s what this is—feel it, Cal, feel what we’re doing—we’re hurrying.
Like somebody’s gonna take it away. I don’t want our first time back to be scared. Not in this room. Not this room.”
And I look at the room.
I haven’t been anywhere but her since the front door—she could’ve walked us into the shop bays and I wouldn’t have clocked it—and now the kitchen puts itself together around me in the dark, one piece at a time.
The stove. The counter. The corner where the rice went. The doorway I stood in with my keys in my hand like a stranger in my own house. This kitchen.
And I’ve got her on the floor of it with her jeans open and her heart going like a bird’s—I can feel it against my forearm, that’s how hard—eleven weeks after.
She caught it. I didn’t. My whole body’s still yelling at me and she caught it anyway, underneath all that, and something in my chest goes hot and ashamed and grateful all at once, a feeling with no name that lands like a slug to the ribs.
“Okay,” I say. Rough. Instant. Zero negotiation in it.
And I watch that land on her—the instant—watch her eyes go wide and then wet, because she knows what instant costs a man whose whole body is filing complaints, and she knows it’s real because we spent the whole summer making it real, one no at a time.
I peel my knee off the tile and sit back on my heels and give her air.
She stays down a second, breathing, shirt gone, hair wrecked, jeans open, eyes shining up at me in the dark—the most beautiful catastrophe on any floor in Montana, and I get to think that now, I’m allowed, she said yes in a gravel lot forty minutes ago.
I’m still shaking. Still hard enough to hurt, still one long live wire from the fence line to this tile, every cell in me howling about the interruption.
And underneath all that noise there’s this other thing, clear and steady, the thing eleven weeks beat into me: we don’t take the shortcut.
The shortcut is how you end up back on this exact floor for the wrong reasons.
She said it in a diner booth with her hands strangling a sugar caddy—touch isn’t a shortcut past the rest of it—and she was right then and she’s right now, half-naked under me on the scene of the worst night of my life.
And wanting her this bad in the same ten seconds as agreeing this fast isn’t a contradiction. It’s the whole rebuilt engine, running the way it was supposed to run the first time.
So I get up off the floor of the worst room in our history. My knees crack. My hands have almost quit shaking.
And the room doesn’t win—that’s the thing I’ve got hold of, standing up in the dark middle of it. The stove, the counter, the doorway, all of it just a kitchen again, or about to be, because this time we walk out of it together, on purpose, slow, nobody’s taillights involved.
And I reach one of them down to the woman I get to try again with—she takes it, palm cold, grip strong—and I pull her up off the tile and against my chest, and into her hair I say the four best-and-worst words I’ve got in me, and I mean every one of them from somewhere brand new:
“Then let’s do it right.”