Chapter 10 #3
I set a rhythm. Not gentle. Not slow. The kind that comes from somewhere deeper than tenderness — desperate, hungry, the physical translation of ten years of want in every thrust. His hand finds mine on the bench.
Grips it. Our fingers lace against the scarred pine, knuckles white, and the contact is almost worse than the sex — more intimate, the kind of hand-holding that belongs to people who have a name for what they're doing.
We don't have a name. We have this — the bench edge biting his hips, the heat of skin in the stuffy dark, our breathing kept behind our teeth, and the weight of my body pinning him in the house where we grew up, and the wrongness of it doesn't overwhelm so much as recede, just another fact in a room full of them, the most relevant being that Cole is coming apart under my hands, his body tightening, his free hand bloodless on the bench edge, and the sound he makes when he comes is quiet and broken and entirely real.
I follow him over. Hand still gripping his hip, forehead pressed between his shoulder blades, and the release unspools from somewhere below my sternum and radiates out until my fingers shake against his skin and the world narrows to this: Cole's back under my forehead, his hand still in mine on the bench, and the silence of two men who just crossed a line they've circled for twenty years with no idea what to do with the territory on the other side.
We stay like that. Breathing. The garage exactly as it was — notebooks under the table, maps on the pegboard, Hannah's card at the edge of the bench, face-up in the half-dark, there the whole time. The bulb still off. Nothing has changed and everything has changed.
He straightens first. Pulls his jeans up with hands that aren't quite steady.
Tucks himself away. Adjusts the gray t-shirt that's been yanked up and pushed down and manhandled by someone who shouldn't have been, and the wrongness of that arrives about thirty seconds late, and I push it away, because pushing things away is what I do — Cole was right about that too, which is its own kind of torture.
I turn to the dismantled engine on the floor — Wade's old small-block, in pieces on the concrete since before I left — and stare at it like it holds the answer to a question I haven't worked out how to ask.
Hands braced on the counter. Knuckles white.
Breathing that might, with time, approximate normal.
Cole moves past me toward the house. Doesn't look at me. Doesn't speak. Boots on concrete, the soft click of the interior door, and then he's gone, and the garage holds his absence the way it held his presence — completely, without judgment.
I stay at the bench. Both hands braced. Staring at the drain in the floor — a rusted grate set into the concrete, there to catch oil and coolant and whatever else Wade poured down it during the years when pouring things down drains was the closest he came to therapy.
The drain doesn't care what just happened a few feet from where Eileen sleeps.
The drain has seen worse. The drain keeps its mouth shut.
The silence between us is a different kind now.
Charged. Raw. Loaded with everything we didn't say and everything we did instead of saying it, and neither of us has any idea what to do with it, and both of us are already pretending, and the pretending might be the most honest thing we've done all day.
I close my eyes. Not for the sex — for the walking away that's coming.
Because one of us will walk. One of us always walks.
And the fact that we just did that against a workbench doesn't change the arithmetic of Trevor Hollander and Cole Marek, which is that standing in the same room too long makes the air unbreathable, and somebody always leaves.
I open my eyes. The drain's still there. Hannah's card is still there. I straighten. Adjust my shirt. My belt. My breathing, still doing something complicated I'm losing the fight to control.
I kill the kitchen light from the doorway.
The yellow wedge dies. The garage goes dark — proper dark, where shapes lose their edges and the room becomes smells and temperatures instead of objects, motor oil here, cool concrete there, the last heat off two bodies that stood too close for too long and finally stopped pretending that standing close was the problem.
I go up in the dark. Third step groans. Landing creaks. Cole's door is closed, the lock turned. Mine is open. The ceiling stain holds its shape over the bed like a country I've been mapping from a distance for ten years and still can't cross.
I lie down. The sheets are cool. My body isn't. Every point of contact — his mouth on mine, his hand in my hair, his back under my forehead, the bench edge against my palms — sits on my skin like a brand I can't scrub off. The fan turns. The shoulder aches. The house breathes around me.
Down the hall, Cole does the same. I know it without hearing it — the quality of silence that means someone's there, breathing, on the other side of a wall too thin for either of us.
Neither of us sleeps. The distance between us is exactly what it's always been — not nothing, but not enough — and after what just happened in the garage, not enough might be the most honest thing we've got.