Chapter 15 #2
He folds the newspaper and sets it aside. He looks at me with an expression I know, the one that says he's seeing me for the first time all over again, memorizing everything, as if I might disappear if he blinks.
"You came," I say.
"Every Saturday for the last few weeks." The ghost of a smile crosses his face. "I wanted to be sure it was safe before I sat down. Old habits."
"How did you find the right coffee shop?"
"I walked every block of Lake Union until I found the coffee shops. Then I watched them on Saturdays until I saw you."
Weeks of watching. Weeks of walking unfamiliar streets, looking for one woman in one window on one day of the week. A man who spent more than a decade making people disappear, using those same skills to find someone instead.
I look at him across the small gap between our tables.
Mateo Reyes, who is not Mateo Reyes anymore, who is some other name in some other life, sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle with a newspaper and a beard and the same hands that held mine in a fluorescent conference room while I gave him a thread to pull.
"What's your name?" I ask.
"Daniel." He pauses. "Daniel Mendez."
"Elena Restrepo." I extend my hand across the gap. "Nice to meet you, Daniel."
He takes my hand. His grip is warm, dry, and firm. The same hands. The same warmth. Everything else is different and nothing that matters has changed.
"Nice to meet you, Elena." He holds my hand a beat longer than a stranger would. Then he lets go and picks up his coffee and takes a sip and looks at me over the rim.
"Do you come here often?" he asks, and the absurdity of it, the mundane smallness of the question against the vast impossible backdrop of everything we've survived, makes me laugh. It's a real laugh, full and unstoppable, the kind that turns heads in coffee shops and makes strangers smile.
He smiles too, a real smile, the first one I've ever seen on his face, full and unguarded, and it transforms him the way sunlight transforms a room, revealing warmth and depth and something that looks, improbably, like joy.
"I do," I say. "Every Saturday."
"Then I guess I'll start coming on Saturdays too."
We stay in the coffee shop for two hours, talking about nothing and everything, having the safe, careful conversation of two people learning each other's new names and new histories, the cover stories they've been living inside.
He works construction now, he tells me, which makes him almost laugh because it's the same work his father did in Sinaloa.
I tell him about the clinic, about the immigration cases, about the way the work feels like the reason I became a lawyer in the first place.
We don't talk about the farmhouse. Not yet, and not in a public place with other people's conversations layered around us like insulation. That conversation requires walls and privacy and the kind of silence that only exists between two people who have earned it.
When we leave, he walks beside me in the Seattle drizzle with his hands in his pockets, matching my pace. The houseboat is a short walk from the coffee shop, and we walk it without touching and without rushing, letting the proximity build the way pressure builds before a storm.
At my door, I turn to him.
"Do you want to come in?"
"Yes."
I unlock the door and he follows me inside.
The houseboat is small and clean and full of the life I've built, with books on the shelves and a quilt my mother made draped over the couch and coffee cups washed and drying by the sink.
Through the windows, the lake catches the gray October light.
He takes it in with the quiet attentiveness I remember, and I watch him see the life I've made.
"It's good," he says. "It looks like you."
"It looks like Elena."
"Elena is you. She was always you."
I close the distance between us and press my palms against him, feeling for the heartbeat that told me the truth when his words couldn't.
It's there. Rapid and hard. The same.
"I missed you," I say. "Every single day."
"Every single day." He covers my hands with his. "Every Saturday, I thought about this. About finding you. About whether the thread would still be there."
"It was always there."
I rise on my toes and kiss him, softly at first, the tentative exploring kiss of two people reacquainting themselves with each other's taste after too long apart.
He tastes like coffee and rain and patience, and when he kisses me back with his hands cradling my face, I feel the last wall inside me come down.
The softness lasts about ten seconds. Then all those months of deprivation ignite.
His hands go from cradling my face to gripping it, angling my mouth against his, and the kiss turns deep and consuming, his tongue stroking against mine, his teeth catching my lower lip.
I moan into his mouth and fist my hands in his flannel and pull, and buttons fly for the second time in our history, scattering across my kitchen floor.
"I'll buy you a new one," I gasp.
"I don't care." He shrugs the shirt off and pulls my sweater over my head in the same motion, and then his mouth is on my neck, my collarbone, the swell of my breasts above my bra.
His hands find the clasp and he unhooks it and my breasts are in his hands, rough and possessive, his thumbs dragging across my nipples until they ache.
"Bedroom," I manage.
He doesn't carry me this time. He walks me backward down the hallway, his mouth never leaving my skin, his hands never leaving my body, kicking the bedroom door open with his foot.
We fall onto the bed together in a tangle of half-removed clothes and desperate hands, and the urgency is nothing like the safe house's controlled escalation.
This is every letter never written and every phone call never made and every Saturday morning spent staring at an empty chair, and it comes out of us like a dam breaking.
I shove his jeans down and he kicks them off. His cock is hard, straining against his briefs, and when I palm him through the cotton he groans into my throat, his hips pressing into my hand. But my eyes catch something first, new ink on his inner forearm, a date in clean black script.
I take his wrist and turn it and read the numbers.
It's the date I gave him the thread.
My throat tightens so hard I can't speak. I press my lips to the tattoo, feel his pulse hammering beneath the ink, and he cups the back of my head and holds me there.
"Every day," he says quietly. "I looked at that every day."
I push the briefs down and wrap my fingers around him, skin to skin, feeling him pulse against my palm, thick and hot and achingly familiar.
"I dreamed about your hands," he says, his voice guttural. "Every night. Your hands and your mouth and the sounds you make when I'm inside you."
"I'm right here." I stroke him, slow and tight, my thumb circling the head, smearing the wetness there. "No more dreaming."
He makes a sound that's barely human and rolls me beneath him, settling his weight between my thighs. He pulls my jeans and underwear off in one rough motion, and then I'm naked under him and his eyes sweep down my body with a hunger that's been sharpening for months.
"You're so fucking beautiful," he says. "I forgot. I thought I remembered, but I forgot."
He lowers his mouth to my breast and sucks the nipple until I cry out, then bites down gently before moving to the other. His hand slides down my stomach, between my thighs, and his fingers find my pussy wet and swollen and aching for him.
"Already this wet," he murmurs against my breast. "All those months, Sofia. All those months I've been thinking about this pussy."
He slides down my body, pressing his mouth to every inch of skin he passes: my ribs, my stomach, the jut of my hip bone, the crease of my thigh. He settles between my legs and spreads me open with his thumbs and looks at me with an expression that's almost reverential.
"Hermosa," he whispers. Then his mouth is on me.
His tongue is slow and deliberate at first, tracing long strokes through my folds, circling my clit with a patience that makes me want to scream.
He eats me like a man savoring the first real meal after months of starvation, and in a way that's exactly what this is.
He sucks my clit between his lips and rolls it with his tongue, and I grab his hair and hold on because my hips are lifting off the bed.
"More," I gasp. "Please, Mateo, more."
He seals his mouth over my clit and pushes two fingers inside me, curling them, finding the spot he mapped in a farmhouse kitchen what feels like a lifetime ago.
The accuracy of his memory makes me want to laugh and sob at the same time.
Instead I moan, loud and unrestrained, because there are no agents through the wall and no cartel coming for us.
There is just us and months of silence being broken.
He works me with his mouth and his fingers, alternating between long sucking pulls on my clit and fast flicking strokes with his tongue, and the orgasm builds with an intensity that scares me.
It's too much and too fast, months of not being touched, of lying alone in this bed remembering his hands, and now his mouth is between my thighs and his fingers are inside me and I can feel the calluses on his hands and I can hear the wet sounds of my body against his mouth and I can't hold on any longer.
I come hard. The orgasm tears through me in long cresting waves, my thighs clamping around his head, my hand twisted in his hair, his name pouring out of me in a voice I barely recognize.
He crawls up my body, his chin slick, his eyes black with need. I taste myself on his lips when he kisses me, and I reach between us and grip his cock, guiding him to where I need him.
"Inside me," I tell him. "I've waited long enough."