I push into him slow. He's on his back, one knee hooked over my arm, and I watch his face the whole way in — the clench of his jaw, the flutter of his lashes, the moment the stretch tips from burn into something else. He takes it. Jesus, he takes it, his head pressing back into the pillow, a hissed breath through his teeth I feel more than hear.
"You alright?" Wrecked. Sweat running down my spine, my shirt gone somewhere, his skin hot under my palms.
"Yes." His hand finds mine where it's braced on the mattress beside his head. Grips it. Our fingers lace, knuckles white. "Harder."
I give him harder. Each thrust driving up into him, the headboard knocking a rhythm against the plaster that would wake the dead if the dead weren't already awake and watching, and Trevor comes with my name in his mouth and his body tight around me and his hand crushing mine into the mattress like he's afraid one of us might float off if he lets go.
Before either of us has caught our breath, he's moving — rolling me, reversing us, his weight settling over me from behind, his cock still half-hard against my ass, and the words come out before I've decided to say them: "Your turn. Fuck me. Now."
He doesn't hesitate. The bottle again, his fingers pressing into me, working me open with a focus that belongs to another lifetime, and the stretch burns and the burn is good, specific, something to focus on besides my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest for reasons that have nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the elation of Trevor Hollander's big fucking dick pressing into me inch by inch.
"Jesus Christ," I hiss. My forehead drops to the mattress, my knuckles white in the sheets, his hand on my hip holding me steady, his chest against my back, his breath hot on my neck. "Fuck. Yes. There. Right there."
He sets a rhythm. Not gentle. Not slow. The kind that comes from a place deeper than tenderness — desperate, hungry, ten years of want translated into each thrust. I match him. Dare him. Push back and take him deeper thanI thought I could, and the fullness of it, the stretch and burn of him inside me, is so fucking good I can't think, can't speak, can't do anything but feel it radiating out from my core until my whole body shakes with it.
I come with his hand on my cock and his mouth on my neck and his hips driving into me hard enough that the headboard slams the wall in a rhythm that'd be embarrassing if either of us had the capacity for embarrassment right now, which we don't, because the capacity for anything but this — the sweat, the grapple, the hurt, the pleasure — checked out three thrusts ago and isn't coming back. Trevor's cock throbs hard inside me and he grunts against my ear, filling me with his cum while he strokes me through it even though I've already come, and every cell in my body is alight, every nerve on fire — the pulse of him inside me, the wet heat spilling into me, the sweat of us — all of it making me dizzy.
We collapse onto the narrow bed. Trevor on his back, one forearm across his eyes, chest heaving. Me beside him, staring at the water-stained ceiling, the brown map of Pennsylvania weather that's been there since before I left and will probably be there after I'm dead. My body feels wrecked. Used. Good in the way that only comes after sex that walked the line between fucking and fighting and decided the line wasn't worth respecting.
The house is quiet. No oxygen machine. No Eileen. Just the kitchen clock ticking downstairs and the faint hum of the refrigerator and the quiet that comes after two people stop pretending the distance between them is something either of them wants.
I sit up. Elbows on my knees. Hands hanging loosebetween my thighs. My breathing slowing, settling, finding a rhythm that might, with time, approximate normal. The fear is still there. Right behind my sternum where the adrenaline used to be. The cold weight of knowing someone in the department is watching me, steering witnesses off, closing doors before I can get a foot in. The knowledge that Hannah Brooks is out there, three weeks into the same withdrawal that came before two disappearances, and every door I knock on gets slammed by someone with a badge, and the arithmetic of that is simple and brutal and doesn't care how good Trevor Hollander's dick feels inside me.
Trevor doesn't say anything. He shifts on the bed beside me. His hand finds the space between my shoulder blades — palm flat, warm, the solidity of him, which is its own language and one I've been trying not to learn for twenty years — and leaves it there.
I don't pull away.
Chapter Sixteen
Trevor
Eileen's home, and the house feels different without the concentrator running. The silence has texture — not the dead quiet of an empty building, but the near-silence of a space where something mechanical has stopped doing its job and the absence registers like a missing tooth. No hiss. No hum. Just the kitchen clock ticking and the refrigerator cycling on and the soft creak of Eileen's armchair as she shifts her weight.
I count the pills into my palm. Two white, one blue, one pale yellow capsule. The morning dose. The pharmacy instructions are taped inside the cabinet where Cole can reach them without bending, his handwriting cramped and hurried in the margins: WITH FOOD and NOT WITH DAIRY and CALL IF TEMP 100.5. I pour a glass of water. Set it on the side table beside her chair where she can reach it without stretching. The routine is its own language, and I've gotten fluent faster than I expected.
"Here." I hold out my palm. The pills sit in the crease of my hand like small chalky planets. "Morning round."
Eileen takes them one by one. Her fingers are cool, papery, the skin thin at the knuckles where the veins stand blue. She doesn't rush. Doesn't complain. Just plucks each pill from my palm with the deliberate care of someone who's learned that medication is a negotiation and rushing means losing. The water glass empties by half. She sets it back with a soft click that seems too small for the weight of what it holds.
Then her hand finds mine. Not reaching — finding. Her palm against my knuckles, fingers curling around mine with a strength that surprises me every time. Her eyes are the same eyes they've always been — pale blue, tired at the corners, the sharpness of a woman who's spent decades seeing through bullshit and has no patience for it in her final act.
"I'm so glad you stayed." Thin but steady. The steadiness of someone who's decided that fragility is a luxury and directness is a kindness. "When you came back for the funeral, I thought — well. I thought you'd do the paperwork and go. That's what people do. They come back, they handle what needs handling, they leave." Her thumb moves across my knuckles. Once. Slow. "But you stayed. And it means more than I can say."
Guilt pools in my stomach. Cold, specific, the kind that lives below the sternum and doesn't care what else is happening. I stayed. Yes. Because a dying woman's request is the kind that sits in your chest and won't budge — but also because down the hall is a room where Cole Marekexists, and the pull of it is something I've been orbiting since I was a teenager lying next to him night after night, and ten years and one war and one round through the shoulder didn't change the math. I stayed because I wanted to. Because I couldn't not. And now there are fingerprints on my shoulder blades and an ache in my hips and the memory of Cole's voice breaking around my name living in places I don't have language for, and none of that belongs in this kitchen with Eileen's hand in mine.
I put on the face. The one that says I'm fine and this is simple and I'd do anything for you — all of it true, which is what makes the face both honest and a lie at once. My thumb finds the back of her hand. Rubs once, slow, the way you'd comfort a child, except Eileen hasn't been a child in sixty years and comfort looks different when the person receiving it knows exactly how little road they have left.
"I'd do anything for you." Flat. Factual. The kind of delivery that doesn't ask for credit, because credit implies performance, and performance is something I've never been good at. "You know that."
She studies me. Her eyes move across my face — the jaw, the cheekbones, the set of my mouth that Cole once said looks like I'm biting down on something bitter even when I'm not — and whatever she finds clears some threshold, because her grip tightens. Fractional. Deliberate.
"I was so afraid when I married Wade." Her voice drops — not to a whisper, to the register people use for something they've carried so long it's worn a groove. "Not of Wade. I knew what he was. Everybody in this town knew what he was, they just didn't talk about it." Her jaw works once, the muscle jumping,and she presses her thumb to it the way I press mine to my cheek. "I was afraid of you. What you'd think of me. This woman coming into your house, sleeping in your mother's bed, acting like she had any right to—" She stops. Corrects herself, a tightening around the eyes. "I knew I could never replace her. Your mother. Poor sweetheart. Died when you were so small."
The name lands between us. My mother. Dead in the textile-factory accident Roan doesn't talk about, because talking about it would mean admitting the safety violations were systemic and the payout was hushed and the woman who died left a small boy who grew up to join the Marines because it was the only exit he could find. I have three memories of her. Maybe four. A smile. Warm eyes. The smell of something baking, though that might be invention, the brain filling gaps with what it thinks should be there. A hand on my forehead when I had a fever. That's the archive. The woman who made me gets four index cards in a drawer I rarely open, because opening it hurts in a way that doesn't have a name.
I hold Eileen's hand. Both of mine now, her small cool fingers between my palms, and the gesture feels both inadequate and necessary, like most honest things do.
"You've been the best mother to me." The words cost. Not because they're lies — because they're true, and truth that lands after decades of going unspoken has weight, and weight is its own kind of pain. "You didn't replace her. Didn't try to. You just showed up. Every day. Made breakfast. Asked about school. Sat at that table while Wade drank and said nothing, because saying something would've made it worse, and you knew that, and you did it anyway." My throat does something complicated. Iswallow past it. "That's more than enough. It was always more than enough."
