"Five years."
She opens her eyes and looks down at me. I am between her thighs with my chin on her hip, and her body is open and trembling while she looks at me and does not look away.
I am lying between her legs with the Richard meeting still locked behind my teeth, the filed parole violation sitting beside Dante's blanket two feet from her head.
"Don't tell me this was a mistake," she says.
"It wasn't."
"Don't tell me it can't happen again."
"I'm not seventeen anymore, Maya."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I'm done leaving this untouched."
She sits up, pulls me up with her, and kisses me with my mouth still tasting like her. Her bare body presses against my clothed one.
"Dante comes home at nine," she says.
"I know."
"Are we going to tell him?"
"Not tonight."
"Cole—"
"Not tonight. Let me figure out how."
The words leave my mouth, and my chest tightens before the last one lands.
Not tonight.There it is again.
A different voice. A different kitchen. My hand making the same damn choice.
Dante said it to me, and I filed it as betrayal. Now I am saying it to Maya and calling it management. I am not ready to open this in the living room at eight o'clock on a Thursday, and my sternum aches where her palm was.
She watches me. Her eyes narrow a fraction at the hesitation, at the not tonight. Then her gaze drops to my chest and comes back to my face.
"Okay," she says. "Not tonight."
She picks up the sweatshirt, pulls it over her head, finds the shorts on the floor, and dresses in front of me without turning away.
"I'm going to shower," she says. "Before he gets back."
Before he gets back.So he will not smell me on her. She is running the concealment herself now. Shower before Dante.Clothes back on. Door locked. The same house taught us both where to put the evidence.
She goes upstairs, and the water starts. The pipes in this house are loud enough to track her position by the pressure shifts, the way I used to track her through the wall in Richard's house.
I sit on the couch with Dante's blanket beside me. The wool still holds the shape of being folded by her hands, neat and precise, corners aligned. The thank-you note is in Dante's pocket now.
I wipe the counter, then straighten the blanket on the arm of the couch, aligning corners that are already aligned. My palms run along the folds again and again. If my hands stop moving, they will reach for the phone. They will text Dante. Or they will try to figure out how to tell the man I have been sleeping beside for six years that I put my mouth on the woman he is falling for while his blanket sat two feet from her head.
The water stops upstairs. Her footsteps cross the hall. Her door closes. The lock turns.
The house is quiet. The counter is clean. Every visible thing is in order.
