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The rain takes us the second we're through the door, cold and total, and she doesn't flinch from it any more than she did outside the Saltbox, this woman the weather can't seem to reach. I stand on the curb one breath longer than I need to, letting the cold do its work, giving the sensible version of me her final say. She doesn't take it. She's been quiet since the booth, since the door, since Camden, outvoted so many times she's stopped attending.

Her car waits two blocks up, and we walk to it side by side, not touching, both of us soaked in half a minute and neither of us hurrying, and at the corner her hand finds mine and our fingers lace like they learned it in the booth. I think, clear as dispatch traffic, you are walking into a fire you have already read, Serrano, you've seen the spread, you know what's burning. I look up at the streetlight rain coming down like sparks, and I keep walking.

The car door closes and the rain goes from a roar to a drumming, the two of us sealed into the warm dark with the windows fogging and the whole car smelling of wet wool, and for a second neither of us reaches for anything, we sit in the held breath of it, water ticking off our coats onto leather that costs more than my truck. The wipers start. Her hand crosses the console and lands palm-up on my knee, an open question with the burn line showing at the cuff, and I look at it, the hand of whatever she is, the hand that held my collar in the booth, and I put mine in it.

“Drive,” I say.

16

ZARA

The door clicks shut behind us and I turn the deadbolt without looking, eleven years of habit living in my wrist, and before the bolt finishes seating Dani has a fist in my sweater and hauls me around and crushes her mouth to mine.

Rain runs off her jacket and ticks onto the oak in a fast little ring around our feet. Her lips are cold from the street and her tongue is hot behind them, and she kisses me with nothing held back, no diner care, no booth grief, all of it converted on the drive into plain want. Her mouth tastes of the diner's coffee. My hands find the wet collar of her jacket and shove it off her shoulders, and it hits the floor with a slap of soaked canvas, and she doesn't even glance down at it. This woman sets boots straight by instinct, and she's letting her jacket lie where it fell, and that tells me the scale of what I'm holding.

I have rationed everything for eleven years, sleep in fours, scotch in inches, grief behind a locked door, want in a drawer I rarely open. Tonight, I told her the worst of it in a vinyl booth and the world failed to end, and what's left in me isn't calm. It's appetite with nothing standing in front of it.

I walk her backward into the entry wall and pin her there.

She goes willingly and then not willingly at all, hands fisting tighter in the wool, pulling me into her so the pin becomes mutual, her hips already moving against mine. I get a hand in her wet hair and tip her head and kiss her from the other angle, deeper, and she makes a sound into my mouth that I'll be hearing for the rest of my life, low and rough and wronged, as if I've been withholding this from her, as if every minute since the booth was theft.

“Zara.” My name comes out of her half bitten. “Off. All of it.”

“You first.”

Neither of us goes first. We go at the same time, which is how the seam of my sweater gives at the shoulder, a small ripping note under her hands, dark green wool letting go, and I don't care. I pull it over my head myself, and her mouth is on my throat before the sweater clears my hair, and her fingers find the clasp of my bra and snap it open one-handed, and that goes wherever the jacket went. Her shirt has buttons, and I have no patience for buttons tonight. I take the placket in both hands and pull, and three of them skitter off across the oak into the dark, tiny applause, and she laughs against my jaw, breathless and delighted, and bites me there hard enough to make me feel my own pulse.

“That was my good shirt.”

“Bill me.”

She drags the ruined shirt off her own shoulders, reaches back, unhooks her bra, and drops it on the pile, and I get my first full look at her in the light off the window wall, the rain's shadow running down her bare skin in long silver lines. The breath leaves me with no dignity whatsoever. I knew her body already. I learned it days ago on a marble counter, the strength of it, the scar lines, the softness in unexpected places. This is different. Sunday, she brought her suspicion through the door with her, a chaperone neither of us acknowledged. Tonight, she heard the worst true sentence I own and drove here through a flooded city to get her hands on the woman who said it.

She takes my left wrist, the burned one, and she puts my palm flat on her sternum, over the hammer of her heart, and holds it there with her eyes open on mine. The healing line at my cuff sits an inch from her skin and neither of us pretends it isn't there.

“That's what you do to me,” she says. “Since the warehouse. Catch up.”

I stop being gentle, which is to say I stop pretending I was ever going to be.

I pin her to the wall in earnest, my thigh pushing between hers, my mouth dropping to her breast, and she swears at the ceiling and arches into me, and her soaked jeans drag rough against my bare thigh as she starts to ride it, slow and shameless, taking friction like it's owed to her. The wall thuds under her shoulders with the rhythm she sets. I pull her nipple between my teeth and she rewards me with her nails, ten points of bright heat raking down my back from shoulder blades to waist, hard enough that I hiss against her skin, and when I hiss, she does it again, harder, and the sting blooms down my spine and turns to want so fast I can't tell them apart and don't try.

“More,” she says. I don’t know if it’s to the teeth or the nails or all of it.

So I give her more. I drag my mouth down her sternum and take her other nipple and use my teeth until her head knocks back against the wall, and her hands leave my back and bury themselves in my hair, not guiding, gripping, holding on. The storm shoves at the window in gusts. Forty stories below us the city floods and honks and goes about its ordinary night, and up here in the dark she rolls her hips against my thigh and says my name like a swear word.

We stop being two people taking turns and become one gorgeous, ugly tangle against the wall. I kiss her until her lip splits under my teeth, a small copper brightness flooding between us, and she doesn't pull back, she pushes in, dragging the taste across my mouth like she wants me marked with it. Her hands wrench the hook of my trousers loose. Mine peel wet denim down off her hips, and the jeans fight her the whole soaked length of her legs until she kicks her boots off mid-struggle, one of them thudding into the console table in the dark, and neither of us spares it a glance. The jeans follow the boots. My trousers follow the jeans. Her thigh comes back between mine, skin to skin now, slick and hot, and we stand there grinding against each other in the entryway of my white museum of an apartment, marking it at last with torn wool and scattered buttons and rainwater, and I think, distantly, that I've lived here for two years and this is the first night the place has ever looked like anyone's home.

“Floor,” she says, against my bleeding mouth.

“The bed is thirty feet away.”

“I do not care.”

I take her down to the oak myself, one hand cradling her skull so the only rough landing is the one we choose, and after that the night loses its architecture. The rain rakes the window in sheets, and the city light comes through it and moves over her in long runnels, and I strip the last wet cotton off her hips, and she sits up far enough to drag my underwear down my legs and pull me back over her before I've finished kicking free of it.

She's soaked, and it isn't the rain. I push two fingers into her and her whole body bows up off the floor.

“God. Zara.”