Page 31

“I have you.” I curl my fingers and she cries out, full voice, no booth manners left anywhere in her, the sound climbing the glass with the rain, and I do it again to hear it again. “I have you. Take it.”

I add a third finger. And a fourth.

She takes it. She rides my hand with her heels planted on the oak and her spine moving like swell under a hull, working herself onto my fingers with a frankness that empties my head of anything that isn't her, and her sounds stop being words, and even that isn't enough for her. Nothing tonight is enough for her. Her hand leaves my shoulder and shoves down between us and pushes into me without asking, two fingers, deep, and the asking ended at the diner door anyway.

The shock of it nearly finishes me on arrival. I clamp around her and groan into her throat, and she laughs under me, breathless and dark.

“There she is,” Dani says, and crooks her fingers, and the laugh falls off her face as I grind down to meet them.

For a moment we hold still like that, joined in both directions, breathing into each other's mouths, the whole night narrowed to the places we overlap. Her eyes find mine in the rain-light. Whatever she's looking for in my face, she finds it, because she sets her jaw, plants her heels, and starts to move.

After that, there's no leading. There's no power in the room at all, or there's so much of it that it stops having a direction. We work each other on the bare floor with the storm hammering the glass. Her palm grinds up against my clit while her fingers curl inside me, and my thumb finds her the same while my fingers match her stroke for stroke, and the wet sounds of us live under the rain sounds, filthy and honest. My knees and elbows take damage on the hardwood that I'll inventory tomorrow. She bites my shoulder when it starts to build in her. I bite hers when it builds in me, and we hang there locked together, teeth set in each other, racing, neither of us willing to go over first and leave the other behind on the climb.

“Together,” she grits out, against my shoulder. It isn't a request.

She tightens first, a flutter and then a grip, and the grip drags me over with her, and we come at the same time with our teeth in each other's shoulders, shaking, her cry and mine landing on the same beat of the rain, hips jerking, hands flooded, the longest doubled wave I've ever ridden in my life. It rolls through and keeps rolling, aftershocks trading back and forth between our hands like we're passing a current, and we ride those down too, slower, gentler, until the storm outside is the loudest pulse in the room again.

We surface in pieces. The rain has eased from hammering to a steady wash, and the room comes back with us by degrees, the pale furniture, the gray window light, the small, wrecked geography of our clothes across the entryway. Her mouth lets go of my shoulder and she kisses the dents her teeth left, once, an apology she doesn't mean. We ease loose of each other with twin shudders and lie tangled on the floor, breathing like we climbed forty flights.

The oak is hard under my hip and I can't be moved to care. Her heart slams under my ear and slows by degrees. The scratches down my back sting where they meet the floor, the bite in my shoulder throbs in time with my pulse, my lip burns where her blood and mine met, and I lie in the wreckage of all of it and feel more intact than I've felt in years. There's a torn sweater somewhere behind us, and buttons in three corners of the room, and a boot lodged against the console table, and a woman in my arms who knows about Natalia and is still here.

She knows, and she's still here. I keep saying it to myself, and it keeps being true.

Dani stirs first, stretching against me with a long low groan, in no hurry at all, savoring her own damage with evident satisfaction. She flexes the hand that was inside me and inspects her knuckles like a boxer after a good round, and the smile that crosses her face is private and entirely earned. Then she props herself on one elbow and looks down at me, hair wrecked, lip swollen, shoulder printed with my teeth, and the look on her face isn't soft, exactly. It's sure. Nobody has looked at me like that since before the fire, with both eyes open and no fear in either.

“You're bleeding,” she says, and touches my lip with her thumb.

“You're welcome.”

The laugh comes up out of her from somewhere deep, and she drops her forehead to my collarbone and stays there a moment, shaking with it, and I hold the back of her neck and watch the rain run the window and let myself have all of it, her weight, the heat coming off her skin, the ruin of my entryway, the unfamiliar quiet in my own head. For once, nobody in there is counting.

“I'm going to shower,” I say into her hair. “I smell like a diner, and you've ruined the rest of me.”

She lifts her head. “Is that a complaint?”

“It's a receipt.” I kiss her, slow, mindful of her split lip, and untangle myself and stand.

She stays sprawled on my floor in the city light, naked and entirely unbothered, one arm behind her head, and she watches me the whole length of the room, and I let her watch. I let her see the scratches, the bite, the burn line at my wrist, all of it. Three days ago, I made her coffee with every button done. Look at me now.

“There are towels in the bathroom off the bedroom,” I tell her. “Water in the refrigerator. I'll be ten minutes.”

“Take fifteen,” she says. “I'm going to lie here and feel smug.”

The bathroom is dark marble and rain-streaked glass, and I run the shower hot and step in and let it take the night off my skin in stages, the diner, the booth, the drive through flooded streets with her hand in mine on the console and neither of us saying a word.

I put my forehead against the warm marble and stand in the water. The silence in my head is so unfamiliar that I keep poking at it, tongue going to a missing tooth. I told her. Not all of it, the names are still mine and the locked door is still locked, but I told her about Natalia, about the door, about the eleven minutes, and instead of reaching for her phone or her chief she reached across a diner table and put her hands over mine and told me my sister was brave. Then she drove me home, tore my sweater off me, bit my shoulder hard enough to bruise, and came apart shaking on my fingers with her teeth in me and the diner’s coffee still on her mouth.

The scratches down my back light up under the spray, ten bright lines, and I arch into the sting instead of away from it.

I should be terrified. I do know that. A firefighter with a web of names in her head is lying naked on my floor, thirty feet from everything I am, and I know exactly what my own rules say about it. Tonight I can't make myself obey them. I'm used and emptied and pleasantly wrecked, and the heat of her is still on my hands under the water, and the sound she made when she said together is still moving around in my chest looking for somewhere to live.

Through the water and the wall, faint, I hear her moving. Bare feet on oak, slow, idle, a woman with fifteen minutes and a strange apartment to wander. The refrigerator opens and closes. There's little enough out there for her to find, and I know it, because I built it that way, six books and an empty ceramic box and furniture chosen to say nothing about anyone. She'll read the spines. She'll stand at the window and watch the storm work the river. She'll learn exactly as much about me as I decided two years ago that any visitor would, which was the point, back when I never planned on wanting a visitor to stay. Her footsteps pad down the hallway and pause where the photographs would be if I owned any, then move on. I soap the bite on my shoulder and smile at the sting and track her by sound out of pure habit, and I'm reaching for the shampoo when the third floorboard past the bedroom doorway creaks.

I know that board.

I pried it up myself fourteen months ago, fitted the cavity underneath with a steel document case, and seated the board back loose on purpose, an alarm that costs nothing, a creak instead of a keypad. The runner covers it. The working file lives under it, the live one, the one that can't go in the locked room because I need it at three in the morning, blueprints and burn calculations and the chemistry in my own handwriting, and the photographs I take afterward, because the cabinet keeps what they buried and the floor keeps what I did about it.

The water beats on my shoulders. The creak doesn't come again.