Page 60 of Don’t Scream

That is as close as we get to a promise.

He moves down the couch and puts two fingers on my jaw, in the same place he has touched since that first night. I could stop him, but I don’t.

“Don’t scream,” he says, quietly. “Kiss me.”

I do.

It is not forgiveness. It is two years of a man I should have handed to Pell sleeping in my bed, and me letting him stay. His mouth is familiar now. His hands are familiar now. When I close my eyes I still see the five names. But I still stay, and I let him stay.

We go upstairs. The bedroom window is uncovered, the way it always is. Harrow Mills throws light up the glass and I do not hide from it. He pulls my shirt off and puts his mouth on my throat, then lower, slow, like he has all night and he knows I am not going to send him out into the trees. I get hard in his hand the same way I did that first hour, and I hate that my body still does that, but I let him stroke me anyway until I have to hold the back of his neck. He drops to his knees on my floor and takes me into his mouth like he is still proving something. I watch him do it. I put my fingers in his hair, and do not tell him to stop.

When I pull him up I kiss the taste of myself off his mouth and take him to the bed. We do not play the old game. There is no mask. There is no blade. There is just his body and mine and the window and the town below us that still does not know his name. He gets inside me the way he has learned I want it now, deep and unhurried, and I hold his hips and let him. I say his name. He says mine. When I come, it is with his hand on my cock and his mouth on my shoulder. When he comes he stays in me until he goes soft, and then he cleans us up because he still will not leave me like that.

After, he puts his hand on my chest and I put mine over it, like we always do after we’ve fucked.

“Stay,” I say.

“I am staying.”

Monday will come. I will put a suit on and go down the mountain and be the lawyer who never closed that file. He will not be in the building. Lena will text about Christmas dinner. Pell will not call again until spring. The case will stay open. The town will keep its lights.

I look at the glass, and at the man in my bed.

I do not pick up the phone.