Chapter 20: Chapter 20

Chapter Twenty

MARA

The night ended the way good nights do, slowly and without wanting to.

We drove home at eleven, Jess and Dex dropped at their respective houses first, and the city was quiet in the specific way it got late on Fridays, lights still on but the urgency gone out of them. Cole drove with one hand and I sat with his jacket still around my shoulders and watched the streets go by and felt the good weight of the evening settling.

He pulled up outside my house and cut the engine and we sat in the quiet for a moment.

"Good night," he said.

"Really good night."

He turned to look at me. The streetlight came through the windshield at an angle that caught the line of his jaw and I looked at him without trying to stop myself and thought about the courtyard and the stars and his arms around me and the specific feeling of being known.

"I don't want to go in yet," I said.

"Then don't."

So we sat. The heater ticked as it cooled. Somewhere down the block a dog was making its opinions known about something. Cole reached over and took my hand off my knee and held it and I turned it over in his and we talked, the late night kind of talking that doesn't need a reason, easy and unhurried.

He told me about his father. Not everything, just pieces — the way things had been before he left, the specific absence after, the way football had gone from being something they shared to being something that was only Cole's, and how that had taken time to feel like gain rather than loss. He said it plainly, without asking for anything from it, and I listened the way I'd learned to listen to him, without filling the space.

"Do you talk to him?" I said. "Still."

"Sometimes. It's—" He thought about it. "It's like a language you used to know. You understand most of it but you have to think about it now."

"That's a good way to describe it."

He looked at me. "Your dad."

"When I was eight," I said. "Different situation, same result." I looked at our hands. "My mom never made it a sad thing. She just made it a fact and built around it. I think that's why I'm like this."

"Like what."

"Practical. List-making. Assuming the scaffolding is down to me."

He was quiet for a moment. "You don't have to build everything alone."

"I know that. I know it better than I did in September."

His thumb moved across my knuckles. "Good."

My mother had left the porch light on, which she always did when I was out, a small reliable thing that I had taken for granted for years and had recently started noticing again. It made the front of the house look warm against the dark street.

"I should go in," I said.

"Yeah."

Neither of us moved.

Cole turned toward me and his hand came up to my face and I met him halfway and we kissed in the front seat with the city quiet around us and his jacket still on my shoulders and I held onto the front of his shirt and thought about how this, this right here, had made the whole difficult year feel like it was building toward something worth arriving at.

When we pulled apart he pressed his forehead to mine and said nothing for a moment and I didn't say anything either because some things don't need words dropped on top of them.

"Mara," he said finally.

"Yeah."

"I'm glad I failed bio."

I laughed, the surprised kind, and he grinned against my cheek and I pulled back to look at him properly. "That is the strangest thing anyone has said to me."

"It's true though."

"You almost lost your starting spot."

"Worth it." He was still smiling, the full version, the one I'd stopped being surprised by but hadn't stopped feeling. "Completely worth it."

I kissed him once more, quickly, and got out of the car before I lost track of time entirely. He waited while I walked to the door, the way he always did, and I turned at the porch and he raised one hand through the windshield and I raised mine back and went inside.

My mother was on the couch with her book, which meant she'd been waiting up under the guise of reading. She looked at me over the top of it.

"Good night?" she said.

"Really good night."

She looked at my face. Whatever she saw there made her smile in the quiet way she had, the one that meant she was filing something away. "Good," she said, and went back to her book.

I took off my heels and went upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed in the green dress for a while, not doing anything, just being inside the feeling before it settled into memory.

My phone buzzed.

Cole: you still have my jacket

I looked down. I was still wearing it. I'd walked into my house and up my stairs wearing his jacket and not noticed.

I typed: I'll give it back Monday

He replied: keep it for now

Then: goodnight Mara

I set the phone down and fell back on the bed and looked at the ceiling, the familiar water stain I'd been looking at since I was twelve, and felt the distance between that version of this room and this one.

In October I'd sat in this same spot counting fifty dollars an hour like a prayer. Trying to make the feeling in my chest into something small enough to manage.

I wasn't doing that now.

The feeling was large and I knew its name and I was keeping it.

I reached over and turned off the light and lay in the dark in Cole's jacket that smelled like the cold and the formal and the front seat of his car and the specific warmth of a night that had been exactly what it was supposed to be.

Outside the city made its noise.

In here everything was still and mine and good.

I didn't want to sleep yet.

So for a while I just stayed there, in the good of it, letting it be enough.

It was more than enough.

It was everything.