"Sorry," I say. "Got snot on your chest."
"I've had worse things on my chest."
I laugh. Real and full and shaking my whole body, and his chest rumbles with his own laugh underneath mine, and we lie tangled together in a cabin in the woods and laugh like two people who have no business laughing.
"Claudio—" I hesitate.
"What."
"Thank you. For the exit today. For not asking why."
His hand moves from my neck to my hair. Fingers combing through it. Slow. The hands of a killer, gentle on my scalp.
"You never have to explain the exits," he says. "Not to me."
I close my eyes. Press my face into his neck. Breathe him in. Cedar and sweat and the warm smell of his skin after sex.
You're falling, Charlotte. You know that, right? You're falling and there's no parachute and the ground is coming fast.
Maybe. Probably.
But his fingers are in my hair, and his heart is under my cheek, and he pressed my vertebrae like a prayer, and I think maybe falling doesn't have to mean crashing. Maybe sometimes you fall and someone catches you. Not because they're required to. Not because you asked. Because they want to.
And for the first time in three years, that doesn't terrify me.
It just feels like landing.
Chapter Eleven: Claudio
Shecan'tworkthecoffee machine.
I've known this for days. She wrestles with it every morning like it personally insulted her, jabbing buttons and muttering under her breath and producing a liquid that tastes like someone boiled a shoe in dirty water. She won't ask for help. My principessa would sooner drink hot garbage than admit she can't operate a forty-year-old Mr. Coffee with a chipped carafe and a power button that sticks.
I watch her from the bedroom doorway for about ninety seconds before I intervene.
"You're putting the filter in backward."
She doesn't turn around. "I'm putting the filter in the way God intended."
"God didn't design that machine. A man in Ohio did, in 1983, and he intended the seam to face out."
"The seam is facing out."
"It's facing in. I can see it from here."
She turns. She's in my shirt. The black one that's become hers by default, hanging off one shoulder, hitting her mid-thigh. Her hair is tangled and her face is bare and she's got a coffee filter in one hand and a look in her eyes that could strip paint.
"If you're so smart, you do it."
"Ihavebeen doing it. Every morning. You just don't notice because you're in the shower."
Her mouth opens. Closes. I watch the realization hit. The slight narrowing of her eyes. The way her lip shifts sideways the way it does when she's been outsmarted and is deciding how much to punish me for it.
"You've been sabotaging my coffee."
"I've been making your coffee. There's a difference."
"You've been waiting for me to fail and then swooping in like some kind of caffeine vigilante."
