Her hands are shaking. The tremor from the 413 calls, the one she couldn't hide from Dante, is visible now in the kitchen where she's been safe for weeks.
I close the textbook and cross the kitchen. She's on the counter, legs dangling, and when I reach her, I stand between her knees. My hands settle on her thighs, warm through the leggings.
"He's not getting near you," I say.
"You can't promise that."
"I'm promising it anyway."
"That's what Dante said. And Dante's version of promising involves people whose business cards don't list their actual profession."
"My version involves Richard and the parole board and me standing between you and every door he tries to walk through."
Her eyes go wet, and she blinks the tears back before they can fall. Maya doesn't cry in kitchens. She cries on the other side of walls where she thinks nobody can hear.
"I'm so tired of being scared of him," she says. Quiet, scraped thin. "I changed my name. I moved states. I built locks into every door I've ever lived behind. And he writes three paragraphs and suddenly I'm thirteen again and the locks don't mean anything because the person they were built against knows where they are."
I put my hands on her face. Both hands. My thumbs on her cheekbones.
"Look at me," I say.
She looks at me, eyes wet, jaw tight, hands gripping the counter edge beside her hips.
"You are Maya Maddox. You chose that name. You built that name. And no letter from a man in block print gets to take it back."
Her breath hitches. Her hands come up from the counter to my wrists. Holding on.
"Say it again," she says.
"You are Maya Maddox."
"Again."
"Maya Maddox. The woman who walked into Dante Voss's kitchen and told him to make her stop thinking."
Her mouth curves. Barely. A faint curve through the wet eyes.
She pulls me closer by the wrists until her forehead rests against mine. Her breath is warm on my face. The tears haven't fallen. Her hands are on my wrists, and every breath brings her mouth closer to mine.
"It's different without him," she says again, quieter.
"Yeah."
"Right now—" Her hands move from my wrists to my chest. Palm flat over my heart. "Right now I want no structure. No one running the room. I want to be in a room with you and feel what that feels like."
"What does it feel like?"
"Like the wall is gone and I'm standing in the space it left."
I kiss her.
The kiss is private. No third breath in the room. Her mouth and mine. The taste I've known since the couch, since the Thursday that cracked everything open, comes back warm and specific.
She makes a small, low sound against my mouth, the one she makes at the start, before everything gets louder, the one that saysyes, this, keep going.
I lift her off the counter. Her legs wrap around my waist. I carry her down the hallway.
At the bedroom doors, I pause. Dante's room, the shared bed. My room, the one I had before the three of us. The one I haven't slept in since she moved in.
