"Yours," she says, reading the pause. "Take me to yours."
Dante's room is the threesome's territory. My room is before that. My room is the other side of a wall that existed in a house in Connecticut. The boy's bedroom. The room I wasn’t supposed to cross into hers.
I carry her through the door and set her on my bed. She looks around. The room is spare. A bed, a nightstand, a team photograph on the desk.
"This is the room on the other side of the wall," she says.
"Yeah. It is."
"I want to tell you something I've never said out loud." She pulls her legs up and sits cross-legged. Her fingers tighten around her ankles, and her voice drops. "When we were at Richard's. Your room was next to mine. The walls were thin."
"I know."
"I used to hear you at night. When you thought I was asleep."
My mouth goes dry. I know what she heard. The sixteen-year-old on the other side of the plaster with his hand on himself and her name in his head and the guilt that made him bite the pillow. Except she heard.
"I heard everything," she says. "And I never told you because telling you would mean admitting I was listening. And admitting I was listening would mean admitting I pressed my ear against the wall and held my breath so I could hear better."
"Maya—"
"I was fifteen. I couldn't reconcile the wanting with the flinching. How I could want to hear you and also flinch when you touched my shoulder at breakfast. Both things were true and I didn't have the framework to hold both." Her hands find each other in her lap. The interlocking grip. "Dante gave us the framework. The three of us together gave me a structure to be wanted in. But this is older than the framework. This is the original thing. And I've never let it exist on its own."
I sit on the bed beside her because what she's telling me isn't a prelude. She keeps her hands in her lap, and I keep mine on my own knees.
"I spent four years listening to you breathe," I say. "Every night. Your breathing was the last sound I heard before I fell asleep. And I wanted to knock. Every night. To open the door and cross the hall and be in the same room. Not even to touch you. To be closer than the wall allowed."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because you had a chair under the doorknob. Because the last man who came into your room at night hurt you. Because I was sixteen and I understood that my wanting didn't override your safety."
She unfolds her legs and turns toward me. Her hand finds my chest. Palm flat, over my heart.
"The wall is gone," she says. "It's been gone. But we've never stood in its absence alone. I want to feel what the two of us are without the third point. Because this thing between us existed first, and I've never given it room to breathe."
I turn toward her. My hand on her jaw. Open palm. Warm against her skin.
"It's breathing," I say. "Right now. Can you feel it?"
"I can feel it."
I kiss her. Slow. A kiss that belongs to this room.
She pulls back an inch. "Don't be gentle because we're alone. I don't need you to be the soft one because Dante's not here to be the hard one."
"I'm being slow. There's a difference."
"What's the difference?"
"Gentle means I'm holding back. Slow means I'm taking my time. I've waited nine years. I want every second to register."
Her breath catches. Then her hand fists my shirt and she pulls, hard enough to drag my mouth back to hers.
The sweatshirt comes off over her head. No bra. Maya bare from the waist up in my room, on my bed, and the only eyes on her are mine.
"Don't look at me like that," she says.
"Like what?"
