The syllables tear out of my chest before I can catch them.
She collapses forward, forehead against my chest. Our lungs drag hard at the air, her body still clenching in small aftershocks around me.
She climbs off me fast enough to leave cold air where she was.
She stands and walks to the bathroom. I hear the tap run. When she comes back, her jaw is set, her chin level, her mouth too still. She takes a glass from the cabinet and fills it at the kitchen sink, but her hands aren't steady. The rim trembles against the counter when she sets it down.
She crosses to where her clothes landed and steps into her underwear. Then the tank top. Then the sweatshirt. Every layer covers more skin, and my hands curl against the rug while she hides it.
I watch anyway.
I watch her hands, her throat, the careful line of her mouth as she puts herself back together. Tables. Press boxes. Doorways. Her tea in my cabinet. Her articles in my phone. My hand at the back of her jaw. Now her voice has gone raw on my name.
I sit up, find my clothes, and pull them on.
She's at the kitchen counter with both hands around the glass.
"Cole can stop worrying," she says. "I'm fine."
"Maya."
"Don't." She sets the glass down. "Don't say my name like that. Not after what we just did. You don't get to say my name like it means something and then walk out and go back to Elm House and pretend this didn't happen."
"I'm not going to pretend."
"Yes, you are. Because you can't tell Cole. And if you can't tell Cole, then it didn't happen. That's how your rules work."
My teeth close hard enough for pain to cut through my jaw.
"What are you going to tell him?" she asks.
"That you're fine."
"And the rest?"
"There is no rest."
The words come out, and her mouth trembles once before it goes flat. I feel it in my own chest. I watched it happen and didn't stop the sentence before it landed.
"Get out," she says, quiet.
I walk to the door, open it, and stop in the frame.
"Lock your door," I say.
"Get out, Dante."
I get out.
The hallway. The stairs. My jaw locked. The cold air burns the mark on my jaw where her fingers pressed. The taste of her still in my mouth. Eight minutes across campus with crescent moons stinging under my shirt and rug burn pulling with every stride.
I walk into Elm House. Cole is on the couch. He looks up.
His eyes move across my face. The bruised lip. The scratches at my collar where the shirt doesn't cover. The mark on my jaw. I watch him catalog each one. His expression shifts. His weight centers. His breathing slows. The same controlled stillness he brings to reading a room when something in it has changed.
"Don't send me again," I say.
"What happened?"
