Page 42 of Faking the Heat

And then I look down and the water coming off me is grey.

It runs off my chest and down my arms and pools around the drain, grey and gritty, carrying the day off me in a slow spiral. The window frame and the smoke and the stairwell and the thirteen-year-old kid whose name I am not going to say out loud in this room, or ever.

I stand there under it and I cannot move.

I want to move. I want to touch her, kiss her, feel her body wrapped around mine.

But I just can’t.

Mandy takes the soap and facecloth out of my hand.

She does not say anything. She starts at my shoulders, both palms flat, working down, and she is not gentle about it. She scrubs. She gets the grit out of the hollow of my throat and off the back of my neck and along the tops of my arms, and she does it with a kind of focused, furious care, like the dirt is the enemy and she intends to win, and I stand there under the water and let a woman half my size wash the worst day of my year off my body.

When she gets to my hands she takes them one at a time. She works the soap into the creases of my knuckles. She’s patient, thorough, and the water running off my fingers goes from grey to almost clear, and she does not stop until it does.

“Turn around,” she says.

I turn around.

She washes my back. She finds the knot under my right shoulder blade that has been there since March and she leans into it with the heel of her hand until it gives, and I put my forearm against the tile and my forehead against my forearm and I breathe.

Then her hands go into my hair on the back of my head where she can reach and I tilt my head all the way back.

She works her fingers into it and scrubs at my scalp, that is the one that gets me. The grit comes out of it in a fine dark rain down the back of my neck, and she does it twice before I turn again and face her.

She has water running off her chin, her hair is dark with it and plastered along her jaw, and she has been crying at some point in the last ninety seconds and the shower has covered for her, and she looks up at me with her chin set like she is prepared to argue about something.

I take the soap out of her hand.

“My turn,” I say.

She goes still. And then she lifts her arms and lets me.

I take my time. I have been taking care of people for a living for six years and I have never in my life done it like this, slow, with nothing on the other end of it, no clock, no radio, nobody’s worst day but ours. I wash her shoulders. I follow the line of her collarbone with my thumb and get the smear of my own day off her skin and watch it go down the drain, and something in my chest unclenches when it does. I wash her arms and the insides of her wrists. I bend and kiss each clean spot before I spin her to face the wall.

I pour a generous line of shampoo into my hands and massage it into her scalp, slow and gentle, my fingers digging deep but not enough to hurt. She makes a sound, low in her throat, that could be a purr or a warning.

Her hair is longer than I thought, darkening to a rich cherry brown as the water soaks it through. I lose myself in the repetition. Suds, rinse, repeat. She leans into my touch, her hands reaching back to my waist, fingers squeezing, pulling me closer. The pressure is light but it sets off a chain reaction in my nervous system.

Mandy turns to face me, her eyes scanning the top part of my body and I watch her brows furrow. I know what she is looking at. I have a decent inventory of bruises blooming across my chest, over my ribs and on my shoulder. The hot water makes them angrier looking.

She does not ask about them. She just leans in, looks at it, and then puts her mouth on the deep pink skin, and something goes through me that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with being seen.

“Sterling,” she says into my chest.

“Yeah.”

“If you don’t kiss me right now I’m going to say something we’ll both regret.”

I tip her chin up and I kiss her.

It is not like the Livingroom. On the couch was six years arriving all at once, a pressure release, both of us grabbing. This is slower and considerably worse for my mental integrity. She opens her mouth to mine, her hands come up my back and everything I have been carefully not thinking since the moment she said don’t ever stop comes up through the floor of me at once.

I get my hands into her wet hair and hold her head where I want it. She makes that sound again. Her fingers press and scratch at my lower back, deliberate.

I lean over her. My mouth on her throat. My name coming out of her in a register I have never heard from her and am now going to need to hear again. The water running between us, hot, endless, loud enough to cover everything except the sounds she is making, which I can hear perfectly, which I will be able to hear at four in the morning three weeks from now while I am supposed to be sleeping.

My hand up over her stomach, her ribs, her breast. Her nipple is already tight, the skin flushed and sensitive. I cup her, thumb brushing over the tip, and she sucks in a breath that turns into a moan.