What We Choose novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Top Floor

His kitchen was small and yellow and warm.

The teapot wallpaper went all the way around. Little blue teapots, a thousand of them, faded where the afternoon sun hit.

A pot of something was on the stove. It smelled like onions and beef.

"Sit," he said.

"I said don't be kind."

"Feeding you isn't kind. It's logistics." He pulled out a chair at the table. "You haven't eaten since breakfast. I can tell by your color."

"You can't tell anything by my color."

"Sit down, Dessa."

I sat.

He put a bowl of stew in front of me and a heel of bread, and he sat across the table and watched me eat.

I told him about room twelve in four sentences.

June ninth. The key in her purse. The job in that bed. The text.

He didn't say anything until I was done.

Then he got up, went to the window, and stood with his hands flat on the sill.

"A year," he said.

"Fourteen months."

"Last Thanksgiving she sat at my aunt's table in Quincy. She brought a pie." He laughed, but it wasn't really one. "I hired him. I shook his hand."

"I moved here for him," I said. "So I guess we both got hired."

He turned around.

We looked at each other across his mother's kitchen.

I put my spoon down.

"Colter. I didn't come here to talk about them."

"I know."

"In December they're cutting both of them off." I put my hand flat on my own chest, over my sweater. "I'm not sorry. I want to live. But they're still mine right now, and nobody's touched them since July except doctors."

His eyes dropped to my hand.

Then came back up to my face.

"I want you to," I said. "While they're mine. I want somebody to want them, one time, before they're gone."

"Not one time," he said quietly.

He came around the table.

He didn't help me up. He pulled me up, by both hands, and kissed me against his mother's yellow counter like he'd been holding it back since the bar.

It wasn't careful at all.

His mouth was hot and sure, and I kissed him back like I was proving something.

One of his hands was in my hair, and I realized it wasn't hair anymore, it was just the shape of my skull under his palm, and he didn't flinch or pause or go gentle.

He pulled me closer.

I grabbed the hem of my sweater and pulled it over my head myself.

Cold air hit my arms, then his hands were on my bare waist, and he made a sound low in his chest that I felt all the way down.

"Jesus, Dessa."

"Don't say it like that." I reached behind me and unhooked my bra, let it fall to the kitchen floor. "Don't say it like I'm fragile."

"I wasn't saying it like that."

He looked at me.

At my breasts, bare and pale under the kitchen light, the left one with its tiny scar from the biopsy.

I took his wrists and brought his hands up.

"Touch them."

He did.

His palms were warm and rough, and he cupped me slow, like he was learning the weight of me.

I watched his face.

"Harder."

He squeezed, and his thumbs found my nipples, and my head fell back against the counter.

"That's what I wanted," I said. "Like you mean it. Like they're mine."

"They're yours," he said. His voice was low and rough. "Every inch of you is yours. I'm just borrowing."

"Then borrow."

He lowered his head.

His mouth was hot on my left breast, tongue flat over the scar, and I gasped and pulled his head in.

He sucked my nipple into his mouth and flicked it with his tongue, and my knees went weak.

"Colter."

He switched to the other side, and his beard scraped my skin, and I held his head against me with both hands while he worked.

My body forgot, for whole minutes, that it was sick.

He lifted his head and looked at me.

"These are beautiful," he said. "I've been trying not to think about them for weeks."

"You failed."

"Every day."

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