Chapter 2: The Cold Room
The bulb on the pull chain hung directly over the stairs and it never stopped moving. Every time someone upstairs shifted their weight the light swung and laid a fresh stripe on the concrete, and the stripe crawled. I had counted them. I had counted everything down there, because counting is what you do when the cold sits on your chest like a second blanket.
The cold got into the mattress first, then the pillow, then me. Two blankets, both thin, the same scratchy wool that smelled like a closet nobody had opened since summer. I'd spread my coat over my feet and pushed my hands into my armpits and it still wasn't enough. My breath went up in a small white cloud and thinned out under the light and died.
Upstairs, someone laughed. Kendall. That laugh has a shape to it, a little bell curve right at the end.
I lay there and did the thing I told myself I wouldn't. I replayed it. His forearm along the top of the sofa. The thumb. Slow and easy, back and forth on the leather, like he had all night and nowhere else he would rather put it. My own thumb moved on the blanket edge. I stopped it.
The pipes ticked. Snow did its soft dry hiss against the little window up near the ceiling, steady as static on a dead channel.
Then the door at the top of the stairs opened.
A wedge of light, gold, gone. Steps, careful ones, the kind a person takes when he knows every board and doesn't trust the eleventh.
He filled the doorway with his shoulder against the frame. Flannel with the sleeves still rolled, no shoes, wet dark at the tips of his curls and melting down onto his collar. He must have been outside. That's the only way snow gets in your hair in a house.
"Nikki."
"Go back upstairs."
"No."
I sat up. The blanket slid off my shoulder and the air came through my tank top like water, and I didn't reach for it. "What do you want, Harry?"
"You."
"Don't do that."
"It's not a line."
"It's exactly a line. You've used it before. You used it on me in September and I let you, and here we are."
He came in. He crouched by the edge of the bed, one knee on the concrete, and his face went in and out of the shadow. His eyes were bad, red at the rims, wet-looking in the way they get at four in the morning. Not crying. Worse than crying.
"I went out on the porch," he said. "Ten minutes. No coat. Spencer had to come and make me come back in."
"Why are you telling me that?"
"Because I couldn't stay up there."
He reached for my hand and his fingers were freezing, wet from the snow. I pulled back and he caught the blanket instead. Held it, knuckles white on the edge, like he needed something in his hands.
"Say it upstairs," I said.
"I can't."
"Then say it down here."
He looked at the window. Black, and the white pasted flat over it.
"Kendall's dad's company writes the check for the athletic complex," he said. "New pitch, new locker room, the whole thing. Liam's on scholarship, and if that money goes away it doesn't go away for me, it goes away for him. And she asks me questions and I answer them and she laughs at my answers and that is all it is. That's the entire fucking thing."
"That's not the entire thing."
"It's all of it that matters."
"Then why are you on my floor at one in the morning?"
His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
I got up. The floor was so cold it hurt through my socks, and I stepped around him and put my hand flat on his chest, on the flannel, and pushed. Not hard. Just toward the stairs. "Go up. Go to bed. Or go wherever. Just go."
He didn't move.
"Harry."
"I want you to hear one thing first."
"No."
"Nikki."
"I don't want your one thing. You want me to feel sorry for you? Is that it? You want to come down here and look at me with those eyes and have me say it's okay, it wasn't your fault, you had reasons, it's fine, I get it."
"I didn't say it was fine."
The light swung again overhead. Somebody upstairs rolled over, and the whole ceiling creaked, and a pipe knocked twice somewhere in the wall like a knuckle on a door.
"You want me to tell you it's fine," I said, quieter. "So you can go to sleep."
He stood up. Too close. I could smell it on him now, cedar and cold wet wool and whiskey, and under that the soap he uses, the one I know from his pillows.
Then I made the mistake, which was pushing him again, both hands this time, flat on his chest.
He caught my wrists.
Not hard. Both of them, right at the bone, his hands so cold they burned, and he held them at my sides where I couldn't use them. His heart was going straight through the flannel into my palms. Mine was worse. I stood there with my arms pinned easy as anything and my chin up, and I pulled, and he didn't let go.
"Let go."
"No."
"Harry."
"No."
He lifted me.
One arm under my knees, one across my back, and my socked feet came off the concrete so fast my stomach dropped. I made a sound I didn't mean to make, something in between a gasp and his name, and he carried me the two steps to the mattress like I weighed nothing at all.
"Nikki," he said again, and set me down on the cold blankets.
The mattress creaked and the wool scratched my bare arms. I landed on my back with my hair fanned out and my tank top riding up, and above me the low ceiling and the swinging bulb and Harry, still standing, breathing hard through his nose.
"Don't," I said.
He put one knee on the bed.
"Harry, I'm serious. Don't."
The other knee. The mattress dipped and rolled me toward him and the whole thing groaned under his weight. He crawled up over me on his hands, caging me, and drips from his wet curls fell on my collarbone, one, two, so cold I flinched.
"What happens tomorrow?" I said, fast, into his face. "It snows all night and tomorrow you make breakfast for her and you don't look at me again. That's what happens. That's the whole fucking plan."
"I don't know what happens tomorrow."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got." His voice cracked on the last word and he put his forehead down against mine and stayed there. Cold skin. His breath on my mouth, whiskey and toothpaste. "I don't have a plan for you. I never have. That's the problem."
He kissed me.
Not soft. There was nothing soft in it, no slow build, nothing like the year of careful kisses in his truck with the engine running. He got his hand in my hair and pulled my head back and put his mouth on mine hard enough to hurt, and I bit his bottom lip and he made a noise low in his throat and pressed down.
My hands were free. I could have shoved him off. I got them in the front of his flannel instead and pulled, and buttons went, one pinging off somewhere across the floor.
"Fuck," he said against my mouth.
"You ruined my night."
"I know."
"You sat there with your arm around her and you wouldn't even look at me."
"I know."
"I hate you." I said it into his neck with my teeth on the tendon there, and he shuddered all the way down his back and ground his hips into mine and I felt exactly how much he didn't care that I hated him.
He pushed the flannel off his shoulders and it landed in a heap. His chest was cold from the porch and hot in the middle. I got my palms flat on his ribs and felt his heart going like something hunted. Down the hall of his body, the little black M under his arm, and I put my thumb on it the way I'd done a hundred times when we were both pretending this was casual.
"Say my name," I told him.
"Nikki."
"Again."
"Nikki." He said it against my throat and dragged the strap of my tank top down off my shoulder with his teeth. Then the other one. Then he pulled the whole thing down and my tits came out into the cold air and my nipples went so hard they ached.
He got his mouth on one and sucked, hard, and I arched up off the mattress and my heel kicked the wall. The bulb swung. I grabbed the back of his head and held him there while he worked his tongue in circles and then bit down, just enough, and my hips came off the bed entirely.
"God, Harry."
"You're so cold," he said, mouth still on me. "You're freezing."
"I wonder why."
He lifted his head and looked at me with his mouth wet and his eyes black in the low light, and I have never in my life wanted to slap someone and fuck them in the same heartbeat.
"Take these off," he said, tugging at my leggings.
"You take them off."
He did. He got both hands in the waistband and peeled them down my legs, and then my underwear with them, and I lifted up to help him because being difficult about it had stopped being fun somewhere around the second button.
The air hit my cunt and it was so cold I gasped, and then his hand was there, flat and warm, cupping me, and his fingers slid through the wet like he was testing something he already knew.
"You're soaked," he said.
"Shut up."
"For me."
"Shut up, Harry."
"It's for me." He pushed two fingers into me, all the way in one stroke, and I made an ugly noise and clamped my legs around his wrist. "Say it's for me."
I bit my lip and said nothing and he curled his fingers up inside and did the thing with his thumb on my clit that he has always, always been too good at, and I came apart inside fifteen seconds and had to cover my own mouth with my hand so the whole house wouldn't hear it.
When I could breathe again I got a fistful of his hair and pulled his head up.
"Get your dick out."
He did it fast, unbuttoning his jeans one-handed with his knee still wedged between my legs. He shoved them down to his thighs, and his cock came out thick and flushed and wet at the tip, and I reached down and got my hand around it and squeezed.
"Ah," he said. His hips jerked.
"Cold hands?"
"Yeah."
"Good." I stroked him slow, root to tip, twisting on the way up the way I know he likes, and watched his face go slack and stupid. "You made me sleep in the basement, Harry."
"I know."
"You put sheets on my bed that smell like a storage unit."
"I know."
"You gave Kendall's friend the room I was supposed to have."
His eyes came open and he looked down at me, wrecked, and said, "I know. I know. I know." Three times, and then he shoved my hand away and got over me and lined himself up.
He didn't ask.
He pushed in.
I was still tight from coming, and he was thick, and the first inch made both of us stop breathing. He held still with his jaw locked and his forearms braced beside my head, and I could feel him shaking, actually shaking, and the two of us just looked at each other like that in the swinging light of a basement that was supposed to be empty.
"Move," I said.
He moved.
Slow at first, deep, all the way out and all the way back in, and the mattress springs squeaked in time. Then his cold hands found my hips and he dragged me up onto him and started to fuck me properly, hard, the smack of it loud in that empty concrete room.
I got my legs around his waist and my nails in his back and I said, into his ear, every filthy thing I'd been saving up for a year.
"Harder. Come on. Fuck me like you actually want me."
"I want you."
"Say it again."
"I want you. I want you. Jesus, Nikki."
He put his hand over my mouth and fucked me into the mattress until the headboard hit the wall twice and I had to grab it with one hand to stop it. His mouth was on my neck and his balls were slapping wet against my ass and my cunt was making noises I'd never heard it make.
"Don't stop," I said against his palm. "Don't you dare stop."
"I'm close."
"Good."
"Where?"
I pulled his hand off my mouth and put it on my throat, light, the way he knows.
"Inside me," I said. "You know where."
He came with his face buried in my hair and his whole body shaking, and I felt every pulse of it, hot and deep, and then I came again right after him with my heels dug into his back, mouth open, silent, nothing coming out of me but air.
He stayed in me. His weight came down slowly and his forehead found my shoulder. The bulb swung once more and settled.
Upstairs, somebody flushed a toilet.
"Your knees are bleeding," I said. They were, both of them, from the concrete.
"I don't care."
"You're going to get blood on the blanket."
"I don't care."
He didn't care. He stayed over me with his chest heaving and one hand flat on the mattress beside my head, and then he pulled out slow, and I felt it come out of me, thick and warm, running down onto wool that was already going to hell anyway.
Both his knees were split open. Little wet half-moons on the concrete where he'd been kneeling.
"Stay," I said.
"You told me to go about four times."
"That was before."
He looked at me a long second. Then he sat back on his heels, peeled his jeans the rest of the way off, and got up, and I watched him cross that cold floor naked in the dark with his ass pale in the swinging light. He came back with his flannel and the bottle of water he'd brought down and never mentioned.
"Hold still."
He wet a corner of the flannel and dabbed at my knees, one then the other, careful about it, frowning like it was a real problem. Then he did the same between my legs, and I put my hand over my face because there's a limit to what I can watch without saying something stupid.
"That's disgusting," I said.
"You're welcome."
"You're wiping your own jizz up with your shirt."
"It's already ruined." He threw it in the corner. "You popped three buttons off it."
"Four."
He got back on the bed and this time he didn't hover. He pulled the blankets up over both of us, shoved his cold feet between mine, and lay on his side facing me with his hand under his cheek. His curls were drying and springing up at the front, and there was a red mark on his bottom lip where I'd bitten him.
"You're shaking," he said.
"I'm cold."
"You're shaking."
"I'm cold, Harry."
He put his arm around me and dragged me in and I let him, because I was, in fact, cold. His chest was warm now, all the way through. His hand moved down my spine, rib by rib, and settled at the small of my back, and his thumb started doing the thing. Small circles. Slow. My whole body went slack against my own better judgment.
"I want to go down on you," he said, into my hair.
"You just came in me."
"I know. I want to go down on you anyway."
He didn't wait for an answer. He got his shoulders under the blanket and moved down my body, kissing my collarbone, the side of my breast, my stomach, and then he had both hands under my thighs and pushed my legs open and put his mouth on me.
And he was good at it. That's the thing I'll never forgive him for. He got his tongue flat against my clit and licked up slow, humming a little, and my heels dug into the mattress and my hand came down on the back of his head. He tasted himself in me and didn't care. His tongue curled inside me, then back up, then two fingers pushing in and his mouth working my clit in a rhythm he knew. He knew exactly. Because he'd had a year of practice on a body he was pretending not to want.
"Fuck," I said, to the ceiling.
He came up for air just long enough to say, "Say it."
"Say what."
"That you want me."
"You've got your tongue in my cunt. I think that's implied."
"Say it anyway."
"I want you. There. Happy?"
He laughed against me and the vibration went straight up my spine and I came with both hands fisted in the blanket and my hips grinding down on his face. He stayed on me through it, slower and slower, until I had to push his head away because it was too much.
Then he climbed back up, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and I grabbed him by the jaw and kissed him so I could taste it.
"How many times can you go in one night," I said.
"That's a weird question to ask a man with his dick in your hand."
"Answer it."
He pushed into me again, easy this time, because I was wet and open and he slid the whole way home without either of us breathing hard about it. Then he turned me, one hand on my hip, and I went over onto my front with my face in the pillow, and he got behind me with his knees outside mine and pulled my ass up into the air.
The wool was rough under my tits. The bulb swung. He pushed two fingers in first, checking the work, then lined up and slid in and bottomed out with a slap of his hips against me that echoed off the concrete.
"Hard?" he said.
"As hard as you've got."
He had a lot. He got a hand in my hair, not pulling, just holding, and fucked me at a pace that made the whole bed walk toward the wall. My tits dragged on the blanket and my mouth was open on the pillow and I was saying things I wouldn't repeat to anyone. He reached around and got two fingers on my clit and rubbed in circles that matched his hips, and the second orgasm came up on me so fast I didn't have time to warn him.
"Harry."
"I know."
"Harry, I'm going to."
"Yeah." His voice was wrecked. "Do it. Come on my cock."
I did. I came so hard my legs gave out and he held my hips up and kept going through it, and I felt him swell and then he buried himself and came with a low sound that came out of his chest more than his mouth.
He held me there after. Warm weight, our skin stuck together, my cheek flat in a wet spot I'd made with my own mouth. Then he pulled out and got down beside me and pulled me in against his chest and neither of us said anything for a while.
Upstairs the house creaked. The snow ticked against the window.
"You're going to have to go up before seven," I said.
"I know."
"Kendall does her vlog thing at seven, she said at dinner. Coffee, sit there, film the view."
"I remember."
"So you'll be up there."
"I'll be up there."
I turned my head on his arm and looked at him. Red eyes, bruised mouth, hair a disaster, the little black M under his rib showing above the blanket edge. He looked back.
"I'm going to say it tomorrow," he said.
"Say what."
"At breakfast. In front of all of them."
The bulb swung and steadied. My heart did something ugly and hopeful in my throat and I hated it immediately.
"You won't."
"Watch me."
"You said that in October."
"I know what I said in October."
"And you didn't."
"And I didn't." He put his hand over my mouth, gently, thumb on my cheek. "Go to sleep, Nikki."
Above us, in the dark ceiling, a floorboard took a step. Just one. It stopped, and then it took another, and the two of them creaked across the boards to the top of the basement stairs and stopped right there.
Neither of us breathed.
Neither of us breathed. I could feel his heartbeat shift against my shoulder, one hard knock and then nothing, like a hand lifted off a drum.
The floorboards creaked again. Then a boot heel, and then the light at the top of the stairs went from black to a thin gray line as a phone screen tipped over the edge.
"Harold."
Louis. Low, but not whispering. Louis has never whispered in his life.
Harry's whole body went rigid. His hand on my back stopped moving.
"I can hear you breathing," Louis said. "You breathe like a horse."
Three steps down. The screen light swung across the concrete and laid a stripe over both of us, and I got the blanket up over my chest a half second before it hit, and I don't know why I bothered. Louis has eyes.
He stopped on the fourth step and looked at the situation. My hair. The flannel in the corner with the buttons gone. Harry's jeans on the floor in a heap with the belt still in them.
"Well," he said.
"Go back up," Harry said.
"Kendall's awake."
The room got colder. Or maybe I just felt it more.
"She's in the kitchen making coffee," Louis said. "Camera's already on the island. She asked me where you went. Twice. Then she started opening doors."
Harry sat up. The blanket slid off him and he didn't care, and Louis very deliberately looked at the ceiling.
"Which doors?" Harry said.
"Yours. Which was empty. So she's doing the math." Louis shifted his weight on the step and the wood groaned under him. "You've got maybe forty minutes before she comes down here looking for you. And if she comes down here, Harold, everybody in this house is going to know exactly what you did all night, and it's going to be the story she tells for the next six months."
Harry got off the bed. He was pale in the phone light and his knees were scabbed and there was a red bite mark on his neck that I hadn't noticed making.
"Give me a shirt," he said to Louis.
"Give me a shirt," Louis repeated. "Give me a shirt. You're a grown man."
"I can't go up like this."
"You can and you will. Walk fast, keep your arms down, go to your room and put on something and come back downstairs looking like you slept nine hours." Louis held out the flannel on the floor with one boot. "This is finished. It's got no buttons."
"Then bring me yours."
"No." Louis looked past him, down at me. "Nikki. You alright?"
I had the blanket up to my chin like a child and I hated it. "I'm great."
"You're not."
"I'm fine, Louis."
He nodded slowly, like he was filing something. He's not stupid. He's about the least stupid person in that house.
"So what's the plan," he said. To Harry. "Because I've got one and it's you going up there and having a cup of coffee and being normal for two hours until the snow stops."
"The snow's not stopping," Harry said.
"Then you're going to have to be normal for a lot longer than two hours."
Harry found his jeans. He got them on and stood there barefoot and bare-chested and pushed both hands back through his hair, and the whole gesture was so exactly him, so exactly the thing he does on the sideline before a game, that I felt my stomach fold.
"Lou," he said. "I'm going to say it at breakfast."
Louis went very still on the stairs.
"Say what," he said.
"All of it. In front of everybody."
"To Kendall?"
"To all of them."
"And then what. Say it out loud, Harold. Then what. Because she's going to laugh, and you're going to laugh, and she's going to put her phone down and say something like, oh my god, and then it's just a thing that happened at a cabin. That's not saying it. That's performing it."
"It's more than I've done."
"It's nothing."
"It's not nothing."
"You promised her in October," Louis said.
The phone light dipped. I could hear the house above us. A cupboard. A spoon on ceramic. Someone laughing, and it wasn't Kendall, it was one of her friends.
"I told you in October," Louis said, quieter. "I told you then. And you've spent every month since making her wait for a version of you that shows up in public."
Harry didn't say anything.
"Up," Louis said. "Now. Bathroom's at the end of the hall. Wash your face, it looks like someone hit you."
Harry picked up the water bottle and stood there looking at me. His mouth was open. I knew what he wanted, and I wasn't going to give it to him for free, so I looked at the wall instead, at the swinging bulb and the two little wet half moons his knees had left on the concrete.
"I'll be back down," he said.
"Don't."
"Nikki."
"You heard him." I sat up straight with the blanket around me and my chin level. "Go have your coffee."
He went up. Two at a time, quick, quiet, and Louis stayed on the fourth step until the door shut, and then it was just the two of us and the ticking pipes.
Louis leaned on the rail and looked at me for a long moment. His face wasn't smug. That was the worst part. It was just tired.
"He means it," he said.
"They always mean it."
"He's never said that out loud before. To me. Not once, in six years."
"That's a low bar, Louis."
"It is." He started back up the stairs, then stopped. "There's a coffee machine in the hall closet, the pod one. It's loud. Don't use it."
"I wasn't going to."
"And Nikki." He had his hand on the door. "If he doesn't say it at breakfast, I will."
"Don't you dare."
"I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it because I'm sick of watching him."
He shut the door and his steps went away across the ceiling, and the ceiling creaked and creaked and then went still.
I sat there in the dark. My knees were stinging. I could still feel him in me, sore and wet, and the smell of him was all over that pillow.
Then I did the math Louis had done. Forty minutes. Kendall in the kitchen with her camera on the counter. Harry coming downstairs washed and normal with somebody else's shirt on.
I got up.
I got up.
The concrete stung the soles of my feet so hard I stood there a second with both arms crossed over my chest and my toes curled, waiting for the room to stop tilting. It smelled like salt and skin and damp wool. My knees ached. My thighs ached. Something low and tired ached, in a good way and a bad way at the same time.
My leggings were at the foot of the bed in a tangle. I got them on standing up, one leg then the other, hopping once when the wool caught my heel. My top was under the pillow, balled into a knot the size of a fist.
The stairs went up. I took them on the outside edge, near the wall, where the wood doesn't talk. Louis's trick from the way down. It worked for him. It worked for me.
The kitchen light was the only light on in the house. Yellow, hard, the kind that shows you everything.
"Morning," Kendall said.
She was standing at the island in the cabin's waffle robe with her hair twisted up in a clip and no makeup, and she still looked like a billboard. There was a pod machine bubbling behind her and a camera on a tripod on the counter with the screen flipped dark.
One of her friends was asleep at the table with her face on her folded arms.
"Morning," I said.
"Pods are behind you. Hazelnut or the dark one." She held up a mug. "You want one?"
"Sure."
She pulled a second mug down and put it under the spout and hit the button, and it screamed like a small animal the way those things do. The friend at the table didn't move.
"You're up early," Kendall said.
"So are you."
"Jet lag from nothing. It's a gift." She slid the mug across. "Did you sleep down there?"
"Yep."
"It's like a fridge in that hallway. I went looking for the bathroom at two and my feet went numb."
She said it easy. No edge on it. She picked up the camera and pointed it at the window, at the snow coming down flat and steady in the porch light, and filmed it for a while without saying anything, and I stood there holding a hot mug with her reflection and mine both floating in the black glass.
Then she turned it off and set it down and looked at me properly for the first time.
"Okay, real question," she said. "And you can tell me to fuck off. Are you and Harry, like, a thing? Because I asked him last night and I got a TED talk about high school and a story about a soccer pitch."
"Just a friend."
"Mm." She blew on her coffee. "That's what he said. Word for word. It was weird."
I drank. The coffee was burnt and I didn't care. I wanted to sit down and there was one stool and the friend was on it.
"He sat with me until almost one," Kendall said. "After you went down. He was nice about it. Asked me about the shoes thing, asked me about Milan. And then I said, so is that your girl, and he said it's complicated, and I said what's complicated about it, and he got up and went to the bathroom."
She shrugged. The robe slid off one shoulder and she pulled it back up.
"Boys who say it's complicated," she said. "For the record, he's not my type. I came up here for the snow. My editor wants a snowed-in video and I have a shoot schedule and this is a free cabin."
I looked at the window. It had stopped snowing. Not stopped, I realized. Slowed. Just enough that you could see the top rail of the porch through it.
"Nobody said it was stopping," I said.
"Radio said eight. They're going to try the pass at eight." She picked up the camera again and started fiddling with a battery. "So we shoot at seven, or we don't shoot at all, and then I'm gone. I've got a flight Tuesday out of Denver and I'm not missing it for a mountain."
"Where's Harry?"
She looked up. "Shower. He's been in there twenty minutes."
That landed somewhere under my ribs and sat there.
"Hey," I said. "That lock thing with the code on it, in the master. The thermostat panel. Does that fob live in there?"
"The what?"
"The little blue tag. On the dresser, by the lamp. It says ZONE 4."
She turned and looked toward the master door and then back at me, and something moved across her face that wasn't unkind. She went in and came back out with the tag dangling off her finger and dropped it on the counter between us, and it skittered and spun and stopped.
"Take it," she said. "I've got lights that melt my own lip gloss in that room. I don't need more heat."
I closed my hand around it. It was still warm from wherever it had been.
The friend at the table lifted her head an inch, said something about a charger, and put it back down.
I took my mug and went down the stairs, and I didn't bother with the edges this time, and the whole staircase announced me. The basement was still cold enough that my breath hung in front of my face. I found the panel and held the tag against it until it blinked, then pressed the arrow up until it read seventy-four.
The pipes in the ceiling knocked and ticked. Warm air came out of the vent by the bed, dusty and dry and mine.
Then I unzipped my bag.
The red thing was folded on top where I'd put it two days ago, when he texted me at six in the morning and told me to pack it. A dress. Short, deep, the kind of red that doesn't match anything else I own. I'd bought it for a party he took me to in October and then didn't stay at.
I shook it out. I stepped into it and pulled it up over my shoulders and reached back for the zip and got it on the third try.
The room was warm now. My knees were scabbed over and my hair was a disaster and I could smell him on my own skin.
I left the mug on the nightstand and went back up.
The kitchen was full when I got up there.
Kendall first, still in the robe, camera mounted on the tripod with the red light live. Her two friends at the table with mugs and phones. Spencer leaning on the counter eating a pear with a paring knife. The boys coming down behind me one at a time, drawn by coffee and whatever Niall had going in the pan.
I walked in and the room did the thing.
Spencer stopped chewing. Kendall's friend set her mug down without drinking from it.
Niall whistled low. "Okay, then."
"Where the hell did you get that," Hanna said.
"Bag."
"On purpose?"
"On purpose."
Kendall tilted her head at me the way she'd tilted it at the window earlier, appraising, no cruelty in it at all. "That's a red. That's a good red. Come stand by the glass, the light back there's garbage."
"Not today."
"Suit yourself." She picked her mug back up. She has spent her whole life being told the best way to look at a thing is through a lens, and I was the thing, and that's the part I can't hold against her.
Niall made me a plate without asking. Eggs, bread, butter, and I ate it standing up against the counter like that was normal.
"Zone four's on," I said, to the room.
Louis looked up over his coffee. He didn't smile.
"How'd you pull that?"
"Kendall gave me the tag."
"Did she now."
"It was melting my lip balm," Kendall said, thumbing her screen. "I look out for the little guy."
Zayn came in with Emily behind him and they both stopped in the doorway. Emily's eyes went dress, face, stairs, in that order, and then she went to the pot and said nothing, which is how she says everything. Liam came last with his hair flat on one side, and looked at the empty chair where Harry's flannel usually hangs, then at Louis, and didn't ask. That's Liam. That's why the rest of us still like him.
Harry came down at seven minutes past.
I heard him before I saw him. He came around the corner in a gray henley that wasn't his, sleeves shoved up, hair still wet and pushed back, and he was doing his face already, the easy one, the mouth turning up before the eyes caught up.
Then he saw me and stopped dead in the doorway with Niall behind him needing to get to the pan.
Niall went around him.
Harry looked at the dress. Then at my face. Then at the dress again. Something went through him that I hadn't seen in a year of stairwells and parking lots and backs of bars, and it wasn't confusion, and it wasn't want.
It was fear.
"You packed it," he said.
"You told me to."
He came in. Got a mug. Poured. Stood with his back to all of us holding it in both hands like the room was cold. Kendall watched him over the top of her phone. "Morning, sunshine."
"Morning."
"Sleep well?"
"Great."
"You look like a raccoon."
"Thanks."
Then she stood up and stretched and said, "Okay, everybody." She turned the camera with her thumb. Red light off. "Snow's letting up. We shoot the porch in twenty and then I'm out. My driver's coming for the pass at eight."
"Pass is still closed," Emily said.
"My driver's coming anyway."
Louis set his mug down. He didn't look at me. He looked at Harry. "Harold."
"Lou."
"Breakfast."
"It's seven in the morning."
"It's past seven." Louis picked the mug back up. "I'll give you to the end of this coffee."
My heart was doing something I didn't like. I put my plate on the counter.
"Would somebody tell me what's happening," Hanna said.
"Nothing's happening," Harry said.
"Something is definitely happening," Aria said, and shut her notebook.
Harry put his mug down. He looked around at all of them, Kendall's two friends included, people who hadn't signed up to be in a room for this, and he opened his mouth and I knew exactly what was coming. A version that cost him nothing. Something sideways that sounded like a confession without making him do anything. That's what he does. That's the only thing he's ever done.
And I had one clean second where I could have let him have it.
So I didn't.
"I'm the secret," I said.
Every head in the room came up.
"Harry and me. A year. He's been fucking me since last spring and nobody's allowed to know." I said it at full volume. "I came up here as his guest and got moved to the basement when Kendall showed so the sponsors wouldn't see. That's the arrangement. That's been the arrangement the whole time."
Nobody breathed. Behind me the kettle clicked off.
Louis set his mug down very slowly and sat back.
Kendall's mouth was open. She looked at Harry. "Wait. Word for word. Just a friend."
"I know."
"You said it's complicated."
"I know."
"Harry." Flat, like she was reading it off a card. "I asked you a direct question and you looked me in the eye and lied."
His jaw worked. He looked at me across the island, and I looked back at him with my scabbed knees under the skirt and his own red dress on my body and I did not lift a finger to help him.
"Nikki," he said. Just the name. Like it cost him.
Niall went to the sink and turned the water on and left it running so nobody would have to hear the room.
Hanna stood up and came to stand beside me. Aria after her. Spencer put the pear down and crossed her arms and moved where she could see the door.
"I told you in October," Louis said, to nobody in particular.
"I know what you told me."
"Harry, mate." Niall, at the sink, not turning around. "Say it now or never say it."
Harry's hands were flat on the marble.
Then Kendall picked her phone up off the counter, aimed it at him, and hit record.
"Go on," she said. "You told me you were going to say something at breakfast. So say it. I want it on camera, so that if you do it, it's real, and if you don't, everyone standing in this kitchen gets to see exactly what you are."
The little light went red.
Harry looked at it. He looked at me. He looked at the red dot on a phone held by a girl he'd known nine hours and thrown me over for.
And he didn't say anything.
I picked my coffee back up. I drank the rest of it standing there, and set the empty cup down in the middle of the island between us.
"Right," I said. "I'm going to go pack."
I got as far as the top of the basement stairs before I heard him behind me.
"Nikki."
I kept going. The wood creaked under each step and I didn't bother with the wall edge this time. Let the whole house hear me. Let Kendall's camera catch it through the floor if it wanted.
"Nikki, stop."
"No."
The basement door shut above me and the kitchen noise cut off like a hand over a mouth. My bag was where I'd left it, flopped open at the foot of the bed. I crouched and started pulling things out of the closet, the drawer, off the back of the chair, and threw them in without folding anything.
"Nikki."
"Say something useful or get out."
He stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders pulled up. His hair was dry now, dried wrong, sticking up in the back. He looked around at the concrete, the swinging bulb, the blanket on the floor from last night.
"It's warm down here," he said.
"I fixed it."
"How."
"Kendall gave me the tag."
He nodded, slow. He looked like someone had unplugged him.
"That's it?" I said. "You came down here to talk about the thermostat?"
"I don't know what I came down here to do."
"Then go do it somewhere else." I shoved a sweater in the bag and yanked the zip. "Your coffee's getting cold."
"I didn't say it."
"No."
"I should've."
"Wow."
"Nikki, that's not." He pulled a hand out of his pocket and shoved it through his hair. "I couldn't say it in front of a camera, alright? Not like that. Not with her holding it up like proof."
"Then say it now."
He stopped.
"Say it to me," I said. "Nobody's here. No camera, no sponsors, no porch light. Just the two of us and a dead bulb. So say it."
He opened his mouth and closed it and I watched him do it and something in me went ahead and finished dying.
"That's what I thought," I said.
"That's not fair."
"Fair." I stood up with the bag in my hand and my scabbed knees under the red dress and my hair a wreck. "You want to talk about fair. I've spent a year being your Tuesday. Your nine p.m. Your back stairwell. You texted me at six in the morning to pack a dress so you could look at it and then hide me under the floor, and you want fair."
"Nikki."
"Don't do the voice."
He crossed the room. Two steps and his hands were on my arms, both of them, holding, and I went stiff as a board under them.
"You know what you are to me," he said.
"Say it."
"You."
"Not good enough."
"Baby."
"Don't." I tried to pull back and he didn't let go and I shoved him, both palms flat, hard, and he came back at me and caught my wrists and I felt the whole thing flip over.
He had them crossed between us. His chest was going. Up close his eyes were wet at the edges, red-rimmed, and he was breathing through his nose like his mouth had given up.
"I'm going to lose you," he said.
"Yep."
"Don't say it like that."
"You're already losing me, Harry."
He kissed me.
It wasn't a soft one. He came in hard with my wrists still caught in his hand and his other arm around my back, and he kissed me like the last thing he'd ever get to do, and my bag hit the floor. My hands stayed where he'd put them. I didn't kiss him back for maybe two full seconds.
Then I did.
I don't have a good reason. I've been asking myself for a year and I don't have one. When his tongue came into my mouth my knees went and made the choice my head wouldn't, and I bit his lip hard enough to make him grunt and he held on and did it again anyway.
He got me turned around and walked me back until the mattress hit the backs of my legs and I sat. He went down onto one knee in front of me on the cold concrete and reached up under the red dress and got both hands on the waistband of my leggings and pulled.
Off. Both legs, one at a time, and my underwear went with them. He left the dress on.
"Jesus," he said, looking up at me.
"Shut up."
I wasn't wet enough yet and he fixed that first. He pushed my thighs apart and got his mouth on me and didn't bother with teasing, just flat tongue and pressure and two fingers up inside me, the same two fingers as before, and he hooked them forward and dragged and I put my hand over my own mouth because I could not make that sound in a house with eight people standing over it.
I came in under a minute, thighs shaking on his shoulders, and he pulled out and stood up and got out of the henley that wasn't his.
The dress came off me over my head and got thrown on the floor with everything else. He kneeled up on the bed and got my tits in his hands, both of them, squeezing hard enough that the soreness from last night lit up all over again, and then he ducked his head and pulled a nipple into his mouth and sucked like he was starving.
I grabbed his hair in one fist. He made a noise around my skin and the vibration went down my whole body.
"Harry."
"Mm."
"I hate you so much."
He lifted his head. His mouth was wet. "I know."
"You made me sleep down here in the cold."
"I know."
"You gave my room to her friend."
"I know."
"You put your arm around her on the couch and you didn't look at me once."
"I know." He got me by the hips and pulled me down flat on the mattress and came up over me. "I know all of it, Nikki, alright. I know."
He was hard and he lined up and pushed in without asking.
I took it in one slow stroke, all the way to the base, and we both stopped breathing for a second. I was still slick and open from last night and he fit like he'd been made to. He stayed there, buried, forehead down against mine, and both of us just breathed at each other.
"Move," I said.
"Say it."
"Move."
He pulled out slow and went back in hard, and my whole body jolted up the mattress. He did it again. And again. He got his hand under my ass and pulled me into it so every thrust hit the same spot, and the bed started walking on the floor, and I got one fist in the blanket and the other on his shoulder and held on.
"Fuck," he said. Quiet. Through his teeth.
"That's good."
"Tell me."
"It's good."
"You're going to come again."
"I know."
He dropped down onto his elbows and got his face in my throat and fucked me in short hard strokes with his whole weight behind them, and I came around him with my mouth open against his shoulder and my nails in his back. It rolled through me in waves and he kept going through all of it, past it, and then his hips stuttered and he buried himself to the root and came with a long shaking noise that he couldn't hide in my neck.
He held there. Sweat and breath and his heart going against my ribs.
Then the pipes knocked in the ceiling and we both heard it at once. A door, upstairs. Feet. Someone moving around the kitchen, working the pod machine, and the machine screamed.
He pulled out. I felt it, the drag and then the wet rush, and he rolled off me onto his back and lay there staring at the swinging bulb.
"Eight o'clock," I said.
"Yeah."
"Your driver's coming."
"Kendall's driver."
"Whatever." I sat up and reached for the red dress off the floor. "I have to pack."
He didn't move. He just lay there with his chest going up and down and his knees scabbed and his mouth red from me, and out in the kitchen somebody laughed.
Upstairs a cupboard shut, and someone laughed again, and the laugh went through the floorboards like it belonged to a different house entirely.
I had the dress half up my thighs when his hand closed around my ankle.
"Nikki."
"Don't."
He pulled. Just that, one slow drag on my ankle, and I slid backward across the fitted sheet with the dress bunched at my waist and my knees skidding on the mattress. My bag tipped over and the sweater I'd just folded went onto the floor.
"I have to pack," I said.
"You don't have to do anything." He got a hand on my hip and rolled me onto my back. His mouth was still red. "It's not eight yet."
"Harry."
"Look at me."
I looked. God help me, I looked, and his eyes had gone dark and glassy and he was already hard again, and I could feel the heat coming off the vent against my bare legs and the cold coming off the concrete against my shoulders.
"Why are you still here?" I said.
"Because you're leaving."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
He climbed over me and put his knee between my thighs and pushed them open, and I let him. That's the truth of it. I let him, and I put my own hand flat on his chest and felt his heart going, and then I slid it down his stomach and took him in my fist.
He breathed out through his teeth.
"You want this," I said.
"I want you."
"Careful."
"I've been careful for a year." He pushed into my hand, thick and slick, and the head of him dragged wet across my palm. "I'm done being careful."
He caught my wrist again and pinned it above my head against the pillow, and then he lined up and pushed in, and I was still wet and still open and he went all the way to the root in one stroke.
I arched up off the mattress and he had to clamp his other hand over my mouth.
"Quiet," he whispered. "They'll hear you."
I bit the meat of his palm and he laughed, low, right against my ear, and then he started to fuck me.
Slow first. Long, deep strokes that pulled almost all the way out and pressed back until his hips were flat against mine. The bed frame knocked the wall with every one, a soft wooden tick, tick, tick, and I got my free hand in the sheet and gripped.
"That's it," he said.
"Shut up and move."
He moved. He got his forearm under my knee and pushed my leg up high against his ribs and fucked me at an angle where every stroke dragged across the front of me, hard and wet and loud. Sweat ran down the side of my neck into my hair. The bulb swung overhead and threw our shadows up the concrete wall and pulled them down again.
"My knees are bleeding," I said.
"So are mine."
"Good."
He dropped his head and bit me on the shoulder, hard, teeth in the muscle, and I yelped into his hand and my cunt clenched so hard around him he groaned out loud and had to stop moving.
"Fuck," he said.
"Do that again."
He did it again. Lower this time, at the join of my neck and shoulder, and I came like that, sudden and hard, with his cock buried all the way in me and his teeth in my skin and my whole body pulling tight around him.
He fucked me through it. Kept going, faster, until the sound of it filled the whole basement, slapping and wet and both of us breathing like we'd run up the mountain.
Then he pulled out and flipped me over.
"Hands," he said, and I put my hands on the headboard. He got a fistful of my hair at the back and pulled my head up just enough and pushed back in from behind, and that angle was worse and better at the same time and I heard myself make a sound that wasn't a word.
"Tell me," he said.
"No."
"Tell me what you want."
"I want you to say it."
Silence, except for his hips.
"Say it," I said.
"I want you." His voice cracked in the middle of it. "I want you, alright, I want you more than I've ever wanted anything, I've wanted you since I was seventeen and I've been a coward about it every single day."
The headboard banged the wall.
"Say my name," I said.
"Nikki."
"Again."
"Nikki." He pulled my hair. "Nikki, Nikki, Nikki."
I came again with my forehead on the headboard and my knuckles white on the wood, and he came right after me, driving in deep and holding there, shaking, with his mouth open against my back and nothing coming out of it.
We stayed like that. His breath on my spine. The vent ticking. The bulb swinging slow enough that the shadows barely moved.
He pulled out and I felt it run down my thigh, hot, and I didn't care enough to move. He sat back on his heels and I turned over and looked at him: raw knees, wet mouth, hair wrecked, chest heaving.
"You're a mess," I said.
"So are you."
I laughed. First time in two days. It came out cracked and ugly and I hated that it was real.
I stopped laughing first, which was the whole problem.
He was still on his back with one arm behind his head, breathing down. The vent ticked. Out in the kitchen someone ran the tap and shut it off again.
I stood up. My knees complained. There was a smear of blood on the concrete where I'd knelt and I looked at it for a second too long.
"You're bleeding on the floor," I said.
"So are you."
I got the dress off the end of the bed and pulled it on. No bra, no underwear, nothing under it, because everything else was in the bag or on the floor. The silk went over my hips and I felt how cold the room actually was once it touched my skin.
"Are you getting dressed or what?"
He didn't move. "In a minute."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.