Chapter 3: Cold Coffee and Hard Truths
The peace lasted until her heartbeat slowed.
Then Karim shifted beneath her, and the question came out of him like it had been waiting there all along, coiled and patient and ready.
"What happens now?"
Layla lifted her head from his chest. Her cheek was tacky with his sweat, her hair plastered to her temple. Through the gap in the curtains, the afternoon light looked thin and bruised. She'd lost track of the hours entirely.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean the rest of it." He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the ceiling, at the water stain in the corner shaped like a bent spine. "Not the sex. I know what happens with the sex. I mean after. The part where you go home. The part where you decide whether to answer my messages tomorrow. The part where you ghost me, or don't, or whatever it is you do."
She sat up. The sheet slid off her shoulder and she let it.
"Why does there have to be an after? We're not even dressed."
"You're deflecting."
"I'm lying here naked in your wet sheets and you want to talk about the future." She reached for her cold coffee, remembered it was empty, set it back down. "You've got shit timing, Karim."
"Or I've got perfect timing." He finally turned his head, looked at her. His eyes were flat and steady and entirely unreadable. "You're still here. You're feeling something. If I wait until you're dressed and halfway out the door, we both know how that conversation ends."
"And how does it end?"
"You tell me it was fun. You tell me you'll text. Then you don't."
She felt her jaw tighten. There it was—the thing she'd been waiting for all day, the thing that had been sitting quiet in her chest like a stone. Not shame. Something worse. Being seen.
"Wow," she said. "So that's what all this was. A fucking intervention."
"That's not what I said."
"You didn't have to." She swung her legs over the side of the bed, away from him. The floor was cold under her feet. "You've been running the numbers on me since last night. Deciding how much I'm worth betting on. Whether I'll pay out."
"That's a hell of a way to read it."
"Am I wrong?"
He sat up. She heard the sheets rustle, felt the mattress shift. He didn't touch her.
"You showed up at my door," he said, voice low. "You stood there and told me your heart was dead. You said you wanted me because there was nothing left inside you that could get hurt. And then you let me fuck you twice and you stayed the night. So yeah. I'm asking a question. Because I don't know which version of you is standing in my apartment, and I'd like to before you leave."
"What version," she repeated. She laughed—short, ugly. "You think I've got versions?"
"I think everybody does."
She stood up. The ache in her legs was shocking, almost pleasant. She found her underwear tangled at the foot of the bed and pulled it on without looking at him.
"You don't get to do this," she said.
"Do what?"
"Make me into a project." She yanked her shirt over her head, inside out, didn't care. "This whole thing. You've got this idea of me—this sad broken girl who says shocking things and needs saving. That's what got you hard last night, wasn't it? The wounded little bird."
"Don't."
"Don't what? It's true. You wanted to be the one who fixed it. The steady hands. The patient guy who sees through the bullshit."
"Stop."
"Because that's a hell of a story, isn't it?" She turned to face him. He was still sitting on the edge of the mattress, naked, palms flat on his thighs. "Karim and the girl with the dead heart. He fucks her back to life. Real romantic."
The blow landed. She saw it—the flicker behind his eyes before the stillness came back down. Good. She wanted it to land.
"Except I'm not your little project," she said. "I didn't come here to get saved. I came here because I was tired of being numb and you were the nearest warm body. That's it. That's the whole thing."
He stood up. Slowly. She hated how slowly he did everything—like he had all the time in the world and she was the one running out.
"Say it again," he said."Say what?"
"That I'm just a warm body. Look at me and say it."
She looked at him. Naked, half-hard, marked with her own nails, the room gone gold and thin around him. She opened her mouth and nothing came out.
"Now I'll say something." He stepped close. His voice dropped—not louder, quieter. The quiet was worse. "I'm not the one who knocked on a stranger's door at midnight and said 'my heart's dead, use me.' I'm not the one who stayed. I'm not the one who came twice on my cock and then started a fight because I asked a question. So whatever you're running from, sweetheart, it isn't me. It's already behind you. And it's gaining."
She hit him.
Not hard—an open palm against his chest, shoving. He didn't move. She shoved again, and he caught her wrist, and she shoved with the other and he caught that one too, and then they were just standing there breathing at each other, her wrists caged in his hands, her chest heaving.
"Let go."
"No."
"I swear to God, Karim—"
"You'll do what? Hit me again?" His grip was calm. His whole body was calm, and hers was a live wire, and she could feel the heat coming off him in waves. "Go ahead. You've been swinging at something since you walked in the door. Might as well be me."
She wanted to hit him. She wanted to claw his face. Instead she surged forward and kissed him.
It wasn't tender. It wasn't anything. It was teeth and impact, her mouth crushing his, her wrists wrenching free so her hands could grab his jaw and hold his face where she wanted it. He made a sound—surprise, maybe, or something rougher—and then his hands were on her, yanking her shirt back up over her head, thumb hooking the waistband of her underwear, dragging both down her legs in one motion.
"You want to stop fighting," she said against his mouth.
"Yeah."
"No. I mean—" She bit his lip. Hard enough to hurt. "You want to stop talking."
"No." He said it into her throat, mouthing the words against her pulse. "I want you bent over the edge of the bed."
The sound that came out of her wasn't a word.
He moved faster than she'd ever seen him move. One hand on the back of her neck, guiding—not rough, not yet, just firm—walking her the three steps to the side of the mattress until her knees hit the frame and her palms came down flat on the ruined sheets. The mattress edge dug into her thighs. Behind her, she heard his breathing, heard the small wet sound of him taking himself in hand.
"Spread," he said.
She spread her legs—wide, wider than she would've offered on her own, because he'd asked and the asking was doing something to her. The air hit her cunt, cold against how wet she already was. She was slick from everything—from earlier, from him, from the fight. Her thighs were still damp.
"Look at you," he said. "You've been wet this whole time."
"Shut up."
"You were dripping while you were screaming at me. You feel how wet you are right now?"
He dragged two fingers up her slit, slow, pressing just enough to make her flinch. When he pulled them away, they came back gleaming.
"Fuck you," she said.
"You're about to."
He pushed in.
One stroke, root to tip, no ceremony. It punched the breath out of her—the suddenness, the depth, the way he didn't stop until his hips were flush against her bruised skin. She fisted the sheets and made a noise like a curse. It was a curse.
"Yil'an abuk," she gasped.
"I don't know what that means."
"It means—" She couldn't finish. He'd started moving.
There was nothing gentle in it. Long, hard strokes, each one ending in a slap of skin, each one driving her hips into the mattress edge until she had to brace her elbows on the bed to keep from face-planting into it. Sweat broke along her back. The world narrowed to the sound of it—wet, obscene, punching—and the grunts he was letting out on every drive, low and guttural, like he was working for it.
"Harder," she said.
He gave her harder.
"Fuck—" Her voice cracked in the middle. "Is that all you've got?"
He laughed. Short, mean, breathless. Then his hand came down flat between her shoulder blades, pinning her, bending her lower so her ass tipped up and the angle went brutal. She felt every inch of him now, felt the head of his cock grinding something soft and deep, and her eyes rolled back.
"There," she rasped. "There, there—"
"Yeah?"
"Yeah—fuck—don't stop—"
He didn't. His other hand came off her back and found her hip, and he used it—hauling her back to meet every stroke, forcing the rhythm faster than either of them could keep. The slap of it filled the room. Her fingers twisted in the sheets until they ached. Something—an old bruise, maybe, or something inside—throbbed with each thrust, and she was moaning now, moaning without shame, into the wet cotton, her mouth open against his dirty sheets.
"You feel that?" He was doing the thing with his voice again. Fucking her and talking like he had all the time in the world. "Feel how deep I am? That's the spot you like, isn't it. That's it. Take it.Take it."
"Karim."
"That's right. Say it."
"Karim—"
She came.
She didn't know it was coming until it hit. It started in her cunt and rolled outward—her thighs locking, her spine curling, her whole body clenching around him in waves that kept coming, kept pulling him in, dragging him deeper with each pulse. She heard herself—distant, animal—and felt him stagger, his rhythm breaking, his grip punishing on her hip.
"Fuck," he gritted. "You're—you're squeezing me—"
"Come," she said, into the sheets. "Come, come—"
"No."
It took a second to land.
He pulled out.
The cold hit her first, the empty clench of it, and then his hand was on his own cock and she felt the first stripe of heat land across her lower back. Then another. Then another—across her ass, up onto her spine, thick and hot, sliding into the dip of her waist. He made a sound like he was being gutted. She lay there bent over the bed and took it, felt it cooling on her skin, and didn't move.
Then: quiet. Just their breathing. His hand on the small of her back, then gone.
She heard him go. Footsteps, a drawer. He came back with something—a shirt, she realized, watching him out of one eye from where her cheek was pressed against the bed.
"Hold still."
He cleaned her off with his own shirt. Slow, careful, the cotton dragging over skin made raw by the sheets and his hands. She let herself feel it—the after-sting, the tenderness, the fact that he was handling her like he didn't want to bruise anything he hadn't already bruised on purpose.
Then the shirt dropped. She heard it hit the floor. And then he was lying down on the edge of the bed beside her, on his back, one arm flung over his eyes, breathing hard through his nose.
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
"I'm not sorry," she said finally."Good."
"About the fight."
"I know which part you mean."
She turned her head. He had his arm over his face, so she couldn't see his eyes. His chest was still moving fast. There were new marks on him—she saw them now, red crescents on his side where her free hand had found purchase during the last stretch.
"I'm not a project," she said.
"I never said you were."
"You were thinking it."
He lifted his arm. Looked at her sidewise, upside down, hair wrecked, face open.
"Here's what I was thinking," he said. "I was thinking I met a woman who says exactly what she means and then hates me for hearing it. I was thinking I want to keep hearing it. That's the whole list. There's no project. There's no sick girl. There's just you, and me, and the fact that you're standing in my apartment at four in the afternoon not knowing how to leave."
She didn't say anything.
"So here's my question," he said. "Not the big one. Forget the big one. Which do you want—me to kick you out, or me to move over?"
The radiator ticked. Outside, someone's car alarm went off and shut itself up again. Layla looked at the stripe of light on the wall, at the shape of it sliding down as the afternoon went, and understood that she'd already stayed past every hour she'd ever given anyone.
She rolled onto her side. He shifted, and the mattress dipped, and there was room.
He didn't say anything about it. He just lay there, breathing, and after a while—she couldn't say how long—his hand found the back of her neck. Not demanding this time. Not even really holding. Just there.
She closed her eyes. Somewhere down the hall, the faucet dripped.
"Do you always clean up with your shirt?" she asked.
"Only when it's not the other person's."
"Cheap."
"You're welcome."
She laughed. It surprised her, coming out of her like that, real and rough. She felt his fingers tighten once at the base of her skull—approval, or acknowledgment, or maybe just reflex.
And the sun kept going down, indifferent, and neither of them moved.
And the sun kept going down, indifferent, and neither of them moved.
She woke to the sound of water running.
For a second she didn't know where she was—the ceiling was wrong, the light was wrong, and there was a dull, deep ache between her legs that made her remember all at once and in the wrong order. The bed was empty beside her, sheets twisted into ropes, and the pillow still smelled like him. She sat up slow, every muscle protesting, and found the bathroom door cracked open with steam curling through the gap.
"You coming in or what?"
His voice, muffled by water, casual as a Tuesday.
She stood. Her legs felt borrowed. The floor was cold and the afternoon had gone violet outside the window, and she walked into the bathroom without bothering to wrap anything around herself.
The steam hit her first, thick and wet. He was under the spray with his back to her, water sheeting off his shoulders, hair flat against his neck. He didn't turn around. Just reached back and pushed the glass door open another few inches.
"Shower's big enough for two."
"Is that a fact."
"It's a shower. Come find out."
She stepped in.
The water was too hot. It stung her shoulders, her back, the raw places where his stubble had chewed her skin. She gasped and he laughed—low, satisfied—and she shoved his shoulder and he caught her wrist without looking, pulled her under the spray with him, chest to chest, and stood there holding her there while the water ran over both of them.
She looked up at him."
This is what you do?" she said.
"What."
"Stand here like you're doing me a favor."
"I'm not doing you a favor." He reached past her for the soap. "I'm waiting to see if you'll bolt."
"I'm not bolting."
"Okay."
"I'm not."
"Okay."
He soaped his hands and put them on her. Not between her legs—her shoulders, first. Working the lather into the knots alongside her spine, thumbs pressing deep, moving up to the base of her skull. She closed her eyes before she meant to.
"You're tense," he said.
"You're not a masseuse."
"No. I'm just the guy whose bed you've been in all day."
She opened her eyes. The water was running down her face and she didn't care.
"You want me to leave?"
"Do I look like I want you to leave?"
She turned around. Facing him. Water running down her tits, down her stomach, between her legs, and she watched his eyes go and she didn't drop her gaze. Let him look. She was past the part where she hid.
"I'm going to wash my hair," she said.
"Go ahead."
She took the shampoo off the ledge—his shampoo, cheap stuff, smelled like his apartment—and worked it in, and while she did, she watched him watch her. Watched his cock thicken under the water, half-hard and unapologetic, watched him not do anything about it. He was waiting. Not for permission. For confirmation.
She finished rinsing. She pushed her hair back off her face with both hands and looked at him.
"You want to make me a deal, or you want to fuck me in the shower."
"I want to fuck you in the shower."
"Then do it."
He moved.
His hands were on her waist and her back was to the tiles and the water hit her from the side, and he kissed her—hard, fast, no preamble—and his fingers slid down her stomach and straight between her legs without asking, two fingers pushing in with the heel of his palm grinding down on her clit. She arched off the wall. Her mouth opened against his and he swallowed the sound she made, biting her lower lip as his fingers worked her—in, out, curl, drag—and she had to grab the shower rail with one hand to stay upright.
"Already wet," he said into her mouth.
"It's the shower."
"It's not the shower."
"Shut up."
"Say it."
"Fuck you."
"Say it, Layla."
She looked at him. Water in her eyes. His fingers inside her, his thumb on her clit, her whole body strung tight and shaking and she was so tired of the fight—tired of deflecting, tired of denying, tired of standing in his shower acting like she wasn't exactly where she wanted to be.
"I came here," she said. "I stayed. I'm still here. That's the whole thing, that's all of it, stop making me say it."
He kissed her. The way he did it now—not rough, not punishing, just close—said he heard it. His fingers slid out and his hands found her hips and he lifted her. She locked her legs around his waist, back against the wall, water in her mouth, and he pushed the head of his cock against her cunt and slid all the way into her in one long, unrelenting stroke.
"Ah—" Her forehead dropped to his shoulder. "Fucking—"
"Slow," he said. "I got you."
He didn't go slow. He set a rhythm that was steady and deep—not punishing, not brutal, but bottomless, every stroke pushing her up the wall and dragging back down, and the water ran over both of them and her nails dug into his shoulders and she didn't care about anything past the place where he was filling her.
She started talking.
She didn't mean to. It came out of her—filthy, low, half-Arabic—things she'd never said to anyone in bed, things that made him groan and grip her harder. She told him how good it felt. She told him what she wanted him to do to her later. She told him where she wanted his mouth next. And when the angle changed—when he shifted his hips just enough—she told him that, too, in two words he didn't understand and a third he did.
"There," she said. "Right there, right there—"
He gave it to her. Fucking her up against the tile with his hand over her mouth because the neighbors probably didn't need the show, and she bit his palm and came in a long rolling wave that made her whole body shake in his grip.
He kept going.
"One more," he said.
"Cunt—"
"One more, I know you can."
"Karim—"
He didn't stop. He pushed her through it, past the sensitivity, past the point where she was flinching with every stroke, and then something gave—some band that had been holding all of this in, some wall she'd built so high she'd forgotten what was on the other side—and she came again with a sob that got buried in his hand. He came right behind her, teeth in her shoulder, hips stuttering, filling her for the second time that day.
Her legs slid down the wall when he let her go.
She stood there under the water, chest heaving, looking at him. Both of them wrecked. Both of them grinning. Grinning—like idiots, like teenagers, and something in her chest did a thing she hadn't felt in years.
"I want to use your shampoo again," she said.
"Knock yourself out."
"I want to stay."
"I know."
"I mean I want to stay."
He looked at her. Water in his lashes. And he said it like it wasn't a thing: "Then stay."
She did.
---
They ate on the floor.
Takeout and two beers and the TV on low and the blinds open because neither of them had any interest in pretending anymore. She sat with her back against the couch and her legs stretched out and her hair still wet and her body still singing, and every twenty minutes or so he'd reach over and put his hand on her thigh like he was checking she was real. She let him.
She told him things she hadn't told anyone. Her job—she was good at it and bored by it. Her family—complicated, the kind of complicated she didn't unpack. The last guy—a story she told with her eyes on the floor and his hand not moving on her knee, steady, patient, letting her get all the way to the end before he said anything.
"He wasn't the problem," she said. "I was. I stopped caring first. Then I just waited for him to notice."
"Did he?"
"He married someone else a year later."
"Good."
She laughed."What?"
"I mean good, he's someone else's problem."
She threw a napkin at him. He caught it one-handed and put it in his empty takeout container, unhurried, precise, and she watched him do it and felt that thing in her chest again.
"How do you do that?"
"Do what."
"Nothing. Never mind."
"Say it."
She looked at him. It was late. The apartment was dark except for the TV glow and the streetlight coming through the blinds. She was wearing his shirt and nothing else. Her heart—that dead thing—had been beating hard all day, hard enough that she could feel it now, hard enough that she couldn't pretend anymore.
"It's not dead," she said.
"What isn't?"
"Never mind."
He let it go. He was good at that—knowing when to push and when to just shut up. She finished her beer. He finished his. They watched something forgettable for an hour and neither of them could tell you what it was about.
They went back to bed. He slept on his back and she slept curled into his side and nothing happened in the night and it was the best sleep she'd had in years.
---
Morning came in loud and orange and unwelcome.
Layla opened her eyes first. The room was too bright. Her body was sore in every direction and her mouth tasted like beer and something deeper and she rolled onto her side and felt it—a twinge, low in her gut, and then the specific, unmistakable cramp.
"Shit."
She sat up. The sheets under her were clean, thank God, but she knew the cramp for what it was. Two weeks late, she realized, counting backward. Two weeks late and she hadn't even noticed because she'd been too busy being numb.
Karim stirred beside her. "What."
"I need—" She stopped. Started again. "Do you have anything?"
"Anything like what."
She looked at him. His hair was sticking up. He was blinking at the ceiling with one eye. He looked like a man who'd slept well and had no intention of doing anything else all day.
"I got my period," she said flatly.
He sat up.
For a second she braced—for the flicker of annoyance, for the moment the fantasy collided with reality, for the slow retreat she'd seen a hundred times from a hundred men. It didn't come. He was already getting out of bed. He picked up his jeans off the floor and pulled them on over nothing.
"What do you need," he said.
"That's—I need a pad. Or tampons. And ibuprofen, and I don't know—whatever."
"Okay. Stay here."
"I'm bleeding, Karim, I'm not—"
"I said stay here." He grabbed his keys off the bedside table. "You want tea?"
"What?"
"Tea. Or coffee. You want tea?"
She stared at him. He was standing in the doorway in unbuttoned jeans and yesterday's shirt, barefoot, holding his car keys, waiting for her answer like she'd just asked him to pick up milk.
"Tea," she said. "Ginger, if they have it."
"Pad brands?"
"Just get the big pack. The green one."
"Tampons?"
"Just the pads."
"Chocolate?"
"What?"
"Do you want chocolate."
She opened her mouth and closed it. "Yes."
"Okay." He turned to go, then stopped. "Heating pad?"
"You don't have to—"
"I'll grab one. Twenty minutes."
And he was gone. The door clicked shut. She sat in his bed alone in his shirt and listened to his footsteps go down the hall and disappear, and she didn't move.
He was back in twenty-two minutes.
She heard the door, then the rustle of bags, then kitchen noises—the kettle, the cabinet, the click of a stove burner. She stayed where she was, because he'd told her to, and because some small petty part of her wanted to see what he'd do.
He came into the bedroom with a mug in one hand and a bag hanging off the other arm.
"Tea," he said. Put it on the nightstand. "Here's everything else."
He set the bag down on the bed next to her and let her dig through it. Pads—the right ones. Ibuprofen. A heating pad still in plastic. Two kinds of chocolate: dark and a milk bar with caramel in it. A bouquet—actual flowers, wrapped in brown paper, drooping a little already because he'd probably grabbed the first bunch off the rack by the register.
She looked at all of it. Then at him.
"You got flowers," she said.
"You don't like them?"
"I didn't say that."
"You made a face."
"I made a face because you got me flowers for a period."
"You got flowers," he said. "You didn't get flowers for a period. You got flowers. I'm not playing that game."
She looked down at the bag again. Then she looked at him, standing there, waiting for her to say something so he could move on with his life.
"Turn around," she said."Okay."
He turned. She peeled off his shirt and opened the pads and dealt with the logistics, and when she was done she said "okay" and he turned back and got into bed behind her without being asked.
The heating pad went on her stomach. His arm went around her waist. The tea sat on the nightstand, getting cold, because she didn't want to move to drink it.
"You didn't have to do all this," she said.
"I know."
"Why did you?"
His arm tightened a fraction.
"Because you got out of bed this morning," he said. "You didn't sneak out while I was sleeping. You didn't invent an excuse. You stayed, and you told me what you needed. That's more than most people manage."
"That's a low bar."
"Maybe." His mouth moved against the back of her neck. "I'll take what I can get."
She lay there with his arm around her, the heat radiating through her stomach, the cramp already loosening. His breathing was slow and steady and she could feel it in her back. The flowers sat on the dresser in their brown paper. The chocolate sat untouched.
And somewhere, deep in her chest, in the place she'd been calling dead for years—she felt it.
A small thing. Not a trumpet, not a swell of music, not anything dramatic. Just a small, steady beat, like the first tap of a hand on a door she'd boarded up long ago.
Not dead.
Not by a long way.
She turned her head and pressed her face into his arm and said something she didn't plan to say.
"Don't leave."
"Not going anywhere."
"Karim."
"What."
She closed her eyes. The heating pad was warm. His heartbeat was right there, under her ear, and hers was right there underneath his, and the two of them were just—there. In a bed, in the morning, with flowers and chocolate and a pack of pads on the floor and no idea what came next.
"I think you might be it," she said.
He didn't laugh. He didn't ask her what she meant. He just held her tighter, and after a second, he kissed the back of her head.
"Good," he said. "Because I wasn't planning on going."
She stayed.