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She was deep in it and it didn’t feel like a dream: asphalt, slick light sliding over the head of the SUV. Nosing through the dark, even though back then, it hadn’t been dark like that; it had been winter and there had been snow on the ground there. That had been, like – it had been early on. Shaw hadn’t been leaving her alone like that. Those nights were blurred, but Letty didn’t think she’d had her foot on the pedal.
But she wasn’t thinking, not in it, and when she woke up, it was still real for maybe five pounding heartbeats before she saw him. She breathed in sharply, seeing him. She couldn’t ever reconcile it, the shape of his back. It made no sense to her until her brain came back together.
She thought she was awake. It was hard to tell, sometimes, but she raised her head and looked to the window. Faint haze. California. Pretty far from that, half the world away.
He was sleeping hard, and she closed her eyes and listened to his breathing, heavy and even. That worked sometimes. She could lie back in the dark and let it lull her.
Sometimes. Sometimes he woke up. Sometimes she had dug her fingernails in. In Ibiza, they’d had a balcony, and there’d been no beach, no sand, just a sheer drop to the ocean, smooth rock and black froth. The waves had come in hard against the shore past the low wall, drowning everything else out. Her thoughts had turned slippery, spread out over the water.
Sometimes she missed Ibiza. She slid out of bed slowly, tried to stay quiet as she went down the hallway. In the kitchen, she kept the lights off and drank from the tap. Her hair was plastered to her neck a little, lifting in the weak draft from the fan.
She took a glass from the cabinet, filled it, leaned over the counter. No ocean here. Sometimes she missed the breakers. There was nothing to fill her head up here, just the creak of the floorboards.
Somebody was moving upstairs. Mia. She knew their footsteps by now. She knew their rhythms: Mia, going down the hallway to where Jack was sleeping. She hadn’t heard him fussing, but Mia would have. Sometimes she cut herself off midsentence and said, “He’s awake.” They all listened. He was, just barely, or he was about to be.
Letty listened, but his door didn’t open. Mia’s footsteps came closer, down the staircase. She was moving slowly, and Letty thought – she didn’t know; did she have time to slink back into the shadows, but the kitchen wasn’t that big, and there she was in the doorway, taking Letty in with one long, steady look.
It was completely neutral, but Letty still felt kind of like she’d been caught doing something illicit, her hand in the cookie jar. She tried not to fidget, not to cross her arms over her chest. It was Mia’s eyes, maybe, still a little sleep-heavy, her head tilted. She was a little rumpled in a way that she wasn’t often, at least not when Letty saw her. Letty didn’t really understand that. She thought maybe Mia’s hair brushed itself.
But now it was caught under the straps of her tank top. They were dressed the same, almost, another strange thing about it.
“You didn’t wake me up,” Mia said, reading her mind a little. She went to the sink, still moving carefully, deliberately. Still half-asleep, maybe, like she was walking through water.
Letty watched her back. Mia slid a plate from the drying rack, held it up. It didn’t drip. She reached up, opened the cabinet, put it back into its place.
She was wearing pajama pants that couldn’t have belonged to her, the waistband rolled over, tied, and still loose at her hips. Letty eased herself slowly down into a chair and ran the pad of her thumb across a hairline groove in the tabletop. She picked up the glass just to have something to do with her hands, tilted it until the water lapped at the rim, almost spilled over.
She said, “You don’t have to-” but she didn’t really know what Mia had done. Come to check on me. “Get up for me.”
She regretted that a little. It assumed something, maybe.
“I’m not very good at leaving you alone,” Mia said. It was something like a confession, but not all that serious. It was a broader you. Letty could tell from the way she said it: the three of you. All of you, maybe.
“I guess we get into trouble,” she said. So they were talking. She set the glass down. Mia gave her a little smile, glancing back over her shoulder.
The shadows were filling her out, somehow, or it was her bare face and her hair loose down her back making her look younger. Like Letty knew what she’d looked like when she’d been younger. She guessed she did, sort of. She’d seen pictures. It had just been hard to focus on anything except her own face looking back at her.
“You didn’t wake me up,” Mia said again, so she could tell that Letty hadn’t believed her. “It’s just habit.” She’d run out of plates. She was just doing little meaningless things now at the counter.
“Jack,” Letty said. He hadn’t always slept through the night. He didn’t always now.
Mia hummed noncommittally, then wiped her hands on a towel and turned. She said, “We were sort of nocturnal for a little while.”
Before, Letty guessed, but it was harder to tell that time what she meant by we. All of us. The three of us. You and me.
She wasn’t going to ask. She drained the cup in one long swallow. It left a wet ring, and she pressed her fingers into it, wiped it thin across the surface of the table.
Mia was watching her, head tilted, too dark-eyed to be readable. Letty said, “Why?”
There was a beat, then, a long one, the silence stretching between them.
“We couldn’t sleep,” Mia said finally.
She took the glass from Letty’s hand. She leaned over her as she did it, letting her free hand rest on Letty’s bare shoulder. The world narrowed disorientingly for a moment, her hair falling like a curtain around them, the clean, warm coconut shampoo-bar soap smell of her. The soft press of her fingers for an instant, and then it all lifted; she was turning to the counter again, setting it down in the sink.
Upstairs, Brian could have been awake, waiting for her. He could have stirred, feeling her sit up; Mia could have shaken her head. Just for a moment. I’ll come back. She’s up at three in the morning again.
Before Letty had gone out to the balcony, she’d gone out to the back steps. Only two times, but both times, Mia had found her. They hadn’t said much, or anything. She’d leaned out over the low wall, put her weight on her elbows, worked her fingernails into the cracks in the mortar.
Brian could have been up, but he wasn’t the one moving above them. Mia startled a little; her gaze flicked to the ceiling. Fantastic, Letty thought; let’s make this a whole fucking party, but there wasn’t that much bite behind it. Probably, she should have seen it coming.
It wasn’t so new, but Dom still raised an eyebrow – seeing her, or seeing the pair of them, with the lights off.
Before he could speak, Mia said, “She was up.”
If Letty hadn’t known better, she would have thought she heard the faintest hint of something chastising in it. Like it was his fault; like he should have tired her out. Mia’s little-sister voice. For some reason, it made Letty’s face feel hot.
Dom just nodded. He shifted his weight to lean back against the door frame. He looked at her, a little questioningly.
Letty shrugged. They didn’t have to get into the details of it. Her dreams were all the same dream, once you stripped the façade off.
Mia was still speaking for her. “She’s tired.” She had moved to stand behind her, and suddenly, her hand had found its way back to Letty’s shoulder. Her thumb pressed into her shoulder blade, slid up along the strap of her tank top, and Letty wanted to pull away, wanted to ask what the hell she was doing, but he couldn’t see, not from the doorway. She stayed still, stiff and straight-backed, and thought she heard Mia sigh a little.
Something was off here, like the air was too heavy. The light was the wrong color, the sky black-cherry purple outside the window. Almost the color of a bruise. Something was happening that she couldn’t grasp. Something was going over her head, maybe not meant for her.
He was looking at Mia, looking past Letty’s shoulder. Still questioning, but there was something else there. Letty wanted to twist to see Mia’s expression, but Mia’s hand was on the nape of her neck, now, almost holding her there.
“Mia,” he said mildly. “You’re freaking her out.”
“I’m sorry,” Mia said, and that was almost a sigh; that was for Letty, leaning down, almost exhaling it into her hair. Her grip loosened but didn’t lift, and Letty stared at him, but he just looked – amused, almost, like he was holding back a half-smile. To him, Mia said, “It’s been a long time, you know.”
It was plaintive. A half-formed idea was coming together in Letty’s head, barely starting to coalesce by the time Dom said, “Yeah, you’ve been good.” He waved a hand. “If you’re gonna tell her, just tell her.”
“Hold on,” Letty said. This was the type of shit Shaw had used to do to her: talk over her head, talk around her, like she’d needed to hear her own name like a dog to start paying attention, and before that, she hadn’t been able to hear. It was all putting her on edge, that tone and whatever this was.
There had been a kind of trap he had used to set up for her, something like this: everything served up on a silver platter. But it had been a test; there had been a catch. She’d reached out and taken it, felt the cuffs close tight around her wrists.
But she had wondered. She had wondered what they’d been doing in this house and she had questions about the way that they looked at each other, the way they looked at her. It was just a little off-kilter, all five of them together: the neat little triad of them, Dom, and then some line out to her. A long line, sometimes. In their orbit on some other satellite.
“The thing is,” Mia said, hesitated, and Letty said, “You and me.” She couldn’t even – it wasn’t conceivable. She’d blocked off too much of Mia in her head, drawn thick black lines: don’t look at that. Don’t think about that. That’s not how you think about her. And Dom was just standing there, so he knew, or somehow, he was all right with that, like it wasn’t her. Like it wasn’t his sister. “You and me and him?”
Mia shook her head. “Not like this,” she said. “Not at the same time. But-”
“We were kind of dumb about it,” Dom said. He ran his hand over the back of his head, a little rueful.
“Kind of,” Mia said, but it was light. “We’ve grown up a little.”
“And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning,” Letty said. She didn’t know which of them she should have been looking at. She settled on Dom. He’d told her something, but at least he looked guilty. “You didn’t think that was something I needed to know?”
“It’s a lot to take in,” Mia said, “and I had a baby.”
Her voice was even, but she’d stepped back, and Letty couldn’t even really look at her. She was thinking: six months. Six months of this and you didn’t tell me. She had a loose grasp on the timeline now; she knew how it had gone, but it had been: California, Puerto Plata, a dark interlude, and then the end. Two months in Ibiza, four months in the house here, and sometimes there had been something strange in Mia’s voice when she’d talked to her. Letty had thought, maybe we didn’t know each other that well. She’d had Dom and he had made sense to her.
“I know,” Mia had said once. “I don’t know why I stay, either.”
They’d gotten grease on the floors or something. She hadn’t meant it, but she had been the one that Letty hadn't quite been able to place in the picture, except for Jack, except for that ring on her finger.
Except for the two of them asleep upstairs. Jesus. “Brian,” Letty said. “Does he-”
Dom huffed out a laugh, inexplicably. “That’s a first.”
“You didn’t care about that before,” Mia said when Letty turned to her.
“That’s diplomatic,” Dom said. “I think how you put it was-” but Mia waved it off with one hand: some other time. It didn’t matter, not right then.
It didn’t matter. “You and me,” Letty said again, and she was asking Mia and she was asking him – me and her, and you knew? And you were all right with that, somehow. Me and her, and I was like that, and she was like that, too.
“Yes,” Mia said, and it sounded like of course, and like an answer to more than one question, or all of them, but she was looking at her carefully, her hands held at her sides. Holding herself back, waiting for something, waiting to see.
She was real, Letty thought suddenly, and maybe it came from the way she had never really let herself look at her. She was dark-eyed and dressed down and her hair was still a little damp, and when Letty stood up, she turned her head into Mia’s kiss. She tilted her face to Mia – “Oh,” Mia said, very quietly, and then her eyelids fluttered closed, and she had the back of Letty’s head in her palm, and she was kissing her.
When her fingers came up into Letty’s hair it was smooth – it was all like that, fitting her mouth to Mia’s mouth; it was right. Letty knew that feeling. When she’d touched him for the first time, it had been like that, like her skin remembered. Like her hands knew what they’d used to be. She hadn’t let herself think about the possibility of it, but she knew the dip of Mia’s waist, the small of her back. It was like that: not of course, maybe, but all right. Before. Maybe always. All right.
Warm and real in the dark. There was more to her than Letty had thought there would be; she’d half expected her fingers to press right through her. She wasn’t so hazy, and Letty was opening her mouth, not remembering, until Mia reached past her, held him back with her arm draped over Letty’s shoulder.
“I thought we were through with that,” Dom said, but it was the same as before, with no bite to it.
“You had your turn,” Mia said. “Just give me a moment.” She’d broken it off, but she didn’t take her gaze off of her. Then, more quietly, she said, “I missed you, you know.” She kissed the side of Letty’s head – not even kissed, really, just pressed her mouth to it and breathed in with her nose pushed into Letty’s hair. She tightened her grip enough to make Letty sway on her feet a little, but Dom’s hand was on the small of her back, holding her steady.
“That’s my piece, I guess,” Mia said when she pulled back. She might have been a little wet-eyed, and Letty wasn’t sure what to do with that, but Mia was sliding the back of her own hand over her eyes; she was practical like that, and something about the way she shook her head made Letty think for the first time: you would have touched me. That and Mia’s other hand still cupped around her elbow, and Dom nodded when Mia said, “Let’s go upstairs.”
It was disorienting to make her way up the staircase like that, between them, leading and being led along. Tiptoeing like teenagers, sneaking in after dark, blindly finding her footing, watching the movement of Mia’s hips. He nudged her in the hallway, raised his eyebrows, and Letty nodded, not sure of what she was conveying, but she thought maybe she meant it.
Back in the bedroom, standing beside the bed, he said, “How do you-”
“Ease her into it,” Mia said – there it was again, that third-person, but this time, it made something shift low in Letty’s stomach. Mia was sinking down to sit on the mattress, lifting her legs up, and she was in a bed that Letty had slept with him in. He had been there and he had looked at her like that. They had the same eyes sometimes, the only thing they had in common.
The only thing Letty had thought they’d had in common. “Oh, yeah, you’re a saint,” Dom said. His mouth twitched up at the corners again. “Like you don’t just want-”
“I didn’t say I didn’t,” Mia said placidly. She patted the mattress in front of her. “Letty, come here,” and Letty went.
It took her a moment to understand how they wanted her, but Mia took her shoulders gently and turned her around, shifted her. He was waiting by the side of the bed, and Mia was guiding her down, easing her back, fingers at the hem of her tank top, now. Lifting the hem, and she was leaning back against Mia’s shoulder. He was between her legs, his hands heavy on her thighs, and she was going to let them undress her.
Letty wondered for a moment how she had been before: if she’d been like this, if she would have closed her eyes and lain back and let them touch her. Probably not. She’d picked up on that from Dom; he’d never seemed very surprised, never put up a real fight when she’d flipped them over. There was something different about this, though, and maybe it was that she was tired and maybe it was Mia leaning over her. Still unbelievable, a little, the dark fall of her hair, and that Mia wanted her, too. That Mia had wanted her.
“It’s easier to not think too hard about it.” Mia said, but it was almost lost in the kiss she pressed to the crown of her head. “You don’t have to think when we’re taking care of you.”
And it was, and they were, and it wasn’t so hard not to think, when he was settling down onto his knees and Mia was leaning forward, resting her hand on Letty’s breastbone.
“I don’t remember these,” she said, and Dom laughed, a warm exhalation against the inside of Letty’s knee, and then he kissed her there. Letty felt the blood come hot into her cheeks again; those were a holdover, kind of, a souvenir from another life, from trying to be somebody else an ocean away, and then it stopped mattering. Mia pressed the pad of her finger to the metal bar through one nipple, almost experimentally, and then she had it between two fingers, tugging at it, just a little.
When Letty had done it, the whole point of it had been to be hard, to be armored, the cold metal of it under her clothes. She hadn’t thought it through; it was like opening her skin up, letting Mia toy with her raw nerve endings, and the cold metal was warming under her touch. A white-hot jolt to her head, a white-hot jolt running both ways, and the stubble on his jaw was rough against the insides of her thighs.
“Shh,” Mia said, softly chastising. “Jack’s sleeping,” with the pads of her fingers pressed against Letty’s mouth.
But it was flooding through her. It met in the middle; she felt it curl in her stomach, Mia’s hands sliding over her and his mouth, and his tongue. Mia was leaning forward and Letty was sliding down; she could see the flash of Mia’s white teeth when she smiled, could see the line of her throat and the shape of her breasts.
She could feel her breathing. She breathed in when Mia did. They were toying with her. Letty was losing her mind – Mia was caressing her breasts, fingering the metal and not pulling hard, and not twisting it, letting go and lightly circling her nipples. He was kissing the insides of her thighs, until Letty reached blindly behind her, found Mia’s shoulder.
She could have turned her head, bitten her. She dug her nails in and didn’t think about whether it would be too much, not until she heard Mia gasp.
“Oh,” Mia said. She was looking down at her, and Letty wondered how she could have ever fallen for that, that wide-eyed innocent act. “Did you want us to-”
“Mia,” Dom said, just a little reproachfully, but she was shifting them, moving out from underneath her. Letty’s head was on the pillow, now, and Mia was leaning over her, kissing the corner of her mouth, and then kissing her.
Kissing her with her breasts sliding against Letty’s chest, kissing her hard, teeth and tongue, kissing the underside of her jaw. “All right,” Letty heard Dom say, and Mia was moving along her; she closed her mouth around Letty’s nipple, sucked hard just as he finally pushed her thighs apart and licked into her.
And the world was narrowing again, just her back on the mattress, just the two of them and the way that her body remembered it. Mia’s weight on her, his fingers digging into her hips, all of it at once, and she was grinding down against him, arching up into Mia. Mia’s hands and his hands on her, stripping away everything. She was just skin; or they’d peeled it back, left her raw all over.
But she knew the press of his tongue. She knew Mia’s lips; she had known them without knowing it, how Mia would touch her. Maybe she’d known they would move like this – if some part of her had known, once – that she would feel it like this, feel it building in her. That they would take care of her.
The world flattened out, went white, and Mia was bringing her through it, kissing her, kissing her shoulders. His mouth had moved to the insides of her thighs, and Mia was saying, warm against her neck: like that, let go.
“There,” Mia said, and drew her up, just a little. Into her lap, and the mattress sank when he came up onto it. His hand settled on her back and she was pressing her face into Mia’s soft stomach, into the dark. She felt delirious. She was still gone on it. She might never have come back, but there they were.
She could have fallen asleep then, in that soft black bubble. She might have been going to. She was somewhere out of her body, curled up in some borderless place in between them. She could feel herself in the places where they were touching her, all over, but she couldn’t place her limbs. They were swimming in her vision.
Sinking deeper. They were talking quietly over her, their heads bent together. She heard it twice: the sound of it, then the words as they filtered down to her. Low rumble, something softer. Her thoughts felt filmy and strung together. They were like wisps of smoke, slipping away when she tried to reach for them, immaterial.
Mia’s fingers combing through her hair. His voice. “Are you going to-”
“I want to.” She was vaguely aware of Mia shifting under her; Mia kept her steady as she did it, one warm hand on her forehead. “I will. But I have to-” she made some shape with her fingers. “I’ll come back, after.”
But she was lingering. She didn’t go.
“Yeah.” He might have nodded. His shadow swayed, or came closer. There was a long silence. Letty could have put her hand up into it, if she’d wanted to move like that, that much, if she’d been able to. “Or.”
Something passed between them, weighted. Letty felt it slip over her.
“Oh,” Mia said, very softly. Her hand stilled in Letty’s hair.
Then they were moving as one. She heard Mia say, “Lift her up.” His arm was underneath her, raising her by her shoulders, and Mia said, shh. A little – if you just – yes. Just like that. There.
The straps slipped from her shoulders. Letty felt a distant tug: something about that, another something she should have remembered. Mia’s fingers left her and then came back again, coaxing this time. Mia’s hand at her jaw, tilting her head, angling her.
Open. Something in her mouth. Letty jolted awake, realizing – she tried to sit up, blood rushing hot to her head - but Mia just shook her head, hushed her, held her there.
She was still on the edge of sleep, still in some lost hour. Still not so hard not to think about it – but, Jesus, in the morning – but she didn’t have to think. You don’t have to think when we’re taking care of you. It wasn’t so hard to let Mia guide her, to find it, to close her mouth around it. Not so hard not to think too hard about it. In the morning, maybe - but not now.
Mia sighed long and low, a release. She tipped her head back. Letty drank and didn’t think and let it settle around her.
She felt drunk on it, dazed and milk-drunk like a kitten, softened and spread out with all of her thoughts blurred. The steady rhythm of their heartbeats, just out of step, and they were holding her. She was drifting off in the dark and he was cradling her head, holding her. They were still whispering over her, but when she blinked up at them, they were shadows. Too hazy to make out. The warmth of their skin against her.
She had been gone so long, out in the cold, and they had missed her.
In the back seat of a car, once, she’d fallen asleep like this, but she’d been bloody back then and there had been smoke in the air. Between them, and after, she hadn’t remembered on whose shoulder. She’d thought it had to have been his. She’d thought she’d imagined it, two sets of hands on her.
But it had been like this. Someone had closed her eyes with their fingers like this, murmuring to her. The dark water had come like this. She felt it close over her.