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a litany of lethe [javier peña]

Working on his father’s ranch, Javier Peña tries to leave Colombia behind. The new housekeeper reminds him how much he enjoys a challenge.

my masterlist pairing: javier pena x f!reader tags/warnings: 18+ (MDNI), post-narcos s3 canon, slow burn, catch the much ado references and i’ll give u a cookie, second chance, enemies to lovers, i take liberties with some geography, javi suffers from foot-in-the-mouth syndrome, angsty javier, angsty reader, angsty everything, bickering, tension of all varieties, emotional constipation from both parties, chucho being wingman no. 1, discussions of past sexual relationships, mentions of domestic abuse (not against reader), implied child neglect/abuse, grovelling king javier peña, we call him grovi, implied age gap, it's been 10 years since javi left for colombia bc i said so, reader has hair, javi is a munch, oral sex (f receiving), grinding, bickering during sex, javi is not a brat tamer but he is a brat handler (thank u mya), unprotected PIV, creampie, dirty talk, fingering, pussy pronouns, lots of biting, javi vampire confirmed??, tagging smut is hell on earth, dividers by @/saradika word count: ~ 17k a/n: this story has been knocking around in my empty skull for a long time, and i'm so excited to finally share!! this fic is also posted on ao3 for those of you who prefer to read longer fics on a different platform. thank you as always to my mya @cavillscurls for holding my hand and for helping me through this whole process - and for just generally being the best. and thank you to el @northernbluess for letting me scream about this fic during its early stages so long ago. i hope you enjoy, and thank you so much for reading!! xoxo

“-- All we have sinnèd, and yet the scars remain.

-- And we, all we had sorrow. -- And we had pain.

O Lethe, let us find thee and forget!”

— Arthur Symons, “A Litany of Lethe”

There is a spot by the water’s edge where the boats never travel.

The Rio Grande is about 330 feet from bank to bank at its widest point, and 7 at the thinnest. The current shifts with the direction of the wind, which is particularly crisp this year (it’s a cool fifty now, partly sunny—thank you, Gary from Channel 9). Near the ranch, there's an abutment in the middle of the river overgrown with moss and cattails, and the eastern fork leads to a dead end.

Half a mile down the riverside—by the dead end—is where he sits, lights a cigarette, and puffs the angry silver smoke into the air.

It's quiet. He can't hear motors grumbling, churning the tranquil greenish water, the fluttering of birds’ wings as they’re disturbed by the shouting. He can't see the telltale flash of black, glossy in the sunlight, preceding the roar of a Reaper cutting through the water. He can’t see the packages sitting wetly at the floor of the boat, the conspicuous blue tarps covering them, the way the plastic flaps in the wind and exposes the contents beneath. Here, Javier knows nothing about the boats. Here, he smokes alone, wrapped up serenely in the itchy grass, the gnats, and the gentle slapping of the water against the eroding bank.

On sunny days, he’ll come out to this spot by the river and watch it. Self-sustaining, it carries its own weight. Javier envies the water. It knows nothing but meeting ends, carrying itself gleefully to the next checkpoint, where it will exchange hands in a sort of dutiful shake and spill its contents into the Gulf.

He can get caught up in the glimmer of the water, transfixed by the little waves and the dance the sunlight performs on the surface. He's envious of the way it never stops glowing. Even at night, the silvery moon lights up the way. He can look out his bedroom window through the black and see the river undulate. Restless.

He knows something about that.

The river is his Lethe. He must make the choice to drink. He hasn't mustered up the courage yet.

Or, he just fucking hates himself.

When he’s done smoking, he flicks what's left of the cigarette into the water so the grass won't catch. Whenever he does this, he's met with the silent scolding of the river as it hisses, putting out the embers. I am not your ashtray, you asshole, it mouths, licking at his shoes for good measure. Javier sniffs in apology and turns back, heading home.

This time, when he closes the creaking screen door (Note to self: fix the fucking door again) and steps into the dining room, there's a woman distributing dinner plates around the little wooden table.

Javier stops, blinking hard, doing a double-then-triple take. No, he isn't imagining it.

You. It's you.

He doesn't forget a face. He doesn't forget anything, not even when he wants to. You don’t quite dress the same, but you look just like you did the day it ended.

You wear a pair of jeans with grass stains on the knees, but you used to wear dresses. Javier remembers the one hanging up in your closet. He remembers the silky fabric dripping through his fingers, warm as running water. He doesn't remember the colour, but he recalls the sensation of it. He recalls that the sun was rising, that the golden light cut strips into the body lying on the bed, tangled in white sheets.

The sun is setting now. His memory comes in ribbons. At the table, you straighten, your face impassive.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he says.

You do not indulge his icy tone save for a slight twitch of your mouth. “Mr. Peña,” you say evenly. “Your father hired me yesterday. I’ll be helping out around the property.”

Javier digs around in his pocket for a cigarette and blows the first puff of smoke out the screen door. His temple pinches taut and he tries to rub the impending headache away.

“I told him I could handle it,” he grumbles, the pad of his thumb pressing hard into the space between his brows. “Told him I didn't need a goddamn housekeeper.”

“Is that why you're sitting on your ass beside the river?”

Irritation heats up the tips of his ears at the unforgiving unfamiliarity in your eyes. Do you even remember him?

“No offence,” says Javier, “but we don't need you here.”

“Your father says otherwise,” you reply, uncorking a wine bottle, “and since he's the one who hired me, I’ll take his word.”

Javier lets his cigarette hang between his lips and meets you in three total paces. You don't even flinch as he plucks the bottle of red from your hand. Sizing him up, your pupils dilate and shrink. They're the same eyes he knew all those years ago. Javier smokes, and you pucker your lips to blow it away.

“I don't work for you, Mr. Peña,” you say.

“Stop calling me that.”

“Sure. What’s your name?”

He works his jaw, blood hot in his cheeks. He can feel the full-body twinge of his teeth grinding together.

“You're spilling,” you say calmly, indicating the bottle in his hand. Red wine trickles from the lip like a leaky faucet, collecting in a pool on the hardwood. He adjusts his grip and slams the bottle down on the table.

“We don't need you,” he says again. “With all due respect, I can handle this house myself.”

“‘My son is getting old,’” you say in a gruff voice, and Javier blinks at the impression of his father. “‘He won't admit it, but we both need someone to help, so don't let his stubborn attitude get in the way.’”

The worst part: he can hear it. It's a terrible impression, but Chucho’s weathered voice bites at the back of his skull. For once in your life, mijo, let somebody else be the hero.

I’m no hero, Dad, he’d say.

The voice only chuckles. My morning paper disagrees.

“I’m not being stubborn. What right do you have to walk in here like you own the fucking place?”

“Your dad gave me a spare key. You can take that up with him.”

“A spare key. He gave you a spare key.”

You scoff. “Good to hear you're finally starting to get it.”

He’s beginning to wonder if this is one of those bad whiskey dreams, as Steve used to call them. Is he four glasses and a half-pack deep? Is he knocked out in a single bed with his jacket half-off and one shoe on his foot? Will he wake up with half-moons branded into his palms, the tender skin around those miniature craters turning purple-blue?

A whiskey dream could make him feel weightless and bound helplessly to the ground all at once. He’d wake up slowly, his eye sockets throbbing, the light through his curtains sluicing a golden path across his chest, and for a moment he would think he'd been cut in half.

Afterward, when the painkillers started to do their job and he was halfway to the bottom of a cup of coffee, he'd promise himself he'd never drink again.

There's a fine golden chain around your neck, a pendant nestled in the hollow of your throat. When you swallow, the reflection from the sun briefly blinds him. It's shaped like one half of a heart.

There's something of the girl he knew gleaming from behind your eyes. She rests between your upper and lower lip, in the curve of your brow, in the spot where your jaw meets your ears, in the steady rise and fall of your chest. He remembers how evenly your breaths came and he remembers feeling envious of the way your heartbeat felt like it belonged inside your body.

He remembers feeling inferior in your light, like somehow you’d discover that his body was just a collection of broken porcelain glued back together. Something in the way you once held him felt so tender that perhaps you had known after all. In the cradle of your palm as it slid along his jaw, in the minty caress of your breath against the curve of his throat, it had felt like you were mending the cracks.

Now, you regard him like a stranger, and the girl he knew begins to curl up, rabbit-like, in the thicket.

“You may not need me,” you tell him, “but your dad cares a lot about you. So, with all due respect, let me do my job, and from now on, keep your smoking outside.”

Javier swallows hard, the distance a balm to his itchy skin as you step away and disappear into the kitchen. He stares at the wall as if he can see your imprint on the ugly floral paper, clenching and unfurling his fists at his sides. Sweat prickles the back of his neck and he snatches at the first button on his polo. You still smell like roses.

He doesn't know why it stings that you don't seem to remember him at all. It's been ten years. You've changed. He’s sure as hell changed.

Javier snuffs out his cigarette in the ashtray by the window and follows you into the kitchen.

The ranch is old and the floorboards creak underfoot. When he was young, he memorised the best pattern to step—more like dance—along the floor so he wouldn't make any noise. He'd crawl up onto the roof around the back, where a ladder was fixed to the wall, and drink his father’s bourbon straight from the decanter.

Once, he fell from the roof trying to descend the ladder. His father drove an hour to the hospital only for the doctors to prescribe extra-strength Tylenol and No More Climbing. Javier had wept his way to bed, covering himself in soft linen and guilt, but Chucho hadn't once chided him. The next morning, he awoke to breakfast on the dining table and a soft-spoken lecture about stealing. He never locked the liquor cabinet, but Javier never touched another bottle he didn't buy for himself.

He doesn't need a housekeeper here. He doesn't need a cook or a cleaner or a goddamn babysitter. After his mother died, Javier and his father got along just fine by themselves. Everything was fucking fine.

The kitchen smells of fresh-picked basil and tomato sauce and roses. You’re standing calmly at the stove, stirring a pot of rich red sauce. The scent makes his eyes prickle at the corners and he realises the sweetness comes from your perfume. He takes a step closer just to inhale; it clings to the roof of his mouth and seeps from his ears. The kitchen is warm, muggy with the stick of your look and your smell and your body to his clothes.

He looks at the recipe card on the countertop. Small, looping letters. Pretty. He remembers the grocery list you had pinned to your refrigerator. Eggs, milk, bread, coffee, sugar, flour. He's always had terrible penmanship, even after the DEA conducted a mandatory workshop—and then another, when the first didn't stick.

“It's my own recipe,” you say without turning your head to face him. “Want a taste?”

Javier peels the wet collar of his shirt away from his neck and takes the spoon right from your hand. You glare at him, reaching for it. He holds it out of arm’s reach.

“This isn't your home. It's not your kitchen.”

His mother’s recipe cards are still tucked neatly in the cabinet above the stove. Chucho is afraid to take them out in case he ruins them, and Javier can only cook if his meal comes in a can. So, the cards haven’t been touched since she died. Maybe it's better that way.

And you…

You. Taking up space, bringing your own recipes into his family’s home, cooking dinner and arranging plates and opening wine as if it’s been your routine for months. Javier meets your impassive eyes and he wonders if this is some petty revenge for that night ten years ago. God knows he'd deserve it, but that doesn't soothe the wound.

“Just because you think the world has it out for you doesn't make it true,” you say. “Give me back my spoon.”

“Go home,” he says as calmly as he can. “Go home and let me call my father.”

“To have him fire me, you mean.”

“I told you—”

“You don't need me. You may have mentioned it.” The venom in your voice slithers into his bloodstream. The back of his shirt is soaked in sweat.

“Really? Because it feels like you don't understand.”

“Oh, I understand fine,” you spit. “I understand that you're sweaty, and upset, and that this is a big surprise for you. But unless you want your father to go hungry tonight, you’ll let me finish.”

His ears are white-hot at the tips. The sauce on the stovetop begins to bubble.

Before Javier can speak, he hears the front door swing open and a boot lower onto the creaky floorboard. Chucho wipes the sweat from his brow with his forearm and meets his son's eyes.

“Let her finish, mijo.”

Javier grinds his teeth. “You really hired her?”

“I hired her,” says Chucho, “and you can give her back the spoon now.”

“Thank you, Señor Peña.” You pluck the wooden spoon from Javier’s fist and return to your sauce. “How was your day?”

“Oh, hotter than hell.” Chucho plucks the hat off his head and fans himself with it. “Have you been rolling around in the dirt?”

You smile fondly. “Thought I’d re-stack the bales in the barn. I know your back can't handle it anymore.”

Chucho’s booming laugh is something out of Javier’s childhood: hamburgers on the grill and fireworks exploding in the heart of the city and mosquitoes and lawn chairs. The smell of citronella and candle wax. Power outages and sawdust and hay tangled in his hair. He itches at the sight of his father laughing with you like he's known you all your life.

“Dad,” pleads Javier, “when did all this happen?”

“I left you a message last night,” says his father, hanging up his hat. “On your phone.”

Last night, Javier was at the bar. He vaguely recalls his phone buzzing in his back pocket. He remembers letting it ring out. Maybe, if he'd answered, he would have been able to stop this.

“You know I’m getting old, mijo,” says Chucho. “I can't do everything around here.”

“That's why I’m here, Dad. I’m here to help you.”

Chucho watches his son for a moment, his white moustache bristling, even whiter brows pinching together. He's always thought with his whole face. Javier’s fingers curl into his palms as he reads those twitches and wrinkles as easily as the scars on his own body.

But you haven't been here. Not really.

Chucho leaves to hang his hat on the hook in the front hall like he always does, and Javier is alone with you and the bubbling sauce.

“You don't belong here,” he says, not meeting your eye. “This is my family’s home. And if you think I’m going to sit next to you at the dinner table like you're a part of it, you’re wrong.”

He doesn't miss the way your shoulders flinch forward as if trying to evade a blow, but he doesn't stop himself from delivering it, either.

You nod and it’s stiff, as if a rope has pulled taut around the base of your skull. Guilt over his choice of words begins to gnaw at his liver.

“If you don’t mind”—you give him a small smile and he doesn’t believe it’s natural for a second—“you’re sweating into my tomato sauce.”

I’m sorry, he should say. I overstepped. I didn't really mean it.

I remember you.

Do you remember me?

Javier turns to leave, but the cool fingers of your voice clamp down on his shoulder.

“I know you probably forgot that night,” you say, the quiver in your voice like twisting a ribbon around one’s finger, cutting off the circulation, “but I never did, Javier.”

He doesn't say a word. He leaves his insides behind for the crows to peck at and he hopes they will wash him clean.

Goddammit, you can cook.

He’d almost wished to find something to hate about it—that you’d lied on your resume to his father so he could find a reason to excommunicate you from this little vigil around the dining table. But it's perfect. It's fucking perfect and he knows that if he looks up, across the table, you'll be watching him realise it.

“Where did you learn to cook like this?” asks Chucho, already halfway through his plate of pasta. Javier's father has never known the meaning of a small appetite. He supposed he should be grateful for it.

You smile fondly at him and Javier sees another flicker of the girl from ten years ago—teeth and lips and eyes that crinkle at the corners. The same nervous habit of pressing your palm between your collarbones, though this time you're fiddling with your necklace. He wonders what the engraving says.

“My grandpa,” you tell Chucho. “When my sister and I were little, he'd sit us up on the counter and let us watch him. He did it so effortlessly, by muscle memory, and here I am, still using recipe cards.”

He didn't know you had a sister. Javier stabs another forkful of spaghetti but doesn't eat it.

“By the time you get to my age, you'll be grateful for recipe cards,” Chucho says with a hearty laugh. “When he was a boy, Javi would hide all his mother's recipes around the house and make him play hide-and-seek with her. She eventually put them all into a book and locked the cupboard so dinner would stop being an hour late every night.”

“Dad,” says Javier. He doesn't mean for it to sound so curt, but his stomach turns over at the mention of his mother. Her spot at the end of the table is empty, but it screams at him. There's still a placemat there. Neither he nor his father have worked up the courage to take it away.

“Javier,” says Chucho, levelling a harsh look at him. Your keen eyes flicker between father and son as the quiet seconds tick by on the clock above the mantelpiece.

“Well,” you say softly, cutting the tension, “it sounds like she was an incredible cook.”

“She was,” snaps Javier, sitting back and rubbing his fingers over his mouth. His lips prickle with the smoky aftertaste of the sauce. “Better than anyone else I know.”

“Did you not like it?” you ask. “I can make something different for you.”

I know you probably forgot that night, but I never did, Javier.

A challenge gleams in your eye and a part of him lights up in the face of it. But he recalls the way you made yourself small at his words, the way hurt shuddered through you like a feeler of lightning, and he decides not to take the bait.

“It was good,” he says at last, rubbing his palms along his jeans. You smile and it's so fucking smug he wishes he had lied.

“I’ll start cleaning up,” you offer, averting your gaze as you stack the plates and carry them into the kitchen. Your hips sway a little as you bump against the swinging door and Javier tilts his head to watch you.

Follow.

The voice isn't his own, but it comes from inside, something festering from long ago that he must have forgotten. You disappear and he abruptly looks away to find his father staring him down.

“After that display,” he says in Spanish, “you’d better go in there right now and help that poor girl with the dishes. As a matter of fact, do them all yourself.”

Javier sighs, running his fingers through his hair and tugging lightly at his scalp. “You didn't warn me, Dad.”

“I did warn you. You just didn't answer your phone.”

“We don't need her. We don't need anyone. We're doing fine like this, on our own.”

“Don’t forget that I own this mortgage, Javier. You may be proud as a stump, but I’m grateful for the help. And she needs the money.”

“Did you know?” he says, curling his fist around the edge of the table. “She hates me. Did you know that?”

Chucho snorts. “Does she have a good reason?”

His laugh rings hollow in his ears. “Of course she does.”

“Give her a chance,” says Chucho. “A chance, mijo. The folks down there gave you a chance, and God be good, my son helped a lot of people. Saved a lot of lives.”

“God isn't always good,” he mutters in English. “You shouldn't talk about it like that. Like all I did was good.”

“Maybe it wasn't,” says his father, “but it was for a purpose. You want to leave it all behind, but sometimes you have to let yourself remember. The past won't change.”

His father is right. He will always hear their engines turning over in his sleep and he will always see the white froth of the water churned up by the boats. They’ll keep speeding past as if nothing has changed, as if the war on drugs was another whiskey dream and Javier was just another puppet on string. He'll drink himself silly in the bar and he'll light a cigarette by the river and he’ll probably keep putting out the smoke in the water.

He’ll dream of bullet holes and gunfire and every wrong move he's ever made. He’ll awake nauseated by his own memory and eat a piece of toast so he doesn't vomit up all the liquor in his body.

He wonders if there are memories even Lethe cannot erase.

He finds you in the kitchen, bent over the sink, scrubbing a plate clean in measured circles. There's a sheen of sweat on the nape of your neck. He licks his lips.

“Let me help,” he says, his throat closing in.

Next to him, you shift on your feet. “I know you don't want me here,” you tell him, “and I won't get in your way. I’m here to do my job, not step on your toes.”

The guilt pulses in his wrists, turning his veins black. You finish washing the plate and pass it to him without another word.

Skin memories can occur when unfiltered contact is made with a person dear to oneself. It's like weaving a bridge from one end of the bank to the other, rebuilding a connection one has lost. Through skin, one recalls family, friends, even lovers. When he takes the plate, his fingers brush yours, and he remembers the body.

He remembers entangled limbs, mouths meeting, smiling, the dip of a waist and the curve of a hip. He remembers a need so delicate and so violent all at once, and he remembers the way his need crashed down into you when he simply could not take it anymore. He remembers your fingers as they played up on his bare chest and he remembers the rhythm of the song they struck upon his skin. He remembers your lashes tickling his skin, your nose nuzzling against his throat, your eyes like moons in the darkness.

He remembers the last kiss he placed on the corner of your sleeping mouth before he left without so much as a warning, and never came back.

He deserves the dreams that come to him.

“I did think you forgot,” he says, wiping a dry cloth around the circumference of the plate. You haven't met his eye since he walked into the kitchen. “I was hoping you did, actually.”

“A girl never forgets her first,” you say icily, and he feels it cut beneath his ribs.

“Right. Yeah.” He stacks another dry plate and clenches the cloth in his fist. “About that…”

“Thanks, but I would prefer that we never talk about it again.” You look up at him, your lips pressed into a tight line. “I'm not here to live in the past. I have a life, and you have a… well, you have something.”

His brow ticks upward. “Yeah? And your life is so great?”

“It's a life,” you say, scrubbing a spoon with a little more aggression than before, “which is more than I can say for someone who spent two hours of his day smoking next to a river.”

“And is this what you wanted out of your life? Cooking, cleaning, and doing dishes for someone you hate?”

“I don't hate your dad,” you say airily. “You have a ways to go.”

“Who says I care what you think about me?”

“The fact that you're still here, helping me do the dishes, and invading my personal space.”

He takes a discrete step to the right.

“And you? Are you happy with your life, Javier?” You begin to scrub the saucepan.

His name sounds the same on your tongue, if a bit more jagged, less like velvet. He watches the way your breasts push together under your tank top as your muscles flex and he swallows the reminder that he hasn't had sex in months.

You continue, “Word is, you've got a lot to be proud of.”

He huffs. “Sure.”

“Very convincing.”

“What do you want from me, a patient?”

“I’m not a therapist, but you might benefit from one, judging from the way you're strangling the life out of that cloth.”

He loosens his grip and reassumes control of his own breathing. “I have a life,” he says, but he isn't sure for whom he says it.

You hum, but say nothing else. He should be grateful. He should shut his fucking mouth and go back to his penance in the form of drying dishes. But something his father said nips at him, and he isn't sure he wants to walk away quite yet.

“My dad said you need the money from this job. For what?”

Your shoulders stiffen and he can recognise, better than most people, the signs of a person shutting down.

“You might think you’re doing just fine,” you say, placing the saucepan on the counter for him to clean, “but there was a lot more life in the guy I knew back then. Though, I guess I only thought I knew him.”

You leave him alone in the kitchen, drying a pan, smelling notes of roses and staring out at the window ahead where the river glistens under the light of the moon.

His bed in Colombia was less a bed and more an air mattress on a box spring. The extra bounce certainly contributed to the potency of his whiskey dreams and certainly did not facilitate any sexual encounters he attempted to bring back to his apartment. He usually went to them.

Now, lying on this cool, firm, proper bed, Javier can't sleep a wink.

He shuffles onto his feet and drags himself into the kitchen. Blinking in the harsh light of the refrigerator, he grabs a jug of orange juice and lets it slosh out into a small glass.

The front door creaks, and you walk inside from the stale, warm dark.

Javier frowns at you. You're wearing a pair of soft lounge shorts and a little top, and he closes the refrigerator so he can't see the details of your figure in those fucking clothes.

“It's two o’clock,” he says plainly.

You rub your eyes. “Yes, it's two o’clock. And you're also awake.”

“What were you doing out there?” he demands. Fuck, sometimes he feels like the guy in charge of interrogations, back in a pitch-black closet with only a desk and a lamp to guide him.

“I was taking a walk. It's this thing you can do where you put one foot in front of the other, and so on until you're moving.”

“Jesus,” he mutters, downing his glass in one gulp. “Never knew you had so much to say.”

Your laugh is groggy, but he enjoys the sound of it. It washes over him pleasantly, warm as morning sunlight. “You didn't hang around long enough to hear the extent of it.”

It's a playful jab, but Javier winces. He cannot swallow this piece of his past, not when it's standing right in front of him.

He rubs his jaw. “Trouble sleeping?” he asks.

You nod. “You?”

“Yeah. You want a drink?”

“Fuck, yeah.”

He produces a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels from the cupboard and pours a couple fingers into two glasses. You swipe one from the counter and he's caught up in the way your throat bobs as you swallow, your head tipped back as if in ecstasy. Your eyes gleam in the dark, lit through the window by the silvery moon.

“I read about you in the paper,” you tell him, “along with half of Texas, probably, but still. Folks around here love you.”

Here it fucking comes, he thinks, tossing back his glass. You watch in amusement as he swallows the burning whiskey and with it, all the simpering print proclamations of his heroism.

But you just wait for him to polish off the glass, mouth twitching at the corner, and say, “I guess you killed a lot of people, huh.”

Javier blinks. Now that you're sleepy, he can hear a bit of the twang that hangs on your vowels like cramped fingers, trying to unlatch themselves from the edge of a cliff. Trying to fall away.

You're honest in a way that sticks uncomfortably to his ribs. None of the Oh, Javier, the things you must have gone through or the Oh, Javier, we’re so glad to have you back; you’re a real patriot.

And to you, he's no hero. He should have guessed.

“Define ‘a lot’,” he says, going for a joke.

Making you laugh, even if it's at his expense, at the idea of death, feels gratifying. It feels like some unspoken piece of a forgiveness he doesn't deserve.

“I get it,” you say. “You don’t let people in.”

“You get it?” he says dryly. “You kill people, too?”

You settle against the counter next to him and bump his side with your elbow. “No, but a long time ago, a guy left me after I’d finally opened myself up to someone. I guess I know something about shutting off.”

He averts his eyes, fingers tracing around the rim of his empty glass. The bourbon flits pleasantly around the top half of his head like twittering birds. “I know you don't want to hear it, but you didn't deserve that. I didn’t… What I’m trying to say is that I never wanted—”

You take the glass from his hand and place it gently next to yours on the countertop. “Why is it that you spent hours sitting by the river out there today?”

He scratches the stubble growing on his jaw that he hasn't gotten around to shaving yet. “Just… I like to think, I guess.”

“Is it because of the boats?”

It's gently put, but stern, and he wants to lean into the pillowy sound of your voice in the night and all its hushed timbre. Like a pile of leaves in a clearing, the sky high above. Stars he can never reach.

“Everyone keeps saying I’m some American hero,” he tells the floor. “How am I supposed to tell them all that none of it really mattered?”

If he meets your eye, he will face all of his failures. Every single thing he's done wrong in the past ten years started with you. With his fingers exploring the soft swell of your breasts and his mouth calming the erratic pulse in your throat. With linen that smelled of roses.

“Maybe trying to forget the past only makes us dwell on it more,” you say. “I guess that doesn’t leave us a lot of room for improvement, does it?”

“No. Not really.” He chuckles, finally looking up into your dewy eyes. “We did some good. But we also did a lot of bad.”

“Life isn’t some cosmic balancing act,” you offer.

Javier huffs. “Don't even think about saying those words around my devout father.”

“Hey, I used to go to church, Peña. I know the Word.”

He laughs again. “You don't go anymore?”

You shrug one shoulder. “I've lost a lot of faith in my life.”

“And…” He licks his lips and watches you do the same. There's a hint of bourbon on your breath and the kitchen is so warm, so humid, that his shirt feels impossibly heavy on his body. “Do you think I should let it go?”

You study him, every minute flicker of your eyes like a laser cutting paths across his face. He feels like he's being peeled apart. “The boats,” you ask, “or your faith?”

“I don't know.”

Your smile is humourless, but it comforts him anyway. “Stop trying to forget,” you tell him. “It won't do you any good, and it definitely won't work. But don't beat yourself up over choices you never made, or mistakes you did make. It’ll drive you crazy. Trust me.”

You bid him a whispered goodnight and leave the kitchen. He can hear you walk your path to the spare bedroom upstairs, across from his. Javier stares at the glass you left behind, at the small imprint of lip gloss on the rim, at the film of bourbon sitting stagnant in the well.

It feels cooler without you next to him, and he should be grateful for the way his collar no longer clings to his throat like a pair of strangling hands. But it just feels like something is missing.

Over the next month, Javier becomes convinced that his father is plotting something malicious.

When you wash the dishes after dinner, Chucho insists that he needs to tend to the chickens, and Javier is left to help you clean. When the horses need to be fed and you're lugging buckets of grain from the shed into the stables, Javier is the only one around to help you manage the load.

I can carry it myself, Javier.

Well, I’m helping anyway. Don't need to hear shit from my dad.

God, you're stubborn.

Yeah, and you're flexible as they come.

Do you know how infuriating you are?

No, but I’m sure you're about to explain it to me in heavy detail.

Then you’d better take a seat because this will take a while.

He isn't sure when he started to seek you out himself, but facing the barrel-end of your glares and your venom isn't so bad anymore. He's memorised the way your frustration escalates, from the twitch of your lips to the wrinkle between your brows. You know how to clamp your venus fly trap jaws around him, and you know how to chew him up and spit out just enough of him that he crawls back for another taste of your poison.

The home doesn't feel cramped like it did when you first arrived. The weather has cooled somewhat for mid-June, and it's not quite so oppressive anymore. The clouds are puffy and white. He helps you wash the dishes and he fixes up your broken taillight. He makes dinner with you every now and then, and he likes it when you shove him out of the way with your hip or snap at him that he isn't doing something right. He likes it when you hold up the wooden spoon to his mouth to give him a taste of your cooking and when you chide him for sampling more than you offered him.

Maybe he likes it because it means you aren't indifferent to him—that he’s something to you despite all he's done. Maybe it's a kind of hope: that he can be redeemed in the eyes of someone who has every right to hate him.

When the farmer’s market comes into town and you need to stock up on groceries for the week, Chucho’s truck magically needs a new alternator.

“You should take her, mijo.”

“Dad, she has a driver’s license.”

“And you have a scowl on your face that can be seen from space. Now go, and play nice.”

“Christ,” he mutters, meeting you out by your truck. You’re bent over the seat, rummaging in the glove box for a reusable bag. He tries his best not to stare, but for fuck’s sake, he's a man, and the jeans you're wearing are sculpted to you. When you stand upright, he catches a glimpse of your breasts, pushed together in your tank top, and he hastily slides his aviators up his nose so you won't catch him in the act of ogling. He never used to be shy about it.

“I know what you're going to say, and I don't need your help.” Pointedly, you place the canvas bag on the passenger’s seat and walk around the truck, shooting Javier a smile that shivers down his belly. “You're starting to suffocate me, sweetie.”

He lights a cigarette and curls his fingers around the rim of the driver’s side window. “I’ll be a good boy.”

You roll your eyes, starting up the ignition. “No smoking in my car.”

He puts out the cigarette in the dirt driveway and slides into the truck next to you. Your bag is emblazoned with your school’s logo. “So you got that degree after all,” he says.

You look at him as if you’re alarmed that he remembered, your face softening with a small smile. “Yeah, I did.”

“I knew you would,” he says. “Knew you were smarter than me the second we met.”

You laugh. “Oh, please. You don't remember the second we met.”

He remembers the day. The leaves were cast in bronze and the air had an early-morning chill to it that had settled in his muscles. He'd woken up past his alarm and decided to stop in a small café on the way to the sheriff’s department. In his hurry to shoulder open the door and find a place in line, he bumped into a pretty girl carrying a coffee cup and textbooks.

Your things scattered across the checkered floor and your coffee spilled in a rich brown pool at his feet. You gasped, pulling your books to your chest, and Javier met your eyes for the first time in mutual astonished silence.

“Fuck,” you both said simultaneously.

He remembers the vaguely manic gleam in your eye. He remembers the sensation of coffee seeping into his soles and the way your chest heaved behind your books. He remembers staring at you, young and a bit skittish, and forgetting his own name until you said yours first.

He bought you another coffee and forgot to get one for himself. He arrived late and empty-handed to the sheriff’s station with shoes that smelled like dark roast.

“I remember,” he tells you. “And I remember how hard it was to get a date with you.”

“You didn't want a date with me; you wanted a fuck.”

“We did both, though, didn't we?”

You scoff. “You're such a guy.”

“For what it's worth,” he says, “I don't think I could forget you if I tried.”

You lift your brows. “Is that right?”

“Mmm. The feeling of coffee soaking through my expensive shoes is memorable.”

You laugh and he swallows the sound of it, liquid moonlight. “I'm glad I made an impression.”

The sun is at its apex and he can feel the heat of it cutting through the windshield, casting your face in so much light that a strange possessiveness surges within him over having seen you in the darkness. It feels like something that belongs to him alone: the fuzzy outline of your body as you came to stand beside him, the remnants of your lip gloss on the glass of bourbon, the watery silver underneath your irises that could have been tears and could have also been his imagination.

Maybe he dreamed that night.

“What about your sister?” he asks, startling himself out of his trance. “Did she go to UT, too?”

Your eyes grow fond and he could look at you this way for hours—like you're watching some piece of your past unfold like an old rug, shaking off the dust. “She wanted to be different from her big sister in every way possible,” you tell him. “She scurried off to A&M a couple years ago. Wanted to go into education. But…”

“But?”

You clear your throat. “She dropped out.”

“Oh,” says Javier. “Did she say why?”

“She said it wasn't for her,” you say, your tone clipped.

“Oh.”

You lapse into silence, speeding down the dirt road with one hand on the wheel, and he kicks himself.

Way to fucking go, Peña.

He doesn't stew for much longer. It’s about a half-hour drive into town and the farmer’s market is abuzz with activity by the time you find a parking spot down the road. He follows you dutifully from aisle to aisle, hearing his father’s scolding echo in his skull, hearing your own words cut him deep enough to bleed.

Play nice. We need the help.

I don’t need your help, Javier.

He isn't sure what he expected from accompanying you into the world, into the small town he once knew and certainly doesn't anymore. But to see the way you toss careless smiles to the locals and exchange your rapid-fire jokes like currency… To see the way you fit in as if you never left at all, while Javier still struggles to pull himself back into this place, feels like another tally against him. Another reminder of the wrongs he cannot right.

Laredo is a second skin that's too tight. What has he done with the ten years of his absence except alienate everyone that's ever meant anything to him for a fight that meant nothing?

They welcome you with kisses on the apple of your cheek and boisterous shouts.

There she is; God, you've grown!

I have those strawberries put aside for you—Dan and I wanted to invite you over for some pie, since it's his birthday tomorrow.

Javier, is that you? I hardly recognised you.

He hardly recognises himself.

It isn't long before his arms are weighed down by produce. He suspects you're indulging a bit more just to test the limits of his strength, but he's fine with it. And maybe he flexes a little when he hauls the groceries into the truck with him, just to show off. Maybe he puffs out his chest when you look up at him, the girl who doesn’t need his help, and squeeze his forearm in thanks.

“You did good, Agent Peña.”

He shrugs like it's just another Monday. But your fingers brand him where they curl around his arm and his mouth feels dry as cotton. He offers to drive back just so he can have an excuse to focus on something other than the dark ring of sweat around the neck of your shirt, the way you fan yourself with a Visit Texas brochure from the market.

You did good.

Countless newspaper columns and superiors and strangers on the street don't compare to the way your approval sits in his chest.

Five minutes into the drive, you point out the window. “Let's stop there.”

He glances through the windshield and recognises the face of the café instantly: Sunny’s, where he met you for the first time. “This place is still open?” he says, backing into a parking spot behind the red brick building.

“They got a facelift,” you say, pushing your sunglasses to the top of your head. “You up for a coffee?”

He looks at the indent on your nose made by the bridge of your glasses. You're staring so intently at him that he has to turn away.

He sifts through his head for a name to describe the way you make him feel. How he can be so certain that you're the bane of his existence one moment, and curl up like a cat into the silhouette of your body the next. How your sharp tongue cuts him open and soothes him to a dreamless sleep. He thought of your lip gloss on the rim and your eyes in the dark, staring at the ceiling until sleep took him.

You say his name. And as always, you elude him, your clever tongue whispering taunts in his ear as you slide slowly through his grasp.

“There’s produce in the truck.”

You roll your eyes. “We won't be long.”

“And if they go bad in the heat?”

“Is there some reason you're stalling, or is it just because you want to annoy me?”

Part of him is thrilled at the thought of annoying you forever, being the object of your ire. Is it masochistic to find this anger of yours so beautiful? To open you up like a book and bleed you and take it all inside him?

He knows he deserves it. But your gooey centre glows bright enough to burn out some old part of him that didn't feel anything at all. The more he taps at the hard shell that closes you in, the more he finds that you're just as scared to bare your heart as he is.

You're the only one who's faced his worst and matched it fearlessly. He bared his teeth to you and you grasped him by the scruff of his neck.

“Fine,” he says. “But just for a minute.”

Your teeth sink into your bottom lip and he wonders what it tastes like to swipe his tongue along the seam of your open mouth. “Just what every girl wants to hear.”

He opens the door for you and listens to the chime of the bell as you enter the café. The air conditioning dries the sweat at the back of his neck and he suddenly doesn't feel quite so grumpy. The checkered floor, where he once spilled your coffee on his shoes, is the same. The display cabinets with all the labelled treats upgraded to new glass doors, and the walls are coated in a sickly-sweet paper that reminds him of bubblegum before it lost all its flavour. A couple curious heads turn and Javier braces himself, but they go back to their conversations and their lattes and their pleasant little lives.

“See?” you say, and it soothes him into dropping his tense shoulders. “Now you can buy me a coffee.”

Javier chuckles, but takes out his wallet. He could buy you the goddamn café and it wouldn't make up for what he'd done. But if this is where you'd like to start, he’ll cough up as much money as you want him to.

You order something extra-sweet, the most expensive drink on the menu, and Javier buys a black coffee. When you sit down with your monstrosity, topped with whipped cream and a straw that looks like a candy striper, Javier watches you close your lips around it and he swallows. It isn't quite so cool anymore. Now, the walls press against him on all sides, and when you smile up at him, his head feels like honey.

This flame, this burn he had thought was hate, flares up, white-hot, and he knows it can't be. Maybe it never has been. Not when your eyes touch his skin like the kiss of a hot poker. Not when you grin and he feels like the funniest man on Earth. Especially not when you poke and prod and chastise and all he does is open his arms wider for you to throw your jabs.

Fuck. He likes it. He likes the thrill he gets from winding you tight and he likes seeing you loose, shrouded in dark and moonlight, vulnerable as a bruise, his thumb to your tender skin as if taking your pulse.

He likes you, and that's his punishment.

“Same spot, huh?” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“You always sat here when you studied. You said the light was best by the window.”

Your mouth opens, then closes, then opens again. “You remember that?”

Javier doesn't tell you that he remembers every detail about you down to the way you chewed your thumbnail when you were concentrating and the way you could never sit with both your feet fully planted on the floor. “I remember you turning me down for every date I asked you on.”

You roll your eyes. “Because I could smell a playboy from a mile away.”

“So why did you say yes?” he asks.

You shrug, licking some of the whip from your drink and swiping it clean from your lips. Arousal snakes down his belly and lingers heavy in his core. Adjusting in his seat, Javier watches every movement as if he’ll be tested. A playful grin tugs at your mouth.

“I guess I just realised you weren't as awful as I’d expected.”

He huffs, leaning back in the stiff wooden chair. “That's the nicest thing any girl’s ever said to me.”

There's a smudge of whipped cream on the tip of your nose and Javier reaches out, wiping it away with his thumb. You go slightly cross-eyed as you watch him do it, your lips parting.

“I liked you, too,” he says quietly, frowning at the white smear on his thumb. “And I remember everything.”

It's strange to find himself lusting after a woman he thought he'd left in the past for good. A woman he'd already known so intimately, touched so deeply.

You were young. You were a virgin. He hadn't known it until he was in too deep, until he’d spent the better part of a month imagining how you would feel wrapped around him, consumed by him, burning up in him. He would lie awake in his bed and spread his fingers, sliding his hand across the cool linens and wondering if you'd be soft as velvet. He would picture your eyes robed in darkness as you slid down onto him, warm and wet, something desperate latching onto both of you until his future blurred in front of him and your worries fled into the corner to hide.

And the sex…

Fuck, you were so soft. Your fingers trembled as they rose to unbutton his shirt, and he covered them with his so you'd feel more brave. Your soft cries and your taste—God, your taste—had him drunk from the first slow drag of his tongue through your pussy. When he hovered over you and fit himself inside you, you met his gaze with a steely determination and grasped his arms.

You were so tight, so hot, that he closed his eyes and buried his face in your throat so he wouldn't lose himself to it. You still smelled of roses then.

“Javier.”

He blinks. You're staring, not at him but at the way he’s clenched his fist around his cup so tightly that coffee has spilled over the rim onto the table.

“Mierda. Fucking kidding me,” he grumbles. You stifle your laughter behind your hand and shoot up to grab a couple napkins from the counter.

“Maybe memory lane wasn't the best idea,” you say, biting into your bottom lip to preserve some sense of his dignity.

Javier accepts your handful of napkins and begins to clean up his mess. “At least I didn't get it on my shoes this time.”

“We're changed people,” you tease. “Although you're still a playboy, if the gossip is true.”

He's never been shy about liking sex. He had plenty of friendly relationships with the women he had slept with in Bogotà. He’d given them the money for visas or to provide for their kids in exchange for information or pleasure. It was convenient and it was detached. But his face heats up under your keen eyes and suddenly he wishes he'd gone celibate all those years.

You lightly smack him with a clean napkin. “Do you think I’m some sexless sack of flesh?”

“Definitely not sexless,” he grumbles.

“I know you saw a lot of women; it doesn't bother me. We aren't sleeping together, and we won't ever again.”

It isn't cruel or sharp, but it still stings. He knows he doesn't deserve you. He knows every ounce of your ire is warranted for the way he’d left you that morning. He knows he can never make amends for leaving you vulnerable and alone, without so much as a call or warning. He'd been selfish and afraid and in want of a release, and you can pretend all you want that it doesn't hurt you, that you don't care, but it's all a goddamn front. He sees that same stubborn set of your jaw when he looks in the mirror. He sees your pain in his own eyes, feels it in the tension that stiffens his shoulders.

“Are you…” He clears his throat when it comes out all wrong, trying to sculpt his tone into something conversational. “Are you with anyone?”

You give him a cold stare. “You were doing so well until that. Let's go before the produce starts baking in this heat.”

Your walls effectively erected in front of your eyes, you leave him to follow you out the door. Cursing himself, he hurries to catch up to you and curls his fingers around your wrist.

“Wait.”

You turn back to face him, your eyes briefly widening at the jolt that trembles between the two of you.

“I’m sorry.” His voice breaks and he doesn't even have time to be embarrassed. He just keeps on, tripping over everything he's trying to say. “I… fuck, I was an idiot, and I didn't want to face you knowing I’d only hurt you, and I know it was stupid, but I’m sorry. Please, just… just know that I’m sorry.”

Wordlessly, you stare, the sticky breeze rustling your hair. It's hotter now than before he entered the café, or maybe he's imagining it. He's still touching you, electricity sprinting up and down your arms in a closed circuit, and he wants you to slap him or shout at him.

If you walk away, he doesn't know if he'll be able to watch you go. He doesn't know if he can stop himself from following.

“We should go, Javi,” you say softly, as if the words are suffocated by the walls of your throat. His heart twists until it's backwards, facing away from the blow your brush-off delivers.

“Right,” he says, dropping your wrist and wiping his palms on his jeans. “Yeah.”

He replays the sound of his name on your tongue the whole way home. A name so lethal that the mere presence of it cut through the air. A name that means You hurt me. A name that means I cannot forgive you.

He tosses a rock across the width of the river and it skips once, twice, before the silky water swallows it, nothing but a ripple in its wake.

He wonders how the water would taste going down. If it’s poison, smoothing over the little folds in his intestines the way radiation bloats the body, or if it goes down smooth as red wine.

He hears the grass being displaced behind him and you sit cross-legged by his side. “Do you ever sleep?”

He puts out the cigarette in the ashtray he brought out with him. At least he's stopped polluting.

“Sometimes,” he says. “Been having nightmares since… uh, since—”

“Since you got back?”

He nods stiffly, but your shoulder is brushing his and you're looking out at the water and the moon illuminates your face, and you're beautiful. You've always been beautiful.

But it haunts him now, this stillness. Your skin is soft as sculpted marble and your face just as set, and he knows that a fractal of the girl he knew is still lodged between his ribs. Maybe you have a piece of her stick inside your chest, too. Maybe you mourn her the way he mourns what he had with you, something easy until it wasn't, chewed-up and unrecognisable now.

“Thank you.”

The words are so soft they nearly drown, but he fishes them from the riverbank. You still won't meet his eye.

“For apologising,” you finish. “Thank you.”

It isn't forgiveness, but he doesn't want that. He's never liked the taste of it—like pre-ripe bananas. Too green, not ready.

“I’ve been an asshole,” he says. “Not just back then, but when you showed up here, too. You felt like a reminder that I hadn't been there for my dad. And it's true—I let myself get caught up in chasing the cartel. I let myself make excuses not to come home. And I left him to handle all of this himself.”

“Yeah,” you say quietly. “But he's also your dad. And he's proud of you.”

“Maybe.” He studies your profile and God, he even likes the way you blink. “You've helped us. More than I wanted to admit. So… thank you. For being what I couldn't be for him.”

“Your dad is perfectly pleasant,” you say dryly, and he hears the implication: Unlike you. “I like working for him.”

“He likes you.” He doesn't know why he’s still talking, but it feels nice to slice himself open and pour himself out. “He calls you his guardian angel.”

For some reason, you close your eyes at the words, as if reliving an old memory. Your lashes rest on your cheeks, utterly still.

“That's what my sister used to call me,” you say. The crickets strum a discordant song and Javier is too afraid to speak over the magic that's settled over the grass. “I practically raised her, since our parents wouldn't. She liked to use our shower curtain as a cape and pretended to fly by jumping off the toilet. I always called her Hero.

“We did our best in that house, but when it was time for me to go to school, I was afraid to leave her there. So I deferred my acceptance and waited until she grew up a bit more. When she finally left for school, I was so relieved. But she met a guy, and…”

He expects the tears stuck on your lashes to linger there, maybe even freeze in place, and become a part of your painting. But they slide slowly down your cheeks, a picture of abjection, and something dislodges inside him.

He shuffles closer. Just a little.

“He treats her terribly,” you whisper, looking down at your fingers, one of them twisting around a blade of grass. Your shoulders are hunched as if expecting a blow. His jaw slides back and forth. “And he won't let her leave. I tried…” Your little gasp cracks his heart in half. “I tried to take her from there, but he…”

You don't need to explain it in detail for Javier to see it clearly. “He threatened that he'd do worse if I ever contacted her again, because I’m bad for her. And I just… I can't help but wonder if I should have tried harder to get her away from our parents. If maybe things would have been better if we’d done it all on our own.”

You shake your head, tears drying on your face. “I feel so useless,” you tell him. “I can't save my sister from him. I couldn't even save her from the people who were supposed to love us.”

“Cielo…” Javier places his hand between your shoulder blades and feels your body decompress beneath his touch. Your bottom lip trembles as you turn to look at him, and your eyes gleam in the darkness.

“I tried,” you say weakly, sniffling as you pluck the blade of grass from the earth. “I tried to help her, and now I’m just… complacent. I think about all the ways he could be hurting her right now, and I’m here, cleaning your house.”

Realisation dawns. “That's why you need the money,” he says. “To get her out of there.”

“I thought if I saved up enough to get a little apartment, I could get her to come with me. Run away, you know?”

You scoff like it’s absurd to even dream, and he feels cruel for all he's said to make you feel unwelcome. For all the jabs he made about you not belonging, when you've never felt welcome anywhere.

His eyes sting when he blinks.

“Tell me about her.”

You look at him in surprise, but something serene settles over the curve of your mouth, taking the shape of memory instead of self-loathing.

“She lives and breathes the colour blue. She would come home from art class with blue fingers because she loved to paint. She was always playing outside, frolicking around the woods behind our house, and I was so scared I’d lose her in there. But she would come running back to me with a little dandelion in her hands, and I was allergic, but I’d take it because she looked so happy to give me a gift.”

Javier smiles. “Sounds like she loves you a lot.”

“Sometimes I think she saved me,” you tell him, stripping another blade of grass in half. “I might've just packed my bags and ran away if I didn't have her. She made me brave.”

“She was lucky to have you,” he says. “She needed you, and she still does.”

You squeeze your eyes shut, turning your head away as if you're still afraid to show him your vulnerability, the way your chin puckers when your mouth begins to tremble.

“I don't know what else to do,” you whisper. “How did you do it? How did you manage down there?”

How do you live with the mistakes you’ve made?

His chest twists and he wants to reach out—to curl his fingers over your knuckles as if to protect them from a blow that won't come. To encircle your body with his arms and cradle the back of your neck in his palm. To impress words he cannot seem to say into your warm skin and hold you there for an eternity as he bleeds into you.

Instead, he licks his lips and says, “I sit out here because it's the one spot where the boats never come. I avoid them because they remind me of all the good we could never do, but I dream about them anyway. I don't know if it's something I’ll ever be able to forget, even though I’ve tried so goddamn hard. Maybe…”

He studies you, the tears like dew on your lashes, the silver light sitting on your collar bones.

Maybe the only way of getting through it is together.

“Maybe I can talk to the sheriff’s department,” he says, “and see what I can do about looking into her boyfriend.”

You frown up at him, your posture straightening and something like hope settling in the space between your lips, and he feels emboldened.

“They can be discreet,” he continues. “I still have connections there, and they're good people. They’ll help if they hear your story.”

Your body turns toward him and he can't suppress the pull of that piece stuck in his ribs as it sings to the call of your closeness.

How would it feel to pull you against him like he once did? Would you melt so easily into him, your mouth sighing open to let him in like it did before? Or would you taunt him to come closer, a fish hook caught in his mouth?

You reach for him and your palm slides across his jaw, tentative, like you're touching something fragile or fleeting, trailing your fingers over the stubble growing on his cheek. You blink and more tears shake free from your lashes.

“Thank you.”

Then he feels your lips on his cheek, and he doesn't remember when he closed his eyes, but you're already walking away by the time he opens them again.

His fingers slowly unfurl from his closed fist. The grass has left tiny impressions in his palm, like the pillars of an ancient temple.

He waits another hour before he follows you to your bedroom door and knocks.

You’re wearing your pyjamas: a pair of shorts and a too-big sweatshirt that falls off one shoulder. Your hair is wet and you're still holding a toothbrush. A smidge of white toothpaste lingers on the corner of your mouth and Javier licks his lips.

“Are you okay?” you ask, amusement glittering in your eyes. You're backlit by the yellowish lamp by the bed and it forms a fuzzy hall around your head. “You're sweating.”

Is he? Is that why he feels so hot?

“I…” He swallows hard. “Shit. I don't know how to fuckin’ do this.”

“Do what? You're starting to scare me.”

He rubs his hand over his face and steadies himself against the wall. “I… I want to take you out. On a date.”

You blink. He isn’t sure if your non-reaction is better than turning around and vomiting.

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I think I do.”

“You think you do.”

“I do,” he says, a bit sharper than he intended. Reminding himself that his father sleeps down the hall, he takes a deep breath. “Fuck, I do. Please just… just let me take you on a date.”

You stare. Javier stares back. As dread creeps up his spine, he wonders if he should be reading your mind for your answer. Maybe he asked wrong. Maybe he should have bought flowers first. Maybe—

“No.”

His stomach swoops into his throat. “No?”

“No,” you say again.

“I…”

“If we do this again, it’ll only hurt us both. Goodnight, Javier.” And when you quietly shut the door, the only sound Javier hears is the click of the lock as he stands, hopeless, unmoored, in the dark hallway.

Javier thinks of himself as longtime friends with desperation. He knows how it tastes to grasp at something he cannot touch, and he knows the siren song that keeps pulling him closer to what he wants even when he knows he can’t have it.

And now that the one person he truly wants is avoiding his eye at every turn, desperation has stepped into his skin and worn him like a goddamn coat.

If we do this again, it'll only hurt us both.

He dreams of you every single night for two weeks. He dreams of you as Beatrice guiding Dante. He dreams of you bathing in a lake of rubies sharp as knives, your body emerging from the crimson tide of jewels unscathed. He dreams of you sitting on a throne with a tilted golden crown on your head. He dreams of sitting across from you at an old oak table, enrobed in darkness, a shared glass of whiskey between him and you.

He has nightmares about you leaving in the broad daylight, dust on the floor in the shape of your feet, the door creaking shut. An empty glass. The churning of an engine in the water.

He oils the hinges on the door. He takes the trash out every week before you're awake. The cows are fed and the hay bales are stacked and he's wiping sweat off his brow before you can tiptoe down the steps in hopes of escaping him.

He takes Chucho’s truck in for a new alternator and he brings yours in for an oil change, too, because he knows a guy. He contacts the Laredo sheriff’s department and has them open an under-the-table criminal history investigation. They tell him they're happy to do it; they don't call him a hero.

He takes his mother’s recipe cards from the cupboards and tries his hand at the asiago she used to make. It tastes like dirt and he gives up. But each night he races you to the kitchen after you’ve made dinner to wash the dishes, and because you refuse to be alone with him for five minutes, you let him do the cleaning.

He lets the heat and the humidity roll over him. He lets the earth swallow his feet. He lets his fingers spread open in the dirt, watching worms go fat and thin as they crawl over his skin. He anchors himself in the work, in the blood of the earth, and wrings out his sweat, wondering if something will someday grow there in the salted ground.

There's something therapeutic in the way the sun bakes him alive. In working all day but never feeling the hot air of someone breathing down his neck, pulling red tape over his eyes. In watching the gradual shift in his father’s posture as Chucho’s back begins to feel some relief. In being useful, being present, sewing some of the wounds he'd cut into his family back together.

Javier watches you from afar. He would be surprised that you haven't quit altogether, if you weren’t so damn stubborn. You've been distant since he asked you on a date, which, yes, had been idiotic. He'd cornered you. You were right to turn him down.

You’re protecting your heart, but he will prove that he can cradle it. He was stupid to let you go the first time. Not again. Not ever.

You stay sequestered in your bedroom after your work is done each day. He lingers in the kitchen late at night, hoping you'll be out in the dark, taking a long walk. You never show. He stares up at the ceiling in his bed for hours before he dreams of you again.

He brings roses from the market. He writes a note in his chicken scratch and tucks it in the bouquet, hoping it isn't illegible.

Let's talk?

— J

You draw a little box and put a check mark inside it, next to the word NO.

But you put the flowers in a vase on the dining table, and they're still flourishing a week later.

When the roses wilt, he replaces them. He buys your groceries from the market and gets to know the vendors. He polishes your truck. One day, he watches you unfold another letter from the new bouquet. You smile, shake your head, and scrawl something inside. It's another NO, but he isn't deterred.

You come down with a cold in mid-August. It's nothing more serious than a cough and a stuffy nose, but panic stabs Javier’s stomach when he watches you trudge down the stairs on a Monday morning, your eyes bloodshot and your throat rattling. Chucho gives you the day off, and you're already improving by the next day. Javier leaves your favourite chocolates outside your bedroom door; they're gone within minutes.

Two days later, he approaches you while you're loading your truck and rests his arms on the driver’s side window.

You frown at him. “Get off my truck.”

He jiggles the keys in his hand. “You need these to drive, don't you?”

“I'm not going on a date with you.”

“Did I ask you to?” He's pleased when you roll your eyes. “Just get in. I’ll take you wherever you need to go.”

Your lips form a tight line. “You’re suffocating me.”

“You've been avoiding me for weeks.”

“I need space.”

“I won't even say a word the whole drive. I promise.”

“You don't need to—”

“What if I want to—”

“—do everything for me!” you cry out. Your cough hacks out of you, dry as bones, and he hurries around the car to place his hand on your back.

“Baby, you're still—”

You smack his hand away, still glaring. He’s relieved to see that you haven't lost your fire. “Don't call me that.”

You close your eyes as if in regret, and when you speak again, it's so soft he can hardly hear it over the cicadas. “I’m gonna get you sick, Javi.”

“That's all right,” he says. “Just… let me help. I memorised your grocery list and everything.”

You tuck your hair behind your ear. “Okay. Fine.”

Everything inside him softens at the way you hold yourself so vulnerably, so openly, prone to wounds. A pad of melted butter on a skillet. The tender insides of a fresh-baked cookie as it splits in two. He wants to share your hurt, wade into the pool of your golden blood, and let you puncture him over and over again.

You don't say a word to him the whole drive into town. You rest your head against the window even as the truck stumbles over the long dirt road, gazing out at the scenery of blue and green and brown and nothing. When he walks around the truck to open your door, you laugh as if he’s the stupidest man on Earth, and pleasure blooms in his gut.

He stares at his ceiling as he lies in bed that night, wondering what you're doing across the hall. If you're sitting at the small desk in the corner, scribbling your to-do list for the week and planning where to hide it away so he can't get to it first. If you're curled up under the heavy quilt with a book. If you're pacing, thinking, sleeping, dreaming.

He wonders how you sound when you sleep, and he wonders what it feels like to slide his hand over your bare hip and cradle you against his chest. Does it feel the same as it did all those years ago? If he pressed his mouth to your throat, would he take your heartbeat onto his tongue to taste? Would you let him roll it around his mouth and swallow so it became his own?

Will you ever let him back in?

Javier rolls onto his side and closes his eyes. In his nightmare, you scream from the far end of a tunnel, but no noise comes out. It's silent and still and his ankles are tied to the tracks.

“That’s enough!”

Your voice floats down the hallway toward him, and he hurries to fit a towel around his hips before you come barrelling through the open bathroom door.

When Chucho’s out of the house, Javier likes to shower with the door open so the steam escapes. He thought you were still out by the stables, bringing apples from the orchard in town to feed your favourite mustang, Blue. He’s lucky he doesn't slip and fall on the damp floor as you storm into the bathroom holding a bouquet of roses, backing him toward the shower.

He feels exposed like this—bare-chested and freshly washed, his skin still damp and sticky from the warm water. There's no way of hiding how his body reacts to you like this, dressed only in a white towel that’s feebly secured around his waist. His cock twitches at the sight of the little dress that hugs your hips. Christ, he could just shuck the soft fabric up over your hips and—

You slid to a halt as if startled into silence, your eyes sliding over his chest before firmly fixing on his face, and the tiniest inkling of hope that you want him just as much swells high in his chest. Gently, warily, you push the bouquet into his chest, the stems groaning, thorns prodding the tender skin of his throat.

“I’m not doing this again,” you say softly. “That's enough, okay? Just… enough. It'll only end badly.”

He shakes his head, tossing the roses into the sink. “Please, just let me say something.”

“Javi,” you sigh, but he takes a small step forward and you don't back away.

“I know I hurt you. I know that. And I know that it's hard for you to let people in, because I’m like you. You hate the thought of it, but it's true and I think you know it. You're the only one who gets me. We work, cielo. We do. We fucking fit.”

You shake your head, your eyes wet, lips pressing together in a thin line, like a mesh canopy trying to keep out a rainstorm. “How can you know that we won't just fight all the time?”

He takes your hand in his, his thumb circling over the pulse point in your wrist. Your heartbeat throbs like a hummingbird’s.

“Baby, you aren't listening to me,” he says desperately. “You are the only person I want to fight with. If I get to come home every day to you mad at me, it's better than never coming home to you at all.” He watches your lip wobble and he knows you're trying not to let your walls crumble. “I used to have nightmares about those boats in the river. Now, it's you I’m having nightmares about.”

You scoff, your resolve visibly hardening. “Very nice, Javier.”

“No, I—” He cuts himself off, rubbing his hand over his jaw. “That isn't what I meant. I just… Being with you is fun. It's exciting and difficult and it's fucking frustrating because you were everything I was afraid of. My failures, my mistakes, my guilt. But you aren't that. And I have nightmares about you leaving. I’m terrified of hurting you the way I did back then. I’m scared of being just another person who lets you down, and I can stand being somebody you hate, but I won’t survive being someone you want to forget.”

He watches the torrent work over your face, clouds obscuring the colour of your irises. You take your bottom lip between your teeth the way you do when you’re deep in thought.

His thumb presses gently into the skin of your wrist, trying to somehow impress the shape of him forever. “I don't like anyone in the world the way I like you,” he says. “Isn't that fucking strange?”

And you laugh. God, you laugh, and you're crying a little too, tears cresting over the thin lip of the well and slipping freely down your face. But it feels like you're drifting closer, and he must be imagining it. He must be imagining the way you charge forward, cupping his face in your hands like the mouth of a fly trap.

When you kiss him, he keeps his eyes open just long enough to convince himself that this is real. Your mouth tastes of mint and honey and you’re so close that your dress is soaking through where you're pressed up against him. Roses and earth and thorns dissolve into his skin, the shower steam circling around his ears.

You're nothing and everything like the girl he once knew, and he's intoxicated from the first renewed taste of you.

Javier cradles the back of your neck, slipping his tongue into your mouth. His hard cock prods your belly through his towel as he walks you backward into the vanity, arousal sticky and hot in his core. It blooms like unfolding petals when you moan softly into his mouth, your tongue sliding alongside his, your fingers tugging at his damp hair, prickling his scalp.

Your pupils are wide, your chest heaving, and he’s so goddamn sick for you he can't breathe. He wraps his arms around your waist and sets you on top of the counter, pushing his way between your thighs. You cry out as he begins to mouth at your throat, his hands blindly tugging at the buttons of your dress, trying to get closer.

Now that he knows how it feels to be in your orbit, he doesn't want to drift away for even a second.

“Javi,” you say, pulling your fistful of his hair so he’ll pull back to look at you. “Bed. Now.”

He nods frantically. “Whose?”

“Yours,” you pant, combing his hair away from his forehead.

“Why not yours?”

“Because I want you to fuck me where you've been fantasizing about me,” you whisper, your hips pushing out, grinding slowly against the tent that's formed in his towel. It's a dream. It must be.

He nips your chin. “I didn't make my bed this morning.”

“If you don't move your ass right now, I’ll make myself come.”

Javier grins against your cheek, bringing his mouth to yours again. You melt into him, your arms sliding up around his neck, your body curving gently into his ribcage as if trying to wedge yourself in the gap between them.

He’d drown himself in the river over and over just to taste your lips like it's the first time.

He gives your ass a playful slap and you roll your eyes, tugging his hand and leading him to the bedroom down the hall. Javier has his lips on your throat before you can step through the threshold into the room, where his bed is unmade and the light bulb in his lamp is burnt out and there are clothes tossed into a heap over the back of the office chair he never uses. The dying sunlight lets out one last cry through the window as he blindly kicks the door shut behind him, his hands fastened to your hips.

You’re the salt of sweat and earth, the tang of perfume that still lingers on your skin, perched on your collar bones like little birds. He can taste your whole day when he bites the smooth flesh where your neck curves into your shoulder. He soothes the mark with his tongue as you whine his name and buck your hips into him, and his towel is slipping off before he’s even managed to take off your dress.

You gasp when you feel him, his hard length nestled against your hip. “You always have so much to fuckin’ say,” he mumbles, descending upon you for another desperate, breathless kiss. “Not so loud now, cielo.”

“You arrogant prick.” Your last word hitches in your throat as he yanks the straps of your dress from your shoulders and sucks your nipple into his mouth.

“Ah!” you cry out, casting your hand out for a purchase on something, anything. You at last dig your claws into the bedpost as he fondles your breast in his hand and mouths wetly at the other.

The weight of his body slowly brings you down onto the mattress, your back sliding along the cool linens. Javier groans into your breast, his hand sliding around your waist and bringing your hips up to meet his; slotted seamlessly on top of your warm body, he whispers your name into your sternum. The beginning of something.

The rest of your dress glides down your body like a ghost, discarding itself on the floor nearby. Javier rears back to admire the shape of you, surrounded by his linens, writhing impatiently on his bed, your cotton panties soaked through before he’s even touched you. Pride swells inside him, but another beast called lust swoops in low for the kill.

“Let me taste you,” he pleads. “Fucking Christ, let me taste you, baby.”

“Why do you think I’m opening my legs, you moron?” A little huff escapes your lips, in tandem with a minute wiggle of your hips, and he chuckles.

“Just making sure you’re still angry with me,” he says.

“I’m always angry with you. Now please just touch me already.”

He yanks your hips so your elbows fall out from under you, your body now flush with the mattress. Descending you slowly, Javier redraws his old map of you, his mouth carving river lines and soaring mountain peaks, writing in the names of places he had forgotten. Though their echoes remained, they return to him stronger now, calling his name in a fury, etching themselves in his skin.

His lips leave a wet trail down your belly, his fingers hooked in the waistband of your panties, bringing them down your legs. You hum softly as he caresses your thighs, easing them further apart so he can lie comfortably between your legs.

“You're so beautiful,” he says, his mouth lavishing your soft skin, nipping playfully at your inner thighs. “So beautiful.”

“Please,” you moan, and the taste of your need, collecting in the glistening spot between your legs, is intoxicating. His cock twitches as he presses a kiss to your clit, warm and swollen under his mouth.

Your sigh rattles through his bones and his grip on your thighs tightens, fingers digging grooves into your flesh. He opens his mouth wide and slides his tongue through your folds, indulging in the heat and the tang and the sound of your muffled cries. You have your hand over your mouth, he realises, drowning your pleasure as if it's something that should not be heard.

He lifts his head slightly just so he can take in the picture of your heaving chest, your raised brows, your closed eyes. Javier covers your hand with his and slowly pries it from your face. You lick your lips, staring down at him with wide eyes, and he wonders if you hadn't even noticed until now that he's still here—that he hasn't run.

“I want to hear you,” he says, his voice scraping with need. “I want to make you come, baby. Just like this.”

“How can you be sure you still know how I like it?” you tease, and of course you're still pushing back, still trying to get your hands around his throat even when he's pinning you down, putting his mouth on your cunt.

His hand slips down to your breast and squeezes at the same time he begins to lap at your little pearl, his nose crushed to your pelvis.

“Fuck!”

Yeah, he still knows how you fucking like it.

You grasp blindly for his shoulders, your legs shaking as he licks through your pussy, letting his saliva mingle with your juices. You're so goddamn soft, so pliant and warm for him, your shell splintering into pieces.

You respond to every touch as if it's a lighted match dropped onto your skin. Threading your fingers through his hair, you let your head fall back against the pillow. Surrender.

He grins into your pussy, his hand sliding back down your body. Wetting his fingers in a few languid swipes through your slit, he slowly opens you up.

“Oh,” you moan, “That’s… mmm, that feels—”

“I know, cielo. I know, baby. Just relax, okay? Let me in.”

Your back arches as he slides two fingers inside, his knuckles disappearing. He twists his wrist and curls them upward and you sob his name, the veins in your throat pulsing for him like a song. Your breath crackles out of you like embers, sweat pooling in the hollow of your throat, and it feels like dipping his fingers into a pot of liquid honey.

“Javi, you're going to make me fucking come. I… God, I can’t—”

“Then fucking come for me, cielo. C’mon, baby.”

Your heel digs hard into his back as he pumps his fingers in and out, his tongue swiping repeatedly over your puffy clit. You sob his name, your fingers tugging his hair so hard it stings, and he wonders how long it's been since you've let someone else in. How long has it been since you last trusted someone enough to see you this way?

Your last cry of Javier is a feeble thing on your lips, the final syllables petering out to silence as you reach your climax. He keeps his lips suctioned around your clit and his fingers applying gentle pressure to the sweet, spongy spot inside you, his free hand curling around your thigh to keep you anchored to the mattress. He's worried you'll begin to fly away when he sees the way your back curves. He wants to walk beneath that archway, to see if it will lead him to greener pastures.

He doesn't think he'll ever tire of watching you come. Your eyes closed, your brows raised as if in shock, your mouth dropping open as if your body is trying to starve itself of any oxygen in an attempt to prolong the high. You gasp, your leg kicking out, his name a scramble of letters on your tongue, your body writhing under his weight. He’d paint this moment if he could.

“Goddamn beautiful,” he says, scattering open-mouthed kisses on your thighs, your belly, your heaving breasts. “Just as good as last time?”

“I'm not impressed yet,” you say, panting. “Show me more.”

“Fucking happily.”

Your hands cup his face as he crawls up your body, bringing him down to you for a kiss. He's addicted to your mouth. Kissing you is petal-soft, your juices still tingling on his Cupid’s bow, gentle but assured. Exploratory, as if this isn’t only a quick fuck but a Maybe this could be more. Maybe this could be something.

You whisper his name, letting his forehead drop between your breasts as you catch your breath. “Oh my God.”

“Still taste like fucking heaven,” he says, pressing his lips to your throat.

“You'll never see heaven, cabrón.”

“Hmph. I see you're learning.”

“From the worst.”

He hoists your thigh around his hip and rolls over so you're sitting on his lap. His cock sits heavy on his belly, his thighs warm underneath yours. Patting your flank, he urges you to shuffle toward him until your wet pussy slides along his length.

He squeezes your hips, his eyes drinking in the sight of your naked body. “Fuck.”

You laugh, rolling your hips over his cock. “You said that last time.”

He twitches, precum spitting from the tip and pooling on his belly. His cock appears and vanishes beneath your body as you rub your clit on his length, soaking it with your sticky wetness.

You plant your hands on his chest for leverage, your weight sinking into him. Good. He wants his chest to cave in under your hands. He wants you to curl up in the crater and make a home for yourself.

“Jesus,” he utters, his hand sliding up your torso and kneading your breast. “You're gonna come for me again, baby. Just like this.”

“I don’t take orders from you, Peña,” you say, your voice airy. You don't stop your slow, grinding rhythm, your slit spreading your juices all over his cock.

“I don't see you stopping,” he bites back, tweaking your nipple between his fingers.

You moan, throwing your head back, and Javier can't help but surge upright, gripping the back of your neck and pulling you down to him for a bruising kiss.

You gasp into his mouth, your hips snapping back and forth as you grind feverishly against his cock. “Jav… I’m gonna come…”

“I know,” he says, his hand on your lower back, coaxing you toward your high. “Come for me. C’mon.”

You whimper, your body seizing against him, your breasts pushed into his chest and your face in the crook of his neck. He holds you so close that a piece of paper couldn't fit between your bodies, nipping your earlobe as your thighs tremble around his hips.

“I’m gonna fucking explode,” he grumbles in your ear, “if I don't get inside you right now.”

“Would it finally shut you up?” You playfully close your teeth around his throat and he laughs, rolling you onto your back.

“I'm never gonna shut up about how much I want you.”

You smile up at him, tracing your fingers along his jawline. “Well, then, I can live with that.”

He takes hold of his cock and guides the head through your slit, wetting it in your mess. Your legs twitch with an aftershock, your hands grasping his shoulders.

He grins. “This all for me?”

“You're such an asshole.”

“Tell me again when my dick is inside you, baby.”

You laugh softly, your fingers sliding through his hair. It curls over his forehead and partially obscures his view of your face as he positions himself at your entrance.

He hisses through his teeth as he sinks into you, his forehead dropping to yours. Warm and wet and fucking tight, you pull him in so deep he doubts he'll be able to work up the courage to leave you. “Shit.”

Your open mouth slides along his temple, legs hitching up around his hips to deepen the angle. He groans raggedly, brows pinching as he bottoms out inside you, his fist clenching around the sheets beside your head.

Your eyes are drooping, pupils puffy with desire, your lips swollen from kissing him. The small cry you let out when his hips meet yours reminds him of the girl he took to bed ten years ago. In this moment, you're more vulnerable than he’s ever seen you, and he knows this will change everything. He cannot let you slink silently away into the night like he did last time, the way he knows a part of you wants to right now.

He takes your hand, his fingers sliding through yours, and brings it above your head, leaning over you and slanting his mouth over yours.

His thrusts are slow to start but fuck, he’ll come in two pumps if he goes any faster. Your tight cunt takes him in so deep it's as if your body was meant to house him, a tiny porch light in the distance he's always been trying to reach from over the mountain.

You kiss him eagerly, your tongue fighting with his as you moan into his mouth, trying to snap and melting instead. You can poke and prod and irritate him until the end of time, but he knows you. He knows you the same way he remembers your body and what it likes. He knows you the same way he knows how to fan your flames, to keep your fire lit. He pulls away just to look into your eyes and, like the split second of consciousness before his morning alarm begins to chime, he feels he can see right into your soul.

“Fuck me,” you whisper, and like a sailor, he follows your song. Pulling his hips back, he bares his teeth at the sight of his length glistening with your wetness. His hand, still intertwined with yours, brings your fingers to your pussy.

“Feel that?” he says. “You feel how fuckin’ wet she is for me? I’m not gonna last.”

“Good,” you say, spreading your folds open with your fingers to give him a good look at how you're taking him. He doubles over, his cock twitching inside you. Jesus, this fucking woman. “Now fuck her. Please.”

He obeys your wish like failing will kill him, grabbing your hips to keep them in place as he pounds into you. You cry out his name, spreading your thighs wider to take him deep, your hands grasping blindly for his arms.

“Fuckfuckfuck… Javi…”

“This what you needed?” he pants, hiking your leg up around his hip as he sits on his haunches. Your eyes roll back in your head at the new angle, your throat bobbing in a fruitless attempt to take in air. “You needed to be fucked stupid, huh? Just like this? Never thought I'd see you so quiet, baby.”

Whatever you want to say in retort comes out strangled, a groan pitching high in your throat. Javier chuckles. “Dick must be in your throat.”

You whine, your cunt closing in around him as if trying to cut off his circulation. He’s harder than steel, his heavy balls slapping against your ass with every thrust. You manage a weak fuck-you, but the pride of rendering you speechless has gone to his head.

The wet shlick of your pussy makes him dizzy. The room smells of sweat and sex and his headboard slams repeatedly against the wall. His ears begin to ring as his orgasm approaches, his balls pulling tight with the need to fill you up.

You nod frantically, a silent admission that yes, you're going to come. The feral gleam in your eye drives him to lean over and kiss you, his arm sliding around your waist to fix you to him.

“I’m gonna come. Please make me come, baby, please.”

He mouths wetly at your jaw, his hand slipping between your bodies to rub your wet little pearl. You bite down on his shoulder, your hips bucking, your pussy choking his cock so tight he groans louder than he's ever heard himself. Your name is the only word he can think of.

Your climax wrecks your whole body. He holds you in the throes of your little death, your fingernails leaving grooves in his back, sweat shining on your skin. He's never stood a chance.

“Where?” he asks, feeling your cunt squeeze him. His head is swimming. Everything sounds muffled, as if he's a foot underwater. “Where, baby? I’m clean. Fuck, where?”

“Inside me,” you plead. “Want to be full of you. Please.”

He squeezes his eyes shut and hugs your body close, a sailor marooned, clinging to driftwood. His mouth finds anything it can bear down upon: your jaw, your chin, your throat, the sweat-slick space between your breasts. He comes hard, his cock pulsing inside you for so long it becomes close to painful. You're his only lifeline, your fingers in his hair, chest heaving, your calming heartbeat like the bridge of a song.

He can feel himself leaking out of you, but he doesn't pull out straight away. Collapsing, Javier leaves gentle kisses on your throat where he'd lost himself, soothing the bite marks with his tongue. You sigh, apparently content, your fingers dancing up and down his arm.

“All right,” you say quietly, your voice like thunder in the silent room. “That was better than last time.”

When he wakes, the clock reads two a.m. and the bed is void of you.

His hand finds cool, rumpled sheets. Your clothes are gone from the floor. Panic sits high in his chest as he tosses the sheets off his naked body and steps frantically into a pair of jeans. He doesn't hear the rumbling of your truck engine but the voice in his head growls just as loud.

You let her go. You never should have touched her. You should have stayed away, far away, so you'd never hurt her again.

The house is calm. He can hear his father’s faint snores from the other side of his bedroom door and the chirping of crickets under the window. A French white baking dish soaks in the kitchen sink. Evidence of your existence litters the room and he can't even see half of it. It lingers in the scent of your rose perfume and the lemon dish soap. You reside in his arteries and you beat inside him like a heart.

He finds you by the river, trying to skip stones. One by one, they sink with a plunk, and you twist your fists in the grass beside your legs.

“Hey,” he says carefully, as if he might spook you. “You, uh… you left.”

You don't turn to face him, but he can hear the smile in your voice. “Taste of your own medicine.”

“Yeah,” he chuckles, dropping onto the ground by your side, “that didn't feel good.”

“What's your technique?” you ask, picking up another stone. “All my rocks keep sinking.”

He resists the urge to push closer into your space, adjusting the rock strategically between your fingers. “Make sure you keep your angle parallel to the water. Like throwing a disc.”

“Did your dad teach you this?” you ask him, winding your arm back and tossing the stone. It skips twice before it descends into the black water.

“My mom, actually,” he says. “She would take me on walks along the river when I was a kid. If you're going to keep throwing things, mijo, you might as well do it correctly.”

You smile fondly. “I could have used some lessons.”

“No,” he says, watching your face screw up in concentration as you toss another stone. “No, you're perfect.”

Three skips.

The river is quiet and still and it doesn't feel so heavy anymore, so fathomless. The stones ripple through the water as it laps softly at the river’s edge. He could touch the bottom if he stood in it.

Your pupils are infused with moonlight. You meet his eyes and the corners of your mouth are turned down, your expression so vulnerable that he feels compelled to check your heartbeat like he would a deer on the roadside.

“Will you give me another chance?”

You blink, and it seems to last an age, his heartbeat stopping as your eyes briefly close.

“I want to give us a real shot. If I’m going to fight with someone every day of my life, I want it to be you. It has to be you. And I’d be an idiot to let you go again.”

You reach for his hand in the darkness. A silvery varnish soaks the landscape in moonlight and he can picture himself here forever, sitting with you in silence and soft grass and something that feels like hope.

“You are an idiot,” you say. “But I like fighting with you.”

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