22Dead Sea || The Lumineers
COLE
She stirswhere she’s resting against my chest and reaches a hand out to wrap it around mine.
“You awake?” I ask in a low voice.
She mumbles something that sounds sort of like a yes and squeezes my hand. I use my free one to stroke her hair. I’m sitting up against the headboard of her bed, watching dust float through the air in her apartment. It’s noon on a Sunday, and we haven’t gotten out of bed yet.
We also didn’t go to sleep until four in the morning. When you promise a girl five orgasms, you stay up until you get the job done.
I find I’m smiling to myself as I keep twisting my fingers in her hair, remembering the way I wrapped it around my fist and pulled while she screamed for me last night. If there’s one sound I’ll never get tired of, it’s that.
My eyes roam over the things in her apartment, the possessions that make up a picture of who she is for anyone who knows her well enough to see it: the cactus collection she’s always adding to because she prefers spiky little plant things to flowers, the CDs she used to pick up at thrift stores back when she wore flannel and Doc Martens every day, the bookshelves crowded with titles that could have been—and probably were—handpicked by Monroe. Her music stand holds a book of songs by The Lumineers. The whole place always smells like her fancy coffee and the candles she likes to burn.
She’s still got that hulking antique mirror in here, and I breathe out a laugh when I remember hauling it up the stairs together.
“Quoi?Whazzsofunny?” Roxanne murmurs, letting go of my hand so she can rub at her eyes.
“Do you remember when you bought that mirror?”
She chuckles against my skin. “Yes. You almost dropped it on me and killed me.”
“You’re the one who wanted to buy a mirror from the fucking Middle Ages. Besides...” I trail my hand down her back and then squeeze the curve of her ass. “I more than made up for it after.”
“Mmm,” she moans. “Yes, you did.”
I heave her further up on my chest and tilt her chin up so I can kiss her. We spent almost all of last night fucking, but it still only takes a few seconds for the heat to build between us again.
“I don’t know,” she gasps out between kisses, “if I can handle more sex.”
“I think you can handle it,” I say against her throat.
I keep kissing her neck until she’s muttering in French and grinding against my leg. We’re both naked, and it would be so easy to shift her over and slide my cock inside her, but that mirror gave me other ideas.
I pull the blankets off us. She protests against the cold, but I just give her ass another squeeze and tell her to get up. I direct her over to the mirror and we stand in front of it, me behind her with my hands resting on her hips.
She’s so damn beautiful. I think I know her body by heart, and then I see it in a certain light or from a different angle, and it’s like I’m learning to appreciate it all over again. With her standing like this, naked and flushed, the skin of her back warm where it’s pressed to my chest, she looks like a fantasy.
No, that’s wrong. She looks better than a fantasy; she looksreal. She looks real and alive andhere. Here with me. She looks like home.
Our reflections go still as we stare at the shape of us together in the mirror. It’s been almost four months since that day Monroe set us up at Taverne Toulouse, which we still give her hell for and which she still only responds to with, “You’re welcome.”
Roxanne and I promised each other to take things slow. We didn’t even sleep together for the first month. We were cautious, scared to break something we didn’t think would survive another crack, but this time isn’t like all the other false starts. We’ve had countless rehearsals, but this time feels like the real show. This is the run-through when everything goes right, when you finally sail past those few notes you kept fucking up during practice and nail your solo before getting swallowed up by the cheering of the crowd. This is that shining moment when you look around and realize that despite all your worries and mistakes, you finally did the damn thing right.
We’re moving into a condo together in two weeks.
Roxanne has a permanent position at her job now. She’s busy as hell, but she says she loves it, and it’s easy to tell that’s true. Some nights she’ll come home raving about whatever distribution disaster she managed to solve or some new marketing breakthrough, and I never get tired of listening to her excitement.
Sherbrooke Station is still going strong. We’re playing bigger gigs than ever, and it’s a running joke between us all that our career is about to peak at any moment. That joke masks an actual fear in all of us, but I try not to let it get to me too often. We’re far from done, and I don’t think the world is through with us yet.
I went to Nadia’s wedding in January. She looked happy, and she told me herself how glad she was to have me there. Auntie is as close to being back to her old self as she ever will be. The heart attack took its toll, but every doctor she’s seen says she has plenty of years ahead of her. I go to their place for dinner almost every week, and most of them time Nadia and her husband are there too, along with Lexi and her family. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to bring Roxanne, but I hope someday we’ll all get there.
I tighten my grip on Roxy’s hips and rest my chin on her shoulder.
“Who would have thought?” I mutter against her skin.
Somehow, she knows exactly what I mean. She’s looking into the mirror and seeing what I see: a scared sixteen-year-old and a bitter young man, both of them filled with pain and confusion, both of them looking for something they don’t know how to name, both of them without a clue about what’s coming for them.
