Litany Of Sins

3 Different Storms, The Same Sun

CHAPTER 3

Different Storms, The Same Sun

“Everett.”

“Oh god, please…”

The memory was so loud she could almost hear the frantic creak of the mattress and the rhythmic, heavy impact of his body against hers. In her mind, the world was a blur of sweat and friction—the raw, pounding rhythm of him taking her until she was breathless and gasping his name.

“Don’t stop…right there…” She could feel the ghost of his weight, the ghost of his grunts and how she gasped when he pounded against her hard, the desperate way she used to claw at the sheets while begging him not to stop.

The sharp mechanical ding of the cash register acted like a slap, shattering the illusion and dragging her back to the present. Lila realized her hand was white-knuckled, fisted into the fabric of her apron beneath the counter as if she were still clinging to those bedsheets. Her chest heaved as she forced her eyes upward. Blinking away the haze of more than a decade-old climax, Lila looked at the man standing across from her.

“That will be five-fifty,” she managed, her voice sounding far more composed than she felt as the mundane price was a stark contrast to the fire still licking at her skin.

Every second their eyes remained locked, the quiet hum of the cafe was drowned out by the roar of her memory. She was not standing behind a counter anymore; she was pinned beneath him, the rhythmic creak of the bed keeping time with her frantic gasps. She could almost feel the rough, possessive weight of his body and the bruising pressure of his hand around her throat as he took her with a desperate, primal hunger. The ghost of his mouth against her skin and the memory of how he used to break her down until she was sobbing his name made the air in the shop feel suddenly, suffocatingly hot.

“Here you go,” Everett responded, sliding a ten-dollar note across the counter. He offered a small, knowing smile. “Keep the change.”

As Lila reached for the bill, his fingers brushed against hers—a ghost of a touch that hit her like a physical shock. In that split second of skin-on-skin contact, the sterile air of the coffee shop vanished, replaced by the phantom heat of their younger bodies tangled together in the dark many times in the past. The memory of their naked, rhythmic collision felt so real it made her skin sting.

“Thanks... I will… have your order ready in a moment,” she stammered, her voice a thin, brittle imitation of the professional El she had spent years perfecting.

“Thank you,” he replied, his casual tone acting as a direct contrast to her obvious nerves.

Lila snapped the register shut with a sharp clack, turning to the row of empty cups. “And... a name for the order?” she asked, clinging to the safety of the shop’s standard script for strangers.

Everett’s expression shifted, a dry scoff escaping him as he leaned slightly over the counter. “Seriously, Lyle? You know exactly who I am and—” He caught himself, the air between them turning heavy as he pivoted to a single word. “Percy.”

The name hit her like a physical blow. It was a relic from their youth—a private nickname she had crafted just for him, a secret language that no one else had ever been invited to speak.

Lila let out a long, shaky breath as she reached for a marker and a blank cup, her head bowed to avoid the heat of his gaze. “Is that Percy with a Y or an IE?” she asked, her voice a forced note of barista-standard politeness.

Everett’s soft, low laugh vibrated in the air between them. “Percy with a Y,” he replied, his eyes dropping to the way her knuckles whitened as she gripped the pen. “Because the girl I knew who gave me that nickname hated wasting time on an extra letter—something she used to call cute but unnecessary.”

The air left her lungs. He was not just answering a question; he was reciting a piece of her own soul back to her. She remembered the nights of scribbling that name, always cutting it short because she would rather spend that extra second touching him than writing his nickname with an ‘IE.’

Lila bit the inside of her cheek, the sharp sting helping her focus as she scribbled PERCY in bold, steady letters. When she finally looked up, she was met with a smile that felt like a solar flare—the same devastatingly handsome expression that had once been her entire world. But it was different now; the boyish edges had been replaced by a decade of hard-earned maturity, making the charm even more dangerous.

“I will call your name when it is—”

“Could you bring it over to my table instead?” Everett interrupted gently, his tone polite but persistent. He lifted his laptop bag, gesturing toward a quiet corner. “I have got some work to wrap up.” He offered a small, tentative smile that felt less like a command and more like a plea. “Please, Lyle?”

Lila let out a long, silent breath through her parted lips, the air feeling heavy with the realization that a small, stubborn part of her still answered to him—a part she was desperately trying to suffocate.

Clinging to her composure, she gave a stiff nod and forced her well-practiced work smile into place. “Of course,” she replied, her tone professional but guarded. “If you decide that you would like something to eat later on, just let me know.”

Not letting him talk more, she quickly turned away, her shoulders dropping as she released a heavy, jagged breath through her parted lips.

As she began the familiar, rhythmic motions of preparing the iced coffee, the muscle memory of her hands could not stop her mind from drifting. She was suddenly back in that final, devastating night—the air cold and thick with the sound of a heart breaking. It was a memory she had spent more than a decade sanitizing, surgically removing the pain until she had convinced herself of a more convenient truth: that they were nothing more than a college distraction.

“We are just having fun, Lila. We had a deal. Do not make it more than it is,” she remembered him saying once, his voice low and teasing against her skin. And she nodded, swallowing the “I love you” that had been clawing at her throat. “Of course,” she had whispered back, “just a f**k buddy. Nothing more.”

She had lived by that lie for ten years since they parted from each other, building a fortress around her strong and over it persona. But now, with him standing just a few feet away, that fortress was crumbling.

A faint, persistent ache stirred in the depths of her chest—a feeling she could not quite diagnose. She could not tell if it was just the residual heat of a lingering lust that had never truly cooled, or the ghost of an unrequited love that had simply been waiting for him to say her name again.

Lila focused on the hiss of the espresso machine, using the mechanical rhythm to drown out the roar in her ears. She exhaled a long, measured breath through her parted lips—the kind she used to teach her patients to panic—and repeated her new mantra like a prescription. “You are not going to let him disrupt your peace, Lila. Not here. Not ever again.” she whispered to the steam. “He is a ghost. He belongs to a version of you that does not exist anymore, and you have already survived that life.” She watched the dark liquid swirl into the ice, a cold, bitter reminder of the distance she had put between then and now.

As the espresso machine went silent, Lila set the iced Americano onto a small tray. She took a steadying breath, her fingers curling around the cool metal as she lifted it.

Strangely, the frantic hammering in her chest had subsided into a hollow, rhythmic calm—the kind of stillness that only comes from a deep, ancient familiarity. She knew the way he carried himself, the way he breathed, and the way he existed in a room; it was a muscle memory she could not unlearn.

Her gaze remained fixed on him as she crossed the floor. He was hunched over his laptop, his brow furrowed in that intense, singular focus she remembered from long nights in the library.

A thousand questions swirled in her mind, threatening to spill over: Why are you here? How have you been? Did you ever think of me even once? Did you miss – “No.” She spoke firmly as she shook her head to get rid of those thoughts out of her head.

For a fleeting, dangerous second, she imagined pulling out the chair opposite him and simply asking.

As she got closer, she noticed the faint, fine lines at the corners of his eyes—the map of a decade she had not been a part of. She had them, too, a matching set of silver threads earned from years of stress and laughter in equal measure. They were the physical proof of their shared growth, occurring in parallel but thousands of miles apart.

They were older now, weathered by different storms, yet sitting in the same sun.