Chapter 14 Miles #2
I'm staring at the yard and my throat is tight and I don't trust myself to speak because he's describing my life. He's describing my exact life and he doesn't know it.
"When everything happened with Lawson — the heat, the pregnancy, all of it — I thought my career was over. I thought my life was over." He pauses. "It was the beginning. I just couldn't see it yet."
"That's..." I swallow. "I'm glad it worked out for you."
"It didn't 'work out.' It blew up and I rebuilt." He turns to look at me. "The scary part isn't the blowing up. The scary part is believing that someone will still want you when they see all the pieces."
I nod because I can't speak. He means well.
He's being generous and honest and he has no idea that the thing he's describing — the heat, the pregnancy, the forced reckoning that rebuilt his life — is a door I can't walk through.
He got pregnant and it changed everything and he rebuilt and now he has Noah and Lawson and this full, loud house.
The pregnancy was the catalyst. The body cooperated.
The biology did what it was supposed to do.
Mine didn't. Mine can't. And no amount of blowing up is going to change that.
"You okay?" Kole asks gently. "Sorry, I didn't mean to—"
"No, you're fine." I take a breath. "I think I just needed some air."
We stand together for another minute, silent, and then the door opens and Lawson sticks his head out and says "babe, Noah just put his hand in the curry" and Kole sighs the sigh of a parent who has sighed this sigh a thousand times and goes inside.
I stay on the porch alone for a moment and press my palms flat against the cold railing and breathe.
When I go back in, Ray is sitting on the floor with Noah in his lap.
Noah has been cleaned up — mostly — and is leaning back against Ray's chest, drowsy, his thumb in his mouth.
Ray has one arm across the toddler's stomach, holding him steady, and the other is gesturing as he talks to Alex about something.
He looks down at Noah and adjusts his grip and the movement is so natural, so easy, so much like a father, that I have to look away.
Lawson sees me looking. "He's good with kids," he says, handing me a fresh glass of wine. "Must be the uncle practice."
"Noah needs a cousin his own age," Devon says from the couch, pointing at Ray. "Get on that."
"Working on it," Ray says, easy and laughing, and the room laughs with him and I smile because that's what my face is supposed to do and inside I am falling through the floor.
The evening winds down. Gabriel has been asleep for an hour.
Noah is fighting it — he wants to stay up with the grown-ups, which mostly means sitting on Ray's lap and aggressively trying to give everyone his pacifier.
Kole is cleaning up and gently refusing help.
Lawson is wrapping leftover food into containers and pressing them into people's hands.
"You sure you don't want a ride?" Devon asks me at the door. Alex is holding a sleeping Gabriel and a bag of leftovers and looks like he's been ready to leave for approximately two hours.
"I've got him," Ray says, keys already in his hand.
Devon looks at Ray. Looks at me. Doesn't say anything. Hugs his brother with one arm and says "call me tomorrow" in a tone that means "tell me everything."
The car is quiet. Not the tense quiet of Thursday morning — something softer. The streets are dark and the neighborhood gives way to downtown and then my building, and Ray pulls up to the curb and puts the car in park.
"That was good," he says. "Right?"
"Your family is..." I search for the word. "Loud."
He laughs. "Yeah. They are." He's looking at me and his expression is open and he's not asking for anything, not pushing for anything, just sitting there being Ray in the way that makes me want to take my skin off so he can see all the way through me. "You fit in, you know. Devon liked you."
"Devon interrogated me."
"That's how he shows love."
I look at the dark lobby of my building through the windshield. I think about my apartment up there — the clean counters and the silent rooms and the bed that smells like nothing and no one.
"You want to come up?" I say it before I can stop myself. My voice is quiet and not quite steady.
Ray goes still. He's looking at me and I watch him processing — what I'm offering, what it means that I'm the one asking.
"Yeah," he says. "Okay."
My apartment is dark when we walk in. I don't turn on the overhead light — just the lamp in the living room, which gives everything a soft, insufficient glow.
Ray stands in the middle of my living room and looks around and I watch him take it in.
The white walls. The minimal furniture. The bookshelf organized by color.
The kitchen with nothing on the counters except a coffee maker and a single mug.
"It's very... you," he says. Not unkind. Just honest.
"That's not a compliment."
"It's an observation." He's looking at me now, not the apartment. "It's quiet."
It is. After the dinner — the laughing, the babies, all those overlapping voices — my apartment sounds like a held breath. Like a room waiting for something to happen in it.
I cross the room. Ray watches me come and he doesn't move, doesn't reach for me, just stands there and waits for me to close the distance.
I stop in front of him. The dinner is still on his clothes — garlic and wine and the layered scents of other people's homes — and underneath it, him. Pepper and ozone.
I put my hand on his jaw. He exhales, slow and shaking, and his eyes close for a second and open again.
I kiss him. Slow. Not like the resort — not desperate, not angry, not heat-driven.
Just my mouth on his, quiet and wanting, and his hand coming up to rest on my hip like he's afraid to hold too tight.
I pull him closer and he lets me set the pace and I kiss him like I'm cataloging every detail — the pressure, the heat, the way his breath stutters — before any of it can be taken away.
His forehead presses against mine. We breathe together in my dark, quiet apartment, and somewhere in the silence the refrigerator hums and the building settles and a siren passes on the street below and none of it matters. Nothing in this apartment has ever mattered. It's just a place I sleep.
He's the first thing in this apartment I didn't choose for its neutrality.