Chapter Nineteen #5
“Ugh.” I bring my knees up and hide my face. “So embarrassing. We’re almost forty years old.”
“You could have told me, you know. That you were having problems.”
I unhide my face and study him. I see a lot more hurt there than I would have predicted.
“But I get it,” he continues on. “I probably wouldn’t have told me either. Nobody wants relationship advice from someone like me.”
I bristle. “Someone like you?”
“Oh, don’t make me spell it out. You already know.”
I’ve seen Raff sad plenty of times. Occasionally mad at himself, but this totally defeated, low-grade-despisement thing he has going on feels very foreign and unnatural.
“I do not know.”
He twiddles his thumbs and tips his head back to watch the stars.
“Hey.” I wait until he looks at me. “Just now, when you said ‘having random sex with random people and wishing’…Did you mean…Wishing you were different than you are?”
His knee jumps. “No. I don’t know. I mean…
I know we were joking about it the other night.
That it would be so much easier to be like Vin.
To just want the person you have. But…it’s not a joke.
Because I see what it means to you to be who Vin wants.
To be the only thing that Vin wants. It’s…
magic, right? Like, the rarest, most special gift you can ever give to someone?
And…I don’t know if I can ever give that.
I just…I don’t think I’m built that way. To only want one person at a time.”
“No, no, no. You’ve got it backwards. You started at the wrong side of the equation.
The rarest and most special gift is loving someone the way they want, or need, to be loved.
And…Vin and I…we’re still working on that.
I meant it when I said that what you described was a fairy tale.
There is no magic spell that makes all this easy for us, just because we’ve made a monogamous commitment to each other.
Raff, there’s nothing wrong with random sex with random people!
Random people love you! You make random people’s month.
But if what you’re saying is that you want partnership or companionship or a commitment of some kind with someone and you want to keep plowing through New York…
well…it’s New York, go find someone who would be okay with that!
Or who wants to do that with you. You know what?
I’m just going to say it. You are forbidden from getting married, being monogamous, and having kids.
You don’t want it! If you tried to do it, you’d just ruin your life.
And the life of whoever you married. Just have random sex with random people if it makes you happy!
Fall in love five times a week. Date everybody. At the same time!”
“That’s exactly what Lauro said,” he grumbles.
“Then take his advice if you can’t take mine,” I grumble back.
“Lauro is in love with one person and wants to be monogamous and get married and do oil paintings of each other’s butts. This disqualifies him from giving advice on this matter. Same as you.”
“Fine, fine. It’s above my pay grade. All I’m saying is that you wishing you were different can, in no way, shape, or form be the catalyst for Vin and me having had trouble this year. It doesn’t even make sense. Quit blaming yourself.”
He collapses back into his chair and looks at the stars. His head rolls to me. “Are you two really fucking again?”
“Mind your own business!”
He’s grinning at me.
“Go,” he says. “I’ll do the candles.”
And so I do.
Vin rolls over and pulls me into him the second I slide under the covers. His eyes are closed, his face is clean-shaven. It all sends a warm jolt through me.
“Good conversation?” he asks on a low grumble, his eyes still closed.
“Always,” I reply, snuggling closer because he is so warm and so big and so mine.
“Thanks,” he says. “For taking care of my brother.” And then he cracks one eye. “He doing okay?”
“Oh, my God! This family! Why don’t any of you ever ask each other how you’re doing? Always with the Hey, Roz.”
He’s smiling. “It’s a game of telephone. You’re the telephone.”
He’s petting my hair now, pulling the blanket over my shoulder, testing my pillow, deciding his is better and trading them.
“What would you ever do without me?” I ask.
“Please, please don’t make me consider that,” he answers.
And then there’s no more movement. We’re just staring into each other’s eyes, a foot apart, tangled under the blanket.
And it’s all so familiar. The feel of him against me, the shadows that nestle into his face.
The curve of his eyelid, the dark fringe of his eyelashes.
He’s thinking his own thoughts and also trying to guess mine.
I know because I know. Because I’ve spent the last eight years working for the privilege of looking at him and knowing what he’s thinking.
“How,” I whisper through the tremble in my voice. “How could I have forgotten, Vin?”
“Forgotten what?” He’s whispering too.
“That I do always know what you’re thinking.
” Not the details, of course. Rarely the specifics.
And PTSD has made it, maybe irrevocably, more murky.
But at the core of it, of course I know what he’s thinking: I love her.
I want her. How can I help her? What can I do for her today?
That’s my man. This is what is written in his heart.
He moves and I move. We meet in the middle, where the pillows overlap. Our lips greet and then slide gently, his hand searches under my shirt for the smooth skin of my back. He’s rubbing a big, slow circle there.
If, earlier today, he turned me on from the inside out—full heat and speed—well, tonight he works from the outside in.
Long, slow touches, every place but between my legs.
He never stops kissing me. He kisses the scar on my collarbone but leaves my shirt on, sliding me out of my bottoms and one of my legs over his hip.
It’s a long time later, when I’ve been slow-burned until I’m gasping, that he pushes gently into me.
He starts to roll me to my back but pauses, reads my eyes, remembers my triggers.
Instead, then, he rolls to his own back and takes me with him.
I pin myself against him and he holds me so tight our heartbeats talk to each other.
He’s got both hands on my hips and his tongue in my mouth.
And I just don’t care that we’re in his mother’s house. That there are other people here. That someone might hear us. I mean, yes, not ideal. But there are some things more important than propriety. And sometimes you just say, you know what? My marriage comes first tonight.
We kiss and gasp and make quiet love on a squeaky bed. Afterward, when I’m listening to his heartbeat hammer in his rib cage, and the world is mixing with the other world, and I’m floating away, sinking in, warm and Technicolor, he says something.
“What?” I murmur, startling awake for a moment.
“Nothing,” he whispers. “Sleep. I’ll tell you later.”