38. Rafe
RAFE
Imake it twenty-six hours without her before the silence in my own loft turns into something I can't stand being inside of anymore.
Twenty-six hours of replaying every word I threw across that brewhouse, twenty-six hours of telling myself I meant all of it and none of it at the same time, and somewhere around eleven at night I give up pretending I'm going to sleep through this and get in the truck instead.
I try the word out loud once, alone in the dark cab, testing it the way you press on a bruise to see if it still hurts.
Something dangerous, she called me. It still hurts.
Every version of tonight I've run through in my head ends the same way, with me either apologizing for something I don't fully believe I did wrong, or doubling down on something I said too fast and too hard to be entirely fair.
Neither one gets me any closer to fixing this.
I gave up trying to script it somewhere around hour twelve.
I don't call ahead. There's no speech built and ready the way I usually build one, because every version I try sounds like an apology I don't fully believe or an argument I don't want to finish.
So I drive the eleven miles empty-handed, nothing planned at all, which isn't like me, and by the time the cabin's gravel drive comes into view I've stopped caring that it isn't.
The porch light's on. It's always on. I used to think that was for the twins, a small mercy against the dark, and some nights now I let myself believe it's for me too.
The door swings open before my boots hit the top step, like she's been standing at that window the whole time I've been driving here since the second I walked out of the brewhouse last night.
She doesn't say anything. Doesn't ask why I'm here, doesn't make me explain the last day or the fight or the exact shape of everything I'm too raw to put into words tonight.
She just studies my face in the porch light a moment, reading whatever's written there, and then she steps back and pulls me in out of the cold.
That's the whole conversation. That's all either of us needs it to be.
I cross the threshold and she's already reaching for me, both hands fisting in my jacket, hauling me the last two feet like the door closing behind us isn't fast enough on its own.
I catch her up against it anyway, my hands finding her waist, then her hip, then lower still, relearning the shape of her like twenty-six hours could have changed a single thing about it.
Her mouth finds mine before I've even got my hands free, and there's nothing tentative in the way she kisses me, nothing asking permission, just twenty-six hours of the same ache I've been carrying finally getting somewhere to go.
She tastes like mint and something warmer underneath it that's just her, familiar enough to undo me faster than it should, and I kiss her back like I'm trying to answer every unspoken question between us tonight.
"The twins," I manage, somewhere between breaths.
"Asleep. Hours ago." Her fingers are already working the buttons of my shirt, quick and certain. "I checked twice."
"I'm not here to fix last night."
"I know." She pulls back just far enough to look at me, eyes dark, voice rough. "I don't need you to fix it. I just need you."
She kisses me again like punctuation, like she's underlining it, her hands sliding up under the hem of my shirt to find bare skin, and the small, involuntary sound she makes against my mouth when she gets there does something to what's left of my restraint that twenty-six hours apart never came close to.
I've got one hand tangled in her hair and the other flat against her spine, pulling her in until there's no space left between us worth naming, and for a few long seconds neither of us moves, just breathing each other in like we've both been holding our breath since the brewhouse.
That's all either of us says for a while.
I walk her back toward the bedroom with my hands full of her, memorizing the shape of her spine through the thin cotton of her shirt, stopping twice more against the hallway wall because neither of us can manage three full steps without needing the other one closer.
By the time we reach the door she's already got that same shirt half over her head, impatient in a way I've never seen from her before, like slow isn't a language either of us has access to tonight.
I peel it off her completely and take one second just to look at her in the thin light spilling from the hall, filing this away too, and she goes for my belt without waiting on permission, her fingers quick and a little unsteady in a way that makes my own hands clumsier than they've been in years.
There's nothing practiced or careful about any of it, just two people trying to close a distance that opened up somewhere neither of us saw coming, leaving whatever's left of our clothes scattered across a hallway neither of us quite makes it past.
We fall onto the bed still half dressed, and I take my time only in the places that matter, tracing the old, familiar geography of her with a kind of desperate attention, like memorizing her again might undo whatever the fight put between us.
Her skin is warm everywhere I touch it, warmer still where my mouth follows my hands, and she arches into every touch, breath catching, her hands fisted in my hair and then flat against my chest and then gripping my shoulders like she's afraid I might actually leave again if she lets go too soon.
I take my time working my way down her, cataloguing every reaction like it's intelligence I actually need to get through tonight, the way her breath snags the moment my mouth finds the curve of her throat, her whole body going taut and then loose again when I find the spot just under her ribs that's always been hers alone.
She says my name once, quiet, almost like a warning, and I ignore it in favor of finding out how many more times I can make her say it before either of us has any patience left for slow.
"Rafe." My name comes out of her broken in the middle, half plea and half command, and it undoes something in me faster than anything else could have.
I move over her, and she pulls me down into her with both hands, urgent, her legs locking around my waist like she's trying to make the distance between us physically impossible instead of just emotionally unbearable.
For a second neither of us moves at all, foreheads pressed together, both of us breathing hard, like we each need one more heartbeat to believe this is actually happening before letting it go any faster than this.
Then her legs tighten around me and whatever patience either of us had left goes with it.
There's nothing slow about the rhythm we find, nothing gentle, both of us chasing something closer to certainty than pleasure, though it's plenty of both.
Her nails drag light down my back, my name breaking apart in her mouth every time I move, and I bury my face against her throat just to hear her better, just to feel the exact moment her breathing stops keeping any kind of rhythm at all.
She says my name again, and then just sound, low and unguarded, her fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to leave a mark I'll be glad to find in the morning.
"Look at me," I tell her, and she does, eyes open and dark and fixed on mine even as her whole body starts to shake apart beneath me. "Right here. Just this."
"Just this," she echoes, like a vow instead of an answer, her eyes never once leaving mine even as she starts to come undone, and I hold that look as long as either of us can stand it, watching her instead of looking away, because I need to watch this happen as much as I need anything else tonight.
Then she's gone, shattering around me with a sound that's half my name and half something wordless, her whole body pulling taut and then dissolving in the same breath.
I follow her under a moment later, my own control finally giving out the way it's been threatening to since the second she opened that door, my face buried against her throat, both of us wrecked and gasping like closing that distance just cost something physical out of each of us.
We stay tangled together a long time after, both of us reluctant to be the one who breaks it first, her fingers tracing slow, absent circles over the old scar at my ribs the way she always does when her mind's somewhere quiet and far off.
My pulse takes its own time finding its way back to something ordinary, hers doing the same under my palm where it rests low on her back, and neither of us rushes to fill the quiet, like breaking it might undo whatever we just managed to fix, even if it's only temporary.
The room's dark except for a strip of moonlight through the curtains, and the quiet stretches out comfortable between us, doing whatever work it can.
It's real. Whatever this is between us, whatever just happened in this bed, none of it is pretend, and I don't doubt for one second that she needed this exactly as much as I did.
There's a version of tonight where that's enough, where two people who love each other close the distance the only way their bodies know how, and it counts as an answer instead of just a good question.
I want to believe I'm living in that version. Some part of me already knows better.
But somewhere in the stillness after, lying with her head on my chest and her hand resting over my heart, I understand this didn't actually fix anything.
The fear from that brewhouse last night is still there, just quieter now, buried under something that felt good enough to mistake for healing.
We didn't talk. We didn't say the words either of us needed to hear.
We just found a different way to have the same unfinished conversation, and it worked for an hour.
Now the hour's over and the fear's still waiting.
I keep still a long while, just listening to her breathe, memorizing the weight of her against my chest, every detail filed away because it might matter later. It probably will. Nothing about the last two days has convinced me I get to keep anything without working for it first.
"You're thinking too loud," Jenna says into the dark, her voice half asleep already. "I can feel it."
"Just thinking."
"About the hearing?"
"About all of it." I press my mouth against her hair, and she settles closer, like she's trying to borrow some steadiness from me even though I know for a fact I'm running low myself tonight. "We should talk. Actually talk. Not just this."
"I know." Her hand tightens slightly over my heart. "Tomorrow. I promise."
"Tomorrow," I agree, and I mean it when I say it, though a quieter, more honest part of me already doubts it's going to happen the way either of us wants it to.
She's asleep within minutes, worn out in the particular way that comes after a day like the one we both just had, and I lie there a long time after, staring at a ceiling I can't see in the dark, running through everything I should have said tonight instead of everything I did.
Somewhere out past the window an owl calls twice and goes quiet.
Whatever it needed to say, it said it and was done.
Morning shows up uninvited, sunlight cutting through the curtains before either of us is ready for it, the twins already awake down the hall arguing cheerfully over which cartoon wins this morning's vote, and Jenna's up and moving before I've even fully surfaced, pulling on clothes with the brisk, distracted efficiency of a woman whose whole day just got a deadline stamped on it.
Josie's voice carries clean through the wall, indignant and fully awake. "You picked yesterday. It's my turn. That's the rule."
"The rule's dumb."
"The rule's the rule, Eli."
I almost laugh, the first real one in two days, and for a second the whole weight of the hearing and the fight and everything unsaid between Jenna and me gets crowded out by two eight-year-olds litigating cartoon rights with the seriousness of Supreme Court justices.
Jenna catches my eye in the mirror, something easing loose in her expression for one whole breath, before the day comes rushing back in behind it.
"I've got to get them fed and dressed and out the door in forty minutes," she says, already pulling her hair back, quick and efficient, the version of her the whole world sees. "Priya wants to go over my testimony one more time before we head to the courthouse tomorrow."
"I know. Go handle the troops."
"We didn't talk last night." She says it plainly, no accusation in it, just a fact she's setting down between us to deal with later. "I mean actually talk."
"No. We didn't." I sit up, elbows on my knees, watching her move around the room like there's still a version of this morning where we find twenty minutes neither of us actually has. "I don't think there's time for it now, either."
"There isn't." She turns to face me, and just for a second the busy motion stops, letting me see exactly how tired she is underneath it, how much of last night's fear followed her straight into today. "I still meant what I said. All of it."
"So did I."
"Then we'll figure out the rest after tomorrow." She crosses the room and kisses me, quick and certain, nothing desperate left in it now, just something steadier trying to hold on through everything neither of us has said. "We have to."
"We will."
I watch her walk out to wrangle two kids into shoes and backpacks, and I sit alone in her bedroom longer than I probably should, the ache from last night still sitting exactly where it was when I woke up, unfixed, unsaid, riding shotgun straight into the one day neither of us can afford to get wrong.
By the time I let myself out, Eli's already lost the cartoon argument and made his peace with it, and Josie gives me a wave from the kitchen table like nothing about this morning is any different from a hundred others.
Maybe for them it isn't. I climb into the truck and sit there a second before I turn the key, watching the porch light finally click off against the daylight, and I head back toward the brewery with that same unfinished conversation riding in the seat beside me the whole way.