Chapter Fourteen #2
“Ouch,” Ravi says, frowning. “You seem sad about it.”
Yael raises a brow. “I thought I was ruthless?”
Ravi narrows his eyes at her. “Do you memorize everything I say just so you can throw it back at me?”
She blinks. “You do that.”
“Oh?”
“The first time we met, you quoted ‘decipher subtext’ back to me.” Ravi laughs, and in response, Yael holds up her hand, bisecting the few inches of space between them, so she can start ticking off fingers. “You quoted what I said about you the second time we met—”
“You called me an asshole. That doesn’t take a lot of thought,” he says.
She huffs, continuing, “Just this Friday, you said ‘I thought I was barely taller than you’ when I so kindly offered you my Emergency Car Pants.”
Ravi closes his fist around her wrist and gently lowers her hand. She sucks in a breath the moment they touch. He knows, because he’s staring at her lips. “And you said, ‘I thought you were tall enough to make the difference.’”
They both breathe heavily, not saying anything, while the air turns liquid around them.
Yael makes a quiet, frustrated groan, and then his mouth is on hers.
She opens to him instantly, their lips locking and tongues sliding not a moment later. He releases her wrist slowly, bringing his hand instead to her jaw so he can ease her head back. Get more of her.
That sound escapes her again, and all of her presses into him—her mouth, her breasts, her hips.
Her arms are draped around his neck, and he’s hardening against her and there’s no way she doesn’t feel it.
He skims his hand over her hip, up the bare skin of her stomach, bunching her sweater.
She kisses like she’s trying to devour him, and he’d happily be consumed.
Ravi pauses for air, and when he leans back in, Yael turns her face to the side, leaning away from his kiss.
“WHAT IS IT?” Ravi asks, staring at her lips. His hand is on her ribs, fingertips grazing the band of her bra.
“I hate you,” she whispers, breath ragged. Not even she believes it.
His eyes flick up to hers, then. “No, you don’t,” he says, but he lets his hand fall away from her bare skin, settling over her skirt at her hip. Carefully, he walks her back against the desk, and she lets him. It takes all of two steps, and so much of him stays pressed against her as they move.
He waits, watching. “No, I don’t,” she says, and tilts her head up to brush their lips together.
Ravi kisses her again, this time slow and deep.
Her legs fall open, welcoming him in between them.
He reaches down, dragging the side of his hand along her calf and hitching her skirt up her thigh, urging her weight onto the table.
When he rolls his hips, his erection presses against her so sweetly, her jaw falls open.
His mouth finds her chin, her jaw, her neck.
She threads her fingers into his rain-curled hair as his tongue traces her pulse point.
Yael’s mind goes completely blank. “Ravi,” she gasps.
“I can’t believe,” he says, “you taste this good.”
She whimpers, sliding her hand up his shirt, dragging her fingertips over his abdomen, loving the way he tenses beneath her touch.
He kisses his way from her neck back to her mouth, and she encourages him with a hand at the back of his head.
She trails over his nape, his shoulder, shoves down his overshirt so she can get to his biceps.
God, those arms. He grips her by the hips, hoisting her up farther onto the desk, which sends a stack of papers crashing to the floor.
They break apart at the sound.
Fuck, Yael thinks, what am I doing? She slides down off the table, not making eye contact with Ravi, and does her best to right herself.
One side of her skirt is somehow tucked into her underpants, the underwire of her bra is pressing into places it shouldn’t be, and her hair is, in all likelihood, beyond saving.
How could she do this to Charlie? How could she do this at work? It’s like she’s trying to get herself fired.
And then, a thought that she has no real right to have, but she latches onto it all the same: How could she do this to Kevin?
Yael runs a thumb along her bottom lip, finding it swollen and wet. A confused heat suffuses her chest and cheeks, arousal tangled with embarrassment.
“I’m sorry,” Ravi says. When Yael looks up at him, he’s wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. Devastating.
She shakes her head. “No. This is … This is my fault,” she says.
“That’s not true.”
He’s looking at her the same way he had on Friday, that pained kind of hunger. She looks back at him, feeling too many things all at once.
“Yael—”
“I’ll see you Thursday,” she says.
Ravi stands there, staring, for a beat longer. Then, he nods once and walks out the door.
Yael stays rooted in place, her pulse thundering in her throat. After many, many steadying breaths, she rounds the desk to clean up the mess she’s made. Or rather, relocate the mess to its usual position and order. It takes her minutes longer than it should.
Before she leaves, she checks her reflection in her phone camera.
It probably could be worse, but to her, the flush in her cheeks and the frizzy curls that frame her face tell a tale of being thoroughly debauched.
She digs a silk scrunchie out of her tote, flips her head forward, and gathers her hair into a pineapple, leaving her signature braid hanging down.
The rain stops in time for her to walk home, and God, does she need the air. Her body is a tingling map of memories—the feel of Ravi’s hand around her wrist, her tongue in his mouth, his teeth on her lip, his fingers on the bare skin of her thigh.
The walk doesn’t clear her. Panic and guilt crowd her chest cavity, and by the time she reaches home, she’s finding it hard to breathe evenly.
When she unlocks the door, Charlie’s already on the couch, a bowl and spoon in hand. “Hey Yael! How was book club?”
“Hey, Charlie,” she says, voice thick. “It was fine, how was your day?”
He sets his dinner down. “Are you okay?”
She nods, blinking back tears.
“Yael, you’re clearly not okay. Have you eaten? I have extra parmesan-and-white-bean soup.”
“I just want to shower and go to bed,” Yael says, unable to look at him as she crosses the space to her bedroom door.
“Alright,” Charlie says, and she slips through her doorway.
Yael is a terrible, terrible person and a worse friend. She pulls on a shower cap, turns the water as hot as she can stand it, and scrubs at herself, trying to erase the map. The tears feel comparatively cool streaking down her cheeks.
She slathers on lotion and pulls on her pajamas afterward, and when she emerges from the bathroom, Charlie is knocking on her door.
“Come in,” she mumbles.
He appears with a bowl in hand. “You need to eat,” he says, and it makes the tears well in Yael’s eyes again.
“You shouldn’t be so nice to me,” she says.
Charlie’s brows knit together. “Yael,” he says.
She shakes her head. “I did something really, really stupid.”
“It can’t have been that bad.”
Yael takes a shaky breath. “You’d hate me if you knew.”
“Did you assault someone?” Charlie asks. Yael shakes her head. “Kill anybody? Commit a hate crime on the way home?”
“No,” she says, letting out a sad laugh. If only you knew, she thinks. I am a terrible person for letting you comfort me.
“Then I wouldn’t hate you, Yael. Just take the soup,” he says, and she does. “You’ll talk to me about it tomorrow, when you’re ready. Or if not me, Sanaa. Or, I dunno, Kevin, even.” And then he leaves, closing the door behind him.
Kevin. Another reason she’s suffocated with guilt.
Yael takes the bowl of soup to her reading chair by the window. It feels better to eat. Not good but better, and it makes her more certain that accepting this food from Charlie was wrong. She’ll correct it tomorrow, once she gets herself together. After she calls Sanaa and figures out what to say.
She sets the empty bowl on the windowsill and picks up her phone. Might as well try to fix the other thing eating at her, the one that doesn’t require her to pretend that she doesn’t want to cry.
In her thread with Kevin, she types, I kissed someone tonight, and I felt like I needed to tell you.
God, that sounds like she made out with someone and immediately went to text him. Which she did, but …
She holds down the delete button and instead types, I kissed someone this weekend, and I feel like I should tell you that, and presses send.