Chapter Twenty-One
Ravi returns to the apartment, pizza in hand, feeling more nervous than he has the entire night.
He meant it when he said he needed to think about his answer, not because he doesn’t know why he did it—it’s pretty simple when he gets down to it—but because he knows this is the difference between having just tonight and having the rest of the weekend.
Maybe another time, too, if he’s lucky. And he also doesn’t want to get into everything with Mia and Suresh right now, not when the way Suresh dismissed him this morning still feels so raw.
He opens the door, and Yael is on the couch, tucked into the corner he’d been sitting in.
He can tell it really is her spot. The way she fits there, folded up, the cushions seeming to envelop her, suggests that it’s been molded to her form by repeated use.
There are plates and napkins on the coffee table, and as Ravi crosses over to Yael, she sits up straight and stretches out her legs.
They fill their plates without speaking, and Ravi waits until they’ve both finished their first slices to say, “So…”
“So,” she replies. “You really don’t have to. I know what this is; you don’t owe me anything.”
He takes a deep breath, looking at her. Her eyes are fixed on her pizza.
“I want to, though. I’ll start by saying I don’t think I behaved well, so I don’t mean any of this to imply that what I did was good.
” Yael nods, listening. “I moved to Portland because I had a responsibility to my family. It’s maybe a little more complicated than that, but the point is it would be really hard for me to be a good boyfriend to anybody right now.
I’m not … dating, I guess. I met Charles in a bar, and I was attracted to him, and I went home with him for that reason. I told him as much.”
I’m not looking for anything more than sex, he’d said.
Not something he’s really felt the need to clarify in that kind of circumstance before, particularly with men, but there was something about how Charles had asked him questions and held his hand that made him want to be sure.
In response, Charles had dropped to his knees.
Ravi swallows against the memory. It feels treacherous to let it linger while he’s here, in the very same apartment, with Yael.
“I tried to make polite excuses to leave afterward, and I don’t know …
He wasn’t getting it. I stayed the night when I shouldn’t have.
And he seemed so happy that I had. So, in the morning, when I knew I had to tell him that I was sorry, but I just wasn’t interested, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I thought nobody else was home, and I left. ”
Yael nods, swallowing another bite of pizza. “That’s not … as surprising as I wish it was.” Ravi cocks his head to the side, confused. She clocks the gesture, sighing. “Charlie—which, by the way, is the name he goes by—he thought you were British and that he needed to sound fancy.”
Ravi laughs despite himself. “Not the first time.”
“Really?” Yael says, shifting toward him. “You don’t sound English to me at all. Too … melodic. English accents are boring in comparison.”
Ravi hums, knocking his knee into hers. “I’m glad I don’t bore you.”
Yael barks out a laugh. “You make me feel a lot of things, and bored isn’t one of them,” she says.
Ravi’s tempted to ask for an ordered list, but she continues, “Anyway, Charlie romanticizes every beautiful man he meets a little too much. Have you seen He’s Just Not That Into You?
” Ravi shakes his head. “Oh, well, this won’t mean anything to you, but he’s kind of a Gigi Phillips.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that thinking about it from your perspective, even though it was cowardly, it’s a lot harder to be as angry at you about it.
Which is why I didn’t want to think about it from your perspective. ”
Ravi nods. The way she’s looking at him feels like a gift he doesn’t quite deserve. “Why didn’t you hear us come in the night before?” he asks.
“Oh, I’m done with questions. My belly is very full,” she says, her smile cheeky.
“Yeah?” Ravi replies, slowly rising up on his tucked knee and leaning toward her. She seems to understand his aim, sliding her legs through the space between his and shimmying down until she’s lying flat underneath him, looking up with unrestrained want in her eyes.
“Yeah,” she says, and he bends to kiss her.
It’s amazing, how even though she tastes like the pizza, she somehow tastes even more like her.
He lifts his hips so that she can spread her legs, lowering down for her to wrap around him.
It’s not long before his mouth is on her neck and she is sighing and squirming beneath him.
He kisses his way down her chest, stopping at the edge of her bra.
When he starts to reverse his path, she whines.
Christ. He’s suddenly impatient again, too, so he grants her wish, returning to where she wants him.
He nudges her nipple with his nose through the cotton, and she gasps, arching upward.
Her inhale isn’t even finished when he takes it into his mouth.
“Ravi,” she says. “Bedroom.”
“HOLD ON TO me,” Ravi whispers into Yael’s neck.
“Hmm?” is all she can manage. She wasn’t listening. That seed of hunger has grown into a tree again, its branches forking through her every limb, so quickly it should be embarrassing.
He laughs, nuzzling his nose against her pulse point. “Hold me so I can carry you,” he says, and she obliges. Then he’s lifting her, one hand splayed in the center of her back and the other hooked underneath her thigh.
“I like looking down on you,” she says, and is rewarded with a flash of his crooked incisor.
“I know you do,” he says, carefully rounding the couch. “I plan to give you every opportunity.”
Her body flushes at that, and she dips her head to brush her lips against his.
He stops just short of her bedroom, pinning her back against the wall so he can kiss her more thoroughly, the hand on her back trailing up the side of her torso and stopping, infuriatingly, at the top of her ribs.
She holds on to him for dear life—not because she fears he’ll drop her but because she worries that she’ll melt out of his arms. Her senses find him everywhere: his fingers, his lips, him hard against her as she rocks her hips.
The smell of citrus and sandalwood and the salt of sweat.
His taste on her tongue, his heat in the few places where the two of them don’t touch.
His heavy breaths, the sounds he’s drawing out of her.
All Ravi. She feels delirious with need. Wet, wanting.
He pulls them back from the wall, robbing her of the sweet pressure between them, but it’s only seconds before he carries her to the room and lays her down on the bed.
Ravi covers Yael’s body with his, and it’s delicious like this, too, all the softness below her and the hardness above.
That drag of Ravi’s hips has her whimpering.
When was the last time she felt like this? She can’t remember, but it must be years, eons. Has she ever felt like this? Has she ever felt like this with a cis man?
Yael’s eyes fly open. “Condoms,” she gasps. “I don’t think I have any condoms.”
Ravi props himself on one elbow. His deep-brown eyes look even darker now, the near-black of his hair. “You know,” he says, tracing a finger along her clavicle and following it with his eyes, “half the time when I sleep with someone, the kind of stuff we’ve already done is the main event.”
Yael swallows. “I mean, me too, but—” I want to do this, specifically, with you, specifically. So badly she can think of little else.
“I know,” Ravi says. He presses his thumb right in the center of her bottom lip, pulling it down and watching it curl back into place when he releases it. “Me too.”
“I guess it’s…” Yael says, trying to grasp for the end of her sentence even as she can feel the length of him, heavy and insistent, pressed between them.
“It’s a good time to discuss…” Ravi’s fingertip trails downward, brushing along the underside of her breast. “I can’t think when you do that,” she breathes.
“Sorry,” he says, placing his palm flat and still against her sternum.
Yael’s mind clears long enough to say, “I’ve been tested since my last partner.”
“So have I,” Ravi says.
“And I’m on birth control,” she says, and Ravi nods. “I didn’t say that to … I’m not trying to suggest that we don’t use protection; I just—”
“I didn’t think you were.”
Relief courses through her, her muscles relaxing against her comforter. “Okay,” she says.
“It’s late,” Ravi says, his hand coming to life again. It takes every ounce of effort she has to focus on his words. “What if we just kiss until we want to go to sleep, and then in the morning I’ll go home to get some extra clothes and I’ll buy some condoms on the way back?”
Yael tries to keep from smiling. “Extra clothes?” she asks.
“You said you had the apartment for the weekend, yeah?” His smile is confident, but Yael can tell from the way he searches her face that the question is earnest, even hopeful.
“Extra clothes would be good,” she says.
“Good,” he says, and presses a quick kiss to the spot where her ear meets her jaw.
Yael drags her hand up the back of his neck, sliding her fingers into his hair and giving a gentle tug. Ravi closes his eyes, exhaling harshly. “Just kissing, you said?”
His eyelids flutter open, his lips spreading into a grin. “Yeah,” he says. “And anything else we don’t need a condom for.”
Yael rolls her hips up into him. Involuntarily, she closes her eyes at the contact, and she wishes she hadn’t so she could’ve watched the effect cascade across Ravi’s face. “It’s a good thing,” she whispers, “that we’re both very creative.”
It’s the last thing either of them says for a long, long while.