Chapter Twenty-Three
On Saturday, Ravi gets up before Yael, and again, she barely stirs. Her coffee maker and everything it requires are displayed prominently on her kitchen counter, so he gets to work.
The smell of coffee brewing seems to rouse her; he hears shuffling from the bedroom before she emerges in nothing but a large University of Washington T-shirt that doesn’t even reach mid-thigh.
She rubs her eye with the back of her hand and extends Ravi’s phone toward him. “It was buzzing,” she says.
“Sorry,” he says, taking it from her.
“It’s okay. I usually wake up earlier than this, anyway.”
Ravi furrows his brow, remembering the day they met—it was later than it is now, and she was dead to the world. She pulls some mugs from a kitchen cabinet, rising to her tiptoes and giving him the briefest glimpse of the curves of her ass.
“Do you want milk?” she asks. “We have oat, soy, and, I think, macadamia.”
“But no dairy?”
She smiles back at him. “I think you know the answer to that.”
“Black’s good for me,” Ravi says. While she pours, he finally looks at his phone. A missed call from Suresh. “Shit,” he says.
“What?”
“Ah—it’s my brother. I need to call him back.”
“You can hide in my bedroom if you don’t want me to listen,” she says.
Ravi hesitates for a moment. He’s not sure he really cares if she hears, but he also doesn’t know what Suresh is going to say, and he doesn’t want to be airing someone else’s private business. “Thank you,” he says, and he presses call before going to tuck himself away.
“Ravi?” Suresh answers.
“Hey.”
“Margot’s leaving early,” Suresh says, with such little emotion in his voice that Ravi is certain he’s devastated. “We heading back now.”
“Okay,” Ravi says. “Did something happen?”
Suresh is quiet for a few seconds too long. “I’m in the car,” he says. “Mia’s here with me.”
“Do you need anything?”
“Are you home?” Suresh says, another nonanswer. Ravi’s stomach clenches with worry—for Suresh and for Mia.
“No, I’m not, but I can be soon.”
“We’ll be back in an hour twenty,” Suresh says.
“See you then,” Ravi says, and the call disconnects.
He finds Yael back in the kitchen, coffee mug in hand. She nudges another one toward him, and he takes it.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
Ravi rubs his hand over the fresh stubble on his chin. “I’m worried that you might not trust that I’m being honest here,” he starts, “so, first, I want to say that I’d like to see you again, if you’re willing.”
Yael stares at him for a moment before nodding.
“And I have a family emergency, and I really need to go,” he continues. “I’m sorry.”
She waves him off. “You don’t have to apologize. I believe you.”
“Thank you,” he says, and he heads back to the bedroom to dress and get his things together as quickly as he can.
When he emerges, Yael is leaning against the part of the counter closest to the door, her phone in hand.
She looks up as he crosses the room. There’s something a little sad in her eyes, and it makes his chest tight.
As soon as he reaches her, he pulls her in for a kiss, savoring the way she sighs into his mouth, how she melts against him.
Her phone buzzes, and they break apart. “Now I have to take this,” she says. “It’s my parents. They’re hiking the southern part of the Pacific Crest Trail, and they rarely have cell service.”
Ravi nods. “I’ll see you Tuesday.”
He slips on his shoes and jacket as she answers to a chorus of “Hiiii, Ellie!” that even he can hear. He’s already in the hall, the door slowly closing, when he catches her response.
“Hi, Dad! Hi, Pops! I missed you guys,” she says, and the door clicks shut behind him.
Ravi stops where he stands, his pulse thundering in his ears, every thump of his heart saying Elle.
He knows in his body, in his bones, that it’s her, even as his brain scrambles to tell him differently. Elle told you she had kissed someone that weekend when you’d kissed Yael that night, he tells himself.
But he’d used the word “recently” when he’d replied to her because he’d felt gross admitting exactly how recently, and she probably felt the same.
You listen to Elle’s voice for hours, every other week, he thinks, you would have recognized it.
But would he? He’s always felt that Elle’s delivery was her impression of a radio voice, and he’s watched Yael change her pitch at will every time she reads aloud at book club.
Elle told you she lived on the East Coast, he thinks, a last-ditch effort. In that first email.
He moves slowly, opening his Gmail app and scrolling through their initial work thread.
His mind is catching up to his body, so he knows what he’ll find before he even gets to it.
She gave him a deadline in Eastern time, probably because Sanaa—and Ravi’s entire resumé—told her he lived in New York. He’d just assumed.
Elle told him she’d had a hypomanic episode, and that’s why she’d asked Sanaa for help. Yael hadn’t heard him and Charlie because she’d been out for fifteen fucking hours. Because she’d taken her emergency medicine. He’d gotten Elle’s—Yael’s—email the very next day.
Ravi is breathing heavily now, his hand trembling.
So many near misses—they would have known immediately if he’d written his full name on his name tag.
If she’d told him her real name on that phone call.
If he hadn’t had just barely enough self-control to not tell her his.
If either of them hadn’t had to whisper!
He looks at the time and, shit, the bus will be at the stop in four minutes. He takes off down the stairs, out the door, toward Burnside.
The bus arrives right as he does, and he climbs on, panting, and nods at the driver, who barely gives him a second look. He pushes his sweaty hair back from his forehead, his heart beating so hard that he worries he’ll choke on it, somehow.
It’s panic, too, that’s making his throat feel tight. What am I going to do? is wrapping around his rib cage.
Because before, he could mostly convince himself that no matter what he thought he felt toward Elle, he didn’t really know her without meeting her.
He could pretend that the effect Yael had on him was some dizzyingly intense form of the same physical attraction he’d felt countless times for countless other people.
But not anymore. Not when he understands just how intimately he knows so many versions of her.
Ravi is deeply, painfully in love with this person, and none of the reasons they shouldn’t be together have gone away.