8. Raven
— ? —
Raven
This was before. Before the Oscars and the interviews and the forgetting. Our second anniversary, when we were still us.
I came home from an audition that had gone so badly the casting director actually stopped me mid-scene to ask if I was okay.
I wasn’t. My lines came out fumbled, the character’s name went missing entirely, and a plant paid the price when I tried to hit my mark.
The ceramic pot had shattered, soil everywhere, and I’d stood there apologizing while they assured me it was fine in voices that said it absolutely wasn’t fine.
“You’re not right for this,” she’d said, not unkindly but not gently either. “Maybe try something more… contained.”
I sat in my car afterward, forehead against the steering wheel, wondering if Josh was the only one who thought I had talent. If love was making him lie to both of us about my potential. If I was wasting everyone’s time, including my own.
I stayed in that parking lot longer than I want to admit, doing the math on how many more of these I had left in me.
The auditions that went nowhere. The callbacks that turned into someone prettier and easier to cast. Josh believed in me with a completeness that had curdled, that year, into a faith I kept failing to earn back, one winced-at audition at a time.
I drove home rehearsing the lie that it had gone fine, because I couldn’t bear to watch his face fall on my behalf one more time.
The apartment door stuck, same as always, requiring a shoulder-check to open. I was already practicing my fake-cheerful voice, the one that said the audition went fine, maybe even well, when I stopped so fast I nearly fell over.
There was sand on the floor. Actual sand. Covering our entire living room in a layer thick enough to leave footprints.
“What the hell-”
Josh appeared from the kitchen wearing the terrible Hawaiian shirt from our honeymoon, the one with neon parrots that hurt to look at. He was carrying two mai tais with paper umbrellas, the drinks fluorescent pink and definitely containing too much rum.
“What is this?”
“You seemed homesick after visiting the compound last month. So I brought Nantucket here.”
“Josh, there’s sand. On our floor. Our deposit-”
“Will be fine. It’s just one night.”
I stood in the doorway of our terrible rented apartment and looked at what he’d built me.
He had carried actual bags of sand up three flights of stairs.
He’d strung the lights and found the parrot shirt and the paper umbrellas and the loop of ocean that fooled absolutely no one.
Minutes earlier I’d been convinced I was a failure wasting everyone’s time, and here was a man who’d spent his whole afternoon turning our floor into a beach because I’d looked homesick at his parents’ house a month ago and he’d noticed, and remembered, and done something about it. My throat closed up on me.
The coffee table had been pushed against the wall, replaced with a beach blanket that was probably from Target but looked perfect in the dim light.
The speakers played ocean sounds, waves crashing on a loop that shouldn’t have convinced anyone and did anyway.
He’d hung Christmas lights from the ceiling for stars, their reflection scattering patterns across the sand.
“You’re ridiculous,” I said, but my voice came out soft, overwhelmed.
“You love it.” He seemed worried suddenly, vulnerable in that way he only got with me. “Right?”
I did. God help me, I loved his grand gestures and his bigger heart.
Loved that he’d spent what was probably our entire week’s grocery budget on sand and seafood just to make me smile.
Loved that he’d seen me spiraling about the audition before I’d even told him and decided the solution wasn’t to talk about it but to transform our shitty apartment into an escape.
Early Josh, the version I’d fallen for, knew me down to the grammar.
He always understood the difference between the nights I needed to be talked through it and the nights I needed to be lifted clean out of it, and back then he never once got it wrong.
I used to think that kind of attention was simply love.
It took me years to learn it was a skill, and that skills go unused until they atrophy, and that a man can quietly stop speaking a language he was once fluent in.
He handed me a mai tai and pulled me against him, one hand on my waist, the other tangled in my hair that was still in the tight bun from the audition.
“Dance with me.”
“There’s no music.”
“There’s always music.”
He spun me around the sandy floor, my socks slipping, both of us laughing as we nearly fell. He whispered film quotes in my ear, the romantic ones we made fun of but secretly loved, his breath warm against my neck.
We had a whole bit about movie quotes, the swooning ones, the lines we’d agreed out loud were garbage and privately memorized anyway. It was one of the first languages we’d built together, back when we had far more time than money and filled the excess hours making each other laugh.
“Here’s looking at you, kid.”
“That’s Casablanca.”
“You complete me.”
“Jerry Maguire. Terrible.”
“I hate the way I don’t hate you.”
“Ten Things I Hate About You. Better.”
“You make me want to be a better man.”
I pulled back to look at him, his face serious now despite the ridiculous shirt. “As Good As It Gets.”
“No,” he said. “Just the truth.”
I kissed him then, tasting rum and possibility. His hands came up to cup my face, thumbs tracing my cheekbones, memorizing the shape of me.
“Tell me about the audition,” he said against my mouth.
“Now? Really?”
“I want to know everything about your day. Even the bad parts. Especially the bad parts.”
So I told him between kisses, his lips moving to my throat as I explained the disaster. The forgotten lines, the broken pot, the way they’d looked at me with professional pity.
“She said I should try something more contained.”
He pulled back, genuinely offended on my behalf. “Contained? You?”
“Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m too much-”
“Stop.” He lifted me onto the kitchen counter in one smooth motion, stepping between my legs. “You’re not too much. You’re exactly right. Your chaos, your tangents, the way your brain makes connections nobody else would think of. That’s your superpower.”
“Josh-”
“No, listen. You’re going to make it. And not because you’re contained or careful or any of that bullshit. Because you’re extraordinary. Because you feel everything so deeply it terrifies people. That’s what’s going to make you a star.”
His hands were under my shirt now, palms warm against my ribs. I arched into his touch, my body already responding to his proximity, to the certainty in his voice when he talked about my future.
“Take off your clothes,” he said, voice rough.
“So romantic.”
“Please take off your clothes so I can worship every inch of you on our sandy floor?”
“Better.”
We stripped each other slowly, laughing when his shirt got stuck on his head, when my jeans wouldn’t cooperate with the sand. Finally naked, he picked me up and carried me to the couch, laying me down slow and reverent.
He started at my ankles, kissing his way up my calves, taking his time, making me wait. His mouth on the inside of my knee, my thigh, everywhere except where I needed him most.
“Josh, please-”
“Shh. Let me take care of you. I’ve been wanting my mouth on this pussy all day.”
When his tongue finally found me, I cried out, hands fisting in his hair. He took his time, building me up slowly, backing off whenever I got close to the edge.
“You taste so fucking good,” he murmured against me. “So wet for me already. God, Raven, you have no idea what you do to me.”
He slid two fingers inside me while his tongue continued its rhythm, curling them just right, and I shattered, his name breaking on my lips.
He kissed his way back up my body, letting me taste myself on his mouth. “You’re so beautiful when you come. The way your whole body lights up. It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I need you,” I said, pulling him closer. “Please.”
We moved to the floor, the sand rough against my back, his weight pressing me down in the best way. He dragged the head of his cock through the mess he’d made of me, notched it against my entrance, and pushed in slow, both of us groaning at the stretch as he filled me inch by inch.
“You feel so good,” he breathed against my neck. “So tight. So perfect around me. Made for me.”
We moved together slowly, relearning each other’s rhythms even though we’d never really forgotten. His hands in my hair, my nails down his back, the sand sticking to our sweat-slicked skin in a way that should have been uncomfortable but just added to the sensory overload.
“Your talent terrifies me,” he said, pulling back to look at me, still moving inside me with devastating slowness. “You’re so much better than you know. So much more than you let yourself believe.”
“Josh-”
“Every rejection is their loss.” He punctuated each word with a deeper thrust, and I clenched around him. “One day they’ll beg to work with you.”
“You’re just saying that-”
“I’m saying it because it’s true.” He kissed me deeply, his tongue mimicking the rhythm of his hips, then worked a thumb over my clit. “You’re extraordinary, Raven. Your brain, your talent, your heart. I’m the lucky one here.”
I believed him then, completely, the way you can only believe someone before they’ve given you a reason not to.
That was the tragedy hiding inside the best night of that year, though I couldn’t have seen it at the time: that the same man saying I’m the lucky one here, meaning it with his whole chest, would one day stand on a stage and say the opposite for a laugh.
People don’t lie in moments like that one.
They just change, slowly, into someone who could.
I didn’t know yet that a promise and its betrayal could wear the exact same face.
I came again with his voice breaking around my name, my body clamping down hard around his cock, and he followed immediately, spilling into me as he pressed his forehead to mine and shuddered through it.
We lay there afterward, sand everywhere, breathing hard. The Christmas lights made patterns on the ceiling. The fake ocean sounds had looped back to the beginning. Everything smelled of sex and rum and the coconut sunscreen he’d apparently sprayed around the room for authenticity.
I remember thinking, in that specific gold-lit haze, that this was what the rest of it would be.
That we’d solved a problem other couples struggled with, that our particular combination of his steadiness and my chaos was a kind of permanent engine, self-sustaining, immune to the slow erosions I’d watched wreck other people.
I was twenty-something and drunk on rum and adoration and I genuinely believed happiness was a thing you achieved once and then simply owned.
Nobody tells you it’s a thing you keep choosing, in the dark, on the ordinary nights, long after the sand’s been vacuumed out of the carpet.
“We’re going to be finding sand for months,” I said, tracing patterns on his chest.
“Worth it.”
“You say that now. Wait until it’s in your coffee tomorrow.”
“Still worth it.”
I traced my finger down his abs, following the line of muscle that led below his navel. He was already getting hard again, because twenty-six-year-old Josh had the recovery time of someone powered by pure adoration.
“You’re a menace,” I told him, and traced the line lower just to watch what it did to his breathing.
“A menace who worships you,” he corrected, entirely unbothered, already rolling toward me.
It should have been ridiculous, the sand and the fake ocean and the two of us broke and tangled on a Target blanket. It was the happiest I have ever been. I didn’t know that yet. You never do.
“Don’t ever stop seeing me like this,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m magic.”
He rolled over, pinning me beneath him, already moving against me again. “You are magic. You’re everything. And I promise you, I will never forget that.”
He made love to me again, slower this time, whispering promises against my skin.
How he’d love me through every rejection and every moment of doubt, how he’d remind me who I was when I forgot.
How we’d tell this story at our fiftieth anniversary, the night he covered our apartment in sand because I was homesick for a place that wasn’t home, just the place where he’d first told his parents he was going to marry me.
I fell asleep that night certain of him in a way I’d spend years afterward trying to explain to myself.
Not hopeful. Certain, the way you’re certain of the floor when you put your foot down in the dark.
It never occurred to me that certainty could be a thing you lose slowly enough not to notice, that a man could stop meaning his promises without ever once deciding to.
If I’d known, I’d have stayed awake. I’d have kept my eyes on it.
But you don’t guard what you can’t imagine losing.
“Forever,” he said, moving inside me, every stroke of it saying he believed it completely. “I’m going to love you forever.”
“Promise?”
“On everything I’ve got.”
He did forget. Years and fame and choices that seemed small at the time eroded those promises into nothing. The man who’d covered our floor in sand would one day mock me on television. The man who called me magic would one day call me a hobby.
But that night, with sand in uncomfortable places and mai tai headaches forming and the Los Angeles traffic mixing with our fake ocean sounds, we both believed in forever, in everything. We believed love was enough to survive anything, including success.
That night, we were magic.
That night, we were forever.