11. Raven #2
Except it did the thing all his small competent kindnesses kept doing.
It moved a little weight off the braced part of me and onto the believing one while I wasn’t looking.
I’d built the whole wary distance to protect myself, and now it was quietly failing, one oiled hinge and one remembered documentary at a time.
Three different people had recognized us at the craft store, taking photos that weren’t as subtle as they probably thought.
One teenager had actually squealed before her mother shushed her.
By lunch, my phone was buzzing with alerts.
#JavenReunion was trending. Our portmanteau, risen from the dead, a relationship zombie.
The rest of the day descended into the particular chaos of wedding preparation.
Wrong flowers delivered. Caterer with questions about dietary restrictions no one had mentioned.
Paige crying about programs that had been printed in the wrong font, though no one would notice the difference between Garamond and Times New Roman after two glasses of wedding champagne.
Without discussing it, Josh and I fell into our old rhythm.
He handled logistics while I handled emotions.
When Paige had a meltdown about the string quartet possibly being late, I talked her through it while Josh called the quartet and got exact arrival times.
When the florist tried to substitute roses for peonies, he negotiated while I kept Paige from seeing the crisis.
We moved around each other with decade-old muscle memory, anticipating needs before they were voiced. He handed me tissues before I’d even noticed Paige was about to cry again. I grabbed his phone charger from the kitchen before his battery died mid-call with vendors.
“You two are good together,” Great Aunt Mildred observed from her wheelchair throne, watching us work.
“We’re good at tasks,” I corrected. “Tasks are easy. It’s the life between tasks we couldn’t figure out.”
Josh flinched but didn’t argue. What was there to argue? We’d always been able to handle external problems together. It was the internal ones, the slow erosion of seeing each other, that had destroyed us.
It was the truest thing I’d said all weekend, and I’d said it partly to wound him, and it had.
I watched it land and felt the old reflexive guilt rise, the one that used to have me apologizing for my own accurate observations before they’d finished leaving my mouth.
I did not apologize. That was new. I let the true thing sit between us and didn’t rush to make it softer for his comfort.
That night, we retreated to his room without discussion. The routine already established after one night. He showered first, I used the bathroom while he set up his air mattress, we both pretended to read while actually being hyperaware of each other’s presence.
The air mattress gave out at midnight, the way it had been threatening to since we got here, one long defeated exhale and then the sound of a grown man sinking slowly to the floor of his childhood bedroom.
“Don’t,” he said into the dark, before I’d said a word. “I can hear you deciding to offer me the bed. I’m fine. I’ve slept on worse. I did a whole film in a tent once.”
“You’re on the actual floor, Josh.”
“I’m building character.”
I should have let it go. Instead I clicked on the lamp, and there he was, flat on his back on a dead air mattress in his mother’s house, looking up at me with his hair wrecked and two years of everything I’d refused to feel sitting right there on his face, undefended, because it was two in the morning and he’d forgotten to perform.
I got up to help him wrestle the thing, which was the mistake, because helping meant kneeling next to him on the floor in an oversized t-shirt, both of us with our hands on the same collapsing mattress, near enough that the heat still coming off his run-warmed skin reached me, and the old current came up my spine before I could talk it down.
He went still. So did I. His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up, one honest half-second he didn’t have time to hide, and the six inches of dark between us went so charged I could hear my own pulse in my ears.
“Raven.” My name, rough, a question and a warning riding the same breath.
And he was going to make me be the one to decide.
That was the unbearable part. He wasn’t going to close those six inches.
He was going to kneel there wanting me with his whole wrecked face and leave the last of the distance entirely to me, because he’d learned, and the learning was so much more dangerous to me than the wanting had ever been.
I closed my eyes. Opened them. Sat back on my heels, and let six inches become a foot become the whole safe distance again.
“Take the bed,” I said. “I won’t be able to sleep anyway.”
“Raven-”
“Take the bed, Josh.”
He didn’t take the bed. He got up without a word, and a moment later the bathroom door clicked shut behind him.
Through the wall, I heard him in the bathroom on the phone, voice low but not low enough.
“I need to move my flight earlier. Sunday morning instead of evening.” A pause. “Yeah, I know. Just do it, please.”
Good. He was leaving early. I didn’t need him being helpful and present and exactly what I’d wanted three years ago when it would have mattered.
I needed him gone. That was the story, and I was sticking to it, and I only had to keep believing it for one more day.
Then he’d be three thousand miles away being quietly, infuriatingly better, and I could go back to the clean simple work of resenting him from a safe distance, which was the only relationship with Josh Gardner I still knew how to have.
And if the thought of him leaving early put a stone in my stomach, that was just the coffee. Obviously. Ethiopian blend was probably too strong for an empty stomach. That’s all it was.