18. Raven
— ? —
Raven
I should not have gone to his house.
Let me get that established up front, for whatever version of me eventually has to explain the choices of my life to herself.
I absolutely should not have been standing on his doorstep at midnight, a week after the awards, pleasantly wine-blurred from dinner with Mia, in a dress I’d told myself I was wearing for the restaurant and not for any subsequent stop I had no intention of making.
I want to walk through the self-deception in order, because it was a masterpiece of its kind.
I’d told myself the dress was for Mia. The second glass of wine, I’d told myself, was for celebrating a nomination.
And pulling out of the restaurant lot, the story was that I was simply taking the scenic route home, which happened, by pure topographical coincidence, to run past the hills where he lived.
I had a story ready for every individual decision, each one airtight in isolation, and I didn’t let myself lay them end to end and read the sentence they spelled, because I already knew the sentence, and the sentence was his address.
He opened the door in sweatpants and glasses, holding a script with his thumb marking the page, and for a second I forgot the entire English language.
Two years since I’d seen him this unguarded, this much the Josh who used to read in bed while I painted my toenails and provided unsolicited commentary on his character choices.
“Raven?” He straightened, the script forgotten against his leg. “Are you okay?”
The concern in it nearly took me out at the ankles, so I skipped every reasonable opening and went straight to the thing that had been circling my skull for a week. “Why did you give me the cottage?”
“What?”
“The cottage. Why.”
“I told you-”
“The real reason.”
He stepped aside without a word and let me in, which was its own small devastation: no negotiation, no it’s late, just a door held open.
The house was different from what I remembered.
My photographs were gone, but the lighter rectangles where they’d hung were still there on the walls, a museum of absences nobody had bothered to repaint over.
I wondered if he saw them every day. I decided not to ask, because I already knew.
“Because it was the only thing I could give you that didn’t ask you to forgive me,” he said finally.
“I don’t understand.”
“Everything else I could do - the letters, the fund, any of it - some part of it was me hoping you’d notice.
The cottage wasn’t. The cottage was just yours.
It was always more yours than mine. You loved it right.
” He set the script down on the console table like he needed both hands free for the conversation.
“You’ll make better memories there than we made at the end. ”
“With someone else?”
“If that’s what you want.” He said it evenly, but I watched it cost him.
“What if I don’t want someone else?”
The air in the room changed pressure. He went very still, the way you go still when a wild thing wanders close and you don’t want to be the one who spooks it.
“Then I hope you remember me,” he said carefully. “The good parts, if any survived. But Raven-”
“I went on dates.” The words came out faster than I’d authorized. “Nice men. Appropriate men. Men who pull out chairs and don’t make me feel like a volume knob somebody keeps reaching for.”
“Good-”
“They also don’t make me feel anything. No electricity, no fire, no-” I gestured uselessly at the space between us, at the whole apparatus of it. “Nothing.”
“You’ll find-”
“I don’t want to find. I want-” And there I stalled out, standing in his foyer, furious at my own mouth for refusing to finish the sentence it had started.
“This was a mistake,” I said, and turned for the door.
He caught my hand. Gently, so gently I could have pulled free without effort, and the terrible thing, the thing I’ll be explaining to therapists for years, is that I didn’t.
“What do you want?” he asked, quiet.
“I want to hate you.”
“You should.” He whispered.
I couldn’t stop now. “I want to forget you.”
“You should do that too.”
“I want-” My throat closed around it.
He waited. He didn’t fill the silence, didn’t rescue me from it, just stood there holding my hand loosely enough that leaving was always an option, present in a way he hadn’t managed for the last two years of our marriage.
I kept crashing into it all night, the difference that made the old defenses useless.
He was here. Not performing presence, not narrating his own attentiveness so I’d be sure to clock it.
Just standing in a foyer at midnight, holding my hand loosely enough that I could leave, letting the silence run as long as it needed to, waiting on me without a trace of the impatience that used to leak out of him the second a conversation stopped being about him.
I’d left a husband who couldn’t stay in a room with me.
This was someone else entirely, wearing his face and his hands and none of his old hurry.
“I want you to kiss me,” I said, “and make me forget why I left.”
He brought his other hand up and cupped my face, and his fingers weren’t steady. “I don’t want to make you forget that. You should never forget that.” His thumb moved along my cheekbone. “But I can remind you why you stayed for ten years.”
The kiss detonated on contact. Two years of missing him poured into one point of pressure: his mouth on mine, my hands fisting in the front of his shirt, his fingers sliding into my hair, remembering the exact route.
We didn’t make it past the foyer. He walked me back into the wall beside the door, and I pulled him with me, and the console table rattled, and I did not care about the console table.
My body had spent two years insisting it had forgotten him, and my body was a liar.
The instant his mouth found mine it all came back at once, not as memory but as fact, the exact pressure and angle and rhythm of a man I’d kissed ten thousand times, and there’s no arguing with that kind of knowledge.
It lived somewhere older than grievance and didn’t care about the interview or the years or the careful reconstructed woman I’d become. It recognized home, and it lunged.
“We shouldn’t,” I gasped, even as I dragged him closer.
“Tell me to stop.” His mouth was at my throat, my collarbone. “Tell me to stop and I’ll stop. I mean it.”
I couldn’t. I hooked a leg around him instead, which is not a sentence that means stop in any language, and he made a sound against my throat, the last of his control walking out the door.
“Please,” I said, and I wasn’t entirely sure what I was asking for, only that he was the answer to it.
“I’ve got you.” He got a hand under my thigh and lifted, pinning me between his body and the wall, and I felt his cock hard against me through two thin layers of fabric.
He rolled his hips once, deliberate, dragging the length of him right against the seam of me, and I gasped into his mouth.
“Is this what you drove over here for?” His voice had dropped low and rough, and I felt it in my spine. “Be honest for once in your life.”
“Shut up,” I breathed.
“That’s not a no.” He shoved my dress up over my hips, hooked two fingers into my underwear and dragged it down, and I toed it off somewhere near the console table I’d stopped caring about.
His hand came back between my legs and he groaned when he felt how wet I already was, two fingers sliding through the slick of me, circling my clit until my hips chased his hand.
“Christ, you’re soaked. All that from the elevator ride over here? ”
“Josh-”
“You’re dripping down my hand, Raven.” He pushed the two fingers into me, curling them, and my head fell back against the wall. “Two years and your pussy still knows exactly who it belongs to.”
“That’s - ah - that’s disgustingly arrogant-”
“It’s not arrogant if it’s true.” He worked his fingers out of me, and I heard him shove his sweatpants down, and then the blunt head of his cock was notched right where I was aching for him, not moving, just holding there, making me feel every second of the wait.
“Tell me you want it. Say it and I’ll give you anything. ”
“I want you,” I said, and it came out broken. “God, I want your cock, just-”
He drove into me and we both cried out. He filled me in one stroke, stretching me around him after so long empty, and I was so wound up it bordered on too much, my whole body clenching down on the thick length of him.
“Fuck.” He held still for a second, buried to the hilt, jaw tight against my temple. “You feel - Christ, exactly the same. So fucking tight. Like you never left. Like this cunt was made for me.”
Then he moved, and thinking became optional.
He set a brutal rhythm from the start, no easing in, hauling my leg higher so he could bury himself deeper, the wall solid at my back and him solid everywhere else, his cock dragging out slow and slamming back home.
Every thrust punched a sound out of me I couldn’t have swallowed if I’d tried.
“That’s it,” he murmured, mouth at my ear. “Let me hear you. You always got so loud when it was good. Loud and wet and mine. I missed that. I missed you.”
“Less talking,” I managed, “more-”
“More what?” He slowed, cruelly, grinding into me instead of pulling back, his cock pressed against a spot that made my vision white at the edges. “Use your words. You’ve got so many, spend one.”
“Harder, you smug-”
He gave it to me before I could land the insult, snapping his hips so hard my back slid up the wall, and whatever I’d been about to call him dissolved into a moan.
He got his thumb between us, rubbing tight circles over my clit in time with every stroke, and the whole thing coiled bright and unbearable and close.
“There it is,” he breathed, watching my face, the only screen worth watching. “You’re squeezing my cock so hard. Come on. Come all over me. I’ve got you-”
I shattered, clenching around him in waves, his name torn out of me, and he fucked me straight through it until his rhythm went ragged and his hips stuttered. Then he shoved deep and came with a groan into my neck, his cock pulsing inside me, my name a wrecked whisper against my skin.
We stayed like that, pinned together against the wall, both of us breathing like we’d run somewhere. He was still holding my thigh, still buried inside me, his heart slamming against my chest. The reality of it came back slowly, cold water rising from the floor.
“This was-”
“Don’t say mistake.” It came out rough, close to pleading. “Please don’t say mistake.”
“I was going to say complicated.”
His forehead dropped to my shoulder. “Okay. Complicated. I can do complicated. I’m excellent at complicated, it’s my whole personality now.”
He said it into my shoulder, and I felt him smiling against my skin, and that was almost worse than the sex, the ease of it, the way we’d fallen straight back into our oldest rhythm, him defusing my panic with a joke before I could spiral the whole way down.
Ten years of that. I’d forgotten it lived in my body too, filed right next to the muscle memory of his hands, an entire language I’d sworn I’d deleted and hadn’t, apparently, deleted at all.
I laughed, which I hadn’t meant to, and the laugh was worse than crying would’ve been. I made myself unhook my leg, made myself find the floor. Fixed my dress with hands that weren’t cooperating. Smoothed my hair into a shape that didn’t broadcast exactly what it had just been through.
“I can’t,” I said. “Not with you. Not again.”
“Raven-”
But I was already at the door, already turning the handle, already halfway to the car that would take me home to a bed that would feel emptier now for the comparison.
In the driver’s seat, I sat a long moment before I could make myself start the engine. My mouth still remembered his. My thighs were unsteady. Everywhere he’d touched still hummed, a body that had gone two years running on memory suddenly handed the real thing and refusing to power back down.
My hands wouldn’t quite work the key. I sat there in the dark of his street doing the accounting, the way I do everything, trying to file what had just happened against a wall into a category I could survive.
Mistake was the obvious drawer, and it wouldn’t shut, because mistakes don’t usually leave you feeling more like yourself than you have in two years.
That was the part I couldn’t make peace with on the drive home.
Not the wanting. The recognition. My body had driven to his door tonight and found north, and no amount of principled fury had been able to argue the needle out of pointing at him.
I’d built an entire recovered life on the premise that what I’d lost was a person who no longer existed.
That the Josh worth missing had died somewhere around the Grant Levy couch, that the man I’d divorced was the real one, that mourning either of them was a category error I was too healed to keep committing.
And now the dead man kept turning up. In a caterer’s Tuesday phone call.
In a harbor, in a ruined suit. In a foyer, with steady eyes and unsteady hands, kissing me like I’d been the only thing keeping him upright for two years.
I didn’t have a filing system for a ghost who kept coming back better than he’d left.
What the hell had I just done.
I already knew the answer, and the answer was that I’d done exactly what I’d driven over there to do, and had lied to myself about it the entire way.