23. Raven
— ? —
Raven
I watched him pace outside my door a long time before I did anything about it.
Back and forth across my little front porch, dragging both hands through his hair, starting toward the door and then retreating, arguing with himself in a pantomime I could read through the window, subtitles and all.
Josh, at two in the morning, in pajama pants and a t-shirt gone soft with age, losing a debate to himself in my front yard.
I’d been having the identical argument on my side of the glass for seven days.
Every reason to open the door lined up against every reason to keep it shut, the same circular argument, no resolution, just two stubborn halves of me wearing each other down to nothing.
Watching him pace the porch was watching my own week acted out by someone with worse impulse control and better hair.
At some point you get tired of fighting to keep out the person you already know you’re going to let in.
Eventually I got tired of the one-man show and yanked the door open.
He froze, caught, mouth open on words that didn’t come.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said finally.
I opened the door the rest of the way. No questions, no conditions. Just opened it and stepped back and let him in, because I was done pretending the porch pacing wasn’t a mirror of the thing I’d been doing internally for seven days.
“I’ve tried everything,” he said, standing in my entryway looking wrecked. “Dating, not dating, therapy, meditation, one of those mindfulness apps with the whale sounds. Nothing works. You’re in my head, my dreams, my-”
I kissed him.
Soft this time. Careful. This was the opposite of the wall: a decision, made slowly, with my eyes open and both feet on the ground. He melted into it, his hands coming up to cradle my face, careful, a thing he’d been trusted not to break. Then I pulled back.
“This doesn’t mean-”
“I know.”
“We’re not back together.”
“I know.”
“This is just sex.”
“Whatever you want it to be.”
The answer should have reassured me and instead did the opposite.
He’d handed me every last scrap of the control, the way he handed me everything now, and the trouble with being handed all the control is that you no longer get to blame the other person for what you do with it.
I’d wanted him to push so I’d have something to push back against. He just kept opening doors and stepping aside, and I kept walking through them, and there was no one left to hold responsible but me.
This time we made it to the bedroom. He undressed me slow, savoring it, kissing every inch of skin as it appeared: my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast, murmuring against me the whole time.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed against my ribs, easing my bra straps down my arms. “Not for before. For now. For still wanting you this much. For not being able to stop.”
“Josh-”
“I know I don’t deserve this.” He got my jeans off, my underwear, laid me back against the pillows and just looked for a second, and I felt it everywhere. “But God, Raven, look at you. Two years, and you still knock every thought out of my head.”
He looked at me like a thing he’d been handed back after assuming he’d never see it again, and that was the difference between this and every careful safe date I’d forced myself through all year.
Tom had looked at me appreciatively. Chris looked at me like a friend.
Josh’s look had two whole years of memorizing the exact shape of my absence in it, and the plain disbelief of watching that shape come back and fill itself in.
Nobody survives being looked at like that. I certainly didn’t.
He kissed his way down my body, unhurried, spreading my thighs and settling in, his breath hot against the inside of my thigh. He looked up my body once, holding my eyes, and then licked a slow stripe up my center and I nearly came off the bed.
“There she is,” he murmured against my pussy, and the vibration of it made my hips buck. “So wet already. You’ve been thinking about this all week, haven’t you. Don’t lie to me, I can taste it.”
“Less commentary-”
He closed his mouth over my clit and sucked, and whatever I’d been about to say turned into a sound I didn’t recognize.
He worked me with his tongue, unhurried and merciless, sliding two fingers inside me and curling them until I was fisting the sheets, and every time I got close he backed off, kept me hanging on the edge until I was swearing at him in two languages.
“Josh, please-”
“Please what.” He lifted his head just enough, his mouth slick with me, his fingers still moving. “Say it. I want to hear my name and a demand, it’s my favorite thing you do.”
“Make me come, you absolute-”
He went back down before I could finish, sucking hard and pumping his fingers deep, and I shattered against his mouth with his name breaking apart on the way out.
He worked me through every wave, gentling only when I pushed at his shoulders, and then he dragged himself back up my body and kissed me deep and filthy, making me taste what he’d done to me.
“I need you,” I said, pulling him down. “Now. Please.”
He lined himself up and pushed into me in one long, greedy stroke, and the stretch of it punched a broken sound out of me I didn’t bother being embarrassed about.
He worked the rest of the way in on slow rocking thrusts, seating himself to the hilt, then went still, buried deep, and made me feel every inch of what I’d spent two years swearing I didn’t miss.
“Missed this,” he said against my throat, holding still, letting me feel all of him. “Missed you. Missed being inside you so bad I couldn’t sleep.”
Then he moved, and it was the opposite of the wall. This was slow and deep and devastating, our bodies remembering everything at once, snapping back into sync with no instruction needed. His hands in my hair, my nails dragging down his back, years of muscle memory flooding back with every stroke.
My body knew his the way you know a song you swore you’d forgotten, every word arriving a half-second before you need it.
Two years of telling myself I’d unlearned him, and here was the proof I’d only ever put him in storage.
Nothing had been erased. It had all just been waiting, patient and intact, for the exact weight of him to press play.
“Look at me,” he said, and when I did his eyes were wet. “I love you.”
“Shut up.”
But I was crying too, and we both knew exactly what I meant.
He fucked me slow and thorough, like we had the whole night and every night after it, his cock hitting deep on every stroke and his thumb finding my clit to work me back up.
When I came the second time it was quieter, longer, a wave that rolled through me and pulled him under with it.
He buried himself deep and came with my name against my skin, a prayer he’d stopped expecting to be answered.
He held on afterward and didn’t let go, a man returned to a shore he’d written off.
And I let him, which was its own confession.
In the wall version I’d fled the second it was over, fixed my dress, outrun the meaning of it all the way to the car.
This time I stayed. I let him keep his arms around me and his face in my neck, and I didn’t reach for a single one of the exits I’d used all year, and we both understood, without saying it, that the staying meant more than any of the things we’d just done.
After, we lay tangled in sheets that now smelled of him, both of us breathing hard, the ceiling fan pushing the heat around.
“We can’t keep doing this,” I said.
“I know.”
“But we will.”
“I fucking hope so.”
“What’s wrong with us?”
He turned to look at me, tracing a finger down my cheek. “We’re addicted to each other. Have been since day one.”
“Addiction isn’t love.”
“No. But love can be an addiction. And what we’ve got is both, which is either very romantic or a diagnosable problem, depending who you ask.”
“That’s not healthy.”
“Almost certainly not.” He pulled me into him, tucked me under his chin. “But it’s ours.”
It’s ours. Two small words, and they undid me more thoroughly than anything he’d said with his mouth between my thighs.
Because they were true, and because I’d spent two years insisting on the exact opposite, that whatever we’d had was over, cauterized, safely in the past tense.
And here he was in my bed at dawn calling it present, calling it ours, and the worst part was that my whole body had agreed with him hours ago and just hadn’t gotten around to informing my mouth.
He stayed until dawn, holding me like he could keep me from coming apart. When the first light came through the curtains he got dressed quietly, kissed my forehead.
In the old days he’d have been gone by now, not physically but in every way that counted, already halfway into tomorrow’s schedule while his body cooled beside mine.
This was the opposite of that, and my body clocked the difference before my brain would let me admit it.
Being held by someone who was actually there, all the way there, present down to his breathing, was a thing I’d been starved of for so long that I’d half-forgotten it was even on the menu.
I lay in the circle of his arms and let myself have it, just for the night, and told myself the having didn’t count as long as the sun wasn’t up yet.
“I should go.”
“Yeah.”
“This doesn’t change anything,” I said, because I needed the boundary stated even as he stood there with his hair wrecked from my hands.
“I know,” he said. “But Raven? It changes everything for me.”
He left with a soft goodbye, and I lay in a bed that smelled of us, wondering how a choice could be so wrong and feel so completely, unbearably right.
I knew, lying there, that I’d stopped being able to call it just sex somewhere around the moment I chose not to run.
You can tell yourself a body is only a body right up until you let it stay the night.
I’d let him stay the night. I’d let him hold me until the light came, and I’d wanted him to, and no amount of careful language about arrangements and boundaries was going to un-want that.
The lie had a shelf life now, and I could feel it beginning to spoil.
My phone buzzed. A text: I meant it. Every word.
I didn’t reply. I screenshotted it. Hoarding proof of a feeling I still couldn’t say out loud.