24. Raven
— ? —
Raven
I came off a brutal night shoot at three in the morning, wired and hollowed out, the specific tired that loops past exhaustion into a jittery, buzzing wakefulness. I drove to his place on autopilot, his old MIT hoodie riding shotgun, the flimsy excuse I was about to carry up to his door.
I’d stopped even pretending, by then, that these were accidents.
The hoodie was a prop and I knew it was a prop, and I’d chosen it deliberately off my own closet floor, a thin transparent excuse to knock on his door in the middle of the night, and the fact that I still needed an excuse at all was the last shred of the story I was telling myself.
We were doing this most nights now. I just hadn’t found a way to say so that didn’t require admitting the entire architecture of my resistance had quietly fallen down.
He opened the door already awake. I held the hoodie out between us, a flimsy little peace offering.
“You left this. In 2019.”
It was the flimsiest excuse in the recorded history of excuses.
I’d been sleeping in that hoodie for years.
It hadn’t smelled of him since the first Obama administration; it smelled of my detergent and my perfume and, on bad nights, my crying.
We both knew it. He accepted it anyway, with the grave formality of a hotel concierge.
“Thank you for returning it,” he said. “Very thoughtful.”
The smirk he was working to suppress made me want to kiss it off his stupid face.
Then I smelled it. Food. Not just food: my food, the specific terrible chain-restaurant pasta I only crave after nightmare shoots, kept warm on his stove.
“How did you-”
“Your call sheet wraps at two on Tuesdays.”
“You know my call sheet.”
He suddenly found the returned hoodie fascinating.
I pulled out my phone and texted Mia right there in his doorway: Did you give Josh my shooting schedule?
Her reply was instant, because Mia never sleeps and never repents: he asked three weeks ago “in case of emergencies.” I decided food is an emergency. you’re welcome.
“Traitor,” I muttered.
“She loves me,” Josh said, pulling down two plates. “She says I’m good for you. I’m choosing to believe she means it and not that she’s fattening me for slaughter.”
But I ate at his counter in the small hours while he pretended to read a script and actually watched me with a look that said I was the best thing that had ever stood in his kitchen. The no-talking rule we’d theoretically established died quietly somewhere between the first bowl and the second.
I’d never once been able to keep it, because talking to Josh had always been the actual drug, the thing underneath the thing.
The sex I could have gotten anywhere, in theory, from any of the appropriate men who pulled out chairs.
This was the part with no substitute: sitting at that counter while a man who’d watched every episode of my show made me laugh about a costar blaming Mercury retrograde, and then listened to the answer, and asked a follow-up question.
I could survive missing his hands. It was missing this that had been quietly killing me.
“The director had a full meltdown today,” I told him. “Threw a chair.”
“A director’s chair? For thematic unity?”
He kept his face dead serious, which was how I knew he was loving this.
“Craft services folding chair. Much less impressive. Sad little clatter. Everyone just sort of watched it happen.”
“Amateur. If you’re going to throw a chair on a film set, you throw the one with your name on it. Otherwise what are we even doing.”
We talked about the shoot, the pages that made no sense, my costar who kept blowing his lines and blaming Mercury retrograde.
“He blamed a planet,” I said. “To the director’s face. Said the veil between worlds was thin and it was affecting his memory.”
“Did it work?”
“The director told him the veil between him and unemployment was also thin. It was the most alive I’ve felt all week.” I dragged a piece of pasta through the sauce. “You’d have hated it. All that waiting around. You always hated the waiting.”
“I hated the waiting because I spent all of it in my own head.” He leaned against the counter across from me. “I’m better at it now. Turns out if you’re not busy composing your own importance, standing around is fine. Peaceful, even.”
“Who are you,” I said, and meant it more than I let it sound.
“Genuinely no idea most days. But I like him better than the last guy.” He nudged the parmesan toward me because he remembered I drown everything in it. “The last guy was exhausting. Very impressed with himself. Terrible taste in what mattered.”
It was easy, and the years between us compressed down to nothing.
It kept ambushing me all through those stolen midnight kitchen hours: the ease.
We’d been so hard at the end, every conversation a negotiation, every silence a held breath.
And here we were slipping back into the old effortless rhythm, the whole catastrophe receding behind us until it went unreal, a bad dream we were both slowly waking from, and part of me distrusted it precisely because it was easy, because I’d learned that easy was how the good ones lull you before they cost you everything.
But another part, the part I was slowly relearning to trust, just noticed that being with him had stopped requiring armor, and wondered how much longer I’d keep wearing it out of habit alone.
Later, in his room, I reached for the lamp on the nightstand and found a small velvet box sitting there.
My whole body went cold. If this was a ring, if he was about to-
“Open it,” he said softly.
It wasn’t a ring.
It was my grandmother’s brooch. The one I’d pawned our first year in LA to pay for headshots, the one I’d never told him about losing, the one that had sat in my chest, a swallowed stone, for a decade.
The brooch was a small ugly-beautiful thing, gold gone soft and warm with age, a spray of seed pearls around a garnet the color of old wine.
My grandmother had worn it to church, to funerals, to the one Broadway show she saw in her entire life.
She’d pressed it into my hand the week before she died and told me to pin it to whatever I wore the day I made it.
I’d pawned it in a strip mall on Ventura eight months into LA for rent money and a headshot session, told myself I’d buy it back by summer, and never had the spare cash to do it until I had more than my grandmother saw in her whole life, by which point it was long gone.
I’d never told a living soul about the brooch.
Not Mia, not Josh, not the therapist I paid specifically to know everything.
Pawning it had been the exact failure that defined that whole first year, the moment I sold off the one thing my grandmother left me to chase a life that didn’t want me yet, and I’d buried it so deep that most days I could almost believe I’d simply lost it.
And here it was, in a velvet box on his nightstand, resurrected by a man who’d tracked it across two years and three states without ever once being told it was gone.
“How?” My voice came out in splinters.
“I’ve been tracking it for two years. Estate dealers, auction records.
Finally found a collector in Phoenix who had it, and it took another four months to convince him to part with it.
” He was watching me carefully, braced for the box to go off.
“It came in on Thursday. I’ve had it sitting in that drawer for five days trying to figure out how to give it to you.
There’s no version of it that doesn’t look like I’m trying to buy you back, and I’m not.
It’s yours. It was always supposed to be yours. I just found where it went.”
“You never even knew I pawned it.”
“No. You never told me. That’s the part-” He stopped, and his jaw worked.
“You lost the thing your grandmother gave you to pay for my - for our life out here, and you carried it alone for ten years, and I was too busy, the whole time we were married, to notice it had quietly stopped showing up. It wasn’t until I went back through old photos, trying to find the wife I’d quit looking at, that I caught the exact spring it vanished and never came back in a single frame after.
You never told me you’d pawned it. You didn’t have to.
So I couldn’t give it back as a surprise, because I was never supposed to know it was gone. I just had to hope you’d let me.”
I broke the last rule we had left and sobbed in his bed with the brooch clutched in my fist. He gathered me in and asked for nothing, gave everything, let me cry out ten years of a loss I’d never said out loud to a single living soul.
Much later, still tangled up, still catching my breath, I found my way back to sarcasm, because sincerity that big is a lot to hold.
“This is unhealthy,” I said.
Neither of us moved. I was still straddling him, he was still inside me, both of us pretending this wasn’t slowly killing us.
“I googled how long it takes to get over someone,” I said against his chest. “Half the length of the relationship. So five years, for us.”
“Three years left, then.”
“You think we’ll make it?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
We said it lightly, both of us, the way you joke about the thing that scares you most so you don’t have to say it straight.
But underneath the joke was the actual terror, the one neither of us would name at two in the morning tangled in his sheets: that we were going to try again.
That all this careful language about addiction and arrangements was just the long way around to the only destination either of us had ever been driving toward.
Neither of us thought we’d make it. Both of us already knew we were going to try.
He flipped us, gently, and started moving again, slow and deliberate, his cock dragging deep and unhurried, and I forgot why stopping had ever seemed important. His mouth found my throat, my jaw, the corner of my mouth.
“I love you,” he said into my hair.
“I know.”
“That’s not the right line.”
“This isn’t Star Wars.”
“Could be. I have a lightsaber.”
“That is the single worst euphemism you’ve ever-”
He kissed me quiet and rolled his hips in a way that turned the rest of the sentence into a moan, and we stopped talking about getting over each other, because we both knew we never would.
Some people you love once and move on from.
Some people get into your blood and stay there and change the rhythm your heart keeps for the rest of your life.
We were the second kind. Pretending otherwise was just one more way of lying, and I was getting so tired of lying.