27. Raven #2
That was the one that finished it, in the end. It wasn’t the porch or the letters or even the two failures he’d volunteered a minute earlier. It was the way he’d quietly set himself on fire in rooms I wasn’t in, for a version of the story where I never even learned I’d been protected.
A man who wanted the credit could not have done that. A man who’d finally understood the exact shape of what he’d taken could not have done anything else.
We sat with that as the sun slid down toward the water.
“I’m hungry,” I said finally, which was the truest thing I could manage.
We cooked together, badly, oversalting the sauce and overcooking the pasta and dancing to terrible music on his phone in the little kitchen.
He spun me and I knocked into the counter and we nearly took out a bowl, and I realized it was the first time in three years I’d felt completely, entirely myself.
Once, leaning over the pan, the smell of the sauce turned my stomach hard and sudden, there and gone, and I blamed the ferry and the nerves and the sheer emotional altitude of the day, the way you blame anything convenient when the real answer hasn’t occurred to you yet.
It was what I’d missed most and never once named, in two years of missing him in more obvious ways.
It wasn’t the sex, though I’d missed that, and it wasn’t even the safety.
The plain daily comedy of being domestic with someone who found me funny, of ruining a meal together and not caring, of a hand at the small of my back while a terrible song leaked out of a tinny phone speaker.
Grief is easy to name when it’s dramatic.
It’s the small ordinary joys you don’t realize you were mourning until they walk back into the kitchen and start oversalting the sauce.
“I missed this,” I said.
“Cooking?”
“Being happy.”
He stopped, wooden spoon in hand. “You weren’t happy? Even after - with all of it, the show, the-”
“I was successful. I was free. I was proud of myself, and all of that was real. But happy? Not really. There was a Josh-shaped hole and I kept walking around it, and I was so mad that it was still there.”
“I’m so sorry-”
“Stop apologizing.”
“I can’t. I’ve got three years of apologies backed up and they’re accruing interest.”
I kissed him to shut him up, and the sauce sat forgotten on the stove while he lifted me onto the counter and we picked up right where the wall had left off, except this time there was no rush and nothing to prove.
He peeled my clothes off slow, laid me back on a kitchen counter in a cottage that was legally mine, and kissed a path down my body until his mouth found me, and he went after me with two years of want and zero finesse, greedy and thorough.
“Say you’re mine again,” he growled into me, two fingers sliding deep. “Just for tonight. Just say it.”
“I’m - God - I’m yours, just-”
He took me apart with his tongue and his fingers until I came against his mouth, then hauled me down off the counter, bent me over the cold marble, kicked my feet wider, and drove into me from behind in one filthy shove that put me up on my toes, nothing slow about it this time.
“Missed this cunt,” he breathed, one hand fisting in my hair, the other splayed across my hip. “Missed being the only one who gets you like this.”
We didn’t stay in the kitchen. He carried me to the bedroom and had me again, slow and serious this time, face to face, and then a third time in the shower with the water in our eyes and both of us laughing at how far past reasonable we’d gone. Joyful, and sliding, somewhere in there, into a vow.
After, tangled in sheets that smelled of us, I said it.
“I forgive you.”
He went completely still.
“For the interview. The neglect. All of it. The whole list. I forgive you.”
He was crying now, silent tears running sideways into the pillow. “You don’t have to-”
“I know I don’t have to. That’s what makes it forgiveness and not a transaction.
” I traced the line of his jaw. “I’m tired of carrying the anger.
It’s heavy and I’ve hauled it up and down the coast for three years and I want to put it down.
Today helped. The letters helped. Knowing you see all of it - even the parts I never named, even the parts I didn’t catch you for.
That’s what I needed. To know you understand exactly what you broke. ”
“I do. God, I do.”
“Then I can forgive it.”
“What does this mean? For us?”
“I don’t know yet. But I want to find out.”
It wasn’t a reconciliation, not yet, not officially, and I want to be precise about that, because precision was the whole difference between this and the marriage that had failed.
I hadn’t taken him back. I’d forgiven him, which was a separate transaction entirely, one I’d done for my own sake at least as much as his, to finally get the weight off my own back.
Whether anything new grew out of the clearing that forgiveness left was a question I hadn’t answered yet.
But I wanted to find out, and wanting to find out, after two years of wanting only to be free of him, was an answer in itself.
He pulled me in and pressed his face into my neck. “I love you. I’ve loved you every single day since you spilled an entire latte on me a decade ago and quoted Kurosawa at me while making my shirt worse. I’ll love you for another decade. Forty more. Forever, if you let me.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Not nearly long enough.”