Fic: Cicatrices (part one of four) (ER; Neela/Ray)
So I've seen exactly one full episode of ER, but one day last summer I suddenly found myself reading, and then attempting to write, Ray / Neela fanfic. Doesn't this happen to everyone?
Here, in four parts, is the result.....
Title: Cicatrices (part one of four)
Rating: R for loads of sex and language and overall adult stuff
Summary: Everything is so routine and comfortable that some days Ray almost forgets to wonder when Neela is going to change her mind and bolt.
Note: Thank you thank you thank you to lowriseflare for all her amazing fic, and for the videos and, most of all, for reading this in all its different iterations over the last year. Characters depicted in this work are the property of those who own ER, and do not belong to me. But, Ray, if you did, I would never have hit you with the truck. Promise.
A month after Neela officially moves in to Ray's place, they're starting to settle into a routine domesticity. Occasionally, it’s a little like playing house, playing grownup, playing husband and wife. But most often it’s college dorm remix. Roomies part two, electric boogaloo.
Ray cooks most nights - boy food like spaghetti, stir-fry, or anything he can throw on the grill when he gets home. Or he brings home take-out or calls for delivery if it’s been a long day or they are too distracted by each other to remember food until they’re too ravenous to move. He’s the hunter, she’s the gatherer: for some reason she keeps bringing home new sheets and other bedding, and suddenly the linen closet he hadn’t even realized he had is overflowing.
They usually eat on the couch in front of some mindless, mediocre TV - he nominally has a dining room with a table but it's usually just a repository for mail and stacks of journals and magazines - and they bicker and banter over Neela’s chronic aversion to taking out the trash, or whether Ray really should just give her all his socks, or whether peanut butter belongs in the refrigerator. Together, they halfheartedly clean house on their days off, only now the frequent detours and distractions from the task at hand are usually sexual in nature. They talk about the wisdom of hiring someone to come in and clean every other week, but decide they’re currently beyond help.
Everything is so routine and comfortable, in fact, that Ray almost forgets to wonder every day when Neela’s going to change her mind and bolt.
In most ways, it's just like their roomie days, except much, much less fraught with angst. That's sort of the problem.
It's not that Ray isn't happy. He is, in most ways, pretty fucking ecstatic. Every night he falls asleep with his body curled around her warm, small sleeping form, inhaling the cocoa butter scent that radiates from her skin, burying his face in her thick, soft hair. And every morning it's still a bit like waking into the best dream he's ever had.
It's just that - and it seems stupid as he thinks it, but, then again, he long ago came to terms with the fact that he may be the stupidest man alive - he hasn't touched a guitar since the moment she arrived, other than to move it out of the way. Since the moment he looked up from his clipboard to see her across the room, standing there like an apparition from the snowy North with that big heavy coat. Smiling at him. Since that moment he has not been his own. He’s just not altogether Ray. Neela Rasgotra finally came to claim what had been hers for three years, and there’s nothing left for anything else.
At first he welcomed the opportunity to disappear into her. Those first few weeks, they devoured each other at every opportunity, desperately trying to sate the desire that only seemed to build the more time they spent together. They had sex on practically every surface in the house, on the back deck, and, one night, on the tree-shrouded front porch when Neela fumbled too long getting her key in the front door.
His friend Catrin, one of the other rehab docs, asked him one day during that first week whether he was feeling all right. He nodded, grinning, almost giddy. God, what an ass. But he couldn’t help himself. Everyone knew that a woman had arrived and that, ever since then, Ray Barnett had perpetual bags under his eyes and was about ten seconds late on the uptake.
In those first weeks he was so fearful of sinking it that he jettisoned everything in his life that didn’t have to do with her. He skipped the gym most mornings, not wanting her to wake up in his bed without him, not wanting to miss out on the bleary, fuzzy, gentle morning sex. He flaked on poker night with the guys to make blackened catfish and dirty rice because they’d seen some commercial on TV the night before and Neela said it looked good. He even bailed on helping Catrin move last weekend because it was a gorgeous day and he and Neela both had two days off in a row and Neela had never been to New Orleans.
And, in the month and three weeks that Neela has been in Baton Rouge, Ray hasn’t once picked up a guitar to play, hasn’t even hummed snippets of a tune into the digital recorder on his cell phone or scrawled bits of lyric on the back of a take-out menu.
It’s the longest he has gone without writing, much less playing, well….ever. Even in the weeks and months after his accident - when he felt like his insides had been flayed away and rearranged somewhere outside this strange new body, when he felt so empty and dead that another fistful of Vicodin seemed inevitable, when he didn’t know if he was ever going to feel like a living person again - he still wrote. Angry, incoherent, unmelodic noise, but it was Ray and it was loud and the moment he could sit with the guitar without screaming in pain he was playing it into his little digital four-track. He knew he was going to be okay when he pictured his career as a legless street busker, playing for quarters on the corner, and the tears streaming down his face were mostly from laughter.
And, actually, some of what he wrote then wasn’t bad. He went back to some of it in the fall, after he got back from Chicago, reduced the profanity-to-printable-word ratio, and recorded a few songs. One of them even made it onto the disc he burned for Neela back in February. He hasn’t played with anyone else or played out at all, although in January he had met a young attorney at Guitar Center who sometimes played with a few friends in his garage, and they had talked about getting together to jam, even exchanged business cards and emails.
And then Ray looked up from his clipboard and saw Neela. And it has been everything he had stopped letting himself imagine it could be. Blissful and raw and sweet and incredibly satisfying.
But it’s not rock-and-roll.
When he thinks about it, all the really great rock songs are about anger and loss and thwarted longing. Missed opportunities. Romantic tragedies. Ok, and lust and passion and doing it in the road, which they certainly should put on their list . . . but not this slightly fearful, cautious happiness.
And fuck if he’s going to end up writing some fluffy bunnybear Whitney Houston shit.
This morning, he gets up before sunrise, puts on his running legs - he has more accessories than a kid’s action figure - and goes for an hour-long run that completely kicks his ass, it’s been so long. But he’s showered and dressed before Neela wakes so he goes into the dining alcove, where his guitars sit in a forlorn row on their black metal stands against the far wall behind the table.
Ray has always loved his guitars the way some guys love a cherry 1967 Mustang convertible or some women love a pair of strappy patent-leather stilettos. The glossy wood, the shiny chrome hardware, even the stupid but also kind of awesome skull-patterned guitar strap he bought when he was in Chicago in October. But he especially loves his honey-colored Epiphone Casino. He ordered it from Musician’s Friend online one morning a few months ago, sitting on the couch in his pajama bottoms with his laptop. The night before, he had been flirting with a cute, brunette LSU co-ed at the gym, and ended up walking her to dinner down the street, then fucking her in the front seat of her little convertible without her ever for a moment suspecting there was anything wrong with his legs.
Hm. Probably best not to share that particular origin story with Neela.
Ray pulls the big, blonde, hollow-body guitar off the stand and runs his fingers over the wood. He loves the wide, curved body with its script-like f-holes, and he loves the loud full sound he can get playing it unplugged, although the feedback kind of sucks when he plays with the amp. He plays a few random chords, then frowns. Shit - he’s going to have to take it in to Guitar Center. The humidity wreaks havoc with the wood and the pickups need to be adjusted and it’s all out of tune. He gently rests it back on its stand and tries to shake the edgy feeling he gets now every time he feels like this part of him is withering away.
Fuck. Ray shakes his head. What do you want? Just be happy, dude.
Ray hears the zip of the shower curtain and the low rumble of the pipes as Neela starts the shower. He wanders into the bathroom and runs his hands over the top of his head, taking a last look in the mirror before the moisture from the shower obliterates his reflection. He kind of likes the close-cropped hair. He'd shaved his head on an impulse, a few weeks before Neela arrived in Baton Rouge. He’d awoken that morning to find an email from Neela, oddly detached and reserved in tone, that left him convinced she was going to take the job at Duke and gradually fade out of his life forever. After work, he wandered with a few friends down to an awesome dive bar he had recently discovered. Numbed by many beers, he flirted with the bar’s owner until well after closing time. She was slightly older than Ray’s usual target demographic, but leggy and voluptuous with short, spiky blonde hair. She smelled like autumn leaves and gave truly inspired head. She gave Ray a ride home on her Harley afterward, his arms wrapped around her narrow leather-clad waist.
And then he stood in front of this bathroom mirror and took the electric razor to his head. As the hair fell away, it felt like shedding a heavy metaphorical weight, the vestiges of the old Ray, the one who clearly wasn’t working out anymore. Who, frankly, had never worked out at all. The Ray who fucked some random cougar - christ, probably some kid's mom - to punish someone who would never even know what he’d done. The Ray who still let himself hope for some idiotically impossible happy ending to what had been, in all, a rather gruesome fairy tale.
The Ray who still grieved for Neela more than any other loss he’d known.
Jesus Christ, what a fucking pussy. Seriously.
Thank God Neela hadn’t arrived three weeks earlier, though. Completely bald, he’d looked like an asylum escapee. The unanticipated upside, though, was that the bar owner didn’t recognize him when he stopped in for a beer later that week.
But the velvety new-growth hair, that, he likes. He can tell that Neela likes it too, the way she’s always running her hands over it and pressing her face against the top of his head. He tilts his head to one side and grins at his reflection. Yep. The hair works. Maybe he'll keep it.
He pokes his head around the shower curtain. Neela is standing under the spray, her eyes still half-closed, the water tracing a meandering path over the gentle curve of her spine, and Ray has to resist the urge to catch a stray droplet off one upturned chocolaty nipple with a flick of his tongue. But he has monthly team meeting this morning, and he will not be late two months in a row.
“Neela,” he says quietly, not wanting to startle her.
She turns, parting her lashes just a millimeter more, then closes her eyes and presses her smiling mouth against his. And Ray’s head and face are wet but he doesn’t mind.
* * * * * *
After almost two months of sharing a bed with Ray, Neela's still not sleeping through the night.
One night she alternates feverishly from sticky heat - which makes the radiant warmth of Ray's chest pressing into her back almost unbearable - to clammy cold once the air conditioning cycles on again. The quiet buzz of Ray's snores in her ear vibrates down her spine and makes her yearn to toss and twitch. She gently disentangles herself from his arms and slips into the living room, drapes a cool, clean sheet over the couch and falls almost immediately into an almost decadently blissful, solitary slumber. But Ray can barely disguise the stricken look on his face when he emerges from the bedroom the next morning and sees her lying there, and the sight of it slices through her sternum and hollows out her chest and she knows she can never do that to him again.
So she lies awake in his arms most of the night, and eventually learns that if she slowly rocks back and forth for a few moments, he will roll onto his stomach and his snores will fade away.
It’s downright distressing that she’s allowed to perform surgery on a human being after a night like that.
It's not as if she hadn't thought this through. She thought it through for weeks, months. Years, really. Whether or not to be with Ray. But, for all her list-making and pros-and-cons weighing, and fretting over whether he even still wanted her after everything her indecision had cost him, she hadn't really thought about what happens next. What happens if. What happens after.
And now they're in the after and it's brilliant, really. It's lovely. Ray is lovely. Truly lovely, just as she had known he would be. Sweet and funny and oddly nurturing and reliable in a way she never would have imagined he could have been when she first met him all those years ago. He makes her toast and egg in the morning, and when he packs his sack lunch before work he makes her one too - a sandwich on soft bread cut in triangles, an apple or an orange, little baggies of salted almonds and crisps and cookies. She’s getting positively fat. He makes her feel safe and adored and just the tiniest bit smothered.
But of course she adores him. How could she not?
It's just so bloody hard in ways she hadn't considered.
She feels compelled to be so careful with him. Of course she needles and banters and teases, but only about the little trivial everyday things that don’t really bother her at all.
Sometimes Neela feels they are actors slightly miscast in a reenactment of the neatest, safest version of their former lives. Rated R, of course, for the sex, but not for adult situations or weighty topics. The television is a blessing, filling in the silences so that unasked questions can remain so.
And it makes no sense because, if anything, he seems so much more. . . durable now than he ever did in Chicago. Substantial. Not just bigger, although he is that. He’s still long and lean, but the almost adolescent-skinny arms and chest she remembers are now defined and substantial and she loves tracing her tongue down along the hard, taut ridges on the sides of his stomach. But everything about him also seems more grounded and deliberate, from the slow firm way he walks now to how he always double-locks the door when he leaves in the morning before she does. Really, on the rare occasions when Neela is entirely honest with herself, she knows she never would have made the move to Baton Rouge for the old Ray, the Ray she knew before Halloween. She would have been too terrified. Even more terrified than she is now.
And it seems rather rotten to miss the old reckless, heedless Ray when she was the one who destroyed him.
Some things are the same, of course - the gravelly voice, eyes the honeyed green of extra-virgin olive oil, tattoos that once seemed like boyish posturing and now mark him like battle-scars.
It’s just that the changes that break her heart are not the ones she expected.
Neela lies awake, listening to the distant hum of the highway, when Ray rises before the sun again this morning. She’s relieved that he’s been going for a run each morning before work for the past week. Every morning she thinks about getting up and going with him, but instead keeps her eyes closed and her breathing deep and regular as his lips press against her cheek, the stubble on his chin grazing her jaw. When she hears his keys turn in the deadbolt a few moments later, she stretches her limbs across the bed like a starfish.
Most days, she promptly falls into a deep, voluptuous sleep for the next hour and a half, until her alarm buzzes. It’s a bit twisted, actually, the way she fetishizes sleep lately. She finds herself wandering the Dillards after work, filling her arms with feather bed mattress covers, fluffy duvets, and silky sheets of ever-increasing thread count.
But this morning, she is restless and unwilling to surrender to sleep. Earlier, hours before the vibrating alarm on Ray’s cell phone buzzed - an alarm that, by the way, sounds quite like Ray’s snores, so she’s baffled as to how exactly it wakes him, but it does - Neela awoke abruptly from a very vivid dream. Rather steamy, actually, and, from what she recalls, spot on with the details.
About Tony.
Bloody hell.
When her eyes flew open, Ray was still snoring quietly, his back to her. So she probably had not been moaning or - heaven forbid - calling out anyone’s name in her sleep. One hopes, at any rate. Neela pushed her tangled hair off her face. The air had cycled on so it was chilly in the room, and Ray was partly covered with the duvet, but Neela felt flushed from head to toe. In the faint glow that penetrated the room from the outdoor lights, Neela could see the dark tattoo nestled between Ray’s shoulder blades and reached out to trace its outline with her finger. Ray shifted and rolled towards her, his sleeping face looking so young and untroubled in the soft, dim light that Neela felt a surge of tenderness and couldn’t resist resting a warm palm against his cheek.
She doesn’t know how to tell him that she has to go back to Chicago.
Just for a few days, for a conference. She has been asked to present, and it’s rather an honor, actually, quite an embellishment for her resume. She leaves next Wednesday and really should have told Ray ages ago. . but. But what? It’s just that every time she thought about telling him, every time she started composing the words in her mind, she found a reason that it wasn’t the right time. And now she has waited so long that it will seem like she has been keeping it from him deliberately for some reason, making it seem so much more sinister than it really is.
Neela almost turned down the invitation, but a couple of lunchtime telephone conversations with Abby convinced her that she was being foolish. When did Abby become her backbone? She actually thought about calling Abby for a moment before realizing that, even in Boston, it was far too early to be awake. And really, she should have told Ray right away, when she was invited. Isn’t that what normal people in normal relationships do?
She will tell him today, Neela vows. Tonight, when they are both home from work and relaxed and . . . oh, God, maybe after a few beers. She’ll call Abby at lunch.
* * * * * *
Ray is liking Weezer lately - early 2000s Weezer to be precise - and, when Neela gets home that evening, she can hear “Hashpipe” blaring through the solid wood front door.
“Ray Barnett, you will be deaf by fifty!” Neela shouts as she walks through the door, juggling her laptop bag and handbag and car keys.
She drops all three near the front door along with the wool sweater she always totes to work in preparation for the arctic cold of the air conditioning in her office. Her office shares a thermostat with the office next door, and it’s a constant - although oddly unacknowledged - battle between Neela and the ruddy, somewhat portly surgeon on the other side of the wall. It seems absurd now that she could have ever been cold at any time in recent memory; her sleeveless blouse and cotton pants are both damp and uncomfortable simply from the 100-foot walk from the driveway to the front door.
Walking by the CD player, Neela turns the volume down to a slightly less ear-shattering level. Ray is nowhere in sight, but there is a new styrofoam takeout box in the refrigerator along with a six-pack of Stella and one of Newcastle. Neela grabs a cold Stella and flops on the couch, where she pauses a moment to appreciate Ray’s utter interior-design genius; the couch is deep and huge and positioned directly under two ceiling vents. When Neela sits all the way back, her legs stick out in front of her like a child’s, so she usually finds herself kicking off her shoes and sitting cross-legged. She does so now, and reaches for the remote to turn on the TV and flip through the recordings on the DVR.
After a few moments, Ray emerges from the bedroom and Neela can hear him behind her, the clink of bottles as he removes a beer from the refrigerator. She turns slightly to look over her shoulder. “Hi.” She smiles.
“Hi.” Ray leans over the arm of the couch and kisses Neela softly on the mouth. He tastes like beer and a just a hint of cinnamon toothpaste, and smells cool and fresh like soap and limes. He’s wearing a thin, black t-shirt that clings to his chest, and grey plaid cotton pajama bottoms. Neela can’t resist pulling him down onto the couch next to her. “How was your day?” Ray whispers into her neck. His mouth is cool from the beer and feels lovely on her skin.
“Long.” Neela arches her neck to one side, and Ray kisses the intersection of her neck and her shoulder. Neela reaches her hand under his shirt to touch his bare chest, feel the warm thrum of his heart against her palm. Sometimes it feels so close to the surface of his skin, like she might suddenly find herself holding it in her hand. She works both hands up under his shirt until he raises his arms and pulls it off over his head. Ray really should wear shirts far less often. Neela leans into him, pulling her own shirt over her head and pressing her skin into his.
Ray does not need much encouragement. He leans back on the couch, threading his body under hers until she finds herself straddling him. She lifts herself slightly, wriggling out of her pants and underwear and sending them to join his t-shirt on the floor, then bends at the waist, bowing over him to press her mouth to his chest. She can feel him hard against her thigh, his hands at her waist, his hips pushing against her, and she feels a low moan escape her throat. It thrills her how quickly he is ready for her, but she wants to prolong this moment, the quivering anticipation that pierces her spine. She traces her tongue deliberately along the muscular indentation of his arm, then across the hard expanse of his chest, and she can feel him flex against her. His mouth is open, his lower lip dark and swollen, and she takes it between her teeth, biting lightly until his upper lip closes over hers and he kisses her hard.
Neela tenses her thighs around him and lifts her hips, releasing him from the thin cotton fold of his pajama bottoms with one hand before lowering herself slowly onto him. They are both so ready that he slips inside her effortlessly. She shudders slightly, feeling herself tighten around him as her hips begin to rock instinctively back and forth. Ray is pressing against her and she feels their movements and breath synchronize as if executing a well-rehearsed choreography. Her hands on his chest, she arches and lets her hair fall down the damp skin of her back. She raises herself until they almost disconnect, hovers for a millisecond, then settles into him again, over and over until she hears him gasp. The sound sends her over the top, the rush beginning at the base of her spine and traveling through her in concentric waves until she collapses against him.
She only realizes that she has drifted into sleep when Ray tethers her, moving her hand from his chest to the lean expanse of his stomach. “I’m hungry. You?”
Neela’s eyes open. “Oh, no, Ray. You didn’t have to wait for me.” She is starved, though, she realizes.
Ray gently eases out from under her and shrugs as he gets up from the couch and takes a long drink from his half-empty beer. “I picked up chicken.”
Neela raises herself on one elbow, watching him as he slips his pants back over his narrow hips and walks toward the kitchen. He moves with a gangly kinesis that is uniquely Ray, as if his body cannot quite accommodate him, and Neela finds it incredibly endearing. She can’t believe how much she enjoys little things like watching him bend at the waist in front of the refrigerator, the thin folds of skin at his stomach, the shadowy edges of his back muscles moving as he reaches inside. Now that she’s here, it is difficult for Neela to understand what took her so long. Why she wasted so much time.
Ray pauses on his way back from the kitchen, the necks of two beers nestled between the fingers of one hand and the carton of food in the other, and leans for a moment against a low table that sits between the doors to the two bedrooms. His brow is slightly furrowed and she can almost see him formulating and reformulating his words in his mind. “I was thinking today. . .” He began. Neela raises an eyebrow and he pauses and smiles, “Yeah, I know, right? But I was thinking, you know, that it might be kind of weird for you, just moving into my place.” She can feel him looking at her with the cautious watchfulness that always sends shards of guilt through her veins. “If you wanted, we could look for a new place, move into a place that is ours.”
Neela stretches her arms over her head, lengthening her mostly nude body against the couch. “Do I look like I’m anything less than completely comfortable here? Roomie?” She enunciates the last word, laughing. “I like moving into your place. It’s what I do.” She turns to face him, sitting on her knees, her elbows on the back of the couch. “And could we find a more perfect place, really? Amazing rent. . . it’s gorgeous, massive, close to everything, a washer AND a dryer. . .”
Ray sets everything down on the table and swings open the door to the second bedroom, revealing stacks of boxes and suitcases overflowing with rumpled clothing. “Then you think you might unpack sometime?”
Neela blinks and feels her face flush as her smile slowly fades. “I will. Maybe next weekend.” She nods. “I promise.”
Neela looks down at her hands. “That reminds me, Ray, I keep forgetting to tell you.”
Ray leans into the doorway again, his arms folded, the angle of his head a question mark. “Yes?”
“I’m going out of town next week for a couple of days. I was asked to present at a conference, actually.”
Ray grins and picks up the beers, leaning over the back of the couch. He is palpably relieved, and Neela feels a surge of relief, too. “Very cool, Neela.”
Neela turns to lean her shoulder against his arm, takes a beer out of his hand and takes a drink. They discuss her presentation for a few minutes, how she has been struggling to find a hook to make her segment - which falls halfway through the afternoon of the second day of the conference - less sleep-inducing. Ray offers approximately seventy-seven suggestions, and, of the dozen that do not involve Neela removing various items of clothing, three or four are actually plausible. Neela retrieves her laptop, and they sit on the couch and page through her PowerPoint over beers and cold fried chicken for over an hour. Ray knows where to find all the best clip art. She had almost forgotten how much fun it was to bat things around with him. How he could alternate from thoughtful and serious to maddeningly ridiculous in a millisecond, and how nonetheless her own thoughts seemed to find better expression after she talked them out with him.
Neela is washing her face at the bathroom sink when Ray leans in the doorway and asks, “So where is the conference?”
“Um….Chicago, actually.”
Ray nods slowly, his face unreadable. His jaw squares and, after a moment, he leans over and kisses Neela softly on the cheek and disappears into the bedroom.
* * * * * *
There are some events that inevitably divide your life into Before and After. For Ray, Chicago exists almost exclusively in the Before and, at this point, he would prefer that it remain there. Visiting at Halloween was supposed to be about closure, about making peace and letting go. But instead Ray found himself constantly confronted with reminders that some of life's recordings are indelible, and you can't just overdub or play a second take. Greg. Neela. His legs. Sometimes the best you can do is try and adjust the levels to mask the roughest parts. Leaving Neela at her apartment that night was one of the hardest things Ray ever had to make himself do, but he knew if he stayed it would be the same off-key out-of-tune shit it always was, fun to play that night, but unpleasant to hear the next day. And, aside from being the planet of Neela's Creepy-Ass Exes - swarthy midget douchebag and the Aussie dickwad - Chicago also is the land of Neela Without Ray, and that particular Before is not a song Ray is anxious to replay.
Baton Rouge, on the other hand, is all After, and, although Ray's life now is certainly less than ideal, it's much easier for him to function there. Ray, much to his surprise, kind of loves Louisiana, especially in the summer and early fall, when the almost daily storms and intense humidity cause improbably huge plant life to emerge literally overnight. Weeding the yard is a futile endeavor - not that Ray especially bothers. He likes the way everything seems enveloped in green, as if structures are too fragile to hold back the surge of life. He has heard tales of abandoned homes invaded by entwining plants, vines breaking through cracks in the wall, threading up through the floorboards, until the house itself surrenders to the soil. The wildness seems closer here, the façade of civilization thinner. In some of his big-thoughts moments, Ray has wondered if all the voodoo and music and lawlessness aren’t just the inevitable human response to the ever-present reminders of the unpredictable hostility of the natural world, the futility of planning and ordinary preparation in the face of its relentlessness, the awareness that destruction is always a present possibility and you just have to take what you can get when you can get it. If Louisiana were a song, it wouldn’t be something cool and sophisticated, like improvisational jazz. No, Louisiana would be an old-school punk thrasher anthem - not some tight, professional post-punk rock song from someone like Green Day or Blink - but raw, edgy noise, with some skinny, strung-out white boy screaming into the mike and a rapid drum beat hurtling just a millisecond ahead of the guitar, as if at any moment the whole thing could careen out of control. And sometimes it does.
He often thinks that Neela must hate it. Although she is, undeniably, here, she often seems perched tentatively, as if at any moment she could take flight in a fluttery burst. The suitcases, the rental car . . . one morning last week Ray found himself grinning like a goon on his drive to work just because he discovered that Neela had filled an entire shelf in the bathroom cabinet with her toiletries, her blow-dryer, her flatiron, her comparably modest store of hair products. He’s turning into a girl, searching for signs of commitment in the tiniest, most meaningless things. Maybe this is some sort of karmic payback for all the women Ray was so careless with over the years. For all the Kateys and the Zoes and the nameless others. . . for pretty much any woman who wasn’t Neela.
He cringes to think about the last time he saw everyone from County, that day in Neela’s office over Skype. The way he leaned over behind Neela, a possessive hand on her shoulder, that smug smirk on his face that said “suck it; I win.” Pissing a giant circle around his territory, knowing Gates would see. Total rookie punk-ass move, Ray thought. Any remotely savvy observer could read his insecurity.
But Ray is encouraged when Neela seems enthusiastic about going to dinner at Andy and Amy’s tonight. Ray met Andy during his earliest days at the gym, and Andy’s wife Amy is quite possibly the coolest person Ray has ever met. Andy is a veterinarian, and he is always bringing home beat-up strays that end up in his office or that he finds wandering in the street. Like Ray. And Amy good-naturedly takes them in and feeds them until Andy finds them new homes. Amy fed Ray probably twice a week over the past year, and the first place Ray went when he got back from Chicago in November was the welcoming refuge of their cozy bright kitchen. He still feels a little bad that he didn’t try harder with any of the blind dates they arranged. But, if anyone can make Baton Rouge seem like home for Neela, it has to be Andy and Amy.
Not that Ray even knows whether Neela intends this to be home. They haven’t talked about it, haven’t talked about what all this means or what they are now. What she wants. After a flurry of cryptic emails and phone calls, which Ray tried very hard not to find encouraging, Neela just appeared one sunny afternoon, and Ray just kind of took her home with him, no questions asked. She later mentioned that she had rented an apartment, but, as far as Ray knew, neither she nor any of her stuff ever made it there, and near the end of the first month Ray casually suggested she give notice. He’s not sure whether she did, but she always comes home at night.
Seriously, his headshot should be on some sort of website for easy marks.
The thing is, Ray isn’t really sure what he wants. Except that he is. Hearts and fucking flowers, Neela-n-Ray 4ever. He has no idea why Neela’s Taylor Swift CD has spent two weeks in his car CD player, or how he came to know all the words to “The Way I Loved You.” Nor is he sure exactly when he became a fifteen-year-old girl, but he fully expects any day to find himself doodling bubbly hearts with Neela’s name inside them on the outside of his notebook. He pulls into an open space and slams the car into park.
* * * * * *
Neela changes her clothes six times before they leave for Amy and Andy’s. She’s flustered; she gets home later than she expects, and of course everything takes longer than she ever could have anticipated. Her hair is a disaster and she does her best to smooth it into a high ponytail, stepping around various items of rejected clothing before settling on a long, loose blue sundress. She knows tonight is important for Ray, that these people mean something more to him than the dozens of other co-workers and buddies she has met, that he really wants her to like them and wants them to like her. No pressure, of course. Neela rolls her eyes. But, on the other hand, she is overwhelmingly relieved to have a dry run before what she assumes will be the inevitable dinner with his mother.
Andy and Amy live in a little bungalow in Hundred Oaks just a few blocks away from Ray’s. The evening is the most temperate and pleasant in weeks, so they walk, her hand in his, Ray periodically swinging their connected arms like a six-year-old to punctuate the conversation. He is in a jokey, upbeat, almost carefree mood tonight and by the time Andy greets them at the front door, Neela is feeling almost relaxed. Neela likes Andy immediately, his flashing smile and the gentle, jovial manner that defuses the visual impact of his stocky, muscular frame. Neela can hear dogs barking in the background, and sees at least three of various sizes pushing against the wooden expanding gate that blocks a small sitting room from the entry. Ray is instantly over the gate and on the floor, laughing, a mass of wriggling, furry bodies and manically wagging tails swarming over him.
It’s ridiculous, of course, typical Ray. Typical Ray. Neela smiles.
Everything is very cozy and friendly and nice, but Neela can’t help but feel a little disconnected. Amy greets Neela with a hug and massive glass of icy white wine. When Ray has finished roughhousing with the dogs, Amy quickly puts him to work stirring something on the stove and shoos Andy out to put fish on the grill, then pulls up a stool next to Neela at the counter, refilling their wine glasses. Ray knows where everything is - spoons, dog biscuits, napkins, salt - and this unsettles Neela more than it should, this reminder that she has missed key scenes of the movie, important clues that might foreshadow how it all ends.
After dinner, Neela follows Amy out the sliding glass door to the small, screened patio. Amy pulls two cushions from a box in the corner and places them on two of the wrought-iron chairs, gesturing to one as she settles in the other. Neela watches as Amy extracts a brown cigarette from the gold foil with two long, tapered fingers, places the cigarette between her lips and lights it, inhaling deeply, eyes closed.
“God that’s good.” Amy smiles apologetically. “I’m down to one a day now. Andy has me on a strict reduction regimen: next week I go to one every other day.” She laughs.
Neela smiles and takes another mouthful of wine. Her chair faces out towards the small backyard, and she can hear the low electric hum of cicadas, metallic and slightly sinister, like an army of robotic snakes rearing to strike. It occurs to her to wonder what they look like, where they are; the sound seems to come from every direction, as if they surround her. She wonders whether she will ever stop noticing it, whether all the sounds and smells and sights of Ray’s world will one day become so familiar that she will stop feeling like an explorer stranded on an alien planet. The clove smoke mixes with the damp, mossy air, and the scent, combined with the pleasant sensation of fullness from the rich, heavy meal and the warm glow of the wine, is almost narcotic. Neela closes her eyes.
“I’m glad you’re here.” Amy says after a moment. Neela opens her eyes and sees that Amy is looking over Neela’s shoulder, through the glass door into the house. “You and Ray . . .” Amy pauses, as if considering her words carefully. “Well, I guess I know now why none of those blind dates worked out.”
Neela laughs. “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.” But the band of anxiety around her chest tightens a notch. She hates this. Blind dates? Will there ever be a time when just hearing some reference to Ray in Baton Rouge before she arrived will make her feel anything other than this sour mix of guilt and apprehension?
“I told Andy there was someone, but he thought no. He chose to believe I was just the worst matchmaker in the world. Which may also be true. For a while I thought Ray might be hung up on that friend of his, Catrin, but I’m glad I was wrong about that. You’ve met Catrin, I’m sure.”
Seriously, what about “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know,” does she not comprehend? But Neela nods nonetheless. Oh, yes, she had met Catrin. At the hospital, and once recently at a happy hour she and Ray stopped by after work. Completely friendly, certainly nothing objectively malignant about her, but Neela nonetheless found her completely terrifying. There was something positively feline about the woman, as if she were stalking Neela from a distance until the time was right to devour her. Neela was fairly confident Ray hadn’t slept with Catrin, although she couldn’t put her finger on exactly why. And somehow that was even more worrisome, now that she considered it.
“God, Neela, I’m sorry. This is probably the last thing you want to talk about.” Amy shakes her head. “I can only imagine how overwhelming this all is for you. A new city, a new job, new people.” She smiles. “The least I could do is keep it to small talk.”
Neela returns the smile. “It’s okay, really. I know you’ve been good friends to Ray; you care about him. I’m glad.” And she truly was. It just…this whole evening, somehow rather than making her feel better, feel closer to Ray, instead marks the distances, the gaps. The times she should have been with him, but wasn’t. She doesn’t think the regret will ever leave her, that she will ever stop hating herself a little bit for not getting to the right answer sooner. Neela finishes her wine.
Amy crushes out her cigarette. “I know you probably don’t know a lot of people here. And that sometimes it’s nice to talk to someone who is not on the other end of a phone. I remember what it was like for me when I first moved here with Andy. Relationships . . . relationships are tough, even under the most ideal circumstances. I just want you to know that, if you ever feel like it’s something you want to do, . .”
Neela nods quickly. This conversation cannot be over soon enough. “Thank you.”
Amy stood. “Well, enough of that.” She nods her head toward the house. “You’d better get Ray home unless you want a furry child to go home with you.”
Neela looks in the window. Ray and Andy are sitting at the table talking. A skinny brown dog rests its chin on Ray’s thigh, Ray absentmindedly stroking its head. “Hm. I wager you’re right.” Neela laughs. “How is it that he doesn’t have one already?”
“I imagine he was waiting for you.”
* * * * * *
Neela leaves for Chicago while Ray is still at work on Wednesday. He is used to being the first one home, but just knowing that she is gone makes the little bungalow seem abandoned. Huge. Lonely. So he finds reasons not to be home. He lingers at the guitar store when he drops off the Epiphone, banging away on the electronic drum kits, examining every band flier, playing the new Gibson Holy V for an inexcusably long time. He reads every article, every last lunatic letter, in the Baton Rouge Advocate while lingering over a burger and fries at the counter of a diner on Chimes Street.
When he does finally return home, it feels a little too much like their apartment after she moved out. He believes - knows - she’s coming back, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling a little pang when he finds her earrings sitting on the coffee table where she left them last night, her cereal box on the counter, her shoes by the couch. The woman may be constitutionally incapable of putting anything away.
She calls when she gets to Chicago. She’s in a cab and Ray can hear snatches of the driver talking in the background. “Just being here makes me miss you,” Neela says. Ray grins, and hates himself a little for being grateful, for the loopy things happening in his chest that leave an achy vacancy when she finally hangs up. He wonders if she will ever stop having this effect on him. He mostly hopes not.
Someone got Neela one of those Hitchcock box sets as a going-away gift, and Ray eventually falls asleep on the couch watching Psycho for the eightieth time. He wakes up early the next morning, feeling like crap, deep itchy aches in bones he’s pretty sure he doesn’t even have anymore. He hasn’t had a morning like this in a while, where the very thought of all the fucking rigmarole required just to get to the bathroom seems to take superhuman effort. He feels ancient, eons older than his thirty-one years.
Work is endless, trying, and he’s relentlessly cheery to keep from biting someone’s head off. Catrin shoots him a sharp look, a raised eyebrow, and Ray shrugs. Sometimes it sucks when people know you.
Catrin is probably his closest friend in Baton Rouge, and the second most-beautiful woman Ray has ever known. The word that comes to mind is abundance; she's a big girl, to be sure, heavier than anyone Ray has ever been with, but everything is exactly where it belongs. And then some. Like some sort of semi-pornographic Amazonian goddess from Xena the Warrior Princess or something. Everything about her is absurdly exaggerated: cheekbones that could cut glass, huge, pillowy pink lips, and almond-shaped cobalt eyes that seem to perpetually snap with secret mischief. She torments a different man every few weeks.
Ray is grateful to remain a spectator, frankly. And Catrin has had Ray's number from the beginning, anyway; none of his bullshit flies with her. She told him, straight up, early on, that she doesn’t sleep with men who are in love with other women.
She's like the inappropriately hot big sister he never had. Or something. Definitely the best wingman he’s ever known, and he always did his best to return the favor. They had fun. A lot of fun, actually.
And she’s also the only person he ever told the whole story, the whole thing with Neela and the apartment and the weddings and the truck.
Which, of course, was a huge mistake.
So Catrin kind of doesn’t like Neela very much, which is unfortunate. And completely Ray’s fault. His version might have been a little one-sided, a little extreme. It was a dickish move, he knows, but he needed to exert some control over this thing. He was performing an exorcism and there could be no halfway. Plus he also might have been a little drunk. A lot drunk.
And Catrin’s savvy, but she is like a mama lioness and Ray, for better or worse, is one of her cubs. It doesn’t help that Ray has pretty much been AWOL when it comes to all the usual friend-type activities since Neela arrived. Catrin hasn’t said a word. But she doesn’t really have to.
She comes up beside him towards the end of his shift today, just as he’s crumpling up the third form he’s fucked up. Christ, he just wants to be done with this and get the hell out of here. Catrin nudges him. “For fuck’s sake, Barnett. This is getting ridiculous.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m an idiot.” Ray runs his palm over the top of his head. He’s acutely aware that he looks like hell; he feels like he needs to sleep for a month. And he needs to do something about his hair; it’s starting to grow in all funky.
“You’re no good to me like this.” She’s eyeing him, appraising him. She stands there for a moment, so close that Ray can smell her familiar, spicy perfume. Finally, Catrin sighs and moves away. “Get some sleep, Barnett. The whole strung-out look isn’t working for you.”
It’s not a bad idea. He contemplates going straight home and just crashing on the couch in front of the TV with all the shades drawn, maybe self-medicating with a little Jack Daniels.
But Guitar Center calls and the Epiphone is ready so he stops in to pick it up. Ray is at the counter paying when he sees a familiar face; it’s that lawyer dude, Mark, the one Ray runs into now and then who’s always talking about getting together to play. He and some friends are playing tonight; Ray should come by. Ray can feel himself nodding as the guy talks. Yeah, yeah, maybe he should check it out. Why the hell not.
Mark’s got his garage tricked out as a band room, with a drum set in the corner and a P.A. and sweet mics and giant fridge full of beer. The other guys are cool and they already have two guitarists who are both pretty damn impressive for lawyers but none of them can sing for shit, so Ray noodles around on Mark’s bass some and sings and plays lead on a couple of songs and it’s basically the most fun he’s had in ages. They’re so not serious. No one seems worried about being cool or even all that tight, but they actually don’t sound half bad and Ray doesn’t think he’s ever played with people who seemed to just love playing so much. Plus they’re loud and raunchy as hell - when they play London Calling, they make The Clash sound like Barry Manilow. And Ray hadn’t realized how much he missed the easy camaraderie that was always one of the best things about playing in a band. Just a bunch of guys drinking beer, making noise and shouting “fuck” a lot. When Mark asks Ray if he can play again next Friday night Ray doesn’t even think for a beat before agreeing.
It’s late as hell when he gets home, but he’s oddly energized, like he just downed a couple of Red Bulls, so he aimlessly straightens up the place a bit before going to bed. He feels more like himself than he’s felt in, well, years. And it’s good. Really fucking good.
Part Two
Here, in four parts, is the result.....
Title: Cicatrices (part one of four)
Rating: R for loads of sex and language and overall adult stuff
Summary: Everything is so routine and comfortable that some days Ray almost forgets to wonder when Neela is going to change her mind and bolt.
Note: Thank you thank you thank you to lowriseflare for all her amazing fic, and for the videos and, most of all, for reading this in all its different iterations over the last year. Characters depicted in this work are the property of those who own ER, and do not belong to me. But, Ray, if you did, I would never have hit you with the truck. Promise.
A month after Neela officially moves in to Ray's place, they're starting to settle into a routine domesticity. Occasionally, it’s a little like playing house, playing grownup, playing husband and wife. But most often it’s college dorm remix. Roomies part two, electric boogaloo.
Ray cooks most nights - boy food like spaghetti, stir-fry, or anything he can throw on the grill when he gets home. Or he brings home take-out or calls for delivery if it’s been a long day or they are too distracted by each other to remember food until they’re too ravenous to move. He’s the hunter, she’s the gatherer: for some reason she keeps bringing home new sheets and other bedding, and suddenly the linen closet he hadn’t even realized he had is overflowing.
They usually eat on the couch in front of some mindless, mediocre TV - he nominally has a dining room with a table but it's usually just a repository for mail and stacks of journals and magazines - and they bicker and banter over Neela’s chronic aversion to taking out the trash, or whether Ray really should just give her all his socks, or whether peanut butter belongs in the refrigerator. Together, they halfheartedly clean house on their days off, only now the frequent detours and distractions from the task at hand are usually sexual in nature. They talk about the wisdom of hiring someone to come in and clean every other week, but decide they’re currently beyond help.
Everything is so routine and comfortable, in fact, that Ray almost forgets to wonder every day when Neela’s going to change her mind and bolt.
In most ways, it's just like their roomie days, except much, much less fraught with angst. That's sort of the problem.
It's not that Ray isn't happy. He is, in most ways, pretty fucking ecstatic. Every night he falls asleep with his body curled around her warm, small sleeping form, inhaling the cocoa butter scent that radiates from her skin, burying his face in her thick, soft hair. And every morning it's still a bit like waking into the best dream he's ever had.
It's just that - and it seems stupid as he thinks it, but, then again, he long ago came to terms with the fact that he may be the stupidest man alive - he hasn't touched a guitar since the moment she arrived, other than to move it out of the way. Since the moment he looked up from his clipboard to see her across the room, standing there like an apparition from the snowy North with that big heavy coat. Smiling at him. Since that moment he has not been his own. He’s just not altogether Ray. Neela Rasgotra finally came to claim what had been hers for three years, and there’s nothing left for anything else.
At first he welcomed the opportunity to disappear into her. Those first few weeks, they devoured each other at every opportunity, desperately trying to sate the desire that only seemed to build the more time they spent together. They had sex on practically every surface in the house, on the back deck, and, one night, on the tree-shrouded front porch when Neela fumbled too long getting her key in the front door.
His friend Catrin, one of the other rehab docs, asked him one day during that first week whether he was feeling all right. He nodded, grinning, almost giddy. God, what an ass. But he couldn’t help himself. Everyone knew that a woman had arrived and that, ever since then, Ray Barnett had perpetual bags under his eyes and was about ten seconds late on the uptake.
In those first weeks he was so fearful of sinking it that he jettisoned everything in his life that didn’t have to do with her. He skipped the gym most mornings, not wanting her to wake up in his bed without him, not wanting to miss out on the bleary, fuzzy, gentle morning sex. He flaked on poker night with the guys to make blackened catfish and dirty rice because they’d seen some commercial on TV the night before and Neela said it looked good. He even bailed on helping Catrin move last weekend because it was a gorgeous day and he and Neela both had two days off in a row and Neela had never been to New Orleans.
And, in the month and three weeks that Neela has been in Baton Rouge, Ray hasn’t once picked up a guitar to play, hasn’t even hummed snippets of a tune into the digital recorder on his cell phone or scrawled bits of lyric on the back of a take-out menu.
It’s the longest he has gone without writing, much less playing, well….ever. Even in the weeks and months after his accident - when he felt like his insides had been flayed away and rearranged somewhere outside this strange new body, when he felt so empty and dead that another fistful of Vicodin seemed inevitable, when he didn’t know if he was ever going to feel like a living person again - he still wrote. Angry, incoherent, unmelodic noise, but it was Ray and it was loud and the moment he could sit with the guitar without screaming in pain he was playing it into his little digital four-track. He knew he was going to be okay when he pictured his career as a legless street busker, playing for quarters on the corner, and the tears streaming down his face were mostly from laughter.
And, actually, some of what he wrote then wasn’t bad. He went back to some of it in the fall, after he got back from Chicago, reduced the profanity-to-printable-word ratio, and recorded a few songs. One of them even made it onto the disc he burned for Neela back in February. He hasn’t played with anyone else or played out at all, although in January he had met a young attorney at Guitar Center who sometimes played with a few friends in his garage, and they had talked about getting together to jam, even exchanged business cards and emails.
And then Ray looked up from his clipboard and saw Neela. And it has been everything he had stopped letting himself imagine it could be. Blissful and raw and sweet and incredibly satisfying.
But it’s not rock-and-roll.
When he thinks about it, all the really great rock songs are about anger and loss and thwarted longing. Missed opportunities. Romantic tragedies. Ok, and lust and passion and doing it in the road, which they certainly should put on their list . . . but not this slightly fearful, cautious happiness.
And fuck if he’s going to end up writing some fluffy bunnybear Whitney Houston shit.
This morning, he gets up before sunrise, puts on his running legs - he has more accessories than a kid’s action figure - and goes for an hour-long run that completely kicks his ass, it’s been so long. But he’s showered and dressed before Neela wakes so he goes into the dining alcove, where his guitars sit in a forlorn row on their black metal stands against the far wall behind the table.
Ray has always loved his guitars the way some guys love a cherry 1967 Mustang convertible or some women love a pair of strappy patent-leather stilettos. The glossy wood, the shiny chrome hardware, even the stupid but also kind of awesome skull-patterned guitar strap he bought when he was in Chicago in October. But he especially loves his honey-colored Epiphone Casino. He ordered it from Musician’s Friend online one morning a few months ago, sitting on the couch in his pajama bottoms with his laptop. The night before, he had been flirting with a cute, brunette LSU co-ed at the gym, and ended up walking her to dinner down the street, then fucking her in the front seat of her little convertible without her ever for a moment suspecting there was anything wrong with his legs.
Hm. Probably best not to share that particular origin story with Neela.
Ray pulls the big, blonde, hollow-body guitar off the stand and runs his fingers over the wood. He loves the wide, curved body with its script-like f-holes, and he loves the loud full sound he can get playing it unplugged, although the feedback kind of sucks when he plays with the amp. He plays a few random chords, then frowns. Shit - he’s going to have to take it in to Guitar Center. The humidity wreaks havoc with the wood and the pickups need to be adjusted and it’s all out of tune. He gently rests it back on its stand and tries to shake the edgy feeling he gets now every time he feels like this part of him is withering away.
Fuck. Ray shakes his head. What do you want? Just be happy, dude.
Ray hears the zip of the shower curtain and the low rumble of the pipes as Neela starts the shower. He wanders into the bathroom and runs his hands over the top of his head, taking a last look in the mirror before the moisture from the shower obliterates his reflection. He kind of likes the close-cropped hair. He'd shaved his head on an impulse, a few weeks before Neela arrived in Baton Rouge. He’d awoken that morning to find an email from Neela, oddly detached and reserved in tone, that left him convinced she was going to take the job at Duke and gradually fade out of his life forever. After work, he wandered with a few friends down to an awesome dive bar he had recently discovered. Numbed by many beers, he flirted with the bar’s owner until well after closing time. She was slightly older than Ray’s usual target demographic, but leggy and voluptuous with short, spiky blonde hair. She smelled like autumn leaves and gave truly inspired head. She gave Ray a ride home on her Harley afterward, his arms wrapped around her narrow leather-clad waist.
And then he stood in front of this bathroom mirror and took the electric razor to his head. As the hair fell away, it felt like shedding a heavy metaphorical weight, the vestiges of the old Ray, the one who clearly wasn’t working out anymore. Who, frankly, had never worked out at all. The Ray who fucked some random cougar - christ, probably some kid's mom - to punish someone who would never even know what he’d done. The Ray who still let himself hope for some idiotically impossible happy ending to what had been, in all, a rather gruesome fairy tale.
The Ray who still grieved for Neela more than any other loss he’d known.
Jesus Christ, what a fucking pussy. Seriously.
Thank God Neela hadn’t arrived three weeks earlier, though. Completely bald, he’d looked like an asylum escapee. The unanticipated upside, though, was that the bar owner didn’t recognize him when he stopped in for a beer later that week.
But the velvety new-growth hair, that, he likes. He can tell that Neela likes it too, the way she’s always running her hands over it and pressing her face against the top of his head. He tilts his head to one side and grins at his reflection. Yep. The hair works. Maybe he'll keep it.
He pokes his head around the shower curtain. Neela is standing under the spray, her eyes still half-closed, the water tracing a meandering path over the gentle curve of her spine, and Ray has to resist the urge to catch a stray droplet off one upturned chocolaty nipple with a flick of his tongue. But he has monthly team meeting this morning, and he will not be late two months in a row.
“Neela,” he says quietly, not wanting to startle her.
She turns, parting her lashes just a millimeter more, then closes her eyes and presses her smiling mouth against his. And Ray’s head and face are wet but he doesn’t mind.
* * * * * *
After almost two months of sharing a bed with Ray, Neela's still not sleeping through the night.
One night she alternates feverishly from sticky heat - which makes the radiant warmth of Ray's chest pressing into her back almost unbearable - to clammy cold once the air conditioning cycles on again. The quiet buzz of Ray's snores in her ear vibrates down her spine and makes her yearn to toss and twitch. She gently disentangles herself from his arms and slips into the living room, drapes a cool, clean sheet over the couch and falls almost immediately into an almost decadently blissful, solitary slumber. But Ray can barely disguise the stricken look on his face when he emerges from the bedroom the next morning and sees her lying there, and the sight of it slices through her sternum and hollows out her chest and she knows she can never do that to him again.
So she lies awake in his arms most of the night, and eventually learns that if she slowly rocks back and forth for a few moments, he will roll onto his stomach and his snores will fade away.
It’s downright distressing that she’s allowed to perform surgery on a human being after a night like that.
It's not as if she hadn't thought this through. She thought it through for weeks, months. Years, really. Whether or not to be with Ray. But, for all her list-making and pros-and-cons weighing, and fretting over whether he even still wanted her after everything her indecision had cost him, she hadn't really thought about what happens next. What happens if. What happens after.
And now they're in the after and it's brilliant, really. It's lovely. Ray is lovely. Truly lovely, just as she had known he would be. Sweet and funny and oddly nurturing and reliable in a way she never would have imagined he could have been when she first met him all those years ago. He makes her toast and egg in the morning, and when he packs his sack lunch before work he makes her one too - a sandwich on soft bread cut in triangles, an apple or an orange, little baggies of salted almonds and crisps and cookies. She’s getting positively fat. He makes her feel safe and adored and just the tiniest bit smothered.
But of course she adores him. How could she not?
It's just so bloody hard in ways she hadn't considered.
She feels compelled to be so careful with him. Of course she needles and banters and teases, but only about the little trivial everyday things that don’t really bother her at all.
Sometimes Neela feels they are actors slightly miscast in a reenactment of the neatest, safest version of their former lives. Rated R, of course, for the sex, but not for adult situations or weighty topics. The television is a blessing, filling in the silences so that unasked questions can remain so.
And it makes no sense because, if anything, he seems so much more. . . durable now than he ever did in Chicago. Substantial. Not just bigger, although he is that. He’s still long and lean, but the almost adolescent-skinny arms and chest she remembers are now defined and substantial and she loves tracing her tongue down along the hard, taut ridges on the sides of his stomach. But everything about him also seems more grounded and deliberate, from the slow firm way he walks now to how he always double-locks the door when he leaves in the morning before she does. Really, on the rare occasions when Neela is entirely honest with herself, she knows she never would have made the move to Baton Rouge for the old Ray, the Ray she knew before Halloween. She would have been too terrified. Even more terrified than she is now.
And it seems rather rotten to miss the old reckless, heedless Ray when she was the one who destroyed him.
Some things are the same, of course - the gravelly voice, eyes the honeyed green of extra-virgin olive oil, tattoos that once seemed like boyish posturing and now mark him like battle-scars.
It’s just that the changes that break her heart are not the ones she expected.
Neela lies awake, listening to the distant hum of the highway, when Ray rises before the sun again this morning. She’s relieved that he’s been going for a run each morning before work for the past week. Every morning she thinks about getting up and going with him, but instead keeps her eyes closed and her breathing deep and regular as his lips press against her cheek, the stubble on his chin grazing her jaw. When she hears his keys turn in the deadbolt a few moments later, she stretches her limbs across the bed like a starfish.
Most days, she promptly falls into a deep, voluptuous sleep for the next hour and a half, until her alarm buzzes. It’s a bit twisted, actually, the way she fetishizes sleep lately. She finds herself wandering the Dillards after work, filling her arms with feather bed mattress covers, fluffy duvets, and silky sheets of ever-increasing thread count.
But this morning, she is restless and unwilling to surrender to sleep. Earlier, hours before the vibrating alarm on Ray’s cell phone buzzed - an alarm that, by the way, sounds quite like Ray’s snores, so she’s baffled as to how exactly it wakes him, but it does - Neela awoke abruptly from a very vivid dream. Rather steamy, actually, and, from what she recalls, spot on with the details.
About Tony.
Bloody hell.
When her eyes flew open, Ray was still snoring quietly, his back to her. So she probably had not been moaning or - heaven forbid - calling out anyone’s name in her sleep. One hopes, at any rate. Neela pushed her tangled hair off her face. The air had cycled on so it was chilly in the room, and Ray was partly covered with the duvet, but Neela felt flushed from head to toe. In the faint glow that penetrated the room from the outdoor lights, Neela could see the dark tattoo nestled between Ray’s shoulder blades and reached out to trace its outline with her finger. Ray shifted and rolled towards her, his sleeping face looking so young and untroubled in the soft, dim light that Neela felt a surge of tenderness and couldn’t resist resting a warm palm against his cheek.
She doesn’t know how to tell him that she has to go back to Chicago.
Just for a few days, for a conference. She has been asked to present, and it’s rather an honor, actually, quite an embellishment for her resume. She leaves next Wednesday and really should have told Ray ages ago. . but. But what? It’s just that every time she thought about telling him, every time she started composing the words in her mind, she found a reason that it wasn’t the right time. And now she has waited so long that it will seem like she has been keeping it from him deliberately for some reason, making it seem so much more sinister than it really is.
Neela almost turned down the invitation, but a couple of lunchtime telephone conversations with Abby convinced her that she was being foolish. When did Abby become her backbone? She actually thought about calling Abby for a moment before realizing that, even in Boston, it was far too early to be awake. And really, she should have told Ray right away, when she was invited. Isn’t that what normal people in normal relationships do?
She will tell him today, Neela vows. Tonight, when they are both home from work and relaxed and . . . oh, God, maybe after a few beers. She’ll call Abby at lunch.
* * * * * *
Ray is liking Weezer lately - early 2000s Weezer to be precise - and, when Neela gets home that evening, she can hear “Hashpipe” blaring through the solid wood front door.
“Ray Barnett, you will be deaf by fifty!” Neela shouts as she walks through the door, juggling her laptop bag and handbag and car keys.
She drops all three near the front door along with the wool sweater she always totes to work in preparation for the arctic cold of the air conditioning in her office. Her office shares a thermostat with the office next door, and it’s a constant - although oddly unacknowledged - battle between Neela and the ruddy, somewhat portly surgeon on the other side of the wall. It seems absurd now that she could have ever been cold at any time in recent memory; her sleeveless blouse and cotton pants are both damp and uncomfortable simply from the 100-foot walk from the driveway to the front door.
Walking by the CD player, Neela turns the volume down to a slightly less ear-shattering level. Ray is nowhere in sight, but there is a new styrofoam takeout box in the refrigerator along with a six-pack of Stella and one of Newcastle. Neela grabs a cold Stella and flops on the couch, where she pauses a moment to appreciate Ray’s utter interior-design genius; the couch is deep and huge and positioned directly under two ceiling vents. When Neela sits all the way back, her legs stick out in front of her like a child’s, so she usually finds herself kicking off her shoes and sitting cross-legged. She does so now, and reaches for the remote to turn on the TV and flip through the recordings on the DVR.
After a few moments, Ray emerges from the bedroom and Neela can hear him behind her, the clink of bottles as he removes a beer from the refrigerator. She turns slightly to look over her shoulder. “Hi.” She smiles.
“Hi.” Ray leans over the arm of the couch and kisses Neela softly on the mouth. He tastes like beer and a just a hint of cinnamon toothpaste, and smells cool and fresh like soap and limes. He’s wearing a thin, black t-shirt that clings to his chest, and grey plaid cotton pajama bottoms. Neela can’t resist pulling him down onto the couch next to her. “How was your day?” Ray whispers into her neck. His mouth is cool from the beer and feels lovely on her skin.
“Long.” Neela arches her neck to one side, and Ray kisses the intersection of her neck and her shoulder. Neela reaches her hand under his shirt to touch his bare chest, feel the warm thrum of his heart against her palm. Sometimes it feels so close to the surface of his skin, like she might suddenly find herself holding it in her hand. She works both hands up under his shirt until he raises his arms and pulls it off over his head. Ray really should wear shirts far less often. Neela leans into him, pulling her own shirt over her head and pressing her skin into his.
Ray does not need much encouragement. He leans back on the couch, threading his body under hers until she finds herself straddling him. She lifts herself slightly, wriggling out of her pants and underwear and sending them to join his t-shirt on the floor, then bends at the waist, bowing over him to press her mouth to his chest. She can feel him hard against her thigh, his hands at her waist, his hips pushing against her, and she feels a low moan escape her throat. It thrills her how quickly he is ready for her, but she wants to prolong this moment, the quivering anticipation that pierces her spine. She traces her tongue deliberately along the muscular indentation of his arm, then across the hard expanse of his chest, and she can feel him flex against her. His mouth is open, his lower lip dark and swollen, and she takes it between her teeth, biting lightly until his upper lip closes over hers and he kisses her hard.
Neela tenses her thighs around him and lifts her hips, releasing him from the thin cotton fold of his pajama bottoms with one hand before lowering herself slowly onto him. They are both so ready that he slips inside her effortlessly. She shudders slightly, feeling herself tighten around him as her hips begin to rock instinctively back and forth. Ray is pressing against her and she feels their movements and breath synchronize as if executing a well-rehearsed choreography. Her hands on his chest, she arches and lets her hair fall down the damp skin of her back. She raises herself until they almost disconnect, hovers for a millisecond, then settles into him again, over and over until she hears him gasp. The sound sends her over the top, the rush beginning at the base of her spine and traveling through her in concentric waves until she collapses against him.
She only realizes that she has drifted into sleep when Ray tethers her, moving her hand from his chest to the lean expanse of his stomach. “I’m hungry. You?”
Neela’s eyes open. “Oh, no, Ray. You didn’t have to wait for me.” She is starved, though, she realizes.
Ray gently eases out from under her and shrugs as he gets up from the couch and takes a long drink from his half-empty beer. “I picked up chicken.”
Neela raises herself on one elbow, watching him as he slips his pants back over his narrow hips and walks toward the kitchen. He moves with a gangly kinesis that is uniquely Ray, as if his body cannot quite accommodate him, and Neela finds it incredibly endearing. She can’t believe how much she enjoys little things like watching him bend at the waist in front of the refrigerator, the thin folds of skin at his stomach, the shadowy edges of his back muscles moving as he reaches inside. Now that she’s here, it is difficult for Neela to understand what took her so long. Why she wasted so much time.
Ray pauses on his way back from the kitchen, the necks of two beers nestled between the fingers of one hand and the carton of food in the other, and leans for a moment against a low table that sits between the doors to the two bedrooms. His brow is slightly furrowed and she can almost see him formulating and reformulating his words in his mind. “I was thinking today. . .” He began. Neela raises an eyebrow and he pauses and smiles, “Yeah, I know, right? But I was thinking, you know, that it might be kind of weird for you, just moving into my place.” She can feel him looking at her with the cautious watchfulness that always sends shards of guilt through her veins. “If you wanted, we could look for a new place, move into a place that is ours.”
Neela stretches her arms over her head, lengthening her mostly nude body against the couch. “Do I look like I’m anything less than completely comfortable here? Roomie?” She enunciates the last word, laughing. “I like moving into your place. It’s what I do.” She turns to face him, sitting on her knees, her elbows on the back of the couch. “And could we find a more perfect place, really? Amazing rent. . . it’s gorgeous, massive, close to everything, a washer AND a dryer. . .”
Ray sets everything down on the table and swings open the door to the second bedroom, revealing stacks of boxes and suitcases overflowing with rumpled clothing. “Then you think you might unpack sometime?”
Neela blinks and feels her face flush as her smile slowly fades. “I will. Maybe next weekend.” She nods. “I promise.”
Neela looks down at her hands. “That reminds me, Ray, I keep forgetting to tell you.”
Ray leans into the doorway again, his arms folded, the angle of his head a question mark. “Yes?”
“I’m going out of town next week for a couple of days. I was asked to present at a conference, actually.”
Ray grins and picks up the beers, leaning over the back of the couch. He is palpably relieved, and Neela feels a surge of relief, too. “Very cool, Neela.”
Neela turns to lean her shoulder against his arm, takes a beer out of his hand and takes a drink. They discuss her presentation for a few minutes, how she has been struggling to find a hook to make her segment - which falls halfway through the afternoon of the second day of the conference - less sleep-inducing. Ray offers approximately seventy-seven suggestions, and, of the dozen that do not involve Neela removing various items of clothing, three or four are actually plausible. Neela retrieves her laptop, and they sit on the couch and page through her PowerPoint over beers and cold fried chicken for over an hour. Ray knows where to find all the best clip art. She had almost forgotten how much fun it was to bat things around with him. How he could alternate from thoughtful and serious to maddeningly ridiculous in a millisecond, and how nonetheless her own thoughts seemed to find better expression after she talked them out with him.
Neela is washing her face at the bathroom sink when Ray leans in the doorway and asks, “So where is the conference?”
“Um….Chicago, actually.”
Ray nods slowly, his face unreadable. His jaw squares and, after a moment, he leans over and kisses Neela softly on the cheek and disappears into the bedroom.
* * * * * *
There are some events that inevitably divide your life into Before and After. For Ray, Chicago exists almost exclusively in the Before and, at this point, he would prefer that it remain there. Visiting at Halloween was supposed to be about closure, about making peace and letting go. But instead Ray found himself constantly confronted with reminders that some of life's recordings are indelible, and you can't just overdub or play a second take. Greg. Neela. His legs. Sometimes the best you can do is try and adjust the levels to mask the roughest parts. Leaving Neela at her apartment that night was one of the hardest things Ray ever had to make himself do, but he knew if he stayed it would be the same off-key out-of-tune shit it always was, fun to play that night, but unpleasant to hear the next day. And, aside from being the planet of Neela's Creepy-Ass Exes - swarthy midget douchebag and the Aussie dickwad - Chicago also is the land of Neela Without Ray, and that particular Before is not a song Ray is anxious to replay.
Baton Rouge, on the other hand, is all After, and, although Ray's life now is certainly less than ideal, it's much easier for him to function there. Ray, much to his surprise, kind of loves Louisiana, especially in the summer and early fall, when the almost daily storms and intense humidity cause improbably huge plant life to emerge literally overnight. Weeding the yard is a futile endeavor - not that Ray especially bothers. He likes the way everything seems enveloped in green, as if structures are too fragile to hold back the surge of life. He has heard tales of abandoned homes invaded by entwining plants, vines breaking through cracks in the wall, threading up through the floorboards, until the house itself surrenders to the soil. The wildness seems closer here, the façade of civilization thinner. In some of his big-thoughts moments, Ray has wondered if all the voodoo and music and lawlessness aren’t just the inevitable human response to the ever-present reminders of the unpredictable hostility of the natural world, the futility of planning and ordinary preparation in the face of its relentlessness, the awareness that destruction is always a present possibility and you just have to take what you can get when you can get it. If Louisiana were a song, it wouldn’t be something cool and sophisticated, like improvisational jazz. No, Louisiana would be an old-school punk thrasher anthem - not some tight, professional post-punk rock song from someone like Green Day or Blink - but raw, edgy noise, with some skinny, strung-out white boy screaming into the mike and a rapid drum beat hurtling just a millisecond ahead of the guitar, as if at any moment the whole thing could careen out of control. And sometimes it does.
He often thinks that Neela must hate it. Although she is, undeniably, here, she often seems perched tentatively, as if at any moment she could take flight in a fluttery burst. The suitcases, the rental car . . . one morning last week Ray found himself grinning like a goon on his drive to work just because he discovered that Neela had filled an entire shelf in the bathroom cabinet with her toiletries, her blow-dryer, her flatiron, her comparably modest store of hair products. He’s turning into a girl, searching for signs of commitment in the tiniest, most meaningless things. Maybe this is some sort of karmic payback for all the women Ray was so careless with over the years. For all the Kateys and the Zoes and the nameless others. . . for pretty much any woman who wasn’t Neela.
He cringes to think about the last time he saw everyone from County, that day in Neela’s office over Skype. The way he leaned over behind Neela, a possessive hand on her shoulder, that smug smirk on his face that said “suck it; I win.” Pissing a giant circle around his territory, knowing Gates would see. Total rookie punk-ass move, Ray thought. Any remotely savvy observer could read his insecurity.
But Ray is encouraged when Neela seems enthusiastic about going to dinner at Andy and Amy’s tonight. Ray met Andy during his earliest days at the gym, and Andy’s wife Amy is quite possibly the coolest person Ray has ever met. Andy is a veterinarian, and he is always bringing home beat-up strays that end up in his office or that he finds wandering in the street. Like Ray. And Amy good-naturedly takes them in and feeds them until Andy finds them new homes. Amy fed Ray probably twice a week over the past year, and the first place Ray went when he got back from Chicago in November was the welcoming refuge of their cozy bright kitchen. He still feels a little bad that he didn’t try harder with any of the blind dates they arranged. But, if anyone can make Baton Rouge seem like home for Neela, it has to be Andy and Amy.
Not that Ray even knows whether Neela intends this to be home. They haven’t talked about it, haven’t talked about what all this means or what they are now. What she wants. After a flurry of cryptic emails and phone calls, which Ray tried very hard not to find encouraging, Neela just appeared one sunny afternoon, and Ray just kind of took her home with him, no questions asked. She later mentioned that she had rented an apartment, but, as far as Ray knew, neither she nor any of her stuff ever made it there, and near the end of the first month Ray casually suggested she give notice. He’s not sure whether she did, but she always comes home at night.
Seriously, his headshot should be on some sort of website for easy marks.
The thing is, Ray isn’t really sure what he wants. Except that he is. Hearts and fucking flowers, Neela-n-Ray 4ever. He has no idea why Neela’s Taylor Swift CD has spent two weeks in his car CD player, or how he came to know all the words to “The Way I Loved You.” Nor is he sure exactly when he became a fifteen-year-old girl, but he fully expects any day to find himself doodling bubbly hearts with Neela’s name inside them on the outside of his notebook. He pulls into an open space and slams the car into park.
* * * * * *
Neela changes her clothes six times before they leave for Amy and Andy’s. She’s flustered; she gets home later than she expects, and of course everything takes longer than she ever could have anticipated. Her hair is a disaster and she does her best to smooth it into a high ponytail, stepping around various items of rejected clothing before settling on a long, loose blue sundress. She knows tonight is important for Ray, that these people mean something more to him than the dozens of other co-workers and buddies she has met, that he really wants her to like them and wants them to like her. No pressure, of course. Neela rolls her eyes. But, on the other hand, she is overwhelmingly relieved to have a dry run before what she assumes will be the inevitable dinner with his mother.
Andy and Amy live in a little bungalow in Hundred Oaks just a few blocks away from Ray’s. The evening is the most temperate and pleasant in weeks, so they walk, her hand in his, Ray periodically swinging their connected arms like a six-year-old to punctuate the conversation. He is in a jokey, upbeat, almost carefree mood tonight and by the time Andy greets them at the front door, Neela is feeling almost relaxed. Neela likes Andy immediately, his flashing smile and the gentle, jovial manner that defuses the visual impact of his stocky, muscular frame. Neela can hear dogs barking in the background, and sees at least three of various sizes pushing against the wooden expanding gate that blocks a small sitting room from the entry. Ray is instantly over the gate and on the floor, laughing, a mass of wriggling, furry bodies and manically wagging tails swarming over him.
It’s ridiculous, of course, typical Ray. Typical Ray. Neela smiles.
Everything is very cozy and friendly and nice, but Neela can’t help but feel a little disconnected. Amy greets Neela with a hug and massive glass of icy white wine. When Ray has finished roughhousing with the dogs, Amy quickly puts him to work stirring something on the stove and shoos Andy out to put fish on the grill, then pulls up a stool next to Neela at the counter, refilling their wine glasses. Ray knows where everything is - spoons, dog biscuits, napkins, salt - and this unsettles Neela more than it should, this reminder that she has missed key scenes of the movie, important clues that might foreshadow how it all ends.
After dinner, Neela follows Amy out the sliding glass door to the small, screened patio. Amy pulls two cushions from a box in the corner and places them on two of the wrought-iron chairs, gesturing to one as she settles in the other. Neela watches as Amy extracts a brown cigarette from the gold foil with two long, tapered fingers, places the cigarette between her lips and lights it, inhaling deeply, eyes closed.
“God that’s good.” Amy smiles apologetically. “I’m down to one a day now. Andy has me on a strict reduction regimen: next week I go to one every other day.” She laughs.
Neela smiles and takes another mouthful of wine. Her chair faces out towards the small backyard, and she can hear the low electric hum of cicadas, metallic and slightly sinister, like an army of robotic snakes rearing to strike. It occurs to her to wonder what they look like, where they are; the sound seems to come from every direction, as if they surround her. She wonders whether she will ever stop noticing it, whether all the sounds and smells and sights of Ray’s world will one day become so familiar that she will stop feeling like an explorer stranded on an alien planet. The clove smoke mixes with the damp, mossy air, and the scent, combined with the pleasant sensation of fullness from the rich, heavy meal and the warm glow of the wine, is almost narcotic. Neela closes her eyes.
“I’m glad you’re here.” Amy says after a moment. Neela opens her eyes and sees that Amy is looking over Neela’s shoulder, through the glass door into the house. “You and Ray . . .” Amy pauses, as if considering her words carefully. “Well, I guess I know now why none of those blind dates worked out.”
Neela laughs. “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.” But the band of anxiety around her chest tightens a notch. She hates this. Blind dates? Will there ever be a time when just hearing some reference to Ray in Baton Rouge before she arrived will make her feel anything other than this sour mix of guilt and apprehension?
“I told Andy there was someone, but he thought no. He chose to believe I was just the worst matchmaker in the world. Which may also be true. For a while I thought Ray might be hung up on that friend of his, Catrin, but I’m glad I was wrong about that. You’ve met Catrin, I’m sure.”
Seriously, what about “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know,” does she not comprehend? But Neela nods nonetheless. Oh, yes, she had met Catrin. At the hospital, and once recently at a happy hour she and Ray stopped by after work. Completely friendly, certainly nothing objectively malignant about her, but Neela nonetheless found her completely terrifying. There was something positively feline about the woman, as if she were stalking Neela from a distance until the time was right to devour her. Neela was fairly confident Ray hadn’t slept with Catrin, although she couldn’t put her finger on exactly why. And somehow that was even more worrisome, now that she considered it.
“God, Neela, I’m sorry. This is probably the last thing you want to talk about.” Amy shakes her head. “I can only imagine how overwhelming this all is for you. A new city, a new job, new people.” She smiles. “The least I could do is keep it to small talk.”
Neela returns the smile. “It’s okay, really. I know you’ve been good friends to Ray; you care about him. I’m glad.” And she truly was. It just…this whole evening, somehow rather than making her feel better, feel closer to Ray, instead marks the distances, the gaps. The times she should have been with him, but wasn’t. She doesn’t think the regret will ever leave her, that she will ever stop hating herself a little bit for not getting to the right answer sooner. Neela finishes her wine.
Amy crushes out her cigarette. “I know you probably don’t know a lot of people here. And that sometimes it’s nice to talk to someone who is not on the other end of a phone. I remember what it was like for me when I first moved here with Andy. Relationships . . . relationships are tough, even under the most ideal circumstances. I just want you to know that, if you ever feel like it’s something you want to do, . .”
Neela nods quickly. This conversation cannot be over soon enough. “Thank you.”
Amy stood. “Well, enough of that.” She nods her head toward the house. “You’d better get Ray home unless you want a furry child to go home with you.”
Neela looks in the window. Ray and Andy are sitting at the table talking. A skinny brown dog rests its chin on Ray’s thigh, Ray absentmindedly stroking its head. “Hm. I wager you’re right.” Neela laughs. “How is it that he doesn’t have one already?”
“I imagine he was waiting for you.”
* * * * * *
Neela leaves for Chicago while Ray is still at work on Wednesday. He is used to being the first one home, but just knowing that she is gone makes the little bungalow seem abandoned. Huge. Lonely. So he finds reasons not to be home. He lingers at the guitar store when he drops off the Epiphone, banging away on the electronic drum kits, examining every band flier, playing the new Gibson Holy V for an inexcusably long time. He reads every article, every last lunatic letter, in the Baton Rouge Advocate while lingering over a burger and fries at the counter of a diner on Chimes Street.
When he does finally return home, it feels a little too much like their apartment after she moved out. He believes - knows - she’s coming back, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling a little pang when he finds her earrings sitting on the coffee table where she left them last night, her cereal box on the counter, her shoes by the couch. The woman may be constitutionally incapable of putting anything away.
She calls when she gets to Chicago. She’s in a cab and Ray can hear snatches of the driver talking in the background. “Just being here makes me miss you,” Neela says. Ray grins, and hates himself a little for being grateful, for the loopy things happening in his chest that leave an achy vacancy when she finally hangs up. He wonders if she will ever stop having this effect on him. He mostly hopes not.
Someone got Neela one of those Hitchcock box sets as a going-away gift, and Ray eventually falls asleep on the couch watching Psycho for the eightieth time. He wakes up early the next morning, feeling like crap, deep itchy aches in bones he’s pretty sure he doesn’t even have anymore. He hasn’t had a morning like this in a while, where the very thought of all the fucking rigmarole required just to get to the bathroom seems to take superhuman effort. He feels ancient, eons older than his thirty-one years.
Work is endless, trying, and he’s relentlessly cheery to keep from biting someone’s head off. Catrin shoots him a sharp look, a raised eyebrow, and Ray shrugs. Sometimes it sucks when people know you.
Catrin is probably his closest friend in Baton Rouge, and the second most-beautiful woman Ray has ever known. The word that comes to mind is abundance; she's a big girl, to be sure, heavier than anyone Ray has ever been with, but everything is exactly where it belongs. And then some. Like some sort of semi-pornographic Amazonian goddess from Xena the Warrior Princess or something. Everything about her is absurdly exaggerated: cheekbones that could cut glass, huge, pillowy pink lips, and almond-shaped cobalt eyes that seem to perpetually snap with secret mischief. She torments a different man every few weeks.
Ray is grateful to remain a spectator, frankly. And Catrin has had Ray's number from the beginning, anyway; none of his bullshit flies with her. She told him, straight up, early on, that she doesn’t sleep with men who are in love with other women.
She's like the inappropriately hot big sister he never had. Or something. Definitely the best wingman he’s ever known, and he always did his best to return the favor. They had fun. A lot of fun, actually.
And she’s also the only person he ever told the whole story, the whole thing with Neela and the apartment and the weddings and the truck.
Which, of course, was a huge mistake.
So Catrin kind of doesn’t like Neela very much, which is unfortunate. And completely Ray’s fault. His version might have been a little one-sided, a little extreme. It was a dickish move, he knows, but he needed to exert some control over this thing. He was performing an exorcism and there could be no halfway. Plus he also might have been a little drunk. A lot drunk.
And Catrin’s savvy, but she is like a mama lioness and Ray, for better or worse, is one of her cubs. It doesn’t help that Ray has pretty much been AWOL when it comes to all the usual friend-type activities since Neela arrived. Catrin hasn’t said a word. But she doesn’t really have to.
She comes up beside him towards the end of his shift today, just as he’s crumpling up the third form he’s fucked up. Christ, he just wants to be done with this and get the hell out of here. Catrin nudges him. “For fuck’s sake, Barnett. This is getting ridiculous.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m an idiot.” Ray runs his palm over the top of his head. He’s acutely aware that he looks like hell; he feels like he needs to sleep for a month. And he needs to do something about his hair; it’s starting to grow in all funky.
“You’re no good to me like this.” She’s eyeing him, appraising him. She stands there for a moment, so close that Ray can smell her familiar, spicy perfume. Finally, Catrin sighs and moves away. “Get some sleep, Barnett. The whole strung-out look isn’t working for you.”
It’s not a bad idea. He contemplates going straight home and just crashing on the couch in front of the TV with all the shades drawn, maybe self-medicating with a little Jack Daniels.
But Guitar Center calls and the Epiphone is ready so he stops in to pick it up. Ray is at the counter paying when he sees a familiar face; it’s that lawyer dude, Mark, the one Ray runs into now and then who’s always talking about getting together to play. He and some friends are playing tonight; Ray should come by. Ray can feel himself nodding as the guy talks. Yeah, yeah, maybe he should check it out. Why the hell not.
Mark’s got his garage tricked out as a band room, with a drum set in the corner and a P.A. and sweet mics and giant fridge full of beer. The other guys are cool and they already have two guitarists who are both pretty damn impressive for lawyers but none of them can sing for shit, so Ray noodles around on Mark’s bass some and sings and plays lead on a couple of songs and it’s basically the most fun he’s had in ages. They’re so not serious. No one seems worried about being cool or even all that tight, but they actually don’t sound half bad and Ray doesn’t think he’s ever played with people who seemed to just love playing so much. Plus they’re loud and raunchy as hell - when they play London Calling, they make The Clash sound like Barry Manilow. And Ray hadn’t realized how much he missed the easy camaraderie that was always one of the best things about playing in a band. Just a bunch of guys drinking beer, making noise and shouting “fuck” a lot. When Mark asks Ray if he can play again next Friday night Ray doesn’t even think for a beat before agreeing.
It’s late as hell when he gets home, but he’s oddly energized, like he just downed a couple of Red Bulls, so he aimlessly straightens up the place a bit before going to bed. He feels more like himself than he’s felt in, well, years. And it’s good. Really fucking good.
Part Two