Fic: Five Times Ray and Neela Didn't Make it to the Bedroom
Title: Five Times Ray and Neela Didn't Make it to the Bedroom
Rating: Super duper M
Word Count: 5872
Author's Note: THIS IS SO GRATUITOUS. I'm sorry. Inspired by prompts here.
Summary: It occurs to her that there's nothing she could possibly do with him here or anywhere that wouldn't be some stupid stunted abbreviation of everything she doesn't have words for, but she's got her hands in his t-shirt already and the steady thrum of his heart beneath his skin is soothing, the uniform beep of an EKG.
1. He wakes up in the living room at nine-thirty, and he's alone.
It takes him a second to remember how he got there--the circus in his chest when she showed up at at the hospital this morning, the frantic, giddy fumbling on the couch--and another to freak out a little bit that she's gone.
Except she's not gone, clearly. Her clothes are right there on the floor next to his. Jesus Christ. Ray scrubs a hand over his bristly head. It's been a crazy day.
He pulls his jeans on and finds her in the kitchen, rooting around the fridge in her underwear like she's lived here all her life. Ray watches her for a minute, the straight graceful cane of her backbone, the muscles in her calves and thighs. She looks disciplined. She's got the body of someone who's hard on herself. "Hey," he says softly, not wanting to scare her.
Neela looks over her shoulder and smiles. "Sorry," she says. "Didn't want to wake you."
"S'okay. There's not a lot in there, though." He crosses the kitchen and stands behind her at the fridge, his mouth pressed against her ear. She smells like he remembers. "Wasn't expecting company."
"Well," she concedes, turning around, skirring a thumb along his clavicle. He's practically tachycardic. "I do like to preserve the element of surprise."
"No shit." Ray rests his hands on her bare middle, her rib cage a rumble strip under his palms. When he heard somebody had taken the job upstairs in surgery he purposely didn't ask who; in truth he'd pretty much convinced himself she wasn't coming, had finally almost stopped hoping for dumb shit like that. Definitely wasn't hoping for shit like that today. "We could go out, if you're hungry. You wanna go out?"
"No," Neela says immediately, and he grins.
"Okay."
They're on each other in a half-second, the long taut length of her flush against him, fingernails scraping lightly at the nape of his neck until his whole body starts to hum. She's a good kisser. There's nothing tentative about her mouth. Ray backs her up against the counter, lifts her onto it so they're at eye level. He stands between her legs. "Hi," he says, tilting his head to the side.
"Hi."
They laugh. They've been doing this all day, looking at each other and cracking up. Nerves, or something.
Something.
Ray swallows. He traces one finger along the strap of her bra, nudging it down on her shoulder and laying his lips against the spot left vacant. He wants her skin on his skin. "You wanna keep this on?" he mutters, his hand at the twin clasps between her shoulder blades.
Neela bites softly at his jaw. "Do you want me to keep it on?"
Oh, Jesus Christ. "Not particularly," he manages.
"Well then."
Well then. Ray angles it open, lets himself stare for a fraction of a second. He is so wrecked. Neela braces one hand on the countertop and wriggles out of her underwear and just like that she's naked in his kitchen, working the buttons on his jeans and pulling him close enough to slip inside her.
Just like that, she's right here.
His breath is coming quickly, now. Neela shifts her hips. The height of the counter isn't perfect for this, but fuck if he's going to let that stop him. "Scoot forward a little bit," he says quietly. "Put your weight on me." Neela looks at him, her eyes dark and inscrutable. Ray can feel her hesitate. He's going to have to spend some time convincing her she's not going to hurt him. "Hey. Neela, sweetheart," he whispers into her hair. "It's okay."
She holds perfectly still on the edge of the counter, coiled tight like a spring. "Are you afraid?" she asks.
Ray tries to think. He's fucking terrified, actually, but he's not sure if that's what she's wanting to hear. "Are you?"
Neela doesn't answer but after a moment she does what he tells her, leaning toward him, her arms around his neck. He slides his hands beneath her, rocking back and forth until he can tell by the hitch in her breath they've found an angle that works. "There you go," he says slowly, letting her set the pace. "That okay?"
"Mm-hmm." Her voice is low and urgent so he keeps doing what he's doing, lazy and then quicker, his mouth against the pulse point on her neck. Neela hangs on. It doesn't take her long to get there, her small body shuddering, and with his bottom lip between her teeth he gets there, too.
When it's over he lowers her all the way to the counter again and they just stay there for a minute, his hands in her dark hair. They breathe. It occurs to Ray that he could stand here for the foreseeable future and never get tired of it. It occurs to him that he's going to have to take care.
"So," he says finally, when they've calmed down enough that every graze of her fingers on his spine only splinters him a little, his heartbeat slowing down. "About dinner."
Neela looks up at him, and they laugh.
2. In August they go to a party thrown by a friend of Ray's from work, a blonde called Caroline whom Neela suspects he may have slept with at some point, and her fiance. They live in a bungalow in Broadmoor that's overflowing with people, a few of whom Neela knows from the hospital and many more who know Ray, who call out merrily when he walks into the room. It makes Neela smile. She likes how full his life is here.
"You need a beer?" he asks, coming up behind her as she chats with a nurse from Ortho and scratching softly at her upper back. Neela nods, following him into the kitchen. He's standing at the fridge when the light hits his face just so and she notices a small scar at his cheekbone, a crescent moon about half the size of a dime. She reaches up, presses a finger there. "What's that from?" she asks.
"What, the scar?" he asks, popping the top off a Corona and handing her a lime.
"Mm-hmm."
Ray tilts his head to the side and gives her a sort of quizzical look. "I don't know if you know this, sweetheart, but a couple of years ago I got hit by a truck."
Oh, God. Neela shakes her head. Sometimes she is so stupid it's a miracle she can even walk in a straight line. The fact that she's permitted to cut people open and fiddle with their organs passes all understanding. "Of course," she says, embarrassed. "I just. Sorry. Had never noticed it before."
"Well," he says, grinning wolfishly, picking a crisp out of the bowl on the table. "Maybe you're not looking at me enough."
He thinks it's funny. Neela doesn't laugh.
After a moment Ray's absorbed back into the party--social animal that he is he has a habit of disappearing at things like this, leaving Neela to navigate a crowd of half-strangers on her own. Under normal circumstances it irritates her to no end and but tonight she's grateful for the opportunity to slip away, to creep out the back door and around to the side of the house unnoticed as she blinks back tears both shocking and uncalled for, the old guilt and regret gnawing at her heels. Neela takes a deep breath. She doesn't know why that small exchange--that tiny mark--just threw her so much. It's not like it's the first time she's spent every day with him and still managed to miss something completely obvious.
Since she arrived in Baton Rouge five months ago Neela has discovered that there's a certain amount of disassociation necessary for this to work, a tacit agreement to leave the past in the past as much as either one of them realistically can. They don't talk about Chicago, really. They don't talk about before. They don't talk about County or the apartment or the night of Abby and Luka's wedding and for her to even consider bringing any of it up seems almost cruel in the face of how resolutely he's managed to move forward; still, the bottom line is that two years ago she didn't love him enough and he went out and lost both his legs, and now when they argue it's over things like whether or not to watch Superbad again before it goes off the free movie section of onDemand.
This is so inappropriate. Neela swipes hastily at the skin beneath her eyes, at the moisture--tears, perspiration, whatever--that has collected there. Ten o'clock at night and it's still close to ninety, the air so thick you'd need gills to breathe it properly. She's being incredibly neurotic. She tries to get herself under control.
"There you are," he says, coming around the corner from the backyard, his loping gait familiar in the dark. "Was wondering where you got to." Ray stops short, beer bottle dangling from his hand. "What happened?"
God in heaven, what a mess she is. What a mess she's made. "I'm sorry," she says, shaking her head. "Nothing. I'm sorry."
"Shh. Hey." He sets the bottle down in the grass and catches her face in both hands. "For what?"
"Nothing. All of it. I don't know."
"Hey," he says again. "You're freaking out."
"I'm freaking out."
"Can you tell me why?"
She hasn't the vaguest idea where to start so she lays her mouth against his, hard, against all her fear and failing. He tastes like salt. It occurs to her that there's nothing she could possibly do with him here or anywhere that wouldn't be some stupid stunted abbreviation of everything she doesn't have words for, but she's got her hands in his t-shirt already and the steady thrum of his heart beneath his skin is soothing, the uniform beep of an EKG. She's kissing him like she's trying to save someone's life.
"Neela, sweetheart." She feels him sink into it after a moment, wrapping her long ponytail around his hand, but when she goes for the buckle on his belt he pulls back a little. "Somebody's gonna see us."
"Nobody can see," she says, though she actually has no idea if that's correct. She sounds a bit desperate to her own ears. "Do you not want to?"
He gives her that look again, like are you serious? "I always want to. Come here," he says, and pulls her further into the darkness, into the corner made by the jut of the chimney on the outside of the house. Why one needs a fireplace in a climate that necessitates two showers a day just to avoid hyperhidrosis is beyond Neela, but it serves its purpose now. "Are you sure?" Ray asks, and she slips one hand down into his boxers. He lets out a low, gravelly breath.
It's quick, quick, his jeans slouched low on his narrow hips, her underwear pushed to the side. The shingles on the house are rough and cool against her back. It's perfect. It's fine. She just wants to feel him, muscle and tendon and bone, the miracle of his body having repaired itself. She just wants her body to be certain that he's here. She's not even trying to come and when she does it slices through her like a ten blade, keen and exacting. She presses her mouth to the scar on his face.
"You feel better?" he asks a moment later, once they're buttoned up and straightened. He's flushed and handsome and looking at her with uncertainty, like he's not sure if he did the right thing.
Neela considers. "I do," she says slowly. "But can we possibly get out of here?" She reaches for his hand as they cross the broad expanse of yard. "I think I'd rather like to talk to you."
3. Morris and Claudia get married in Chicago in February, a giant church wedding full of redheads and cops. The invitation sits on the kitchen table for three days before either one of them says anything about it, circling like it's radioactive, a missive from another life.
Neela breaks first. "We don't have to go," she says finally, lying in bed in the watery dark. Her palm lands at the faint trail of hair beneath his navel, nails raking over his skin. "You know. If it's odd."
"Oh no," Ray says, and it comes out with something like certainty. "We're going."
So, they go.
He honestly thinks it’s going to be fine until they get to the reception. After all, it was fine last year, when he stopped by County on his way to the rehab conference. A little weird, sure, but ultimately no big deal.
This is more than a little weird. It's a fucking time warp. It's like the real-life version of Facebook, people he never thinks about anymore coming up and poking him when he least expects it. Gates is there with Sam, so he guesses that's still going on. Chuny and Haleh. A bunch of second year residents he doesn't know, plus that Australian dude Brenner who gives Ray this look like he wishes Ray'd get eaten by a dingo, or whatever the hell predators they have in the outback. Killer wombats, maybe. “Neela Rasgotra,” Ray intones quietly, “this is your life.”
“Shut up,” she says. She slips a hand into his back pocket and squeezes. “This is my life.”
“My ass? My ass is your life?”
"Oh, you're hysterical."
Morris is sort of hilariously excited to see them--hilariously excited in general, all back slaps and shit-eating grins, the pitch of his voice way up. All his kids are there. Ray's happy for him. He concentrates on not thinking about the last ER wedding he went to, that dress and and that hopelessness and the burn of the bourbon in his throat. He tries to keep it together. He's at the bar getting a glass of wine for Neela and a seltzer for himself (not that he's superstitious, except a little he is) when Abby sidles up next to him, bumping him in the side. “So this is totally bizarre, right?” she says, instead of hello.
Ray grins. "Hey, Lockhart." He hasn't seen Abby in forever and he didn't realize he missed her until right this second. He's glad she and Kovac decided to show.
"Hey yourself." She eyes him appraisingly. “You know, Neela wasn't kidding. You’re good-looking now.”
“I’ve always been good-looking.”
“You’ve always thought you were good-looking. There’s a difference.” She makes a face. “So are you vomitously happy down there in the bayou?”
"I don't know," he says, making one back. “Are you vomitously happy up there in Red Sox Nation?”
He just means it as a throwaway but Abby stops and thinks before she answers, forehead crinkling a little. “We’re getting there,” she replies after a moment. "Lot of stuff to figure out."
“Yeah,” Ray says. "Us too."
They get back to the table and of course Gates is running his mouth about something, the many lives he's saved or the challenge on last night's Biggest Loser, who the fuck knows. “Southern weather makes you soft," he's saying, in that voice like he's read the encyclopedia, like he's a goddamn man of science. "Slows your blood down. Right Ray?"
What the fuck does that even mean? Ray nods, raising his eyebrows a little. "That's us Southerners," he says. "Slow blood."
Abby snorts. Neela considers him shrewdly over the bowl of her wineglass, and Ray gives her a look like, what? Okay, on one hand it feels sort of like wanting to slug your high school nemesis at your ten-year reunion-just, unnecessary. The kind of thing Ray should be over by now. He won, didn’t he? He got the girl. There’s no reason for him to still feel so twitchy about it.
On the other hand, fuck this guy, he’s a douchebag and he always has been.
So.
Whatever. It's fine. He chats. He schmoozes. He tries not to think about the fact that he's eating caprese salad with two other dudes who've seen his girlfriend naked. It's his own damn fault. He's in a weird mood, and the effort of pretending not to be in a weird mood is making him want a drink, but he can't have one of those because the last time he tried to drink away his weird mood at a wedding he woke up two days later weighing thirty pounds less than he used to.
He doesn't get jealous anymore.
He doesn't.
Ray thinks Neela can probably feel whatever tense balky energy's coming off him because after awhile she slides one subtle hand onto his lap beneath the table, rubbing at the muscles in his thigh. It starts out as a totally PG kind of thing--reassurance, he thinks, I am with you in this--but as dinner goes on she gets braver, her fingers creeping upwards, trailing along his femoral nerve until finally she's torturing him under the table, her fingers up and down the length of him.
Fuck.
He doesn't look at her. He concentrates. He asks Sam about her kid.
She doesn't stop.
She goes faster.
"You're in trouble," he mutters under his breath.
"Actually, love, I think you're the one in trouble." Neela smiles demurely. He's almost absurdly hard for her; it's taking every iota of self-restraint in his body not to push restlessly against her hand. Anyone looking at them would thinks she was asking him if he knows the name of this song. "Listen to me," she says quietly, letting go--Ray tries not to groan--and picking up her purse. "I want you to count to one hundred." She's looking at the dance floor, at the DJ, anywhere but at his face. "And then I want you to meet me outside."
Five minutes later she's flipped the lock on the bathroom door and they're horizontal on that little sofa they have in there so girls can gossip to each other, her dress around her waist, her body warm and slick beneath his fingers. She smells like herself. They've been doing this for almost a year now and honestly Ray worried he'd get bored but instead it's like she keeps surprising him, one secret thing after another. She braces her hands against his chest.
"Oh, bollocks," she says afterward, getting up to straighten her dress and catching sight of herself in the mirror. She looks...really good. "I don't have a brush." She smoothes her hands down over her hair, tamping it back into place. "If I go out there with bedhead everybody will know."
"That we were doing it in the bathroom like common deviants?"
"Precisely."
"So what?" Ray shrugs. "I make scenes at weddings, you know. It's like, my thing. Might as well stay true to form."
That gets her attention. "See?" she asks, whirling on him. "You are squidgey about being here!" She sounds perversely triumphant, and a little sad. "I knew it."
Ray busies himself with his dress shirt, slipping the buttons through their corresponding holes. "I'm not squidgey about anything."
"We didn't have to come."
"Yeah, we did."
"Because you had something to prove?"
He makes a face. "You make me sound so crass."
"You are crass," Neela says matter-of-factly, sitting back down beside him and resting her chin on his shoulder. "But for what it's worth, whatever it is, I think you just proved it."
Well.
"Wasn't there a person in here?" he asks, because he knows she's probably right and he doesn't want to talk about it. "There's a dude in the men's room hands out towels and stuff."
"Don't change the subject."
"I'm not changing the subject. I'm just asking."
"I gave her fifty dollars to leave."
Christ almighty, she's an impressive woman. She's got no qualms about it at all. "You paid fifty dollars to have sex with me?" Ray asks, boggling a little. Objectively he knows it's not the awesomest thing she's ever done, and yet. Yet. "Really?"
"Do you feel cheap?"
"No, actually," he admits. "Should I? I probably should. But I actually think I kind of love you."
She kisses him once, fast, at the edge of his mouth. "I actually think I kind of love you back."
Ray grins. His mood has improved a shit ton and he thinks it might not be so much the sex--although the sex helped, he's not going to lie--as the feeling of being in on something with her, of getting one over on everybody else. "How long do we have?" he wants to know.
"Well." Neela fishes her phone out of her bag and presses the button to wake it up. "Another three minutes," she reports, and Ray nods seriously.
"Should probably get your money's worth."
4. This is the truth: all Neela wants to do is elope.
It's too late now, of course. The ceremony is--oh God in heaven, the ceremony is tomorrow. Her entire family is in from London: brother and sisters, aunts and cousins. Ray's grandmother is here. Abby and Luka have brought Joe; Morris is in town, though Claudia is too pregnant to fly. The guest list is enormous. The price tag is terrifying. The whole thing is like some absurd international farce, My Big Fat Punjabi-Louisiana-by-Way-Of-Chicago-Full-of-Missteps-and-a-Healthy-Serving-of-Tragedy-But-We-Do-All-Right-Considering Monsoon Wedding.
She wants to hide under the bed.
She's terribly ungrateful. She knows this. She's terrible, but the truth is that she and Ray have spent the last two years so wonderfully separate from everything else, insulated by distance and climate and choice, and to have everyone descending at once makes Neela feel invaded, a zoo animal on display. She's incredibly self-conscious. She's anxious all the time. Ray has moved into Jacy's house for the time being, both to accommodate Neela's sprawling family and preserve the ridiculous pretense that they don't sleep in the same bed. She misses his warm body, the weight of him beside her, and the closer it gets the more this wedding feels like something that's happening to them both separately, like they're floating down the same river but pulled apart by different currents. They haven't been alone in days.
Neela sighs, rolling over in the bed she's sharing with Padma and Malika--her younger sisters both snore, and Pad is a ferocious bedhog--and trying again to relax. She's being dramatic. It's actually fine. There are benefits to a large, fussy wedding, after all: Jacy, for example, has warmed considerably, the jagged edge filed off her wary, long-held suspicion. And though he'd never admit it, Neela gets the feeling there's something important to Ray about the pomp and circumstance, about her standing up in front of the world and choosing him once and for all. I choose you every day, she might tell him, but Neela suspects it's not quite the same thing.
Besides, she's already cheated her parents out of one wedding. It would be poor form to deny them again.
It was Neela who got this whole ball rolling in the first place, anyhow: who snapped, in the middle of a particularly nasty row six months ago over the goggle eyes Ray was making at the checker at Target, "Oh, who cares what you do? Go ahead and boff the entire sales team, if you want to. It's not like we're married."
Ray blinked. They were standing in the bathroom; he'd followed her in there after she'd huffily announced her intention to shower off the discount-store phermones.
"Wow," he said, shaking his head. "You fight dirty, you know that?"
She did know that, actually. And she didn't particularly care. She fumed as she scrubbed her hair and back and elbows, hating him and his instinctive flirtatiousness, hating herself for letting it bother her after all this time.
When she got out of the shower, there was a ring sitting atop a folded towel on the sink.
"Been trying to ask you for a month," he told her, leaning comfortably against the doorjamb as she stood there, dripping and teary and shocked. "You wouldn't shut up long enough for me to do it."
Bastard.
So they made the arrangements, and they spent the money, and they got some friends of Ray's to play the reception. Neela sat restlessly all afternoon while her grandmother painted her hands and feet with henna, watching as the patterns took shape before her eyes.
Her phone vibrates on the nightstand now, and she grabs it before either of her sisters can stir. Ray. "Hang on," she whispers, scrambling out of bed and shutting herself in the bathroom, pressing his voice against her ear. "Hi."
"Come outside," he replies, sounding casual, sounding completely relaxed. "I'm parked around back."
Neela sits down on the closed toilet seat. "You want me to sneak out of the house?"
Ray laughs. "Why, are you worried you'll get grounded?"
"I never got grounded."
"Of course you didn't. Are you coming out here or not?"
Neela smiles. "Give me five minutes."
"Wow," he says, when she slips into the passenger seat and shuts the door behind her, taking in the intricate designs on her hands and forearms. "They got you to hold still long enough to do that?"
"It took hours," she says, shaking her head. She can hear the croak of tree frogs through the windows. "I look like an interstate map."
"I wouldn't say that, exactly."
"Well." Neela pulls one pajama-clad leg to her chest, resting her chin on her knee. "You're supposed to find it terribly attractive."
"I, uh." He glances up at her, down at her inkstained hands. "Find it pretty attractive."
Neela sits back a little, rather pleasantly surprised. "Really?"
"Yeah." He pauses. "Is that weird? You just said I was supposed to!"
"No, no, you are." The idea sends a giddy flutter through her chest, like back in the apartment a hundred years ago when she first realized he might have a little crush on her--the sheer improbability of it enough to make her smile. "It's because it's like tattoos," she says. "You would find that a turn-on."
Ray doesn't answer. "Can I--?" he asks, ghosting one tentative thumb over the underside of her wrist. "Like, will it smudge off?"
Good God, sometimes he is such a boy. "You can touch it," she says, and he does, tracing the patterns on the backs of her hands, careful, concentrating. "That tickles."
"You want me to stop?"
"No."
Ray grins. Together they watch the movement of his fingers up her arm, over the flowers and spirals and curlicues; their faces are so close that when he kisses her it's just an extension of breath. She missed his mouth. Her tongue at his is eager; she bites his bottom lip. "Come here," he says, a little roughly. She smirks at him, then angles herself into his lap. "Yeah."
They fooled around in the car constantly, when she first got here, and Ray braces his hands on her waist as she navigates the space. Knees on either side of his body, she buries her face in the crook of his shoulder; she pulls at the collar of his t-shirt, her tongue in lazy circles at his throat. He's already hard and Neela rolls her hips against him, the contact sending shards of pleasure up her spine. "You wanna marry me tomorrow?" he asks.
Neela laughs. "I do."
He kisses her again, so certain, so long and well and surely. He pulls her tank top over her head. Her bra follows a moment later, his thumbs slow and teasing against her skin; she works at his shirt and he works at her bottoms and then there they are, the two of them, alone and together, I choose you. She's just about to settle down onto him when he stops.
"Are you afraid?" he asks quietly, leaning back against the headrest. His eyes are almost copper in the light.
Neela swallows. She's bloody terrified, actually, but she's not sure if that's what he's wanting to hear. "Are you?"
Ray--charming, rakish, surprising Ray--nods slowly. "Yeah," he says. "I am."
"Me too."
"Good," he says, and he sounds satisfied. His hands are on her body as she moves.
5. Millie wakes up again at three-fifteen, so Neela heaves herself out of bed and stumbles toward the door. "Damn," she says, tripping on the throw rug and whacking her elbow on the wardrobe. She feels like she's just drunk a fifth of tequila. "Damn, damn, damn."
Ray stirs, scrubbing a hand over his smooth, sleepy face. "You want me to go?" he mumbles, and she absolutely does, but she shakes her head and tells him to stay where he is. She can get mobile faster than he can, of course, but more than that--occasional injuries notwithstanding-- Neela actually rather cherishes the solo time with their small, tempestuous girl. Ray's at home with her all day.
She makes her way down the hall to the nursery, lifts the squalling baby from her crib. "All right," Neela says quietly, her face against Millie's smooth, sweet-smelling head. She rocks back and forth in the dark. "All right, now."
In a turn of events that is shocking to absolutely no one, Neela's not a natural at this. She was terrified the whole time she was pregnant--of eating the wrong thing, of not eating enough, of the way her body changed and swelled and felt not like her own so much as a vessel, a container for she knew not what. She worried she wouldn't love the baby. She worried she'd love it too much. "I can't do this," she wailed, sitting on the kitchen floor in tears halfway through her third trimester, having realized at work that day that, to her horror and humiliation, she'd gotten too big to effectively navigate the OR. "I just can't."
It got enormously better once Millie was born--the tactility of her is reassuring, her strange delicate sturdiness. She's a bloody gorgeous child, with Ray's honey-green eyes; the very fact that she exists at all feels like a miracle, like the best kind of luck. Still, four months into motherhood Neela walks around with a kind of dull unbroken anxiety--it's masochism to care about someone this desperately. It's completely insane. Some days it's all she can do to go to work. Having a baby reminds her, bizarrely, of being an intern: the fear and fatigue, the constant knowledge that one false move could be her undoing. Exhausting, but somehow--right.
Ray, though. Ray knows exactly what he's doing. They're peas in a pod, he and Millie, socks in a drawer--they trek all over town together, Millie in the backpack, Ray chatting away about groceries and movies and the headlines in the Baton Rouge Advocate. He's easy with her. He doesn't overthink. Neela loves watching them, loves watching him, as though in learning to raise this strange new creature he's become one himself. It's fascinating.
She doesn't mean to fall asleep standing up, but she must because the next thing she knows Ray is running one hand over her back, whispering in her ear. Neela blinks. "Sorry," she says, handing him the sleeping baby, warm and dense in her terrycloth romper. "How long have I been here?"
"Not that long." He lays Millie down and they hold their breath as she squirms for a moment, then quiets and sleeps. She is so small. Neela exhales, collapsing onto the sofa against the far wall, and Ray raises his eyebrows. A smirk pulls at the edges of his rosy lips. "You resting up for that long trip down the hall?"
"Just for a minute," she says, yawning. She pulls him down with her, holding his hand, and rests her head on the back of the couch. "Or two."
Ray laughs softly. "You're never going to get up."
"Sure I am."
"Mm-hmm." They sit for a moment. He leans back beside her, trailing one finger down the side of her face, over her collarbone. Neela sighs, her eyelids slipping closed. A moment later she feels his mouth at the corner of hers, a pair of soft kisses there. Neela smiles. She's completely knackered--Ray is too, she knows--so she's a bit surprised when he does it again, harder this time, sucking at her bottom lip. She opens her eyes, and he grins.
They lie back on the couch, quiet, quiet, his clever tongue rasping against hers. He flattens his palm over the gentle slope of her stomach, sliding down toward the elastic at her waist. "Are you too tired?" he asks, flirting a little, hint of a dare in his voice. "If you're too tired I'll stop."
"Strange," she says, though in fact she's exhausted; her very limbs feel waterlogged. "I'm suddenly feeling very awake."
"Right," he says, tugging her t-shirt up over her breasts, deliberate with his fingertips and mouth. Neela breathes in sharply. There was a bit of time right after Millie was born when he was so unbearably careful with her it was as if they'd never met before, but tonight his hands are like they've always been: teasing and familiar, like he'd be perfectly able to create a relief map of her body by memory alone. It's lovely, to be known this way. She hooks her fingers in the waistband of his pajama bottoms, pulling them over his narrow hips.
Ray pushes her gently onto her back, supporting himself on one elbow as he reaches down between her legs, nudging her thighs apart. A quick thrill rolls through her core. Neela loves having him this way, the pressure of his body, her hands at the muscles in his broad, solid back. He moves above her with a slick sleepy slide, everything a bit blurry around the edges. She opens up her hips and angles him deep.
No one is hurrying, here; her muscles are heavy to begin with and by the time she gives herself over to the slow delicious fullness of it, a rumble that starts at the very base of her backbone, she's wrung out like a washcloth. Ray rolls a bit toward the back of the couch so that while his weight's not on her, his body still is. "Can we stay here?" she murmurs, feeling the tethers loosen, the drift toward sleep.
"Yeah," he says, yawning a little, pushing her bangs back off her face. "We can stay here."
Rating: Super duper M
Word Count: 5872
Author's Note: THIS IS SO GRATUITOUS. I'm sorry. Inspired by prompts here.
Summary: It occurs to her that there's nothing she could possibly do with him here or anywhere that wouldn't be some stupid stunted abbreviation of everything she doesn't have words for, but she's got her hands in his t-shirt already and the steady thrum of his heart beneath his skin is soothing, the uniform beep of an EKG.
1. He wakes up in the living room at nine-thirty, and he's alone.
It takes him a second to remember how he got there--the circus in his chest when she showed up at at the hospital this morning, the frantic, giddy fumbling on the couch--and another to freak out a little bit that she's gone.
Except she's not gone, clearly. Her clothes are right there on the floor next to his. Jesus Christ. Ray scrubs a hand over his bristly head. It's been a crazy day.
He pulls his jeans on and finds her in the kitchen, rooting around the fridge in her underwear like she's lived here all her life. Ray watches her for a minute, the straight graceful cane of her backbone, the muscles in her calves and thighs. She looks disciplined. She's got the body of someone who's hard on herself. "Hey," he says softly, not wanting to scare her.
Neela looks over her shoulder and smiles. "Sorry," she says. "Didn't want to wake you."
"S'okay. There's not a lot in there, though." He crosses the kitchen and stands behind her at the fridge, his mouth pressed against her ear. She smells like he remembers. "Wasn't expecting company."
"Well," she concedes, turning around, skirring a thumb along his clavicle. He's practically tachycardic. "I do like to preserve the element of surprise."
"No shit." Ray rests his hands on her bare middle, her rib cage a rumble strip under his palms. When he heard somebody had taken the job upstairs in surgery he purposely didn't ask who; in truth he'd pretty much convinced himself she wasn't coming, had finally almost stopped hoping for dumb shit like that. Definitely wasn't hoping for shit like that today. "We could go out, if you're hungry. You wanna go out?"
"No," Neela says immediately, and he grins.
"Okay."
They're on each other in a half-second, the long taut length of her flush against him, fingernails scraping lightly at the nape of his neck until his whole body starts to hum. She's a good kisser. There's nothing tentative about her mouth. Ray backs her up against the counter, lifts her onto it so they're at eye level. He stands between her legs. "Hi," he says, tilting his head to the side.
"Hi."
They laugh. They've been doing this all day, looking at each other and cracking up. Nerves, or something.
Something.
Ray swallows. He traces one finger along the strap of her bra, nudging it down on her shoulder and laying his lips against the spot left vacant. He wants her skin on his skin. "You wanna keep this on?" he mutters, his hand at the twin clasps between her shoulder blades.
Neela bites softly at his jaw. "Do you want me to keep it on?"
Oh, Jesus Christ. "Not particularly," he manages.
"Well then."
Well then. Ray angles it open, lets himself stare for a fraction of a second. He is so wrecked. Neela braces one hand on the countertop and wriggles out of her underwear and just like that she's naked in his kitchen, working the buttons on his jeans and pulling him close enough to slip inside her.
Just like that, she's right here.
His breath is coming quickly, now. Neela shifts her hips. The height of the counter isn't perfect for this, but fuck if he's going to let that stop him. "Scoot forward a little bit," he says quietly. "Put your weight on me." Neela looks at him, her eyes dark and inscrutable. Ray can feel her hesitate. He's going to have to spend some time convincing her she's not going to hurt him. "Hey. Neela, sweetheart," he whispers into her hair. "It's okay."
She holds perfectly still on the edge of the counter, coiled tight like a spring. "Are you afraid?" she asks.
Ray tries to think. He's fucking terrified, actually, but he's not sure if that's what she's wanting to hear. "Are you?"
Neela doesn't answer but after a moment she does what he tells her, leaning toward him, her arms around his neck. He slides his hands beneath her, rocking back and forth until he can tell by the hitch in her breath they've found an angle that works. "There you go," he says slowly, letting her set the pace. "That okay?"
"Mm-hmm." Her voice is low and urgent so he keeps doing what he's doing, lazy and then quicker, his mouth against the pulse point on her neck. Neela hangs on. It doesn't take her long to get there, her small body shuddering, and with his bottom lip between her teeth he gets there, too.
When it's over he lowers her all the way to the counter again and they just stay there for a minute, his hands in her dark hair. They breathe. It occurs to Ray that he could stand here for the foreseeable future and never get tired of it. It occurs to him that he's going to have to take care.
"So," he says finally, when they've calmed down enough that every graze of her fingers on his spine only splinters him a little, his heartbeat slowing down. "About dinner."
Neela looks up at him, and they laugh.
2. In August they go to a party thrown by a friend of Ray's from work, a blonde called Caroline whom Neela suspects he may have slept with at some point, and her fiance. They live in a bungalow in Broadmoor that's overflowing with people, a few of whom Neela knows from the hospital and many more who know Ray, who call out merrily when he walks into the room. It makes Neela smile. She likes how full his life is here.
"You need a beer?" he asks, coming up behind her as she chats with a nurse from Ortho and scratching softly at her upper back. Neela nods, following him into the kitchen. He's standing at the fridge when the light hits his face just so and she notices a small scar at his cheekbone, a crescent moon about half the size of a dime. She reaches up, presses a finger there. "What's that from?" she asks.
"What, the scar?" he asks, popping the top off a Corona and handing her a lime.
"Mm-hmm."
Ray tilts his head to the side and gives her a sort of quizzical look. "I don't know if you know this, sweetheart, but a couple of years ago I got hit by a truck."
Oh, God. Neela shakes her head. Sometimes she is so stupid it's a miracle she can even walk in a straight line. The fact that she's permitted to cut people open and fiddle with their organs passes all understanding. "Of course," she says, embarrassed. "I just. Sorry. Had never noticed it before."
"Well," he says, grinning wolfishly, picking a crisp out of the bowl on the table. "Maybe you're not looking at me enough."
He thinks it's funny. Neela doesn't laugh.
After a moment Ray's absorbed back into the party--social animal that he is he has a habit of disappearing at things like this, leaving Neela to navigate a crowd of half-strangers on her own. Under normal circumstances it irritates her to no end and but tonight she's grateful for the opportunity to slip away, to creep out the back door and around to the side of the house unnoticed as she blinks back tears both shocking and uncalled for, the old guilt and regret gnawing at her heels. Neela takes a deep breath. She doesn't know why that small exchange--that tiny mark--just threw her so much. It's not like it's the first time she's spent every day with him and still managed to miss something completely obvious.
Since she arrived in Baton Rouge five months ago Neela has discovered that there's a certain amount of disassociation necessary for this to work, a tacit agreement to leave the past in the past as much as either one of them realistically can. They don't talk about Chicago, really. They don't talk about before. They don't talk about County or the apartment or the night of Abby and Luka's wedding and for her to even consider bringing any of it up seems almost cruel in the face of how resolutely he's managed to move forward; still, the bottom line is that two years ago she didn't love him enough and he went out and lost both his legs, and now when they argue it's over things like whether or not to watch Superbad again before it goes off the free movie section of onDemand.
This is so inappropriate. Neela swipes hastily at the skin beneath her eyes, at the moisture--tears, perspiration, whatever--that has collected there. Ten o'clock at night and it's still close to ninety, the air so thick you'd need gills to breathe it properly. She's being incredibly neurotic. She tries to get herself under control.
"There you are," he says, coming around the corner from the backyard, his loping gait familiar in the dark. "Was wondering where you got to." Ray stops short, beer bottle dangling from his hand. "What happened?"
God in heaven, what a mess she is. What a mess she's made. "I'm sorry," she says, shaking her head. "Nothing. I'm sorry."
"Shh. Hey." He sets the bottle down in the grass and catches her face in both hands. "For what?"
"Nothing. All of it. I don't know."
"Hey," he says again. "You're freaking out."
"I'm freaking out."
"Can you tell me why?"
She hasn't the vaguest idea where to start so she lays her mouth against his, hard, against all her fear and failing. He tastes like salt. It occurs to her that there's nothing she could possibly do with him here or anywhere that wouldn't be some stupid stunted abbreviation of everything she doesn't have words for, but she's got her hands in his t-shirt already and the steady thrum of his heart beneath his skin is soothing, the uniform beep of an EKG. She's kissing him like she's trying to save someone's life.
"Neela, sweetheart." She feels him sink into it after a moment, wrapping her long ponytail around his hand, but when she goes for the buckle on his belt he pulls back a little. "Somebody's gonna see us."
"Nobody can see," she says, though she actually has no idea if that's correct. She sounds a bit desperate to her own ears. "Do you not want to?"
He gives her that look again, like are you serious? "I always want to. Come here," he says, and pulls her further into the darkness, into the corner made by the jut of the chimney on the outside of the house. Why one needs a fireplace in a climate that necessitates two showers a day just to avoid hyperhidrosis is beyond Neela, but it serves its purpose now. "Are you sure?" Ray asks, and she slips one hand down into his boxers. He lets out a low, gravelly breath.
It's quick, quick, his jeans slouched low on his narrow hips, her underwear pushed to the side. The shingles on the house are rough and cool against her back. It's perfect. It's fine. She just wants to feel him, muscle and tendon and bone, the miracle of his body having repaired itself. She just wants her body to be certain that he's here. She's not even trying to come and when she does it slices through her like a ten blade, keen and exacting. She presses her mouth to the scar on his face.
"You feel better?" he asks a moment later, once they're buttoned up and straightened. He's flushed and handsome and looking at her with uncertainty, like he's not sure if he did the right thing.
Neela considers. "I do," she says slowly. "But can we possibly get out of here?" She reaches for his hand as they cross the broad expanse of yard. "I think I'd rather like to talk to you."
3. Morris and Claudia get married in Chicago in February, a giant church wedding full of redheads and cops. The invitation sits on the kitchen table for three days before either one of them says anything about it, circling like it's radioactive, a missive from another life.
Neela breaks first. "We don't have to go," she says finally, lying in bed in the watery dark. Her palm lands at the faint trail of hair beneath his navel, nails raking over his skin. "You know. If it's odd."
"Oh no," Ray says, and it comes out with something like certainty. "We're going."
So, they go.
He honestly thinks it’s going to be fine until they get to the reception. After all, it was fine last year, when he stopped by County on his way to the rehab conference. A little weird, sure, but ultimately no big deal.
This is more than a little weird. It's a fucking time warp. It's like the real-life version of Facebook, people he never thinks about anymore coming up and poking him when he least expects it. Gates is there with Sam, so he guesses that's still going on. Chuny and Haleh. A bunch of second year residents he doesn't know, plus that Australian dude Brenner who gives Ray this look like he wishes Ray'd get eaten by a dingo, or whatever the hell predators they have in the outback. Killer wombats, maybe. “Neela Rasgotra,” Ray intones quietly, “this is your life.”
“Shut up,” she says. She slips a hand into his back pocket and squeezes. “This is my life.”
“My ass? My ass is your life?”
"Oh, you're hysterical."
Morris is sort of hilariously excited to see them--hilariously excited in general, all back slaps and shit-eating grins, the pitch of his voice way up. All his kids are there. Ray's happy for him. He concentrates on not thinking about the last ER wedding he went to, that dress and and that hopelessness and the burn of the bourbon in his throat. He tries to keep it together. He's at the bar getting a glass of wine for Neela and a seltzer for himself (not that he's superstitious, except a little he is) when Abby sidles up next to him, bumping him in the side. “So this is totally bizarre, right?” she says, instead of hello.
Ray grins. "Hey, Lockhart." He hasn't seen Abby in forever and he didn't realize he missed her until right this second. He's glad she and Kovac decided to show.
"Hey yourself." She eyes him appraisingly. “You know, Neela wasn't kidding. You’re good-looking now.”
“I’ve always been good-looking.”
“You’ve always thought you were good-looking. There’s a difference.” She makes a face. “So are you vomitously happy down there in the bayou?”
"I don't know," he says, making one back. “Are you vomitously happy up there in Red Sox Nation?”
He just means it as a throwaway but Abby stops and thinks before she answers, forehead crinkling a little. “We’re getting there,” she replies after a moment. "Lot of stuff to figure out."
“Yeah,” Ray says. "Us too."
They get back to the table and of course Gates is running his mouth about something, the many lives he's saved or the challenge on last night's Biggest Loser, who the fuck knows. “Southern weather makes you soft," he's saying, in that voice like he's read the encyclopedia, like he's a goddamn man of science. "Slows your blood down. Right Ray?"
What the fuck does that even mean? Ray nods, raising his eyebrows a little. "That's us Southerners," he says. "Slow blood."
Abby snorts. Neela considers him shrewdly over the bowl of her wineglass, and Ray gives her a look like, what? Okay, on one hand it feels sort of like wanting to slug your high school nemesis at your ten-year reunion-just, unnecessary. The kind of thing Ray should be over by now. He won, didn’t he? He got the girl. There’s no reason for him to still feel so twitchy about it.
On the other hand, fuck this guy, he’s a douchebag and he always has been.
So.
Whatever. It's fine. He chats. He schmoozes. He tries not to think about the fact that he's eating caprese salad with two other dudes who've seen his girlfriend naked. It's his own damn fault. He's in a weird mood, and the effort of pretending not to be in a weird mood is making him want a drink, but he can't have one of those because the last time he tried to drink away his weird mood at a wedding he woke up two days later weighing thirty pounds less than he used to.
He doesn't get jealous anymore.
He doesn't.
Ray thinks Neela can probably feel whatever tense balky energy's coming off him because after awhile she slides one subtle hand onto his lap beneath the table, rubbing at the muscles in his thigh. It starts out as a totally PG kind of thing--reassurance, he thinks, I am with you in this--but as dinner goes on she gets braver, her fingers creeping upwards, trailing along his femoral nerve until finally she's torturing him under the table, her fingers up and down the length of him.
Fuck.
He doesn't look at her. He concentrates. He asks Sam about her kid.
She doesn't stop.
She goes faster.
"You're in trouble," he mutters under his breath.
"Actually, love, I think you're the one in trouble." Neela smiles demurely. He's almost absurdly hard for her; it's taking every iota of self-restraint in his body not to push restlessly against her hand. Anyone looking at them would thinks she was asking him if he knows the name of this song. "Listen to me," she says quietly, letting go--Ray tries not to groan--and picking up her purse. "I want you to count to one hundred." She's looking at the dance floor, at the DJ, anywhere but at his face. "And then I want you to meet me outside."
Five minutes later she's flipped the lock on the bathroom door and they're horizontal on that little sofa they have in there so girls can gossip to each other, her dress around her waist, her body warm and slick beneath his fingers. She smells like herself. They've been doing this for almost a year now and honestly Ray worried he'd get bored but instead it's like she keeps surprising him, one secret thing after another. She braces her hands against his chest.
"Oh, bollocks," she says afterward, getting up to straighten her dress and catching sight of herself in the mirror. She looks...really good. "I don't have a brush." She smoothes her hands down over her hair, tamping it back into place. "If I go out there with bedhead everybody will know."
"That we were doing it in the bathroom like common deviants?"
"Precisely."
"So what?" Ray shrugs. "I make scenes at weddings, you know. It's like, my thing. Might as well stay true to form."
That gets her attention. "See?" she asks, whirling on him. "You are squidgey about being here!" She sounds perversely triumphant, and a little sad. "I knew it."
Ray busies himself with his dress shirt, slipping the buttons through their corresponding holes. "I'm not squidgey about anything."
"We didn't have to come."
"Yeah, we did."
"Because you had something to prove?"
He makes a face. "You make me sound so crass."
"You are crass," Neela says matter-of-factly, sitting back down beside him and resting her chin on his shoulder. "But for what it's worth, whatever it is, I think you just proved it."
Well.
"Wasn't there a person in here?" he asks, because he knows she's probably right and he doesn't want to talk about it. "There's a dude in the men's room hands out towels and stuff."
"Don't change the subject."
"I'm not changing the subject. I'm just asking."
"I gave her fifty dollars to leave."
Christ almighty, she's an impressive woman. She's got no qualms about it at all. "You paid fifty dollars to have sex with me?" Ray asks, boggling a little. Objectively he knows it's not the awesomest thing she's ever done, and yet. Yet. "Really?"
"Do you feel cheap?"
"No, actually," he admits. "Should I? I probably should. But I actually think I kind of love you."
She kisses him once, fast, at the edge of his mouth. "I actually think I kind of love you back."
Ray grins. His mood has improved a shit ton and he thinks it might not be so much the sex--although the sex helped, he's not going to lie--as the feeling of being in on something with her, of getting one over on everybody else. "How long do we have?" he wants to know.
"Well." Neela fishes her phone out of her bag and presses the button to wake it up. "Another three minutes," she reports, and Ray nods seriously.
"Should probably get your money's worth."
4. This is the truth: all Neela wants to do is elope.
It's too late now, of course. The ceremony is--oh God in heaven, the ceremony is tomorrow. Her entire family is in from London: brother and sisters, aunts and cousins. Ray's grandmother is here. Abby and Luka have brought Joe; Morris is in town, though Claudia is too pregnant to fly. The guest list is enormous. The price tag is terrifying. The whole thing is like some absurd international farce, My Big Fat Punjabi-Louisiana-by-Way-Of-Chicago-Full-of-Missteps-and-a-Healthy-Serving-of-Tragedy-But-We-Do-All-Right-Considering Monsoon Wedding.
She wants to hide under the bed.
She's terribly ungrateful. She knows this. She's terrible, but the truth is that she and Ray have spent the last two years so wonderfully separate from everything else, insulated by distance and climate and choice, and to have everyone descending at once makes Neela feel invaded, a zoo animal on display. She's incredibly self-conscious. She's anxious all the time. Ray has moved into Jacy's house for the time being, both to accommodate Neela's sprawling family and preserve the ridiculous pretense that they don't sleep in the same bed. She misses his warm body, the weight of him beside her, and the closer it gets the more this wedding feels like something that's happening to them both separately, like they're floating down the same river but pulled apart by different currents. They haven't been alone in days.
Neela sighs, rolling over in the bed she's sharing with Padma and Malika--her younger sisters both snore, and Pad is a ferocious bedhog--and trying again to relax. She's being dramatic. It's actually fine. There are benefits to a large, fussy wedding, after all: Jacy, for example, has warmed considerably, the jagged edge filed off her wary, long-held suspicion. And though he'd never admit it, Neela gets the feeling there's something important to Ray about the pomp and circumstance, about her standing up in front of the world and choosing him once and for all. I choose you every day, she might tell him, but Neela suspects it's not quite the same thing.
Besides, she's already cheated her parents out of one wedding. It would be poor form to deny them again.
It was Neela who got this whole ball rolling in the first place, anyhow: who snapped, in the middle of a particularly nasty row six months ago over the goggle eyes Ray was making at the checker at Target, "Oh, who cares what you do? Go ahead and boff the entire sales team, if you want to. It's not like we're married."
Ray blinked. They were standing in the bathroom; he'd followed her in there after she'd huffily announced her intention to shower off the discount-store phermones.
"Wow," he said, shaking his head. "You fight dirty, you know that?"
She did know that, actually. And she didn't particularly care. She fumed as she scrubbed her hair and back and elbows, hating him and his instinctive flirtatiousness, hating herself for letting it bother her after all this time.
When she got out of the shower, there was a ring sitting atop a folded towel on the sink.
"Been trying to ask you for a month," he told her, leaning comfortably against the doorjamb as she stood there, dripping and teary and shocked. "You wouldn't shut up long enough for me to do it."
Bastard.
So they made the arrangements, and they spent the money, and they got some friends of Ray's to play the reception. Neela sat restlessly all afternoon while her grandmother painted her hands and feet with henna, watching as the patterns took shape before her eyes.
Her phone vibrates on the nightstand now, and she grabs it before either of her sisters can stir. Ray. "Hang on," she whispers, scrambling out of bed and shutting herself in the bathroom, pressing his voice against her ear. "Hi."
"Come outside," he replies, sounding casual, sounding completely relaxed. "I'm parked around back."
Neela sits down on the closed toilet seat. "You want me to sneak out of the house?"
Ray laughs. "Why, are you worried you'll get grounded?"
"I never got grounded."
"Of course you didn't. Are you coming out here or not?"
Neela smiles. "Give me five minutes."
"Wow," he says, when she slips into the passenger seat and shuts the door behind her, taking in the intricate designs on her hands and forearms. "They got you to hold still long enough to do that?"
"It took hours," she says, shaking her head. She can hear the croak of tree frogs through the windows. "I look like an interstate map."
"I wouldn't say that, exactly."
"Well." Neela pulls one pajama-clad leg to her chest, resting her chin on her knee. "You're supposed to find it terribly attractive."
"I, uh." He glances up at her, down at her inkstained hands. "Find it pretty attractive."
Neela sits back a little, rather pleasantly surprised. "Really?"
"Yeah." He pauses. "Is that weird? You just said I was supposed to!"
"No, no, you are." The idea sends a giddy flutter through her chest, like back in the apartment a hundred years ago when she first realized he might have a little crush on her--the sheer improbability of it enough to make her smile. "It's because it's like tattoos," she says. "You would find that a turn-on."
Ray doesn't answer. "Can I--?" he asks, ghosting one tentative thumb over the underside of her wrist. "Like, will it smudge off?"
Good God, sometimes he is such a boy. "You can touch it," she says, and he does, tracing the patterns on the backs of her hands, careful, concentrating. "That tickles."
"You want me to stop?"
"No."
Ray grins. Together they watch the movement of his fingers up her arm, over the flowers and spirals and curlicues; their faces are so close that when he kisses her it's just an extension of breath. She missed his mouth. Her tongue at his is eager; she bites his bottom lip. "Come here," he says, a little roughly. She smirks at him, then angles herself into his lap. "Yeah."
They fooled around in the car constantly, when she first got here, and Ray braces his hands on her waist as she navigates the space. Knees on either side of his body, she buries her face in the crook of his shoulder; she pulls at the collar of his t-shirt, her tongue in lazy circles at his throat. He's already hard and Neela rolls her hips against him, the contact sending shards of pleasure up her spine. "You wanna marry me tomorrow?" he asks.
Neela laughs. "I do."
He kisses her again, so certain, so long and well and surely. He pulls her tank top over her head. Her bra follows a moment later, his thumbs slow and teasing against her skin; she works at his shirt and he works at her bottoms and then there they are, the two of them, alone and together, I choose you. She's just about to settle down onto him when he stops.
"Are you afraid?" he asks quietly, leaning back against the headrest. His eyes are almost copper in the light.
Neela swallows. She's bloody terrified, actually, but she's not sure if that's what he's wanting to hear. "Are you?"
Ray--charming, rakish, surprising Ray--nods slowly. "Yeah," he says. "I am."
"Me too."
"Good," he says, and he sounds satisfied. His hands are on her body as she moves.
5. Millie wakes up again at three-fifteen, so Neela heaves herself out of bed and stumbles toward the door. "Damn," she says, tripping on the throw rug and whacking her elbow on the wardrobe. She feels like she's just drunk a fifth of tequila. "Damn, damn, damn."
Ray stirs, scrubbing a hand over his smooth, sleepy face. "You want me to go?" he mumbles, and she absolutely does, but she shakes her head and tells him to stay where he is. She can get mobile faster than he can, of course, but more than that--occasional injuries notwithstanding-- Neela actually rather cherishes the solo time with their small, tempestuous girl. Ray's at home with her all day.
She makes her way down the hall to the nursery, lifts the squalling baby from her crib. "All right," Neela says quietly, her face against Millie's smooth, sweet-smelling head. She rocks back and forth in the dark. "All right, now."
In a turn of events that is shocking to absolutely no one, Neela's not a natural at this. She was terrified the whole time she was pregnant--of eating the wrong thing, of not eating enough, of the way her body changed and swelled and felt not like her own so much as a vessel, a container for she knew not what. She worried she wouldn't love the baby. She worried she'd love it too much. "I can't do this," she wailed, sitting on the kitchen floor in tears halfway through her third trimester, having realized at work that day that, to her horror and humiliation, she'd gotten too big to effectively navigate the OR. "I just can't."
It got enormously better once Millie was born--the tactility of her is reassuring, her strange delicate sturdiness. She's a bloody gorgeous child, with Ray's honey-green eyes; the very fact that she exists at all feels like a miracle, like the best kind of luck. Still, four months into motherhood Neela walks around with a kind of dull unbroken anxiety--it's masochism to care about someone this desperately. It's completely insane. Some days it's all she can do to go to work. Having a baby reminds her, bizarrely, of being an intern: the fear and fatigue, the constant knowledge that one false move could be her undoing. Exhausting, but somehow--right.
Ray, though. Ray knows exactly what he's doing. They're peas in a pod, he and Millie, socks in a drawer--they trek all over town together, Millie in the backpack, Ray chatting away about groceries and movies and the headlines in the Baton Rouge Advocate. He's easy with her. He doesn't overthink. Neela loves watching them, loves watching him, as though in learning to raise this strange new creature he's become one himself. It's fascinating.
She doesn't mean to fall asleep standing up, but she must because the next thing she knows Ray is running one hand over her back, whispering in her ear. Neela blinks. "Sorry," she says, handing him the sleeping baby, warm and dense in her terrycloth romper. "How long have I been here?"
"Not that long." He lays Millie down and they hold their breath as she squirms for a moment, then quiets and sleeps. She is so small. Neela exhales, collapsing onto the sofa against the far wall, and Ray raises his eyebrows. A smirk pulls at the edges of his rosy lips. "You resting up for that long trip down the hall?"
"Just for a minute," she says, yawning. She pulls him down with her, holding his hand, and rests her head on the back of the couch. "Or two."
Ray laughs softly. "You're never going to get up."
"Sure I am."
"Mm-hmm." They sit for a moment. He leans back beside her, trailing one finger down the side of her face, over her collarbone. Neela sighs, her eyelids slipping closed. A moment later she feels his mouth at the corner of hers, a pair of soft kisses there. Neela smiles. She's completely knackered--Ray is too, she knows--so she's a bit surprised when he does it again, harder this time, sucking at her bottom lip. She opens her eyes, and he grins.
They lie back on the couch, quiet, quiet, his clever tongue rasping against hers. He flattens his palm over the gentle slope of her stomach, sliding down toward the elastic at her waist. "Are you too tired?" he asks, flirting a little, hint of a dare in his voice. "If you're too tired I'll stop."
"Strange," she says, though in fact she's exhausted; her very limbs feel waterlogged. "I'm suddenly feeling very awake."
"Right," he says, tugging her t-shirt up over her breasts, deliberate with his fingertips and mouth. Neela breathes in sharply. There was a bit of time right after Millie was born when he was so unbearably careful with her it was as if they'd never met before, but tonight his hands are like they've always been: teasing and familiar, like he'd be perfectly able to create a relief map of her body by memory alone. It's lovely, to be known this way. She hooks her fingers in the waistband of his pajama bottoms, pulling them over his narrow hips.
Ray pushes her gently onto her back, supporting himself on one elbow as he reaches down between her legs, nudging her thighs apart. A quick thrill rolls through her core. Neela loves having him this way, the pressure of his body, her hands at the muscles in his broad, solid back. He moves above her with a slick sleepy slide, everything a bit blurry around the edges. She opens up her hips and angles him deep.
No one is hurrying, here; her muscles are heavy to begin with and by the time she gives herself over to the slow delicious fullness of it, a rumble that starts at the very base of her backbone, she's wrung out like a washcloth. Ray rolls a bit toward the back of the couch so that while his weight's not on her, his body still is. "Can we stay here?" she murmurs, feeling the tethers loosen, the drift toward sleep.
"Yeah," he says, yawning a little, pushing her bangs back off her face. "We can stay here."