Raze (Riven 3)

“Should Halloween sex be in costume?” I asked, breathless and winking as kissing turned to touching.

“What would you wanna be?”

I looked up at him and let him see everything I wanted.

“I want to be…yours. Your partner.”

My heart beat for him, and I pressed a hand to Dane’s chest so I could feel his beating too. He cupped my face in his hand.

“Then we’re already in costume,” he said.

I kissed him deep and sweet, and we sank into each other with abandon.

Epilogue

SIX MONTHS LATER

Felix

I woke up to a wall of rippling muscles blotting out my vision. When I blinked, it resolved itself into Dane’s glorious torso as he leaned over to kiss me good morning.

“What’s on…?”

I started giggling. Dane had written Happy Birthday on his stomach, where once he’d written his affirmations. But he was so used to writing them so that he could see them in the mirror that he’d written it backward.

“Told you I wouldn’t forget, sweetheart,” he said, and kissed me again, gathering me in his strong arms and giving me a very happy birthday greeting indeed.

After I’d come, still shivering from the intensity of pleasure that he brought me every time we were together, I tucked my head in the crook of his neck and let myself drift, relaxed and satisfied.

The last few months had been the most difficult and the most wonderful of my life.

In the weeks after Dane apologized to Rachel, he had begun to let go of some of the guilt he’d been carrying all these years.

At first he’d been nearly euphoric with the freedom of stripping it away. But then, the grief hit. The guilt had been a bandage keeping it in place and when he ripped it off, sadness for all the time he lost began to weep out.

One morning I woke in the predawn moonlight to a sound in the living room. I found Dane sitting on the floor with his notebooks all around him, filled to every margin with his cramped scrawl, years and years of midnight scrivening.

“This is what I did,” he choked out when I sat beside him. “This is what I did instead of…of having a fucking life. I copied a dead man’s words like some kind of p-pathetic machine.”

He tore one of the notebooks in half with his bare hands, cover and all, the scribbled pages drifting down like grim confetti. I let him rage through those pages, but I took the other notebooks away before he could destroy them. There were twenty-four. The next day I found a box frame and I arranged the notebooks in it, in six rows of four notebooks each, and I hung it on the wall next to the bookshelves as a reminder of how quickly something that took up so much space in the past could become just another piece of decor for the future.

Sometimes I caught Dane staring at it, like he was trying to reconcile the man who had written in the notebooks with the man he was now. But when I asked if he wanted to take it down, he said he didn’t.

Little by little, the grief was passing. Dane smiled more—spontaneous smiles of happiness, not just smiles that answered mine. He talked more, too. Over our first few months together, his monosyllabic answers to questions had turned into halting confessions. Now, though—now that he truly believed I wanted to hear whatever he was thinking, wanted to hear his fears and desires as well as the facts he learned from podcasts, he loved to talk to me. He described the process of making fabric dyes from roots and the history of wicker. He told me things he saw during his day that reminded him of me. He mused.

He loved to listen, too, and sometimes he’d hold me on the couch and stroke my hair, wanting me to just talk. He had the same amazing capacity to take in information about me as he did information from what he read and listened to, and sometimes he shocked me by remembering random tidbits I didn’t even remember saying in the course of the rambling narrations he encouraged.

We spent a lot of time together. Usually at Dane’s, but occasionally at my apartment. Although it had been our home for years, with Sof gone, it mostly just felt unfamiliar. Lonely.

I’d been glad when she got back last month. The tour had gone incredibly well and Riven invited her to join the band officially. It was only a matter of time until she and Coco went public. They were ridiculously in love. It wasn’t anything like the life I thought she’d have or the one I wanted, but she was happy and I was happy for her.

Dane had let Johi take the wheel with the bar and she proved to be just as awesome as I’d known she would be. In addition to karaoke night she added theme nights, drink specials, and online advertising. She also refined Dane’s vague ideas into a vibe that felt welcoming enough for people who weren’t drinking to hang out there. She added a board game night and—much to Dane’s delight, though he wouldn’t admit it—a Quizzo night.