Page 98 of Give & Take

Raph lets his thumb trail down over my cheek. It brushes, softly, against my lip, and I feel heat gather heavy in my lower half.

Then with one last brush of his fingertips, his hand is gone. “I want to read you something.”

He shifts in his chair. Is he readjusting himself?

“Read me something?” I repeat, a little stunned.

“Yup.” He reaches into his back pocket. The motion twists his t-shirt across his torso, revealing a firmness to his lean form. That heaviness feels acute. An ache blooming between my legs.

“Raph,” I say.

He pulls out the worn, yellow-edged paperback, settling his forearms on the back of the chair as he cracks it open. “Do we have time?” he asks, sounding completely unrushed.

If he didn’t have the book open, I’d think it was a broader question. Do we have time to do this? Or be together the way I so desperately want? Or is he talking about the summer—our time together?

“Today,” he specifies. He must see me spiraling.

I pin my thoughts, forcing myself to breathe. It’s funny, he sees me freaking out, but he’s completelyunconcerned. Another man might worry I’d spook, that he’d lose his chance to get laid.

But not Raph. It might be that cockiness, but I don’t think so. It’s like he knows me, and doesn’t mind my waves. He keeps the boat steady each time I try to rock it.

Through it all, he stays.

He stays.

“Yes,” I whisper. “We have time.” Right now, we have time.

Chapter 26

Lana

The poem is not what I expected. I don’t know what I expected. Something flirtatious maybe. Something light. Instead, he reads a poem by Dickenson. Then another by Cummings, followed by Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Classics I remember hearing in school but never like this. Never touching on a particular part of my heart left open and waiting for just those words.

Raph reads about children and fragile hearts, love and worth and living not in vain. And even though they’re all different, there’s a coherence to the way he reads them. He chooses each poem like it’s meant to be heard right after the other.

Each one cracks open my heart and heals it again in a different way.

When he’s finished, tears streak down my face. Because these are not just meaningless poems. These are poems that speak to each corner of my life, and the girls’.

He’s been paying attention.

“I’ve been saving them,” he says, when I tell him this. “I just write in the margins.” He shows me the inside of the book. Page after page, the poems are underlined. Asterisked. Empty spaces at the side of the text marked with words: our names; things like “How much she loves her children”; and “Our girls.”

My heart clenches, tears filling my eyes for the hundredth time today. I wipe them away, embarrassed.

The words, I note, are in different inks, like he’s been doing this awhile. “When did you start doing this?” I ask.

“Since…before,” he says.

Before what? Before we crossed the line? Before he started feeling a certain way?

I don’t ask. I’m too scared the answer will take me to a place I can’t come back from.

I try not to think about how much Raphael knows how to touch my heart and make me laugh. How he makes me feel things I thought were a place of deficit.

“I was so scared today,” I tell him. The words come out of nowhere. Or maybe they come out of everywhere, all the places he’s opened up. I’m shaking now—from the memory or the cooled temperature of the bath, I’m not sure.

“I knew, logically, the animal was scared, that she just wanted to get away. But things could have gone so much worse. Raph, I had to choose—” I feel winded at the thought of what I had to do.

---