Page 79 of Isn't It Obvious?
“Fuck,” Ravi swears.
“Pressing me down like this,” she continues, not even sure what she’s saying. She draws a tentative circle over her clit and God, she’s so fucking close. It’ll take barely anything. “Perfect,” she repeats.
Ravi talks to her, too. Tells her how she makes him feel,how good she is, how he can’t believe how well they fit. She tells him the same, she thinks, until she truly can’t speak anymore, until his strokes become less measured, until she’s completely dissolving, practically crying into her comforter, Ravi shuddering and moaning and collapsing on top of her.
He starts to lift his chest off her back, but she grapples for his arm. “Stay,” she begs, and he does.
EVENTUALLY,RAVI PROPShimself up on one arm, creating space between them. It has to have been minutes that he’s been lying flush against her, but Yael still makes a noise of disappointment.
Christ.
Ravi kisses across her shoulders, down the center line of her back. “I need to deal with the condom,” he murmurs. Yael sighs and nods, the side of her face still resting against the comforter, her hair spilled like wine over her sheets. “I’ll be back soon; I promise.” Yael nods again. “I’m going to pull out now, okay?”
“Okay,” she says, not opening her eyes.
He does so carefully—he can tell how sensitive she still is, and honestly, so is he. Dodging their discarded clothes, he makes his way to her bathroom to clean himself up. His reflection in the mirror is disheveled and flushed, and there’s a shadow of a love bite where his neck meets his shoulder. He averts his eyes. It’s bad enoughfeelingwhat Yael does to him. He doesn’t need a visual reminder of just how much trouble he’s in.
Back in her room, Yael is still sprawled, seemingly boneless, across her bed. When she hears him approaching, sherolls onto her back, throwing her arm over her eyes to shield herself from the light streaming through her window. He swallows. She’s so beautiful. Always, but especially like this.
“I know I need to get up,” she says, “but I can’t yet.”
“I’m surprised to hear you forming full sentences,” he says, climbing onto the bed beside her. There’s already extra color in her cheeks, but she blushes further. She seems to shrink into herself, scrubbing her hand down her face. He catches her by the wrist, folding her hand into his. “If I’ve embarrassed you, I didn’t mean to. It’s a good thing.”
She releases a breath and nods. “Okay. I think my brain turned off for a few minutes back there, and that’s sort of… I don’t know.”
Ravi smiles at her, set aglow from his chest to his extremities. “I like that I can turn your brain off,” he says. “Partly because when I met you, I thought it never did.” He unfurls her fingers so he can trace the creases in her palm.
They’re quiet for a while, him just touching her in this small way. And then, her voice hesitant, she asks, “Did you feel that, too?”
“Yes,” he says, because he knows exactly what she means.
“I don’t want to leave this bed,” she says.
“You don’t have to. We can stay here all weekend, if you want.”
“I’ll have to pee. And we’ll have to eat at some point, probably.”
“Well,” Ravi says, “we can always hurry back.”
Yael smiles now, relaxed and loose. “That sounds like a plan.”
They have sex twice more that day, in between talking and laughing and kissing for hours. They only leave the bed for the bathroom and leftover Pizza Kat and again for a thrown-together pantry meal that tastes much better than it should.Ravi falls asleep feeling sweaty, spent. And, frighteningly, tender.
YAEL WAKES UPin the middle of the night with Ravi’s arm slung across her stomach; suddenly certain her heart’s about to be broken for the second time this year.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
On Saturday, Ravi gets up before Yael, and again, she barely stirs. Her coffee maker and everything it requires are displayed prominently on her kitchen counter, so he gets to work.
The smell of coffee brewing seems to rouse her; he hears shuffling from the bedroom before she emerges in nothing but a large University of Washington T-shirt that doesn’t even reach mid-thigh.
She rubs her eye with the back of her hand and extends Ravi’s phone toward him. “It was buzzing,” she says.
“Sorry,” he says, taking it from her.
“It’s okay. I usually wake up earlier than this, anyway.”
Ravi furrows his brow, remembering the day they met—it was later than it is now, and she was dead to the world. She pulls some mugs from a kitchen cabinet, rising to her tiptoes and giving him the briefest glimpse of the curves of her ass.
