Title: The End of The Beginning

Author: Phin

Rating: An overcautious R for naughty words and references to naughty situations

Summary: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." -Winston Churchill
In which the move to Baton Rouge is the start of the story, not the end.

Disclaimer: All that I own is the inability to use commas properly.

Author's notes: Huge debts of gratitude to the wonderful profshallowness who did such an excellent job of betaing this and then received no thanks for 5 months. I'm so very sorry.
Any remaining mistakes are mine and I should probably warn you all that I've gone against advice and left the beginning fairly bleak. Have no fear, it lightens up.

They don't talk about the fact that he doesn't drink whisky anymore because something about that earthy burn tastes like anger and bright lights and waking up 30 pounds lighter because you've got no legs.

She hates the air here. The way it can get so warm and watery; it's like sucking a damp blanket into your lungs. It makes her hair frizz and leaves her feeling woozy and weighed down. Her genes may hail from a country with temperatures that sizzle but she spent all her life in England where the clouds turn heavy purple in winter and the drizzle's constant but where the air always has a certain grey clarity. The frequent changes from humidity to frigid air conditioning leave her exhausted and dehydrated, sweat beading on her neck while her eyes itch and her nose burns for want of moisture. Mild disorientation seems like her natural state at the moment.

The air conditioner in their apartment has been broken for three days now and it makes her so irritable she wants to weep and throw things. She can't, though, because how do you throw tantrums about air conditioners when you're living with a man who has no legs because two years ago you were too stupid and selfish to make up your own mind?

Once long ago, somewhere in the time when they were transitioning from roomies-who-were-sort-of-more-friendly-than-just-roomies-should-be to roomies-who-were-embroiled-in-a-tragic-unspoken-clusterfuck, she'd told him that one of the many English slang words for drunk was 'legless'. He likes to make legless jokes now sometimes when he's very, very drunk. She feels her whole stomach drop with guilt every time he does it and that nasty little part of herself that she hates wonders if he knows that and that's why he does it. If perhaps, maybe when he's drunk, he remembers just how much the nasty little part of him hates her for what she's done and wants to get a little stab in. Then she hates herself even more for even thinking it.

She doesn't ever tell him not to make those jokes. The fact that he doesn't have legs is one of those topics that they don't talk about except in practical terms like whether his prosthetics are rubbing, or, in the first few weeks after her arrival, the dynamics and propulsions of how to make love. Even then their conversations about it are all in stilted half sentences –

"Are they too…"

"Do you need to…"

"Maybe if you…"

Even their conversations have been cut off at the knees.

They're very much in love now, everyone says so and Neela herself is convinced of it almost all the time. But she still can't stop feeling like she needs to walk on eggshells and bite her lip. Sometimes there still seems to be something very much of the clusterfuck about the whole thing.

It seems to Ray like a lot of the time most of their energy goes into the middle distance. They have both perfected the blank-eyed stare of waitresses, underwear models and women who don't want to be hassled. The look of being terribly busy with something else far away and far more interesting. Their hands have become equalised magnets for each other's scars. Never avoiding those tight, white lines of bad memories, never swerving quickly away. That would draw too much attention. Just floating smoothly by, held gently aloof by opposing forces. Sometimes, when Ray doesn't quite avoid touching parts of Neela's body, he feels like a vaudeville magician playing his ineptitude for cheap laughs, "Observe her completely unscarred body! See that there is no evidence of my failings! Watch as I show you that this was not my fault!"

It's not that he doesn't want to touch her scars. He can tell she thinks they disgust him. They don't. But touching them would be the start of a conversation he doesn't have the words for yet. He wants to touch them, though. It's been a year and he still wants to touch all of her all the time. If he's away from her for too long because of shift patterns and friends and paperwork, he starts to feel almost feverish with it, aching and burning with the need to be touching and biting and all up inside the amazingness that is Neela. He's like a teenager or a romance novel and he'd feel humiliated except she seems to feel exactly the same way about him, even though he's a cripple who lost his legs and sometimes feels that he's only barely hanging onto the girl.

He had a friend who went to Thailand once, who came back and told him about the hungry ghosts. Because of their terrible karma, they're cursed. Forced to haul around bloated, gargantuan bodies but with such tiny mouths they can never eat enough to stop their hunger. They trail bad luck with them wherever they go. He can't think of a more fitting punishment for a man who would steal a wife from someone serving in a war.

Ray wishes he could talk to Neela about all this. About her scars and his scars and about how he sometimes feels like a hungry ghost but, because it's her he's always hungry for, it's almost nearly sort of a good thing. But how do you start a conversation like that? So, instead he tells her he loves her and he wants her, and he fucks her until she can barely string a sentence together. He lets his hands pretend they can't feel her scars, while he pretends that there's nothing awkward about a relationship where one of you has to remove your limbs before getting into bed. And during the day it's wonderful, but sometimes, at night, it's all so pathetically sad that it makes him want to cry.

In movies and books, people always seem to connect so much more easily. She's getting better at it. She's learning the silent cues: what the different angles of shoulder slope mean about his mood, the little quirks of his face. But she still can't look into his eyes and see what he's thinking. She sits in an armchair by the window sipping tea that the weather is far too hot for, just because she wants something that tastes like home, and thinks that the eye-reading thing is probably a myth. But it doesn't make her feel like any less of a failure for not being able to do it.

She still feels like she's fumbling through most of the time, just about grabbing onto the tail-ends of meanings but still missing all the undercurrents. They've stopped being cautious about the small things. Deciding whether to order Chinese or pizza is no longer a cautious rope tug of "Well I'd like… but I mean, I don't mind if you… oh, I'm really not that..." But anything beyond that still feels like tap dancing in a minefield. She's still not entirely sure how much freedom she has in what still feels like his house, even though it's now bursting at the seams trying to contain all her possessions too.

Her eyes flick back to the kitchen, where he's leaning against the dining table and watching her. His eyes are intent, glued to her and this is one time when she can tell what he's thinking. He still makes her feel too clumsy and breathless, and she takes a sip of tea without thinking and scalds her tongue. He crooks a finger at her, seemingly in control but with something just faintly ragged and desperate around the edges. She feels the broken glass of desire roll in her belly. This she understands.

One day, Ray returns to the house and finds Neela in the middle of the lounge on a bright blue mat. She's standing in an inverted v, hands on the mat, ass in the air, hair crazy, bright red in the face. He walks over and bends forward until his head is hanging down, facing hers and quirks an eyebrow at her. He can tell she's mortified, but she's trying to brazen it out by shifting into pissed off mode.

Not going to work.

"Hey."

"Hey. Go away." She's gritting her teeth, but he's not sure if it's with the effort of not falling over or the effort of not spitting nails at him.

"Watcha doing there, honey?" They both know that he's secretly saying 'roomie' in his head but they're not quite ready to start bringing that word back into common usage.

"Downward dog. Piss off."

"Downward what now?"

"It's yoga. Will you please piss off?"

So he saunters to the kitchen, gets a glass a water and leans against the counter sipping it until she falls over. Then laughs heartily at the state of her, all sweaty and dishevelled and incredibly pissed off. As she storms into the bedroom, he hopes that she's only half angry. The kind where he gets to tease her for a while as she pouts and turns her back on him and then he miraculously thinks of something sweet to say or tickles her or something and then they have make-up sex. Hopefully, it's not the kind of real angry where she glares at him and chews her food in a way that implies that she doesn't know why she puts up with him. If it's really bad, she puts on a marathon of Grey's Anatomy or 90210 or something else awful and reads a newspaper instead of watching it herself but smacks him every time he tries to touch the remote. He can't even leave the room because he knows from experience that if he walks out on his punishment then she won't let him touch her for a week.

But he just can't help watching her when she's a mess. He told her he got rid of it but his favourite picture of her is hidden in his underwear drawer, plenty of room now that there's no need for socks. It's quite probably the ugliest photo there is of her. It was taken back in Chicago when he was messing around with a new camera he'd just bought. They'd been walking home from a double shift and it had been one of those strange Chicago days that are wind-whipped and sun-pierced at the same time. Neela's coat had been too warm for the weather and she was sweating, dark circles under her eyes, looking bulky and lost in the oversized jacket. Her face was half turned towards the camera, twisted at an uncomfortable angle to create strange shadows on her nose and give the illusion of a double chin. Her eyes were squinched against the sun and she was frowning. Hands were battling her hair, which the wind was pulling out into medusa snakes. She looked truly awful.

This is Ray's favourite photo of her.

He loves her best when she's a mess because he's the only one who ever sees her like that. His own private Neela. In front of the rest of the world, she's always put together. Neurotic as hell, but tailored and brushed and polished.

And there'll always be the tiny voice in the back of his mind that's waiting for her to rip the rug out from under him again and that seething tide of jealousy he still feels towards half the men at County will probably never subside completely. Still, he might not have been the first man to kiss her, or be loved by her, or even to marry her but he'd bet that he's the first man to love her enough to keep an ugly picture of her in his underwear drawer just because it's his secret part of her.

When he walks into the bedroom, Neela's crying on the bed and he realises that she thinks he was laughing at her and he might have really fucked up this time. His stomach lurches and he's caught in a twist of panic. Stupid as it is, all he can think to do is to open the drawer and lay the ugly picture next to her on the pillow. It's obvious from the soft, feathery edges just how often he's looked at it and she seems to understand because she stares at it for a moment, gently rubs her finger along one of the pulpy edges, then huffs out a little laugh and drags him down onto the bed. He wraps his arms around her, throws his leg over her thigh, cradles her to him and is just so grateful that she understands how stupid he is, as she sniffles and tucks her head into his chest and mutters "I'm still not bloody well sleeping with you, though."

Sometimes she feels like she's the disabled one in this relationship. There doesn't seem to be anything that Ray can't do, meanwhile she's stumbling around trying to make allowances for things she can't say or think or do.

If there's one thing Neela's always been, it's an expert at crippling her own chances.

Ray can't sleep some nights. If he's been wearing his prosthetics all day, his scars start to feel too tight and itchy and he just wants to shuffle about under the covers and huff until he feels appeased enough to settle. Waking Neela is a very bad idea if he wants her to leave any hot water for him in the shower in the morning, though, so instead he just watches her sleep.

Even though she complains about the heat, she still sleeps like a little girl, with the covers pulled right up around her throat and bundled about her, tiny feet sticking out of the side of the bed to maintain some semblance of keeping herself cool. Through extensive research, he has found that stroking the back of her neck while she sleeps has a similar effect to tickling a five year old, causing her to wriggle about and mumble but at the same time to squirm up against him. It's pretty entertaining, unless he does it too much and wakes her up, and the squirming definitely has merit, but at the same time it always reminds him of the time he'd nearly crashed the car with her in it, which always leaves him feeling slightly shaky and sick.

He'd been driving them back from the hospital, a little too tired, a little too jittery on caffeine, a little too desperate to get Neela back to the apartment where he could lock himself inside, turn on the air conditioning, push her up against something and make love to her until the weird hyperactive feeling he'd been having all day finally dissipated. His hand had been absently rubbing at the back of her neck, feeling the slight damp of her sweat, the other hand lolling on the wheel. Half-thinking about how quickly he could be pushing Neela up against the door and getting his hands up her shirt, he'd decided too late to change into the turning lane and take a shortcut home, not paying attention until a huge Tahoe screamed out of his blindspot. He always remembers the little shriek that ripped out of Neela, like a page out of a book. Remembers swearing and jerking the car back into the lane, the other driver's angry face screaming past. Slowing down and pulling over as soon as he could, breathless, sweat slippery hands shaking on the wheel.

Neela had her head on her knees and her hands on the dashboard, trying to even out her shaky breaths. Ray had turned to her, eyes wide and gasped "Shit, oh shit," which seems woefully inadequate now but at the time had seemed to be the only way in the world to say "I nearly killed us both". And suddenly Neela had been rearing up and pushing her hair back out of her face and screaming at him.

"Why did you have to be such a bloody idiot? You just had to make up your mind and stick with it. We would have been fine if you'd just made up your mind which way you were going. Why can't you ever just make up your mind! If you hadn't started swerving around, none of this would have happened! This is how people get hurt!"

Nerves jangling from the near miss, Ray had felt his temper rise in preparation for their first real fight since she'd arrived. It was too damn hot and he was too damn tired and he'd been fractious and restless all day. Now that terror and guilt had been added to the mix, he felt like he was barely clawing onto the ragged edges of his emotions. Just swirling round in a haze of 'Shit, oh shit'. Neela was rammed as far back against the door as possible, one hand clutching her headrest, the other grabbing convulsively at the dash, breath slamming in and out of her. He could already tell this was going to be one of those arguments when they'd both scream things they didn't mean but knew would linger the longest. This was the argument that they'd both think about every time things got too much and they considered calling it quits. The words that were about to slam out of them and fill up this car would be the ones that in five years they'd remember and think, 'No. Y'know what? Just, no,' before packing a bag and leaving with nothing but a note on the fridge. Until Neela's eyes fell involuntarily to his legs and she suddenly deflated with a huge shuddering, sob until she was shaking and crying, arms wrapped around her ribs, face turned into the seat.

Oh.

Not him that she was angry at, then. Ray realised that if there was one thing he should never have forgotten, it was Neela's capacity for self-loathing.

He reached over to try and touch her, make her face him, just do something to try and get her to stop thinking about a two year old car crash that he hadn't realised she still blamed herself for so much. He patted ineffectually at the tears running down her face, absently thinking with the detachment of an adrenaline comedown that maybe this was a metaphor for his role in their relationship, until she shrugged his hand away and whispered, "This didn't have to happen." She was still keeping her face turned away from him and Ray stared at her for a moment with no idea what to do, before hauling her into an ungainly sprawl, half on his lap. He kissed her quickly before muttering fiercely against her lips "Yeah, but then maybe this never would have happened either."

The half-hearted smile she gave him was probably the closest he'd felt to being a real man since the accident. This was how real adults did it. This was how you comforted the woman you loved. This was him not messing up. This was his life, happening right now.

Now it's a year later and he wishes he could have said something better. He knows she still feels guilty even though she pretends that she doesn't. Knows that he didn't manage to convey the fact that while he doesn't blame her there's still a tiny part of him that occasionally wants to scream in her face that he's got no fucking legs and in a way, yeah, it kind of is because of her. But really he's pretty Zen about the whole thing now. Sort of. And there's really only so eloquent you can be when you're parked on a grassy verge after nearly crashing your car.

It's a year later and he still doesn't know what he should have said to make everything perfect and get rid of that startled, guilty look he sometimes sees on her face when he looks at her too quickly. But they're both still there and he thinks he's seeing that look less often. He watches her as she sleeps, lets his fingers trace the air just over the surgical scar that lunges down her abdomen. His fingertips ghost almost close enough to touch. Nearly there. Nearly.

He's still seeing a therapist when she first arrives. A steel-haired woman in her 50s named Dr. Andrews who doesn't push him too hard to talk but has a certain look that she uses to call bullshit when she knows he's skirting something.

For the first few months after he'd moved back to Baton Rouge and started seeing her for weekly appointments, he didn't talk about Neela at all. Sometimes he didn't talk about anything, just sat there and stared at a wall or cried for an hour while Dr Andrews tried to coax him out of it. Finally, Neela's first email arrived and after that she was all they talked about for a while. It was a long story.

By the time Neela arrives, he's tailing off his appointments with Dr Andrews, but he was glad he got to tell her about this before they stopped altogether.

They talk about his work for a few minutes until he suddenly cuts himself off in the middle of a sentence and finds himself blurting, "Neela's here. I think for good maybe. Just showed up at my work two days ago."

Dr Andrew is good, doesn't betray her own emotions. Just leans back, opens her eyes a little wider and asks him how he feels about that, whether it's bringing back any issues.

He stops to think for a moment. Well, yeah, it's bringing back a whole bucket load of issues but right now that doesn't seem to matter. Can't quite phrase it right but the best he can do is, "I think it's going to be hell for a while. But I'm good. I'm damn good." Suddenly he realises that his face has split into the most enormous grin and that he just can't stop it. And Dr Andrews is grinning back at him and they both just sit there for little while, ridiculous smiles on their faces. Heh, he always knew she was a closet romantic.

They finally have their first, vicious argument after she's been there for three months. It's bad. Really bad.

They've been at a friend's house for a party and they're both a little too drunk and spoiling for a fight. Neela gets nervous when confronted with crowds of people she doesn't know. She's not social. In all honesty, she doesn't like that many people and she's happy to keep her group of friends small. She wants to cling to Ray because other than a couple of nurses and a lab tech from the surgical floor, none of whom she has anything to say to, Ray is the only person she knows there. But she doesn't want to spoil his evening and she doesn't know how much she can hang around him before he'll get annoyed. There are other guys from his clinic here, he might want to… have guy time with them. And he's introducing her to everyone as 'Neela,' not 'my girlfriend Neela' and after the fifth time she's feeling close to tears and seething at the same time and keeps wondering how long she'll have to live with him before she qualifies for the title of girlfriend when being introduced to good-looking blonde women. She can't get herself together and when she finally splits away from Ray, she seems to spend the rest of her night trying to stand by herself next to the snack table or laughing too loudly at people's jokes to compensate. She knows she's drinking too much and that it's whisky, which Ray will hate. Two hours later and she's just a big, stupid, watery ball of emotions in a bubble of skin and if she makes one more accidental social faux pas she's going to end up sobbing into the cheese dip.

Finally Ray rescues her and they leave but she's still too raw and thin-skinned to talk in the taxi on the way home.

Ray watches her staring out the window and seethes. He'd forgotten how much packed rooms filled with music and wafting alcohol haze remind him of being ten minutes away from getting crushed under a truck. He's been tensed up the whole time, body preparing for a hit that never comes. Neela's been distant all night and now she's sitting in the back of a taxi smelling like whisky and ignoring him. And he can't stop thinking about how every time he sees her talking to another man he gets a spike of jealousy and remembers all the other parties he's been to where she's been with someone else. Her wedding, most notably. He'd like to keep her next to him all night at parties like this, just to remind himself that he can. But of course he can't, because it'd probably just piss her off.

But most of all he can't stop thinking about the incredibly drunk girl he somehow got cornered talking to. The one who when he introduced himself, had replied "Oh! So you're the one who's –" she'd cut herself off, hazily squinting at his knees and then grinning brightly. "Huh. I wouldn't have guessed."

Nice to know that he nearly passed for normal in drunk lighting. What really kept tearing around his brain was how the first sentence had been going to end. And it could have ended one of twenty ways but there's a part of him that's relatively sure the word 'cripple' was going to feature in there somewhere and now he just wants to punch things.

From Ray the irresponsible rockstar to Ray the disabled guy. Huh. He wouldn't have guessed.

When they get back to the apartment it's all just bad from start to finish. Words snapping and glasses slamming until finally one of them goes too far and they're suddenly facing off in the middle of the bathroom, jabbing their toothbrushes at each other as they shout. It must look faintly ridiculous but this is years' worth of arguments they've never had and oh god, even as they're yelling, they know they should pull the words back in but it's all too fraught and too late. By the time the downstairs neighbour bangs on the floor and Ray flings his toothbrush into the sink and storms into the kitchen for another beer, he's already called her selfish and thoughtless and a whore. But as she clutches onto the sink and reels, she can't remember exactly what she screamed back, although she knows that pathetic and useless and unable to take responsibility for his own mistakes were definitely in there. She doesn't know where to go from here, but if this is what they think of each other then it feels like Chicago is as good a bet as any. Although - while she meant everything she said, has meant it for months - now that it's all fallen out of her in a big poisonous gush, none of it seems true anymore.

She doesn't know what to do, but she doesn't think she can spend another night in four rooms with Ray and everything she's just said to him still hanging in the air. She starts to pack, taking the photo of him from her side of the bed and enough clothes for two weeks. Takes his photo out of the bag before changing her mind and putting it straight back in again. Pausing one last time to rifle through his drawers for a t-shirt because, as much as she hates him and thinking about him makes her want to cry, she knows she won't be able to sleep without his smell around. God, she hates him.

She pulls out the top drawer, which is mainly underwear, and pokes around, hoping for some old t-shirt he'll have chucked in here by mistake and won't notice is missing. Instead she finds a photograph. It's a little worn around the edges, as though he looks at it often. It's her. Looking hideous. She doesn't understand, but there's something about the fact that he has an ugly photograph of her that he hides away like a jealous little secret that makes her remember just how strange their relationship is, how long it's taken them to get here. Her heart lurches a little at the thought of throwing it all away. So she slides the photo back into the drawer and hides the bag in the back of the closet from where she'll unpack it in the morning once Ray's gone to work.

She finds him in the lounge, beer bottle in a vice grip, staring at the dark TV. She slides down next to him and she knows she should be apologising or waiting for him to apologise but he flinches slightly when she tries to take his hand. So she sits next to him, knees drawn up to her chin and stares at the blank screen with him. Until eventually she can't stop herself from asking the most irrelevant question, the one that's been bothering her all night.

"Why didn't you tell anyone that I was your girlfriend?"

He looks at her finally, startled into answering by the way she can ask such an utterly mundane question when not half an hour ago they were screaming loud enough to wake the neighbours. When he's spent the last twenty minutes sitting out here trying to decide what to do when she inevitably storms past him, heading to the door with suitcase in hand. Should he throw himself on her and refuse to let go until she promises to stay, or should he hurl some obscenities down the hallway after her and then call someone to change the locks? Now here she is. No bag. Just sitting quietly next to him, prying his beer out of his grip, taking a pull and giving it back to him, gazing ahead like they're actually watching something and asking strange, quiet Neela questions. Because it's them, it makes a kind of sense.

"Well, they all know we're living together. It just seemed kind of redundant. And possessive. Wouldn't you have hit me for being un-femininist-y?"

She turns to him finally, he's squinting into the middle distance, and she knows that this is still absolutely not what they need to be talking about, but…

"They all know that?"

He turns to face her too. Head lolling against the back of the couch and just plain exhausted. Confused about how she could have failed to realise just how much time he spends talking about her and annoying his colleagues, hell, most of his patients have never met her and could still probably recognise her by sight. He's slightly confused too about the fact that neither of them seems to be angry anymore. It's like they've apologised without actually saying it.

"Yeah. I kind of talk about you all the time."

Oh.

Neela knows she should still be angry about the things he called her, knows he should feel the same, but it's like the weather after a storm and somehow the whole apartment feels cooler and fresher. What he said still stings but in a good way, like antiseptic on a cut going bad. They'll probably apologise one day. But they've waited years to have this argument in the first place, and it can wait a while longer to be closed.

Cautiously, she lays her head on his shoulder. Feels him lay his head down on top of hers. Just sits and breathes him for a minute. Finally asks, "Next time we go to a party, can I just… stay with you the whole night?"

There's a moment of silence and he sounds slightly choked when he replies, "Yeah. Yeah, that would be good."

He has no shame about being a guy around her anymore. When they're watching one of her poker tournaments on TV and he absentmindedly scratches his balls, honestly, it is pretty disgusting. But she kind of likes the fact that she gets to take her head off his shoulder and glare at him or smack him in the leg with her beer bottle, and then he'll make a joke about how she can scratch them for him if she likes. Then it's her turn to tell him to bite her and his turn to leer at her and waggle his eyebrows in that cartoony, lecherous way he has, and then she's supposed to huff and turn back to the TV and ignore him.

And underneath it all, yeah, she'd still like him to stop scratching his balls in the first place because, just, yuck. But at the same time there's something painfully wonderful about little routines like this that remind her of when they were roomies, but are infinitely better because they're completely new and all hers and there was a long while when she didn't think she'd ever get to make any new memories with Ray.

And there was that one time when she'd had maybe one beer too many and been feeling slightly fragile and bold and like she had something to prove, when he'd offered to let her do the scratching for him and she'd just raised an eyebrow and let her hand land on his crotch. And having sex on a carpet that needed vacuuming, with the world poker tour blaring in the background and her arse resting in a puddle of beer they'd spilt on the way down was not something Neela had ever expected to do. But giggly carpet and beer sex was apparently one of those new memories that she liked because she was making it with Ray.

Even if moving the couch the next day to hide the beer stains had been a total bitch.

It's been a year and a half since she moved down to Baton Rouge when she wakes up to find him shaking her shoulder and looking down at her with an unsettling combination of panic and resolve sketched across his face. It's dark and the shadows puddle around his eye sockets and cheekbones but she can still see tired, dark smudges under his eyes and she knows he hasn't been to sleep yet.

Her mouth opens to ask him what's wrong but he cuts her off. "I'm sorry about those things I said that time." Which shouldn't make any sense but she realises that maybe she's finally started getting that silent communication thing that they always have in movies, because she knows he's talking about the huge fight they had. The one from over a year ago that they've still never apologised for. Until now.

"I-" her voice is still all raspy with sleep and it takes a couple of tries to get going. "I know. It's OK. Me too." It all sounds so anti-climactic as the end to such an enormous fight. She's still not sure why they're talking about this now but it's typical Ray. He's just a big ball of spiky impatience sometimes, like when she wakes up at 2am to find him in the lounge with his guitar, quietly picking out chords that he can't hold in until morning. She doesn't know where this is going but it isn't done yet. It feels wrong, like a big turning point is on the horizon and something this important shouldn't happen on a Tuesday night after a day when the most remarkable thing that happened was that she didn't burn the tacos for dinner.

He's pushing the sheet down and her top up until he's staring straight at her surgical scars. She wants to roll onto her stomach or squirm away or kick him or something because this, this is not something that they do.

As he brings his hand to her abdomen he's deliberate, like he's trying not to spook a horse. And the simile's not entirely wrong because she's trying to look at the ceiling, not at him and if she could be then she'd be snorting and stamping, shying away with her eyes rolled right back into her head. He's touched her scars before but never like this. Never so deliberately. This is almost like talking about them.

His fingers land on her, slowly tracing the line of white. In the dark it almost looks like a line of light, slithery on her stomach. She shudders when he first touches her but, as he continues, she starts to calm down. She bucks as his nails scrape against her and a shivery feeling is starting to unfold in her belly, it's like he's touching new flesh. He carries on as he leans down to kiss her, slowly and with a thoroughness that leaves her disorientated, hands curled over his shoulders, clutching spasmodically at his flesh. She's feeling very raw and pink and new but it's not a bad feeling, just complicated, like she doesn't know how to control her limbs or where to put herself.

As he pulls back, Ray stares at her scars again. Seems to steel himself for something, swallows and then blurts, "Have I ever told you about the hungry ghosts?" She's nothing but sensation right now and she shakes her head in confusion. She doesn't know where this is going, but she knows that it matters. And Ray shifts himself, head resting on her breasts, gazing up at her face, and begins to talk.

Thanks for reading. If you made it to the end, well done! Any thoughts or comments would be greatly appreciated.