56. RAVEN

56

RAVEN

Maddy crouches before the flowerpot that stands next to my balcony door.

"I got it for you," I confess. "Right before, you know…"

Smiling, she walks out onto the balcony and takes a seat in my wicker chair, her legs folded under her.

I follow, handing her a martini I made for her, and fire up the grill.

She is hungry, she said. Of course—that's Maddy after sex.

I steal glances of her as she lazily stretches. She's wearing my T-shirt— my T-shirt—the sight that makes it impossible not to smile.

Two marinated steaks and a plate of vegetables are sitting by the grill, and I feel like a lucky bastard to have her back.

"Your smile is dangerously suspicious," she says.

And my heartbeat is dangerously high on happiness.

I slap the steaks onto the grill, light a cigarette, and smoke as I transfer the vegetables onto the grill, too.

Maddy lights a joint and tastefully exhales a cloud of smoke, her eyes back on me. That's another thing I learned about Maddy. She likes to smoke one when she is super relaxed.

"You want help?" She nods to the grill.

I shake my head.

"Where did you learn to cook?"

"Mac taught me."

Sometime back, during one of our phone conversations, I told her a little about Mac.

"I like Mac," she says dreamily, squinting just a little as she takes another puff. "Tell me more about him?"

That I can do. I can talk about Mac for hours.

I tell her that cooking was just one of the many things Mac was good at. And when I lived with him, I wanted to be like him. Because he had a house. Because everything was clean and in order. Because he talked properly. Because he read books. Because he had a job that didn't pay much but earned him the respect of the worst neighborhood in the city and praise among the minority communities. Because even though many houses in his neighborhood were raided, trashed, and robbed, his was untouched. Even the worst thugs who robbed and killed respectfully nodded at him on the streets. When electricity was cut off during a storm once, a Cadillac with tinted windows pulled up at his house. Two guys covered in gold chains and diamonds with guns tucked under their belts asked him if he needed a generator or if anything had to be fixed. A famous rapper called him on every holiday, and when I asked Mac if that was the guy from TV, he said, "I don't watch TV." But the rapper won a Grammy, and he called Mac Mr. Wright.

"Mac got me to turn my ways around. ‘You have to take yourself seriously. If you want to deal, make sure you deal something that will benefit others, not ruin them.' To think that he changed my life with good food," I murmur, flipping the steaks as Maddy sits completely still, listening to me. "But it wasn't the food he cooked for me that made me feel normal. It was the feeling of having a family, though it was only Mac. Having a father figure, though his neighbors looked at a white boy like me and knew I must have come from some serious trouble. When I finally got back on my feet, got my business going, got my own place, every place I lived in since, I cooked. It created an illusion that I had a home.

"I once asked his neighbor, Mrs. Jackson, why she thought Mac never moved out of the bad neighborhood. Considering he had many influential patrons who donated to his non-profits. She said, ‘Ain't no pride in living a fancy life at the expense of others. A shepherd has to be where his flock is.'

"I wish I'd given Mac a reason to be prouder of me," I say to Maddy who seems to have forgotten about her joint and sits with her head tilted to one side, her eyes never leaving mine. "But I understood that, for him, it was never about achievements. It was about young people like me finding themselves. He gave me his favorite book as a present. Jonathan Livingston Seagull . It's about a seagull who went against the Law of the Flock and learned how to fly for the love of flying. Mac was Jonathan Livingston, and kids like me were his flock. Many of us, I found out later. Mac was a magnet for all things broken that he carefully glued back together. He is a craftsman, that old man."

I smile and go silent, realizing that I hardly ever talked so much to Maddy about my past, and she hasn't uttered a word the entire time.

"I like hearing you talk," she says softly.

The steaks are ready, but I feel bad having this perfect night with her without the little dude.

"Before we eat, wanna call the kid?" I ask.

She nods and laughs. "Yeah. Little trickster."

He is a good trickster. Though at some point, I have to have a conversation with him about being reckless.

"Maddy!" Sonny shouts on the speakerphone, and both Maddy and I snort with laughter.

"Someone got his energy back," I murmur.

"Did you find Rave?" he asks.

"Yeah. I found Rave," she says, smiling coyly at me as I clean the grill.

"At the cave?"

"Yes, at the cave."

"Did you talk?"

"Yes, Little, we talked."

"What did he say?"

"He said no more Thai food for you or chips or movies if you ever pull off anything like you did."

He breaks out in laughter, but then his voice is serious and quieter. "Is he… is he really really angry with me?"

Maddy looks at me, waiting for an answer.

"I'm not," I say louder. "I'm glad you are okay."

"Rave!" he shouts. "You there!"

Both Maddy and I try to keep our smiles contained. He is, again, his obnoxious self.

"You at Maddy's?"

"Maddy is at my house," I say.

"No way! Did she see the flower?"

I look at Maddy.

"Yes, I saw it," she says, meeting my eyes.

"S' cool, innit?" Sonny says. "Rave calls it Maddy's flower."

The light in her eyes gets so much brighter at the words.

"He got it for you," Sonny says. "When he missed you, you know."

We don't respond, gazing at each other, until there's some noise in the background.

"Hey, Samantha brought chips, and we gonna watch a movie. So…"

"We will come see you soon."

"No! No! Don't! We are watching a movie. But… Can we have dinner tomorrow?"

"Yeah," we both say at the same time.

Tonight's dinner passes in small talk, and I make us another round of drinks and we cheer, but before we take a sip, we consummate this new "us" with a kiss. And I'll tell you one thing about kissing Maddy—there is no world war that can break us apart right now. We don't stop kissing as we set the drinks down and I carry her to my bedroom. She demands that I take my clothes off again. How can I refuse? Especially when she does it for me, and we are skin to skin again, and I'm inside her, and the rest of the world falls off until she comes around me with beautiful moans, and I come inside her proudly and feeling like I finally understand the concept of heaven. And yeah, I'm her fucking boyfriend.

We make out lazily wrapped in each other for what seems like hours, like we are trying to catch up on kissing. Just kissing. It's better than sex. Lasts longer, too. The longest kiss on record is fifty-eight hours and thirty-five minutes. I could top that. That is if Sonny wasn't around to interrupt us.

I get lost in her taste, the softness of her mouth, the wild thought that she is letting me in. I kiss her in all ways possible. Long ravishing sessions, then soft kisses, then sucking on her lower lip, swiping my tongue against the seam of her mouth. Eventually, we slow down, sag against each other, and drift asleep for some time, though every time we move, we kiss again.

And then we are awake again, and I make love to her. She strokes her hand absently through my hair. I lose track of something she says, that's how good her touch feels. She kisses my chest, then glances up at me and smiles, visibly embarrassed.

Jesus, does she know what she does to me?

She tries to pull away, but I catch her and kiss her, holding her chin up with a hand around her jaw to keep her from escaping.

My heart beats slowly and steadily at her touch.

Right, my heart. It's a free-spirited beast. I built walls around it to keep it in check. With her? One kiss and the fucker jumped right over the walls, ripping on barbed wire, and darted toward her, howling like a werewolf at the blood moon.

I lie awake, wondering how it's possible that my life went from hell to happy in less than two hours.

I stare at the ceiling for the longest time, then close my eyes and try to decipher how I feel, with her next to me, sleeping, both of us naked, and a promise of so much more tomorrow.

It starts getting bright outside, dawn light seeping through the windows. Maddy stirs.

"We don't have to get up yet," I whisper.

She smiles sleepily, her hand roaming along the center of my torso until it drifts lower, and my enthusiasm at her touch starts tenting the sheet over me. And then I'm shifting to get better access to her, and she is shifting to take what I offer, and we make love slowly, kissing the entire time until we both come and continue kissing for a while.

Eventually, she gets out of bed. "I have to go to work."

I text Nilanski to come pick her up.

She wiggles her butt into her panties, then bra, then dress, then her tennis shoes as I watch her every move, savoring the sight. And I pray in my mind to whoever rules this mad universe, " Let me keep her. "

Finally, I swing my feet off the bed and pull my boxers on.

"I'll see you at the medical center, right?" Maddy opens the door, turns to throw a last glance at me, and smiles.

She smiles like she doesn't smile at anyone else. And that's more than my dirty bruised heart can handle.

When the door closes behind her, I have this sudden feeling that she'll never come back, so I dart to the door and throw it open.

She's only several feet away, startled as her eyes widen at me in momentary surprise when I sweep her into my arms, and her legs instantly wrap around my waist. Her hands fly into my hair, and I crash my mouth into hers.

You are mine, beautiful girl, I want to say, but I don't, because she is not—not yet. I'll have to work it out, make sure of it, and be the best man I can be for her.

While my brain is working out the future, I kiss her madly, disregarding Nilanski only several feet away.

I shouldn't let her go. I should lock us up in my bungalow for days. Because I can't seem to get enough of her. And I desperately want to prolong this moment.

I tried to keep the door to my soul locked for so long, but she opened it and marched right in. I wanted to break her to see what she was made out of. Instead, she is breaking me. And I want to shatter into pieces at her feet if only her gentle hands would take those pieces and glue them back together.

M.

Maddy.

Madness.