Raymond & Raya: Forbidden Passion
Copyright© 2025 by R.R. Ryan
Chapter 1: The Quiet House
What we have here is another type of relationship. A familial one, where they share not only healthy outings, meals, and movies, but forbidden desires. A brief peek into an astounding home where the only boundaries are those of love and lust, resistance and yielding.
The Alexander house—the blue one on the right side of the street. That one in the middle of the block, larger than the rest.
Behold, four-twenty-four, Bannock Street, Denver, Colorado. An average home, on an average street, of a more than average city. You walk into this home at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that might be, but one that shall be.
This is not a new problem. It’s simply an extension of what, from time to time, happens, unforgivable lust taking hold between a man and woman. A biblically forbidden passion, which has plagued fathers since the first man fell in love with his daughter and the first daughter fell for him. The moral dilemma festers between them.
But like every one of those who preceded them, this kind of love has one steely decree. Don’t do what you know you shouldn’t.
For Raymond and Rayanna Alexander, father and daughter, are about to step headlong into the Incest Zone!
Raymond Alexander’s Laptop Journal
It’s odd but true, I woke up with my eyes already open. As if sleep was an afterthought or a practical joke someone else played on me. The ceiling hung there, a milky sheet of white cottage cheese covered with old water stains. Putting my hand to my face, I traced their outlines with my eyes, slow as a prisoner mapping escape routes with a spoon.
Outside, the sun was making a lackluster effort behind the clouds. Its light slipped around the edges of the curtains, spilled into the room in pale stripes, which didn’t so much illuminate as accentuate. It was a morning that asked for another hour, or three, in bed.
But the clock on the dresser disagreed, and the fucking clock always won.
The room was stale with the faint redolence of last night’s Jamison. My clothes, scattered everywhere, even an undershirt I didn’t remember wearing. A button-down shirt slouched over the back of a chair like it was waiting for a bus that’d never come.
On the bedside table, a glass of water sat, the rim smudged, surface still as a pond on a breezeless mountain day. The whole room screamed with neglect. Not casual negligence, but rather one that’s not quite curated. Almost deliberate in the lack of care.
All of it, the result of a man who’d stopped expecting company long ago.
At first, I didn’t move. The body, I’d learned, was like a machine you tricked into starting each morning. If one acted eager, the inertia would’ve taken it as a challenge and doubled down.
Staring at the patch of ceiling where the paint bubbled and peeled away, I let myself drift. It appeared to have survived a siege, if only just, and waited for the right moment to give up altogether.
Next to me, the mattress sagged a little. The indented hollow on the far side was deeper than my own. A ghost of a body heavier than my memory could carry. My wife, Dana’s pillow, was still there, slightly askew.
The cotton flattened in the shape of the head that rested there for six, horrid months. The logic of it still being there defeated me, and I should’ve thrown it away.
However, the bed was easier to share with a shadow than alone.
My joints ached. Not the clean, sharp ache of a night spent on a bad mattress, but the sticky, inflamed pain of something festering inside the bone. Flexing my left hand, the fingers protested with the slow crackle of old wood.
It took me four separate attempts to sit up. By the time I’d swung my legs over the side of the bed, I was sweating like I’d run a marathon.
Even then, I took a full minute to catch my breath, hunched forward, elbows to knees, head in my hands. Trying to remember how it felt to wake up next to someone who expected you to move and scrutinize dust floating through the air.
The rest of the house was silent. Not the gentle hush of a sleeping home. Rather, the oppressive, reverberating silence of abandonment. The floorboards under my feet stung cold through the threadbare carpet.
I’d meant to patch the spot where the fibers were worn away, but that was last winter, and the previous winter might as well have been another lifetime.
On the chest of drawers stood a photo in a cheap frame. It was the only thing there that didn’t gather dust. Dana’s face stared out from behind the glass. Smiling, lips parted as if about to say my name, or laugh, or tell me to shave. The glass, smudged with fingerprints from me holding it.
Because I never cleaned it, I didn’t want to risk losing the impression of her touch. Even if it was my thumbprints layered over old memories. Gazing at the photo for a long time, the woman in it looked nothing like the one who’d left.
She was happy and confident, and for a moment, so was I, because she gazed at me.
I reached for the glass of water on the nightstand and took a cautious sip. It tasted warm, with a flat flavor. Therefore, I set it back down, aligning it with the coaster’s faded ring. It was the only thing I ever bothered to align.
The bathroom was twelve paces from the edge of my bed. Why’d it take me half a dozen false starts? Each step labored, and as if I moved through syrup. My knees wobbled. Tendons grumbled. But I made the trip upright and unassisted. The mirror over the sink greeted me with the usual contempt.
The stubble on my jaw was dense, three days past reasonable, flecked with white like a dusting of salt. Running my fingers along the edge of my scalp, finding only more gray, more defeat. I stared at my reflection until my eyes looked back. The world blurred at the edges and blended with the wall behind.
With my shoulders hunched, I could see how my posture collapsed in months after the funeral. Each morning I promised myself to stand tall, but every evening gravity won. My shirt sagged around my frame. Even my skin seemed to have given up, pooling loosely at the elbows, hanging at the jaw.
My daughter and I wanted for nothing. Nothing except her presence. Couldn’t help but wonder why she’d never told me about her trust fund. An orphan, raised in foster care, with millions of dollars in a trust fund. A fortune she’d left to my children and me.
The twins, a boy and a girl, have now become a man and a woman, and they have left home. The son lived on the west coast, and his sister on the east coast. Both married and happy, they’d run back to happy lives as soon as the casket was in the ground. When I told them about their inheritance, it made them angry. Angry that we didn’t live better in their youth. Enraged at her for not telling us. Furious at me for not knowing.
In my head, I calculated how long it’d take them to burn through their ten million each. Five years, I estimated. But Rana and I could spend the rest of our lives barely touching the principal.
I splashed water on my face, cold enough to make my eyes snap shut. I counted to three, forced myself to breathe. The pipes groaned in sympathy as I let the faucet run. The bathroom window faced east, and for a second, the rising sun caught the mirror just right. Throwing a golden line across my neck like a stage effect.
It vanished as soon as it appeared. I reached for the towel, caught it on the third try, and wiped away the evidence of a man who’d tried and failed to start his life again.
The rest could wait. The rest always waited.
The kitchen existed as a crime scene, without the tape. Everything preserved exactly as it was on the last normal day, but it surrendered to entropy. Sunlight from the window over the sink turned dust motes into tiny, doomed planets.
The linoleum floor, checkered blue and white, faded everywhere but the corners. A single mug ... her mug, with the chipped rim and faint lipstick crescent ... sat on the dish rack, far enough from the others to make its absence a statement.
With her hair tied up in a makeshift bun, Raya stood at the stove. Wearing a battered t-shirt she’d stolen from me back when stealing from your father seemed a fun game. She moved with a rhythm I never did in the mornings.
As if she assembled a machine out of toast, eggs, and silence. I hovered in the doorway a second longer than necessary, hoping to go unseen.
Still, she had the radar daughters developed after years of living with a father who alternated between too loud and all but invisible.
“Morning, Dad,” she said, and tried out a smile. It didn’t quite fit, but she wore it anyway.
“Morning.” My voice held the consistency of old gravel.
She scooped eggs onto a plate, not the kind I liked. Over easy, yolk barely tethered to the white. The kind she wanted, which I tried to learn to appreciate.
Small but deft, her hands manipulated the spatula with the precision of someone who’d spent hours in this kitchen. Making breakfast for two and fantasizing that three would eat.
The table, set for two, but not without thoughtfulness. The chair at the end sat empty, except for the old cardigan draped over the back. I ignored it. I always ignored it, and Raya faked she did too.
“Coffee’s fresh,” she said, already pouring. She used the mug with the faded palm trees, the one from that awful family trip to San Diego. Without looking, she set it in front of me and topped off her own cup. The inside coated in the color of dried blood from a thousand unwashed mornings.