Raymond & Raya: Forbidden Passion
Copyright© 2025 by R.R. Ryan
Chapter 9: Morning Light
Raymond Alexander’s Laptop Journal
This was a special morning after. It isn’t the type built from bar receipts and bad pickup lines. Where the worst you can expect is a headache, a false name, and maybe a lingering resentment of a lack of restraint.
This one engineered by us from the bones out. The kind that twists you up before you’re awake. The type welded from memory and regret together so tight they become indistinguishable.
With the room gone colorless and thin, I woke in the blue drift of early light. As if overnight, the sun bled dry, and only the ghost of it remained. And I hurt, not with the soft, forgettable ache of sleep, but my body throbbed.
A deeper, more insistent pain mapped itself across my chest, my thighs, the creases of my hips.
With my head heavy on the pillow, I lay on my back, left arm pinned and tingling. For a long, floating minute, I didn’t remember why.
And then, in a blinding flash, I did.
All of it, every fevered second. The feel of Raya’s mouth. The press of her hips. How she’d whispered Daddy into the hollow of my shoulder. Like it was, the only word that mattered. I remembered her fingers clawing at my back.
The smell of her skin, the taste of salt and surrender. While I moved inside her, I saw the way she’d gazed at me. Remembered her and how she’d known all along that we were what mattered.
The inevitability of it all. This was fate, her and me, or some other story we tell ourselves to make the impossible more survivable.
Wrapped around me like a second skin, Raya still lay here with me. Legs draped over mine, one of her feet hooked behind my knee. Hand resting below my navel, her arm across my stomach, palm flat and possessive. With her head nestled in the crook of my shoulder, and her lips parted in sleep.
Naked, of course, and so was I. The sheets twisted around our waists. Like we’d both tried to flee in the middle of the night and collapsed from exhaustion.
I didn’t move. Didn’t dare. Lying perfectly still and letting the reality of it expand. Filling up the room. Until it pressed against the windows and seeped into the walls. With Raya’s breath, warm and shallow, ruffling the hair on my chest.
Remembered the aftershock in her body.
How she molded herself to me and refused to let go. Even after the last wave had crested. An intimacy to it. An innocence, which made my skin prickle with a shame so raw it electrified under my flesh.
The guilt came first, as it always does. A black tide that sucked at my ankles. Threatening to pull me under. I’d known the line and stepped over it. Sharp as barbed wire, I’d crossed it, anyway. Not with eyes wide open but with a smile.
And the worst part, the most unforgivable, I didn’t want to take it back. Not for a second.
I watched her sleep. In the half-light, she looked impossibly young. Softer than I remembered from the night before, her face scrubbed clean of all the bravado she wore around the rest of the world.
With Raya’s hair a tangle of brown and gold, fanned across my arm and the pillow. Catching the morning sun in fine, impossible filaments. Her lashes fluttered against her cheeks, and I had the irrational thought that if I blinked, she’d vanish.
Out of nowhere, my hand moved almost without permission. Brushing a strand of hair from her forehead, my fingers trembled as they traced the line of her temple. Trying to be gentle, to do it without waking her. But she stirred anyway, a little, the barest shift of muscle and breath.
Curling her hand tighter around my stomach. With the grip possessive and childlike. Pressing herself closer, her thigh slid higher over mine. The heat bloomed at the point where our skin met.
Caught between the urge to bolt and the desire to anchor her there forever, I froze. My heart stuttered in my chest, too loud, too obvious. Suddenly urgent, I stared at the ceiling, its cracks, and watermarks as if hoping for some divine sign.
Something to explain what to do next. But all I saw were the ghosts of sleepless nights. Watching from their silent perches, amused by the inevitability of it all.
I turned my head slowly and saw her face inches away. Asleep, she was beautiful. In a way that was almost painful to gaze upon. Cheeks flushed with the residue of our fever, lips swollen from too much kissing.
A faint bruise blossoming below her chin where I’d bitten down too hard. I wanted to apologize for that. To trace the mark with my tongue and promise never to hurt her again. But that’d be a lie.
Because I’d hurt Raya. Because I was her father, and fathers always hurt their daughters. Sometimes when they tried to save them, they succeeded.
One second dreaming, the next wide-eyed and awake, Raya woke all at once. Staring at me, she’d remembered where she was. With her pupils ballooned in the low light, turning her eyes black and bottomless.
But Raya didn’t turn away. Didn’t flinch. Instead, she smiled. A small, private thing that curved only the right side of her mouth, and she reached up and touched my face. Fingers traced the flesh rough with stubble and settled on my cheek. Brushing the hollow below my eye, she held me there, as if checking to make sure I was real.
“Good morning, Dad,” she said.
With her voice hoarse, spent, but with no shame in it. No apology. Only the steady, terrifying certainty that this was where she intended to be.
The words stuck as I tried to speak. I managed a noise, low and broken, and Raya grinned.
“Didn’t think I’d run, did you?” she asked, and the tremor in her hand was gone. Replaced by something steadier, stronger. Pressing her palm to my head, fingers in my hair, and holding me there, our nasty secret.
Taking her wrist in my hand, I brought it to my lips. Kissing the pulse point, tasting the salt of her skin. For a second, all the guilt evaporated. There was only her, and the need to keep her safe, and the impossible sweetness of having her close.
The room was alive with the evidence of us. The sheets were tangled and stained, a bra hung from the lamp like a flag of surrender, and my own boxers hid halfway under the bed. On the nightstand, a glass of whiskey sat untouched, the ice melted to a thin, pathetic ring.
The photograph of my wife was there, too, face turned slightly away from the bed, her smile fixed and unseeing. For a moment, I thought she might judge us, but I realized she was probably tired of watching me drink myself to death every night.
Raya shifted, sliding up to rest her head in the crook of my neck. Her hair tickled my jaw, her breath warm against my throat. She wrapped an arm around my chest and pulled herself on top of me, bare skin to bare skin, her breasts flattening against my ribs. She propped herself on one elbow and looked down at me, eyes bright and dangerous.
“You’re thinking too loud,” she said, her voice a whisper but sharp as a razor.
I smiled, weak and ashamed. “How could I not?”
She shrugged, hair falling over one eye. “You always do. Especially when you’re happy.”
“Am I happy?” I asked, and the question sounded pathetic, but I meant it.
She considered, nodded. “Yeah. You don’t know what to do with it.”
Leaning down, she kissed me, slow and deep, and her tongue traced the edges of my mouth. She tasted of sweat and sleep and something wild. Something that belonged only to us. When she pulled back, she was grinning, all teeth and mischief.
“I love you,” she said, the simplest thing in the world.
Staring at her, I tried to memorize the shape of her face. The light in her eyes. How her skin glowed in the morning sun. I wanted to tell her I loved her too, but feared that speaking the words might shatter the spell.
Sending us both back to our separate corners.
So I held her. My hand across the smooth curve of her back, fingers tracing the bumps of her spine. The scars she’d gotten from falls and failures. The silence between us thick and alive, Raya laid her head on my chest and listened to my heart.
Outside, the world creaked and stretched, getting ready to start all over again. But in here, in this tiny, ruined room, we were the only things that mattered.
She closed her eyes, drifting in and out of sleep, her body melting into mine. I watched the sun creep up the wall. One inch turned to a foot. This continued until it hit the photograph on the nightstand and turned my wife’s smile into something conspiratorial.
Stirring against me, Raya said, “Daddy,” and I laughed, quiet and hopeless.
There’s a special morning after. The one you spend counting your blessings and your sins. Wondering if they’re the same thing.
Closing my eyes, I kissed the top of her head and held her as tight as I dared.
The day crept in by degrees, color returning to the world one molecule at a time. Shadows crawled down the walls, slow and methodical, and the only sound in the room was the sigh of the mattress as we shifted against each other. I thought she’d gone back to sleep. Breathing slowly, almost meditatively, Raya’s fingers moved on my chest. Making spirals, loops, and the occasional heartbeat matched tapping on my sternum.
I didn’t want to break the spell. Not yet. But the words had been building in me all night, pressing against the inside of my skull like steam in a kettle. And I understood if I didn’t let them out soon, I’d implode.
I cleared my throat, the sound too loud in the hush.
“Raya?”