Raven in black and grey waiting for someone who doesn’t show.

He doesn’t know how he knows this. He just does. It’s one of those feelings that just as easily turn out wrong, but in the moment everything feels like the obvious truth. He feels the tiny shame in the way she props her elbows on the table and her eyes search the fringes of the plaza without moving her head. Her broad mouth is set, full lips smiling too much but not enough.

The first time he scanned the plaza for an obscure place to sit in front of something cold she was just a blur in the blur of faceless café customers. The next time his eyes lingered a hot moment around her face and then moved on. Now he sees a convergence of quiet rarities, obsidian and alabaster wrapped around each other like smoke and wind.

The plaza is lit well enough, but it’s nighttime and the only air moving is the last of the day’s heat rising off the cobbles.

He understands her hair seems darker now than it would another time, as if the night were holding her head in its hands. A loose braid curls around her sinuous neck and almost disappears against the black silk of the cropped blouse knotted below her breasts. From here he can’t tell if the charcoal bolt of fabric around her hips is a skirt or pair of shorts, almost loose and high on sweeping thighs.

There’s something deeper to the black and grey of her clothes than color. Maybe it’s the way she sits inside them, or the lotion shimmer of scrubbed skin making everything that touches the space around her look like a cheap imitation of something even cheaper.

Strains of a nearby flamenco concert waft through from an open air courtyard not far away. Occasional applause. It sounds desultory. Half there. More like breaking glass than hands.

She scans the plaza again. By now it’s all reflex, one of those temporary habits that come on long enough to take us through an unnatural situation. Her eyes pause in their circuit and land on Turner. He’s not the one, and after the seconds it takes her to realize this he’s like another archaic doorway, something you quit noticing after a glance or two. She tilts her head and moves on.

The waiter comes out and works his way through a half dozen other customers to her table. He says something and her face angles up to acknowledge him just before she scans the plaza one more time. She looks at Turner again, but not as long this time. She gives the waiter an awkward smile and says something back.

Turner starts across the plaza at a brisk pace. She doesn’t see him coming until he’s a few paces over the waiter’s shoulder, coming on like he belongs.

“Baby,” he says, “sorry I’m late.”

He smiles like he knows her, like he really owes this apology. He lists sideways and fans out his palms in a gesture of contrition. She’s confused but smiling. The waiter turns and regards him with bored disapproval. Turner’s already been a few miles today and doesn’t look like whatever a raven like her would be waiting for.

She opens her mouth but doesn’t have words to fill the gape of a gracefully angular jaw. Her eyes well up but don’t spill, firing back and forth between him and the waiter. Her forehead knits. He feels like an idiot, only making her humiliation worse if the waiter catches on.

“I got really held up,” he shrugs. He grins and takes another step inside her house of disappointment, moving around the waiter to her side of the table.

“Late start, late finish. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.” He leans down to kiss her cheek, lightly touching the other side. Suddenly his senses are full of shampoo and perfume, the touch of living silk against his lips.

Something tells him to take her mouth and he listens. She gives it back, leaning into the kiss, and for a few moments too long it feels like the only natural thing to happen since he walked into the plaza. His hand moves to her neck, his fingers around the nape while his thumb grazes her throat. Their lips begin to open and they pull back just before everything has a chance to become surreal hunger.

“I wish flowers could smell like this.” He whispers so only she can hear, letting her know it’s not just part of the charade.

He’s improvising. It’s all he knows how to do except he hits the wrong chord and something comes over her. She seems to forget the waiter’s even there and looks at him like he’s someone else. Someone she’s met before. Someone she might even wait for in a place like this. A darkness passes behind her eyes while her face transforms into a mask of hurt.

She stands up – awkwardly, as if it’s something she’s not used to doing - and slaps him hard enough to make her breasts quiver.

Surprised, the waiter leans back as if he’s afraid of being struck. Turner stands without flinching and everyone turns to the sound of her palm crossing his face.

“I’ve been waiting for ages!” she spits. “I was worried. Don’t you dare do this again.”

The charcoal turns out to be a skirt. Her legs are slender, not muscular but toned, and her face has angular, sweeping lines that give off an air of dignified heat.

Her accent is strong but her English is clear and effortless. He doesn’t try to guess where it’s from. She looks local but the cadence of her voice comes from somewhere further north. She can’t seem to contain herself through a moment in which she seems to consider slapping him again, but she finally comes back to herself and sits down.

Turner braces himself with a breath and orders espresso and water and sits. The waiter walks away and a moment passes in which the tepid air is full of meaningless conspiracy.

The Raven frowns and suddenly looks mildly horrified with herself.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “your cheek is turning red. I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s all right,” he says. It’s not the first time he’s been slapped in public by a woman, but every time it happens feels like the last.

It takes a few seconds but she relaxes and almost smiles. She looks at him as if she’s trying to decide a few things at once. He hasn’t shaved since yesterday. His hair is dark but not as dark as hers, at a point of being too long or else not long enough.

He can feel the long stretch of a good ten years between them.

Her smile doesn’t break all the way. It does something to her face that surprises him. Everything about her falls into a place that feels like something he once imagined and suddenly remembers.

His face feels like it’s smiling but he knows it’s not a real smile. It’s like his mouth can’t get there all the way because her cheekbones are doing something improbable. Everything seems to quiet down at the same time. The other people speckling the plaza, the flamenco strains, even the lack of moving air feels like it stops to take a breath before doing nothing again.

“And so?” A few certainties but more questions in the slow fire of her dark eyes.

For a moment, he begins to wonder if suspicion and curiosity are different rooms in the same house, but for the first time since he came into the plaza, she stops scanning the fringes.

“So,” he pauses, thinking, “it just didn’t seem right. You sitting here like you were.”

One side of her mouth curls and the cheekbone on that side slowdances with his brain. “So this is a selfless rescue? Saving a strange woman from…a minor embarrassment?”

“Maybe,” Turner shrugs. “Maybe I’m just rescuing myself a little bit.”

The waiter comes back. They don’t talk in front of him. There’s something faintly embarrassing about waiting for him to finish. The sweet, ropy stink of hashish filters in and hangs in the still air. Everyone notices but no one cares. It’s just one more secret the night doesn’t mean to give up.

The waiter goes back inside with merciful efficiency.

“And what would you need rescuing from?” she finally asks.

Turner smiles and silently watches her fingers play with the little white ear of the demitasse cup. He steps up to and then hovers on the verge of telling her the truth when Howlin’ Wolf’s version of Killing Floor starts up from someone’s apartment window. It has that tinny, old radio sound. Scratches in the vinyl. Hubert Sumlin banging rhythm like a V-8 spinning off gravel.

I shoulda quit you, a long time ago,

I shoulda quit you, baby, long time ago,

I shoulda quit you and went on to Mexico



Turner’s eye is on The Raven, but his ear is mainlining on Willie Dixon and the Wolf.

If I ha'da followed, my first mind

If I ha'da followed, my first mind

I'd'a been gone, since my second time



It’s so out of place there in eyeshot of the looming cathedral it almost begins to make sense again. The Raven senses the divergence of his senses. The curious amusement in her face deepens a moment and then returns to the surface. Turner realizes he wants to see that look on her face again, but he doesn’t know how to make it come back while sense memories are dancing alone in empty houses in his mind.

The whole problem with music is the power it has to take you somewhere you’re not anymore. Even places you don’t need to see again. The Raven keeps waiting. Maybe she thinks he’s thinking of an answer to her question. He’s looking at the lacquered onyx of her eyes but The Wolf has him by the scruff of his spirit.

He’s out of choices now but to follow that raw, Chicago fatback groove back to the last place he needs to be and something inside him falls off a ledge. He reads the way she notices the understated mutiny of the muscles in his face. The taste of long gone lips comes across the surface of his mouth.

Her eyes narrow on him as she studies his emotional detour. She’s distantly curious but gives him a good twelve bars before leaning forward and touching his hand.

“She hurt you. Something like that?” There is a fraction of a smile on her lips, an expectation of confirmation.

He turns the hand under hers upward so their palms are touching. He wonders if he should say his name when their fingers lace. He feels the looming presence of the cathedral behind his back, feels the weight of foolish choices following him like spiteful ghosts.



I should'a went on, when my friend come from Mexico at me

I should'a went on, when my friend come from Mexico at me

I was foolin' with ya baby, I let ya put me on the killin' floor

Lord knows, I should'a been gone

Lord knows, I should'a been gone

And I wouldn'a been here, down on the killin' floor

He feels the weight of better choices he’ll never get the chance to make now as he curls his fingers snugly into the fine bones of her hand. He wonders if there’s a way around always living in someone else’s history.

He turns their clasped hands over, touches a pale blue vein on the underside of her wrist. Her pulse feels stronger than her wrist looks.

“Who were you waiting for?” he finally gets to it without looking at her face.

“Is it so important?”

“Depends on the answer.”

Her finger moves across his damp palm. “Will you trust me if I say it doesn’t matter?”

“Sure,” he nods. What difference could it make either way?

“It shouldn’t matter to you.”

“Sure.” He doesn’t nod this time. “Your pulse is going faster.”

“Suppose I ask who you were remembering when that song began.”

“Is it so important?” he echoes.

“Depends on the answer.” She half smiles like something precious he lost before ever having.

“It shouldn’t matter to you.” He challenges the other half of her smile.

“It doesn’t.” She leans forward, accepting the challenge.

Their hands begin to move against each other in a strange dance, fingers reaching like arms across bodies, like a dance, like making an agreement their hearts aren’t prepared to recognize.

“Do you think there’s any comfort in regret?” she asks, looking at him for the first real time.

“Until recently I would’ve said no,” he says.

She waits a beat, does something with her fingers under his palm that feels obscene. “And do you think there’s any redemption in revenge?”

“No, redemption is revenge.”

She laughs, and her fingers keep moving under his palm while her head leans back and her throat opens on a soft howl of feline mystery. All of his veins begin to feel too small for the wild horses racing through them.

When she comes back to face him he’s begging the question.

“Here it is,” she says. “What would you say if I told you you’re the one I was waiting for?”

He grins as if he just stole a chunk of time. “I’d say you’re full of shit, but I wouldn’t ask you to admit it.”

She laughs, not as hard this time.

“Are you always so charming?”

“No, but I’m really trying to impress you.”

She almost laughs, but there’s a detour going on in her mind and her eyes narrow on him again. He leans back and watches her study him like the wild card on a jury. Their hands feel strong. Any moment now the air could suddenly emit sparks.

“I still don’t know if I should ask your name.”

“As long as you don’t, you’ll always have the choice. The moment you do, everything changes. When and if you decide, I’ll tell you truly.”

A veil of approval slowly descends over her face. “Until then,” she says, “I’ll think of you as No Name. But you must have a way to think of me.”

He leans across the table. Their hands are all but making love now and he places the fingertips of the empty hand against her throat. He feels the air passing in and out of her body. If she had something to say it would be full of her voice.

“When I saw you I called you Raven. In my mind.”

“Ha. A squawking bird with a huge beak.” Her throat moves under his fingers.

“Dark, strong and free.”

She leans forward. They face each other too closely for people who don’t know each other. He’s cupping the side of her neck in his hand and she squeezes the other hand while her face twists into a statement of hard truth.

“I don’t want to be free.”

The table is an awkward intrusion on what Turner wants to say next. It’s too small and crowded with cups, but her face is close enough to feel her breath touch him in tiny pulses. He touches the edge of her cheek. She sits upright and lets him finger the shape of her jawbone. His fingers stop around her chin and his thumb moves toward her bottom lip.

“No one really wants to be free,” he finally says. “It’s not a natural condition. Too many end up drowning.”

Her lips part against the pad of his thumb. Her breath rushes against his thumbprint. He feels the closeness of her tongue like a vague promise.

“Are you drowning?” she asks against the press of his thumb, but it’s more statement than question.

“I’m waiting for tomorrow on that,” he says, standing.

She stands, too, facing him across the table while he digs a bill out of his pocket and leaves it on the table. She takes his arm but she’s the one who leads the way. She’s the one who knows her way through the narrow, unlit streets not much wider than medieval donkey carts. They leave the plaza and enter a world of fractured moonbeams and shadows.

Turner feels at home but The Raven tightens her grip on his arm. He understands the only danger she fears is in herself, the same danger he began to embrace the moment she slapped him. They walk in the kind of silence only people who’ve known each other a long time feel comfortable in.

The street takes a soft bend ahead where a pink neon bubble of light seems to call them forward. They approach, moving almost in unison now, but before they get close enough to see the source of the pink she realizes something and suddenly stops. The pink gives her face an ethereal cast.

“I just realized,” she says, looking straight at his throat, “I’m no longer waiting for someone who didn’t come.”

He touches her face with both hands and angles her up to look back at him. “Now we’re both just waiting for something else,” he says.

He leans across the last few inches to her mouth. The kiss is neither tentative nor forceful at first, but there’s a hunger behind it that pushes them. There’s that staggered lunge of lips opening and tongues spearing into the heat of another body. He wraps one hand around the knot in her blouse just below her breasts. His knuckle brushes the swell as he pulls her closer, driving deeper into her mouth, sweeping the minefield of her unknown longings.

He feels something crack open in a dream he had long ago, and now it’s oozing down their skin. The next muted moments of their lives are made of kissing and the moist reach of tongues. Her blood is flowing into his body and it’s warmer than his.

Behind her there’s a darkened window with handmade guitars hanging down like surreal bodies. He pulls away from the kiss and leads her by the knot in her blouse.

Around the bend is the source of the pink, a small neon sign that reads SEX above the door of a shop with headless mannequins dressed in the kind of lingerie that’s meant to fuck in. They laugh when they see it, but Turner pulls her into a little jut where the corner of the building adjacent to the sex shop is built further into the street. If it weren’t for the sign they’d be in total shadow, but they’re bathed in a garish pink that makes a living man and woman seem like something tawdry against the ancient cobbles under their feet.

“So this is what it all comes down to?” she snickers. “Following the obvious signs?”

“That’s only part of what we’re here for,” he says, pulling open the knot the way he’s been thinking since he sat down at her table. Her blouse opens and bare breasts fall into his hands. He kisses her again like he’s trying to crawl inside her. Her breasts are smooth and warm in his hands, pliant as he kneads them. Her nipples scrape against his palms as he turns her up against the corner between the buildings and feels her bare thigh shove between his legs as she angles up hard into his kiss.

He pulls away to see her bathed in the light announcing where extravagant dreams are bought and sold cheap. He touches her face, letting his hands trail over her neck and shoulders, finally reclaiming the smooth weight of her breasts.

“Back there,” he says, “when you slapped me…” Her mouth takes the shape of the start of an apology but he puts his finger there to stop it. “It was pure,” he goes on. “Unguarded. I envied you so much at that moment. It was a moment of freedom…real freedom…not the kind we were talking about…but the kind of freedom I always wished I could know something about. So I just want to warn you now…because this is your time to run if that’s what you need…but until the moment we part ways, I’m going to hope and try to be so free.”

She studies his eyes but he knows they must look like nothing more than shadows to her. Her hand moves over the crotch of his pants, searching out the shape of his blossoming cock. He grows thick and unyielding under her hand. Her fingers trace the shape of his simmering stalk until she opens his pants and pulls his hard flesh into both of her stroking hands.

“Isn’t this what you’d call free?” she asks.

He shakes his head, tweezes her gemstone nipples. She reaches under her skirt with one hand, still stroking his cock with the other, and draws the gusset of her panties to the side. She angles his shaft toward her pussy and uses his meat to rub herself wet.

“Sometimes,” he tells her, his breath beginning to stagger, “the unspoken truth becomes toxic. Not like a deadly thing that lays you out for the last time, but the kind that destroys pieces of your spirit until you’re just dancing with all the other zombies in the subway.”

Her neon pink shaded eyes begin to hood slightly as she gnashes the head of his cock across her drowning clit.

“I think I saw a piece of your spirit dying when I saw you in the plaza, but that’s not even what made me walk up and invade your time.”

“Fuck,” she whispered, half listening to his voice, the rest of her trained on the rub of dripping flesh on more dripping flesh.

“How many times have you looked at someone and wondered…everything…but not because they’re so beautiful…but because of the way in which they’re beautiful?”

“Shut up or you’re going to murder the other pieces of my spirit,” she tells him.

So he just kisses her again and caresses her breasts while she tries to angle his cock to slide into her pussy. He kisses her head back against the stone of the building and squeezes everything in his hands one time hard. He lowers to the cobbles on his knees. When he pulls her panties down, he rakes his hands down the lithe flesh of her slender legs. She steps out of the panties and he leaves them on the cobbles.

He pushes up the front of her skirt and lifts her leg onto his shoulder as he covers her slit in a long, wet, sucking kiss of abject hunger. She winces and moans into a half squat as his tongue rolls across the burning knot of aching that crowns her flushing petals. She grabs for the wall as she fucks back at his face, but when there’s nothing to grab but stone she reaches for his head and claws at his hair.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she chants as his fingers push inside her just below the edge of his mouth.

Her pussy is an exquisite monument to slick friction as his fingers drive and fuck, slip and glide, while his lips pull and suck at her clit. She wraps the other leg around his other shoulder, balancing her weight between his shoulders and the wall at her back while she grinds his ravenous mouth into a honey spattered mess. His mouth and fingers are giving back everything she has to throw at him, until he feels her grip tighten on his hair, pulling as her pussy pushes against his mouth, flushing as she cums against the unrelenting onslaught of his mouth.

Suddenly they both grow still. Turner is on his knees while The Raven petrifies against his mouth. His fingers are deep inside her but he slowly draws them out, wet digits teasing at the cleft between her buttocks. Slowly, one at a time, her legs move off his shoulders and her feet touch the ground.

Turner rises to face her. “Kiss me now and taste how we are together,” he says.

She takes his kiss with a wild, delving sweep of her tongue through his mouth. She utters a little grunt against his tongue when he lifts her legs around his waist and backs her up hard against the wall. He fondles the pliant cheeks of her ass just before groping for his cock and guiding the shaft toward the swollen lips of her anxious pussy.

She tries to say “fuck me” but his tongue is deep in her mouth. He crams the dome of his cock in her maw and shoves with his hips, grinding half-pumps until his throbbing bone is deeply embedded inside her. They freeze again, hovering on the same intake of breath as they search each other’s eyes between neon and shadow.

“It’s all about the ‘what if’,” he says.

“No,” she mewls, “it’s all about the ‘what is’.”

He kisses her again like he’s known her for years. By now, maybe he has. She kisses back like she’s known him even longer. He grips her hips hard, clutching her as he rears back once and thrusts. His cock is swimming in her pussy’s clutch and honey. His lungs empty with a huff every time he pumps into her, while hers fill. She writhes and grinds between Turner’s lunging body and the unmovable wall like some sleek animal at the peak of her existence. She cries and yowls without restraint as he fucks with gasping lunges. Someone yells down from a high window.

“Shut up and leave us alone!” she screams back in rage.

Turner kisses her to fill her mouth with something else. But then he can hardly breathe and pulls back to yank desperate air deeply into his heaving lungs. High above, the window slams shut while Turner and The Raven get lost.

“You fuck like a rainforest,” he groans.

“You’re a fucking lunatic,” she mewls.

Nothing then but the sound of labored breathing and the hot, wet plunge of Turner’s cock in The Raven’s broiling pussy. At some point he feels her clench like she did around his fingers. He closes his eyes and lets himself catapult through the center of her being. He’s going down in flames and rising up through the smoke and embers of himself.

His cock leaps hard with spasms as she begins to shriek against his mouth. His soul snaps in half and his leaping cock blossoms inside her in a bursting shower of cum.

Nothing left but sweat-soaked bodies and pounding hearts. Moments later, a man’s cock slowly relaxes and slips quietly from his lover’s sheath. The Raven’s feet touch down and she kneels. She glances up once, then holds him in her hand and licks his cock. Her lips and tongue roll over his spent flesh until he starts tingling again, but once she has it all she stands back up and faces him.

“Now…kiss me and taste how we really are together.”

There’s something obscene in the slow, deep tenderness of the kiss. Something is broken, but stronger where the scar has scored its skin.

Turner pulls his pants back together and they sit down side by side on the cobbles, leaning up against the wall of the sex shop under that cloying, toxic pink. Her panties remain nearby on the cobbles. She sits with her knees raised and her brief skirt bunched around her hips.

No one says anything for a long time. The time to get up and go their separate ways comes and goes several times.

“I know if I walk one way and you walk the other, that’s going to be it,” he states simply.

“Yes. That’s true.”

It seems they’re both waiting for the right thing to say to come along, but it never does. There is only the tiny hum of the unmerciful sign.

“Then let’s not,” she says. “At least for now. Who’s to tell us we cannot walk the same way?”

Turner nods. “That would be good,” he says.

“So…how much longer do you think we can go without knowing each other’s name?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Turner says, “but I think we’re about to see.”