Requested by Anonymous: my take on the events surrounding 19x13
A multi-part story: foreplay in the first degree, smut in the second, and feels in the third
Table of Contents
Part II: Origami
The vulgar, animalistic twist and clench of impatience tore at his skin, threatening to breach the boundaries of decency and virtue within which it had been forcibly enclosed by the sheer fucking power of his will.
He watched you slide into the back of the town car in one smooth motion, unreservedly; the brazen push of you into the easy yield of darkness a duplicitous suggestion of erotic debauchery and grace. In turn, he chased you --letting himself sink, unopposed, into the intricate folds of your material show of wealth and power, letting himself be pulled further into your body by the hook of your bare ankle around his calf, letting the ferine primitiveness of his desire overtake him, at last.
“Harrison? ‘Round the park, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It took every ounce of his self-restraint to face forward, and to continue doing so as he felt the trail of your daring fingers take an unnecessary detour by the way of his belt to the panel, in full view of your driver. But he had to wait, and wait-- wait until you’ve raised the partition to cleave the world into halves of indecent obscenity and lawful chastity, wait until the engine’s sudden roar beneath his thighs synchronized with that of the untamed brute’s within his chest, and wait until your car began defiling the streets of New York City with its forward glide.
Only then, did he slowly turn his head toward you to drink you in, a potent cocktail of promise and peril that he selfishly, triumphantly savoured, without having to share the sight of you with anyone else.
“‘Round the park?” He asked, sotto voce, his calm a stark contrast to the madness lurking on the edge of his mind.
“To see the trim of the foliage at night, counselor,” you teased quietly.
Coy and daring, you bared your neck to him. On anyone else, the very gesture would’ve spelled submission, but on you, it was a paradoxical cipher of challenge and condescension, thrown into sharp relief by the low purr of luxury upon which you were reclined. He was wearing at least thirteen thousand dollars from head to toe; yet, one blink from you tugged the threads of his handmade suit loose, and another unraveled the rich swaths of cloths, till all that remained was a poor, Cuban boy at the red light crossing of Bronx and Cambridge, of defiance and inadequacy.
But he didn’t feel cold. “Truly?” He murmured, half-swaddled in the heat of your eyes and the comfort of unmocked candor. “A woman with an eye for the visual arts.”
Maybe he ought to feel more disquieted at being seen through with such clarity. But the further your car carried him away from the imminent threat that the fissured pillars of his professional integrity posed, and further away from the chaos of a thousand voices decrying every breath he drew, the quieter his mind.
For the first time in years since he translated his life from Brooklyn to Manhattan, he had no use for pretense. And he wanted you to drop yours.
“Clearly,” you cocked an eyebrow at him meaningfully, lancing the sharp consonants with a smile full of self-congratulation and flattery.
Something clawed at his throat --he felt such a primal urgency to see you, for reciprocity--
He wanted to bite down on you and consume the whole of you, starting with the traitorous throb at the base of your neck that he could discern, clearly, under the slanted ribbons of street lights dimmed by the tacit tint of the backseat windows. The rabbit speed of your heart betrayed your semblance of composure, and he barely managed to swallow down the savage pleasure rising within him to meet the only truth that your body dared disclosing.
He wanted to bite down on you and take possession of your unwavering, unfaltering self-assuredness --for his own had been lost to time, acquaintances, and circumstances. This was a yearning so strong that it physically propelled him into the cloud of your perfume, each breath of which made his mouth water.
He wanted to bite down on you and consume the whole of you, to be with you, in you, outside you. He wanted undisputed ownership of your pleasure and his; he wanted it backdated and filed yesterday.
It’s a good thing he’d excelled at Mergers and Acquisition at Harvard Law.
The hem of your dress ran through his fingers like holy water, blessing him with the warmth of your skin, of your eyes. Spurred on by the turn of your head into his, he palmed your thighs open and, one thumb on the outer edge of your pussy and one thumb on the line of your jaw, he leaned in to do what he wanted to do: bite down on your neck.
A breathy moan erupted out of you in response, half-pain, half-pleasure; the sound piercing through the layers of silence and fabrics between him and you, stroking his ego and cock with equal pressure. The rapid course of your blood writhed beneath the delicate skin of your neck, and he languidly traced your pulse with the tip of his tongue, setting the proprietary nicks of his teeth there with a swipe of glaze.
You tasted faint, sweet, with a bold hint of familiarity, like an ever elusive truth dancing out of his reach. And your laugh: lazy, an open clause of late Sunday mornings pelted with sunlight and riddled with loopholes worth a dozen double-takes. He followed it with his lips to the end of its line, crossing his teeth with the shell of your ear, and dotting his eyes with the shifting gleam of your hair.
“Clearly, your taste is as exquisite as mine,” he whispered in your ear before tonguing your earring aside in favour of your flesh, his short exhales warming your cheek.
Unable to stifle a gasp, you turned your head toward him to replace the air you had lost, between his finger and his tongue, with the air he had displaced from his lungs, and momentarily found yourself nose to nose with him.
His eyes flickered down to your parted lips.
Time stretched between you, morphing into a heated aligot, caught in the turn of the fork in the road.
And then, abruptly, it broke, its loose end swinging with the tail lights of the car.
Frustration whiplashed into your eyes. “So, are you gonna give me a taste, as promised, or do I have to wait until the court inevitably disappoints you a little more for you to indulge me?” You breathed, smile sharp, and tongue sharper, your words lancing him through mercilessly.
“Why wait when you can address the court directly? Oh, wait-- that’s right, you can’t,” he mocked, flipping the bird against the seam of your pussy with one hand. His motion made your thighs jerk, closing on his wrist in a spasmic hold reminiscent of the tight, wet heat of a woman’s sex as he first breaches her.
But while the hitch of your breath ruled in favour of his motion, your glare disputed it.
Weaved in sadomasochistic cruelty, your words twisted with his to hang in the narrow space between your bodies, whispering ugly truths in the allusive night, taunting the bowstring of egos that neither of you had undrawn in defense --for what good was an unstrung bow when offense was intended?
Your back arched and tensed under his fingers.
“Even if you could,” he continued, his need to bait you into release outweighing his self-preservation, “what’s to say that you would have any judicial merit?”
Oh, did he love to see you snap.
Before he could blink twice, you had steadied yourself on a handful of his shoulders and had thrown a leg across his lap to straddle him, your movements lightning quick and fluent in seduction. “That’s your expert opinion, Mr. Barba? When have you had the time to cultivate your expertise-- in between taking calls from the Office of Self-Doubt and meetings with the District Anxiety?”
“That’s all you’ve got?” He ground out as you ground down on his lap. “How… Vanilla.”
“And that’s all you’ve got?” You taunted, pointedly drawing down the zipper of his trousers to outline his half-hard cock underneath. “How vanilla.”
The sharp retort on the tip of his tongue died with half of his brain as you scratched a single fingernail along the underside of him through his boxer briefs.
“Give me a taste, counselor,” you continued lowly, rubbing your knuckle against the swell of his rapidly dampening head as his hands flew up the sides of your thighs to hold you still. “C’mon. Give me a taste, show me what you really taste like, Mr. Barba. C’mon, show me.”
The breath in his throat suddenly arrested, shackled by the five year old phantom of his own belt in Adam Caine’s hands: his very first case with SVU. He’d taunted the defendant on the stand in the exact same tone, with almost the exact same words-- tell me how you like it, Mr. Caine, come on, show me-- with his own belt looped around his neck, the cold buckle pressed into the nape of his neck, and the loose tip in a rapist’s grip. He’d gotten choked in open court for his efforts, tasting the bitterness of the coffee he’d downed half an hour prior in the back of his tongue; and wasn’t that just a faithful foretaste of his time with SVU?
Why didn’t he take that as an omen? The leather noose, threatening the integrity of his physical and professional selves. The eyes in the gallery, watching on, with growing disbelief, judgement, and disapproval as the consequences of his increasingly questionable occupational decisions played out in front of their eyes. And then the hand, a disembodied menace: merciless, reckless, with a mind and an agenda of its own.
If only he’d known; he would’ve withdrawn from SVU as quickly as the red imprint of the belt upon his neck. Here he was, then --five years later, having given up chunks of himself in sacrifice to uphold ill-conceived ideals, trying to take back his sense of self by taking you, a lobbyist, who seemed to have what he lacked in spades, despite the games of moral subjugation to which you had a daily subscription.
The car circled back around the park to the Upper East, bringing his career up short and your hand to his jaw. He tilted his head up, catching you as you flited your eyes up from the curve of his lips to meet his gaze. Your quick, shallow breath fanned across the bridge of his nose, wanting, desiring. It would cost only a shred of his restraint to lean up and kiss you, to drink decorum and poise from your lips. Or to take you, to rip away the virtue in which you had clothed yourself, just to see whether it was as corruptible and flimsy as his own, and whether you were just as lonely and vulnerable without it as he’d previously surmised.
Your lashes effloresced the top of your flushed cheeks as they fluttered --it would only cost a shred of his restraint to brush his lips against yours, and he swallowed against the rising urge to consume you, because oh, did he want.
A tearing sound ripped through the air, and he suddenly found himself knuckles deep in the wet heat of you, eliciting a surprised gasp and a reflexive clench around his fingers. Belatedly, he came to the realization that, in the physical exercise of his restraint, he had split apart a fortuitous dyad with his digits: the lace of your panties, and you.
He might not know exactly who he was anymore, after five years spent in the concrete jungle, but of this he remained sure: he was nothing if not opportunistic.
Without further delay, he surged up, letting your pussy suck an additional inch forward. Your knees flailed on either sides of his hips, but he had the back of your neck in a firm grip, steadying your body in his lap. He beckoned your pleasure with a curl of his knuckles deep in your pussy and a press of his thumb against your clit.
You panted as he began fucking you relentlessly, pinned to his lap, the first syllable of his name threatening to roll off the tip of your tongue, and the last, corralled at the back of your throat. He flicked his wrist, the wet click of your pussy lips as they dragged against his skin filthily loud, and he could not help but wonder if that was what you’d sound like, stretched open and sliding down on the length of his cock.
Your nails had long laid waste to his suit jacket as they grappled for purchase upon his biceps and collar with increasing desperation, but he hungered not for composure --he hungered for release. He hungered for it so much, with such intensity, that he could almost taste it for how close it was, for how close you were to achieving it, if the quivering around his fingers were any indication, and for how close he was to be the blessed with it. You were freedom, you were complete, and whole; he wanted to be imbued with it, with you. If you’d only--
“Rafael--”
You came, silently, biting through your lip with wide, doe-like eyes, as if caught in the headlights of a hundred luminous headlights.
The back of the car was dim, but he needn’t see all of you to visualize the peak of your pleasure. You were so very responsive in his hands, knees digging into the leather bench, lewdly rocking your hips into each of his thrust, your wetness rolling down his wrist, feminine moans unfurling around mouthfuls of his first name. He allowed your neck to loll back into the palm of his hands, to lay bare its long column for his viewing pleasure. The sight of you, free at last, almost made him tumble over the edge, untouched.
For this --this was the capitulation he wanted from you, the unabashed exposure of your true self: the unravelling of an intricate origami, the thousand folds of your thousand selves construed by your careful hand and undone by his.
The back of the car was dim, but his eyes were burning, assailed by the brightness of your face and the sheen of your skin. You shone and glowed: a small sun cruising at fifty miles per hour along Fifth Avenue. And suddenly, he was too hot, too close--
Hubris had lifted Icarus’s wings and greed had carried him too close to the sun.
He could feel the hot sting of wax drip down his spine, as the first layers of his self-hatred began to melt, scattering the loosened ends of doubt and disquietude that feathered the scaffold of his psyche.
Your eyes: an unguarded, vast expanse of maelstrom in which he could easily drown.
There was no escape, no juste milieu --for you were both the sun and the sea, a double threat of nature against avarice and mediocrity.
In the quiescence of the night, nobody would bear witness to his fall.
Nobody would hear him fill his lungs with you.
Author’s Notes
hi this is christine
my anaconda don’t want none of my life & school right now cause it hasn’t got no buns
oh. my. god. look at how fucked i am for endocrinology
so part 1 was foreplay. part 2 to ?? is gonna be straight up smut more or less and they’ll pillowtalk their way into a kind of relationship
stay tuned ;) i’m gonna tackle my other requests while working on part 3
special thanks to @writefasttalkevenfaster and @8cetera for the pre-reads and for your rotten tomato reviews i really appreciate it my babes. @mrsrafaelbarba: surpriseeee!
can we please please get rafael in paris speaking french? (i know from your about page that one of you speaks french and i'm just taking advantage of this) thanks a million!!!!!!
bonjour, c’est christine
êtes-vous ready pour les honhonhons et croissants fourrés au rafael 😏 , mes très chers et chères motherfuckers?
(image credit x)
A tranquille stroll in the Versailles garden, languid kisses on cobblestoned avenues, shared Romanée-Conti 2011 over tender agneau au jus de truffle…
It felt like a honeymoon.
When you had first landed at Charles de Gaulle, with your rusty B+ average AP French and your Cubano-Americano boyfriend in tow, you had felt an apprehension like no other when you had set foot in the lobby of your very French, very elegant hotel.
But to your utter surprise, your very sharp boyfriend had tout de suite started rolling his Rs the French way, starting with “bonjour mademoiselle”, followed closely by a self-assured, rapid-fire “oui, la suite présidentielle, s’il vous plaît, merci.”
As you ascended the opulent marble stairs to your aforementioned suite présidentielle, you shook yourself out of your stunned daze in time to catch a smirking Rafael Barba with a shell-shocked, “Where and when the hell did you learn to speak French?”
“Freshman year, Harvard,” he had winked at you.
In response, your head had started to chant voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir? in true Moulin Rouge fashion, complete with the peek-a-boo frills and feathers behind which your apprehension furtively retreated.
The moment your suite’s door had slammed behind the bellhop, you had sidled up to your very hot, very sharp, very accomplished Cubano-American boyfriend, and, while scratching the hollow of his throat with a fingernail teasingly, had purred, “Well, mon cher procureur, I look forward to receiving your éducation.”
The first item on the curriculum at the Finishing School of Rafael Barba: touches.
Rafael’s touches came in gradation of intrusiveness upon your person. In Manhattan, where the prominent public persona of an attorney cut the masses in halves of political discontent and acclamation, touches were elusive. They were cloaked in the conspiratorial covertness of a quiet whisper, across the back of your hand as he unintentionally grazed it with the back of his, as the both of you ate up the pavement with business-casual strides in lieu of a romantic, candlelit dinner.
In Paris, where the anonymity of foreigners is only broken by the outstanding –a standard of dress and manner toward which nor Rafael, nor you strived– touches were free. They were as liberated as the French were from the iron fist of the church and monarchy in the age of the Enlightenment.
The touches stroked across your bare clavicles, as Rafael curled an arm around your shoulders to pull you into his body, as if the weight of you against his chest were a necessary prerequisite to contemplating the fall of an angled chisel upon stone. Then, in the next breath, La Joconde: a timeless, transcendental witness to the urgent, forward press of Rafael’s hips into the small of your back.
The touches also brushed your bare shins under the dinner table, as Rafael instigated a juvenile game of footsie in rebellious contrast to the posh lavishness of your chosen restaurant of the night, pushing the boundaries of French sensibilities up and away, along with the hem of your skirt.
Vive la révolution française, as they say.
The second item on the curriculum at the Finishing School of Rafael Barba: kisses.
If touches were elusive in Manhattan, then kisses were hallucinatory, practically hypothetical, with how fleetingly scant and insubstantially flimsy they befell your person. They materialized in the null spaces prescribed by the office of law and framed by prosecutorial virtues. They were stolen, constrained behind the closed doors of an overpriced mortgaged property, after justice has been served and before the violation of constitutional rights threatened peace.
In Paris, Rafael’s kisses were as unrestrained as the sprawl of lush vegetation at the Jardin du Luxembourg, and as French as the history-rich soil upon which you stood. Upon this land, Marie-Antoinette had lost her head to the anger of her people; upon it, you lost yours to the playful nibble Rafael gave the bottom of your pout. To her famished people, Marie-Antoinette had nonsensically cried “let them eat cake!” To your starvation for his lips upon yours, Rafael had indulged the both of you in endless kisses, each and every one a flambé of buttery sweetness that remained unparalleled, even by the intricate pastries favoured by the last of the French monarch.
As the both of you perused the Parisian skyline atop the tour Eiffel in search for some promised beauty in the outlines of mismatched roofs breaking skies, Rafael boxed you in with steady arms and breathed a hot, wet breath against the shell of your ear in ominous forecast. Before long, he rained kisses along your hairline, carelessly letting them roll down the slope of your neck, letting them pool in the hollow of your throat, startling laughs and shivers and gasps out of you.
The kisses Rafael shared with you in the privacy of your suite had the heaviness, the momentum, and the certainty of a continuance, granted to you by the rapid rise of unfulfilled longing for each other, untempered by the conventions that dictated civilized order beyond the doors of your suite, and unhindered by the layers of unspoken pronouncements that draped your bodies. These kisses were unabridged, unlike the case laws that oft tumbled pass Rafael’s lips. Those were kisses that knotted one’s soul to the tail end of another’s: finite and infinite, a sum of two within which contained a forever expanding universe.
And the third item on the curriculum at the Finishing School of Rafael Barba: seduction.
Throughout your life, men had unwittingly chased the idea of you, each idea as divergently reductionist as the next, hatched over the time it took for a glance, a word, a turn of head. Rafael Barba had been the same: he was merely a man, after all. But he had found purchase in the familiarity of your accoutrements, of your erudition and had not felt the need to strip you down with his hands to construe the shape of you. He was an attorney, the legacy of two centuries of his forefathers’ scholarship, and so he crafted you the way he crafted his arguments: complex, potent, with an edge of aphrodisia bordering on indelicacy if not for his irrefutable respect and your steadfast humour.
And edge you, he did: first with words, then touches and kisses, then the unhurried slide of his cock –hurtling you further and further on, toward the threshold of a climax to which only he and he alone possess the key to twist, pull and push as he pleased. He was merely a man, but where any other man blindly chased the idea of your pleasure, Rafael stilled to listen, to see, to feel, taste, and smell. He did not chase– he founded your pleasure, and set out to build upon it centuries’ and civilizations’ worth of worship, the history of which he etched upon your hips with half-crescent indents of his nails, traced upon your neck with swirls of his tongue, and seared into you with each grind of his cock. Your body was a memoir of his acts of love and reverence. In return, you used his as a blank canvas, onto which you painted exclamations of tenderness and adoration à la Jackson Pollock: spontaneous, blatant, raucous, and primitive.
Paris invited the hours to loiter and the minutes to stretch out, not unlike a sated cat sunbathing atop a windowsill on a Sunday afternoon. Ever an opportunist, Rafael took these freely given moments in hand and weaved you into the linens previously tucked into the prim corners of your bed, turned down and spread out for your carnal pleasures. And you, tangled in the lust of his gaze, folded into scraps of soft lace and silk that spoke to offerings in expanses of yet unconquered flesh and to prophecies of delight– you beckoned him to you. With one crooked finger and a come hither in equal measures of open thighs and tilted neck, you beckoned; and who was he to resist such allure?
“Si belle, si envoûtante, mon amour,” Rafael murmured against the peak of your breast, watching you watch him bite down once again, watching you rut up to take more of him into you. “Veux-tu venir? Veux-tu que je vienne en toi?”
“Oui,” you gasped, turning your head to kiss the open palm that curved along your cheek lovingly, “s’il te plaît, Rafael, s’il te plaît!” You begged, breathless and mindless with the promise of his deliverance.
There was no sight more exquisite than your lover’s capitulation to his basest instincts. Rafael made a living out of his cerebral intellect, employing his physicality solely to instigate and punctuate a verbal brawl. In his surrender to la petite mort, it was his body that he used to close the argument between his love for you and yours for him.
“Oh, si, ça me plaît,” Rafael groaned, unable to take his eyes nor his hands off your body, as if by fear that you’d dissolve in the apex of your pleasure should he fail to bear witness to its unravelling.
À l'œuvre, on connaît l'artisan.
And he would be damned to let you finish your éducation française without a déluge à la crème.
Translations
Procureur –prosecutor
Vive la révolution française –long live the French revolution (a phrase commonly uttered)
Si belle, si envoûtante, mon amour –so beautiful, so bewitching, my love
Veux-tu venir? Veux-tu que je vienne en toi? –Do you want to come? Do you want me to come in you?
S’il te plaît –if it pleases you (direct translation; usually just means ‘please’)
La petite mort –the little death (i.e., orgasm)
Si, ça me plaît –yes, it pleases me (i.e., Raf is just being a cheeky lil shite as always)
À l'œuvre, on connaît l'artisan –a workman is known by his chips (i.e., you can recognize the artist by the quality of his work, which is me being a cheeky lil shite because of the next bullet point)
déluge à la crème –not a conventional saying but it’s exactly what you think it is. i mean you did beg him to come in you, so……..
Special thanks to @adacarisi, @mrsrafaelbarba, and @writefasttalkevenfaster for your patience as i word vomited all over the place.
A/N: Rafael attempts to ruin the New Year’s celebrations with a misunderstanding.
Dedicated to @writefasttalkevenfaster and @mensreactusreus
The silence in the cab was unbearable, but you dared not break it. You sat beside your fiancé, who was rigid as a board, although his stiffness wasn’t from the cold. The ride home felt excruciatingly long, the inner turmoil you felt did nothing to relieve your agitation. In reality, the traffic in the snow filled streets extended your normal journey time. But your stomach churned and your palms were sweaty in spite of the chilling climate the two of you had created in the cab. He was angry? There was no doubt about it. But why?
As the evening had progressed, Rafael’s demeanour had grown more and more frosty, not that you’d noticed at the time. One potential reason came to mind, but it was so ridiculous, you tried to dismiss it. But the evening insisted on playing out in your mind as you tried to fathom the depths of Rafael’s thoughts.
Olivia had suggested a New Year’s gathering with the squad, since Sheila had offered to look after Noah for the night. As the night progressed, the bar had become increasingly packed and rowdy.
“I’m getting another drink, anyone want one?” you asked. Laughing as practically everyone raised a hand. You pulled out your phone and tapped in their preferences, since there were far too many to remember in your slightly intoxicated state.
The bar was crowded, uncomfortably so. You pushed your way through to the front through a sea of tall, beautifully manicured strangers and placed your order.
“That’s a lot of alcohol for a little lady,” a smooth velvety voice spoke into your ear, making you jump.
You turned your head to find a devastatingly handsome man towering over you, dangerously close. The scent of his rather overpowering cologne wafted across to you, permeating your nostrils and making you feel more lightheaded than you expected with how much you’d had to drink. Laughing nervously, you replied, “I happen to have a lot of friends!” Hoping he would take a hint, you turned back to the bar.
Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to understand your lack of interest, either that or he didn’t care. He continued with his unwelcome advances, his smarmy come-ons delivered with a falsely manufactured smile. You cringed as he placed a sweaty palm on your bare arm and as much as you tried to move away, there was nowhere to go. You felt trapped, like a dormouse facing off with the Cheshire cat.
While you were at the bar dealing with your own troubles, you remained blissfully oblivious of Rafael’s eyes, watching your every movement.
“Chill Barba, she won’t be gone long!” Fin snarked. “I’m sure she won’t get lost in the crowd. Of course there is always the danger of her running off with a tall, handsome stranger.”
Fin’s words lingered in the forefront of Rafael’s mind. His confidence was mostly a persona he wore to convince the world of his competence. In reality he felt like a scared child, waiting for the world to come crashing down around him. He had felt this anxiety almost overwhelm him as he stuttered through a proposal. You had said yes before he had even finished, jumping into his lap, even though he was down on one knee, resulting in both of you in a tangled laughing mess on the floor.
Rafael’s eagle eyes narrowed as the vulture swooped down towards his prey. For a moment, Rafael made to rise from his seat, ride in on a white horse, your knight in shining armor, but he knew you would scorn his heroic antics. He heard your voice in his head, ‘I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself thank you very much, you don’t need to do everything for me.’
So he held off, but the longer he watched, the more frozen to his seat he became. Why didn’t you move away? Tell him you’re engaged, he thought. Show the bastard the ring he had spent hours selecting. Why were you telling him touch you? Maybe Fin was right, maybe you’d realized that you could do better. Fear and doubts clouded his eyes to your distress.
Fin and Amanda turned away, sniggering together over a dirty joke. Olivia, deep in conversation with Melinda Warner barely noticed the exchange.Only Sonny remained silent, he followed Rafael’s gaze towards you. Sensing that something was wrong, Sonny rose from his seat, silently crossing the room to your aid.
“Hey,” he tapped your shoulder. “What’s taking so long with those drinks? Can’t see in the new year without the celebratory bubbles, can we?”
“No!” your relief at having Sonny come over was palpable. Your eyes screaming your gratitude.
“Can we help you, sir?” Sonny turned to the stranger, who had introduced himself as Brett.
“No, I was just telling Brett that I plan to celebrate the new year with my fiancé and friends.”
“Well I’ll grab this tray, and you get those and we can head back to them!”
“Oh God, thank you Sonny,” you whispered as the two of you made your escape. “He really wasn’t taking no for an answer.”
“No worries,” he winked as you sat back down next to Rafael, oblivious to his slight standoffishness.
The strike of midnight was your first clue towards Rafael’s temperament. His kiss was merely a peck, barely a brush of your lips, a fleeting show of sentiment. Simply put, it was devoid of its usual affection. Not long after that, he had suggested you call it a night.
You had assumed that Rafael had sent Sonny to your rescue, but there was now a sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach that this was not the case.
The cab pulled up outside your apartment and Rafael paid the driver, only nodding in answer to the new year wishes. Wordlessly, you endured the elevator ride up to your apartment. Every second of silence made your skin crawl. Tears of frustration and sorrow pricked at your eyelids, blinking determinedly, you refused to let them fall. This isn’t how you wanted to start a new year with your fiancé.
What did you need to do to make him speak? Something, anything! Just an acknowledgement of your presence, to know he knew you were there. Suddenly your sadness evaporated and the vexation you had been bottling up since the ball had dropped was ready to explode.
Rafael had locked himself in the bathroom once you got home, leaving you alone with your thoughts. As he emerged, he determinedly avoided eye contact with you. It was the last straw, if you were a camel, you’d have more than a broken back.
Your hand clenched around the pillow that you had been hugging. Before you’d realized what you were doing, you’d drawn back your arm, the pillow had left your grip and was hurtling across the room towards your fiancé.
It hit Rafael’s back. You watched the pillow fall to the floor in slow motion, your heart pounding against your ribcage. Rafael turned, looking from the pillow to you. His eyes, their peridot green reflected clearly in the bedroom light, they bore into your soul, but you could no longer read his thoughts as you once had. The distance between you seemed to stretch out, like a chasm, impossible to breach.
He bent down to pick up the pillow, his movements slow and tired. How could you have just done that? “I’m sorry!” The words bubbled out between the tears that tumbled down your cheeks.
“I think I deserved it,” his voice was weary.
“I just don’t-” your sentence overtaken by a sob.
“Understand?” Rafael crawled onto the bed to sit beside you and took your left hand in his, massaging your palm, tracing the outline of your fingers with his.
“I didn’t want that … man to talk to me, you know.”
“I know. It wasn’t that. It’s just… you aren’t wearing your ring and … I thought maybe you didn’t want to-”
“Marry you?”
“Yeah.”
“This ring?” you held out your right hand, and there, nestled snugly on your ring finger was the beautiful symbol of his love. “It was a little loose, so I put it on the other hand because I didn’t want to lose. I have weird asymmetrical digits,” you said, showcasing your hands for his benefit. “I thought I’d get it resized when work was less crazy, so we could go together.”
Rafael sighed heavily. “Well it seems like I’ve made a bit of a fool of myself.”
“A bit?” you asked, cocking an eyebrow in his direction.
“Can you forgive me?”
“That depends.”
"On?" he asked apprehensively.
“On whether you’ll forgive me for throwing a pillow at you?”
“I’m pretty sure it was well deserved. I’m sorry for ruining the start of the year.”
“How about we just have a new new year. New resolutions and everything. Starting now?” you suggested. “I’ll go first. I resolve to not throw things if I’m angry.”
Rafael chuckled at your resolution. “Mine is to be more open and communicative about how I feel.”
You looked into each other’s eyes, you could see the warmth behind them again, no longer steely and closed off. “I don’t want to lose you, Rafi.”
“Me neither. Will you count us down so we can start this year afresh?”
A smile tugged at your lips, lips that you caught Rafael staring at in anticipation.
“Five, four, three, two…”
Tags: @serendiptious-esparza, @motherbearof03, @carisiismyking (I assume you want me to tag you because you liked the post, if not, please tell me!)
Can you do a SUPER angsty Rafa one for like.... a break up that went bad, or something? Preferably no character death and brownie points for jealous Barba... *gives you internet cookies for bribery*
Hey everyone! I know it’s been a while since I posted anything new, so I hope you enjoy this little story about Rafael and his girls for the festive period. Merry Christmas!
This story is dedicated to @moriartyhiii and @writefasttalkevenfaster, thank you for your patience and support and my constant whining. Love you! And thank you @larkistin for pointing out all my mistakes!
Even as his pen scratched its way across his legal pad, Rafael scowled that he was being forced to finish his paperwork before Christmas Eve. He felt like he has been writing for hours and his purgatory would never end.
As Rafael struggled to concentrate, a small whimpering sound floated through the slight ajar door of his home office. The sound finally permeated Rafael’s ears, dragging his attention away from the case law he was trying to mould to fit his case.
Rising from the comfort of his chair, Rafael ventured out in search of the sound. He opened the door and almost tripped over the lithe form of his youngest daughter.
“Lina! Mija, why are you sitting here?” Rafael dropped down to his knees. “I could have tripped over you! Are you trying to break your Papi’s neck?“ Rafael joked, until he noticed the streaks of tears across his daughter’s face. “Lina, what’s wrong?” he scooped the five year old into his arms, where she buried her face in his neck.
Despite having been a father for just over eight years, Rafael still couldn’t get used to being covered in snot and tears, (not to mention other bodily fluids). As Lina blubbered onto his Harvard sweatshirt, he caught the words ‘Lorena’, ‘Santa’ and ‘no real’.
Extrapolating from his daughter’s distress, he assumed that his older daughter, Lorena had broken the news about Santa’s existence, or lack thereof. Rafael sighed, he really didn’t have time for this. He carried his still sniffling little girl into the living room where her sisters were constructing the dollhouse their abuela had brought over.
“Mami, they don’t need a pre-Christmas gift,” Rafael chastised Lucia.
“Nonsense Rafi, mis nietas merecen nada más que lo mejor.”
“You’re spoiling them, Mami.”
“The women in this family deserve nothing but the best Rafael.”
“I know Mami but-”
“Rafi, when you were a little boy, we didn’t always have the means to give you what you wanted for Christmas-”
“Mami-” Rafael tried to interrupt, but Lucia insisted on finishing what she had to say.
“Now you have your own family, and I never want my beautiful granddaughters to ever want for anything. Anyway, it’s my money, I should be able to spend it how I want.”
“How about a starting a college fund?”
“That’s your job, Rafael. Mine is to spoil them.”
“The same way you let abuelita spoil me?” Rafael grinned at his mother.
“If it were up to her, you’d have dentures by now.”
“You make it sound like I ate my weight in candy!”
“She would have let you, even if it made you sick or kept you up all night from the sugar rush.”
“Abuela!” a chorus of sweet voices floated into the hallway as three little girls raced to greet their grandmother, saving Rafael from providing his mother with a response.
“Girls,” Rafael stood over the twins and looked down at them sternly.
“Way to go Lorena, now he’s gonna threaten us with coal in our stockings,” Serena said angrily to her twin.
Lorena scowled at her sister and rolled her eyes in the most Barba-esque fashion. “Shut up Serena!” she hissed.
Rafael stood in the living room with his three children, feeling completely at a loss for what he should say. He thought of how you had come into his office before leaving for work and had given him a kiss, and before you had left, you had asked, “are you going to be able to handle all three of them?”
Rafael waved his hand at you. “I know how to look after my own children, if you please.”
“Mami said she was free to watch them if you’re busy.”
“Cariño, we’ll be fine. Now go save some lives for Christmas!”
You’d walked away half expecting trouble.
“Can you two come over here and sit with us?” he said, making himself comfortable on the floor in front of the family sofa, which was difficult with a tearful five year old who was clinging to his neck.
“But Papiiiii, I didn’t dooooo anything,” Serena whined from her spot by the tree.
“I’m not interested in who did what, please do as you’re told.”
The twins reluctantly put down their figurines and trudged over to sit by their father. While he waited, he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and made quite the show of cleaning Lina’s face. He hoped that showing the twins how much their had upset their sister would make them confess of their own accord.
At least, that’s what he thought, until Lorena piped up with her opinion. “Papi, we ain’t gonna just fess up, you know. No matter how much you make us sweat.”
“Que? What did you say Lorena?”
“Tío Sonny said that when you are trying to make the bad guys confess, you make them sit in a room and ‘make them sweat’. Well Papi, look! I ain’t sweatin’!” She lifted up her arms, revealing her dry armpits.
Try as he might, Rafael couldn’t keep a straight face. He laughed long and hard at his daughter’s outburst.
“What’s so funny Papi?” Serena asked, she seemed more concerned about her pending punishment.
Rafael’s laughter ended with a sigh. “Remind me to have a word with Tío Sonny about what he teaches you two.”
“Is he in trouble too?” Lina asked in meek voice, speaking for the first time. She looked nervously at her sisters, knowing that her sisters would blame her for getting them into trouble.
“No one is in trouble, mija.”
“We’re not?” “They not?” All three girls looked surprised. “Por que Papi?”
“Why did you think you were in trouble?”
“Because we didn’t let Lina play with the dollhouse.”
“And why wouldn’t you let her play?”
“She’s too little, she ruins everything. Why can’t me and Serena play with it?”
“Because abuela said the gift was for all three of you. Santa will bring your individual gifts on Christmas Eve.”
“Tha’s what I say,” Lina spoke up again. “But Papi, Lorena say that Santa not real.”
Rafael pondered on the conundrum he was faced with. What was the best way to deal with his daughters’ belief system? He felt like he was being asked to argue both sides in a court of law.
“Lorena, why do you think Santa isn’t real?”
“Pleeerse Papi, you seriously expect us to believe that an old man in a red suit is gonna fly to all the kids in the world and give them a gift on Christmas.
“Papi, it’s sci’tific’lly impossible,” Serena added. She was truly her mother’s daughter, only you would ever dare to use scientific facts to get the upper hand. “Even airplanes can’t go that fast, how do you expect Rudolph to go faster than a airplane?”
“And how does he get down all the chimneys if he so fat?” Lorena added.
“And what if you don’t have a chimney? How does he get in? Or does Santa just leave you out? Cos that ain’t fair.”
“Tío Sonny said that if you go in someone’s house without a key, it’s called breakin’ and enterin’.”
“Tío Sonny is going to hear a thing or two about the rules sooner rather than later,” Rafael muttered under his breath.
“But if Santa isn’t real, how do we get presents every year?” Lina asked obstinately clinging to her five-year-old belief.
“Do you girls want to hear about the real Santa?”
“Objection Papi, you can keep treating Lina like a baby, but I know what’s real, and it ain’t Santa,” Lorena stood up and folded her arms. She was no longer a little girl, she had her own mind and her own personality… and a stubbornness to match Rafael’s own.
“Lorena, you’ve had your say, now it’s my turn. You know that in this house, everyone is allowed a turn at voicing their thoughts. Please be respectful and listen.”
Lorena stared at her father for a few moments before conceding, her piercing green eyes were identical to his.
“Also, who taught you the word ‘objection’?”
“I heard Tío Sonny tell Mami that you say it all the time in court.”
Rafael pinched the bridge of his nose, he was really going to have to speak to Carisi after the holiday was over.
“So, what was I saying?”
“You were trying to make us believe that Santa’s real,” Serena sassed.
“How do you know that the pictures of the fat man in the red suit are actually Santa?” Rafael challenged.
“Because everyone says he is!” came a chorus of replies
“So just because someone says something is true, you believe them?”
“No, Mami says you need to see the ev'dence,” Serena insisted.
“Ex-actly.”
“Hang on Papi, so you don’t believe in Santa either?”
“Actually I do believe in Santa, I just don’t think Santa is an old man who flies around in a sleigh pulled by ten reindeer.”
“Eight,” Lina whispered.
“What’s that mija?”
“Santa has nine reindeer, Papi.”
“I stand corrected. But what I mean is that to me, Santa isn’t a person. Santa is more of a … festive gesture.”
“Papi, what does gesture mean?”
“A gesture is something someone does to show how they feel. And on Christmas, I want to show you girls how much I love you by giving you a gift. But sometimes it’s special if you get a gift and you don’t know who it’s from, because you know that there is always someone out there who loves you. Not necessarily a creepy old man with an excessive number of inappropriate pets.”
A silence fell over the Barba household as Rafael’s daughter’s pondered his explanation. After several moments of contemplation, Lorena crawled over to her father, flung her arms around his neck and surprised him by saying “Papi, I believe in Santa too,” she whispered. “I know he got you lots of presents this year.”
“I’m glad mija.”
“Lina?” Lorena turned to her younger sister, surprising her father even further. “I’m sorry I said you were too little to play with us. We can show you how to play, if you like?”
Serena and Lorena grabbed each of Lina’s little hands and lead her over to where they had been playing.
Rafael smiled over at his daughters. Maybe this parenting thing wasn’t as hard as he thought.
Lina turned around and grinned at him like a Cheshire cat. “Papi! Look Lorena said we can give them a reindeer for a pet. Come and play with us!”
As Rafael made his way over to them, a little stab in his back made him rethink his confidence in his parenting abilities.
