Novels by Clarisko

RAY ♠️Ray KnowsThe last patient left at six-fifteen.I walked them out, said the things I always said at the end of an appointment, the follow-up dates, the prescription notes, the gentle professional reassurance that is part of the job and which I have given so many times it lives in my mouth like a second language. I closed the clinic door. I stood in the reception area with the chairs empty and the afternoon light going gold through the windows and the complete, ringing silence of a building that had cleared out.Then I went back to my office and sat at my desk and tried to remember who I was.Dr. Ray Lionel. Gynecologist. Married. Thirty-five years old. A man who had built something real and good, a practice, a reputation, a marriage that was comfortable and genuine and more than many people ever found. A man who was, by any reasonable measure, in possession of a good life.A man who had kissed his married first love in a consultation room six hours ago and had been unable to

SCARLET ♠️I have kissed my husband four thousand times.I know this because I am the kind of woman who remembers things like that, the first time, nervous and laughing outside a restaurant on our second date. The wedding, which was perfect in the way that photographed moments are perfect, every feeling slightly performed for the camera. The anniversary kisses, the goodbye kisses, the automatic press of lips to cheek that marriage reduces passion to eventually, quietly, without either person noticing the exact moment it changed.Four thousand times. And not one of them felt like that.I was still sitting in Ray’s consultation chair, both hands pressed flat against my thighs, trying to locate my composure. Ray was back behind his desk, I didn’t see him move there, I just looked up and he was behind it, the desk between us like a decision we had both made simultaneously without discussing it. He was looking at the window. I was looking at the floor. The room was completely silent exce

Scarlet ♠️I drove home with both hands on the wheel and my mind somewhere completely else.The road, the traffic, the familiar turns toward the Benson house, I navigated all of it on autopilot while my body replayed what had happened in that consultation room on a loop I could not seem to interrupt. The sensation. The sound that had escaped my mouth before I could catch it. The way I had gripped his coat like it was the only solid thing available. The way I had gotten wet and horny. The silence afterward, thick and aware and full of things that had no business existing between a doctor and his patient.Ray Lionel is my gynecologist.I said it to myself three times on the drive home, in the firm internal voice I usually reserved for talking myself out of things. It didn’t help. If anything it made the heat in my chest worse.By the time I pulled into the compound my heart had slowed to something approaching normal. I sat in the parked car for a moment, hands still on the wheel, and

SCARLET ♠️Ten years.I sat across from him and thought, ten years and I felt every single one of them collapse like they had never existed.He hadn’t changed. That was the thing that undid me first, before anything else, the simple, unfair fact that Ray Lionel had not changed. He was still tall, still broad across the shoulders, still carrying himself with that particular stillness that had always made me feel like the rest of the world was moving too fast. His hair was darker than I remembered or maybe the office light was different. His jaw was the same. His hands were the same. Everything about him was the same and I had spent 10 years telling myself I was over it and apparently I had been lying to myself for 10 years.He was looking at me the way he used to look at me when he was trying to figure out what I was thinking before I said it.I dropped my eyes to my lap and started rubbing my thumbs together.“Scarlet.”His voice. Lord, his voice!! still that same low, unhurried reg

SCARLET ♠️I woke to an empty bed and the specific silence of a house that had already decided to go on without me.Noah’s side was cold. His lamp was off, his pillow undisturbed on his side, he had a habit of remaking his half of the bed before he left, every morning, like he wanted to erase the evidence of having been there at all. I lay still for a moment and looked at the ceiling and let last night come back in full.“What is the point, Scarlet.”“Something has to change.”“A real wife.”All of them landed on my mind without permission. I sat up.I was not going to lie here and let those words settle into me any deeper than they already had. I had given them enough space. I had given Ruth enough space, and Noah enough silence, and this marriage enough of my patience to last three lifetimes. Today was mine.I got up, washed my face, and stood at the bathroom mirror long enough to look myself in the eye.The woman looking back at me was tired. Not the surface kind of tired that sle

Scarlet ♠️I heard them before I saw them.Ruth’s voice carried through the walls of my own home like she owned every brick of it, sharp, deliberate, loud enough that there was absolutely no question about whether I was supposed to hear. This was not a private conversation. This was a performance staged specifically for my ears, and Ruth Benson had always been an excellent performer.“That’s enough, Noah. Eight years. Eight years and that woman still has not given you a child.”I sat at the dining table with my hands folded in my lap and my back straight and my face arranged into something that could pass for calm. The table was set. Candles lit. Food goes cold. I had cooked tonight deliberately, carefully, because Ruth was coming and I had learned in eight years of marriage that a well-set table gave her fewer things to criticize.I should have known she would find something anyway.I heard Noah say something low that I couldn’t make out, and then Ruth’s voice again, louder this t