“I came to see how you were doing. You were pretty rough this morning. I was checking to make sure you didn’t choke on your own vomit.”
“You turned me on my side so I wouldn’t.”
He blushed slightly. “You noticed. I didn’t think you noticed anything earlier.”
“I’m fine,” I said after a moment to fill the silence. “I didn’t choke on my vomit. I didn’t even vomit. I got up early, ate a nutritious breakfast, and went on a bracing fifty-mile bike ride. I’m thinking of becoming a professional cyclist. I hear they have the best drugs.”
Hudson wrapped an arm around my shoulder and walked me back to his car. “I gotta get my food,” he said. Opening his car door with one hand, he pulled out an insulated bag and shut the door again. With his arm still around my shoulder, he walked me back to the garage.
“I have to eat,” he said and gestured to the door to the house. I opened it, and he waited for me to enter, and then he followed me after he closed the garage. I watched him put his bag down on the kitchen counter.
Hudson began to laugh. He laughed so hard he threw his head back. “Nutritious breakfast,” he exclaimed between laughs. “Nutritious breakfast!”
“What?” I said, affronted. “Don’t laugh. I did have a nutritious breakfast. Full of nutrients and phytochemicals and antioxidants and whatever other crap we’re supposed to eat these days.”
He picked up something from the counter. “Piece of donut,” he said, holding it up and started laughing again.
“I’ll have you know that’s not a donut.”
Hudson arched an eyebrow at me. “Oh, no? It looks like donut. It smells like donut.”
“It’s not a donut,” I lied. “It’s a bear claw.”
He started laughing again. He opened his bag and took out two glass containers and a drink shaker. “Fifty-mile bike ride. I almost laughed when you said it, but I held back.”
I sat at the counter and looked down at my hands. “Well, maybe not fifty miles. But there were miles involved. And I went on a trail by the river. Some of it was uphill. I had to pump my legs. My thighs are sore.”
Hudson smiled and shook his head in appreciation. He sat on the stool that Joe had sat on before and opened his food containers. The smell of cold chicken and broccoli hit me. “I’m so proud of you, Eliza. You’ve come a long way. Maybe not fifty-miles, but a long way. And look at you. You’re like a new woman. Your face isn’t doing that thing.”
My hand flew to my face, and I felt around for anomalies. It felt normal to me. “What thing? My face does a thing?”
Hudson scrunched up his face to illustrate. “You do something like that. Frozen in a wave of anxiety. Like your car is about to crash into a wall. Something like that.”
“Maybe I need Botox,” I suggested. “Or fillers. My best friend told me I need fillers. She went to a fillers party where all the women had it done. But I chickened out and didn’t go with her.”
“Fillers make women look like chipmunks,” Hudson said and stabbed a piece of chicken breast. “Like aliens. I want a woman to look like a woman. I don’t need her breasts to float in the water like volleyballs. I don’t need her skin to be a flat plane covered in three inches of makeup.”
“You don’t?”
“No. Disgusting.”
“You’re so full of shit. Every man wants those things from a woman.”
Hudson stopped eating and locked eyes with me. He had beautiful eyes. Amazing blue. Mediterranean blue. Caribbean blue. Not that I had seen either of those seas in person to know for sure. “I’m not every man, Eliza,” he said. His voice was deep and raspy, a testosterone-filled booming baritone. “I’m unique. I’m me.”
“Oh,” I breathed and tried to keep it together. I hated when I was attracted to him. He was so much younger than I was. I had no business being attracted to him. I kept trying to turn off the attraction, but then he would say things and look at me, and the attraction would whirr into action again.
“You don’t need Botox or fillers,” he continued. “No plastic surgery. No plastic anything. You just need to take care of yourself a little.”
“Self-care.”
He popped a piece of broccoli into his mouth. “Ugh. Don’t use that expression. Just don’t hurt yourself. Be kind. Don’t treat yourself like dirt, just because your husband treated you like dirt.”
The words hit me like I had been slapped in the face with a wet towel filled with oranges. They hurt.
“Steve didn’t treat me like dirt. We had a good marriage.”
I sounded like I was about to cry. Then, I started to cry. Not big, blubbering crying. Just a couple teardrops falling from my eyes onto the kitchen counter. I hated that I was crying. I hated that I was crying because I was grieving over a marriage that I thought had been just fine and turned out to be a nightmare.
