“Oh wait, I’m going to bake soon. What would you two like me to send you?”
“All the brownies,” Elias says immediately.
I manage to shove Elias off of me for two seconds, the span of time it takes for me to take a breath and spit out, “blondie and oatmeal cookie, please,” before he leans back and squashes me again.
“All right. Expect it in the mail soon. I hope it doesn’t get stolen from your lobby like the last batch. Love you both!” she says.
“Love you, Mom.”
I mouth the words.
Elias hangs up and leans further back on the couch. I can feel my eyeballs popping out of their sockets. He pulls up his web browser and types in “best places to eat new orleans”.
I don’t move, because I can’t and because I really like it here.
FIVE
Elias
“One, two, three,”I scream at Mia.
“Eyes on me,” she yells back.
“Three, two, one!”
“Down and done!”
We down our shots. We’re both pretty tipsy at a bar in our neighborhood. Our neighborhood is filled with young twenty- and thirty-somethings, and Mia dragged me here to get our first round of ‘practice’ in.
Not before spending an hour at our apartment grilling me on what kind of clothes guys found attractive.
I mean,unclothedis the correct answer, but I wasn’t about to say that to Mia.
“I don’t know,” I told her, one hundred times. “Something tight,” I finally relented. “Or something that shows a little skin. But not too much. Trashy is bad.” I pause. “Trashy is bad,sometimes,” I amend.
After an hour, she finally decided that it was all a waste of time and dragged me out sans make up, in the clothes she’d been wearing all day. And now here we are.
Honestly, whatever, at this point. Free drinks for me, and maybe if she asks me for a demo, then I’ll end up taking someone home. Sounds grand.
Mia’s blue eyes have spent the last hour or so flitting around the bar, but she hasn’t done anything about it. I can tell she’s nervous. “How are your sessions at the gym going?”
“Fine.”
She frowns, now focusing on me. “That’s it? Fine?”
I shrug. “Nothing new to report.”
“It’s going well, though?”
“As well as it could be.”
She looks at me for a second with her scary X-ray eyes. I shift in my chair. “You know the most annoying thing about you?”
“That I leave toothpaste splashes on the bathroom mirror? That I used to put dead bugs in your shoes? That?—”
“That you sell yourself short,” she cuts in. “You’re, like, annoyingly competent at existing.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “I think there’s a compliment buried in there?—”
