He looked at the ground around him with the reasonable skepticism of someone who could not see any evidence of tree roots. "I don't see any."
"They're there."
Lila had turned to look at me with her eyes slightly narrowed in the way that told me she had already worked out exactly what I was doing. "You just don't want him helping me."
There was no reasonable response to that other than the honest one. "No. I don't."
Ethan laughed, which was a more gracious response than the situation required of him. "I can stop.”
"Good," I said.
Lila made a sound that was working very hard not to become a laugh and not entirely succeeding.
When Ethan offeredto help carry the bookshelf in from the porch I had already picked it up before Lila drew breath to answer. It was a solid piece of furniture and I carried it one handed because that was simply the most efficient way to manage it.
Lila followed me inside with the expression of someone who had a great deal to say and was selecting carefully. “I “didn’t ask you to do this…”
“You were going to ask Pool Hall Boy…and his limbs seem a little weak.”
“Azrael…”
"I saved us time,” I shrugged.
Lila huffed and I could tell that I was getting to her. “That is genuinely not the point."
Ethan followed us in and helped direct where the shelf should sit against the far wall, which I permitted because it was her house and she had already extended him a level of welcome I was not technically in a position to override. The three of us stood in her living room surrounded by half-unpacked boxes and houseplants and sticky notes on every available surface, and the atmosphere had the specific quality of a situation that everyone present was interpreting differently.
Lila's phone rang from the kitchen counter. She reached over and hit speakerphone without looking at it.
"So," Debbie's voice filled the room at considerable volume. "Did Hot Neighbor come over?"
Lila moved for the phone with a speed I had not previously observed her apply to anything. She did not make it in time and Ethan glanced in my direction.
I gazed at him while Lila picked up the phone, took it off speaker, and walked into the kitchen with the brisk energy of someone who intended to have a very focused conversation in another room.
Ethan gathered himself to leave with the composed dignity of a man who had assessed the situation accurately and arrived at a sensible conclusion. He was, I had reluctantly determined over the course of the last hour, a decent person, which did not make any of this easier.
He looked at Lila in the doorway. "I was thinking, if you're free next Saturday, we could grab dinner?"
She hesitated and it was brief but she covered it quickly. Something had crossed her mind and made her pause, and whatever it was she found the pausing irritating.
“She's not," I answered for her.
And then…”Mine.”
It came out quietly, with more certainty than I had intended, and underneath it was every single thing I had been refusing to say out loud since the night she moved in.
The room went still and Ethan turned to look at me slowly. "Excuse me?"
I heard my own words replayed through the silence and understood, with perfect and unhelpful clarity, exactly what had come out of my mouth.
Lila was staring at me. "Did you just..."
"No."
She quirked a brow.”You absolutely..."
"No."
