I watch her tap another answer. She does a small fist pump — got it right. My first thought is “that’s my girl,” but … that’s a dangerous group of words.
I glance around even though I know Jason is out with his nutritionist today. These food acquisition missions are an all-day affair because sourcing Jason’s specific elk and bison quotas apparently requires visiting four different farms way out in the boonies.
Which means we have the apartment to ourselves. All day.
I sit up on the couch, letting the blanket fall, and pad barefoot to the kitchen. Ella doesn't hear me — headphones — so when I slide onto the stool beside her, she startles so hard she nearly knocks the laptop off the counter.
"Jesus, Bernard!"
"Sorry. Morning."
She pulls one earphone out, pressing a hand to her chest. I try not to look at the way her T-shirt stretches across her breasts when she does that. I fail. "How long have you been awake?"
"Just woke up. What are you studying?"
"Pharmacology. Reviewing mechanisms of action of cardiac drugs.” She turns the laptop toward me, showing the practice interface with the audio controls. "Look at this — the text-to-speech feature reads the questions out loud, and I actually get them right. I've been passing practice sessions all week."
She says this like she's reporting game stats, but I can see the brightness underneath, the pride she won't let herself fully feel. This is the woman who told me she was stupid. Who evidently believed it.
"That's amazing, Ella."
She presses her lips together. "It's because of you, partly. The way you quiz me in the car… I realized I learn better through listening."
I should not say what pops into my own dumb brain. Yet I hear the words forming, and I don’t bother to stop them.
"Well," I say, "I've been told I give great aural."
Ella stares at me. Her mouth twitches. She bites her lower lip, and I watch the color flood her cheeks, and I think: this is it, she's going to throw the laptop at my head. I deserve it.
Instead, she says, very calmly, "Is that so?"
"I mean. So I've heard."
"From whom?"
“A gentleman never tells.”
She's smiling now — really smiling, so big her nose crinkles — and the kitchen is warm, and Jason is gone, and she's sitting beside me in shorts with her bare knee almost touching my thigh, and the word "aural" is hanging between us like a lit fuse.
"So," she says. “That means you should totally blab.”
The mouth on this girl. I grin at her. “Ella Rujkowski. What are you implying?”
She shrugs. “That you’re the kind of guy who gives out sex lessons…”
My pulse kicks. "I am.”
“Well.” She bites that lip I tasted last week. “I’d like to start the day off right, if that works for you."
If that works for me. If having Ella Rujkowski in my arms works for me. I exhale through my nose and nod, because words have temporarily left my body.
She closes the laptop and climbs down from the stool, adjusting her hair. “Could we go into the bedroom? Just … because there’s a door.”
I nod and follow her in there, wordless. I duck into the bathroom and brush my teeth. The room smells like her—shampoo, fruity deodorant, laundry detergent. When I emerge, Ella sits on the bed facing me, cross-legged, and the confidence from the kitchen is already wavering. I can see it — the shift in her eyes, the way she touches the hem of her T-shirt. She's nervous. The bravado that got her to say "deflower me" over meatballs is different from the vulnerability of being here, in daylight, about to take clothes off.
"We can stop anytime," I tell her. "Any second. You say the word."
"I know."
