I nodded with conviction. “Uncle Barry can go fuck himself.”
“Never let anyone say you aren’t loyal, Vera.”
As we crossed the street to continue deeper into the Quarter, stumbling partygoers spilled out from Bourbon Street.
We walked down to St. Louis Cathedral and Eli led me to Royal Street.He walked behind me with his hands on my shoulders as he turned me to face the shadow of the Jesus statue with outstretched arms projected onto the church.
“You can’t go to New Orleans without seeing Touchdown Jesus,” he said solemnly.
After a stroll around Jackson Square, we got a bag of beignets to go and took them back to the square, where we settled onto a bench, tucked away under a giant tree covered in Spanish moss.
We dug into the beignets and were covered in powdered sugar in a matter of seconds.
A guttural moan came out of my body as I took my first bite.
Eli’s eyes briefly widened at the sound before he cleared his throat and looked away.
“Okay,” I said, trying to recover from my absolutely pornographic response to powdered sugar–covered deep-fried balls of dough. “I would sit throughhoursof unexpected live music for these.”
He made a pleased noise. “That good?”
“So good.”
We ate the rest in silence and watched people and snippets of their lives pass us by.
As I finished the last of my beignet, a joint bachelor-bachelorette party meandered through the square with the bride and groom taking up the rear as they engaged in a drunken shouting match loud enough for everyone in a two-block radius to hear. It was hard to follow their inebriated argument, but it seemed that the groom didn’t think the bride was ready and she was very upset about something that had happened on a swamp tour earlier that day.
“Do you ever wonder,” Eli said softly, “what would have happened if we’d woken up in Vegas and just... stayed married?”
I looked at him, but it was too dark to fully read his expression and gauge how he might answer that question himself. Not that Eli was ever an easy read.
“Sometimes,” I whispered. I did think about it, especially that first year or two after he’d disappeared.
“I think about it,” he said. “A lot.”
I wanted him to give me more. To say the vulnerable things first.
“Do you still have the ring?” he asked.
I nodded. “I do.” I’d always liked the ring. “I’d wear it for months at a time, take it off, and then see it sitting in my little jewelry dish. I don’t wear much jewelry, ya know, but I would spin it around my finger and fidget with it. In waiting rooms. During phone calls. God, even when I waited with my mom’s body for the paramedics to come. It was comforting.”
He paused for a moment so long that I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me. “I’m glad the ring was there for you even if I never was. I haven’t seen you wear it, so I wasn’t sure.”
“I didn’t want you to think I’d been holding on to it in the name of something that never really was.”
“What if I was holding on?”
My breath caught. “What if?” I asked, because I couldn’t bring myself to answer his questions before he did. I couldn’t let myself be the one who put themselves out there only to be rejected or, even worse, shoved into the dark corners of his life like I had been with Brody.
The wedding party disappeared into a souvenir shop and I groaned, holding my hand up. “I hate having sticky fingers.”
Without a word, Eli took my hand, his thumb rubbing a circle into my palm. Then he pressed each of my fingers to his lips, sucking them clean one by one. My heart practically crashed into the ladder of my ribs. His warm tongue sent tendrils of heat through my arm and up to my neck.
“That’s one way to clean them,” I said quietly, my voice trembling.
Eli leaned his head down to me, his pointer finger hooked under my chin as he tilted my head up to meet him.
And then I yawned.
