She pressed her lips shut. She was not discussing consummation within sight of a Crocs outlet.
He lifted his left hand for her. Slowly, she pushed the ring along the length of his finger, feeling a tiny current of electricity buzzing at the gentle contact.
“There.” She shook out her hands. “Now, we match.”
“We do,” he agreed. Then he exhaled. “Did it make you feel weird…that we didn’t kiss?”
For a moment, she hoped someone would hit her with their car. “Of course not. Did it make you feel weird when I sent Isaac private medical photos of your condition as we were leaving?”
“What? How?”
“Relax,” she said, stretching out the word as his eyes bugged out of his skull. “They’re clearly stills from a zombie show. There’s only a forty percent chance he thinks they’re real.”
“I don’t—” He cut himself off with a groan, his eyes staring longingly across the parking lot as though he, too, might welcome death. Perhaps a short coma brought on by a collision with an all-terrain bike. “Forget it,” he said, dropping the subject, which was probably wise. Repudiations would only encourage her. “You seemed offended when I didn’t kiss you. That’s all I was saying. I didn’t want you to think it was personal. Or about your appearance.”
“I didn’t think it was,” she responded, voice appropriately unbothered.
He bobbed his head. “Good.”
“Great.” She clapped her hands together. “Well, if that’s that, I guess I’ll see you around?”
“What?” He looked genuinely affronted. “We have to go home and unpack.”
Her eyes drifted over to the mountain of suitcases strapped into the bed of his pickup truck.
“Wait.” She looked at Elliot. Then at the truck. Then at Elliot again. “Do you think you’re moving in with me?”
“It’s going to be confusing to my employer and health-care provider if my wife and I have different home addresses.”
“Uh, it’s called lying, Hodges.”
His hand worried at the back of his neck. “I don’t lie to the people who pay my bills, and I can’t afford to keep living in a bed and breakfast if you want me to make you an offer on Forest’s Bridge sometime in the next decade.”
That last part was slightly more persuasive than owing honesty to an evil health-care conglomerate.
She sighed. “You can’t live with your turtles?”
He dropped his hands to his sides. “Come on, Lainey. We just got married. You had to know living together was going to be part of the deal.”
Her palms were starting to sweat. “But we’re not, like,together…”
Elliot’s face contorted like he’d eaten something foul. “Oh god. Of course not.”
“Okay.” Lainey took a full step back. “That was an unnecessarily big reaction, considering thatdays agoyou were basically in love with me.”
“Lainey.” His fingers swept under his glasses to massage the bridge of his nose. “We are roommates who will have to coordinate our taxes together come January. That is all. You pay taxes, right?”
“The essential ones.”
He did one of his closed-eyed inhalations that was becoming familiar. “I will dig further into that another day. Can we go home now, please?”
Home. The word chafed against her insides. It had a heft to it. When all of this was said and done, they will have shared a home together, and as much as she wanted to believe this arrangement meant nothing, “home” did mean something.
“Okay.” She swallowed and walked to her driver’s-side door, twisting her keys around her finger. “Do you think you can remember where it is? It’s the two-bedroom, one-bath where you narced on me not too long ago.” She wiggled the key into the lock with one hand while jerking the chrome handle with the other.
“Yeah, I think I can find my way to a house that is literally on my property,” he volleyed back as he climbed into the driver’s side of his truck. This antagonism was good. It felt right. They’d been getting too chummy earlier.
They didn’t hit a single red light all the way home. It was as if the universe was conspiring to force them expeditiously into this hell of their own making. In her driveway, he pulled up behind her and stepped out of his truck.
