At seven fifty-seven, once he was showered and she was ready to face the day, they would carry on with being friends as though the kiss had never happened. He’d make them both coffee, and she’d help him with cabin renovations for a few hours while doing her level best to stare at his hands in an instructional way and not a leering way. It wasn’t helping matters that Elliot had a way of listening to her that she was finding hard to resist.
It was the intensity in his eyes as he watched her, like every word she said carried weight. She’d never really feltheardbefore. It cracked her open when he looked at her like that.
At around ten, he would settle into his remote job at her dining table—architecting, she assumed—and she would leave to carry on as she normally would, doing whatever provided her enough money to stop working just before sunset, in time to stare at the incomplete art pieces that were metaphorically cackling at her like mean-spirited tree witches while Elliot worked on the cabins again. Once or twice, they’d spent the evening in lawn chairs with Vincent Groff’s journals—Elliot with a glass of wine, Lainey with a water—mulling over the many possibilities of the still-imaginary Forest’s Bridge.
This new routine was made possible by her medication. She’d had a few rough mornings that required a breakthrough pain medication, but she’d otherwise enjoyed her mostly migraine-free existence. She hadn’t realized how much of her life she’d handed over to her pain—fretting about it, managing it, enduring it—until it no longer required so much of her. And it was all thanks to Elliot. Her husband. Her friend. Her…whatever he was.
Her daily routine also relied on her indifference to how large Elliot’s hands were and her exceedingly detailed memories of how they felt on her body.
•••
On Sunday—the one that happened to follow Easter, which had come and gone without a peep from Camille—she disrupted their new normal to make some much-needed cash at the Groff Retreat.
Bree’s parents—the owners of the resort and the final word on most things on its premises, including Bree’s personal life—did not approve of hiring unlicensed handypersons for on-site repairs, and Lainey was certainly not an exception. But on Sundays, when legitimate tradespeople were difficult to come by, they pretended not to notice her fixing an occasional sink in exchange for cash.
“So he kissed you, and now he’s just not talking to you at all?” Bree asked. She was perched on the edge of the tub in an oxblood red sweat suit, supporting her weight with one hand and cradling her belly with the other.
“No.” Lainey swung her head out from under the sink to set the record straight. “We still work together and bicker—like we always do—but now all of our arguments have this ever-present undercurrent of sexual tension.”
“Sexual tension. I remember that,” Bree commented absently.
Lainey wasn’t sure whether to linger on her friend’s comment, so she forged ahead. “When we fight, it’s no longer the bitter back-and-forth of an elderly couple resigned to marital-bed death. Now when I look at him, I’m picturing myself Wolverine-ing into his clothes with my fingernails and then I remember that we can’t do that—which only makes it hotter.”
“I hate to break it to you, but you two have always been that way,” Bree replied.
Lainey grimaced, back under the sink. “But it wasn’t out there in the open like a third roommate. And now that I’ve felt his abs, and I can’tunfeel them.”
“Elliot has abs?” Bree asked curiously.
“Yes, and they’re not the bulky, gross kind. They’re subtle and understated. Elegant.”
“His abs areelegant?”
“I’m just as surprised as you are.” Lainey nodded as her hand threaded a slip nut back into place. “So now I have to live the rest of my life possessing this knowledge, knowing I’ll never have the opportunity to touch them again.”
She’d seen his stomach before, but she imagined it would look different to her now that she held a deeper appreciation for its context. Art was so often that way for her. It stood to reason that six-packs followed a similar principle.
“I don’t see why you can’t hook up again. He doesn’t seemuninterested.”
She lifted herself up on her elbows to look at Bree eye to eye. “He’s already made it clear he’s not looking for a married-with-benefits situation with his temporary wife.” Lainey forced lightness into her voice. That particular rejection had touched a raw nerve that’d been stinging for days. “And even if he could handle something like that, it would never work with Elliot. He eats the same thing every third day. It’s always salmon, tuna, cod. Salmon, tuna, cod. Over and over again.” Lainey gave the nut a snug turn with the wrench.
“You eat all the same foods, too,” Bree argued.
“Because I’m poor and bad at cooking. Not because the exact sequence of my meals is the one thing holding together the paper-thin fabric of my existence. I could never be compatible with someone like that. He has the coffee maker set to brew coffee at the exact same time every single day.”
And to brewhercoffee. But for some reason, she left that part off his morning routine when she relayed it to Bree.
Lainey pictured the way he looked that morning when she left, measuring and remeasuring two-by-fours for the deck on Forest’s Bridge with his tongue captured between his teeth. He came alive when he worked on that project. His passion wasinfectious. A desire to create itched through her limbs more than ever, and she knew the only difference was him. It had to be. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
“Oh my god, you’re obsessed with him!”
Lainey swung her head out of the cabinet to find Bree crouched on the ground directly in front of her like a baby sparrow.
“Jesus! When did you creep up here?” Lainey squawked.
“You are! You’re, like, swooning,” she insisted, duckwalking another two steps until Lainey’s back was up against the cabinet door. “You can’t lie to me. I’m pregnant.”
Lainey was fairly certain those two things weren’t connected, but not enough to argue the point. “Fine, I like him. Is it so bad to like your husband?”
