“His eyebrows never grew back,” Bree finished from her ergonomic chair.
“Jesus, Davis.” Elliot practically choked on the air.
“I think he’s waxing for the aesthetic. To better terrify his underlings.”
Bree ignored Lainey’s conspiracy theory, smoothing her dress and focusing on Elliot. “Sconie is also very good. It’s our other restaurant on the grounds. It’s a lot of the same chefs, but not asfussy. And the entire menu from Sconie can be delivered to your room,” she recited mechanically, as if lifted directly from her employee handbook.
Lainey rubbed Elliot’s arm. “I’m sorry about the restaurant.”
“Please, don’t worry about it,” he assured her. “I’m more than happy with the side I chose in the great eyebrow debacle.” He dipped his head down, giving her a goofy look over the top of his glasses that made her knees wobble.
“Good,” Bree interjected. “I’d like to see that same kind of dedication where gas stations are concerned.”
“See!” Lainey poked his chest.
“I will not bow down to the tyranny of the Bauer family,” he declared, lowering their bags to shove them under the desk. “Bree, thank you so much for this. This is—”
“Don’t thank me. I should be thanking you. Lainey never lets me help her. I owe her about two hundred favors and she’s called in maybe…four over the course of our entire friendship. I appreciate your help in balancing my side of the ledger. Now, let me…” She reviewed a spreadsheet on her computer with different-colored cells. “Okay, I can get you into Sconie if you head over right now.”
Elliot scrubbed his face with his palm. “How are all of these places booked up? Barely anyone lives here.”
“It’s busy season,” Bree said, her tone heavy with an unmistakableDuh. “Seriously, you have to go. A group of US senators started doing whippets on their ‘wellness retreat’ and now there’s a complex structure made of toilet paper and bath products in the Sundial Suite.”
“Which senators?” Lainey asked, at the exact moment Elliot inquired about the structural supports of their tower.
Bree’s eyes darted between them. “You two are very different people. In a good way. I like it.” Then she sent them off to eat so she could deal with her toilet paper catastrophe.
Fifteen seconds later, Lainey’s phone pinged with a text.
Bree: OH MY GOD! HAVE YOU SEEN HOW HE LOOKS AT YOU!!!!!!!!!! Call me later to debrief.
Sconie was a Wisconsin dive bar for people who did not wish to step foot inside anactualWisconsin dive bar. She had no doubt that Bree’s mother—who hailed from Lake Geneva, another sneakily wealthy Wisconsin vacation destination, where her family’s defining struggle had been a particularly contentious lawn maintenance feud—was responsible for the design. Lainey imagined words likeelevatedandmasculinehad been printed onto a physical mood board alongside fabric samples with colors like “elk tongue,” “oxblood,” and “smoked cedar.”
The leather booths were too supple. The sports memorabilia was too clean. The weathered look of the wainscoting was clearly artificial. It was an Epcot impersonation of the working-class experience.
“In the bathroom hallway there’s a towel that Aaron Rodgers bled on during the 2011 Super Bowl,” Lainey said, leading Elliot through the entry doors.
Elliot didn’t respond.
“Don’t worry. It’s behind glass. And I don’t think it’s really his blood. But then, I guess it’s justsomebody’sblood, which isn’t much better.”
She looked at the man standing stiffly beside her, taking the measure of his hard swallow. He blinked slowly, his unfocusedgaze darting among the dozens of flat-screens lining the bar like a swimmer trapped under a sheet of ice, desperately searching for the surface. It was the one stereotypical dive bar detail she’d overlooked. The thing Elliot “didn’t do.”
Several different basketball games competed for their attention. She knew that whatever was happening to Elliot was bad, even without understanding his reaction to it.
He held his eyes shut, and after a deep breath in and out, he opened them. “It’s fine,” he said, shaking himself out of his stupor. “I’ll be fine. I just zoned out for a second.”
A couple of weeks ago, she might’ve believed him. But a couple of weeks ago, she didn’t know that his nose twitched a little when he was uncomfortable. How he fought the urge to adjust his glasses at the bridge of his nose when he was stressed. But now, it was too late. She knew him.
“I know you’ll be fine,” she assured him, because he would’ve been. She was confident he could’ve white-knuckled his way through dinner and be halfway convincing while doing it. “But I want to talk to you, and I can’t pay attention if people are cheering for the Lakers in my presence.”
He smiled and let her lead him out the door.
A quickCode redtext to Bree got them bumped up the list so they could order room service in the comfort of their suite. She’d expected Elliot to nerd out over all the little details, but when they got to their room, he melted into the bed, face down.
She climbed onto the mattress, lining up their bodies—hers facing his, his facing the comforter. Everything in the room was an expensive shade of vanilla—the painted walls, the stone hearth, the white pine accents. Her body sank into the bed, cradled by a nest of down feathers. It was all expensive and meaningless. Gran once told her that after a certain point, moneystopped making things better and only made them different. They were well past that threshold for her, and the only person who could give the extravagance of the room meaning was lying face down on the mattress.
“Elliot,” she whispered, her eyes drilling into the side of his skull like it was the key to unraveling its contents. “Why don’t you go to bars with TVs?”
