35. Sully
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
sully
WE WERE MAKING QUICK work of the living room.
It only took about an hour for us to finish the first half, though we’d definitely have to do another coat.
Which was fine. I wasn’t in any particular hurry.
I would be happy to spend all night painting with Ellie, and I didn’t want to rush her.
In fact, I’d made her sit down twice to drink some water and take a break, which she’d begrudgingly allowed.
Ellie was in charge of the music while we painted.
She’d always been the queen of the auxiliary cord in high school and college, and I never complained, even when it meant listening to her mixes filled with random Broadway tunes that she loved belting in the back seat with Natalie or the indie bands that I’d never heard of before.
Eleanor always introduced me to new music, and it was no different today.
“I went to her concert,” she said as she began on a new section of wall. “In San Francisco, right after I moved to California. It was in this little theater down by the wharf, and I’d had to fight through a sea of tourists to get there.”
I tried not to picture it, but my brain was too visual and self-sabotaging, and soon, there was an image in the forefront of my mind: Ellie elbowing through a crowd by herself, just so she could see her new favorite artist.
Or maybe she wasn’t by herself.
“Did you go alone?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“No.” She shook her head, and I nodded, trying to act casual.
Like I didn’t care about this additional detail, like it didn’t matter to me who she spent her time with when she wasn’t with me.
“I went with a girl from work. She overheard me listening to Wednesday Elevett my first week in the office and said she had an extra ticket! It was really nice, but beyond that, we didn’t end up hanging out a ton. ”
“Wait—” I did a double take at hearing the name of the artist, glancing at the speaker filtering out music and then back to Ellie. “Wednesday Elevett…you know that Noah’s friends with her, right?”
“What.” Ellie’s roller brush halted midair, her jaw dropping and head swinging around to give me a disbelieving stare. “Are you serious? That was a few years ago, but she’s like, really big now. And I love her.”
“I’m serious,” I laughed before dipping my brush into the cup of paint I held in my free hand. “She’s married to one of Noah’s best friends, Grayson. He’s a wide receiver for LA.”
“Oh my God.” Ellie dropped her roller into the tray before putting her fingers on her temples, rubbing them like I’d caused her brain to explode. “Oh my God. I need to text your brother immediately.”
“Go for it,” I chuckled, watching as she grabbed her phone from the TV stand and aggressively typed out a message for Noah. “He might not get back to you right away, though. It’s Tuesday, which I’ve learned means family date night in his household.”
“That’s okay.” Ellie put the phone back down and then skipped back over to pick up the roller brush. “I just needed to scream at him about that for a second.”
“I am in full support of you screaming at my brothers.”
Ellie’s eyes flicked up in mock irritation as she walked toward me, and then she gave her roller a little flick so paint splattered off it and onto me.
“Excuse me,” I scoffed, wiping a bit of paint off my cheek and watching as Ellie fought to contain her laughter. “Rude.”
“What was it you said?” She cocked her head playfully to the side, and something about her tone made my dick twitch in my pants.
The corner of my mouth lifted as I dropped down from the footstool I’d been using. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Ellie lifted a brow. “I believe you implied that you didn’t have a problem getting a little…” She spun the roller brush again, and more paint splattered, this time on my shirt. And on the floor, which was luckily covered by a drop cloth. “Dirty.”
Yeah, okay, this little display and her husky tone of voice were not good for my cock.
“I don’t have a problem with it,” I said and then cleared my throat, trying to keep my want from leaking into my words. “But I’m also not above—” I jerked my wrist, letting a little bit of paint fly from the end of my brush. “—revenge.”
Ellie looked down at the yellow on her arm and then back up at me, narrowing her eyes. The air thickened, making me wonder if the air-conditioning had suddenly gone out.
“Duly noted,” she tsked and then turned on her heel, marching back to her part of the wall. We’d started on opposite ends of the room to avoid working on top of each other, as delightful as that sounded to me, and slowly, we’d been painting our way to a meeting point in the middle.
At the moment, though, I felt a little sad to see her float away, out of grasp.
We returned to painting, settling into a comfortable silence, music floating in the background.
I got back on my stool and thought more about Ellie in San Francisco, going to concerts, meeting new people.
It made me realize that I didn’t know enough, that I’d missed so much, that I wanted to know more.
“Did you like it?”
“What?”
I glanced over at her, watching the focus she had on the paint. “Living in California.”
“Oh.” She paused, but only for a second. Her brows pulled together. “I liked some aspects of it.”
“Yeah?” I’d liked zero aspects of it. “Like what?”
“Well, being close to the ocean,” she replied, and I nodded.
That was a fair answer that didn’t surprise me.
I used to have to throw Ellie over my shoulder when we’d go to the lake because she refused to leave the water.
“There’s so much you can do outside—when I force myself to leave my coding cave, anyway. ”
“But?”
I could just hear it in her tone, unspoken.
Or maybe that was just me being optimistic and ridiculous.
I was glad that she’d found some joy out there.
I wanted her to be happy, no matter where she was.
But fuck, the distance had killed me. And the lingering thought that she might want to go back…
well, that gutted me more than anything.
So call me selfish, call me whatever the fuck you wanted, but I needed there to be a but.
Ellie sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t think working in Silicon Valley is really for me. I don’t think I…vibe.”
“You know, I was surprised,” I admitted. “When I saw you there.”
“Yeah, I—saw me there?”
My head had been tilted as I focused on the trim—the crease where the wall met the ceiling. But at Ellie’s questioning words, my neck straightened, and I stared ahead at the yellow wall. Shit.
“Did Nat share pictures with you?” she asked. “I don’t…”
She drifted off, but she didn’t need to finish her sentence.
What she meant to say was that she never posted pictures. She didn’t share videos. Eleanor might be chronically online and glued to her computer, but she didn’t really do social media.
So how had I seen her?
Well…
“No.” I fidgeted with my hair, raking my fingers through it. Fuck, had the AC gone out? It felt warm in here. Like, really warm. Maybe it was because I was so close to the ceiling, and heat rises and all that, but—
“Then how did you—”
“I didn’t see pictures of you,” I admitted, interrupting. “I just saw your…dot?”
“My dot?” Ellie laughed, clearly not understanding.
I tried to play it off, glancing over my shoulder and gesturing to my phone, which sat by hers on the TV stand. “Yeah, your location.”
Then I went back to slowly painting along the ceiling, trying to focus on keeping my brush straight and not on Eleanor’s reaction.
She was quiet.
Too quiet.
The room was quiet.
I might have also been holding my breath.
“Sawyer, you—” she said eventually, before cutting herself off, and fuck.
I forced myself to turn around and face her. Because I needed more than that little snippet of a response.
Ellie had a hand over her mouth, her eyes fixed on me. And damn if they weren’t unreadable.
“I just…” I shrugged, not knowing what to say to explain myself. “You never stopped sharing it with me. And I never stopped looking.”
She blinked.
I went back to holding my breath.
And then decided I needed to clarify, “Well, I did stop looking as much, but—”
“I lied before.”
“What?”
Ellie turned her back to me, refocusing on the wall, rolling up and down like she hadn’t just left me sitting on a fucking cliff. She was moving quickly, too, making broad, somewhat crooked strokes as she rolled toward me.
“I did ask Natalie about you,” she said without turning away from the wall. “Once.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.” She jumped a little, trying to get her roller to reach up to where I’d painted the trim. “After I watched your graduation online, I couldn’t stop—” She paused, but it only lasted a moment. “I wanted—no, I needed to know where you’d be. If you had plans to move or plans to stay.”
My breath caught, but I managed a response. “I’m sure you weren’t surprised when she told you I didn’t have plans to go anywhere.”
Ellie had made it all the way across the wall, and now she was right beside me. Well, under me might be more accurate, since I still stood on the step ladder.
Her eyes flicked up to mine. “What I’m trying to say is, I get it.”
I swallowed, hanging on her words, needing her to say more.
“I didn’t know how to live without knowing where in the world you were, either,” she breathed.
I stood there, a little stunned, as her words untangled in my chest. And then when they really hit me, when my pulse doubled in speed and my heart felt like it just might burst, I realized there was too much distance between us.
My limbs realized it too, my feet tripping over themselves as I tried to get closer to her.
The result, unfortunately, was me tumbling from my step stool and crashing into the wall…and Eleanor.
It might not have been that bad—I mean, I couldn’t really complain about the press of her entire body against mine—if it weren’t for the fact that my paintbrush slipped from my hand, too.
And so did my paint.
Which meant Ellie and all her beautiful words, her perfection, her sweetness…were now covered in a coat of Buttermilk.