Chapter 6 We Know the Water Smells Like Eggs #2
I pull my bottoms down and self-consciousness alights in my belly at the sight of my aggressively unsexy undergarments.
I ball up the faded cotton and hide them in my shorts like I’m at the gynecologist. Then I toss them on the floor near Ethan’s feet and yank the shower handle.
Smelly, ice-cold water sputters onto my chest.
“Holy—” I cry out, just as Ethan says, “Whoa. That’s…pungent.”
When the heat of the water settles somewhere just below body temperature, I give up the fight and dip my head under the limp stream.
“I grabbed my soap from the van.” His hand stretches through the opening. My eyes immediately lock on the tattooed flowers that climb up his forearm.
Something about seeing a male hand so close to my naked breast sends an unwelcome swoop low in my belly. I can’t remember the last time a man’s hand grazed my nipple. I think it was snowing.
I grab the bar from him, and thankfully, the feeling subsides when his hand disappears. “ Bar soap? Is this a joke, Powell?”
“No plastic, and those giant bottles take up too much space.” He laughs at my tortured whine. “I promise, I always rub it onto my washcloth. Never my body.”
“If I find one curly hair, I swear to god—”
“I bought you a little bottle of shampoo from the counter whenever you’re ready for it. I figured you might not be ready for the multiuse-shower-product lifestyle.”
“You were correct,” I answer, closing my eyes and rubbing the milky white bar into my palm. “Is that what you were doing at the front?” My voice is innocent. Mostly.
“Yes…what else would I be doing?” he asks, and I’m grateful for the moldy curtain that hides my reddening cheeks.
“That was a lot of chitchat over a bottle of shampoo.”
I feel it first—the weight in my chest, the burning in my throat—before I know what it is.
I’m jealous. I’m jealous of the woman, who minutes ago was just the cashier selling shampoo and scratch-offs but, with one look from Ethan, is now the physical embodiment of every way I’m falling short.
She’s a little bit younger. Her hair is just a little blonder.
Her smile, eager. She looks easy and effortless when all I’ve ever done is try way too hard.
I know it’s not a romantic jealousy—we’ve never been like that—but best friends are their own kind of soul mates.
They’re the people with whom we share our innermost selves.
Ethan’s known me best at nearly every stage of life.
New people will never meet that nervous, optimistic kid, or the chaotic yet motivated college student, or the young professional with expensive suits and spotty dental coverage.
No one else will ever split my life into a before and after because they’ll only exist in his after. They’ll only know the person I’ll let them know. But best friends get it all—our best selves and our darkest versions—even when they’ve never asked for it.
It’s only natural to feel a little threatened by someone new when you have a friendship like that.
There’s a self-satisfied smile in his voice when he responds, “Autumn was asking about my T-shirt.”
“Autumn,” I repeat, letting her name fill my mouth.
It takes me a second to picture exactly which worn band tee he’s wearing, but then the colorful figures come into focus.
“Aren’t you wearing a Stop Making Sense T-shirt?
” I pause for dramatic effect. “You think the Sydney Sweeney lookalike is a big Talking Heads fan? Shampoo, please.” I send my arm through the slit in the curtain.
Our knuckles brush as he takes the body bar and replaces it with a tiny green bottle of Garnier Fructis.
He clears his throat.
“She doesn’t look like Sydney Sweeney. Sydney Sweeney doesn’t even look like Sydney Sweeney.”
I uncap the shampoo and the shower steam mixes with the scent of tropical smoothie. The aroma is a time machine that sends me traumatically straight back to a middle school girls’ locker room. “There’s no way she’s heard of them,” I tell him with certainty. “She looks twenty.”
“She might’ve.” His tone is defensive, but less for Autumn and more for the enduring relevance of David Byrne. “She doesn’t look any younger than we do,” Ethan adds.
“Can we just admit that that gorgeous young woman was looking to spend her fifteen in the back of your van with your small-batch tub of artisanal lube? Rather than existing in this alternate reality where twenty-year-olds know the words to ‘Psycho Killer’?”
I cut the shower, and Ethan’s hand slides against my ribs with one of his wide microfiber towels.
“I never said she wasn’t flirting with me.”
Something circles in my stomach—the last vestige of my hangover? I’m not sure. But it’s the reason I sound unsteady when I reply, “Sorry. I, uh, didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You didn’t. Well, you did, but I don’t care.” His voice is cool. Sure. Confident. “She’s not my type.”
“Oh.” The syllable is more a puff of air than a response.
Goose bumps rise along the surface of my skin, and suddenly, I’m too aware of how intimate this is. Ethan standing on the other side of a thin curtain while I shower. Ethan’s knuckles gliding against my wet skin as he passes me a dry towel.
“Not to mention…” He coughs. “When you have so many women beating down your van door, you have to be pretty selective.”
My laugh jumps out of my throat and breaks whatever odd tension had been building between us.
“You’re delusional,” I scoff, but I’ve never been so grateful for the reminder that though Ethan is my Ethan, he’s also just a single guy I’d absolutely swipe left on if I ever bothered to redownload my dating apps.
“Do you think she recognized you?” I ask, wrapping myself in the towel.
Even from behind the curtain, I can detect Ethan’s flinch at the mention of the minor celebrity status he achieved from his former band’s only hit.
“No. There’s this, uh, look people get in their eyes.
A Did we go to high school together, or are you the guy that sang that one song that was in that one show that they parodied on SNL ?
kind of look. If I never have to hear someone request ‘Velvet Nebula’ again, it’ll be too soon. ”
“Hey, don’t take it out on ‘Velvet Nebula.’?” I scrunch my wet hair into the towel, careful not to elbow the shower curtain.
“It’s a great song. I’ll never forget where I was when Sutton and River finally kissed during the alien invasion at the end of season two.
Then the music swelled, and my buddy Ethan was singing about the cosmic beauty of some random chick—”
He interrupts me with a groan so loud, I have no choice but to stop my shot-for-shot recap of Aurora Falls , the teen sci-fi soap that featured Ethan’s song in a moment so beloved by girls that the world felt compelled to mock it ceaselessly in a way his band never recovered from.
It was the monkey’s paw of overnight indie rock band success.
His band, Lemonface, had a number one hit…
and an SNL parody skewering the now-infamous teen soap moment.
The group bagged a People’s Choice nomination…
and lost the award to Justin Bieber, who made fun of Ethan’s earnest lyrics in his speech.
Lemonface was beloved and reviled all in one moment they could never escape.
After finishing their first tour as headliners, the band broke up.
Ethan was able to extend his fifteen seconds a little longer than the others by dating a slew of gorgeous, slightly more famous women, but ultimately settled into the college performance circuit, playing “Velvet Nebula” over and over for the age group who still appreciated it, albeit ironically.
I swaddle myself in his towel. “I love that song,” I tell him, even as something deep inside me shrinks at the raw, romantic vulnerability of the lyrics and the idea of Ethan having someone significant enough to write that song about.
There’s a particular cruelty in being friends with a musician.
The reminder that you’ll share decades of memories, secrets, and small, well-meaning lies, but all added up it’ll never reach the emotional magnitude of even a two-week whirlwind romance.
Fifteen years of friendship will never scratch the surface of whatever he shared with the girl who inspired “One More Night in Fiji.”
Wrapped in the damp towel, I shake out my shiver and slip between the curtain and the glistening tile wall.
“Hey.” Ethan’s eyes widen with something like surprise, as though he’s realizing for the first time that I’ve been naked for most of this conversation. “Oh, you have a little…” He gestures at his own cheekbone.
“Is it puke?” I squawk, searching the spot above the sink where the mirror should be and finding nothing but fire-damaged cinder blocks. I inwardly grimace at the prospect of reentering a shower that smells of warm egg salad.
He smiles. “No, it’s dark, like eyeliner or something.”
This seems plausible. It’s highly likely I skipped the micellar water step in last night’s skin routine when I was clipping into a rowing machine half in its bag.
I swipe my fingers along my undereyes. He frowns at my cleaning efforts.
“No, you’re missing it. Here.” He takes his thumb and gently dabs along the ridge of my cheekbone.
His face is close enough that I can make out all the tiny muscles tightening around his eyebrows with concentration.
I pick a freckle on his forehead and stare.
“I’m sorry I’m such a disaster today. I don’t normally, um, let loose like I did last night. Even after a shower, I probably still look like I got hit by a truck.”
“No, you’re always beautiful,” he says, his voice low and gentle to match the weight of his thumb on my cheek.
“Okay. Now I know you’re full of shit.” I swallow, feeling each second pass with our faces this close.
“I’m sure Autumn would just love this,” I say, because the way he’s touching me is just so unintentionally a move that not commenting on it almost feels like its own move, and I wouldn’t dare project any sort of romantic intentions onto Ethan.
“You know she’s probably googling you right now. ”
“It’s hard to google a name you don’t know.” He lets go of my face to rinse his hands. I keep my eyes on his forehead, hearing the rusty crack of the faucet handle, the splatter of water, and the high-pitched squeak of metal against metal as he shuts it off.
“Of course. She only knows you as ‘hot van guy.’?”
“Oh yeah?” He winks. As a rule, I hate when men wink, but Ethan objectively carries it off.
“It’s funny,” I start, my voice not sounding as casual as I intend. “Rich always pretended he couldn’t remember your name. Or any critical details about you. He was always like, ‘Your friend Aaron who plays his keyboard at state fairs.’?”
His fingers gently caress the sensitive skin under my eyes. “Dude, these days, I wish I could book the Minnesota State Fair. Could you imagine?”
I could. There was a time when his band headlining stadium tours felt inevitable.
“It was his weird power move, like there were things about me and my life he couldn’t make space in his head for.”
Ethan doesn’t respond. He just smirks.
“What?”
He pauses his work on my undereyes, and his cheeks stretch the tiniest bit farther. “You have, like, three friends, Chuck. The dude knows my name. Rich was threatened by me.”
“Why would he feel threatened by you?” I ask, knowing exactly why I suspect Ethan wasn’t Rich’s favorite topic of conversation.
When Rich and I were dating, every story of the old days had a way of looping its way back to Ethan, but from our honeymoon onward, his ire was definitely rooted in the way I drifted around the Airbnb that weekend like a zombie, checking my phone for apology texts that wouldn’t come.
Still, I’m praying to everything holy that Ethan doesn’t know that part.
He bobs his head, that smile ever expanding. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
I can’t respond. I can only manage to stare at that forehead freckle. He chuckles. It’s a warm, rumbly sound that shakes his chest, his shoulder, all the way to his thumb, so that I feel the tremble of his amusement at my temple.
I shut my eyes, unable to handle how he’s crowding all five of my senses at once.
The feel of his guitar-callused fingers holding my chin while his other hand draws careful circles under my eyes.
The percussive rhythm of his steady breaths.
His smell of sweat and sugar is so overwhelming, I can almost taste the salty sweetness on my tongue.
Each piece could be too much on its own, but combined with the way he’s looking at me, like I’m something delicate? Impossible to withstand.
The bathroom feels much too small all of a sudden, and I can’t take another second of it.
“You know, I think I wore waterproof mascara last night. It’s probably not going to get much better than this.
” I take a step back from Ethan. His hands fall as he searches my face with the kind of penetrating blue-eyed stare that could make a smart woman do stupid things.
He swallows, nods, and searches for a place to put his hands.
“Can I…?” I point to my bag. It’s resting on his shoulder by the strap.
“Of course, here you…” He trails off, extending the bag toward me. I accept it with the hand that’s not securing the towel over my breasts.
“I’ll just…” I raise the bag an inch.
“I’ll be…” He collects my clothes off the floor with the garbage bag like a dog owner bagging a turd but doesn’t leave. My eyes drop to Felix the spider as we just stand there for another few seconds.
“I’m cold,” I announce.
“Sorry, yeah,” he responds, and then he walks out of the bathroom.
Since there’s still no surface on which to set anything, I have to clutch my towel and clumsily swing my bag in front of my hips, one-handedly grabbing at my belongings in search of clothes.
While I’m doing this dance, wishing Ethan were still in here, the single shirt I packed flies straight into the toilet.