Chapter 11
Eleven
ELI
The flat smelled like paprika when I walked in just before seven. It had been so long since I had smelled cooking that wasn’t my own, and even longer since I returned home to find someone else making food for me.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and closed the door just a little too loudly to make sure that Adrienne knew she was no longer alone.
“Hello?” a voice called out, half wary, half welcoming.
Despite talking to her for the past few weeks, I had forgotten that I hadn’t actually heard Adrienne’s voice for years.
It sounded almost exactly the same as it used to. But deeper. Huskier. Richer. Overall, to be honest, it sounded sexier.
“Yeah, it’s Eli,” I called back. I heard muttered curses ring through the kitchen as I stepped into it.
Adrienne’s back was to me. She still wore her hair in black braids that were currently piled messily on top of her head, revealing a sprawl of black ink on the back of her light-brown neck that I couldn’t quite identify from this far away.
She still held her spine almost impossibly straight, never one to shy away from her height, which was kissing six feet when we were sixteen. She was taller now, but not by much.
‘You okay?” I asked. I saw the slow rise and fall of her shoulders, heard a muttered sentence that sounded a bit like ‘does she fucking hate me?’ before she turned around, and my breath caught in my throat.
I remembered a lot about Adrienne, but I had completely forgotten just how stunning her eyes were.
They were a shade of green that I was sure hadn’t been invented.
When we were younger, I had never been able to make eye contact for too long, or I would start to feel like I was drowning in them.
I wanted to study them extensively so I could figure out what it was exactly that made them look like they carried every shade of green that we knew of, but if I did that, she would have dragged me through the mud and fifteen-year-old me didn’t need to give her the ammunition for that.
In certain lights, they looked like emeralds. At different angles, they turned to moss. Sometimes, they were bottle green or the colour of leaves at the peak of spring. On one occasion, they looked like the darkest depths of a dense forest.
Right now, they were two perfect emeralds, framed by thick black square frames, staring daggers at me.
It was like being fifteen all over again.
She still hated me.
And I still had the world’s biggest crush on her. I’d been ignoring that fact while there had been an ocean between us, but now that we were in the same space, I had no choice but to at least acknowledge it to myself.
She threw the tea towel draped over her shoulder onto the counter behind her. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“What?”
She threw her hands up. “You’re you!”
“Yes?”
I wasn’t quite sure where the confusion came from. We had been talking for weeks. Vivi had told her who she was living with.
“You go by Eli Jenkins now?”
Oh, right. If she was only told my name, a name I didn’t have when I knew her, then I could see where her confusion was coming from.
Although she had always called me Eli. The way her mouth formed the word felt familiar. Almost comforting.
Maybe there was still hope that she didn’t hate me like she used to.
“Uh, yeah. Have done for about eight years now,” I replied. She didn’t need to know why I changed my name. If I told her that, then she would ask more questions, and I was in no mood to delve into the fucked-up world that was my family.
Not tonight, at least.
“I thought you hated it when people called you Eli?” she probed.
I don’t know why I was surprised. She always asked questions when she didn’t understand something, and I had been really adamant about Eli not being my name.
Not that she listened. And I had taken great enjoyment from how annoyed she got when she realised that I had stopped correcting her, because after a while, I started to like it when it came from her.
I shrugged. “People change. They grow. Or they realise that they don’t hate the shortened version of their name as much as they thought.”
“Didn’t you say it didn’t fit in with being a guy in finance?”
Christ, how did she remember that? Did she have a little ‘Elijah’ file in her head where she filed away all the things I had ever told her, just in case she needed to throw them in my face?
Actually, yeah, she probably had one for everybody she had ever met because Adrienne Henry didn’t forget a damn thing.
“As I am sure you know by now, Adrienne, I am not a guy in finance.” I never had been.
“Yeah, why is that? If you’ve been doing this chef thing for close to a decade, it sounds like you never even entered the finance arena.”
So maybe we were going to do this now. Joke was on me for forgetting to prepare myself for a mini-interrogation from this woman. Even if she had known it was me, there were still a lot of unanswered questions. She always needed all the information as soon as possible.
“I didn’t enter the arena. I tapped out of uni in my first year to go to culinary school and told Dad that I did not want to be his successor.
He didn’t take too kindly to me ‘throwing away all his hard work’.
So, he disowned me and moved on to making sure my sister was primed and ready to inherit the ‘empire’.
I have no idea what is going on with them anymore.
Dad stopped talking to me years ago, and Katie slowly went down the same route.
I only really talked to my mum, but when she died, so did any kind of connection I had with my family. ”
The pause after I finished speaking was weighted.
“Oh, shit. That’s heavy. I’m sorry about your mum.
And the rest of it. Sorry, I shouldn’t have pried.
It was none of my business.” She did sound genuinely sorry, and in a new turn of events, she looked sheepish.
I had never seen Adrienne look anything other than self-assured.
There had always been an air of arrogance to her.
Although she could always back it up, so maybe arrogance wasn’t the right word. It was confidence.
“It’s fine. How were you to know that my decision was rooted in such trauma?
” It was probably better that we got that out in the open early, knowing she wouldn’t actively ask about my family again.
She had all the information she needed now.
She would be satisfied on that front. “Sorry I am me,” I added.
Her eyes lost their dagger-like quality, and she turned from me to check the food in the oven.
“You don’t have to apologise for that. It was just a surprise. Really, it’s my sister I’m mad at. She could have at least given me an inkling of a heads-up. There is no way my mum could have known, but Clo knows who you are.”
“I only saw her for the first time today. It’s not like she’s been befriending me behind your back and just waiting for you to make your discovery, Adrienne.”
She sighed as she removed a roasting tin and put it on the counter. The sound of chicken sizzling filled the room, the smell of paprika becoming more prominent.
“Be that as it may, she is still getting a piece of my mind. And it’s Addie,” she said softly.
I cocked my head.
“You can call me Addie. I only said that you couldn’t all those years ago because I was kind of a dick.
I probably still am one, actually, but not in that way anymore.
I don’t think. Maybe I am. Not letting that Eli thing go just then was kind of dickish.
Anyway, the point is, you can call me Addie. ”
I’d forgotten that she had banned me from calling her Addie despite everyone else calling her that. Teenaged Adrienne was a very petty person. In hindsight, it was funny.
I nodded. Unlike her, calling her by a different version of her name would take some getting used to for me.
“What have you made?” I asked, keen to move away from thinking about my estranged family and dead mother. That was too heavy for what was supposed to be quite a pleasant day.
“Oh, chicken, obviously. The potatoes just need a couple more minutes. I faffed around with them for way longer than was strictly necessary. Shopping tired me out, and I figured the best way to keep myself going until a respectable bedtime was to make this dish as complicated as possible. I’m rambling, aren’t I?
I do that. When I’m tired or stressed or—” She trailed off.
I chuckled. I got the impression that she was prone to rambling via her texts. Adrienne was not afraid to send multiple messages in quick succession.
“You’re fine. It’s nice, actually. To have someone to talk to when I get home from work.”
How deeply pathetic of me to play that hand so early. I probably sounded so needy. Something flickered in her eyes before she blinked, and they went back to normal. For a moment, she almost looked sad.
“And how was that? Work that is?” she asked, sounding genuinely interested as she picked a piece of chorizo out of the roasting tin and dropped it into her mouth, not seeming to care that it was oven-hot.
And for the first time in a long time, I told someone about my day.