Chapter Seven
Laila
“Hang on! I’m coming, I’m coming . . .”
I wasn’t sure what time it was, but the sun wasn’t all the way up, so it was definitely too early for anyone to be pounding on my door like I was the suspect hiding in a crack house on an episode of Law Order.
I thought I had grabbed my bathrobe from the end of my bed, but as I stumbled out of my room and attempted to pull it on, I realized I’d grabbed my pajama pants instead. Hang on. I looked down at my legs—my bare legs, unfortunately—and things started to rush back. Well, okay, there was no rushing. My brain does not rush first thing in the morning. But the details of the night before did begin meandering into place with the slow, steady swagger of an old cowboy of a bygone era, traipsing across the Old West in too-tight chaps and boots with jingling spurs.
I’d gotten too hot in the night. September was one of those weird months in Colorado during which you had to turn on your furnace and your swamp cooler all in the span of one day. Whatever you began the day or the night wearing would rarely be sufficient for the span of time that inhabitants of other climates took for granted. Okay, I’d gotten too hot and taken off my pants and that meant . . . Yep. I had been about five seconds away from opening my door in just a tank top and my underwear. Awesome.
“Be right there!” I yelled, but of course I was just on the other side of the door, so the delay (and the yelling) was starting to seem a bit silly.
I slipped one leg into my pajamas and then hopped on that foot as I attempted to get the other leg in while simultaneously leaning forward to look through the peephole.
Glasses!
I couldn’t see a thing, of course, except for a fuzzy shadow in the predawn orange haze that was beginning to bounce off the mountains and the clouds.
Shoot.I turned and began hurrying back to my bedroom to grab my glasses off my nightstand and called over my shoulder, “Who is it?”
“Lai, it’s me. Open up.”
Cole had seen me every which way. With split pants after jumping on a trampoline, in bathing suits through every stage my body had ever gone through, and in the hospital, high on morphine after a tonsillectomy, attempting to sneak out of my room because I thought Noah Wyle in an episode of ER on my TV was diagnosing me when he said, “I’m afraid we have to amputate.” Typically hearing his voice on the other side of the door would have put a speedy kibosh on all the pretenses surrounding opening the door in a presentable manner. But among the details that had sidled up next to me with a leisurely “Howdy, ma’am” were memories of crying myself to sleep in full makeup. Contacts came out, pajamas went on . . . and that was it for my day-end beauty regimen.
Not that that mattered either. After a cute, single, nice guy roughly my age named Michael Perry moved to Adelaide Springs in 2014 and then dumped me after five months because he needed to “get back to civilization,” Cole took to calling me McStreaky because of the mascara-stained state of my face for a solid week. But that was fine. Being called McStreaky made me laugh. Cole made me laugh.
There hadn’t been many times in my life when Cole had been the one to make me cry. I just couldn’t stand the thought of piling that guilt on him on top of everything else he was dealing with.
“Just a second!” I needed to grab my glasses, make sure I was at least mostly dressed, and now I needed to wash my face too.
Of course none of that was as important, in the mind of my cat Gilbert Grape, as feeding him forthwith. He curled between my ankles, and to avoid stepping on him, I lifted my left foot. But that meant I was left to balance on my right foot, and my right foot was still covered by the hem of my pajamas, since I hadn’t gotten them pulled all the way on yet. My foot gave way against the white-oak laminate wood flooring in my foyer, and my legs went flying. I landed on my back and I heard Cole’s panicked voice respond to the thud by asking if I was okay, but at that moment I was only concerned by two things:
Had I landed on Gilbert Grape?
What was that noise I heard that sounded suspiciously like a key turning in my lock?
I instinctively reacted to both concerns at once, turning over onto my stomach to look for my cat and attempting to bar the door shut with my admittedly-feeble-in-the-best-of-circumstances upper-body strength.
“What in the . . .” Cole peeked around the door after opening it as far as it would go—ultimately not blocked at all by my brute strength and determination but by my head, which got bonked before he realized what was awaiting him inside—and then slid through the opening. “Lai . . . talk to me. Are you okay? Laila?”
“I’m fine,” I muttered into my hair, which was all piled up between my face and the floor. “Is Gilbert Grape okay?”
“What?” he asked as he lowered himself to the narrow space in the hallway foyer beside me.
“Gilbert Grape!” I shouted through another mouthful of hair. “Gilbert Grape!”
Forgive me for not being able to better articulate my thoughts right now, Cole, but you’re the one who made enough sense of my drug-induced paranoia to explain to doctors that I didn’t need a psychiatric evaluation, we just needed to turn on something less threatening than an ER marathon. Connect the dots!
“Yeah, he’s fine. He’s on the cat tower with Cocaine Bear.” He gently brushed the hair away from my face. Or he attempted to, anyway. It was still all over the place. “What happened? I’m afraid to move you. Did you hit your head? Should I call Doc?”
There was no hope for further postponing the inevitable. I rolled over onto my right side and faced him and his adamant “Careful! Careful!” instructions.
“How many times do I have to tell you? I am not naming him Cocaine Bear. I refuse. His name is Shang-Chi.”
A smile—and a whole lot of relief—overtook his face. At least I was pretty sure that was what I was seeing. He was basically still a blur. “What have you gotten yourself into here, kiddo?” He sat down in the extra space I had made by rolling over and crossed his legs. His fingers made further attempts to clear the hair away from my face and check for damages. “Seriously, are you hurt?”
I exhaled. “I have no doubt I’ll be needing some aspirin and a hot bath later, but otherwise I’m fine. I just slipped trying to pull up my—” I groaned and rested my forehead on his knee. “Okay, be honest but kind. How naked am I?”
He chuckled and reached down just below my hip and pulled the elastic from my pajama pants up to my waist. “Not at all, now. Although if you were a man, that flap would be pretty worthless for you back there.”
My hand flew to my bottom to discover my super-comfy junior men’s pajamas from Old Navy were, in fact, on backward. Ah, well. In the grand scheme of things, it really could have been so much worse.
I snorted as the thought went through my head, and then I gave in to an all-out giggling fit. Cole laughed with me, just because it was contagious and all so ridiculous, I guess, and asked what was so funny.
“I actually just thought, ‘Ah, well. Could have been worse.’” The giggles completely overtook me again. “How could this possibly have been worse?”
He kept laughing as he said, “Easy. I mean, in addition to the possibility of blunt-force trauma to your head and a squished cat and all that, you might not have had your contacts in yet. If the Sophia Lorens had gotten broken in this whole kerfuffle, that would have been a tragedy. I know I never would have gotten over it.”
I had horrible eyesight, but I was fortunate enough to have had roughly the same horrible eyesight since middle school. I’d gotten contacts freshman year, and for nearly twenty-five years, I’d had the same oversize, pink plastic Sophia Loren glasses that no one apart from Cole and people related to me by blood had seen me in since. I’d insisted for years that they were bound to be back in style again someday, as all fashion trends were, but once again our improved internet capabilities and a lot of Netflix bingeing had completely changed my life. When Barb from season one of Stranger Things sported the exact same glasses, the legend of the Sophia Lorens grew in both stature and adoration. At least as far as Cole was concerned.
“Fear not. The Sophia Lorens are safely stored on my bedside table, which was part of the problem to begin with.”
“Oh, I see. So you can’t see me at all right now, can you?”
I squinted and leaned forward, and he mirrored me until our noses were two inches from each other and his good-natured ribbing finally came into focus. I began pushing myself up with one hand and pushed his face away with the other. He laughed softly and stood to help me to my feet.
Ouch.My hand went to my behind. Nope, that wasn’t going to feel better as the day went on, that was for sure.
Cole put his hand on my lower back, and I winced slightly, causing him to move his hand to my elbow.
“I should call Doc so he can check you out. Just to be safe.”
I shook my head and stretched my arms over my head, leaning to one side and then the other. “I’m fine. Really.”
“But you might have cracked a rib or something.”
“I didn’t.”
With his shoes on, he was easily nine or ten inches taller than I was barefoot, and he used his height advantage to examine my head again. “And you’re sure you didn’t hit your head? Concussions can be sneaky buggers.”
I chose to ignore “sneaky buggers,” though it really cried out for some teasing, and instead decided to change the subject entirely. “What are you doing here, anyway? I was sort of sleeping, you know.”
His eyes grew wide. “This was my fault. Oh, gosh, Lai . . . I knew it was early, but I didn’t even think about you still being asleep. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“It’s not.” He guided me into the living room and helped me onto the couch. “As much as I hate to ask: Is it safe to assume the return of McStreaky is my fault too?”
Oh. That. In all the kerfuffle, as he’d called it, I’d rather pleasantly stopped thinking about all of that. Well, for better or worse, I had a moment to think about it now. A quick one. The words, “Hold that thought,” spilled out, and then he vanished from my very nondescript view.
What to say when he got back . . . I shook my head for my own benefit as the thoughts and emotions crystallized in my head. There was no choice, really. I didn’t want to inflict guilt on him—and I would do what I could to avoid that being the outcome, though I knew him well enough to know he was already inflicting it upon himself—but I couldn’t very well be upset with him for cutting me out and not communicating and then turn around and do the same to him.
“Here you go, Sophia.” The huge glasses appeared in front of my face.
“Thank you.” For adding the benefit of sight to this disastrous morning and still calling me Sophia rather than Barb. I’m eternally grateful.
“No problem. Anything else I can get you? Want me to make some coffee? Or I can bring you a bag of frozen peas or something for your back.”
I patted the couch next to me. “Just sit.”
He did as I instructed, most of a seat cushion away, but turned so that he was facing me and his propped-up knee was nearly touching mine. “I really am sorry, Lai.”
“And I really am fine. Admittedly, my thirty-eight-year-old body is already telling me this isn’t like when we were kids and we’d take turns rolling down the ski slopes and not have so much as stiff muscles getting out of bed the next morning, but I’m not hurt. Really.”
“Well, just give it another week or so until you’re thirty-nine like the rest of us. Trust me—it sucks.”
I laughed. “And just think about poor Seb. In his forties. I mean, I know we didn’t grow up with him, but doesn’t it make you feel ancient just knowing that someone we did grow up with is married to someone in their forties? It drives home the sad truth that it’s just around the corner for all of us.”
Cole’s laughter dissipated into the air, but the smile remained as he watched me giggle, and then that became more subdued as well. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I shrugged. “And you’ll never have to figure it out. But—”
“But I really hurt your feelings last night. Didn’t I?”
I smiled gently to soften the blow. “Yeah.”
“You know that would never be my intent. But I . . . I’m sorry, and I know it’s not our typical way, but I really did just need to be alone.”
“I get that.” I nodded and slipped a couple of fingers from each hand up under my lenses to rub my eyes. Note to self: Don’t even look in a mirror until you get out of the shower. What you see will not help anyone. “And I’m sorry that maybe I wasn’t the most sensitive to that. But it wasn’t you wanting to be alone that bothered me so much as the ‘read the room like everyone else.’” I reached over and gently punched his knee. “I’m not everyone else, Cole. And that was the first time in a very long time that you made me feel like I was.”
He grabbed my hand just as I began pulling it away from his knee and raised his eyes to look at me sheepishly. “Forgive me?”
“Well, that depends. What are you making for breakfast?”
He’d never questioned whether or not he’d attain my forgiveness, of course. And I would never want him to. All the same, relief flooded his features as he leaned in and kissed my cheek, then hopped up and walked across the room toward my kitchen—stopping to give Gilbert Grape and Shang-Chi a little chin-rub love.
“Whatever you want, as long as you’ve got the ingredients in your fridge.”
I heard the water running in my kitchen sink as he washed his hands, so I followed in after him before speaking so he could hear me. “I thought we were meeting Brynn and Seb at Cassidy’s.”
He shook the water off his hands and grabbed my self-made hippopotamus hand towel from the knob on the cabinet door. “Change of plans. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, actually.” He rested his hip against the counter and faced me.
“Oh, really?” I crossed my arms in mock frustration. “Yeah, makes total sense that you’d wake a girl up to tell her she’s not getting the brunch food she was promised. Rob her of her sleep and her little sausages-wrapped-in-croissant pigs-in-a-blanket things. You always have had a way with the ladies.”
He groaned and opened up the refrigerator, looked around inside it, and then groaned again. “I’m pretty sure I can still pull something together, but yeah . . . sorry. You’re not getting anything quite as ostentatious as pigs-in-a-blanket, unless the pigs come in deli-ham form and the blankets are . . .” He stood up and looked around my kitchen. “I don’t know . . . ground-up Cheez-Its? Oh, hang on! You have eggs?”
“Yeah, Magda’s. I already hard-boiled them.”
He closed the carton and stuck it back on the shelf. “When was the last time you bought any groceries?”
I shrugged. “Not sure if you’ve heard, but my best friend’s a chef. I live on leftovers.”
He closed the fridge and opened the cabinet above the stove, going straight to the unopened box of pancake mix he’d bought me months ago in an attempt to convince me I, too, could mix floury stuff and water, drop it in a pan, and have my favorite breakfast food in front of me, ready to eat, just moments later.
As for the success of his lesson, I repeat: the box was unopened.
“Do you have chocolate chips?”
My eyes widened. “Always!” I pulled a chair from my two-seat kitchen table and placed it beside him. Then, using his shoulder for a boost, I climbed up and grabbed the airtight glass cylinder from the cabinet above the fridge. That was where I kept my favorite guilty pleasure foods. The brilliant thought behind that, of course, was that if I had to go to a little extra effort to access them, I wouldn’t go through them as quickly.
“Okay,” Cole said as I handed him the half-empty container. “And how old are these?”
“New bag. Just opened yesterday.”
He grimaced, and at first I thought he was being judgy about how many semisweet morsels I had eaten in a day, but then I realized he was grimacing in response to whatever expression was on my face. Probably a grimace, come to think of it.
Oh. Yeah. That hurt.Getting up on the chair hadn’t been too bad, but as soon as I began stepping down, my lower back began throbbing.
“Here, let me help you.” He put his hands at my waist to lift me down, but I put my hand on his head to stop him.
“Not yet. Hang on.” I took a couple slow, deep breaths until the throbbing lost its intensity. “Just let me stand here a sec. I’ll be fine.”
From the time we were all kids, Cole had been our protector. He was the one who insisted on walking the girls to our doors, even though the only real possible threat was the occasional bear or mountain lion—which, let’s face it, wasn’t going to honor Cole’s chivalry and recognize that the girls should be eaten last. Still, he insisted. Every single time. He’d made more pots of chicken noodle soup in his lifetime than half the grandmas in America combined, and he’d gotten into more than a couple fights in his time standing up for someone he loved. So I knew that what he perceived as my stubbornness in refusing to let him take care of me was killing him. And if I hadn’t known that just because I knew Cole, his wrinkled brow and eyes that hadn’t blinked since the grimace overtook his face may have given it away.
“Maybe some ice or something would be good,” I relented.
He snapped into action and carefully slid the chair, with me still standing on it, a couple inches to the side so he could open the freezer. His exasperated sigh quickly reminded me what he would find in there.
Just ice cream.
“How do you not have even one single bag of frozen vegetables? And even if you live off the spoils of someone else’s hard work, don’t you ever want ice in your water? This is not an acceptable way for a grown adult to live, Laila.”
I dissolved into giggles. He was genuinely so disappointed in this side of me, and though it wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision, the never-ending amusement I found in his disappointment filled me with enough joy that on some level I probably did do it on purpose.
“Yeah . . . this is hilarious,” he muttered. Then, before I knew what was happening, he had wrapped his arms around my knees and carried me back over to the refrigerator, lifting me a few inches higher until my bottom was even with the open freezer. “Sit.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Sit,” he repeated, and I did as I was instructed, though I didn’t at all understand why I was doing it. But then, in an instant, the frigid air washed over me, and the thick blocks of way-past-due-for-defrosting ice caused my sore muscles to relax. Or maybe I just went numb. Either way, it was magical.
Cole helped me slide a little farther back into the freezer, until my folded arms were hunched over my knees, and then he stepped back a bit. His chest pressed against my dangling legs to stabilize me, and his eyes were even with mine. “How’s that feel?”
I relaxed my neck and lowered my forehead onto his shoulder. “‘You’re a wizard, Harry.’”
“And you’re a dork, Laila.” His shoulders fell as tension released from them, a direct result of finally being permitted to help me, I knew.
“I bet you feel silly now.” I stopped worrying about holding myself in position and rested my weight against him.
“I’m not the one with my rear end stuck in a freezer, but I’ll bite. Why should I feel silly?”
“For making fun of me for having my pants on backward. I tell ya, if the pharmaceutical companies ever get wind of how genius this is and the sort of money they could be making, men’s pajama pants will no longer be available over the counter.”