Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Adam’s weekend job rotation begins the next day, and I’m happy to put some distance between us. I lay awake for hours on the sofa last night, staring at the marijuana-leaf ceiling with the last remnants of our candy binge pumping through my veins, my brain.
Or maybe that was our kiss.
Our fake kiss. Since we’re fake in love.
Ugh. This is why I don’t eat sugar.
It’s a bad day for more than one reason. Lovie woke up angry, and even giving her a mood stabilizer didn’t help the way it should. She hit me hard enough on the shoulder that it’s still tender, already bruising. And it really pissed me off.
Frustration simmers beneath my skin, at a lot of different things. At my grandmother’s disease, how it makes her feel like all she can do to stand up for herself is lash out with whatever weapons are at her disposal. At my grandmother herself, for not giving us more time together. And maybe at Adam, who can be so hot one second, when he’s teasing me in the glow of my laptop screen and leaving me all the chocolate candy, and cold the next. He didn’t say good-night last night, the way he’d started to.
But that was before he kissed me.
Lovie is napping, and I have half a mind to lock the bedroom door, just to put some extra space between us.
This house used to be my safe place. It was home .
At one point, though, it started feeling more like a vacation: somewhere I came when city life was too overwhelming, too loud. I’d return to my childhood bedroom, to the grandparents who raised me, and be able to breathe again.
Now I’m suffocating.
I don’t lock Lovie in her room (because yes, it’s still elder abuse even if you’re related), but I do confirm she hasn’t crawled through a window to escape me. I settle onto the couch with my laptop instead, intent on distracting myself by bingeing my favorite guilty pleasure— Jersey Shore.
Snooki and JWoww are constructing the infamous Ron is cheating on you note to Sammi when a text pops up in the corner of my screen.
Liss Kessinger: We miss you!!! Call me when you can. Give Lovie kisses.
I shoot her a response:
Lovie’s more “punch first, kiss second” these days. Calling now!!!
When she picks up, I jump the gun to avoid her prying questions about Lovie. “Did you miss me?”
Liss laughs, and my heart reinflates. It’s been too long since I’ve heard that sound. “More than a kidney. And you know how much I pee already.”
Hearing her voice is nice, but it only scratches the surface. A sharp tug of nostalgia and, surprisingly, homesickness, lances through my middle. I need to see her. “I’m switching to FaceTime. Get decent.”
She squeals, because she hates unplanned video calls more than I hate driving.
The call connects and her pixelated face beams back at me. Her frizzy blonde hair is tucked in a high, messy bun, her blue eyes a watered-down version of the ones that looked so regretful after kissing me last night. Whereas Adam’s are a deep, middle-of-the-ocean blue, hers are the water as it meets the shore.
Those exact eyes narrow on-screen. “Why do you look like that?”
“I missed you. And I think you have some flour freckles on your nose. It’s a good—”
“No,” she cuts in. “That’s not it. You look … you look like you did something bad.”
This is definitely Soul Sister Shit.
It’s a blessing and a curse to have someone know you so completely. I’m not sure I believe in soul mates, but if I did, I think mine would be Liss. No one has ever known me as inside out as she does, known what I need before I realize it myself.
It’d just be nice if I could sleep with her.
Wait, no.
That sounded wrong.
I very firmly like penis.
It would just be nice to have the whole package. Someone who can knock my socks off in bed and also knows how I like them folded.
“Let me see,” a familiar voice says off-screen. Liss moves so Dakota is in frame. “Yeah,” he muses. “I see it too.”
I squint at myself in the preview window. What, exactly, does it look like when you’ve done something bad?
“Elle …” She draws my name out to last three entire beats. “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” I say, too fast for her slow inquiry.
Her eyes narrow further, baby blue hardly visible, before blowing wide open. “You slept with someone!”
I said before how great it is to have someone know you inside out. I’ll be retracting that statement now.
“I—what— no I didn’t !” But despite it sort of, technically, being the truth, it’s too insistent to be believable.
She gasps. “Was it that guy from high school? The mechanic. What was his name? James? Jack?”
“John,” I mumble. “And if you must know, Alissa .” I level her with a death stare I hope she feels the heat of through the screen. “No. It was Adam.”
Liss’s mouth quirks, a mannerism she picked up sometime in the college years we spent apart. She was baiting me, and I fell for it. “You’ve been gone a month.”
“Which is why,” I stress, “I’m not allowed to leave without you ever again. Clearly, I can’t be trusted.”
Dakota’s head pops back into frame. “Adam is the nurse, right?” His blond hair also, somehow, has flour in it. How they get any work done is beyond me.
“The hot nurse,” Liss corrects. “Who Elle is pretending to be in love with around Lovie.”
“Why?” Dakota asks.
His question wraps a vise around my lungs. “Lovie’s gotten … she’s mean now. I have bruises, plural.” I still haven’t mentioned them to Adam. There would be no point. “She’s called me fat multiple times, says I talk too much, doesn’t want to spend any time with me. She … doesn’t remember me.”
Saying everything out loud is almost too much. It gives it more power than it deserves. That must be what pulls tears to the brim of my eyes, and gravity must be what pulls one down my cheek. A month here and I’m turning into someone who has emotions .
Gross.
“Oh, Elle.” Liss frowns. “I’m so sorry.”
I sniffle hard enough that if I hadn’t already wiped it away, the tear would have been sucked back into my eye. “She needs to be in a full-time facility.” I fill them in on the details of the past few weeks with Adam, our stilted dance in the kitchen, morning smoothies and Jeopardy! cuddle sessions. Last night with Hocus Pocus . The call I had this morning with the insurance company about some additional required documentation. “Until then, we’re stuck in this impossible situation. She pops up unannounced all the time, so we have to stay on .”
Liss’s blonde eyebrows pinch together. “Wait. He’s staying in Lovie’s house too?”
“Scrubs in the dresser and toothbrush on the sink.” I was pleased to discover Adam’s toothbrush is in good shape, like he replaces it every three months exactly. I’m not even that diligent. “Lovie doesn’t do well when he’s not here. It was a whole thing.”
“Isn’t there only the one bed?”
She knows there is. When Liss and I were younger, we’d share that one bed for sleepovers. But it’s a lot different for two preteen girls to share a double mattress than it is to share anything with the behemoth that is Adam Wheeler.
“We’ve been sharing.”
Unfortunately, Liss doesn’t know Adam’s girth, so I recognize the second the words are out she’s going to read them wrong.
Back up a second. Girth? I meant size. Stature. Build. But I’m sure Adam is proportional everywhere. His shoes are size fourteen —not that I checked.
“You slept with him?” they say together, pulling my thoughts back on course.
“Fuck. No. I misspoke.” Well, except for the one time, but they don’t need to know that.
“Since when does Elle Monroe misspeak?” That’s Dakota, and nope, I didn’t miss him one single bit.
Liss whispers, “She doesn’t,” and the two of them snicker at my expense. “Nurse Adam must be hot if you kissed him.”
I pull my knee up and drop my chin to it. “Not my idea. Lovie thinks Adam and I are her and Grandpa Bobby. She thinks we’re …” The words are lodged so deep in my throat I have to clear it three times to shake them loose. “In love or something.”
“And?” she says.
“And what?”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
Liss groans. “Elle.”
“Of course I’m not in love with him. I hardly know him. I don’t know him.” And it’s the truth. But so is this: “It’s just maybe, possibly, slightly terrifying how he’s already so familiar.”
Dakota voices his dissent. “Familiarity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Especially if you’ll be living with this guy for the foreseeable future.”
He doesn’t understand.
“You don’t understand,” Liss echoes, shooting him a glare. She may have learned to smirk in college, from that elusive boyfriend I never met and who I’m forbidden to bring up, but she got that look from me.
“Can we go back to the bed-sharing thing?” she prompts. “Are you sleeping in shifts? Switching off nights? He gets one half and you get the other? And is the split vertical or horizontal? If you could mark up a photo, I’d—”
“Can we go back to Lovie?” I say, desperate not to talk about Adam or our sleeping arrangements anymore.
“Okay.” She nods. “Are you holding up okay? Mentally?”
I shrug, picking at a loose thread unspooling one of the couch flowers. “It’s getting better, and the podcasts are helping.” I’ve still been posting weekly episodes of Elle on the L , pulling from my backlog and unaired archives, and putting my thoughts to paper about Lovie is therapeutic. I give an exaggerated pout. “But my best friends are all the way in Chicago.”
Liss throws a smile so sweet it gives me a toothache. “Well, even if we’re here, you can always call me—”
“Or me,” Dakota chimes.
“And I know it’s not the same, but you have millions of adoring fans who will support you no matter what you go through.”
Dakota mumbles something I don’t catch. Liss fills me in. “Hey, we need to run a delivery uptown. But call me if you need me, okay? Hoes before wedding cake.”
I want to reach through the phone and pull her back with me for a hug. “I love you.”
She accidentally hangs up in the middle of returning the words, and when the call ends, I’m lonelier than before.