Chapter 23 Guest Cigarettes
Guest Cigarettes
Two minutes had passed since Elliot’s truck left the driveway. She knew because she was watching the second hand tick all the way around the clock. It was all she could bring herself to do, let time pass and simply exist. Existing seemed a challenging-enough task at the moment.
She didn’t hear Bree walk in, but arms wrapped around her from behind. A round belly pressed against her back.
Three minutes.
The clock blurred.
Bree led Lainey back to her car. Lainey hadn’t had the chance to explain that she’d evicted Elliot from her home, but she didn’t want to be physically alone anyway.
“I can’t even divorce him.” It was the first thing she’d said out loud since Elliot left. “Not only would I lose my insurance, but he could take everything.”
“He won’t,” Bree interjected. “Elliot’s not capable of something like that.”
Days ago, she would’ve sworn on her life that Elliot Hodges was incapable of deceit. That he couldn’t have stood in front of her dining table, confessing in one breath and declaring his love in the other. But she was beginning to realize she didn’t know him at all.
“I don’t know what he’s capable of anymore,” she argued, her voice empty.
She also realized that they were pulling into Bauer’s for gas.
Her stomach rattled, suddenly desperate for a box of day-old donuts.
And inside the gas station, between the lobster tank and the dairy case, was Tobin Collier.
Her stomach plummeted, and faster than you can say Mamma Mia!
Here We Go Again, her maybe-father—a virtual stranger—spotted her.
“Nee-Nee,” he said softly, like she was a bubble he was worried would pop.
“Don’t call me that,” she muttered.
“I’m sorry. Lainey. Of course.” He closed his eyes like he was sifting through boxes in his brain in search of the one that contained what he wanted to say next. “Since you came into my bar, I’ve been thinking a lot about you. How it—”
“Can you move?” she asked, cutting him off. This was not the time for whatever reconciliation this man was looking to have. She suspected there would never be a time for it, but if there was, it certainly wasn’t now. “You’re blocking the glazed ones.”
He sidestepped out of her way, revealing a stack of grease-soaked boxes.
“Are you busy? Can I take you out for a beer?”
She scowled, grabbing a box. “It’s eleven. And no, I don’t drink.”
“Is that a ‘lifestyle thing’ or—”
“It’s a health thing, and you don’t get to do this, you know.
You don’t get to dig up ancient history now that I’m an adult who’s conveniently standing in front of you, trying to buy a box of donuts in peace.
I don’t know you. I don’t remember you, because years ago you decided I wasn’t worth the trouble.
And I get that you were young, and I get that Camille was…
Camille, but you made a choice, and now you have to live with the consequences of that, because I already have. Whether I wanted to or not.”
His mouth didn’t move. It stayed frozen mid–vowel sound, like a beached lake trout. She shoved the box into his chest before walking out the door empty-handed.
“Are you okay?” Bree asked, her tone teetering between wary and concerned. “What happened in there? Who was that guy?”
“Literally no one. Can we just go to your house? I don’t want to see any more people today.” Lainey climbed into Bree’s car and slammed the door shut.
“Yeah. Of course.” Bree pushed the button to start the ignition, and the car quietly rumbled to life. They were silent for a while until Bree cleared her throat to say, “I should probably tell you that, at present, ‘my home’ is the spare bedroom in your grandmother’s condo.”
“At the retirement community?” Lainey asked. Bree’s profile gave up nothing. She checked her blind spot and turned onto the highway as though she hadn’t just said the second-craziest thing Lainey’d heard today. “Bree?”
“Colin and I are no longer”—she moved her hand over the steering wheel as if attempting to conjure words from the air—“a romantic pairing. We’re working on establishing our boundaries as we transition into a platonic partnership and prepare to become co-parents—which is very healthy of us—but we’re no longer seeking a… traditional marriage.”
Lainey shook her head. “What do you mean?”
Bree stepped on the gas and cut over in front of a tractor. “Oh my god. We broke up. Are you happy?”
“What?” Lainey understood everything, and then promptly nothing again. “What happened? What did he do? Do we have to kill him?”
Bree let out a short burst of laughter, her eyes going wide, like the joy had taken her by surprise.
“No. Nothing happened. We weren’t right from the start.
We were this vacation fling that was never going to last in the real world.
When I found out I was pregnant, he said he wanted to be in the baby’s life, but we lived in different countries so…
” She tilted her head side to side, like you know the rest. “The other night I asked him if he thought we’d still be together if we weren’t having a baby—like, I didn’t even ask if we’d be married, just if we’d still be making a go of it. ”
Lainey had that stomach-twisting feeling of staring at a slow-motion car wreck. “What did he say?”
Bree took a deep breath, as though preparing for battle. “He said he wasn’t sure ‘we’d even be in touch.’ ”
“Wow.” Lainey couldn’t imagine letting loose that kind of brutal honesty on anyone, particularly a pregnant woman who’d recently reported crying over a discontinued shade of undereye concealer. “That’s a strong statement!”
“Very. Then he tried to make it better—”
Lainey sucked in a breath. “Oh boy.”
“—by telling me it was only because he was still seeing other people up until I got pregnant since he hadn’t realized we were ‘closed off.’ ”
“Is he a contestant on Love Island?”
“Apparently! But he’s not the only problem—it’s me, too.
Everything he does annoys me. Like, everything.
The way he puts on this bad posh accent with my parents that sounds like Michael Caine in Batman, but every time we fight he sounds like Michael Caine in real life.
How he makes me watch endless YouTube videos on his smudged phone screen.
And you know that his eyes do a full-body once-over of every woman he meets.
The time he did it to you, I dreamed of him cheating on me with Gritty, and the image was so alarming, my subconscious forced me to keep you two apart. ”
Lainey couldn’t help but feel a little offended by the Gritty comparison, even though she knew that wasn’t the point.
“I hear myself snapping at him all day long over the most ordinary things, but I can’t stop myself.
So last night I was soaking my massive feet in a bowl of salt—as one does—reflecting on how my best friend is falling madly in love for the first time, and it was suddenly so apparent to me that Colin and I will never have that. ”
Hearing her relationship observed that way from the outside, as something existing between love and madness, was both validating and heartbreaking.
It was nice to have proof that what had happened to her was real.
That it hadn’t all been in her head. She knew some of it had been a lie.
But part of it was love, and Bree had seen it, too. It helped as much as it hurt.
Bree turned off the highway onto a narrow road surrounded by tall grass.
“So then I told him that I didn’t think we made sense together.
Romantically. And I couldn’t call you because the idea of staying with a happy couple made me want to cry.
And I obviously couldn’t tell my parents because they have been foaming at the mouth to say ‘I told you so’ since I got pregnant.
And the resort is booked up, so yes, I moved into your grandmother’s guest room. ”
She pulled into a space in the familiar parking lot and cut the engine.
“I’m so sorry, Bree.” Lainey reached over the console and pulled her friend into a tight hug.
“And I’m really sorry you didn’t feel like you could come to me about it.
But, in case you missed it, my relationship happens to rest atop a bed of lies, so, you know, silver lining: I have a spare bedroom now.
Well, until he divorces me and leaves me with nothing. ”
“Oh, I’m way ahead of you. We’re spending tonight here so I can pack and then tomorrow morning I’m moving in.”
Lainey raised an eyebrow at that. “You weren’t even planning to ask?”
Bree shrugged. “Do you have other plans? We’re both on Crappy Relationship Island now.”
“Ah, the little-known follow-up to Love Island.” Lainey stepped out of the shiny black car and shut the door behind her.
Bree followed with an unsteady wobble and beeped the locks. “It doesn’t get nearly the love it deserves on social media.”
“So are you getting a divorce?” Lainey asked, a bit more casually than the question probably called for, but how did one ask about the dissolution of a marriage while cutting through a shuffleboard court?
“Can’t,” Bree responded. “He’s here on a spousal visa.
” Words prickled on Lainey’s tongue, but she kept her lips pinched all the way shut.
“There’s a way to switch it to a work visa eventually, but he also works for me, so that doesn’t necessarily uncomplicate things…
” Bree trailed off, catching wind of whatever energy was vibrating off her friend’s body.
Lainey gathered up every ounce of her restraint, and yet…
Bree groaned. “Just say it.”
“How are you just as stupid as me?” she burst, then promptly clapped her hand over her mouth.
“No, I’m not.” Bree’s ankle shook on an unstable paver as they made their way to Gran’s door. “My situation is completely different.”
“This has never happened to us before.”
Bree wagged her finger. “It still hasn’t.”
“Are you married for reasons that once sounded perfectly logical and are now absolutely breaking your heart?”
“Yes,” she whimpered pitifully.