Chapter 6 Elijah
ELIJAH
The girl stretched out on my mom’s couch was all legs.
It was Valentine’s Day, cold as balls outside, but she was in shorts, and was somehow tan. Her hip curved like a figure eight as she rolled in my direction, and heavy bangs obscured her eyes momentarily, so all the focus was on her mouth.
Fuck me. That mouth. For a handful of seconds, I could only picture the things I wanted to do to it, before I asked myself who the hell she was.
These fantasies were followed by twenty-four hours of self-flagellation. Because the girl turned out to be Easton.
I hadn’t seen her since I’d left for grad school the summer before—we’d spent winter break on a cruise with our grandmother—and during those six months, something had changed dramatically.
Easton no longer seemed like a kid. She’d always been pretty, pretty enough to earn her attention she was way too young for, but now she was something else entirely—the kind of woman who could look up at you from beneath long lashes and thick bangs and purse her bee-stung lips, the way she was at that precise moment, and leave you struggling to form words.
“Why are you here?” she asked, as if I’d walked into her home, and suddenly she was Easton again, the one I knew.
And Jesus, the things I’d just pictured...I winced. “Why are you here? In my home?”
“Because this is the worst holiday,” she said. “So I’m hanging out with your mom.”
I let my bag slide to the floor. “What’s your beef with Valentine’s Day?”
She raised a conversation heart from the bowl on the coffee table. “These things, for starters. They’re terrible and yet they’re addictive, and every single time I bite into one I worry that I’m going to crack a tooth. Also I’ve given up on men.”
“Well, yes, making Valentine’s plans with a forty-five-year-old woman kind of clued me in, but why?”
“Because my boyfriend and I broke up and he keeps coming by my house, begging me to change my mind, which is such a ridiculous tactic.”
I took the seat across from her. I wished she’d change position—into one that didn’t display those curves the way they were currently displayed—but at least she was being very Easton to remind me who she was.
“Why is it ridiculous?”
She pinched another conversation heart between her fingers and studied it.
“You never get anywhere by letting someone know how you feel. Relationships are about status, about securing the most high-quality match with whom to pass on your genetic material. His desperation alone proves that he was not a high-quality match.”
I laughed. There it was. Easton and her facts, Easton and her science.
I could ignore the curves and the thoughts about her mouth when she was being the version of her I remembered.
Funny and strange and charming and awkward all in the same breath.
“Aren’t you a little young to be worried about passing on your genetic material? ”
She rolled on her back and stared at the ceiling.
The change of position didn’t help as much as I’d hoped.
“From an evolutionary perspective, I’m precisely the right age and you’re nearly too old.
And what I’m saying is that the search is hard-wired, so we act on it whether we’re planning to reproduce or not. ”
My mouth opened to argue that there was no way that was true—that I was only twenty-two and had plenty of time. But that was what she wanted. She wanted me to get into a fight with her about biological clocks and evolution and forget that she still hadn’t truly explained why she was here.
“So, why’d you dump him in the first place? If you reference evolution or genetic material, I’m definitely on his side.”
She examined her nails. “I realized I was bored, kind of out of nowhere, and the next time I saw him, I was even more bored, and then I started to actually resent him for boring me. And that’s not really a fair way to feel about somebody who likes you and has done nothing wrong, so I broke up with him, but I didn’t expect him to turn into such a fucking whiny baby about being dumped.
He’s actually interesting now, but in a bad way. ”
I laughed. That poor fucking heartbroken kid—I could totally see it from his point of view. And it was cute now, but one day she’d be dangerous. One day, every man who fell for her would give her his heart and he wouldn’t get it back.
I was so relieved that I was older, and that it could never happen to me.
“What changed?” my mother asks. “Why is she willing to make the drive now?”
I scrub a hand over my face, unable to answer. This is a terrible idea, this trip with her.
I’d have known it the second I saw her sitting on the beach in her bikini with her ponytail blowing in the breeze, her spine curving over her bent knees, except I wasn’t planning to ask her to come at all.
I went out there simply to get any fighting out of the way so that it didn’t happen in New Orleans instead. If she’s going to start shit with me the way she nearly did yesterday before my mother arrived, I wanted it out of the way here, not within earshot of twenty family members.
And then...there was the stupid thing about her hair, and that bruise on her leg, and I started worrying about what the hell her dad and brothers might do over the course of the next week and a half and.
..it just came out. The request. We weren’t even supposed to leave until Friday but the thought of her here, dependent on their sobriety and goodwill. ..I couldn’t stand it.
“I’m relieved,” my mom continues. “I just don’t understand what changed.”
Nothing changed.
That’s the problem.