Chapter 12 Easton
EASTON
The restaurant is lovely.
Mrs. Cabot is not.
While her friend Betty keeps trying to get a good photo of me and Elijah with her iPhone, making us clink our glasses together and suggesting we do things like feed each other or eat the same piece of linguine from opposite ends, Lady and the Tramp style, Mrs. Cabot is saying that “no reasonable person” could believe Elijah would date me and explaining to Betty that I’m “not even a real doctor.”
“Betty, I appreciate this,” I finally say, “but I think it’ll look like a setup. Thomas knows me. I’m not really one to post couple photos.”
Betty sighs. “Okay, let me give this some thought. I’m going to figure this out for you, and you’ll make Thomas put me on his show after I do. I want to play a lounge singer.”
Betty clearly has no idea what Thomas’s show is about, but her refusal to hate me is the last straw for Mrs. Cabot. “Easton, how’s your father’s drinking?”
“Prolific,” I chirp. “Thanks for asking.”
“Grandma,” groans Elijah.
“Oak Bluff is such a terrible place, Betty,” says Mrs. Cabot. She turns back to me and Elijah. “So much alcoholism. And remember all those robberies? Every time I picked up the phone Judy was telling me about another one.”
I stiffen, gripping my fork so tight that my hand is blanched of color.
“That was a long time ago,” Elijah says.
“They never found those men, did they?” she continues, turning to Betty. “They shot some poor boy. Football player with a full ride to Georgia Tech. Paralyzed. It was so awful.”
I can’t get a full breath.
“Oh, that’s heartbreaking,” says Betty.
“I can’t even blame your mother for leaving,” Mrs. Cabot says to me. “I assume she stayed away?”
I smile, though my teeth are grinding. My appetite is gone. “Unless she’s mastered the art of invisibility.”
“And—”
Elijah’s hand lands heavily on the table. “That’s enough,” he snaps, and his grandmother blinks in surprise.
“I was just making conversation,” she says.
I’m glad he stopped her before she got around to asking if my brother was still in jail, which I’m certain was next.
“So I figure we’ll stay overnight in the Ft. Myers area tomorrow,” Elijah begins. “I’ve got to make reservations, but—”
“I can’t leave tomorrow,” says his grandmother. “My shoes haven’t arrived.”
Elijah runs a hand over his face. “Could you not wear different shoes?”
“I ordered them just for the wedding,” she argues. “And if I’m not home they’ll get stolen.”
“Maybe Betty could pick them up for you.”
Betty looks between him and Mrs. Cabot. “Well, that would be sort of tough, since I’m coming on the trip with you.”
Elijah coughs. “You are?”
“Well of course,” says Betty, wrapping her arm around my shoulders. “Otherwise, Easton’s never getting her man back.”
Betty and Mrs. Cabot both own very large homes across the street from each other in the historic section of town, and Mrs. Cabot’s could easily sleep twenty guests if they weren’t guests she hated.
I wait until he’s walked each of them to their respective doors before I bring up the thing that’s been worrying me since dinner.
“Don’t we have to be out of our place in the morning? ” I ask.
He shakes his head. “It had a three-day minimum, so I had to book it through Friday.”
My chin falls. I have no idea how much a house like this in Key West rents for...but I know it can’t fall in the category of “It’s so cheap that we rented it for three nights without planning to stay.”
My hand wraps around the grab handle. “I’m beginning to worry that you’re super bad with money.”
He raises a brow. “I’m beginning to suspect that you have none.”
“You don’t need to suspect it. I’ve made that incredibly plain.”
His mouth presses flat as he pulls up in front of our place. “How is that possible? You’ve got two advanced degrees.”
“I’m doing a post-doc,” I reply, climbing out. “I get a stipend and that’s it.”
In theory, after this year, there will be a staff position available for me.
If I’m still with Thomas, that is. The one thing better than getting degrees from an Ivy League university is being employed by one.
I look forward to the day all those witches in Oak Bluff—so disdainful of my family as a kid—need my help getting a grandson or niece into school.
Elijah locks the car and places his hand on the small of my back, guiding me to the house. He’s always been a hoverer, though. I’m not sure he even knows he’s doing it. “I wasn’t going to bring this up, but you also had a rich boyfriend until a few days ago.”
I blink up at him. I’ve never referred to Thomas as rich, not to Kelsey, not to anyone, and he isn’t rich—not compared to someone like Hawk. “Thomas isn’t rich, and as far as I know, being someone’s girlfriend doesn’t make their bank account transfer to yours by osmosis.”
“You two seem to have a pretty glamorous life for people who theoretically aren’t rich,” he says. “Didn’t he take you to Istanbul? And Dubai?”
I shrug. “Those were speaking engagements. Someone else foots the bill.”
A muscle feathers along his jaw as he unlocks the front door. “Why don’t the two of you live together?”
I guess the question makes sense. Most couples live together before they get engaged, and Thomas did bring it up the last time I was renewing my lease.
The truth is that I just sort of like my independence.
I like being able to lay on the couch and watch junk television while eating ice cream with Julia and Avery, and if I was living with Thomas, it would have been impossible.
There’d have been a comment about empty calories, a suggestion that watching Below Deck was making my brain rot.
“No, we didn’t live together. We both kind of like having our own space.”
He flips on the lights as we walk inside. “So how’s that going to work if you get married?”
I hitch a shoulder. “I don’t know. I guess that we’ll stop being people who want our own space.”
It sounds na?ve, but I actually look forward to a future date when I’ll be forced to become a better person...I’m just not ready to become one now, when I’m still in school and need an outlet or two.
Elijah and I part ways in the living room.
I climb into bed and check Thomas’s social media.
He’s finally posted something other than study results, but his feed is, predictably, still as chaste as a priest’s: there’s a picture of his hands cupping clear blue water; another of him standing at the helm of a boat.
For the truth, I then go to Devon Hunt’s Instagram profile, which shows him and a few guys—Thomas among them—holding shot glasses next to a bar full of icy vodka bottles, something Thomas would never normally drink because of the way it impacts his sleep quality.
There’s a table spread out with barbeque, a food that Thomas would never eat.
And then there are the girls. At least ten leggy, beautiful girls in bikinis that are barely scraps of fabric, sunning themselves on the boat, drinking champagne, sharing a big plate of French fries, or wearing shiny dresses and sky-high stilettos as they drape themselves over Thomas and Devon.
It’s not as if it’s a surprise—I’ve seen the kind of women Devon Hunt brings along on a trip—and it doesn’t mean Thomas is sleeping with one of them, but he’s attractive and the most famous guy on the boat, so he could if he wanted.
He could probably have orgies and threesomes with these beautiful girls who are currently doing all the things he never wanted me to do: drinking, eating badly, tanning.
He seems to have significantly lower standards for these women than he ever had for me. I’m torn between jealousy and simple resentment.
Sighing, I put my phone on sleep mode and prepare to close the blinds, but stop in place as a roach the size of my fist scuttles across one of the wooden slats.
Of all the things I don’t miss about the South, this is definitely number one.
I immediately text Elijah.
There’s a roach in my room. Your assistance is required.
Elijah
I’m already in bed and I’m not dressed. You’ll be fine until morning.
What if it climbs into my mouth while I’m asleep?
If you sleep with your mouth open that wide, maybe I *do* want to come to your room.
Before I can respond, he’s knocking on my door.
“Come in,” I call over my shoulder, barely glancing away from the roach on the windowsill.
Elijah steps up beside me, clad in shorts and nothing else, and I blink rapidly. I must’ve told Thomas a thousand times that I don’t care about muscles or height, and it felt true when I said it, but it feels a little less true now. Elijah’s abdominal wall alone makes me weak with thirst.
He’s tan, pure muscle, and his shorts are low-slung enough to make out a hint of his happy trail—something Thomas doesn’t even have.
I want to run my finger along it.
“If you’re through ogling me, I’ll go ahead and deal with the roach.”
I don’t have much of a response to this since I was actually ogling him, so I step aside and nod toward the blinds. “There. I was just about to close them when I saw it.”
“You realize in the process of trying to kill it, I might end up disturbing it just enough that it scuttles away and then you won’t know where it is all night.”
I scoot into a ball near the headboard. “And if that happens, we’ll be switching rooms, as you were the one who chose this place. I’d be asleep in Oak Bluff if it was up to me.”
For a moment his eyes darken before he blinks his unhappiness away. “Do you have a shoe or something?”
“You can’t use my shoe. I don’t want dead roach all over it.”
He laughs under his breath. “A magazine?”
I don’t have any magazines, but the room came with a book in the nightstand just like hotels used to. I grab it and hand it to him.
He raises a brow. “You want me to destroy a life using the Bible? Isn’t that like a thousand years of bad luck?”
That’s a good name for my memoir about this road trip: A Thousand Years of Bad Luck. “You’re confusing it with a chain letter. Pretty sacrilegious of you.”
“Pretty sacrilegious of you to care so little about the Bible that you’d have me smash a roach with it. You’re just asking for karmic retribution.”
“I can’t imagine any punishment greater than traveling with you,” I say, and he just smiles as if he knows I don’t mean it.
Which is fair because I don’t. I’m sort of enjoying this trip, whether I should or not.