Chapter 13 Easton
EASTON
Isleep like the dead.
I sleep like a girl who didn’t sit in a car most of yesterday, followed by a significant nap. I suspect I could sleep for another few hours if I allowed it.
I mentally scroll through disorders in which sleeping heavily is the only symptom. Very little comes to mind.
“What are the odds that this place has a carbon dioxide leak?” I ask Elijah when I enter the kitchen.
He frowns, glancing up from his paper. “Pretty slim, given that I’m not tired.”
I walk to the Keurig, then fumble in the surrounding cabinets, looking for coffee pods.
“There aren’t any,” he says, his gaze still on the paper.
“You don’t even know what I’m looking for. Maybe I was hoping they had some cocaine.”
“This place would have been a lot more expensive if that was the case,” he says, still not looking up. “Let’s go get breakfast.”
Two days ago I’d have refused, deciding it was best to limit any one-on-one time with Elijah. I’ve sort of given up on that, I guess, and it’s not as if it matters.
No matter how appealing he grows, I’m not going down that road again.
“Let me just get dressed,” I tell him.
“You look fine,” he says. “This whole dog-and-pony show you’re putting on is unnecessary.”
I’m currently braless and wearing pajama shorts, so he must have incredibly low standards for restaurant attire.
I return to my room and emerge in a pair of jogging shorts and a T-shirt, with just enough makeup on my face that if one of Thomas’s superfans spies me, there won’t be an online discussion about how bad I look in real life.
Okay, there might be anyway. The truth and what is said about me in Thomas’s comments are two circles in a Venn diagram that rarely overlap.
Elijah groans as he rises. “That should have taken two minutes and took twenty instead. Why can you not leave the house without acting like you’re heading to prom?”
I snatch my phone off the counter. “Because people will talk, Elijah. Jesus, are you ever gonna let this go? I have a well-known boyfriend with a fanatical following, and they live to talk shit about me. They comment on my hair, my clothes, my body, my expressions. They discuss plastic surgery they’re certain I had and plastic surgery they think I need—mostly they think if Thomas loved me he’d have bought me implants.
So yeah, I’m careful when I leave the house because God knows what they’ll say if I’m not. ”
Elijah sighs, holding the door for me. “The old Easton wouldn’t have cared what a bunch of idiots said.”
The old Easton didn’t care because it was only your opinion that mattered to her, Elijah, but it turned out you didn’t like her either, remember?
I was more certain of myself when I was younger, but that’s because the three people I loved the most all seemed to like me just the way I was.
We wander down the street to a cute little café set on the first floor of an old house.
We are seated on the front porch, where the whirring ceiling fans overhead don’t do much to dispel the heat.
I’d still prefer to be outside than in, however—I probably should have adapted to the cooler temperatures in Boston, but I really haven’t.
Even on a day when everyone else is talking about how nice it is outside, I’m longing for just a bit of the South’s oppressive summer heat.
And I’m over Boston’s winter before it’s even begun.
Our coffee is delivered in oversized glass carafes that are scalding hot when we try to pour them into our cups. The waitress is openly eye-fucking Elijah, and though I can’t blame her—even with his second-day scruff and his wrinkled shorts, he’s unbearably attractive—I frown at her anyway.
I order avocado toast, though I really want pancakes and he orders two breakfasts for himself...one of them the very pancakes I’m not letting myself have.
“You know,” he says, once our waitress has departed, “your ex isn’t that famous. He has a dumb show on Netflix and that’s it.”
I glance up from my coffee. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that it’s really fucking unlikely that anyone’s going to recognize you or that they’d care if they did.”
He isn’t wrong. Thomas’s following seems huge to me because it’s huge compared to mine.
And yeah...he gets recognized on campus and at medical conferences and increasingly at restaurants, but it’s not as if he’s got teenage girls screaming his name outside a hotel or throwing bras at him as he heads to work.
And I’ve appeared on his show only a few times, a minute or two in a couple one-hour episodes, but even then I was only in the periphery.
There are very, very few people who’d recognize me on my own.
And yet.
“How many people do I need to hear talking shit about my appearance before it’s allowed to make me self-conscious?” I ask. “How many times would you personally be able to stand hearing you’re too boring or low-class for your partner before you started making some changes?”
His mouth presses tight. “The world is full of people who lack half your intellect. Why listen?”
“I don’t know,” I reply, though it’s not entirely true.
I grew up without access to the same shit everyone around me did.
My years of college and grad school have been a continual reminder of that fact.
When I don’t know what fork to use, when I don’t know that Montauk is part of the Hamptons, or I pronounce Louboutin wrong.
..it feels as if I can’t trust my own judgment about anything.
“I’d just rather not hear about it, if I can,” I explain.
“Then don’t,” he says. “You don’t need a public profile, do you? Shut it down or set it up so only friends can comment. You’re allowed to protect yourself, even from stuff that shouldn’t make an impact.”
My mouth opens to tell him that those comments mostly appear on Thomas’s posts, not mine, but then he’s going to ask why Thomas is not blocking those comments.
Which makes Thomas, again, sound like a prick, when he is not—he gets comments too, comments he sometimes actually listens to.
Like he shaved his beard after he heard about it enough and got a slightly hipper wardrobe.
He’s keeping a lot of balls in the air and one of them is me.
Or was me, anyway. And he was only holding me to the same standards he holds himself to: no alcohol, vigilant sunscreen use, healthy food, a disciplined bedtime.
It’s irritating, however, that he did his best to turn me into a TV-appropriate wife who’d age well when it appears what he wants is a hot but short-lived mistress instead.
Our food is delivered and Elijah dumps half his pancakes onto a small plate and slides them my way. “There’s no way you only wanted avocado toast,” he says.
I would like to argue, but they’re covered in strawberries and pecans and, well, fuck it.
If Thomas isn’t holding himself to a single one of his standards, why should I?
As we eat, Elijah responds to work texts and I respond to his sister, who’s asking how the trip is going.
Last night your grandmother said I’m not as pretty as I think I am, that I’m only after Thomas for his money, and then she asked about my dad’s drinking.
Kelsey
You’re not going to call 911 for her, are you? That’s totally fair.
I was thinking about how much she’d hate it if I held her hand while Elijah makes the call. So I’m okay with holding her hand after all.
When breakfast is done, we walk down the street to the house. It’s nearly noon and Key West is wide awake now. Already, sunburned tourists are clutching oversized daiquiris to their chests.
“So we’re just hanging out today, and we’ll take off tomorrow?” I ask.
Elijah frowns. “Unfortunately, we’re operating on my grandmother’s schedule. I can’t swear we’re leaving tomorrow either.”
“A less caring road-trip fake girlfriend would suggest you leave her ass here,” I suggest.
He laughs. “Nice try, Easton.”
A couple flies past us on Vespas, and my gaze follows.
That would have been me, once upon a time.
I can’t blame Thomas for everything. No one emerges from med school with an appreciation for mopeds or trampolines or slicing your own bagels—three things about as likely to send you to the ER as rampant drug use.
I guess it’s just that there was still some wildness in me before Thomas. There was still some bend. Now it’s as if he’s ironed me stick-straight and dipped me in shellac. I hunger for that wild part of me, but I don’t even know where to find it anymore.
“We’re, uh, having dinner with my grandmother and Betty again,” he says.
My mouth opens. “Why—"
“It’s a special thing, on this island. Betty planned it all for you to help win Thomas back, so you’ve got to go.”
Fuck my life. “I bet your grandmother just loves that.”
He laughs ruefully. “Yeah, we’ve already exchanged words.”
When we return to the house, I settle under an umbrella by the pool and open my phone.
Thomas
Hey, someone just dropped into my comments to say she saw you out with another guy?
Oh shit. Here we go. Suddenly this entire plan seems reckless and crazy, and why did I ever come on this trip or think this would do any good?
He sends a screenshot of the comment, which comes from someone named SweatyBettyKW:
SweatyBettyKW: Dude, I peeped your girl with some other guy last night in Key West.
User 8869: @SweatyBettyKW were they on a date?
SweatyBettyKW: @User8869 Looked like. And let me tell you...she traded UP. He was a total snack.
Betty, a woman who hit adolescence before Vietnam, is more adept at Gen Z slang than I am. Or so I assume, based on the fact that I barely understand what she’s saying.
And I guess I should be thrilled at this first sign of jealousy.
It’s the whole reason I’m here. Instead, I’m just sort of irritated.
A piece of me simply wants to explain, then ask him what he thinks of the UCSD study, but I’d be giving him what he wants.
Reassurance, a bit of the companionship we had before. So I don’t say either one.
You ended our relationship, as I recall.
I guess it’s a manipulative answer, one that won’t allay any of his fears.
I glance toward Elijah, who’s getting ready to go for a run.
I sort of wish I was dating someone I didn’t have to manipulate in the first place.