Chapter 26 Easton
EASTON
Love is really about hormones.
I remind myself of this as I watch Elijah move around the kitchen, making us breakfast. Dopamine, the pleasure hormone, and norepinephrine, so fizzy it can make you an insomniac—they surge when you fall in love, and they last just long enough to make sure you’ve reproduced.
Five years hits, though, and it’s all gone.
Your dopamine is back at baseline and norepinephrine does the same.
When you hear people saying that the thrill is gone?
It’s just that they never realized the thrill was entirely manufactured—nature’s little trick to save the species from dying out.
I know this, and yet every time Elijah’s tricep pops as he stretches his arm, I’m getting a hit of dopamine, and as any drug addict will attest, getting one hit only makes you want another.
Elijah is my drug of choice, and I once thought that if I just stayed away long enough, the craving would lessen, but it hasn’t worked that way, has it?
I think about him lying on the couch yesterday, or telling me there’s no reason for me not to have some fun last night, and I can hardly get a full breath.
And what did he mean when he said there’d been other stuff going on at the time?
It’s what I’ve wanted to know for five fucking years, the one thing I haven’t been able to make sense of, and I had too much pride to ask a follow-up question.
I’ve lost my chance, but it’s probably for the best. I don’t need clarification about any of this shit...I just need to emerge in one piece when I return to Boston in a week.
“Are you just going to sit there looking pretty, or are you going to help?” he asks, glancing at me over his shoulder with a brow raised, his right hand continuing to move a spatula along the pan’s surface.
“I was hoping to just sit here looking pretty.” Though pretty is a stretch—I look like someone who ate lots of sodium last night and went to bed without showering. My mattress is somehow covered in sand now.
“Start the coffee.”
“You’re only asking me to do this because I’m a woman,” I grumble, which is absolutely illogical given that he’s the one cooking. I say it mostly to make him laugh, and he does.
We sit down over eggs and turkey bacon and sliced avocado a few minutes later. I once again think—but do not say—how nice it is just to eat relatively normal food. To have coffee instead of matcha and some tasty cancer-causing nitrates with my eggs.
And how nice it is to sit with him, a guy who’s known me my entire life, who’s seen me at my absolute worst. Even after two years together, I’m sort of on my best behavior with Thomas, as if our relationship is a thirty-day free trial after which I might be returned.
He did return me. That’s the crazy thing. I was on my best fucking behavior for two years, and it still wasn’t enough for him.
“So we leave tomorrow?” I ask.
He raises a brow. “In a rush?”
“No.” I like it here. I like having Elijah to myself—the occasional flash of a dimple, the way he makes me laugh, how I come alive when he walks into the room.
I like this house. I like the sapphire-blue coastal dune lake right outside our door.
A part of me doesn’t ever want this to end. “I just wondered what the plan was.”
“I’m not sure. Today, Grandma wants to go to church in Seaside—”
I wrinkle my nose and he laughs.
“I knew you’d react like that,” he says, “but you really ought to check it out. You’ve never seen a church like this one. And after that, she wants to go to the graves.”
My fork stops halfway to my mouth. He must be referring to his dad and Campbell. “I had no idea they were nearby.”
He nods. “We lived up this way when they died. The graves are about a half hour from here. You’re welcome to come, though I realize it’s not the most appealing way to spend a Sunday at the beach.”
I shake my head. “As much as I love annoying your grandmother, intruding on that is taking things too far, even for me.”
He sips his coffee. “You wouldn’t be intruding. I mean, Betty’s coming too. And...I think my dad would’ve liked to meet you. You were an important part of our family.”
No matter what Elijah’s saying, Mrs. Cabot will definitely resent my presence. But it sort of seems like Elijah wants me there, so fuck Mrs. Cabot. It’ll keep her spirits up, complaining about me the whole way home.
I go upstairs to shower and once again don the dress I reserved for the rehearsal dinner.
It seems, perhaps, slightly too formal and business-like for the occasion, but I don’t have anything else.
If I had known this trip was going to take one billion years when I was back in Boston, I would’ve packed better.
I’ve just pulled it on when Thomas texts.
THOMAS
Look, if you really want me to come to the wedding, I will. I realize I put you in a shitty situation.
I perch on the edge of the bed, staring at my phone.
If he’d offered it a week ago, I’d have agreed. But Thomas doesn’t get to just waltz back into my life after he’s put me through this, so he sure as fuck doesn’t get to waltz back in like he’s doing me a favor.
What happened to Sofia Leigh?
That was nothing. We’re just friends.
Bullshit. If they’re not together, it’s because Sofia Leigh decided she couldn’t deal with someone who had to be in bed by ten.
I already told Kelsey I wasn’t bringing anyone. Thanks anyway.
I’m sure they can add me back in. When’s the rehearsal dinner? I’ll see if I can land early enough to make all the events.
He’s so certain I want him there and that I’ll take him back. It’s laughable how fucking certain he is, and of course it’s also not laughable because I do plan to take him back, but I don’t want him at the wedding anymore.
If he’d come on this trip, I’d have missed last night, and snorkeling at Garden Key, and watching Elijah nearly get his hand eaten off by Tarpons. I’d have missed tannins hitting saltwater, and Elijah getting an erection while I glued together his cut.
What else will I miss if I let him come to New Orleans?
We aren’t together. Why would I want you at the wedding?
THOMAS
Look, I know we need to talk, and we will. We’ll figure all that out. But Kelsey’s thing is a big deal, and I don’t want to screw you over.
Though he sure didn’t mind screwing me over when Sofia Leigh was a possibility.
God. How badly did I want to swan around that wedding with my famous boyfriend and that big-ass diamond on my finger?
An embarrassing amount. It was going to be my triumphant final scene: Take that, Elijah; take that, everyone who thought nothing of me as a kid.
That’s how much I wanted to show all the people from my past, though mostly Elijah, that I’d surpassed them.
Except allowing Thomas to show up as an act of charity doesn’t prove anything except that I still feel I’ve got something to prove.
But that’s not the reason I’m telling him not to come. I just want these days with Elijah, even if I should not.
I don’t want you there.
I turn the phone off and go down to the living room.
“You look nice,” Elijah says.
I smile. “That’s a big difference from your attitude when I wore this a few nights ago.”
His gaze brushes over me, palpable as the palm of a hand on my skin. “There’s something different now. I can’t put my finger on it, but you just look like yourself again.”
I feel like myself again, weirdly, and I’m not sure why. And how did I live for so long not feeling like myself without even noticing it? Maybe I just needed a vacation more than I’d realized.
We drive over to Paul’s house to pick up Mrs. Cabot and Betty. Mrs. Cabot’s eyes narrow when she sees me—shocker.
“You’re going to church?” she asks as she climbs into the car.
“I think it’s just a rumor about witches catching on fire if they enter,” I reply, “but we’ll find out for sure, eh?”
“She does realize that we’re going to Campbell and Duncan’s graves after this, yes?” she snaps at Elijah.
“Yes,” I reply. “She does.”
“Okay, you two,” Elijah says mildly, “it’s a Sunday and we’re on our way to church. Let’s pretend for an hour that we’re all adults.”
Mrs. Cabot’s mouth opens to respond then closes. Mine does the same.
If I were slightly less annoyed by her, I’d probably laugh at just how similar the two of us seem sometimes.
We park across the street from the church and walk toward it, two by two.
It’s tall and narrow, with its shiplap exterior painted the purest white. Inside, there’s an exposed beam ceiling, with fans overhead to move the breeze and sun flowing through the endless windows on every side.
I grew up attending dark, gloomy churches that reeked of age and incense, and they never once made me feel grateful to something or someone greater than myself.
Here, however? I just might.
We slide into a pew, and a sort of stillness enters me. Or maybe it’s a stillness that was here all along, but there was just too much noise and distraction to notice it.
I take a deep breath, and close my eyes.
My problems feel small and inconsequential here.
Thomas. Sofia Leigh. My career. How everyone will treat me if Thomas and I aren’t back together.
What I’ll do with myself if it doesn’t work out.
All of these things that mattered so very much. ..they matter a lot less, now.
Elijah’s pinky brushes mine, and I open my eyes to glance up at him. He holds my gaze with this quiet smile on his face, as if he knows everything I’m thinking.
I want to think all of my feelings for him are inconsequential too, but they’re not.
Though we’ve spent many years apart, though he broke me into a million pieces, he’s still the only thing that really matters.
I ache for him the same way I did a decade ago.
I’m as wrapped around his finger as I ever was.
I’m doomed to want something I can’t have, forever, and I wish I hadn’t realized it.