Prologue #4
His fingers trace idle patterns on my spine, circles, then what might be the shape of a flower if I squint with my imagination.
The apartment settles around us, refrigerator hum, distant traffic on Sunset, Whiskers knocking something metallic off a counter in petty revenge. Eli’s breathing slows. Mine follows.
“Hey,” he murmurs, already half-asleep. “Thank you for asking me in. For all of it. For telling me exactly what you wanted.”
“Hey,” I murmur back. “Thank you for asking before everything. Even the filthy parts. Especially the filthy parts.”
He kisses the top of my head, clumsy and soft, and I fall asleep tangled in a man who takes up three-quarters of my mattress and somehow still leaves room for me to breathe, awkward, enormous, and already rewriting the shape of my night.
Outside, Silver Lake keeps being Silver Lake. Inside, for the first time in a long time, I sleep without running tomorrow’s inventory numbers through my head, just the weight of his arm and the ridiculous certainty that I will want this man again in the morning.
I wake up alone.
The bed is cold on his side, sheets thrown back, pillow still dented where his head was.
Morning light streams through my curtains, that pale early sunshine that makes everything look softer than it actually is, and for one horrible moment I think he left.
I think I was an idiot, I think I fell for the oldest trick in the book, I think…
Whiskers meows from the doorway, utterly unbothered by my existential crisis.
“Thanks for the support,” I mutter, throwing off the covers.
My body aches in pleasant ways I’m choosing not to examine too closely, and his shirt is gone from the floor where it landed last night, and I’m already composing the angry speech I’ll never give when I hear something outside my apartment door.
Muttering. Someone muttering.
I pull on yesterday’s jeans and a sweater that’s definitely inside out, creep toward the front door, and press my ear against it like a person in a horror movie who’s about to make a terrible decision.
“I want to see you again. And again. And-” the muttering says. “No, that’s stupid. Okay. Az, last night was… no, don’t start with last night, she knows about last night, she was there-”
I yank the door open.
Eli freezes mid-pace on my doorstep, one hand around a coffee cup, the other shoved deep in his pocket. His hair is a disaster. His t-shirt is inside out. He’s looking at me like I’ve caught him committing a crime.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“I got coffee.” He thrusts the cup toward me. “I didn’t know what you liked so I got black, but I also got…” He pats his pockets frantically, produces three sugar packets and a tiny container of cream. “Options. I got options.”
“Were you rehearsing something?”
His face goes completely red. “No.”
“Eli.”
“Maybe.” He runs his free hand through his hair, making it worse. “I wanted to… I had this whole thing I was going to say, about last night, and wanting to see you again, and how you eat like you mean it, which sounds weird but I swear it’s a compliment-”
“Yes.”
He stops, blinks. “What?”
“Yes. I want to see you again.”
“Oh.” He lets out a breath like he’s been holding it since he woke up.
“Good. That’s… okay. Good.” He’s still standing on my doorstep, coffee cup extended, looking at me like he can’t quite believe his luck.
“Can I… would it be weird if I kissed you? Before I… I mean, I was going to leave, give you space, but now I feel like I should-”
“Eli.”
“Yeah?”
“Stop asking.”
His face does that confused-to-hopeful shift I’m starting to recognize, and then I’m pulling him through the doorway by his inside-out shirt and kissing him in my entryway while Whiskers winds between our ankles and the coffee sloshes dangerously in its cup.
“Okay,” he says against my mouth. “Noted. Stop asking.”
“Quick learner.”
“I have hidden depths.”
I pull back far enough to look at him, rumpled and ridiculous and so earnest it makes my chest hurt. “Give me your phone.”
He hands it over without question. I type in my number, save it under “Azalea (hallway assault victim),” and hand it back.
“Don’t lose that.”
“I would never.” He looks at the screen, and the smile that breaks across his face is worth every awkward moment of the last twelve hours. “Hallway assault victim?”
“It’s how we met. Very romantic.”
“You’re kind of mean.”
“You said that last night.”
“It wasn’t a complaint.” He pockets his phone like it’s something precious. “I should probably go. Let you do whatever you do on Friday mornings.”
I should let him go. I have work in three hours and I desperately need a shower.
“Do you know how to make eggs?” I ask instead.
“Eggs?” He blinks at me.
“Breakfast. The meal that happens in the morning. Do you know how to make it?”
“I… yes? I make excellent eggs, actually.”
“Prove it,” I say.
His whole face lights up. “Yeah?”
“Kitchen’s through there. Try not to let the cat convince you he hasn’t been fed. He’s a liar and he’s already had breakfast.”
Eli heads toward my kitchen with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for much more exciting invitations, and I watch him go, this huge tattooed man who sings like heartbreak and blushes when I tease him and apparently makes excellent eggs.
Whiskers follows him, already plotting his second breakfast.