Chapter 14
REESE
TRACK: Melody Gardot, “Morning Sun”
“This is nuts.” I lean back against the passenger seat in Eli’s truck, nerves clattering in my stomach. But it’s not just nerves. It’s curiosity. Excitement. Like tiny, frantic butterflies hopped up on too much caffeine.
Eli grins and turns the wheel with the flat of his left hand as he rounds the corner onto the red bridge.
Great. Now it’s all that plus a softer, more liquid fluttering down low. Why is his competent driving so hot?
I turn away from him, looking out through the window and squeezing my thighs shut as if I can physically stop the sensation. Eli’s grin has always undone me—even when I harbored so much anger toward him.
So much pain.
It’s why I hated it so much.
“I’ll have you back to the kitchen in half an hour. Tops. Unless you want to stay out.”
“I should never have gone!” My voice is a little strangled. I’m mad at myself for leaving ahead of the lunch rush. But I wasn’t acting rationally back then. I couldn’t think with Eli so close to me; the scent of his soap and skin flipping every cell in my body to on.
His fingers drumming a beat on the console between us has me turning back to him. It’s almost like he’s nervous.
I truly have no idea where he’s taking me.
The hyped-up butterflies pick up their pace. “Is it a new restaurant I somehow don’t know about?”
“Nope. In fact, it’s the furthest thing from restaurant work I could imagine.”
Nevertheless, a moment later he’s pulling up on Riverfront Way, parking right in front of Ben’s restaurant.
I frown, confused.
But Eli’s hopping out of the truck, and I’ve only just gotten my seat belt off when my door swings open and he’s got a hand out to help me down. A frigid breeze picks up on the sidewalk, sending a swirl of crisp orange leaves swirling behind Eli. His hair whips in the cold.
I’m tempted not to take his hand. It’s like I still need to hang onto that tiny piece of the Reese from two weeks ago—the one that was still so fucking mad at Eli Dunham.
But I can barely hear that Reese anymore.
It’s only temporary. And there’s no harm in losing my hand into his big warm palm, feeling the comfort of his fingers curling around mine.
Eli looks a bit like a kid at Christmas as he leads me across the sidewalk, wind nipping at our cheeks.
We’re not going to the restaurant, I realize, but to his building next door.
A moment later, he’s punching numbers into a keypad, then holding the door for me when it clicks open.
I pass him too closely, his clean laundry scent filling my nostrils.
I’m suddenly knocked back into a moment, two years ago. We were lying in bed together, Eli’s freshly laundered sheets wrapped around our naked bodies, that same scent filling the space around us, along with another muskier scent that makes my stomach flip even now.
Was I lying down, still breathing hard from making love when he spoke, my hands twisting circles in the dusting of his chest hair? Or was it afterward, that he told me that story?
Afterward, I recall, as we enter the darkened lobby. I was wrapped in that soft sheet while he painted my toes—yes, Eli Dunham had once painted my toes—badly—when he told the story about building his mom a Popsicle-stick model of the hotel.
“It took me weeks,” he’d said, aiming the brush at my tiny pinkie toe. “Months maybe, I can’t remember. Dad had to help me cut all the windows. I insisted they match exactly. I even painted the ghost of Eleanor Cleary in the east wing with Cassandra’s pale peach nail polish.”
I’d laughed, but my chest was tight, thinking of that little boy. I think that was the moment I fell for Eli. I mean, I know that can’t be right; it can’t have been his face, slightly embarrassed at having confessed this elaborate present he handmade for his mom to the woman he was casually seeing.
Casual.
I let go of Eli’s hand as we make our way up the dark stairwell, ostensibly to grip the railing, but more so I don’t fall down into a sinkhole of old feelings. Because that’s the only way I’ve managed to keep my head through all of this.
He doesn’t say anything as we walk up the stairs, past the artist studios on the first and second floors, their doors painted vibrant colors.
But I can feel him behind me. I can sense his energy, and I’m all kinds of messed up about it.
Because part of me feels the man from before, the one I’ve been mad at for so long.
The other part of me sees the man he’s been now: his thoughtfulness and caretaking of my feelings, his gratitude and shock that I’d be kind to him.
And that pulsing, intense, gorgeous man under it all, the one I’ve never stopped wanting.
The one who made his mom a Popsicle motel.
When we reach the third floor, he leads me into the hallway, and stops in front of an unmarked door.
“Ready?” he asks.
I balk, my heart pounding, and not just from the stairs. “I don’t know!”
He inserts a key in the deadbolt on the door. “Close your eyes.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. If you don’t I’m going to take off my tie and blindfold you.”
Sparks go off in my belly as I remember a time, years ago, during our brief fling, when he blindfolded me in bed. We’d been a little drunk.
“Not like that.” Eli’s voice is rough, letting me know he’s thinking of the same moment. “I mean, I could mean it like that if you want.”
He’s teasing me.
I glare at him, and he laughs. Still, my eyes go down the scruff at his throat, which is eye level for me. His pulse throbs, and my nipples have the audacity to harden under my shirt.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
There’s a long pause where I almost want to open my eyes again, just to see where he’s looking, and what’s in his expression. But I don’t. Then I hear the sound of the lock clicking open and the swing of a spring-hinged door.
He grasps my hand then, slipping his rough fingers over mine with a familiarity that makes my stomach flip.
I sense us going through another door, then Eli says, “Holy shit.”
“Hey!” I say, eyes still closed. “Can I open my eyes?”
“Yeah, Reese. Open your eyes.”
My eyes flutter open, and for a moment, there’s nothing but the dulled sound of traffic down on the street below as I take in the scene before me.
My stomach drops. Not just a little—like a thousand feet. So fast, I feel sick.
Next to us, there’s a giant sound-mixing table, with floating monitors and a rolling chair in front of it. The table’s set up against a wall with a giant plate glass window, and next to that, a blue door.
“Your spot’s in there,” Eli says, bringing me toward the door and letting go of my hand to push it open.
I don’t follow him. I can barely hear him, over the thudding of my heart. The room is walled with soundproofing tiles. There’s a mic hanging from the ceiling, next to where a stool might go. A raised platform at the back of the room looks big enough to hold a whole band.
For a moment, my eyes fill in the space. Me, sitting on that stool, a guitar on my lap, singing into the mic. A band on the back platform, the drummer looking at me with earnestness, sweat beading down his brow.
Simon, on the other side of the glass, standing up with rage in his eyes. Cutting the mic. Screaming something none of us hear.
“There are still a few details to finish, but Sam did an incredible job,” Eli says. He’s still looking around the back room. “It’s not hooked up yet, but it will be by Friday.”
Then he turns to me, and I watch, with absolute self-loathing, as the excitement drains from his face, replaced with the same sick expression I’ve been feeling. “Reese,” he says. “I didn’t mean to—fuck.”
He comes over to me, but I back up, fast, until I hit the wall. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“No,” he says. “No, I’m sorry.”
But I can’t take that either, not after he’s done all this for me. In two weeks.
I race outside, then down the stairs, needing to put as much space from that place and me as I can.
I know what he’s doing. I told him to fucking do it. Make my dreams come true.
He doesn’t know I don’t have any dreams anymore.
At the lobby I nearly smash into a woman with short, bleached bangs and a nose piercing—one of Eli’s artists, I’m sure. He should be with her. Someone who remembers how to have fun. Someone not scared of her own dreams.
A flash of jealousy hits me even as I smile at her, not wanting this stranger to see I’m this close to sobbing.
I push out into the milky-white late morning, running now through a gap in cars on Riverfront to the walkway on the other side of the street.
I don’t stop until I reach the railing, then my hands are wrapped around its freezing length, and all I can see below is the rush of the Quince.
I take a breath, then another. Across the water and to the right is the river path, and above that, to the right, Rolling Hills’ golf course, and the hotel itself up higher, nestled into the trees.
I sense more than see Eli come up beside me, though I can see him in my peripheral vision; hope and kindness and feelings wrapped up in six feet, two inches of handsome man.
He rests his elbows on the railing, staring down at the water with me.
“I’m sorry, Reese. You don’t have to use it.”
I can’t help it; I bark out a laugh at the absurd thought of him building that studio for nothing. Then I meet his eye. “I haven’t been inside a studio in years.”
Eli steps toward me and I shiver—from the cold, that terrible memory still flickering in my brain or him—I’m not sure. All I know is when I hold my hands up, running my thumb over my wrist, Eli takes my hands in his.
“You’re shaking,” he says. He unbuttons his coat and presses my hands up against the warmth of his chest.
I blink, the tears that were threatening before now filling my eyes. “It’s so stupid.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“Yes, it is. I let someone else tell me I wasn’t good enough.
I showed him my vulnerabilities and he…used them against me.
He let his own insecurity and sense of failure take precedent over me and my life.
I knew, intellectually, that his words were full of shit…
but that stuck. And it became this self-fulfilling prophecy.
I failed auditions. I sent tapes to producers that never went anywhere, and he said, ‘See? You’re not cut out for this, Reese.
You’re a background player.’ Michelle says she could hear it on those tapes, that self-doubt.
She said it didn’t sound like me and kept encouraging me to try again.
But all I could see was his stupid face. ”
“Simon,” Eli says.
I snap my eyes up to meet his. I told him, I remembered. Years ago. I’d confessed my fears to Eli, that I’d let an asshole ruin my life for good. That it was Simon’s fault I was still a server, work I always did because it was the only thing I was good at. Everything else was a pipe dream.
“Fucking Simon,” I whisper.
“Fucking Simon is right.” He pulls my hand from my jacket, the one with the ink on the wrist. The letters stand out stark in the bright light of day. SH.
“This is him, right?”
“Yes.” Sort of.
“Did he tattoo your initials on himself too?”
Eli’s jaw is working hard, and I know he’s restraining his anger.
I shake my head, and Eli looks visibly relieved. “Good. If I knew that scumbag was walking around with your initials on him…”
I smile, sadly. What would he do, exactly? “You know, it took ten years for me to leave him?” I look out at the water again. “Every time I’d try he’d turn into this sweet guy I hardly recognized. He’d turn into you, when you’re not even trying.”
I’m not looking at Eli, so I can’t see his expression.
But I’m lost in the past, thinking of how hard Simon had to work to be nice.
How it wasn’t until later I realized he’d spoon-feed me compliments and praise not because he meant those things, but because they were props for him to control me.
To give him something to point to when I told him he was an asshole.
“I didn’t exactly help, either,” Eli says.
Surprise runs through me at that. “You weren’t anything like him.” But then I go quiet. There’s no denying Eli hurt me too, even if compared to Simon, he was an angel.
Eli looks back up at the hotel. “I’m sorry if the studio was too much, but I want you to at least know it’s there for you.
Use it if you want to, or don’t. The power will be hooked up on Friday, and I’ll have to go for the inspection booked then, but after that I won’t go there for the whole six weeks we’re… ”
The whole six weeks we’re supposed to be pretending to be together.
“Until the show’s done filming,” he finishes with. “After that, you can decide what you want to do. Stay, go, it’s up to you. But I won’t set foot in there until then, unless you want me to.”
I know that deadline will be here before we know it.
Kelly told everyone yesterday that the trailer for the show was up on the network’s website and would be on TV next week.
By the time the show’s on air, filming will be over, she and Neil will be gone, and all this masquerading with Eli will be over too.
I should be happy—but somehow the thought of all this ending fills me with a numbing sensation. Like I’ve held something cold against me so I can’t feel.
Eli takes my hand again, only this time, it’s to press something into my palm.
The key to the studio.
“The code for the main building is 0925.” He curls my fingers around the key. “There are no strings attached, okay, Reese? Even the pretend dating thing…you’re free anytime. We can tell them you left me for your music. That would be an honorable way for me to get dumped, I think.”
I can’t help laughing, a tear escaping my eye. “You’re crazy, Eli.”
He shrugs. “Nothing new there.”
I shake my head, pocketing the key. He’s right, I don’t have to use it. I can just hold on to it, knowing it’s there.
“Thank you,” I say, meaning it. “You one thousand percent didn’t need to do that but…thank you.”
“Come on,” he says, shoving his hands in the pockets of his coat. “I’ll take you back to work.”