Chapter 9
Saturday dawns with a curious blend of excitement and nausea.
Eleanor wakes up just after the sun, tossing and turning until it’s clear that she’s up for the day. After coffee, a shower, and laying out half her new wardrobe, it’s still only nine thirty in the morning. Even though she knows it’s an entirely platonic outing, it still feels like she’s preparing for a date, and Eleanor resigns herself to pacing the house until Dani’s truck rolls up at twelve forty-five.
She’s tired of feeling overdressed. So, after a long and arduous decision-making process, Eleanor has landed on a pair of cutoff jean shorts that Mila insisted she buy, with a simple, red cotton T-shirt. Her makeup is sparing, and she spent a very focused forty-five minutes this morning carefully clipping and filing her nails. Completely unnecessary, but she needs something to fill the time.
At the last moment, she grabs the flannel that Dani left at her house last week, throwing it overtop as she opens the door.
When Dani climbs out of the truck, Eleanor is treated to a wonderful moment of gratification: Dani’s eyes widen and drift down to take in her outfit. They linger on her thighs and then again on the flannel shirt around her shoulders. She even stumbles a little as she walks toward the house.
The gratification doesn’t last much longer than that, though, because the moment Eleanor gets a good look at what Dani is wearing she completely forgets the painstaking morning she spent deciding on her own outfit.
In contrast to Eleanor dressing down, Dani has dressed up. She’s wearing the first pair of fully clean blue jeans Eleanor has ever seen her in—tight blue denim worn low on her hips with a thick, brown leather belt and a big buckle. Her dark-red shirt is buttoned all the way up and tucked into her jeans, and her hands have been scrubbed clean. There’s not a trace of engine oil or shop residue to be seen. But the most arresting part of the whole ensemble, the part that hits Eleanor the hardest, is Dani’s hair.
It’s the first time Eleanor has ever seen her without her ever-present ponytail and ballcap. Dani’s hair is down, falling in slightly messy waves around her face, and she’s biting her lip with what looks like apprehension.
In short, she looks absolutely delectable. But Eleanor can’t say that to her face. She struggles to find a compliment that won’t bare her entire soul as Dani makes her way from her truck to Eleanor’s door, since you look especially climbable today seems a little bit intense.
“Wow,” Dani says, her hands shoved deep in her pockets as she reaches the bottom step of the front porch. “Nora, you look… I mean, you look better in that shirt than I do.”
Dani’s cheeks are pink. Eleanor’s heart hammers.
“You showered,” is what comes out of Eleanor’s mouth in response.
After a few seconds of stunned silence, Dani bursts into laughter. Her nervousness seems to disappear, and suddenly she’s the Dani that Eleanor has known for weeks now—loose, confident, and grinning.
“I’m known to do that every so often.”
Eleanor grabs her keys and shuts the door behind her before she can dig an even deeper hole, feeling rather warm. When Dani opens the truck for her and helps her up into the seat, Eleanor notices something else that makes her smile—Dani dressed up, but she’s still wearing the same scuffed, dirty work boots she always does.
When they arrive at the park, people are under a pavilion by the widest bank of the river, scattered over a mass of picnic tables overladen with food. Adults are playing horseshoes, kids are weaving through the tables with armfuls of water balloons, and the potluck offers everything from Swedish meatballs to walking tacos. Dani’s contribution is a dessert—some kind of chocolate-and-peanut-butter bake that looks deliciously cavity inducing—and though she assured Eleanor that she didn’t need to bring anything, Eleanor contributes a few bags of chips to the table anyway.
With a bright, sunny day overhead, it seems as if the entire town has come out. Naomi, Owen, and Ryan wave from a nearby bench. Ryan’s mouth is crammed with half a bowl of guacamole dip. Sarah makes her presence known by throwing a Nerf football with such devastating accuracy that it pegs Dani on the side of the head, and Mila and her husband turn up around 3 p.m., this time with no moonshine to speak of.
In comparison to last weekend, this celebration is tame, though things kick up a little when the sun goes down. There’s a collection of communal coolers near the river, and Eleanor sits with Dani on a tailgate to watch Ryan and Owen unload a huge speaker system, then connect it to the AV in someone’s truck. People back their cars and trucks in to surround a makeshift dance floor on the grass, and the kids congregate on the dock that juts out into the river for some sort of diving competition.
When an upbeat and only vaguely familiar country song starts to play, Ryan and Sarah even start up a choreographed-looking dance.
“Danielle!” Sarah shouts, waving Dani over as Owen steps in line and joins the sequence. “Get your ass over here!”
Dani jumps off the tailgate, holding out an expectant hand. The moment she realizes what Dani wants, Eleanor clutches the side of the truck bed.
“Absolutely not.”
“Nora!” Dani whines, jumping up and down impatiently. “It’s my favourite line dance!”
“And?” Eleanor says, not letting go of the truck that she’s fully convinced is the only reason she’s not being made to dance right now.
Everyone else seems to agree with Dani—they’re joining the line, hands hooked in belt loops as the song lyrics pontificate about deals with the devil over a heavy fiddle solo.
Eleanor shakes her head again when Dani makes a come-hither motion. “Not happening.”
With a groan, Dani finally gives up. She grabs a cowboy hat off the nearest person’s head—it happens to be Mila sitting in a lawn chair next to the truck—and runs toward the growing line of people.
Mila throws her empty cider can in retaliation. It misses by a solid two metres, hitting Owen instead.
“She better not wreck my hat,” Mila grumbles, settling back into her chair and opening up a fresh drink. “Why didn’t you go up with her?”
“I don’t know this dance,” Eleanor says, gesturing at the line of people all moving in perfect sync. “How the hell does everyone here know it?”
“We learned it in gym class. Didn’t you?”
Eleanor had actually learned how to waltz in private school, but she keeps her mouth shut and watches the crowd instead.
It still astounds Eleanor sometimes how attracted she is to Dani. It’s a wild thing, something deep and alive in her chest that wakes up and howls at the moon when Dani laughs in that endearing way, where her eyes squint up and she sounds so utterly delighted that she can’t hold it in.
Dani is doing it now, throwing her head back as she stamps and claps along to the beat, singing the words to the fast-paced song Eleanor has only heard once or twice before. She looks equal parts ridiculous and adorable.
The song finally ends. Eleanor is distracted enough in her soft, inconvenient feelings that when Dani waves her over again, looking so eager and hopeful, Eleanor slides off the tailgate.
“I can’t dance,” Eleanor says weakly as Dani takes her hand.
“I promise it’ll be fun!” Dani calls over the music. “If it isn’t, I’ll…I’ll jump in the river naked.” She grabs both of Eleanor’s hands and starts pulling them back and forth in a basic motion.
“I don’t know the steps,” Eleanor shouts. The music is even louder this close to the speakers; the dance sequence is simple this time at least, and the crowd is even bigger and easier to get lost in. Eleanor copies a step or two but gets lost when everyone does an unexpected twirl.
“Just shuffle your feet!”
Ignoring the choreography, Dani links their arms together and starts to skip in a circle. Eleanor follows, switching arms after a few beats and skipping in the opposite direction in time with everyone else. As silly as it feels, as silly as Eleanor is sure it looks, Dani is right.
It is pretty fun.
After the first chorus, Eleanor has figured out some of the steps. It’s a lot of rhythmic stomping and shuffling that she can’t quite follow, but the rest is just a lot of linking arms and spinning, and she’s laughing at Dani’s antics when everyone goes completely off-book.
When the music shifts into an exuberant banjo solo, half of the pairs around them stop, hug their partner around the waist, and start to spin. And that’s all the warning Eleanor has before Dani is in her space. Dani gets a quick “hold on!” in, but soon Eleanor is being lifted with Dani’s strong arms braced firmly around her middle.
Eleanor squeals, holding on for dear life as they start to spin dizzyingly in a static circle.
Dani is warm and solid against her, hands firm on her middle, and her face is somewhere in the vicinity of Eleanor’s chest. She can feel Dani’s breath, getting quicker with exertion and laughter. Eleanor is being held as if she weighs nothing and then pressed hard against Dani’s solid frame, and if it weren’t for the spinning, Eleanor is sure the entire party would be able to read her thoughts on her face.
It’s soon blotted out by dizziness, followed swiftly by laughter as Dani finally loses her balance and stumbles, bracing herself so that her body blocks Eleanor’s fall and hitting the grass with a whumph .
“Are you okay?” Eleanor gasps breathlessly, rolling off Dani while the ground lurches under her like a funhouse.
Dani is lying comfortably on her back, her hair spread out over the grass like a halo, and she’s cackling . The laugh takes over her whole body, and soon enough Eleanor is laughing, too, flopping onto the grass and letting the dusky sky spin in dizzying circles above them.
Most other people seem to be in the same state as the song continues, either on the ground or seriously bent over, and when Dani punches her fist up and lets out a loud whoop, some of the crowd responds.
“Do you do that every time?” Eleanor asks once they’ve calmed down and are sitting up and holding their sore sides. “The spinning?”
“Every time,” Dani says happily. It seems like the end of the song signals a drinking and smoking break of some kind, and the dance floor clears out. Dani hauls herself up, staggering only once, and dusts the grass from her now-stained jeans. “Ah, man. These are new—Mila’s gonna kill me.”
Once the sky is dark enough, the fireworks come out. Dani leads Eleanor to end of the rickety boat launch, recently vacated by the group of kids now distracted by the handing out of sparklers. The noise of the party gives way a little to the quiet lapping of the water.
Eleanor can almost see her house all the way down past the river’s wide mouth. The lights on her back deck are glowing in the distance, but for maybe the first time in her life, she’s happier not being at home.
As they sit down at the dock’s edge, a single loon cries out in the distance. Low and mournful. Dani smiles softly, raising her hands to her mouth in a cupped position and blowing into the strange hand instrument she’s made. The sound comes out as an almost-perfect loon call. The loon cries back, and they maintain a back-and-forth until Dani drops her hands, bracing them against the dock.
“My brother taught me how to do that,” Dani says, kicking at the water’s surface with the toe of her boot.
It’s the first piece of information Dani has offered willingly about him since he was first mentioned. Eleanor keeps her voice low. “Garreth, right? Did he spend a lot of time here with you?”
Dani shakes her head, staring down at the ripples caused by her foot. “He moved back to the city for school not long after my parents passed. He never really felt comfortable here.”
“You mentioned that you don’t talk much.”
“Yeah. I always sort of hoped that I could stay with him when I moved south,” Dani says. There’s a forced air to her nonchalance that makes Eleanor think Dani isn’t quite as indifferent as she wants to come across. “But he was busy, you know? Building his career and everything. He had a tiny place. Didn’t work out.”
There’s a thread of sadness in Dani’s story that Eleanor has never heard before. Unsure of what to say, she puts a hand over Dani’s, squeezing gently before pulling away, and Dani smiles. It’s a tiny nugget of Dani’s life, but every crumb Eleanor can pick up is appreciated.
“It’s okay. We grew apart. We’re still family, even if we don’t see each other.” Dani is looking out over the water again, and Eleanor gazes out with her. The moon is bright against the dark sky, shining a long rippling white reflection across the water. Eleanor gets the impression that she tells herself this pretty often.
“I don’t have siblings,” Eleanor says, sensing that Dani could use a subject change. “I don’t have much family left besides my father’s carousel of ex-wives.”
Dani turns to her, the seriousness of just a few moments ago easing. Her shoulders relax. “A carousel, huh? That many?”
“Six in total. They came and went pretty quickly.”
“Real-life evil stepmothers?”
Eleanor snorts, thinking of Renée. She’d be both horrified and delighted to find out just how little work Eleanor has been doing on this trip—horrified by her work ethic but delighted by the chance to expose Eleanor’s laziness to the board. “You have no idea. They could have their own reality show.”
Dani’s attention is drawn by the first loud pop . She points up at the shower of red sparks above them. “Look! It’s starting!”
Dani hurries to take off her boots as the show begins and suggests that Eleanor do the same, and soon enough they’re dipping their bare toes in the cool water as the sky lights up with multicoloured rockets. It illuminates Dani’s excited and smiling face, and with their hands almost touching where they’re braced on the dock, the fireworks in the sky are mirroring the ones in Eleanor’s chest.
As suddenly as the explosions begin above them, Eleanor is struck by a vivid vision of leaning over, running her fingers through Dani’s hair, and moving in for a kiss.
It’s not surprising, as fantasies go. Eleanor has had thoughts about kissing Dani before, but this fantasy is by far the most intense. The most realistic. Eleanor can practically feel Dani’s lips, can smell her shampoo, can imagine how it would feel to swing a leg over her thighs and press herself down into Dani’s lap.
Eleanor looks away quickly, hoping the darkness will hide how her body is reacting, and watches the fireworks. Attraction or not, pursuing those thoughts with Dani is a layer of complication that she doesn’t need.
Still, all in all, it’s the single-best night Eleanor has had in recent memory. It’s practically perfect until they’re leaving the party, Dani having sobered enough after her single beer to drive Eleanor home.
“ Cooper! ”
The male voice behind them is loud enough that Eleanor jumps a little, spinning around to find they’re being followed by the same man that Dani beat so handily at arm wrestling a few weeks back. He has two other unfamiliar men flanking him. There’s a vein bulging in his neck.
Dani turns around much more calmly, sticking her thumbs into her belt loops.
“Matthew,” Dani drawls, inclining her head in his direction. She seems entirely too relaxed, in Eleanor’s opinion, considering Matthew is looking ready to snap.
“I believe we’ve got some unfinished business,” Matthew growls.
“Come on, Matty,” Dani says, shaking her head. “Don’t ruin the party with this bull.”
But Matthew cracks his knuckles, handing his trucker cap to one of his friends. He stumbles a little as he does, and Eleanor wonders if this bout of rage hasn’t been brought on by a bit too much strawberry moonshine.
Dani sighs, unbuttoning her shirt cuffs and starting to roll up her sleeves in a businesslike fashion. “Sorry, Nora. This’ll just take a minute.”
Eleanor hardly has time to get out of the way before Matthew swings. He strikes out just as Dani is finishing her first sleeve, roaring angrily, but Dani sidesteps him. He overbalances, missing his punch and wobbling for a few seconds before he rights himself.
Dani rolls her neck from side to side. “That wasn’t a fair start. Now who’s the cheater?”
“Fuck you!” Matthew grunts, putting his fists up and starting to circle. Dani does the same, and for a few seconds, they hover in a stalemate before Matthew strikes again, winding up for a hit that never lands. Dani dodges it, ducking under his arm and throwing her elbow hard into the middle of his back as she passes.
He grunts in obvious pain as her elbow connects, his back bending forward as he stumbles, and his knees hit the gravel while Dani finishes rolling her second sleeve. Once it’s duly fastened, she turns and offers him a hand.
“I don’t want to fight you, Matty,” Dani says quietly.
Matthew seems to consider it. He’s breathing heavily, holding his back, and for a moment, Eleanor thinks he might take Dani’s hand—but instead he explodes off the ground and strikes again, and this time one of his fists connects to Dani’s cheekbone with a sickening crack .
Dani rears back, grunting. When she moves her curtain of blonde hair out of the way, there’s a stark red mark against her cheek—it’s split, and blood is starting to bead along the crack.
Eleanor’s stomach drops. Dani touches the spot with a gentle hand, frowning at the crimson that comes away on her fingertips.
“Are you packing?” Dani asks. There’s a quiet anger in her voice.
Eleanor has no earthly clue what that could mean in relation to a fight, but Matthew answers the question right away—he opens his hand to reveal a cigarette lighter clenched in his fist, which he tosses into the dirt. He has a large class ring on his middle finger that must have caused the cut.
Dani, who up until this point seems to have been merely humoring Matthew, gets noticeably serious. Her face sets in determination. She pulls an elastic out of her pocket, gathering her hair up and out of her face.
Matthew doesn’t seem to sense the change in intensity, but Eleanor does.
“Nobody beats me, Cooper, especially not you,” Matthew says, flexing his hand. His knuckles are red, and it looks like a bit of Dani’s blood is on his ring. “It was true in high school, and it’s true—”
He’s cut off by Dani’s fist connecting with his face three times in lightning-quick succession, each harder than the last.
It’s a startling blur. A co-worker being slapped by a jilted girlfriend is the most violence Eleanor has ever seen up close, and now Matthew is sprawled out on the dusty gravel with Dani towering over him, her fist bloodied and her face grim.
It’s even more startling to realize that she finds Dani’s physicality attractive even in this context. And, even more shockingly, Matthew’s unfair hit to Dani’s face makes Eleanor angry enough on her behalf that she almost feels like she could strike at him herself.
Luckily she doesn’t need to. Matthew groans, rolling over and pulling his arms up around his head. With the fight obviously over, Dani picks up the lighter he’d been clenching in his hand and tosses it over to his friend.
The friend flinches, barely managing to catch it, but Dani only smiles at him. The genuine expression conflicts with the man still lying motionless on the ground. “When he comes to, go get Naomi to look him over.”
The friend nods silently. Dani turns back around, holding her arm out to Eleanor like a perfect gentleman. She escorts Eleanor back to the truck calmly, and once they’re safely inside, Eleanor finally explodes.
“What the fuck was his problem!” Eleanor says fiercely. “Just coming at you like that! Look what he did to your face!” She reaches out, unthinking, and traces a fingertip gently over the still-bleeding cut on Dani’s cheekbone.
Dani smiles, only wincing a bit at the pain it obviously causes her, and shrugs. “It was just a tilly. Once he calms down, he’ll be right back to normal.”
Dani is completely calm about the entire situation. Unthinkably calm, really, after getting punched so hard that there’s blood drying in her hair. Eleanor is so flabbergasted that she doesn’t even think to ask what kind of made-up word a tilly is.
“Shouldn’t you have Naomi look at this?” Eleanor asks, grabbing one of the napkins Dani keeps in the glove compartment to dab at the blood.
“Nah, I’ll clean it up at home.”
“How do you know you don’t have a concussion?”
“I’ve taken worse hits,” Dani says, winking with her rapidly swelling eye.
Eleanor balls up the napkin and stuffs it into the cup holder. “Is that why he was talking about high school? Did you fight back then, too?”
Dani’s face falls a little, the lightheartedness flickering for a moment. She chews on her bottom lip, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel before she answers.
“We sorta dated the same girl back then,” Dani says after a pause. “She left him for me. And then…she left me for him. He still likes to brag about being the winner because his life peaked in grade twelve.”
Dani sounds embarrassed more than hurt. Not like the situation still bothers her, but more like she’s worried Eleanor will judge her for it. It explains why Matthew reacted so explosively to Dani beating him—his ego is probably still sore, even though the girl went back to him in the end.
“And where is she now?” Eleanor asks.
Dani shrugs. “Dunno. She moved down south. Left us both in the end, I guess.”
Dani trails off, and rather than pushing her, Eleanor clears her throat and changes the subject. “Well, you certainly kicked his ass.”
Dani chuckles, finally turning the keys in the ignition and shifting the truck out of park. Eleanor is relieved to see that the pensive look is gone. “Not a bad night out on the town!”
Dani bids Eleanor good night at her door. Her eye is truly swollen in a way she manages to make look cute, and though Eleanor has always been fairly anti-violence, she has to admit that watching Dani take down Matthew in a few hits has made an impression. A deep one.
Eleanor is a little bit flustered.
She tries to shake it off. She pours herself a glass of wine, sinks into a bubble bath, and turns on some deeply unsexy jazz music, trying to put the whole thing out of her mind. But her willpower seems to be less and less effective lately.
Soon enough she’s in for another night of self-care. Another night spent thinking about Dani Cooper, except that this time she’s imagining more than just the woman’s hands. She’s lost in thoughts of Dani’s arms wrapped around her waist. Her own hands slipping under the collar of a red button-up while water laps underneath them. Of spreading her legs and guiding Dani’s hand between them in the moonlight.
She comes harder than ever before, and it makes it that much more disappointing when she opens her eyes to find herself as alone as always. The only water is her cooling bath, and the only sky above her is the white ceiling of her candlelit bathroom.