Chapter 31 Eliana
ELIANA
bloom: /blo?om/: noun
I still don’t really know what just happened.
But, as weird as this sounds, now doesn’t really feel like the right time to talk about it.
Bastian and I are sitting in a sunlit bubble of silence, and for a change, the usual antagonistic tension is absent. It’s easy to sit here, not quite cuddling him but not quite not cuddling him, either, and just breathe in sync as the sun keeps sliding up the sky like an over easy egg.
Bastian shifts beside me, adjusting the blanket that’s slipped off my shoulder. His fingers brush my collarbone and I shiver, not from cold this time.
“You good?” he asks.
I snort. “If ‘good’ means I just let my boss finger me in the back of his Range Rover while watching the sunrise over Lake Michigan, then yeah. I’m spectacular.”
A laugh rumbles out of him. “You’ve got a way with words.”
“Yeah, well, it gets me into more tight spaces than it gets me out of.” I blush and, because I can’t help myself, add, “No pun intended.”
Bastian laughs again, a little louder this time. It’s a sound I’m quickly wishing I could treat the way my early 2000s self would’ve done and burn onto a CD, because I want to skip back to the beginning of the track and play it over and over again.
“That does remind me of something, though,” I continue. “You never told me why you’re bad with enclosed spaces.”
His brow wrinkles. “Huh?”
“Back in the elevator, you told me you weren’t good with enclosed spaces. Why not?”
“Oh.” He scratches his jaw. “That’s kind of a bummer of a story.”
“Bummers are what I do best,” I tell him. I spread my hands toward the sunrise. “Everything else is going too well right now to belong in my life. So I’d rather invite some grief in on my terms instead of waiting for the world to invent the grief for me.”
He shakes his head in dismay. “Pessimism does not suit you, you know.”
“Oh, I’m as jaded as they come, buddy. Trust me. Pessimism is my art, and I am its Picasso.” I butt my forehead against his shoulder. “Now, stop ducking the question. It’s your turn to be a little vulnerable for once.”
He laughs, but it peters out quickly. There’s a sadness in his eyes I’m starting to recognize. It tends to crop up whenever anyone pushes him about his past. First, it was Dante at the oyster bar; now, here I am, making him dig up all his metaphorical dead bodies.
Bastian’s jaw works from side to side for a moment. His eyes drift toward the lake, though I don’t think he’s really seeing it.
“When I was a kid,” he starts slowly, “maybe seven or eight, I was at this restaurant where my brother worked. Well, where he sort of did some side work for this guy, Dmitri, who owned it. Anyway.” He clears his throat.
“We were horsing around, playing tag or some shit, running through the kitchen like idiots.”
I stay quiet, sensing that if I interrupt, he’ll clam up entirely.
“I ran into the walk-in freezer to hide from him. Thought I was being clever.” His mouth twists up. “But the door… It had this heavy-duty latch. It’s supposed to have a safety release of some kind on the inside, but this one was broken.”
My stomach flips as I see where this is going. “Oh, Bastian.”
“The door swung shut behind me. Locked automatically.” All the light has gone out of his voice now.
“I was in there for… I don’t know. Felt like hours, but it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes, maybe thirty.
I screamed until my throat was raw. Pounded on the door until my hands were numb and bloody. ”
He holds up his hands, and for the first time, I notice faint scars across his knuckles that I’d always assumed were from kitchen work.
“It was dark. So fucking dark. And cold—the kind of cold that gets into your bones and won’t leave. I remember thinking I was going to die in there. That they’d find me frozen solid, like a popsicle.” He lets out a bitter laugh. “Dramatic for an eight-year-old, I know.”
“That’s not dramatic,” I whisper. “That’s traumatic.”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugs like he’s unbothered. “My brother finally found me. I was blue, shaking so hard I couldn’t stand. He wrapped me in his coat and carried me out.” He turns to look at me. “Bottom line is, since then, I hate dark, tight spaces. End of story.”
I reach out and lace my fingers through his. His hand is warm and solid. “I’m sorry that happened to you,” I tell him softly. “That must’ve been terrifying.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Trauma doesn’t really care about timelines, though, does it?”
“No,” he admits. “I guess not.”
We sit in silence for another moment, watching the sun climb higher. The sky has eased into a softer, paler, robin’s egg shade of blue that makes me think maybe winter won’t last forever.
In the back of my head, though, is that same doomsday clock that’s been running for a week now.
Eighty-two days left. Time’s a-wasting.
But for the first time since my diagnosis, sunrise doesn’t bring dread with it. Just this calm, easy, floaty feeling, half-warm and half-cold and not at all unpleasant.
“Thank you for the surprise wake-up,” I tell him. “Sorry if I was a little ungrateful at first. You were right: This was worth it.”
Bastian looks at me for a while. I go through that weird human experience of watching someone else watch you and wishing you could crawl inside their head to see through their eyes, think their thoughts, breathe their breath.
Then he sighs. “You’re welcome.”
I want to ask him what happens next. Where do we go from here?
But the sunrise is too beautiful, and he’s too warm, and I’m too tired of overthinking everything.
So instead, I just lean my head against his shoulder and let myself exist in this fragile, perfect moment for as long as it lasts.
It does come to an end eventually. When the sun is high enough that the world no longer feels like it’s just ours, and joggers and dogwalkers keep passing along the lake’s edge to remind us that there are in fact other people on the planet, we disentangle.
“Guess that’s that,” I say.
“Yeah. Guess so.”
“We’ve got work today.”
He nods. “Yep. We do.”
“I can’t be late. My boss is a real asshole.”
Bastian chuckles. “Need me to kick his ass for you?”
“I’d pay good money to see that,” I giggle in response. “He deserves a good ass-beating.”
“Couldn’t agree more.” Bastian helps me out of the trunk. He follows me around to my side of the car and holds the door open for me.
I wouldn’t exactly call him a gentleman, but this is one act of chivalry he never fails to perform. Every time he does, a strange thrill shoots through me. Feminism is nice and all, but a big, strong, handsome man holding open your car door just does things to a lady’s insides.
When I’m settled, he closes the trunk, then comes around to get behind the wheel. “Drop you off back home?” he asks.
“Yeah. Gotta shower off the musk.”
“Whose musk?” he asks in mock offense, hand plastered to his chest. “Mine?!”
“No, the other caveman who dragged me out of my cozy bed and into the freezing cold.”
“Hm,” he grunts. “I’ll keep an eye out for him then. Sounds like he needs his ass kicked, right after your boss.”
I roll my eyes as I suppress another giggle. Bastian puts the car in drive—and as we pull away from the lake, with the sun high and bright in the rearview mirror, he puts a hand on my thigh, too.
I wish the drive would last forever if it meant his hand would stay there. But we come to a stop in front of my apartment a few short minutes later. I unbuckle my seatbelt, mumble a goodbye, and start to get out.
“Thanks again,” I say.
“Anytime.”
He says it sort of gruffly, and as I look back at him, I see the early signs of his usual mask settling back into place. I wish that didn’t depress me the way it does.
I also wish I wasn’t longing for some silly sort of goodbye.
A kiss is out of the question, of course—all of our hanky-panky thus far has taken place in the darkness, and it seems to me like that’s the only place it belongs.
But my body just yearns for some sort of closure to one of the weirder nights of my life.
I get nothing, though. He says nothing. I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing, too. I just get out of the car and start the cold, lonely shuffle up to my building, with a pile of my marshmallow layers draped across my arms.
I’m opening the door when I hear the whine of the window rolling down. Then:
“Eliana.”
I turn and look back. Bastian is leaning over to call my name through the passenger window.
“Yeah?” I ask, ignoring the sudden flurry of butterflies in my stomach.
“Friday night,” he says. “Eight o’clock.”
I blink. “What’s happening Friday night at eight o’clock?”
The corner of his mouth quirks up. “We’re crossing off the next item on your list.”
“Oh?” My heart does a weird little stutter-step. “Which item?”
“You’ll see.” He grins wolfishly. “Wear something nice. Not marshmallow-level nice, but nice.”
“But what are we—”
“Eight o’clock, Hunter. Don’t be late.”