Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
A RISK AND A LIABILITY
LOUISA
We agreed to meet to discuss the details, because he made it clear, there would definitely be details and we need to ‘align on a plan.’ (It sounded like a threat.) Which he then communicated to me by saying (I’m paraphrasing here) ‘come over at seven, we’ll work through everything then.
’ Not ‘if you decide yes.’ Not ‘assuming you’re on board.
’ Just seven, dinner included, and bring nothing but yourself.
(Implied) He didn’t even laugh when I asked him for his address.
He ordered another extra-hot americano, two-coffee Sunday (which is new information for Toby) and left.
Walked right out the door and back into the Sunday morning, like he hadn’t just proposed marriage to me in a coffee shop.
Like it was a scheduling matter rather than the single most insane sentence anyone had ever directed at me in my entire adult life.
Chandler slid in next to me as soon as he left, very quietly and with tremendous restraint, asking if I wanted to talk about it.
I didn’t, because I didn’t know what to say about it, mostly and because of the horrible, annoying, completely presumptuous fact that he had already known I would say yes before I had finished thinking it to myself.
He probably knew before I sat down. He built the next move on top of the assumption without waiting for confirmation, like he knows the foundation will hold.
The most horrifying part of all, the part that has been living deep in the base of my throat since? He’s right.
I was going to say yes. I am going to say yes.
Because when you’re hanging on the ledge of your life, and someone offers you a hand and a plan, you take both. Even if the hand belongs to Hudson Ellis and the plan is fucking insane.
I left The Double Shot, proposal in hand, anxiety in gut, and spent my afternoon submitting auditions for a stack of non-fiction titles I’ve been sitting on.
Non-fiction is fine. Non-fiction is good, actually.
It's earnest and useful, full of harrowing true-life accounts and real people who have successfully figured something out and want to be helpful about it.
Characters who exist in the actual world, who made decisions under real pressure and came through the other side.
Which, given recent events in my life, feels aspirational in a way I genuinely need right now. (If they did it, so can I. Right?)
The thing is, I am better at fiction. (Or I thought I was.)
A romance novel when I have climbed the rising action, and two people who have been furiously denying their feelings for three hundred pages are finally ready to combust. Is there a better feeling?
(No, there isn’t.) The moment it stops being subtext and becomes holy text, the moment the careful restraint collapses and takes everything with it?
I live for that, it’s the part of this job that I would do for free (you know what I mean) and in the early years, essentially did.
(Sometimes it actually seemed like I was paying them.)
Non-fiction doesn’t have that moment, not in the same way. And following Roma’s recent (accurate) deeply burrowing-into-my-brain feedback, I’ve been even more aware that the passion I need to be delivering is lacking some of its former conviction.
The other problem with non-fiction (and I say this with the utmost full professional respect) is that nobody is using wingspan as a euphemism for dick size.
Nobody is discussing wingspan at all (maybe a biography on the Wright Brothers), and no one is talking about dick size, period.
(Except in an LBJ biography I read once, I’m serious.) The only wingspan I can think of right now belongs to who I am trying to accept as my soon-to-be fake-husband.
So I log the hours in the booth. Record the auditions and send them off.
By six-thirty I’ve also done a completely productive (and not at all spiraling) amount of light Googling about expired visas.
The internet, as always, knows everything and absolutely nothing simultaneously and makes you feel horrible about both.
I close seventeen browser tabs without reading them and call that enough preparation for the day.
I show up at his door at seven on the dot. I knock, and he pulls it open like he was already in the hallway, waiting. (Of course he was.)
His apartment smells, as it did last night, like a decision was made and bulk purchased, a curated scent like a five-star hotel.
It’s not like next door. My apartment is a rotating cast of Home Goods clearance-shelf candles that occasionally create something interesting and more frequently require damage control in the form of another, stronger candle.
Today we’re working with Pear Pancake, a combo that even at the time I bought it, gave me pause.
(But curiosity won out.) This is, as a metaphor for the two of us, so on the nose it barely qualifies as a metaphor at all.
“Come in, sit,” he says, already turning back toward the kitchen island before I’ve fully crossed the threshold of entry.
He’s different than he was last night, likely because he expected me at his door tonight.
Every conversation we have that isn’t immediately adversarial catches me off guard, and when it inevitably devolves into the state of reality we know, it’s stubbing my toe on a piece of furniture I should have known was there.
I don’t sit, I mosey. Circling the far side of the counter instead, trailing my eyes over the kitchen that is pristine.
Funny because I’ve definitely heard him using a blender at two in the morning when I was in the middle of an emotionally devastating breakup scene.
You know what doesn’t work in that scene?
That’s right, a blender. At a completely unreasonable blender hour.
“You don’t have any appliances,” I say.
“They’re in the cabinets.”
“Who would put their toaster in a cabinet?” I say as I open one to see if I find the right cubby.
(I don’t.) Just perfectly stacked tupperware, all with matching lids, meanwhile my tupperware collection has been gathered from takeout containers and creates a plastic avalanche every time I open the cabinet door.
“People who don’t want to look at a toaster,” he says like this was self-evident.
“I’ve never once thought about looking at a toaster…” I take another step and pick another cabinet to check. (Again nothing.) “So what do you do when you want toast?”
He stops straightening what is already straight on the marble island in front of us, and looks at me for the first time since I walked through the door. “I take it out of the cabinet.” His face looks offended at the question.
“And then you just… put it back?” My search for the hidden toaster has been unsuccessful so far. (Haven’t found this mysterious blender either.)
“Where else would it go?”
“On the counter, like a person.” He points diagonally and downward from where he is. I grab the cabinet handle and pull it open for the big reveal.
“AHA!” I exclaim like I found it on my own.
There are six binders lined up in a row.
(Who even has six binders lying around?) He has clearly spent his intervening hours doing what I can assume he does with any problem: organizing them into submission.
Which should by any right be annoying. (It is, and it's also kind of extraordinary to see his brain work.)
“Your status is already expired,” he says, anchoring us to the only thing I know. “An immediate marriage to a citizen, with an application for adjustment of status filed concurrently, addresses the unlawful-presence issue.” He looks up. “But only if it’s handled quickly.”
“How quickly is ‘quickly’?”
“City clerk's office for the license Tuesday. Married by the end of the week." I stare, mouth agape. I don’t think I can pull together a grocery list as quickly as he has planned our wedding. (Who am I kidding, I never make a grocery list.) I can’t tell whether this is impressive or whether it is the single most alarming thing I’ve ever heard.
“This week,” I repeat, just for clarity of the thing I already know.
“Yes.”
“But, Tuesday is in two days.”
“I’m aware how calendars work.”
“Ass,” I say. And it's a flicker of the relationship we actually have.
The one where he is a sarcastic asshole, and my existence just annoys him.
But I might see the corner of his lips flicker in hopes of being invited to smile, just waiting for a reason, and the subtle warmth of the insult might just be it.
“We’ll review these folders together, then take them home to study.” He’s already sliding the first folder toward me. “Dinner arrives in fifty minutes.”
I hoist myself up on the counter and swing my feet. He crosses the kitchen to me in two strides, and now, standing next to me, we are eye level for the first time. He takes my hand in his, and places the other on the small of my back.
“Down,” he says flatly.
“You invited me over for dinner and then ordered in?”
“I'm not known in the kitchen for my culinary skills.” A small guided push to get me off the marble. He doesn’t release my hand until I’ve landed on my feet. I just sigh at him in response. “Down first, offended later” he says. (What a buzzkill.)
“What are you known for in the kitchen?” My question results in a look from him that actually seems to bloom something devious, so I clarify. “Culinarily. I mean culinarily.”
“Scrambled eggs,” he responds with the same dry effect he brings to most things.
“I love scrambled eggs,” I say under my breath. (And to myself.)